Anthony Mansueto
Bitter critiques of established institutions are, historically, something that we associate with the Left, while conservatives, even when they acknowledge the need for change or reform, remind us of the critical importance of even imperfect institutions in cultivating human beings capable of realizing their latent potential and serving the Common Good. Today, however, we find quite a different pattern, with the Right attacking and, in some cases, even attempting to destroy not just the Church but also the Press and the Academy, the legal profession and the courts, and the that dangerous bastion of revolutionaries, the civil service.
The most developed version of this is the Dark Enlightenment critique of what it calls the Cathedral. The Dark Enlightenment is, fundamentally, a “next generation” offshoot of libertarianism –and in particular the fusionist libertarianism represented by Murray Rothbard and F.A. Hayek (Rothbard 2007, Hayek 1988). This sort of libertarianism, integrates radical free market economics with social conservatism, aring that markets and traditional social institutions have both demonstrated their survival value. Libertarianism has had a strong constituency among the technocratic intelligentsia for some time. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, Frank Tipler argued that humanity could, should, and would build God by re-engineering the universe into a massive supercomputer running off of the gravitational sheer created in the final instants of a closed universe which would run emulations of everything that was logically possible. And, following Frederick Hayek (Hayek 1988) he argued that free markets would get us to this point fastest (Barrow and Tipler 1986). But for Tipler and indeed for Hayek “right-leaning” meant free markets, not fascism.
The turn towards a more authoritarian ideology came in the mid- to late 2000s as it became increasingly apparent that democracy and libertarianism were incompatible. Sometime around 2006 or 2007 elements within the technolibertarian trend, including Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), Nick Land, Peter Thiel, and Michael Asimov began to realize that libertarian economics did not stand a chance in a democracy. A majoritarian electorate would simply never consistently vote to support libertarian policies which, advocates of this line of reasoning increasingly admitted, simply were not in their self-interest. And so, they began to argue for abandoning democracy in favor of a network of autocratic corporate city states in which people would have the right of “exit” but no “voice.” Anyone who wished to (at least anyone with the necessary resources) could, in other words, leave one city state for another, more to their liking. But within each city-state, one would have to toe its line. The idea is that the owners of these city-states would be motivated to run them as well as possible and thus to attract the best and the brightest (Yarvin 2007).
The question, of course, is how one builds the power necessary to carry out such a transformation. Dark Enlightenment theorists found their answer in the ideas of antidemocratic theorists from the first third of the twentieth century, including traditionalists such as Julius Evola (Evola 1934) and Rene Guenon (Guenon 1927), who had a quite different political-theological agenda, and more recent thinkers such as Hans Herman Hoppe (Hoppe 2001). They also began to attract around them a periphery of related trends which distinguished themselves from other currents on the right by the purportedly scientific basis of their claims: the “human biodiversity trend,” which argues that there really are genetically determined races with distinct, if not necessarily superior or inferior biological adaptations (Frost 2015, Fuerst 2015), and the “androsophere” (Lewis 2019, Kennedy-Kollar 2024) which argues for traditional gender roles on the basis of sociobiological and similar arguments.
What does this have to do with the Right’s attack on institutions? Yarvin’s principal thesis is that democracy is a failure. There are two reasons for this. First, following James Burnham (Burnham 1941), he argues that there is a disjunction between who owns the state (and other social institutions) and who manages it. Like Burnham, he believes that elites always rule, and that democracy is simply a mechanism for elite competition. And the elites actually governing, not just the state but also corporations, are members of the managerial class (also often called the “new class,” the “professional middle class,” or the “new petty bourgeoisie”) who have no real stake in what they are governing.
Second, Yarvin argues that democracy has been legitimated by what he calls the “Cathedral,” the complex of hegemonic academic, cultural, and liberal religious institutions, including the Press and the popular culture industry which, it argues, promotes a more or less secularized version of liberal Christianity. The Dark Enlightenment is quite vigorous in pursuing this polemic, and in using Christian as a term of derision and attacking even militant New Atheists such as Dawkins and Denton as “shills” for the Cathedral.
The Dark Enlightenment associates the Cathedral specifically with the Puritan tradition. It is quite insightful, in this regard, in tracing the specific cultural roots of what has come to be called liberalism (more properly social liberalism) in the United States. The spiritual shadow cast by Puritanism over the Left in the United States is evident in the fact that progressive politics are seen to be first and foremost a reflection of an innate spiritual superiority than an expression of definite social interests. This is one legacy of the Reformed Tradition, and especially its liberal variants, which looked to “usefulness to society,” expressed through either economic productivity or (in this case) commitment to social justice, as evidence of divine election. And this pattern holds even for those whose Calvinism has become fully immanentized. Against this Puritan or “Roundhead” legacy, the Dark Enlightenment identifies with the Cavalier tradition and with its legacy in the Deep South, and indeed with traditionalist trends generally.
