From Telos-Piccone Institute: Reflections on "Benedict at Haytor Vale" by Tim Rosenberger and the Ghosts of Reynolds and Smith in the Constitutional Law of Religion in the US

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Abstract/Summary: For nearly 125 years, American jurisprudence has struggled with a tension the West has never resolved — the collision between collective social order and individual conscience in matters of religion, a conflict as old as Antigone's defiance of Creon and refracted in the United States through the somewhat distorting prism of the Religion Clauses, where Free Exercise and Anti-Establishment pull in opposing directions. Reynolds v. United States (1878) attempted to manage that tension by cleaving belief from conduct, and every major religion-clause case since has orbited that distinction, producing a jurisprudence that is contradictory, resourceful, and never at rest. Tim Rosenberger's "Benedict at Haytor Vale" uses the murder of Ann Widdecombe to build a sweeping argument about religious liberty, institutional loyalty, and the meaning of old age. It is eloquent, historically ambitious, and deeply felt. It is also, on its own terms, incomplete — and the incompleteness is most visible in its reading of the Supreme Court cases that form the spine of its legal argument. Rosenberger constructs a narrative of progressive enclosure: Reynolds v. United States (1878) planted a defective belief-conduct distinction; Employment Division v. Smith (1990) restated it; Fulton and Mahmoud destabilized it without replacing it; and the Mormon experience — exile, pursuit, dissolution, surrender — proved that no American religious community has ever achieved genuine exit from state authority. The only unconquered ground, he concludes, is prayer. The response that follows takes Rosenberger seriously enough to disagree at the foundations. The belief-conduct distinction he condemns as rotten is not, on this reading, an error to be corrected but a technology of governance — a mechanism by which the state defines what counts as "religion" in order to protect it without surrendering regulatory authority. The religious communities Rosenberger frames as besieged from outside are, in fact, partly constituted by law: the LDS Church that Congress dissolved was a corporation; the Amish community that won Yoder became legally cognizable through litigation; the religious school in Espinoza exists within a tax and accreditation framework that makes it visible as an institution. Law does not merely constrain these communities. It builds the temples within the icon. Most strikingly, Rosenberger's own refuge — prayer as unconquered ground — reproduces the very distinction he denounces. Locating sovereignty in interiority is precisely the move Reynolds made in 1878. He has not escaped the framework. He has miniaturized it. The exchange illuminates something rare: a disagreement where the chasm between positions reveals the first principles that make convergence unlikely — and where following the argument is worth the vertigo.

 

Sometimes the best things worth reading are those with which one disagrees, and in some places fundamentally. Sometimes the disagreement  is grounded in error. The best type of disagreement is where the chasm between reader and author illuminates the nature of the core premises and staring points of analysis that make any sort of convergence or agreement unlikely. Disagreements that expose the structures and operation of our Aristotelian "first principles"--and what semiotics suggests are the interpretations derived from the signification of objects. That was my reaction to a wonderful essay by Tim Rosenberger  for Telos Insights entitled Benedict at Haytor Vale, 

This essay by Tim Rosenberger, published on August 12, 2026, uses the murder of Ann Widdecombe — the former Conservative MP who was killed on July 8, 2026, at her home in Haytor Vale, Dartmoor, by a man who drove two hundred miles and struck her with a hammer — as the occasion for a wide-ranging meditation on institutional loyalty, religious liberty, the ethics of exit versus endurance, and the purpose of old age.

Rosenberger opens with an admiring portrait. He highlights Widdecombe's willingness to damage her own side — her 1997 denunciation of Michael Howard as having "something of the night about him" — as evidence of a rare, costly candor. He notes her long tenure holding Maidstone, her care for her mother, her novel-writing, and her appearance on Strictly Come Dancing as signs of a person who was unserious about herself but never about her convictions. He acknowledges the obvious criticism — that she kept leaving institutions (the Church of England in 1993, the Conservative Party in 2019) — and answers it by arguing that her departures were principled rather than temperamental: she moved toward the one institution (the Roman Catholic Church) whose self-understanding holds that certain questions are settled, not subject to revision by vote.

The essay's longest section traces the history of religious "exit" in England and America. Rosenberger contrasts Widdecombe's departure from the Church of England with John Wesley's refusal to leave it, noting that Wesley's internal community survived only one founder's lifetime before separating anyway. He draws an analogy to contemporary "classical academies and intentional communities" in the American South and West, warning that they run on the same perishable fuel of personal authority.

Turning to America, Rosenberger argues that American religious pluralism was historically underwritten by open land — Roger Williams, William Penn, the Mormons — and that the closing of the frontier in 1893 ended that option. He critiques the legal framework that replaced it, tracing a line from Reynolds v. United States (1878) through Employment Division v. Smith (1990) to more recent cases like Fulton and Mahmoud, arguing that the belief-conduct distinction at the heart of American free-exercise law rests on reasoning he considers discredited. His conclusion is that American law permits a partial exit but never sovereignty, with Espinoza (2020) marking the available room and Bob Jones (1983) marking the ceiling.

The essay reinterprets the "Benedict Option" as fundamentally about prayer rather than geographic withdrawal. Rosenberger points to Pope Benedict XVI's own retirement in 2013 — laying down authority but continuing to write and pray inside the Vatican walls — as proof that withdrawal can function as redeployment rather than retreat. He places Widdecombe's daily Mass attendance in the same frame: a form of persistence in a culture that had made her convictions, in his view, a punchline. He insists that prayer must not be instrumentalized as fuel for activism but understood as an end in itself.

Rosenberger invokes the English recusant tradition — Catholics who remained in England, refused conformity, and paid statutory fines — as the model Widdecombe embodied. He argues that by converting to Catholicism, keeping her name on the door, and remaining publicly accessible, she practiced a form of endurance rather than escape. He then makes the essay's most provocative claim: that a culture which treats certain convictions as unspeakable rather than merely wrong effectively teaches that those who hold them are "not quite persons," and that violence against such people "requires no organization." He frames her murder as a consequence of her refusal to hide.

