Dotan Leshem’s study is a valuable intervention in the larger project of developing a theological genealogy of the modern concepts of economy and government, a project inspired by Michel Foucault’s lectures on governmentality in the late 1970s and extended more recently in Giorgio Agamben’s latest contributions to the Homo Sacer series.1 In my remarks, I will focus mainly on Leshem’s dialogue with Foucault and Agamben, highlighting areas where I believe his work has clarified and furthered their established discourses. I will then turn to several questions that I believe are productively opened in the conclusion of Leshem’s book. These questions revolve around the mechanisms through which the theological heritage of economy mutates into the neoliberal market of the contemporary world. Leshem’s work seems ambivalent about whether this mechanism should be understood as a process of secularization or something more radical. I suggest that a deeper engagement with the Reformation moment, and particularly the classic understanding of the Reformation’s impact on the economic subject established in Max’s Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, might be pursued in future work.2 Moreover, I suggest that a more extended engagement with Foucault’s own account of the transformation of the Christian pastorate in the wake of the Reformation and the pastorate’s implicit transformation into the regime of neoliberal governmentality could also illuminate some of the questions raised by Leshem’s study.

The singular achievement of Leshem’s study is the way it extends our understanding of how the principles of incarnation and growth are central to the way the early church develops its unique notion of oikonomia. In order appreciate this intervention, it is helpful to review briefly key texts by Foucault and Agamben with which he engages. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault derives the concept of an “economy of souls” (oikonomia psuchon) from Gregory Nazianen and identifies this notion of “economy” as a distinctive and foundational concern of the Christian pastorate, which more broadly forms the deep “background” of modern “governmentality.”3 Before he turns to the pastorate, Foucault defines governmentality as such as the “art of exercising power in the form of economy”—economy is the key term designating the “field of intervention for government” in both modernity and in the early and medieval church.4 While the orientation of economy will change over time (shifting from the pastoral concern for salvation in the next world to the well-being of populations and individuals in this world), what remains consistent for Foucault is that economy fundamentally involves questions of human “conduct”: how individuals conduct themselves or others, or allow themselves to be “conducted” through various strategies and tactics. Indeed, Foucault suggests that the “least bad translation” for Gregory’s “economy of souls” would be “the conduct of souls.”5 When Agamben picks up the thread of economy and governmentality from Foucault in The Kingdom and the Glory, he shifts the emphasis decidedly away from conduct and the pastorate, and instead seeks to develop the “theological implications of the term oikonomia” in terms of the “fracture between being and praxis” in the “Trinitarian paradigm.”6 From the perspective Agamben develops, governmentality is best understood as a “secularization” of divine providence: the “way in which God articulates and carries out his providential action” in the created world.7 Governmentality is thus cast as a predominantly providential scheme, which shapes modern political economy in secularized concepts such as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”8 Agamben’s analysis tends to take place on the level of large theoretical paradigms; the way these paradigms might intervene at the more prosaic level of the conduct of individual actors is left undeveloped.9

The great virtue of Leshem’s study is that it reconciles divergent approaches to the theological genealogy of economy and governmentality, and at the same time clarifies how Christianity inaugurates a distinct form of economic life at both micro (subjective) and macro (social) levels. Leshem accomplishes this reconciliation, by recentering the discussion around the key Christian concept of the incarnation, which is persuasively shown to emerge, in the discourses of the fourth and fifth centuries, as a “transcription” of the economic life of the Trinity. In turn, the economy of the incarnation is shown to unfold into specific forms of human conduct, mimetically related to divinity, that inform the “art of pastoral economy.”10 The Christian principle of the incarnation, which is hardly mentioned by Foucault, and generally treated as a distraction by Agamben, is shown by Leshem to be the key to the distinctive Christian development of economy and government: “In the economy of the incarnation humans witness a perichoresis [full communion and interpenetration] between a divine nature and a human nature.” (69) The incarnation introduces a constitutive excess into the understanding of economy; the economy becomes the space in which an order of reality that transcends human reason appears. Furthermore, the transcendent excess of the incarnation enables the continual growth of the economy, insofar as it operates according to “inclusive purification”: in unifying divinity with human nature, Christ purifies this nature of sin, and sets in motion a concatenation of purifying actions on the part of followers who imitate his conduct and grow his economy in the created world. (70–71) It is this purifying growth that the pastorate seeks to foster in its guidance of individual Christian conduct and that of the Christian community, cast in Leshem’s terms as “the society of believers in Christ’s economy,” a society formed around an ongoing incarnational event that exceeds full human comprehension. (77)

This précis illustrates how Leshem’s study identifies key concepts of neoliberal economics—notably excess and growth—as emergent in the concept of economy developed within the early church. Furthermore, how pastoral governance is a specifically economic activity (cultivating modes of conduct that will enable the growth of the incarnational economy) is clarified in this account. However, what I find less clear in Leshem’s account is how the passage from this theological economy of the early Christian world to the materialistic economy of the contemporary world occurs. At several moments in the final chapter of The Origins of Neoliberalism, mechanisms for the transformation of Christian economy into the neoliberal economy are suggested, but are not fully elaborated. In the remainder of this response, I want to consider how the mechanisms that are allusively suggested might be more fully fleshed out in further research, particularly by engagements with Weber’s classic thesis of the Protestant Ethic and with Foucault’s implicit extension of the concept of pastoral power in his analysis of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics. The potential intersections and tensions between Foucault and Weber may prove a particularly productive site for extending some of Leshem’s insights.