This said, the Dark Enlightenment attack on the Cathedral is simply one manifestation of a broader Gramscian turn on the Right. It is no accident that the rupture of the postwar social-liberal alliance and the turn rightwards towards neoliberalism, which is often dated to the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was preceded by the suspicious death of Albano Luciani, John Paul I, in September of 1978 and the election of Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, who began a protracted period of reaction in the Church. As the theology of liberation struggled to keep the Catholic Church aligned with the people, Joseph Ratzinger and his allies in the Communio tendency took aim at the growing influence of the professional middle class and argued for an Augustinian theology focused on the doctrine of original sin, a primarily expiatory understanding of the work of Jesus of Nazareth, and the importance of submission to the pontifical magisterium of the Church. On the Protestant front, previously apolitical dispensational premillennialists, who regard the ethical teachings of Jesus as pertaining only to a past Jewish dispensation, with no relevance in the present “Church Age,” formed the core of a new Religious Right, joined by emerging trends such as Reconstructionism and Dominion Theology, which went further to argue for direct Christian control of all principal social institutions. Meanwhile, groups like the Institute for Religion and Democracy struggled to pull “mainline” Liberal Protestant communities back towards the Center Right (Neihaus 1981, Fast 1985, Diamond 1989).
Further to the Right, just as momentum towards the creation of the European Union was building, the European Nouvelle Droit began to revive traditionalist and historic fascist discourse around ethnic identity and national sovereignty, with many of them breaking explicitly with Christianity in favor of various neopagan revivalisms (Faye 1998, Krebs 2012). After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, liberal and social democratic tendencies struggled, while a powerful Eurasianist block emerged, which eventually united around Alexander Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory,” which argued that the liberal and democratic civilization of Europe and North America was decadent and dying and which argued for a multipolar world of competing civilizational empires (Dugin 2009/2012). This ideology found growing support across Europe and eventually in the US among so-called National Conservatives who made electoral gains by organizing resistance to globalization from the Right, and by building parallel cultural institutions such as universities and media corporations, while attacking the legacy academy and media as having been taken over by “Cultural Marxism.”
What makes the Dark Enlightenment distinct, however, from all these trends is the fact that it has aimed to actually destroy the “Cathedral” rather than to reassert control over it or replace academic, religious, and cultural institutions.
With this in mind we need to understand just why the attack on the Cathedral is so central to the strategy of the Right –and why defending the Cathedral, but also reforming it, must be so central to ours. The analysis has important implications for political strategy generally, and in particular how we understand the strategy of cultural hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci and now shared in significant measure by much if not most of both the Left and the Right.
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Why is the Dark Enlightenment critique of the Cathedral so dangerous? Here it is vital that we understand what is most distinctive about our own civilization, which the Right blames the Left for destroying –and which is a constitutive dimension, albeit in differing degrees, of all axial and postaxial civilizations1. The Saeculum2 at least in its liberal and democratic forms, understands itself as having ended the primacy of spiritual authority over temporal which defined all earlier civilizations, so that the State is at once supreme and somehow limited by pre-existing and/or constitutionally defined human rights. But this is not really accurate. Medieval Christendom was constituted not by theocracy or by the supremacy of Church over state, but rather by the dialectic between Empire and Church, in which the Empire was responsible for pursuing the means by which humanity could realize its calling, while the Church helped humanity understand what that calling might be, and cultivated the capacities necessary to realize it (Goerner 1965, Gilson 1968). The line between the two domains was never easy to define. Emperors and kings tried to appoint bishops who would be loyal to them, and Bishops and Popes claimed the right to dissolve the bond between a people and its ruler when the ruler violated the norms of natural law. But had either succeeded in establishing effective primacy over the other; it would have ceased to be itself. Without an autonomous spiritual authority distinct from itself, which could grant it legitimacy by validating (conditionally) its claim to serve the Common Good, the Empire would just have been another band of warlords. And without the Empire, the Church would have absorbed the functions of the Empire and become the very temporal institution which it claimed to hold accountable to a standard higher than either brute force or positive law. And while the dialectic between Empire and Church in Europe was especially intense and perhaps uniquely balanced by comparison with some other civilizations, a similar pattern held in China, India, and Dar-al-Islam. As imperfect as they are, religious institutions hold political institutions accountable before the court of natural law.
Secularization certainly altered this dynamic. But secularization was not something really distinct from the European Conquests, the formation of the Absolutist State, and the process of primitive accumulation and proletarianization which led to capitalist development, aimed at liberating people from some imagined papal tyranny while they were being conquered and stripped of their land and local autonomy and transformed into instruments of production. It was a constitutive dimension of the process of capitalist development (Milbank 2006).
This point is worth explaining in more detail. The seizure of Muslim and Jewish assets in al-Andalus and the Holy Land was of a piece not just with the later seizure of indigenous lands in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, but also with the clearances and enclosures which drove millions of peasants off their land to make way for sheep, and with the secularization of monastic and other religious estates, a process which, on both the margins of Europe (e.g. in Sicily and the Mezzogiorno) and in the Americas (e.g. Mexico during the Reforma) extended well into the nineteenth century, contributing to both proletarianization and to the primitive accumulation of Capital.
This couldn’t have been done, however, without strong states which were increasingly independent of the Church. The Crusades, the Reconquista, and the European Conquests in Africa, America, and Asia were driven by growing shortages of new land on which knights could be settled with families. This meant that they remained unmarried and living in what amounted to castle barracks, raping and pillaging the countryside. While the Church supported the Crusades and other conquests as a way to “usefully engage” what was becoming a socially dangerous population of young, armed, aristocratic men, these wars ultimately hurt the Church politically. This is because large wars of conquest required strong centralized states capable of fielding large standing armies and staging massive transcontinental expeditions. This was also, precisely the kind of state which could begin to dismantle the autonomous authority of the Church, which had hitherto held the warlords of Europe in check, however imperfectly and with however many compromises.