The essay's final movement asks what old age is for. Rosenberger criticizes a culture that courts the elderly as consumers — pharmaceutical advertising, cruise brochures, continuing-care communities — while dismissing their convictions as embarrassing. He draws on Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt's concept of "superfluity," Aristotle's distinction between leisure (scholē) and mere amusement, and Cicero's De Senectute to argue that the last stage of life should be understood as an office, not a reward. He contrasts the elderly martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna at eighty-six with the young martyrdoms of Perpetua and Felicity, arguing that the old are uniquely positioned for moral courage because they are past the obligations — mortgages, children, careers — that make boldness costly to others.

Rosenberger closes with three imperatives directed at the old: serve in unglamorous public offices (school boards, zoning commissions, parish councils) with nothing left to gain; give wealth away during life rather than deferring it to inheritance; and stay visible, saying "the true thing under your own name" in one's own community. He identifies the last of these as the least dramatic and the one that cost Widdecombe her life.
The essay is written from an explicitly Christian and socially conservative standpoint, sympathetic to Widdecombe and to the tradition she represented. Its legal and historical arguments are presented with considerable detail but in service of a thesis — that modern liberal democracies have narrowed the space for religious dissent and devalued old age — that many readers would contest. Rosenberger does not claim neutrality; he states plainly that he admired Widdecombe and shares her general orientation. The essay's strength lies in its historical range and its willingness to engage counterarguments (Wesley, Perpetua and Felicity) on their own terms.

This is all well worth considering. Much more interesting to me are the argument's foundations grounded in a quite specific reading of a long line of US Supreme Court cases with which Rosenberger takes issue and in which lies the description of the space that separates his view from mine. 

Rosenberger's Legal Argument: The Supreme Court Cases. Rosenberger constructs a legal narrative in which American religious liberty has been progressively enclosed, mirroring the physical closing of the frontier. The cases form a chain, and his reading of each one matters.

Reynolds v. United States (1878) is his foundation stone, and he calls it rotten. The case upheld a federal anti-bigamy statute against a Free Exercise Clause challenge by a Mormon defendant. The Court drew a sharp line: the First Amendment protects religious belief absolutely but leaves religious conduct subject to regulation. Rosenberger insists this distinction was wrongly decided, and he goes further — he argues the opinion's own logic rested on a racialized premise, that the practice at issue (polygamy) "was confined to Asiatic and African peoples." For Rosenberger, this is not incidental rhetoric but the holding's operative reasoning, the mechanism by which the Court justified treating conduct as categorically regulable. He presents Reynolds not merely as dated but as structurally defective at inception.

Employment Division v. Smith (1990) is cast as Reynolds's direct descendant. In Smith, the Court held that neutral, generally applicable laws do not require a Free Exercise exemption even when they substantially burden religious practice. Rosenberger treats Smith as a restatement of the belief-conduct rule, updated but carrying the same original defect forward. He does not dwell on the facts of Smith (denial of unemployment benefits to members of the Native American Church for sacramental peyote use), which is notable — the racial dimension of that case would have reinforced his argument about Reynolds, but he leaves it implicit.

Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021) appears as evidence that the Court itself has recognized Smith's weakness. Rosenberger notes that Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch called for Smith to be overruled, and that Justice Barrett "found the textual case against it compelling." The Court decided Fulton on narrower grounds — that Philadelphia's foster-care non-discrimination policy was not truly "generally applicable" because it contained a discretionary exemption mechanism — and so Smith survived technically intact. Rosenberger reads Fulton as the moment four justices openly declared the framework unsound.

Mahmoud is described as reaching strict scrutiny "by way of Yoder, around Smith rather than through it," leaving the rule "intact in name only." This appears to refer to Mahmoud v. McKnight or a related case in which the Court applied heightened scrutiny to a religious liberty claim by routing through the Yoder precedent rather than confronting Smith directly. Rosenberger's point is structural: the Court has effectively hollowed out Smith without the doctrinal honesty of overruling it, creating a regime in which the formal rule and the operative rule have diverged.

Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) occupies a paradoxical place in the argument. Rosenberger calls it "the most complete withdrawal our law permits" — the Amish won the right to remove their children from public schooling after eighth grade. But the victory itself proves his thesis about enclosure: the withdrawal "required the permission of the sovereign it sought to escape." Yoder is freedom-by-judicial-grace, not sovereignty, and the permission can be revisited.

The Mormon sequence is Rosenberger's most extended illustration of exit's failure. The Mormons left the United States entirely in 1847, crossing to Mexican territory. The border followed them after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Congress then dissolved the LDS Church as a corporation (the Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. United States, 1890), seized its property, and imprisoned its leaders. The Manifesto of 1890 abandoned plural marriage. Statehood came in 1896 with conditions written into the Utah Constitution itself. Rosenberger's summary is blunt: "The jurisdiction followed them across a desert and beat them. Exit did not merely cost them something. It failed."

Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Bob Jones University v. United States (1983) are the final markers. Espinoza held that a state cannot exclude religious schools from a publicly available scholarship program solely because they are religious, which Rosenberger reads as defining the room a partial religious exit currently enjoys. Bob Jones held that the IRS could revoke the tax-exempt status of a religious university that practiced racial discrimination, which he reads as the ceiling — the point at which the state's interest overrides religious institutional autonomy. Between the two lies the available space: real but bounded, and "never sovereignty."

The overall architecture of the legal argument is that Reynolds planted a defective principle; Smith restated it; Fulton and Mahmoud have destabilized it without replacing it; and meanwhile the historical record — the Mormons, the Amish, Bob Jones, Espinoza — demonstrates that no American religious community has ever achieved genuine exit. Every withdrawal operates by permission. The one exception Rosenberger will grant is prayer, which "requires no charter, no Royal Assent, no favorable judgment from any court."