In chapter 5 of Leshem’s study, where the transition between the economy of the early church and the economy of neoliberalism is pursued most directly, the transformative event of the Reformation and Max Weber’s sociological account of its consequences for economic life are addressed only in passing, in connection with a critique of Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of the ills of a modern society organized in primarily economic terms. According to Leshem, Arendt’s embrace of a “cultural-Weberian” explanation of modern economic society as a state of “world alienation” is only partially persuasive, because it does not recognize the deep history of the Christian ecclesia as an “economic” society, and thus fails to comprehend that “in addition to the expropriation of the Church’s worldly possessions . . . a further expropriation took place . . . the Church was stripped of the society of believers in the economy.” (161)

This notion of a social stripping away of the economy of the ecclesia, which coincides with a material stripping of the church is provocative but underdeveloped. How precisely did such a stripping away occur? By what means and mechanisms? To a scholar of early modern England, such as myself, Leshem’s language is evocative of Eamon Duffy’s classic account of the early English Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars (although that work is not cited), where we find a historical narrative that suggests that a material expropriation of the church by the state was indeed accompanied by a social expropriation, by the collapse of an incarnational economy—both material and pastoral—that (Duffy claims) sustained an entire social-sacramental lifeworld.11

Such a historical account would be one place to begin filling out Leshem’s claim; however, I want to suggest that a fuller engagement with Weber’s work might be another place to begin, closer in spirit to Leshem’s project, which is fundamentally philosophical and sociological, rather than strictly historical. For it seems to me, reviewing Weber’s argument in light of Leshem’s account, that the Protestant Ethic does describe the emergence of the signature economic sensibility of capitalism as the result of a profound reorganization and mutation of the economy of the incarnation established in patristic discourse and practice. The radical expansion of an Augustinian sense of original sin, the corresponding amplification of the sense of the divine as absolutely transcendent, the denial of free will in the doctrine of election, and the devaluation of good works as means of salvation—positions cultivated particularly by Calvinist teaching—alter fundamentally the society of believers in the economy of Christ. The notion that the economy of the incarnation may grow through “inclusive purification” would seem to be forestalled by such doctrines. The transposition of “good works” (which would seem to belong firmly within the pastoral, incarnational economy that Leshem describes) into “signs” of divine election seems a crucial pressure point. As Weber famously argues, in this transposition, “the Calvinist ‘creates’ his salvation himself . . . more correctly: creates the certainty of salvation” in the absence of the traditional patristic pastoral universe; this “certainty” is, of course, never actually certain, and for Weber, the striving, entrepreneurial “spirit” of capitalism may be traced as a consequence of the Reformed “idea of the necessity of putting one’s faith to the test [Bewährung des Glaubens] in secular working life.”12 Referring back to the theses of The Origins of Neoliberalism, I wonder how far Leshem would accept this as an account of how the concept of growth may have been displaced from the incarnational economy into the mundane economy of the creaturely world. Do the doctrinal shifts wrought by the Reformation constitute an actual “stripping away” of the incarnational economy and its society—or simply an effective and momentous recalibration of it into a new ethic, that of the “ascetic conduct of life” that Weber claims inadvertently contributes to a vast wave of capitalist expansion?13 As Leshem’s book ends with a call to reflect on “Economic Ethics,” I would submit that Weber’s hypothesis warrants more careful consideration, and I would welcome further elaboration on this front.14

This last point about the nature of “conduct” in Christian and capitalist economies leads back to a consideration of Foucault, and one final point where I believe the concluding arguments of the Origins of Neoliberalism could be further developed. We can discern some complementarity between Foucault’s concept of pastoral government and that of Weber’s Protestant Ethic insofar as both represent efforts to account for the conduct of economic subjects in modernity as they are conducted by techniques and practices that are genealogically related to the religious sphere, particularly if we consider how Foucault implicitly extends his analysis of pastoral government into the regimes of liberal and neoliberal governmentality in The Birth of Biopolitics (1979).15 While direct references to the pastorate disappear in Biopolitics, I believe we are warranted in finding its implicit extension in these later lectures, particularly if we bear in mind Foucault’s claims that pastoral power “has never been truly abolished”; even if it has been reorganized and redirected.16 I read Birth of Biopolitics as anatomizing the new form of pastoral power that emerges in neoliberal governmentality (ironically, inspired in part by Weber’s Protestant Ethic, which in Foucault’s account introduces the powerful motif of “irrational rationality of capitalist society” which neoliberalism will attempt to address systematically). 17 This assumption of an irrationality within capitalism and its market mechanisms that must be controlled or contained forms an essential part of the episteme of the neoliberal governmentality. It provides a warrant for the development of a new variant of pastoral power, which will produce the entrepreneur as homo economicus—not a rugged free agent, but an eminently “governmentalizable” individual to be comprehended according to the “grid of intelligibility” of economic behavior, which may in turn be modified, governed, by strategic initiatives and policy interventions, both within the political sphere and beyond it.18 Despite differences in emphasis, both Foucault and Weber were alert to how the modern economic subject is shaped by the long-term continuity of pastoral government, its extension and proliferation beyond the church.19 Both identify the Reformation as a crucial event in the transformation of Christian economic conduct. However, while Weber is frequently identified with claims that this process should be understood as a process of secularization, Foucault resists conceiving of this change in secularizing terms: in the wake of the Reformation, “there was not a transition from the religious pastorate to other forms of conduct, conduction or directing. In fact there was an intensification, increase, and general proliferation of this question and these techniques of conduct.”20 Pastoral government explosively grows in the sixteenth century; it intensifies with the multiplying religious pastorates, but it also exceeds the boundaries of these churches, entering into new spheres. This is the condition that Foucault presents as a prelude to his analysis of neoliberal governmentality.

I would like to relate this analytic back to another striking, yet under-elaborated, claim in Origins of Neoliberalism, where Leshem addresses the mutation that the “modeling of humans” has undergone in the neoliberal economy. Like Foucault, Leshem resists thinking of the modern transformation of the economic sphere and the economic subject as a straightforward secularization: “What occurred was not a clear and simple secularization of Christian society but a radicalization of the Christian theory of economic growth, which now holds that each and every object possesses the ability to generate in humans an unlimited, unsaturated desire”; this state is characterized as “a double-edged displacement of Christ’s excessive quality to the interplay between, on the one hand, the desiring subject and, on the other hand, each and every object of desire.” (168) This is a fascinating claim, but again, the mechanisms by which this transformation in subjective and objective economic life occurs appear opaque. My question is whether this proliferation of desire beyond the bounds of the patristic incarnational economy can be correlated to Foucault’s claim about the proliferation and transformation of pastoral techniques beyond the bounds of the church and into the realm of what we now call governmentality? As Leshem ably demonstrates earlier in his work, the early church pastorate effectively formulates and fosters a specific model of the desiring subject as a participant in the economy of the incarnation. To what extent are these pastoral techniques (or a version of them) still at play in molding the subject of the neoliberal market economy? And if we resist saying that these techniques and this subjectivity are “secularized,” by what other conceptual means can we describe this radical change (and the continuities within it).