Finally, at the ideological level, emerging absolutism provided the basis in experience for an emerging emphasis on divine sovereignty, something which was reflected in the Augustinian Reaction of the thirteenth century, which effectively suppressed Aristotelian science (because it was seen as limiting the power of God to what was logically possible) and which ultimately led to the Scientific Revolution, as science was forced by theological censors sympathetic to the emerging absolutist monarchs, not the papacy, to withdraw from teleological explanation to formal, mathematical description, but also the Reformation.
These developments were far from being uniformly liberating but rather represented a loss of autonomy for individuals and communities across classes as they lost access to the means of production, as power was centralized in distant capitals, and as faith in the ability of autonomous reason to engage questions of meaning and value was undermined.
Arrangements differed, to be sure. Most of Europe ended up with state churches, Catholic or Protestant, which rarely had the power to stand up to the new Absolutist Monarchs. Some places, such as France, Italy, Mexico, and Russia, as they broke their monarchies, attempted to break the Church as well, creating radically secular states. The United States was unique in opting, largely out of necessity, for radical disestablishment, something which turned out to let religion flourish (de Tocqueville 1835/2003). Universities, as they were liberated from bishops became subject to states and struggled to conserve freedoms the rationale for which was embedded in now discarded theologies. New media (the printing press) made it possible to transfer knowledge rapidly and without the widespread collaboration of those who held it, leading to the erosion of the guilds as emerging capitalists trained workers using textbooks and instruction manuals, bypassing the years of training previously necessary –but also the power of the guilds to regulate prices and wages and the moral community which they created (Eamon 1994).
That said, there were liberating processes underway which were distinct from the process of capitalist development, state formation, and secularization. While in most of Europe the peasant revolts which followed on the demographic crisis caused by the Black Death were either successfully repressed or followed by enclosures and clearances, in a few places, such as the Low Countries and the hinterlands of the Lombard cities (Anderson 1974), they succeeded, effectively ending feudal burdens and creating a rural prosperity which was capable of sustaining thriving artisan/merchant cities. And these cities became the locus of a revival (and re-imagining) of a civic humanism reaching back before the advent of the Roman Empire. As we have argued elsewhere (Mansueto 2010, 2016, and 2025) this humanistic secular project, which had its roots in the dialectical tradition, gained enormous strength first urban communes and then through the liberal, democratic, and socialist revolutions, which attempted, though with only partial success, to create new political subjects (the rationally autonomous individual, the people as demos, or the working classes) which could make humanity the master of its own destiny. The liberal and democratic revolutions which grew out of this humanistic tradition appealed above positive law to universal principles to which they argued all states were subject. Secular liberals and democrats grounded these principles in natural law. Dissenting Protestants grounded them in Divine Command or in the fact that God created us –and thus owns us, the real basis of Locke’s natural rights theory (Locke 1690/1967). These are the principles which are invoked by the United States Declaration of Independence and the French Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 and 1793. And largely because the constant struggle between Church and State, between Catholics and Protestants, and among the ever-growing swarm of Protestant sects was fought to a stalemate, de facto religious pluralism and a regime of toleration gradually became the norm and was accepted, though at first as a not value but rather as a condition of survival. Eventually this regime of toleration led to a growing, though obviously by no means fully universal and secure, radical pluralism of different ways of being human.
It is here, in this ambivalent and imperfect mess of institutions –universities freed from the bishops and struggling to remain free from the state, religious institutions struggling to find a constituency in a world in which the principal of locus of meaning is now within this world, a “free” Press which is actually owned by private capitalist, but which for centuries somehow managed nevertheless to hold both other capitalists and the political authorities they supported accountable—that we find the origin of what Yarvin calls the Cathedral. It is necessary to our civilization. Because we are material and social beings, the principles we want to recognize and uphold require institutions to embody them and make them effective. And if these principles are to be understood as in some sense “above” positive law and the state, and even as under some circumstances compelling the state to take action, the institution(s) which uphold them must also be “above” the state, not legally, to be sure, but morally. The Cathedral, as the messy, imperfect complex of cultural institutions which emerged from Medieval Catholicism, the creation of moveable type and later of electronic communication, disestablishment, secularization, and globalization (which brought into the dialog other civilizations and their architectonic institutions), is the visible presence within our civilization of the diverse plurality of higher principles to which that civilization is ordered, and the final guarantee of our right to pursue those aims within the limits of comparable freedom for others.
The Dark Enlightenment hates and fears the Cathedral because it represents a check on the ability of the capitalist magnates to do whatever they want to whoever they want.
The institutions which make up the Cathedral are, however, not just guarantors of fundamental human rights and indices of civilizational ideals. They form people intellectually and morally as free human beings and engaged citizens with a mature spirituality –ideally one they have chosen for themselves, on the basis of extended study of humanity’s historic deliberation around questions of meaning and value. And here the tension with Capital –and with whatever post-capitalist techno-feudal Behemoth the Dark Enlightenment envisions as its replacement—becomes more intense. A free human being will never be happy being forced to sell their labor power in order to survive. Nor will Capital –much less the agonistically rather than economically driven billionaires behind the Dark Enlightenment—ever be happy with “employees” who yield just enough in order to survive, much less those who, in virtue of a quasi-monopoly on certain kinds of knowledge and direct control of the levers of administration, bend the capitalist enterprises and the state to what they regard as higher goods.