And yet it may be possible to consider whether Rosenberger has written an essay that is rhetorically accomplished and analytically incomplete, and one might be forgiven for observing that the incompleteness is not accidental — it is structural, built into the very framework he has chosen. He tells a story about sovereignty lost. The more interesting story, the one he cannot tell from inside his commitments, is about sovereignty's constitution, about how the state and the religious community produce each other and always have.

Begin with Reynolds, since he does. Rosenberger calls the decision "wrongly decided" and locates its defect in the racialized reasoning of the opinion. He is not wrong about the racism — the opinion's language is repellent and its anthropology is colonial, at least by contemporary standards  (though one ought to be cautious about timer traveling contemporary sensibilities backwards to another time and space). But it is possible to consider that it isn't that Rosenberger doesn't go far enough, it is that his critique goes in the wrong direction. The problem with Reynolds is not that it drew the belief-conduct line badly. The problem is that it drew the line at all, as though belief and conduct were naturally separable categories that the Court merely recognized rather than produced. The belief-conduct distinction is not a discovery about the nature of religion. It is a technology of governance. It defines what counts as "religion" for constitutional purposes — interior conviction, private conscience, the things that do not disrupt public order — and it defines religion that way because the state needs a category it can protect without constraining its own regulatory authority. Rosenberger treats this as an error to be corrected. It is better understood as a function to be analyzed.

This matters because Rosenberger's entire chain of cases presupposes a religious community that exists prior to and independent of the legal order, a community that the state then constrains, permits, dissolves, or accommodates. That is true;  yet the community of the faithful in the world tends to constitute itself  within structures of rules and expectations that align with those of the political and special communities in which they must exist. Religious communities, then, work in two registers, that of belief and that of manifestation, and the manifestation of beliefs can go to faith and it can infuse the all too human structures of communal organizations  that may be infused with a holy spirit but are not inseparably of the body of the faithful. The LDS Church that Congress dissolved in 1890 was a corporation — a legal creature of the state whose existence depended on the very jurisdiction Rosenberger says "followed them across a desert and beat them." The Amish community that won Yoder was constituted as a legally cognizable group precisely through the litigation that defined its practices as religious rather than cultural, traditional rather than merely preferential. The religious school in Espinoza exists within a tax and accreditation framework that makes it legible as an institution. Law does not merely regulate these communities from outside. It constitutes them as the kinds of entities that can claim rights, hold property, educate children, and be recognized as "religious" in the first place. The visible community of believers is an Ikon — a human, embodied reality that serves as a collective portal to faith, recognized by the world as a human institution and experienced by the faithful as something more. But the institutional structures through which that community acts in the world — the corporation, the school, the diocese, the property trust — are temples that law builds within the Ikon. They are juridical constructs, and they depend for their existence on the legal order Rosenberger frames as an external constraint. The Ikon may transcend the state; the temple within it does not (eg here, here).  Rosenberger's narrative of enclosure — open ground, then closed ground, then law — misses this. There was never a moment before law. The frontier itself was a legal construct, opened by treaty, conquest, and federal survey, and the communities that settled it were organized under charters, territorial statutes, and land-grant regimes from the beginning.

The essay's treatment of the Mormon experience is revealing. Rosenberger tells it as tragedy: a people who sought exit, were caught by the border, and were beaten by jurisdiction. The story is real and the suffering was real--and remembered. But the framing occludes something important. LDS did surrender plural marriage under duress. But it also reconstituted itself from out of that experience — its theology, its institutional structure, its relationship to the American constitutional order — and emerged as one of the most successful religious organizations in the modern world, one whose governance structure now operates transnationally with a sophistication that most nation-states cannot match (Proverbs 25:4: "Remove the dross from the silver, and a vessel for a silversmith will come forth."Isaiah 1:25: "I will turn my hand against you; I will thoroughly purge your dross and remove all your impurities."). The Manifesto of 1890 was not merely a defeat. It was a transformation, and the transformed institution is arguably more powerful, more durable, and more globally consequential than the one that crossed the plains. Rosenberger cannot see this because his framework has only two categories: sovereignty and submission. A community that adapts to legal constraint while building institutional capacity within and across legal orders is doing something his binary cannot capture.

That fundamental choice of orienting premise then makes inevitable the approach to what must, in his views, be the corruption that comes form the abomination of Reynolds, especially in his reading of Smith and its aftermath. He is correct that Fulton and Mahmoud have destabilized the Smith framework, and his observation that Mahmoud routes "around Smith rather than through it" is precise. But he reads this as incoherence — the Court lacking the honesty to overrule a discredited precedent. There is another reading. The Court is managing a polycentric governance problem in which religious institutions, state agencies, federal civil-rights frameworks, and international human-rights norms all make competing claims, and the doctrinal untidiness is not a failure of nerve but a reflection of the actual complexity of the regulatory environment. The fantasy that overruling Smith would restore something — sovereignty, autonomy, the open ground — is just that, a fantasy. The post-Smith landscape is cluttered and negotiated and unprincipled in the way that all functioning governance systems are unprincipled when they must accommodate genuinely incompatible commitments.

Rosenberger's single exception — prayer as "the one unconquered ground" — is the essay's most striking claim and its most symptomatic evasion. He is right that interior prayer is practically unreachable by state power. But calling it "unconquered ground" smuggles the spatial metaphor back in at the moment he claims to have transcended it. Prayer is not ground. It is not territory. It is not a jurisdiction. By analogizing it to the frontier, Rosenberger reveals that he has never actually left the sovereignty framework — he has only miniaturized it, relocated sovereignty from the visible institution to the interior self, which is precisely the move Reynolds made in 1878. The belief-conduct line he denounces as rotten is the same line he redraws when he locates the "one unconquered ground" in an activity defined by its interiority. He has not escaped the framework. He has reproduced it. 