There is very much in Dotan Leshem’s book to recommend it.1 It extends and makes available the philological or semantic history of “oikonomia,” the Greek term that modern English renders as “economy.” It articulates that history with a genealogy of the “human trinity” of politics, economy and philosophy through five moments that it calls classical, imperial, Christian, liberal and neoliberal. In doing so, it provides us with many more of the building blocks of a theological genealogy of economy and government. And its genealogical ambitions include no less than a diagnostic of the ethical radicality of neoliberalism as a formation that “inserts the power relations of the market . . . into the ethical sphere of the relationship between a person and herself.”2 It is indeed an important study that will form the foundation of many more.

I should first “confess,” if I can use that term, that my own interest in matters theological has been modulated through the study of three “profane” thinkers, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, rather than the firsthand study of theology.3 There is little about the third of these thinkers in Leshem’s book, and quite a bit about the first two, and it is his use of these thinkers that provides the opening for my comments here. Indeed, in contrast to my own theoretical trinity, Leshem adds Hannah Arendt to his. I should also confess a little surprise that although Leshem’s book follows in the footsteps of Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory4 in that it could be described as a “theological genealogy of economy and government” (as it is by Etienne Balibar on the dust jacket), it ultimately confirms a Foucauldian genealogy of governmentality rooted in the Christian pastorate. So I shall briefly offer a precis of the Foucault-Agamben debate, if I can call it that given that one of them is party to it only posthumously, summarize the way it appears in Leshem’s book, and then conclude with a few questions to the latter.

It has long been known that Foucault had an interest in what he called pastoral power and its relationship to modern forms of power and government. In his long-published lectures at Stanford, he had spoken about the way Western political rationality was formed through not only the “city-citizen game” but also, and more importantly for him, the “shepherd-flock game.”5 Together with the early-modern cameralist Polizeiwissenschaft and raison d’État, the Judaeo-Christian trajectory of the pastorate would be a key element in the formation of that rationality. Yet it was somewhat unexpected to find that his lectures on the history of governmentality in 1978, not published until about a decade ago (2004 in French, 2007 in English), contained some four and a half lectures on the topic.6 Even there, there seems an equivocation and a degree of embarrassment on the part of the speaker. At the beginning of the third of these (of 22 February) he announces he would like to finish with these “long-winded” histories of the “pastoral,” and at the conclusion of the lecture, he declares that he has done so and will return to his principal theme of governmentality.7 When he tries to do precisely this at the beginning of the next lecture (of 1 March) he is forced to ask the question of “how the problem of government, of governmentality, was able to arise on the basis of the pastorate.”8

The lectures unfortunately offer no clear answer to this question. In this lecture (1 March) he attempts to do so by considering the relationship between conduct and “counter conduct” in the “great age of the pastorate” from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries.9 The lecture in effect is a long discussion of these counter-conducts, which include practices founded on asceticism, community, mysticism, the Scripture itself and eschatology. At the conclusion of the lecture, he again promises an end to the discussion of the pastorate after adding that by analyzing it he had sought the “inner depth and background” of early modern governmentality.10 An indication that none of this was very satisfactory for him was that he begins the next lecture (8 March) again on the same theme of the “transition from the economy of souls to the government of men and populations.”11 Having examined historical contexts, and St. Thomas Aquinas’s text about secular monarchical government (De regno), he finally explains the “de-governmentalizaton of the cosmos” through the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the natural history of John Ray, and Port Royal grammar, all of which removed God’s rule of the world to that of “general, immutable and universal laws” and “final causes.”12 Foucault is clearly frustrated with himself at not being able to bring this discussion of the pastorate to a conclusion and not being able to give an intelligible account of its transition and relation to modern governmentality. Elsewhere, he will appear to make a gloss of a secularization thesis to explain the post-Reformation release of the pastorate onto modern authorities and experts from the enclosure provided by its “ecclesiastical institutionalization.”13

In The Kingdom and the Glory, to my mind a work every bit as important as the paradigm-shifting Homo Sacer 1,14 Agamben places his research “in the wake” of precisely these investigations and seeks to explain this sense of their incompletion.15 He argues there are three internal reasons why Foucault could not bring them to completion.

The first is a historical misstep. While Foucault recognizes the intimate relationship between the early Christian pastorate and governmental techniques, he ignores the theological importance of the oikonomia. This is particularly strange since he cites Gregory of Nazianus’s definition of the pastorate as an oikonomia pyschōn, an “economy of souls,” but immediately proceeds to redefine “oikonomia” as the concept of government understood in terms of the notion of “conduct”—as indeed, the “conduct of conduct.”16 He thus suppresses the theological genealogy of the economy for some fourteen centuries until the term rather mysteriously reappears in the work of the Physiocrats in the eighteenth century.

Second, Agamben claims Foucault fails to attend to archaeology as a “science of signatures” as evidenced by his use of Aquinas’s De regno rather than his treatise De gubernatione mundi.17 Foucault had also mentioned Malebranche in his fundamental misreading of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” as an image that encapsulates the constitution of economics as an “atheistic discipline . . . without God . . . without totality . . . that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility of a sovereign point of view over the totality of the state that he has to govern.”18 Again, Foucault’s tendency to move with a secularizing current in his genealogy of governmentality is confirmed. Just as he notes that raison d’État was denounced by Pope Pius V as ratio diaboli, an atheistic devil’s reason,19 in the sixteenth century, so liberal government will enter into a dialogue with the truly atheistic discipline of political economy two centuries later.