And here we come to the complex knot of contradictions at the center of the current crisis. On the one hand, the institutions of the Cathedral have very largely failed to cultivate free human beings and engaged citizens with a mature spirituality –or, for that matter, “clerics3” who authentically and effectively order their lives to the civilizational ideal which they have embraced. On the contrary, most of the professoriate, nearly all of those engaged in pastoral ministry and leadership, and all but a handful of journalists and lawyers and civil servants, have come nowhere near deciding independently and based on an authentic grasp of the historic debates, where they stand on the question of what it means to be human. And while most were drawn to their work in large part because of a broad sense of its contribution to the common good, they have made a lot of compromises in the interest of greater security and expanded opportunities. This is especially true of the professoriate, which welcomed the vast expansion of “higher education” after the Second World War, even though it was legitimated to the people as a means not of intellectual, moral, and spiritual cultivation and political empowerment, but rather as a means of upward mobility –a substitute for class struggle. The Catholic hierarchy, custodians of the single most effective global institution dedicated to both civilizational leadership and spiritual development, willingly sacrificed its calling in order to defend the comfort and privilege of a male celibate clergy, even when this meant not having the resources to carry out its mission. Journalism allowed itself to be professionalized, resulting in the disappearance of one of the last places where rising working class intellectuals could build a career and ultimately some public influence, and then failed to resist as the publications they worked for –always, ultimately, platforms for the not always enlightened agendas of their proprietors– into divisions of larger corporations subject to total control and often “downsized” to the point of irrelevance.
These failures of the Cathedral to carry out its highest mission, to effectively limit the predations of Capital, and to cultivate free human beings and engaged citizens who can decide for themselves what it means to be human –and who have the courage of their conviction, were the condition of its existence under capitalism. But even a neutered and broken Cathedral is too dangerous for the emerging stratum of capitalist magnates, who want freedom unlimited by that of others, including the freedom to radically thin the herd of human sheep they no longer believe they need.
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This leaves us in a situation in which we need to simultaneously defend and reform the Cathedral. But how? Here the starting point –not just because of his authentic insights into the question, but because he has become the strategic touchstone of both the Left and the Right—must be the work of Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1948, 1949a, 1949b 1950, 1951, 1954, 1966), who understood himself to be undertaking precisely this task.
In order to understand Gramsci’s position, it is necessary to situate it in the context of Communist political strategy and specifically in the context of debates around how best to resist fascism. Marx and Engels (Marx and Engels 1848/1978) understood history, and thus revolutionary change, as driven by contradictions between the forces and relations of production. Structures which, like free markets in capital, labor, and goods and services, which once facilitated technological progress and economic growth eventually became an obstacle. This led to economic crises and to increasingly complex levels of resistance on the part of the working classes –in the case of the industrial proletariat from sabotage through trade unionism—until workers began to form their own political party with the aim of seizing control of the state and using it to restructure the social order.
That said, Marx also recognized that the commodification of labor power alienated people from their underlying humanity (Marx 1843/1978, 1844/1978), so that a fully revolutionary class consciousness did not develop spontaneously but rather required a conscious leadership which understood the “line of march, conditions, and ultimate general result” of the historical process generally and of the struggle against capitalism in particular (Marx and Engels 1848/1978). For Marx, this most likely meant informal intellectual leadership within broader socialist parties. Lenin (Lenin 1902), however, argued that effective revolutionary struggle required a disciplined, compact party of professional revolutionaries. Both, however, believed that the revolutionary process itself was driven by underlying economic contradictions. It was the task of the party to exploit those contradictions in order to build power and eventually seize control of the state, an approach which Lenin executed brilliantly, at least from the vantage point of strategy, to seize control of and remake the Russian State and to begin to build socialism on the periphery of the world capitalist system.
The advent of fascism, however, created new challenges for the Communist Movement, showing that other elements could exploit the contradictions of capitalism as well, linking the distress and humiliation of the masses to an authoritarian nationalist agenda, pushing the Communists to the margins. This led Gramsci to refine the historical materialist understanding of power, stressing that it was not just a matter of force (dictatorship) or of co-optation (for which he used the Italian term transformismo), but rather of hegemony, which involved not only casting one’s political project in terms of the traditions of the people, so that the structures of exploitation and oppression by means of which the ruling classes sustained themselves seemed to be part of a legitimate moral order, but also forming the people intellectually and morally in such a way as to meet the needs of the ruling classes. Gramsci himself concentrated more on the former dynamic, with the Frankfurt School, and Erich Fromm (Fromm 1941, 1947) in particular, looking in greater depth into the formation of authoritarian personality structures.
It is in this context that the Catholic Church first enters the field of view of Communist Strategy not just as an adversary but rather also as a model, the model of an institution which successfully made an exploitative and oppressive social structure –first the Empire and then feudalism—seem like part of an eternal, legitimate moral order. It did this situating the potentially revolutionary message of Jesus in the Gospels (the basis of its appeal to the peasant masses) in the broader theological context of a Pauline theology which stressed a divine command ethics and original sin and which understood the work of Jesus as primarily an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of all humanity.