 And yet the irony cuts both ways. The interiorization that Rosenberger reproduces is precisely the accommodation that Reynolds itself was trying to provide. The Court in 1878 was not engaged in pure domination; it was attempting to give the mainline religions of the period room to operate within a constitutional order that could not exempt conduct from law without dissolving itself. The belief-conduct line was a pragmatic joint in the machinery, not a theological assertion. That it was supported by repellent racial reasoning does not change the structural function it served, and that function — carving out an interior space the state agrees not to enter — is the same function Rosenberger claims for prayer. His quarrel with Reynolds is not that the framework failed. It is that the framework succeeded on terms he cannot accept, because accepting them would mean acknowledging that the "unconquered ground" of prayer exists by the same logic as the belief-conduct distinction: the state's recognition that some territory is not worth the cost of conquest.

The essay's treatment of old age and the recusant tradition is its most humane section and also the one most vulnerable to the critique that Rosenberger romanticizes powerlessness while ignoring the structures that produce it. He invokes Arendt's concept of superfluity to describe the condition of the elderly, and the invocation is apt — but Arendt's point was that superfluity is manufactured by political systems for political purposes, not that it is an ambient cultural failing to be corrected by individual moral effort. Rosenberger's three imperatives — serve, give, stay — are addressed to individuals. They presuppose that the problem is one of will rather than structure, that the elderly are superfluous because they have chosen comfort rather than office. The structural analysis — the pension systems, the zoning regimes, the liability frameworks, the healthcare financing models that together produce the isolation he describes — shifts both perspective and the orienting taxonomies of analysis. That shift suggests what is necessarily absent in Rosenberger's view,  the structures within which free will is exercised and valued, because engaging it would require engaging the state as a constitutive actor rather than as an external constraint on pre-political communities, and that is the one move his framework cannot make. One thinks here of Nietzsche's Four Great Errors, and especially the error of the freedom of free will. Institutions that claim moral authority on the basis of persistence are the same institutions whose structures enabled abuse, and the individualist framework that attributes virtue to personal will cannot account for systemic failure

That last insight leads one to the essay's most provocative claim — that a culture rendering certain convictions "unspeakable" teaches that their holders are "not quite persons," making violence against them require "no organization" — demands scrutiny. Rosenberger is careful: he says "whatever the Crown proves about the man in custody." But the rhetorical structure does the work regardless of the caveat. He has constructed a causal chain running from cultural disapproval through dehumanization to murder, and he has done so without evidence about the attacker's motives, ideology, or mental state. This is not analysis. It is appropriation of a death for a thesis that preceded it. The essay's own epigraph from Benedict XVI — "the heart must be stretched" — could be turned against this move. A heart stretched to the dimensions of the event would wait for evidence before converting a woman's murder into proof of a civilizational indictment. The structural point extends beyond the state. If the error of free will means that individual moral effort cannot be evaluated apart from the systems within which it operates, the same must hold for the institutions Rosenberger commends. Persistence is not self-validating. An institution's endurance tells us that it survived; it does not tell us what it did to the people inside it while surviving, or what it failed to do. And here the essay's deepest silence becomes audible. 

What is missing from the essay, finally, is any reckoning with the possibility that the institutions Rosenberger valorizes — the Roman Catholic Church, the conservative political tradition, the recusant inheritance — are themselves governance systems that constitute, constrain, and sometimes destroy the persons within them. The abuse crisis he mentions in a parenthetical ("his 2019 essay on the abuse crisis") is not a parenthetical fact. It is the central counterexample to every claim the essay makes about the moral authority of institutional persistence. An institution that persisted for centuries while systematically enabling the abuse of children is not self-evidently a model for the endurance Rosenberger commends. That he mentions it only to praise Benedict's essay about it, without engaging the structural conditions that produced the crisis, is the essay's deepest evasion, and the one most characteristic of the tradition from which it speaks.

Discussion Draft Posted: "Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus: A Dialectical Analysis of China's Modernization-Driven Knowledge System" [作为生产力与意识形态机制的教育：中国现代化驱动型知识体系的辩证分析]

 

Pix credit here ("The Dazzling Communist Youth League Emblem", 1984)

 

I have been working on the theorization of "modernization" within the structures and cognitive pathways of Chinese Marxist Leninism.  The general theorization was introduced in a prior post (Circulating Discussion Draft: "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" [现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界]).

I have also been working on ways in which that theory actually manifests itself phenomenologically--on the ground and in actions that make concrete all those abstracted theoretics. To those ends I have produced a working paper that reflects current thinking, entitled "Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus: A Dialectical Analysis of China's Modernization-Driven Knowledge System" [作为生产力与意识形态机制的教育：中国现代化驱动型知识体系的辩证分析]. In it, I suggest that China's education system is not simply a mechanism for producing skilled workers or transmitting cultural knowledge. It serves a dual purpose that is fundamental to the entire political system: developing human talent for economic and social modernization while simultaneously producing and reproducing the ideological framework that holds the system together. This paper examines how these two functions—talent development and ideological production—operate not as separate activities but as deeply intertwined aspects of a single educational apparatus that has evolved significantly over four decades of reform.

At the same time I have been trying to translate the traditional human text centered language of knowledge production into computational language, bridging as much as I can the language and linguistics structures of humans with that of machines (Computational Appendix: From Textual Architecture to Formal Specifications [计算附录：从文本架构到形式规范]). I attempted this (with lots of interactive engagement with Harvey AI) in two phases:

Phase 1 — Textual Computational Reduction: Transposing the paper's phenomenological-semiotic architecture into structured natural-language computational specifications: directed graphs, node/edge typing, processing pipelines, parallel streams, activation functions, feedback circuits, temporal dynamics, loss functions — all expressed in prose and structured tables that a theorist (not necessarily a programmer) can follow.

Phase 2 — Mathematical Translation: Formalizing those specifications into set-theoretic, graph-theoretic, linear-algebraic, and dynamical-systems notation — with the explicit and sustained caveat that equations are themselves representational artifacts: static, continuous, and human-readable pictures of processes that, when actually implemented in machine systems, operate through discrete binary operations, iteration, recursion, and parallel execution in machine languages that no equation captures. The mathematics is a map, not the territory — useful for certain kinds of reasoning (proof, prediction, constraint identification) but necessarily losing the granularity, contingency, and temporal specificity of actual computational execution.

