The relevance of a work about conflict in democratic politics needs very little introduction. We live in a moment of conspicuous public conflict, in which the possibility of finding sources of unity and common action in liberal democracies feels ever more precarious. Against this backdrop, Nicholas Norman-Krause wrestles with how big a difference and the desire for community should be held together in democratic life and comes to the arresting conclusion that the answer lies in embracing, not fearing, conflict. His case unfolds in both a critical and constructive direction: exposing the shortcomings of the theological tendency to pathologise conflict, and placing Christian political theology into sustained dialogue with agonistic political theory to provide examples of what an agonistic politics looks like in action.
Norman-Krause identifies in contemporary political theology a tendency to start theorising what democracy should look like through extrapolating from the character of God. In contemporary political Augustinianisms – whether of a postliberal or civic-liberal flavour – Norman-Krause suggests this positions political community and difference as necessarily opposed to one another, leading to a falsely negative evaluation of the role of conflict in democratic politics.
To fill out the generative possibilities of conflict, Norman-Krause turns to theories of political agonism. William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe are presented as key figures who resist political liberalism’s tendency to marginalise conflict, instead highlighting the liberative potential of conflict for democracy. Democracy becomes, in this light, ‘a practice of negotiating conflict in order to judge and act together to forge a common life amidst difference’ (pp. 95–96). Norman-Krause attends to the bridges that have already been built between agonistic pluralism and radical political theology but argues that the attempts in radical political theology to reimagine political life through reimagining the divine are to begin in the wrong place.
Instead, Norman-Krause develops an account of democracy as a fundamentally creaturely practice, and it is this that he begins to set out in the third chapter. Theological accounts of finitude, contingency, and embodiment are developed in engagement with Thomas Aquinas, Rowan Williams, Stanley Cavell, and others. Conflict emerges as ‘simply basic to the kind of sociality proper to finite creatures’ (p. 96). Nothing is necessarily going wrong, therefore, when we experience conflict. Moreover, conflict is the necessary ground not only for democratic life but also for ethical growth. In the contingency through which finite creatures grow and develop, we only see things from a particular embodied location, not from another, and conversation with those who see things differently is needed to fill out the picture of what common flourishing requires. All of this, for Norman-Krause, stems not from scarcity but from the abundance of creation. There could be multiple good outcomes in any given situation, and the conflicts that arise in the context of that multiplicity attest to the goodness of creation, of which our finitude is a part.
The communal and practical dimensions of this anthropology are developed in a chapter on ‘Judging in Conflict’. In his exploration of shared judgement and action amidst creaturely difference, Norman-Krause draws on Johannes Althusius, Yves Simon, and Hannah Arendt (amongst others) to propose that political judgement should be ‘provisional, contestable, answerable to dissent, and open to revision’ (p. 34). This kind of judgement is capable of treating conflict as the lifeblood of democracy, whilst resisting fragmentation and factionalism. The final chapter then takes this agonistic politics in a more explicitly theological direction, through a return to engagement with Augustine (and especially his account of love). For Augustine, a people is most fundamentally held together not through shared rationality but through love. It is love that prevents political conflict from degenerating into violence and orients people to pursue the common objects of their desire. In this light, Martin Luther King Jr. and Gustavo Gutiérrez embody for Norman-Krause an agonistic politics of love, capable even of accounting for love of enemies.
Norman-Krause provides a clear and compelling vision of how agonism, if rightly understood and properly channelled, can strengthen democratic life and enrich our common existence, and this book is a rich and welcome contribution to contemporary political theology. His sustained dialogue with agonism is deeply informed and allows for the unfolding of a fruitful (but critical) friendship between political theology and radical democracy, and his constructive argument for recognising conflict as simply part of creaturely sociality is deeply persuasive.
Yet such a strong emphasis on conflict as stemming from finitude, and leading to the growth of finite creatures, risks obscuring the way in which fallenness – and not just finitude – will inevitably shape our conflicts. Although he is attentive to the fact that it is fallen creatures who engage in conflict, his focus is on the redemptive possibilities of such conflict. More attention could be paid both to how conflict can compound fallenness and to the practices needed to guard against forms of conflict that tend to damage rather than to grow. This would fill out an already excellent exploration of the nature of conflict in democratic life, which already does a huge amount to elucidate its potential for common creaturely flourishing.