Gramsci understood the process of capitalist development as having been accompanied by a series of reformations, Protestant, Liberal, and Democratic, which restructured the ideological and cultural domain in a way which reflected the lived experience, interests, and aspirations (in various combinations) of the absolutist monarchies, the various elements within the bourgeoisie, and the petty bourgeoisie, and in fact understood the socialist revolution as requiring what amounted to a Socialist Reformation (Portelli 1974). Where the Protestant, Liberal, and Democratic reformations had been fairly successful, as in the United Kingdom, France, and United Staes, the bourgeoisie, working through a more pluralistic and less tightly integrated complex of institutions than the Catholic Church (somewhat different in each case, but including a more pluralistic mix of religious institutions, the schools and the academy, and the press) had been able to achieve this sort of hegemony, presenting capitalist development as a realization of some mixture of the Protestant Ethic and the liberal and democratic variants of the humanistic ideal.
In Italy and Germany, however, this had never really happened, leaving the door open for fascism. Indeed, in Italy at least, the bourgeoisie failed to even develop a full party system. Instead, it ruled by means of what Gramsci called transformismo, with various elements in the bourgeoisie (e.g. landowners growing wine or citrus, oil or grain, and the older mercantile and the emerging industrial and financial bourgeoisies) cutting deals with elements of the working classes to win elections and form governments. This undercut the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony and made it easier for fascism to come to power, but it also opened the door for the Communist Party to mount a contest for hegemony long before it was able to successfully win elections or otherwise “seize” state power.
In Gramsci’s view, it was the task of the Italian Communist Party to carry out a Socialist Reformation, drawing on the popular Christianity of the peasant masses to restore Christianity to its origins in the teachings of a marginalized Galilean rabbi for whom the demand for justice required a clear option for the poor and which, in the new conditions which existed after the industrial revolution, required socialism and ultimately fully realized communism. The party needed, in other words, to displace the Church as the principal interpreter of popular traditions and of Christianity in particular. Only then would it have the power to begin the deep structural transformation which communism required.
There are many different readings of Gramsci, and many different attempts to implement his strategy. Broadly speaking, however, those readings can be classified as either populist (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) or institutionalist (Portelli 1974) and, in the case of the latter reading, as theorizing hegemony as displacement of existing religious and cultural institutions, alliance with those institutions in a kind of broad popular front, or deep engagement with and transformation of existing religious and cultural institutions.
It is the populist reading of Laclau and Mouffe which has been dominant on the Left in the past few decades. This reading departs more or less entirely from historical materialism, with its focus on class struggle as the underlying force behind politics and instead sees the struggle for hegemony as a purely contingent process of constituting political subjects through discourse and other cultural mechanisms. For them, the “socialist moment” was just that, a time when diverse political interests came together around class identity to mount a struggle against capitalism and for socialism. The present period, especially since 1989, might be better described as one of fragmented new social movements organized around race and ethnicity, sex and gender, and even concern about the integrity of the ecosystem, all understood as fully contingent and ultimately subjective identities, now coupled with a renewed resistance to capitalism motivated by neoliberal austerity and organized around poles such as Socialism of the Twenty-First Century, Democratic Socialism, and Left Populism, without much reference to historic working class institutions such as trade unions or the Communist Party.
We will not debate here whether or not this reading of Gramsci is accurate as a reading –though we believe that it is not. What we can say is that it reflects an abandonment of the struggle over institutions which has been going on for the past 50 years, and which we are on the verge of losing, both in the sense that the Cathedral itself is now under threat, and in the sense that the Cathedral has become less and less effective in cultivating free human beings and engaged citizens with a mature spirituality.
The institutional reading of Gramsci understands hegemony as fundamentally a question of building cultural institutions which create a framework of meaning and value in which the communist project makes sense. Practically, this has meant thee different things. Originally, for the Partito Communista Italiano which embraced it, Gramsci’s strategy was understood as a mandate to develop a parallel Communist culture and institutional complex centered around the party, something which was by no means unique to Italy but which was, perhaps, more developed there than elsewhere. Critical here were the Case del Popolo, essentially bars/cafes/social clubs, present in every Italian working-class neighborhood or rural village in the decades following the Second World War. It was not unusual to see these decorated with images of the Gesu Socialista, a figure in Italian Socialist iconography and discourse, even before Gramsci (Manuseto 1985).
However much they may have rejected Gramsci’s broader theoretical innovations, the Communist Parties of both the Soviet Union and China, clearly understood the problem he was addressing. Especially after the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union invested significantly in research around the question of how to create the “spiritual conditions for socialism” (Dahm 1985). The Cultural Revolution did, of course understand itself as creating precisely those conditions, and when this nearly led to civilizational collapse, new attempts were undertaken under Hu Jintao (Palmer 2017) to create a “socialist spiritual civilization,” and under Xi Jinping to develop and even broader discourse around China as a “civilizational state” rather than an ordinary empire, and to retheorize Communism as the xinxue of socialist society (Jiang 2010, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020).
Later, as it became clear that while this counterhegemonic strategy had been quite successful in building a strong communist bloc which could deliver roughly a third of the electorate, but which was not growing beyond that, Aldo Moro and his colleagues suggested the Compromesso Storico between the Democrazia Cristiana and the Partito Communista Italiana, an alliance which led ultimately to the fusion of significant elements of both in the Partito Democratico.