Leshem engages in detail with the work of both these thinkers but positions himself somewhat closer to Foucault than Agamben. He recognizes certain incompletions and misconceptions in Foucault. The incompletions include gaps between the “micro” and “macro” levels of pastoral power and governmentality, between philosophical life and communal life, and between the imperial politics of Western and Eastern late antiquity and what he perspicaciously calls the “ecclesiastical economy.” (6) Most of all “Foucault does not allude to the (theological) knowledge of divine economy that informs the art and theory of pastoral power.” (6) Foucault also misconceives Christian philosophical life as departing from the previous philosophical tradition, in describing its technologies as “self-alienating” and in ignoring its communal aspects. (6) Nonetheless, despite the anachronism of calling the ecclesiastical economy “pastoral power,” the strength of Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality is the insertion of “the patristic chapter in the archaeology of the human trinity.” (5)

Leshem’s treatment of Agamben is somewhat less forgiving. He starts from a historical shift: from the prominence of the Trinitarian theology of the second century for Agamben to the formulations of the fourth- and fifth-century Greek church fathers. This shift has a number of consequences: Agamben identifies economy with providential administration, and fails to recognize orthodox Christian distinctions between the divine economy for humans and providential care of the world. Most significantly, the shift undermines the very notion of an “economic theology” because economy and theology had become distinct by the time of the Council of Chalcedon as “the internal organization of the triune Godhead in the case of theology and the worldly manifestation of God in that of the economy.” (7) This leads Agamben among other things to a misidentification of a number of conceptions including the dual theoretical and practical character of the economy and a downplaying of the ethical dimension of the economy. Leshem also parries Agamben’s state of exception concept with a conception of pastoral power as a suspension of canon law that does not unleash the violence of sovereign power but facilitates philanthropy as the “mimesis of divine love” and “accommodation unto salvation.” (148–49)

At a crucial point of the diagnosis of neoliberalism, Leshem repeats Foucault’s phrase about cutting off of the king’s head, only to correct himself and say that for neoliberalism, “the political monarch has been anarchized.” (175) These of course are not quite equivalent. In addressing the first catchphrase, we can try to displace its preeminence in current political thought by “the king reigns, but does not govern,” an old syntagma from at least 1600 that has been taken up by Adolphe Thiers in 1830 and, via him, by Max Weber, Schmitt, Erik Peterson, Walter Lippmann, Foucault and Agamben himself.20 This phrase would keep together without reduction or displacement, in a certain kind of oscillation, reigning and governing, theology and economy, divine and human orders, providence and fate, sovereignty and governmentality, an act that serves as an emblem of the signature of power. Perhaps to speak of an anarchized monarch is to keep that same tension or, to use a fashionable term, pay homage to a certain “hybridity.” It definitely reminds us of the phrase, “the anarchy of the market.” But it also calls to mind the Ordoliberal Alexander von Rüstow’s characterization of classical liberalism as a form of pantheistic economic theology that requires correction by a legal and political order that leads “toward a new life of human dignity” and thus requires a resolution of pantheism and monotheism, anarchism and monarchy, economic and political theology.21 It will be said there are different kinds of neoliberalism, no doubt. But at least in its practical formations, contemporary neoliberalism tries to effect this resolution, and is mired in the attempt. It is an anti-statism that calls for a strong state to implement its “free” economy, it grounds the political and legal ordering of human life and freedom in an ultimately unknowable economic order, and it institutes the conditions of freedom, entrepreneurship and just competition by what Rüstow called “a strong and prudent state policy of policing the market.”22 An anarchized political monarch means that in every form of economic governing there remains a form of sovereignty or reigning, in every historical form of salvation there remains a divine order, in every market, a system of police, and in every economy, a theology.

This, then, is how I understand one small but crucial set of theoretical arguments in the book. Rather than trying to position myself in relation to this, I shall simply conclude by posing a series of questions. They are mainly directed to Leshem’s critique of Agamben, but the first set concerns Foucault. While one can accept that Foucault indeed built the foundation of a theological genealogy by placing the ecclesiastical economy (or what he called “pastoral power”) at its center, is there not a sense in which Foucault remains a thinker too rooted in immanentism to grasp the way in which religious practices and forms of organization constitute and depend upon transcendent conceptions of theology? Isn’t his narrative of government and economy too immanent, too flat, and ultimately too anti-sovereigntist to grasp the ambiguities, hierarchies and even violence of contemporary neoliberalism? Doesn’t it bear too close a relation to a secularization thesis as a “relative eschatology” in which all that will be left is a governing through self-governing to really hit upon the aporias of contemporary neoliberal forms of governing that weave together both “free markets” and “police,” economic liberal freedoms with illiberal or authoritarian practices and interventions?

In respect to Agamben, the core of Leshem’s argument concerns the historical shift in the relations between theology and economy in the fourth and fifth centuries. Yet, one of Agamben’s theoretical virtues would appear to be his capacity to search for the moments of “indistinction” between such opposed terms. Can’t we read him as searching for a logical, philological or historical point prior to a distinction (e.g., sovereignty and biopower in Homo Sacer, economy and theology in The Kingdom and the Glory)? To put this in methodological terms, if he is read as an “archaeologist” in his own (and not Foucault’s) terms, that is, as a researcher who seeks to recover archai that stand prior to such distinctions, then isn’t he being judged by alien protocols when we point to the later developments of a semantic history? In that sense, to ignore or claim the supersession of the early discussions of the Trinity recovered by Agamben is to ignore the way in which theological discussions of what is later called the “immanent Trinity” are articulated upon the history of salvation of the “economic Trinity”?23 Doesn’t a focus on the relative autonomy of “the human trinity” from theology risk missing this articulation and already point too easily in a-theological or secularizing direction?

Further, Agamben’s theological genealogy does not rest content with the oikonomia; he continues it through medieval notions of “providence” and “order.” The three notions of oikonomia, providence and order have the virtue of maintaining the relationship between transcendent and immanent powers or what Leshem calls theology and economy and what Agamben calls the two paradigms of political theology and economic theology. Are we not in danger, for example, of missing the role of providence in early economic liberalism from the Physiocrats to Malthus? Of missing the role of scholastic conceptions of order in the formation of what Ordoliberalism from the 1930s (alluded to above) and hence a relationship between acting to create the conditions of a competitive market and a market order that is ultimately unknowable, so central to neoliberalism? Moreover, doesn’t a narrative that emphasizes the break between the theological and the economic one too easily suppress the way “immanent” economic and managerial forms of government constitute and depend upon “transcendent” or sovereign aspects of worldly powers? Again, how can we avoid Foucault’s error of analytical, historical and political anti-sovereigntism, exemplified by his too forthright desire to cut off the king’s head in political thought and characterize the modern liberal economy as atheistic?

Having asked these few questions, I realize I am only scratching the surface of this rich and challenging book. These are some first thoughts, located at a site I have been digging for some time. Leshem’s book will no doubt continue to help direct me to new and richer fields for a long time to come.