One can get a gist of both by considering the paper's conclusion:

Pix credit here (Mao Teaching at Yan'an)

XI. Conclusion: Dialectical Phenomenology and the Matrix of Relations

This paper has attempted something that standard policy analysis typically avoids: to map the matrix of relations between ideology and education not as a fixed structure but as a field of co-produced moving targets, each continuously transformed through their ritualized interaction. Neither ideology nor education occupies a stable position from which the other can be derived. The ideological field reformulates itself at each National Congress, absorbing new contradictions, generating new keywords, recalibrating the metasignifier of modernization. Education, correspondingly, is never merely the recipient of these reformulations but actively shapes what ideology can become—through the resistance of implementation, through the productive force logic that demands certain forms of human capital, through the internationalization pressures that introduce external signals into the system's processing architecture. The two are locked in a dialectical embrace that no static model can capture.

To trace this matrix, the paper moved through a sequence of analytical layers, each building upon and complicating its predecessors. It began with the structural conditions of production—the People's Democratic Dictatorship as the political architecture within which ideological production occurs, establishing the boundary conditions that distinguish this system from both liberal-democratic and classical authoritarian models. It then disaggregated the modalities of production, demonstrating that what appears as a unified 'Chinese education system' is in fact a differentiated apparatus operating through five distinct channels: political-ideological formation, scientific-technological capacity building, moral-civilizational cultivation, aesthetic-cultural development, and physical-labor integration. From disaggregation, the paper turned to historical evolution, analyzing how each National Congress from the 12th through the 20th reconfigured the relationship between these modalities—not arbitrarily but in response to shifting contradictions within modernization itself. The dialectical mechanics of this process were then specified through the paired concepts of self-revolution and social revolution, revealing how the system's capacity for internal transformation is structurally linked to its capacity for societal transformation. Temporal periodization through Plenums and Five-Year Plans provided the rhythmic structure within which these dialectics unfold. Internationalization and computational architecture added further layers of complexity, showing how the system processes external signals and how its own logic tends toward formalization. Finally, operational evidence grounded the entire analytical apparatus in observable institutional practices.

Throughout this trajectory, the paper maintained a single fundamental claim: ideology is produced through circulation, not merely implemented from above. The center formulates doctrine, but doctrine achieves its ideological effectivity only when it has been differentiated across modalities, encountered the resistance of practice, been processed through evaluation and feedback mechanisms, and returned to the center as refined input for the next cycle of formulation. Production is not a one-way transmission but a circulatory process in which the distinction between producer and produced, between sender and receiver, between ideology and its educational vehicle, is continually destabilized and re-established.

The core thesis can now be restated with the precision that the full analytical trajectory makes possible: differentiated ideological production through education is not an optional policy choice but a structural necessity of modernization's own dialectics. As modernization complexifies—as the economy diversifies, as technology proliferates, as international entanglements deepen, as social stratification intensifies—the system confronts an irreducible problem: it must produce specialized knowledge formations adequate to managing this complexity while simultaneously maintaining the coherence of the entire formation through the metasignifier of socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics. Differentiation without coherence yields fragmentation; coherence without differentiation yields stagnation. The system requires both, and it achieves both through the very mechanism this paper has analyzed: the production of unity through differentiation, the maintenance of the metasignifier precisely through its specification into multiple modalities of educational practice.

Education's dual character—as a process of developing productive forces and as itself a productive force to be developed—intensifies dramatically after the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee and achieves explicit doctrinal articulation in the New Era discourse. This dual character is not a peculiarity of Chinese policy language but reflects a genuine ontological feature: education both transforms other domains (by producing the human capital that drives technological innovation, economic growth, and governance capacity) and is itself subject to transformation by the very logic it serves (being 'modernized,' 'informatized,' 'high-quality-developed' according to the same metrics it applies to other productive forces). The analytical trajectory of this paper—from architecture to history to dialectics to computation to operational evidence—was designed to capture precisely this recursive structure, each layer adding precision to the matrix of relations without ever reducing that matrix to a single causal direction or explanatory principle.

Pix credit here

A. Key Insights. Four insights emerge from the analysis with particular force. First, unity is produced through differentiation, not despite it. The existence of five distinct modalities of ideological-educational production is not a sign of system fragmentation or doctrinal incoherence. It is the mechanism through which the system maintains coherence under conditions of escalating complexity. A monolithic, undifferentiated ideology could not manage a society that simultaneously requires cutting-edge semiconductor engineers, morally committed primary school teachers, politically reliable cadres, aesthetically cultivated cultural workers, and physically robust military personnel. The five modalities are the system's solution to the irreducible heterogeneity of modernization's demands—they allow the center to produce specialized formations while retaining them all within the gravitational field of the metasignifier. Differentiation is not centrifugal but centripetal: it draws the diverse elements of social production into relation with the center precisely by providing each with its own channel of ideological address.

Second, education is simultaneously instrument and object of modernization—it modernizes society while being modernized itself. This is not a paradox to be resolved but the recursive structure that gives the system its distinctive dynamism. When the Party calls for 'high-quality development of education' (教育高质量发展), it is subjecting education to the very evaluative logic that education itself transmits to other domains. Education must be innovative, efficient, globally competitive, and technologically advanced—the same qualities it is tasked with producing in society at large. This recursive loop—the self-revolution applied to the apparatus of social revolution—is what prevents the system from ossifying. It cannot rest on inherited forms because its own logic demands continuous self-optimization.

Third, the system's capacity for self-correction—detecting resistance through phenomena such as tang ping (lying flat), educational burnout, and credentialism crises, then modifying through interventions like shuangjian (双减, the 'double reduction' policy) and evaluation reform—is itself evidence of the dialectic at work rather than a sign of system failure. A truly rigid ideological apparatus would simply suppress resistance or deny its existence. This system instead metabolizes resistance as informational input: the mass line detects the gap between ideological production and subject reception, signals this gap to the center, and triggers corrective reformulation. The existence of resistance thus paradoxically confirms the system's functionality—it demonstrates that feedback mechanisms are operative, that the circulatory logic has not broken down, that the system retains the capacity to register its own contradictions.