Finally, during much the same time, we saw a much deeper collaboration between the Catholic Left and communist elements in the national liberation movements in Latin America, in which the Catholic Left and the communist movement began what amounted to a process of profound mutual transformation, a process which was cut short by the election of Woytila in 1978 and the crisis of the Soviet Bloc over the course of the 1980s.
It is this final interpretation and application of Gramsci’s strategy which we have found most powerful, though we have generally argued for a mutual transformation which is both deeper and more mutual, pointing towards a new synthesis rather than simply creating a strategic alliance and which is much more radically open to engagement with all ways of being human (Mansueto 2010, 2016, 2025).
At this point, however, it is necessary to add two caveats. First, it should be clear that the most powerful application of Gramscian strategy over the past 50 years has been on the part not of the Left but rather of the Right, and that they have both created their own organizations (Opus Dei and its many instrumentalities, for example, new more conservative colleges and universities, and especially new media outlets) and penetrated and transformed existing institutions, with the most dramatic examples being the papacies of Woytila and Ratzinger and the effective capture of the US Federal Judiciary. The Right, in other words, embraced the institutionalist reading of Gramsci’s strategy, and has been far more successful than those on the Left who embraced the populist reading. Second, however, after a period in which the institutional communist movement was effectively destroyed outside of China, and the Cathedral lost battle after battle for its autonomy, while declining in its effectiveness both in resisting the Right and cultivating free human beings and engaged citizens with a mature spirituality, the Catholic Church (which also suffered a mass loss of moral authority due to the sexual abuse crisis, and in which the liberationist and other Left currents seemed to have been decisively defeated), has suddenly reappeared, under Francis and now Leo, as perhaps the strongest and clearest voice against the Right (though we should not presume that this represents a return to liberationism).
What are we to make of this? What does it imply for our strategy?
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It is no doubt true that the theory of hegemony as a general theory of power and of communist strategy is a product of historical materialism and specifically of Gramsci and his interpreters. But clearly the practice of hegemonic struggle is much older, and those practitioners have their own theory. Perhaps we ought to look at how it has been understood by its most successful architects. How does the problem of the “Cathedral” look from the vantage point of the Catholic Church and the other religious institutions which Gramsci and his interpreters have counseled us to engage? Anything like a complete answer to this question would require a work of at least book length, and as such it will form an integral component of Part III of our Summa: Finding Our Way: Spirituality and Politics in an Era of Civilizational Crisis. But we can at the very least look at how the Catholic Church has historically understood its relationship to the temporal order and political authorities and also identify some valuable alternative perspectives from other traditions.
Historically the Catholic Church has understood itself as exercising three distinct offices or functions: teaching, governing, and sanctifying. The teaching office guides people in understanding the ends of human life, both temporal and spiritual. While bishops and popes have sometimes claimed a monopoly on this office it is best understood as divided between what Thomas Aquinas called the magisterium magistralis and the magisterium pontificalis (Gryson 1982). The first is the teaching authority exercised by philosophers and theologians, who carry out the work of exploring what it means to be human, engaging the people around these questions not just to teach them but also as themselves a source of wisdom (the sensus fidelum). Bishops, priests, deacons, and other pastoral leaders participate in this work in their ordinary preaching and teaching. The second is the juridical magisterium exercised by the bishops and the pope which defines the boundaries of what the church officially endorses, and also what teachings it considers to be actually dangerous. Thomas explained the relationship between these two magisteria by saying that theologians are the architects of the Church, priests the craftsmen actually building it, and bishops the overseers on the construction site. The vision of the theologians is both broader and higher, but the bishops have both the right and the obligation project people from certain obvious pitfalls. While we may dissent from certain applications of this authority, we must, in the present period, certainly acknowledge the value of a non-coercive authority which warns people against deception and hatred.
The governing authority of the church is both internal, as an organization ordered to help humanity achieve its highest ends, and external, as a judge and guarantor of natural law. With the exception of a few outliers (Goerner 1965), the Church has always recognized the autonomy of the civil authorities, with which its own autonomy and peculiar authority is interdependent. But as an institution ordered to higher ends the Church reserves the right and has the legitimate authority to caution the civil authorities when they violate natural law, and also to dissolve the bond between peoples and their rulers when those rulers become intolerably unjust, and when the damage done by that injustice clearly outweighs that which will result from the disorder caused by revolution.
The sanctifying authority of the church is, similarly, both universal and particular. The church has historically emphasized its sacramental functions, but the work of sanctifying also, and I would argue more importantly, includes building communities where people can find and create meaning, challenge and nurture each other, and hold each other accountable as they grow and develop. These functions are exercised differently internally among those who have grown up in or embraced the Catholic tradition, and externally among the people as a whole, but they are critical in both contexts.
We have here, in other words, a complex institution which is by its very nature distinct from the state and not only autonomous from but also superior to it, but which exercises both its auctoritas and its potestas, its authority and its power, through the people it leads, and not by attempting to control the state directly. And it does this by
- teaching, i.e. by exploring what it means to be human and leading the people in their own, rationally autonomous but informed explorations,
- governing, including serving as an authoritative but non-coercive interpreter of natural law, with the right and the responsibility to identify laws which, because they are unjust, are also invalid and, in the most extreme cases, to dissolve the bond between peoples and their rulers, and
- sanctifying, i.e. challenging and nurturing people to live out fully the way they have chosen, and to excel both as carriers of that way and in their particular vocations.