Dotan Leshem offers us a new Christian secularization story, not of the sovereign as an earthly God, à la Schmitt, but of the transposition of the Christian model of the earthly ecclesia, the expansionary sphere of the revelation and outworking of God’s salvific plan, to the capitalist market. In contrast to Noam Yuran, his countryman, who has recently sought the secret of Protestant asceticism as a religious outworking of the “unspeakable voice of money,” the infinitely expansive desire that constitutes its substance, a desire for what money cannot buy,1 Leshem tells a secularization story not of money nor market, but of the ordering of divine excess, the generation of surplus, and growth. The formation and functioning of the Christian economy as a divinized earthly sphere parallels the Father’s begetting of the Son, “a surplus world created through the Son” (33).2 Following Tatian, the economy’s “principle of movement” is the generation of surplus from the divine excess immanent in its formation.

In Leshem’s account the Christian model, “a techno-theoretical apparatus” of the divine economy, understood as the outer earthly expansion and transcription of the inner economics of the triune Godhead in the ecclesia, ultimately migrated to the capitalist market (3, 9). Contra Agamben, it is this divine growth, not providential administration of the mystery, that constitutes the Christian economy.3 Paul first proclaimed the role of the church bishops as economists charged with “the dispensation of revealed divine mystery” (25). Major elements of the formal model grounding their understanding of their mission would, centuries later, show up in those of the economists who laid out the beneficent temporal logic of the market in wealth formation, and the growth of employment and consumption. It is not that religious figurations are economic; his genealogy demonstrates that our economics, our formal understandings of the capitalist market, are religious in form.

Leshem’s text, a brilliant, muscular historical semiotics of the economy, traces not only the category, but the model, of the economy from the classical world in which the private oikos whose prudent management of nature’s excessive means would generate a surplus allowing the master to freely participate outside in the polis or to pursue philosophy, to the Christians, through Paul of Tarsus who identified the ecclesia as an open-air oikos within which the excessive economics of the mystery of divine incarnation was proclaimed, witnessed and experienced, to Iranaeus who set the stage for the economy to be understood as a progressive history of salvation, a realization of the divine plan culminating in the “fullness of the ages” (38, 48), to Gregory of Nyssa who theorized an ever-growing sphere of human souls purified of sin, driven by their ever-growing, unsaturated desire for God (93–96), a desire that itself became desired, right up to the relentlessly expansive free market, likewise grounded in limitless human desire, which transforms all, including the self, into commodities convertible into coin.

In both the Christian and the market orders, growth is the watchword and telos, the substantiation of their value and truth, the evidence of the excess that animates them: growth of membership, belief and desire in the Christian economy, of the reach of the market and the amount of the goods that circulate within its ambit in the liberal market. As Cyril writes, “the ultimate end of economy is the sheer size of the Church” (143). In both, excess is desirable. In both, the economy is a sphere of freedom, of choosing. In both, the economy is a society of believers (163). In both, the state, a potentially coercive sinful body, should be subservient to the service of economic expansion based upon the free choice of its members.4 For those of us in the social sciences long conditioned to understand the capitalist economy as a profane and carnal domain, as the secret sociological ground of the power of dominant classes and nation-states, let alone our god, Leshem has turned the tables. God is the originary invisible hand.

But perhaps there are no tables to turn.

I engage Leshem’s book not as a historian of religion, let alone a theologian or philosopher of religion, but as a religious sociologist. My project is not to locate the sociological ground of religion, but the religious constitution of society. I look to Leshem’s elaboration of Christian “models” of the economics of mystery not for their interpretive adequacy and textual faithfulness in his reading of master Christian thinkers, something I am anyway not qualified to judge, but as materials for the building of a religious approach to orders of social being. I wish to push Leshem’s model beyond where he intended it to go.

The Christian economic model at the center of his story crystallized in response to the vexed relationship between the humanity and divinity of Christ. The critical Christian move that sets up the ontology and the cartography of the divine economy, Leshem shows, comes in the fourth and fifth centuries, between the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon, when on the one hand, an “ontological communion” of the three personas of the Godhead is elaborated as a theological domain outside space and time and the reach of philosophy, and on the other the separate sphere of the ecclesia as a human domain outside the Godhead in and to which he reveals his plan for salvation. It is this latter sphere, to which the Godhead is invisible, known only by its operations, that is henceforth identified by the Christians as the economy, the kataphatic face of “revealed operations” of the apophatic God (51).

Humans do not share in divine nature, yet participate in the Godhead through the divine indwelling of the perichoresis. It is only through human practices in the divine economy, in a human becoming afforded by divine being, that man is in communion with God, that human society becomes “a mirror in which the Godhead participates and in which it is reflected” (68). The inner organization of the trinity, its paradoxical combination of unity and plurality, one divine substance and multiple personas, this central mystery, is mirrored, or mimed, by the outer organization of the ecclesia (57, 71). The relationship between the divinely human Christ and God is the template for the relationship between the earthly ecclesia and Christ, the church as the body of Christ. Growth of the divine economy depends on human mirroring and miming of the Godhead, on what Leshem terms Christomimesis.

Although he asserts that the model is productive, a “paragon to be imitated, a mimesis by which the economy’s proper conduct and growth are secured,” its actual impact on growth is neither specified nor estimated (57). This is not a study of how growth actually takes place—the material practices of preaching, conversion, baptism, tithing, charity, taking of sacraments, church building, missionizing, conquest and colonization—in the Christian economy. Nor is it a study of the productive role of the economic models through which that growth was understood. This is a historical semiotics, not an analysis of the productive performativity of those words. It is a study of economics, not economies.

When I read Leshem’s Christian models of the economy of mystery, of hypostasis and perichoresis, of one essence and multiple modes of being, of the relation of divine and the human, it was uncannily familiar. I had not imagined that I would find sociological tools in the Cappadocian settlement. I read in Leshem’s model of the divine economy the elements for a model of a general institutional logic.5 I want to explore the possibility that this Orthodox Christian incarnational theology is not just a model of a divine Christian economy, but the general form and mode of operation of all institutions. The implication, as Weber suggested long ago, is that we live in a world of heterogeneous “value spheres,” an earthly polytheism.6

