Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology

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Is Christianity exclusively a religious phenomenon, which must separate itself from all things political, or do its concepts actually underpin secular politics? To this question, which animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology, Liturgical Power advances a third alternative. Christian anti-politics, Heron contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, he argues, assumes the form of what today we call “administration,” but which the ancients termed “economics.” The book’s principal aim is thus genealogical: it seeks to understand our current conception of government in light of an important but rarely acknowledged transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity. This transformation in the idea of politics precipitates in turn a concurrent shift in the organization of power; an organization whose determining principle, Heron contends, is liturgy―understood in the broad sense as “public service.” Whereas until now only liturgy’s acclamatory dimension has made the concept available for political theory, Heron positions it more broadly as a technique of governance. What Christianity has bequeathed to political thought and forms, he argues, is thus a paradoxical technology of power that is grounded uniquely in service. About the Author Nicholas Heron is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland. He is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Introduction 1 1 The Economic God 15 2 Liturgical Power 41 3 The Practice of Hierarchy 75 4 Instrumental Cause 89 5 Anthropology of Office 116 Conclusion 133 Acknowledgments 141 Notes 143 Bibliography 187 Index 199