Know Your Enemy
patreon
Compact with the Devil? (w/ John Ganz)
🕑 Added 2022-04-09 19:51:34 +0000 UTCMatt and Sam are joined by KYE all-star John Ganz to discuss Compact: A Radical American Journal, a new publication founded by Sohrab Ahmari, Matthew Schmitz, and Edward Aponte. It's launch coincided with a profile in the New York Times—and a party that Sam attended. What are the ideas behind Compact? How should the left approach the perspective it offers? Your hosts answer these questions, and more, drawing on Ganz's excellent Substack post on these topics, "Compact Magazine's Unholy Alliance."
Sources and Further Reading:
John Ganz, "Compact Magazine's Unholy Alliance," Unpopular Front, April 3, 2022
Jennifer Schuessler, "Two Religious Conservatives and a Marxist Walk into a Journal," New York Times, March 22, 2022
Various, "Note from the Founders," Compact
Various, "Away from the Abyss," Compact, March 31, 2022
Sohrab Ahmari, "How American Kneecapped Its Unions," Compact, March 31, 2022
Comments
Caroline J
As a former Catholic, I'd love a more current events focused episode on integralism and the quasi-schism in the Catholic church. As a current Jew, an episode on the nexus between Zionists and fundamentalist Christians would also be super interesting.
Know Your Enemy
That's a really interesting question, Samuel, and I'm not the best person to answer it. But my half-educated response would be that I definitely think Milbank's work prepared the way for some of what we're now seeing among "post-liberals." I don't always mean directly—I can't say how many of the post-liberals, or even just those around Compact, have read him or would explicitly cite him as an influence. (And I wouldn't want to suggest, either, that Milbank would want to "claim" any of those we're talking about.) When it comes to particular cases, my instinct is that if someone is coming from more of a political/polemical background they're probably less likely to have been influenced by, say, Theology and Social Theory, than someone who has formal theological or philosophical training. (That's just my guess.) I'd also wager that, substantively, Milbank's claim that there once was no secular, would be among his more important contributions to post-liberal thought—there's nothing inevitable about secular liberalism, it had to be created, and thus it can be uncreated. My suspicion is that Milbank/Radical Orthodoxy might have been a gateway drug for some theology types who eventually went on to a species of the current post-liberalism on offer. These are just some of my hunches. (Matt)
Samuel McCann
Interesting episode! I wonder if there is any influence from the Radical Orthodoxy movement in Christian theology on this magazine? It feels like John Milbank has been a major voice in Christian theological circles for a mixture of left-leaning economic policies and socially conservative policies.