Institutional logics are constellations of subjects, practices and objects whose coherence and efficacy depend on metaphysical goods.7 Institutional logics are grounded in goods that I conceptualize as non-phenomenal institutional substances, beyond experience and reason, which can only be known through the operations which presume them and the institutional objects through and around which those practices are effected. And reciprocally, the practices of an institutional logic are only effective because of their grounding in the institutional objects which themselves depend on those institutional substances, for their believability and desirability, on belief and faith. Institutional objects—money, equity, accounts, contracts, borders, ballot boxes, scientific findings, a lover’s body, depend for their objectivity on institutional substances—market value, accountability, state sovereignty, popular representation, knowledge, love. Institutional objects incarnate the substance. These goods function as the gods of institutional life, not as highest beings, which would imply an institutional theolatry, nor as subjective values externally imprinted on things, but as virtual entities, or, in terms laid out by Jean Luc Marion, as divine givens.8

Christianity is true. But the truth of this Christianity, I want to suggest, is the truth not just of God and Jesus, but of institution. The troubling question for a book entitled The Origins of Neoliberalism is the historical relation between the two. I would suggest that the model of the Godhead, a “community” of divine personas, a “self-sufficient excess that inherently exceeds human rationality” (56), which is reflected and participates in the ecclesia, is a model of all expansionary institutional worlds. In the “ontological communion,” there is a “communion of interpenetration and mutual inclusion that subsists as the condition of appearance of the singular mode of being (hypostasis) of each of the Godhead’s personas” which is likewise the model for the ecclesia (56). In this new Christian understanding, Leshem writes, “the relation between the origin (God the Father) and the image (God the Son) is reflected and participates in the persona of the transcribed image, in the mirror of the being of the Son” (66). Just as Gregory imagined the church, human communities are held together by their communion, their mutual participation, with and through these institutional substances mirrored by their communion (98). And parallel to Gregory of Nazianzus’s anti-Arian proposition that the communion of divine persons of the Godhead be a model for the thinking the relation of ecclesia and Caesar, institutional communities are constituted through practices organized through constellations of institutional objects, no one of which necessarily has primacy (118).

In my view institutional substance is a Godhead whose being is knowable neither to experience nor reason—or as Basil remarked, “his essence remains beyond our reach” (70)—which, like Christ, penetrates and is reflected in the singular mode of being of institutional objects, whose objectivity depends on that hypostatic immanence, on the penetration, participation and reflection that is there in the mystery of its central material symbolizations. In this vein, Devin Singh has pointed to money’s incarnational logic, of Jesus as “God’s coin.”9 Institutional objects, whose substance is not located in Cartesian extension but through their participation in something which make them a “this” in Aristotelian terms, are icons of the substance. Institutional objects depend on this same “mutual interpenetration/inclusion,” the mutual immanence, that distinction without separation, that obtains in the ontological communion, the hypostatic elimination of any gap between a transrational good and its exemplary material objects.

The Christian cannot rationally access the relationship between divine personas, can never fathom Christ’s divine begetting. He can only know his God through God’s principles of action, through the ways in which we, not just God, participate in God’s divine operations in the human economy. In our institutional worlds, we only know institutional substances through the material practices they afford which participate in and reflect them. It is through these practices anchored in institutional objects that we “participate in the divine personas which reveals itself in the economy, whether of Christ’s body, the Church, the martyr’s flesh, a human’s own souls, and in the eyes of the his fellow members in the society of believers” (68). As with the hypostatic Christ, it is through institutional objects that we achieve a consubstantiality with the substance—with truth, sovereignty, market value, love, knowledge, representation. We have been formed and form ourselves in their image. They afford kinds of personhood, written in our hearts, interiors that exceed us. And thus the substances both participate and are reflected in our practical relation with institutional objects (68). Defending the border, appreciating the masterwork, manipulating a body of knowledge, turning goods into property, casting our ballot, caressing the body of a beloved, we become members through the incarnations of the highest goods. As in Gregory’s account of the Christian community, we are both bound as a community and revealed in our singularity in the eyes of others through this “communion in divine excess” (92). Through them we likewise “ceaselessly beget” ourselves “anew” (93). The truth of each of us is located in the way we reflect and participate in our distant, yet intimate, gods. In our institutional worlds, we “become at home only in a perichoresis with some One whose nature is alien” to us “beyond recognition” (77). Like Gregory’s virgin we all desire invisible grooms. We all, like Jesus, freely, lovingly subject ourselves to one Father or another (119). Christ’s body is everywhere.

Institutional substances are, and must be, excessive to the material practices through which they are substantiated on earth. That excess is essential to the central engine of the divine economy, the individual freedom to choose to participate in the persona revealed within it (68). The economy depends on a double gift, on a double exception external to it. The mystery of divine will, his self-giving, to which Paul pointed is complementary to the twinned mystery of human will, in which we give ourselves to the given which gives us to ourselves.10 This excess is integral to our choosing, choice being the center of the Christian economy.

That excess is part and parcel of the indeterminacy of reference, essential then to the inclusionary growth of any institutional logic, to its ability to incorporate new objects, new persons, new practices. Growth entails the uncertainty of reference, and reference exceptional authority that can never be reduced to a norm. Reference is always a potential state of exception. That excess, the intentional energy of growth it implies and its irreducibility to the visible practices it informs is also integral to the exceptional powers of institutional authorities to suspend the rules in pursuit of inclusion and the prevention of exclusion, just as Leshem documents in the extra-canonical validation of words and sacraments outside the boundaries of the church as in the case of the Catharoi (138). That growth—the ever-changing reference, the multiplication of practices, the re-agglomeration of institutional objects, the increasing number of things that circulate in its name—affirms the immutability and eternality of the Name (95). The transcription of this excess is sustained by the perpetual possibility of the sacrifice of its material forms and instances—results which are no longer knowledge because they have paved the way to new knowing, money that disappears only to reemerge in new expanded form, even objects and persons who have been institutionally excised, made inert. Such sacrifices are both a test and a source of belief in the divine substance which is in no way diminished, and indeed its excess is revealed, affirmed and grows, by them.

