“How can one dare blame the sciences before one of Europe’s most learned Societies, praise ignorance in a famous Academy, and reconcile contempt for study with respect for the truly learned? I have seen these contradictions, and they have not rebuffed me.”1
This famous statement is in response to the question proposed by the Academy of Dijon in the year 1750: “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?” It is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) who argues that human souls have been corrupted as the sciences and arts advance toward perfection. There is a relationship between corruption and Enlightenment. Ancient politicians talked about morals and virtue, while politicians of today talk only of business and money.2
The European notion of Enlightenment, literally known as the century of lights (Le Siècle des Lumières), or Aufklärung in Germany, refers to an intellectual and philosophical movement during the eighteenth century. Its chief proponents, the philosophes, challenged the prejudices and narrow-mindedness of those in power. They were convinced that the people could be enlightened in terms of education and rational reasoning. Progress on earth was their slogan. Belief in Enlightenment and progress was featured in the massive Encyclopedia edited by Diderot.
However, in Rousseau’s view, virtue and Enlightenment are in apparent contradiction. Inequalities were thus created among people to the degree that the society has developed out of the egalitarian independence of the state of nature. In fact, natural human beings were endowed with self-preservation or self-love and compassion. Hobbes’ “war of all against all” has little to do with the true state of nature, but was the product of historical development. Its warlike last stages of the state of nature led to establish a social contract in civil society. When one follows the progress of inequality in different evolutionary stages, the establishment of the law and the right of property are the first stage. The institutions of government and the magistracy are the second. The last stage of inequality is the change of legitimate power into arbitrary power.3 The powerful oppression of the weak under an illegitimate and despotic government is likened to a “war of all against all,” which is to be overthrown by revolution.
In social life, Rousseau holds, the institution of property and the growth of wealth led to inequality, crime, and oppression, which may become a necessary means of establishing civil society. Civil liberty or freedom in the social contract takes precedence over virtue. His paradox lies in a return to the classical principle of virtue in the First Discourse, while at the same time pursing the modern principle of civil liberty against virtue in the tradition of the antiquity in the Second Discourse.
Incomplete Project of Modernity and Iron Cage
In the present study of critical theory and political theology, I take Rousseau’s view of Enlightenment as the point of departure. In dealing with the aftermath of the Enlightenment, I still remain in the unfinished project of modernity, especially in accordance with critical theory. The project of modernity undergirds the relentless development of natural sciences and propels the universalistic foundations of morality, law, and art. It also undertakes and specializes in the rational organization of social relations and dominates cultural life.4
But, it is not finished yet, despite its pathologies. One is leaving Enlightenment behind, while the other is in pursuit of its incomplete project in terms of an alternative form of modernity. Europe began to comprehend its emergence of hegemony, coping with the crisis and challenges announced by the Reformation (1517). Then Europe’s hegemony came to fruition, along with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution; Industrial Revolution subsequently accompanied the expansion of European powers in the colonies. European global dominance began around 1500 CE: the communication breakthrough with Gutenberg (1390–1468), Columbus’ discovery and Spanish colonial conquest of the Americas (1451–1506), the Scientific Revolution with Copernicus (1473–1543), and Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) Reformation.5
Indeed, we need to consider that the historical turning point emerged in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries during the Renaissance. Social technology in the form of Italian bookkeeping emerged in the cities of Venice and Florence and revolutionized the entire economic system. This rational breakthrough known today as double-entry bookkeeping offered the foundation for shaping the whole of modern society. This calculating rationality characterizes modernity in terms of a functional mechanism instilled with cost and utility. The functional mechanism is best found in the cost-and-profit calculation of the new capitalist enterprise in terms of utility and efficiency. To the degree that the utility calculation has been transformed into a legal system and its codification, Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarded the social system as the divine will.6
In dealing with the incomplete project of modernity, it is significant to advance the analysis of Enlightenment and modernity in connection with critical theoretical argument. Hic Rhodes, hic salta (“here is Rhodes, here you will jump”).7 We know that the ancient story in a proverbial Latin expression was made in the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. For instance, someone was boasting about a record of long jump in an overseas competition. The islanders wanted accountability and responsibility for this claim, responding that the bragger had to prove the island of Rhodes.
To have a critical look at the complex reality of late modernity, I take Enlightenment to be the springboard for analyzing the incompleteness of the modernity narrative, in both its positive and its negative aspects. In this sociological, hermeneutical study, I find that the socioeconomic analysis of capitalism remains crucial in its historical development. An ethical, theological endeavor is undertaken in correlating critical theory with political theology. Here, an ethical vision is to purse the common good based on recognition, justice, and solidarity in the life of the margins.
In a different context from Rousseau, a sociological study of rationalization and capitalism has been taken up by Max Weber. In his analysis of the process of disenchantment of the world, Weber draws attention to a notion of purpose rationality, which is based on employing appropriate means to a given end. The rise of purpose rationality leads to the disenchantment of the world, making Western people dependent upon technological control of nature and society. It has unleashed the exercise of instrumental reason that has caused a loss of meaning and freedom. It results in human domination over the natural world and ecological devastation. In his conclusion of the study of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Weber argues that the modernity falls into the trap of the ‘iron cage.’8
Weber’s analysis of the rational side of capitalism cannot be properly comprehended apart from his political sociology in dealing with the irrational and gloomy side of capitalism. Most of Weber’s critics tend to undermine his critical analysis of the non-rational and colonial side of imperial capitalism in the political sphere, which includes Marx’s basic concern of the capitalist economy. However, Weber’s major concern is to analyze the rational side of economic sphere in the field of relation of production in regard to religion, society, and culture. Thus, Weber’s elective affinity between Protestant asceticism and capitalist ethos contradicts an a priori, idealist approach, unveiling problems and limitations of “the liberal Protestant metanarrative.”9
Unlike John Milbank’s account of the liberal Protestant metanarrative, Weber’s sociology calls into question the process of disenchantment of the world and its outcome of the secularization fallen into the reality of iron cage. It is not credited as betraying and subverting the modern history of the Enlightenment and rationalization; instead, it is to interpret history in a sociological model or types in seeking elective affinity between religious ideas and material interests in the historical course of development. His concern is not to essentialize the metanarrative of the liberal Protestantism, but to analyze it by challenging its cul-de-sac.
In Weber’s account, the Puritan ethic, based on its aristocracy of salvation, has renounced the universalism of love and deviated the direction of a universal brotherhood. It has been trapped in an iron cage. In order to overcome this phenomenon, Weber takes into account religio...