Must Liberalism Be Violent? A Reflection on the Work of Stanley Hauerwas

I INTRODUCTION My subject is the work of the theologian Stanley Hauerwas on violence and coercion. I shall argue that his views on the violence of war and his views on the violence of the liberal state are inextricably linked, and that the critique of liberalism that emerges from his thought actually does have--contrary to his own view--important implications for public policy. In order to appreciate his thinking on these matters, one must appreciate his starting point, which is not the starting point of the standard academic analysis--that is, he does not begin with liberalism. He begins (and he would say, ends) with Christianity. Not Christianity in the sense of Christendom but Christianity in the sense of church--the place to which Christians are called and through which their lives are constituted. And although Hauerwas certainly has some interest in what commands bind believers in general and Christians in particular (a point to which I will presently come), his larger concern is the creation and nurturing of people who believe that commands bind them--that people are in the first instance bundles not of rights and preferences (as liberalism would have it) but of duties. These duties, moreover, are not owed to each other, or to ideology or party, or to government or future generations or Mother Earth; they are owed to God. The notion that we are created by God, and owe duties first to God, is crucial to the conceptions of church and of society that motivate his work. Following close behind is his conception of American culture--legal, political, and economic--as determined, through every available method of temptation and coercion, to conceal these duties, to cloud them, to draw us away from them, recreating us instead as creatures sufficiently arrogant to believe in our own freedom to choose our own ends--in short, to suit us for capitalism. Although my subject is Hauerwas's views on violence, it is important to begin with this account of his views on culture and personality, because he largely rejects the distinction, crucial to the liberal account of politics, between the legitimate use of force that creates the coercion of law and the illegitimate use of force that constitutes mere violence that the state must rein in. (I say "largely rejects" because some of his work seems to me inconsistent on this point; but what I have described I take to be his more settled view.) In this I suspect that Hauerwas is influenced heavily by the theologian Paul Ramsey (whom he often quotes), who once suggested that, having developed a theory of just and unjust war to cabin the use of legitimate force abroad, we might perhaps consider using similar criteria to determine what counts as legitimate force at home. (1) I am not sure that Hauerwas goes quite this far, but in his radical rejection of the liberal distinction among types of violence, he does indeed invite us to reconsider the very premises on which liberalism rests the supposedly legitimate coercion by the state. II When we think about morality and violence, our thoughts turn naturally to war--the flooding horror of armed conflict between nations--and war is a subject on which Stanley Hauerwas has written voluminously. Indeed, so dominant has Hauerwas become in the field that no theologian or philosopher can address the problem of war in a serious way without grappling with Hauerwas's ideas. He has written about war many times, most recently in a quite impressive forthcoming book entitled War and the American Difference, wherein he challenges his fellow Christians to decide how they "should live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished." (2) His reference to the abolition of war--a subject he has written about in the past--offers a particular claim about the effect of the Cross of Christ. I will not here repeat his intriguing argument for the proposition, but I will say that understanding that Hauerwas believes this is crucial to understanding his view of war. …