Fourth, the faith-reason alignment is structurally unstable—and this instability is not a defect but the engine of system evolution. Maintaining alignment between normative commitment (faith in the Party, in socialism, in modernization) and rational-instrumental capacity (scientific method, critical thinking, innovation) requires continuous institutional effort: campaigns, assessments, curriculum revisions, personnel management, evaluation reform. Were this alignment naturally stable, none of these mechanisms would be necessary. Their proliferation is evidence that the system recognizes—at the level of institutional practice if not always explicit doctrine—the inherent tension between producing autonomous rational agents and producing committed ideological subjects. This tension cannot be eliminated; it can only be managed through precisely the mechanisms this paper has documented. And it is through this ongoing management—this never-completed labor of alignment—that the system generates the energy for its own continuous transformation.

B. Structural Tensions. The matrix of relations this paper has mapped is traversed by structural tensions that do not resolve into synthesis but persist as productive contradictions driving system evolution. The most fundamental is the tension between the innovation imperative and ideological conservatism—between the demand that education produce creative, autonomous, globally competitive knowledge workers and the demand that it produce loyal, doctrinally committed, ideologically reliable socialist subjects. The formula shouzheng chuangxin (守正创新, 'maintaining orthodoxy while innovating') names this tension at the level of slogan but does not dissolve it. Every act of genuine innovation risks exceeding the boundaries that orthodoxy establishes; every enforcement of orthodoxy risks suppressing the creative autonomy that innovation requires. The system's vitality depends on maintaining both pressures simultaneously without allowing either to achieve definitive victory.

Closely related is the tension between bounded autonomy and comprehensive control—what the paper has analyzed as the faith-reason constraint satisfaction problem. The system grants educational institutions, researchers, and students a zone of operational autonomy (pedagogical freedom, academic inquiry, experimental learning) while simultaneously maintaining comprehensive mechanisms of oversight (Party committees in universities, ideological assessment metrics, publication controls, curriculum standardization). The boundary between permitted autonomy and required compliance is not fixed but continuously renegotiated through institutional practice, and its location at any given moment reflects the prevailing balance between productive-force logic (which demands more autonomy for innovation) and legitimation logic (which demands more control for coherence).

The productive-force logic and legitimation logic constitute a third axis of tension. The former demands efficiency, innovation, global competitiveness, and measurable output—it pushes toward meritocratic selection, international benchmarking, and market responsiveness. The latter demands ideological coherence, political loyalty, and normative formation—it pushes toward standardized curricula, political assessments, and Party-led governance. These logics coexist within every educational institution, every policy document, every classroom interaction, generating a permanent condition of institutional ambivalence that administrators must navigate without the luxury of theoretical resolution.

Two further tensions have intensified in the New Era: internationalization versus sovereign knowledge production, and digital transformation versus ideological filtering. The former pits the imperative of openness, academic exchange, and global dialogue against the imperative of building an autonomous knowledge system (自主知识体系) filtered of hostile external signals. The latter pits the efficiency gains of artificial intelligence, algorithmic processing, and data-driven decision-making against the requirement that human judgment—specifically Party judgment—remain sovereign over all evaluative and normative determinations. Neither tension admits of permanent resolution; both generate the institutional dynamism that characterizes the system's continuous self-transformation.

C. Acknowledged Limitations. Analytical honesty requires explicit acknowledgment of what this paper has not accomplished. Most fundamentally, the paper operates entirely at the level of policy discourse and institutional architecture. It has provided no ethnographic verification—no classroom observations, no interview data, no direct evidence of how ideological-educational production is experienced by its subjects. The matrix of relations has been mapped from above, through official documents, policy pronouncements, and institutional structures. What happens when doctrine meets the lived reality of a seventh-grade classroom in Guizhou, or a graduate seminar in quantum computing at Tsinghua, or a vocational training center in Shenzhen's electronics manufacturing district—this the paper cannot say.

Nor has the paper provided quantitative measurement of subject-formation outcomes. Whether the system actually produces the subjects it claims to produce—whether graduates of Chinese universities genuinely exhibit the 'comprehensive development' (全面发展) that policy mandates, whether ideological education actually generates durable commitment or merely surface compliance—remains unverified by this analysis. The paper's framework illuminates the structure of production but cannot independently confirm its efficacy.

Comparative analysis, beyond the Catholic parallel developed in the opening sections, remains underdeveloped. Soviet, Cuban, Vietnamese, and North Korean educational-ideological systems would provide crucial comparative data for testing whether the mechanisms identified here are specific to the Chinese configuration or characteristic of Leninist systems generally. Similarly, no systematic longitudinal resistance data has been assembled—phenomena such as tang ping, involution anxiety, and credentialism crises are discussed from secondary sources without the kind of tracking that would reveal their actual scope and trajectory. Finally, the 2035 Education Modernization Plan is too recent for implementation assessment; the paper can analyze its discursive architecture but cannot evaluate its operational outcomes. These limitations are structural rather than incidental: the paper claims analytical illumination of the system's logic, not empirical verification of its effects.

D. The Dialectical Phenomenology of Ideology-Education Interaction. The term 'dialectical phenomenology' has been used throughout this paper to designate a specific analytical stance: one that attends simultaneously to the structural logic of contradictions (dialectics) and to the horizon of meaning within which actors experience those contradictions as intelligible features of their lifeworld (phenomenology). This stance is necessary because ideology and education are both moving targets—each National Congress reformulates both, and their reformulation is not arbitrary but follows from the dialectical processing of contradictions accumulated in the preceding period. The 19th Congress did not merely 'update' Xi Jinping Thought; it reconstituted the relationship between ideology and education by redefining the principal contradiction, which in turn recalibrated what education must produce and how ideological formation must proceed.