It is the historic teaching of the Church not that there is no salvation outside the Church, i.e. that only good Catholics can be “saved,” but rather that there is no salvation without the Church, i.e. that the full realization of human potential requires an institution carrying out the functions which the Catholic Church has undertaken (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2000).
If we had the time to analyze the other axial and postaxial traditions, we would see significant differences not only in the way in which they understand the ends of human life and in the ways in which propose to help humanity realize its latent potential. Each puts more or less emphasis on the three tasks or “offices” we have identified. Indeed, in may cases they understand these offices rather differently. But all, I would argue, must carry out each these offices, and do so effectively but non-coercively.
This does not, of course, mean that axial and postaxial traditions are in any sense free from either the metaphysical limits of contingent being or from the oppressive structures which humanity has created in pursuing its ultimate aim, the Power of Being as Such, under these conditions. The Catholic Church was clearly deformed first by the Roman Empire and then by feudalism (Voskuilen and Sheldom 2008) primarily, I would argue, by the subordination of the fundamentally still Jewish teachings of the “Jesus Movement” to the imperialist theology of Paul of Tarsus (Mansueto 2025). And we could say similar things about the deformation of other axial traditions. The Confucian tradition was deformed by its alliance with the very Legalist Empire which tried to destroy it and Taoism by the aristocratic quietism of those who chose to withdraw from the struggle for power and thus for social justice. The various “Dharmic” traditions were deformed by their accommodation with caste structures and landlordism (warlord, priestly, and monastic) as well as with royal sponsors. Hellenism was deformed by its accommodation with chattel slavery and the Pax Romana. Even Islam, which more than any other axial or postaxial tradition centered the struggle to build a just society, was deformed by the reality of Empire which was the condition of its claim to effectively “command right and forbid wrong.” The Liberal Protestant and humanistic secular traditions which gave birth to the constituent institutions of the “Cathedral,”—courts and the legal profession, the secular academy, and the Press—were deformed by capitalism. And there is no good Communist who would deny that the Communist parties have been deformed by the need to build socialism under hostile conditions, and thus to industrialize rapidly in order to be able to defend themselves, carrying out a primitive socialist accumulation often as brutal as any primitive capitalist accumulation, and quickly succumbing to authoritarian, imperial-restorationist tendencies in the process. But this does not mean that these institutions do not continue to play the absolutely essential role of reminding the people of their ideals and holding both them and the state accountable to those ideals.
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So what do we mean when we say that we need to defend the Cathedral while reforming it? The defense of the Cathedral has three principal dimensions. First, we must defend the material bases on which the Cathedral depends. This means defending state funding for colleges and universities and the students who attend them, for other public cultural institutions, as well as for nonconfessional non-profits and NGOs and authentically nonconfessional activities of religiously affiliated activities where these can be reasonably separated from confessional aims (e.g. research funding for Catholic and other religiously affiliated universities, but not funding for the core operations of religious schools which aim at providing an education fundamentally informed by a particular religious ideology, even though they may mostly teach secular subjects ). It also means strong tax incentives for charitable donations and strong tax preferences for charitable organizations –provided that effective control of the organizations in question belongs to those who have dedicated themselves to the charitable activities and their constituents, so that they do not become a tax shelter for the activities of oligarchs. Second, we must defend the general and particular freedoms on which the Cathedral depends for the free exercise of its calling: freedom of conscience (including freedom of religion and irreligion) and expression first of all, and academic freedom and freedom of the press more especially. Finally, we need to develop a strong public intellectual defense of the necessity of the Cathedral, showing why institutions which exercise intellectual, moral, and spiritual leadership are necessary and need certain privileges in order to be effective.
Reforming the Cathedral is a far more complex enterprise. Clearly this means shifting its material foundations. We cannot expect institutions which depend on allocations from a state still subject to bourgeois hegemony to reliably support work which is critical of capitalism. The same is true of institutions which depend on what amount to rentier endowments or, for that matter, tuition payments which will always be evaluated for “return on investment.” We must create an autonomous material basis. We must gradually reduce the influence of donors on the organizations they fund, beginning, perhaps with a limit on the percentage of seats on governing boards, declining over time, which can be held by representatives of state funders or major donors, and with a growing percentage to be held by those who undertake the work of the organization and those they serve.
These suggestions might seem like pipe dreams, given the current dependence of nearly all of the activities of the Cathedral on either state funding or private donations, most of which come from the very wealthy. But we must remember that this has not always been true. Urban parishes with beautiful buildings, parochial schools, and a large staff of clergy, religious, and lay teachers and clerks were built and sustained by very poor immigrant communities. The same is true of trade unions and workers parties and a wide array of mutual benefit societies, fraternal organizations, sodalities, and independent cultural centers, such as the small opera houses which were typical in Italian immigrant communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The conditions are different and therefore the modalities will have to be different. But it can be done.
That said, economic dependence on those we would hold accountable is very far from being our only problem. Religious institutions, colleges and universities, and the press have, historically, been much more willing and much better equipped to “bite the hand that feeds them” by pointing out grave injustice on the part of their funders, than they have to authentically teach their own traditions in a way which actually cultivates human beings capable of the Common Good –and a political base for their work. Why?