That excess is a source of desire that is itself excessive, yet integral, to their operation and their extension or growth. It is, as Gregory maintained, an erotic desire that “nourishes itself” (74). It is that institutional excess—as characteristic of money as it is of Christ—that is the presupposition of expansive “human wants,” which Leshem identifies as a natural source of excess in the market (177). To ground those practices solely in the pleasures of our individual benefit is to make a carnal reduction, making the origins and operations of institutional practice solely about passions and interests, conflating the desire for goods with the desire for the goodness of the good. To ground those practices only in their productivity, to refuse to ground them in something which transcends them, which can never be present, is to engage in an idolatry, to fail to understand the mysterious excess and consubstantiality essential to the fusion of productivity and performativity upon which institutional logics depend. The divine economy of an institutional logic is constituted by excess, an excess that is an engine of growth, a source of a limitless desire, of individual choice, a basis of passionless desire, the creation and production of surplus, and the suspension of norms and breaking of rules.11

Although not referenced in his text Leshem returns us to the preoccupations of Karl Lowith’s Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History who read the Western doctrine and apotheosis of progress as a secularization of Christian eschatology. Leshem, too, locates the “debut” of the “story of progress” in Christian historicity, “composed of crucial moments that are connected and ordered along a line that begins with creation and ends in endless eternality” (49). Lowith’s account was challenged by Hans Blumenberg both for his failure to recognize the Christian sources of secularization of eschatology as it adapted to the apparent deferral of Christ’s return, the conversion of the “energy of eschatological ‘state of emergency,’ set free, pressed toward self-institutionalization in the world,”12 and his failure to see the ways in which the nominalist tradition in Christianity, precisely the one that emphasized the unknowable and transcendent Divine will, his potential absoluta, that thereby stripped history of any telos and created the conditions for human self-assertion, not as a driver of secularization, but of the creation of a new modern world.13

What is the historical force of Leshem’s model of the divine economy? For Leshem, the model of the Christian economy worked out in the fourth and fifth centuries is a “key moment” in the “genealogy of the neoliberal marketized economy” (6). Leshem tells us a tale of the “migration” of economy—as concept and model. In part Leshem follows in the footsteps of Blumenberg who recast what had been described as secularization as the “reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant,” not a “transposition of authentically theological contents.”14 Leshem offers us a history of ideas as answers to “seemingly different” questions grounded in a trans-historical conceptualization of an invariant economy, a separate sphere in which excess is converted into surplus through prudence (3).

But contra Blumenberg, there is still a secularization story in the answers, in the uncanny parallels between the Christian economics of mystery and the neo-classical mystery of the market, particularly its emphasis on growth, in the migration of the model and the identification of the “origins” of a growth-centered marketization in the Christianity of late antiquity (163).15 So while Leshem repeatedly tangles with Agamben over his reading of the Christian economy, he repeatedly adopts Agamben’s understanding of secularization as a “signature,” “which move[s] and displace[s] concepts and signs from one field to another . . . without redefining them semantically.”16 In Leshem’s account the institutional movement of oikonomia is understood not in terms of changing sense, but of new denotations, in which the “very secularization of the world becomes the mark that identifies it as belonging to a divine oikonomia.”17

A religious approach to institution would obviate the need to invoke secularization. It is not that the economy has religious origins: All institutions are religious mechanism, which may also facilitate the transposition of models across them. That the divine is always already contained in the Son spells out a more general economics, ultimate goods as givens that ground an infinite desire for their materialization on earth. We all live for one Son or another, this One a hypostasis that provides a clarified formal model for the ways in which the goods of human life give us to ourselves, and that it is the necessary sacrifice of their material instantiations that both expresses and enacts the gap between the “economy” as a domain, or theater, of divine operations and the existence of the divinity itself. The god is known through this difference in the same way that market value transcends any price, knowledge any result, sovereignty any border, information any datum, property any possession. In an institutional approach, the origins of excess never fall to earth; they remain on the plane of the gods.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. The Kingdom and the Glory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

Friedland, Roger. “Divine Institution: Max Weber’s Value Spheres and Institutional Theory.” In Religion and Organization Theory, ed. Paul Tracey et al., 217–58. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 41. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2014.

———. “God, Love and Other Good Reasons for Practice: Thinking Through Institutional Logics.” In Institutional Logics in Action, Part A, ed. Michael Lounsbury and Eva Boxenbaum, 25–50. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 39. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2012.

———. “The Value of Institutional Logics.” In Topics and Issues from European Research, ed. G. Kruecken et al. Cheltenam, UK: Elgar, 2016, forthcoming.

Lowith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.

Marion, Jean Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Singh, Devin. “Incarnating the Money-Sign: Notes on an Implicit Theopolitics.” Implicit Religion 14 (2011) 129–40.

Weber, Max. “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and intro by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 323–62. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

Yuran, Noam. What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Growing up Orthodox Christian, I learned that a certain discretion is allowed to the bishop, priest or spiritual father/mother to discern a relaxing of the canonical rule kat’oikonomian. So, for example, if one were sick, she could be allowed to eat meat during fasting periods, kat’oikonomian, as it was not spiritually discerning to follow the fasting rules kat’akribeian, according to exactly as it is written. I had a general sense that for one’s relationship with God, sometimes the letter of the law needed to be relaxed. What always puzzled me was why the word oikonomia was used to express this attitude of discernment. I knew that oikos is the Greek word for household, and nomos is that for law, but “law of the household” doesn’t really explain much. After reading Dotan Leshem’s book, I now can muster a response that is at least suggestive, if not definitive.

Formally, Leshem offers nothing groundbreaking, as there exist numerous productions of genealogies that try to locate that precise moment in Christian history or that particular turning point in Christian thought where it all started heading in the direction we find ourselves today, with no end in sight. Substantively, however, Leshem does bring our attention to the much under-studied shifts in understanding of oikonomia from the Classical Greek household to the Christian appropriation for expressing God’s relationship to the world in terms of communion. If I read Leshem correctly, there is more discontinuity than continuity between the patristic trinitarian meaning ascribed to oikonomia and that of the Classic Greek understanding; but, there is more continuity than discontinuity, ironically, between patristic trinitarianism and neoliberalism. As he states, his book “establishes the Christian moment as the missing link, which, nevertheless, functions as the turning point in the use history of the economy between the ancient oikos where excess was despised, the economic sphere kept to minimum, and the neoliberal marketized economy where excess is desired, the economy infinitely growing” (3). Leshem accomplishes what any genealogy should—makes us see the ironies in history. But like most genealogies, Leshem establishes this missing link on the basis of blind spots that negatively could discredit the positive thesis he offers, or minimally and positively, will continue the discussion he has initiated. In light of the fact that Leshem elsewhere offers a detailed summary of his argument (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2016/06/16/the-origins-of-neoliberalism-modeling-the-economy-from-jesus-to-foucault-an-introduction/), I will forgo such a summary and begin by addressing what I find to be the most noticeable blind spot—his sources for interpreting Christian oikonomia in the fourth century.

