"Christians would be neglecting the distinctive service which they can and must render to the State, were they to adopt an unquestioning assent to the will and action of the State which is directly or indirectly aimed at the suppression of the freedom of the Word of God . . . Christians would, in point of fact, become enemies of any State if, when the State threatens their freedom, they did not resist, or if they concealed their resistance."
There are many who are wary about love functioning as a political concept and their concerns are not unwarranted. Respect, after all, is a much less volatile concept, less given to the corruption that can take place given the vulnerability necessary to love. There is also the concern about love (or friendship, for that matter) being violent, that is to say, domesticating difference. There is plenty to read on these subjects: Arendt's work, Augustine, Derrida's Politics of Friendship, even Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical Deus Caritas Est. There is an increasing interest in how love might function politically, or why it may be beneficial to liberate love from the tyranny of private relationships. Eric Gregory will be publishing a book in the spring entitled, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. I read the first draft and would recommend it. I recently came across a set of videos where Michael Hardt discusses this topic at the European Graduate School. He is probably most well know for his book Empire and is a professor here at Duke. He things that love might bridge the gap between spontaneity (the thought that one needs no formation for a worthwhile politic to be possible) and dictatorship. The first of the videos can be seen below:
Of course, or at least as I would argue, the question is not: whether or not to include love in our political descriptions of the way politics may function, but the question of what sort of love. I find much to commend in Hardt's conception of love (contra Freud, Benedict XVI, et al.).
