Rather than cohere directly to one another, we relate to each other through the state by the formal mechanism of contract. Paul’s image of the Body — internally differentiated yet suffering and rejoicing a as one — is supplanted by a formal interchangeability of each individual with any other.
–p. 193, William Cavanaugh, The City: Beyond Secular Parodies” inRadical Orthodoxy, (eds. Pickstock, Ward, Milbank)As Raymond Williams and others have argued, war is for the liberal state a simulacrum of the social process, the primary mechanism for achieving social integration in a society with no shared ends. In a word, violence becomes the state’s religio, its habitual discipline for binding us to one to another.
—p. 194 Cavanaugh, The CityThe Eucharist undercuts the primacy of contract and exchange in modern social relations
–p. 195 The Cityscan the final section