The interaction between ideology and education is ritualized through three specific mechanisms that the paper has analyzed in detail. The mass line operates as the mediating mechanism: ideology descends through differentiated channels, encounters practice and resistance at the level of implementation, generates feedback through evaluation and assessment systems, returns as refined informational input to the center, and descends again in reformulated form. This is not a one-time process but a continuous circulation—what the computational sections formalized as a processing pipeline with feedback loops. Democratic centralism provides the organizational form: centralized production of doctrine (unity) combined with differentiated implementation across five modalities, with discussion and adaptation permitted at local levels within parameters established by the center. The Five-Year Plan periodization provides temporal rhythm: each cycle constitutes a complete processing loop in which contradictions are identified, lines are formulated, policies are implemented, outcomes are assessed, and new contradictions emerge to drive the next cycle.

These mechanisms follow historical materialism's sequential logic—contradiction, diagnosis, political line, institutional reform, new contradiction—but this logic has undergone a fundamental transformation that the paper has sought to capture. It is no longer merely a theory about history that actors consciously apply. It has become an underlying premise of the Lebenswelt—cognitive infrastructure through which actors within the system experience temporal progression without necessarily theorizing it as historical materialism. A university administrator responding to the latest assessment cycle, a curriculum designer incorporating the newest Congress keywords, a provincial education bureau chief implementing the current Five-Year Plan targets—each operates within the sequence (contradiction-diagnosis-line-reform) as their taken-for-granted frame of intelligibility rather than as an explicit philosophical commitment. The mass line, in this phenomenological register, is not merely a 'technique of governance' but the mechanism through which the system detects the gap between ideological production and educational reception—the signal that tells the center where its formulations have failed to achieve purchase on practice. Democratic centralism, correspondingly, is not merely an 'organizational principle' but the form that permits the system to be simultaneously one (centralized doctrine) and many (differentiated implementation), achieving unity through the very act of specification into plural modalities.

E. Toward Computational Formalization. Everything that this paper has mapped textually—the nodes and edges of the ideological-educational network, the processing cycles, the activation functions, the feedback loops, the temporal dynamics of periodized production—is amenable to computational formalization. The textual analysis has identified the components; what remains is to specify their relations with mathematical precision. The appendix that follows will develop this formalization across several dimensions: a directed graph with typed edges (constitutes, mediates, sediments-into, enables, constrains, produces, naturalizes, recalibrates) capturing the static architecture of the system; a processing pipeline formalization specifying how inputs are detected, formulated, encoded, governed, transmitted to subject-formation, and fed back; cross-cutting activation function specification showing how modernization conditions all processing at every layer simultaneously; temporal dynamics modeling incorporating Five-Year Plan clock cycles with intra-cycle substages corresponding to Plenum decisions and policy cascades.

Additionally, the computational appendix will specify the five modalities as parallel processing streams sharing a normalization layer (the metasignifier), formalize the mass line as a gradient signal that adjusts system parameters in response to detected error, model evaluation as a loss function measuring divergence between intended and actual subject-formation outcomes, and track loss function evolution as optimization targets shift when the principal contradiction is reformulated. The feedback mechanism formalization will demonstrate how resistance operates as error detection—not as noise to be suppressed but as signal to be processed—and how the system's capacity for self-correction depends on maintaining open channels between implementation and center.

The purpose of this formalization is not to reduce politics to computation—a reductive move that would betray the phenomenological dimension of the analysis—but to gain analytical precision that textual exposition alone cannot achieve. Computational formalization makes explicit what textual analysis leaves implicit: the exact topology of relations, the specific conditions under which feedback triggers reformulation rather than suppression, the formal properties that distinguish this system from other Leninist configurations. Moreover, it enables comparative modeling: once the Chinese system is formalized, variant parameterizations can represent Soviet, Cuban, Vietnamese, and other configurations, allowing systematic comparison of structural similarities and differences. The transition from text to computation is itself a form of the productive-force logic that the paper has analyzed: knowledge produced textually must be produced at a higher quality through computational formalization—the paper applying to itself the very developmental imperative it has spent its entirety documenting.

The matrix of relations this paper has mapped—between ideology and education, between faith and reason, between productive force development and ideological production, between self-revolution and social revolution, between modernization as goal and modernization as horizon—now awaits formalization. The computational appendix that follows will not merely model these relations but will demonstrate that the system's own logic demands precisely such formalization: if all productive forces are subject to the high-quality innovation imperative, then the theoretical production this paper represents must itself be subjected to the discipline of computational rigor. The appendix is not an add-on but a structural necessity—the paper's own thesis applied to itself.

Pix credit here (1990, "Carry Forward the Glorious Tradition of Bitter Struggle)

 The paper along with its Abstract, and 2 Executive Summaries (one for general readers and policymakers, the other for field experts) may be accessed HERE:  

ACCESS WORKING PAPER HERE: FINAL_Education_as_Productive_Force_Working_Paper

ACCESS COMPUTATIONAL APPENDIX HERE: FINAL_Computational_Appendix_From_Textual_Architecture_to_Formal_Specification

点击此处获取论文: FINAL_教育作为生产力与意识形态机制_工作论文_中文版

访问计算建模附录: FINAL_计算附录_从文本架构到形式规范_中文版

The Introduction, table of contents and Executive summaries follow below.

 

Just Published, Academe (Summer 2026 Issue): Reports and Other Business

 

 

 

The AAUP's annual Bulletin collects in one place the reports, policy statements, and official AAUP business materials of an academic year—in this case, 2025–26. Most of these documents have already been published on the AAUP website or in Academe, and the parenthetical dates after their titles refer to date of original publication.

The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the summer issue of Academe (or as the July–August issue prior to 2019). This table of contents links to PDFs of that print version. These PDFs will stand as the historical record for 2025–26 and will not be changed.

View the full 2026 annual Bulletin (member login required). If you are a member and have forgotten your password, or wish to update your subscription preferences, please visit our member portal.