One of the more lively debates in contemporary Orthodox theology is to what extent the patristic interpretations of the most notable Orthodox theologians, such as Vladimir Lossky, Dumitru Staniloae, Georges Florovsky and John Zizioulas, actually represent the “mind of the fathers,” or are theological constructions making use of language and ideas in patristic writings, whose meaning is very much shaped by the questions and concepts of modern and post-modern philosophical thought. Among the more well-known and relentless critics of these theologians are John Behr and Lewis Ayres, among others, and one would be hard-pressed to find very many, if any, references to these theologians in current patristic scholarship. Regarding Zizioulas, I have argued that his theology of personhood is defensible on the basis of the patristic writings, but without attempting to defend that an “ontological revolution” is what explicitly the Cappadocian fathers were advancing. Leshem seems to be unaware of this debate, and while he does refer to well-known patristic scholars such as Brian Daley, Khaled Anatolios and John Behr (he does not, oddly, refer to Lewis Ayres), the substance of his interpretation is supported with reference to Lossky, Zizioulas and Florovsky. He does reference John Behr’s work, but the bibliographical citation contains only Behr’s first book on Irenaeus and Clement. He does not offer support from Behr’s magisterial two-volume, The Nicene Faith. Also problematic is that the very model Leshem offers to explain the Christian understanding of oikonomia (48) is explicitly rejected with another model by Behr in his The Mystery of Christ (175). Leshem’s unfamiliarity with conversations surrounding patristic interpretations would lead me, at this point, to suspend judgment on whether, in fact, he has found the “missing link” between the ancient oikos and the marketized economy. Rather than offering an interpretation of the emerging Christian notion of oikonomia, he could be reading into the patristic texts a twentieth-century conversation around oikonomia, which was guided by a different set of questions and concepts than those of the fourth century. This does not mean that such an interpretation is irrelevant, as it could, indeed, offer a different way of understanding oikonomia than that offered by neoliberalism, but whether such an interpretation is really that of the fourth-century Christian thinkers awaits the judgment of patristic scholars.

The unawareness of the contours of contemporary theology is also evident in two other instances. The first has to do with Leshem’s references to the patristic scholarship of Michael Azkoul, to whom he expresses gratitude for “his strict guidance in orthodox readings of the Church fathers” (ix). What Leshem does not know, or does not mention, is that Azkoul is among those Orthodox thinkers (John Romanides and Christos Yannaras) who are uncompromisingly and virulently anti-Western, and who attribute all the ills of Western society to theological mistakes made by Augustine. There is an emerging literature on this Orthodox construction of the “West” that renders this typical metanarrative no longer credible. Azkoul, as well as the other anti-Westernists in Orthodoxy, rely on the patristic interpretations offered by Lossky and Florovsky, both of whom cannot be unambiguously characterized as anti-West. So, again, if Azkoul is indeed one of Leshem’s guides to a so-called “Orthodox reading,” it is a guidance that is blatantly ideological, especially in its attempt to diametrically oppose a pure Byzantine civilization against the heretical and, hence, inevitably nihilistical culture of the West. What is even more ironic is that Azkoul and his school of thought would blame neoliberalism on the heretical failings of Augustine, while Leshem seems to attribute neoliberalism to a particular understanding of Greek patristic thought. Where things go wrong for Leshem is the turn to an entirely immanent sense of oikonomia, which some no doubt would trace to Augustine, but which Leshem does not. It is a noticeable gap, however, that since neoliberalism did emerge in the West, and that Augustine’s was one of the most influential forces shaping Western thought, Leshem does not refer to or analyze Augustine’s trinitarian theology, especially his more complicated understanding of the relation between oikonomia and theologia.

Leshem’s discussion of the “social Trinity” is another instance that manifests a superficial acquaintance with contemporary theological discussions. Given his apophatic approach, Lossky absolutely cannot be counted as endorsing a social Trinity, nor can Zizioulas, though I realize some have used him in this way. And while Moltmann, LaCugna, and Boff did advance such a model, it has come under what some would consider insurmountable challenges by Karen Kilby and Kathryn Tanner. It would also have been good for Leshem to mention that LaCugna’s patristic interpretation of the relation of oikonomia and theologia in the Cappadocians, Augustine and Aquinas has been discredited by such notable scholars as John Behr, Lewis Ayres and Giles Emery, OP, rather than give the impression that her book decisively shaped his selection of patristic passages, as when a particular quote of Basil’s is indicated as “cited in LaCugna” (41).

I want to end by saying that although I do think Leshem has provided a genealogy that does break through ossified readings of history and which has opened new ways of seeing how we have arrived at our current neoliberal context, Leshem joins a long list of genealogists who try to open up possibilities without suggesting what those possibilities are. (In my opinion, Foucault’s later work was grappling toward those possibilities.) The one person who has actually offered concrete alternatives is John Milbank, but they are so unrealistic as to wonder whether they are simply proposed for the sake of rhetorical demonization of the other. Milbank’s politics of diametrical opposition is also theologically inconsistent with what is otherwise a beautiful theological vision of God’s trinitarian relation to the world.

Perhaps his ignorance of the subtleties of the debates within contemporary theology reveals the limits of interdisciplinarity; or, hopefully it will finally inspire scholars in other disciplines to realize that they should take theology seriously. Leshem is, at least, to be commended for his attempt at interdisciplinarity and for engaging theology not simply to identify a concept on the margins, or for identifying genealogically the hidden moment of difference, but as a discourse that contributes to the question of what it means to be human.

Leshem entered largely unchartered waters and demonstrated how Christian thinking of oikonomia is not irrelevant to contemporary philosophical discussions of the trinity of politics, economy and philosophy, as evinced especially in the work of Foucault, Agamben and Arendt. He provocatively suggests that the ills of neoliberalism may have something to do with thinking oikonomia without the transcendent. Can oikonomia look differently when tethered to something more than the divinization of the self? How can we have a different oikonomia that does not elide, as Milbank does, the church and the public political space? What is left ambiguous is whether in the public political space, which is not the church, the transcendent needs to take the form of a Christian ontology (Milbank), the monotheistic God (Paul Griffiths and Oliver O’Donovan), or, as I would argue, a substantive notion of the common good. On these and other related questions, Leshem has offered an important and groundbreaking book.