I would like to suggest that the problem here is fundamentally that we are leading in the wrong way –or rather not actually leading at all, but rather simply participating in a broader struggle to impose our vision, if not coercively, through control of the state (though this is the historic model of the Left, both social democratic and communist) then semi-coercively, within the non-state organizations we create, penetrate, or control. And this is not just an organizational failure, nor is it just a moral failure (though it is both of those). It bears on the very nature of the projects we share, which emerged either of the axial age or out of humanistic secularism in its liberal, democratic, or socialist forms.
Here Mary Daly’s contribution (Daly 1984) is critical. Daly argues that the men generally, and the hierarchical religious (and by extension other cultural) institutions in particular, have expropriated what were originally women’s wisdom and women’s sanctifying power and transformed it into something necrotic, substituting dead order for living organization. While she does not provide a coherent historical account of how and when this might have happened, we can situate it clearly in the advent of bronze technology, which led to the emergence of warfare as an economic development strategy, and ultimately to the emergence of tributary city states, kingdoms, and empires (Mansueto 2016, 2025). Older, often matrifocal, spiritual traditions were integrated into the sacral monarchic pantheons which warlord elites used to legitimate their rule. It was against this sacral monarchic, tributary social order that the axial age revolution was aimed, but it was ultimately only partial, carried out (largely) by men who continued to operate, at least in some significant degree, within the necrotic modalities of the system against which they had rebelled. The same was true of the new institutions created by the liberal, democratic, and socialist institutions, which often admitted women into leadership roles, but only within a structure which required that they act like men. And this is why these institutions continue to form human beings intellectually and morally as patriarchs –even when they manage to teach that patriarchy is bad.
This is why many women reading this essay no doubt found my comfort with engaging historic religious institutions difficult to swallow and even off-putting, even if the arguments seemed to make sense. But it is also why no matter how many women we recruit into still fundamentally patriarchal institutions, very little changes. Efforts to control women, and especially women’s bodies, are more obvious in conservative religious institutions than in the liberal Cathedral. But the pattern is pervasive.
Challenging patriarchy, furthermore, is not just a women’s issue. It is about the whole way in which we relate to each other. Patriarchy, Mary Daly demonstrates, is fundamentally about rejecting the wild and often reckless drive of all the various forms of matter to Be, and especially the drive of life to grow and reproduce, to immerse itself in sensation and intellection, and then to move in accord with the passions and the will to be which arise from sensation and intellection. Patriarchy either does not see or regards as sinful the natural self-organizing capacity of matter and argues that surviving and thriving requires replacing living self-organization with dead order imposed from without. One of the great merits of Daly’s work is that unlike some other feminist theorists, she does not gender reason as “male” and passion as “female,” but rather distinguishes between the reason which able to see our drive to Be and a reason which is narrowly reductive and instrumental and sees meaning and purpose as subjective or as an external imposition. The error is intellectual first -as is the means of correcting it.
This does not mean that sensation and passion, intellection and will cannot lead us astray. Being finite and contingent, our limited knowledge and the limited desires which arise from them sometimes take us down blind alleys and even lead us to predatory behavior. But the underlying problem for humanity is not sin. It is a finitude and contingency with which we struggle to come to terms. Treating our always only partially successful efforts at Being as sinful, rather than as merely limited and fundamentally misguided, justifies the imposition of a dead order which degrades rather than enhancing our efforts.
The task of reforming the Cathedral is, in this sense, difficult precisely because it is so subtle. It is not simply a matter of changing who exercises authority, but rather of changing the very nature of the authority we exercise, so that it is no longer something we “have” as we “hold” positions, but rather something which develops between us as we challenge and nurture each other and build relationships which embody the meanings and values we uphold. We must, in other words actually live our calling as scholars and teachers, organizers –and yes fighters4—pastors and counselors, differently long before the conditions to support our callings can be created, and do so because not just because it is right thing to do, but because it is both the only way to build a base of support that will sustain us, and a source –the source—of authentic joy.
Reforming the Cathedral is, in other words, both ideological and political. We must combat doctrines which misunderstand the origins of evil, attributing it to some fundamental failure of will, and instead help people to understand both the beauty and the tragedy of the human condition. We are the desire to Be, and that is good. But we are also finite and contingent and naturally want more than is possible. And this leads to error and exploitation and oppression. But we are also capable of understanding our errors and of repairing the torn fabric of the cosmos, of our civilization, and of ourselves. And we do that by building and exercising a different kind of authority, one rooted in the ability to shed new light and open up new possibilities, to challenge and hold accountable to be sure, but always with a humility born of a deep sense of our own limitations and profound respect for the potential of others, and to demand and provide the support necessary for everyone to grow and develop.
***
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Even if the Right is defeated at the polls over the course of the next few years and somehow, miraculously and contrary to all reasonable expectations, decisively yields, we face a long struggle to rebuild what has been lost. And more likely than not, any electoral victory we win will be partial and ambiguous, and the response of the Right a new and even more vicious onslaught. But we can choose both to fight and to live differently, accepting the fact that as finite and contingent beings our struggle is permanent, but that the impossible future we desire becomes real when we enact it. Let us continue.
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