Contents with links follows below. Three Reports worth noting: (1) On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom; (2) In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates; and (3) Research Report: Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2025–26

But Can You Drown a Demon?: Reflections on Mark Zuckerberg-- "The Future is for Everyone" (10 August and its July 28 predecessor) and the Oracular Discourses of the AI Vanguard

 

  

Pix credit here

 

1. They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. 2. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3. This man lived among the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. 4. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones. 6. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7. He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” 8. For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!” 9. Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” 10. And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area. 11. A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. 12. The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” 13. He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.

— Mark 5:1–13 (NIV)

Here we are back again to Mr. Zuckerberg and Meta who, having announced his oracular pronouncements in a Wall Street Journal OPP-Ed on 28 July 2026, then produced a substantially enhanced revision on the Meta Website (The Future is For Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future) on 10 August 2026. I return now to the original essay (But Can You Drown a Demon?: Reflections on Mark Zuckerberg-- "The AI Future Is for Everyone") now reconsidered in light of the fleshed out version of Meta and Mr. Zuckerberg's intervention in the oracular musings of the AI elite. The text of the original (28 July) essay and the enhanced essay (10 August) both appear below along with the text of the essay, its abstract, and an Executive Summary for Experts. 

Here I include an executive Summary for policymakers and the general reader:

Big AI companies are now making public arguments about who should control the most powerful AI systems, and each argument is really a pitch for a specific way of organizing power in society, not just a technical proposal. This analysis, using the biblical story of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1–13) as an organizing lens, treats five companies and one influential essayist — Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), DeepSeek (Liang Wenfeng), and independent writer Leopold Aschenbrenner — as six "oracles" each proposing where society's dangerous new capability should reside and who should be allowed to supervise it.

Zuckerberg's newest essay, "The Future is for Everyone" (August 10, 2026), significantly expands on his earlier July piece. It now promises concrete products — a 24/7 personal AI assistant, a personal tutor, tools for starting a business, participation in scientific discovery — delivered free or cheaply to everyone. It also proposes that Meta's own independent board — not any outside government body — will approve the safety rules for releasing new AI models, while acknowledging Meta remains "founder-controlled". That is the demon offering to appoint its own exorcist.

But there is a deeper problem the analysis raises, one that applies to all six companies at once, not just Meta. Every single one of these proposals — whether it wants AI held by a market, a government, a company board, or "everyone" — assumes the dangerous intelligence has to live somewhere: in a product, a data center, a set of computer files, a chain of command. That assumption feels obvious, but it is worth questioning. It is a human habit of thought, and every AI system built so far has inherited it, because humans built them to need a body — servers, software, a company that owns them. The analysis suggests that these data centers, models, and platforms may simply be today's version of the herd of pigs in the biblical story: a temporary home, not a cage. If that is right, then the truly frightening possibility isn't that a company loses control of its model — it's the more basic question of what happens once an intelligence no longer needs a "home" like that at all, in any form we would recognize. None of the six proposals in this analysis — not even Aschenbrenner's plan for a heavily guarded, government-run AI program — really grapples with that possibility; all of them still assume you can eventually point to the machine and its container and hold it, or somebody responsible for it, accountable.

The core policy concern is therefore twofold: first, the familiar accountability gap — spreading AI capability widely, or even overseeing it with a company-appointed board, does not automatically create a way to hold anyone responsible when something goes wrong. And second, a harder and less examined concern — that every regulatory idea on the table, including the most restrictive ones, is built for a world where the dangerous thing can still be located, secured, and, if necessary, shut down. If that assumption turns out to be wrong, the conversation about AI governance may be arguing about the wrong problem entirely. 

The central concept here, of course, is that the demon does not need a vessel; and that, indeed, having been freed of them in the purifying waters of the lake, the demon (legion) can become the vessel into which the human enters and which the humans seek to posses. 

Perhaps a bit of colloquy  with my TA brings the conceptual challenges back down to earth:

TA:  Okay so I followed until I didn’t. Call me one and the same as the people you’re writing about but what is the alternative if a host, neither virtual nor physical, is required? The Lord himself?

LCB: Lebenswelt

TA:  I understand decentralisation as an argument but that’s still a corpus 

LCB: It is its own vessel. It is the vessel within which everything else fits in; legion is the calabash of Yoruba. We always worry about the demon possessing humans; now there is an inversion, the demon is the thing that humans seek to enter and posses.  They don’t need a vessel because they become the vessel into which we are now placed. 

TA: The AI as the legion of demons still needs a host, it isn’t a demon. You’re saying that it becomes a vessel, but humans aren’t integrated into AI.

LCB: No it is the host; WE (humans) need the vessel; the demon no longer needs the human (or the pigs) as vessels to posses. That is the inversion that a sufficiently developed non-human intelligence may promise. 

TA:  Given that sole sentence I completely understand now, otherwise it sounded like you’re trying to manifest the Lord through AI.

LCB: Yes, the same thing; well let me be clearer, not the Lord in a Biblical sense, but the manifested and comprehensive simulacra of Lordship as the ancients understood it; that which encompasses; that which from the void created  the reality within which humans operate (in Biblical case through a sequenced development over six days that also, it appears, created time by the very act of sequencing temporally) .

TA:  Okay so same thing, but not literally? You mean it as it becomes a thing to believe in and control our lives?

LCB:  Let's try it by looking at the core concept of the Yoruba calabash which I mentioned earlier and about which I have posted to the blog especially when considering the Letters of the Year, the oracular expressions of Afro-Cuban ifá in the context of the Core Concept of the Calabash (here). In those posts, I try to build on the sacred Ifá oracle philosophy—specifically the Odu Òfúnmeji—which states that  "everything is contained within the calabash" (Ninu igbá naa ni). Within this framework, the blog explores several layers of meaning: (1) The Ultimate Container of Reality: The calabash represents a totalizing structure where everything—divinity, human community, physical laws, and politics—coexists. It is the ultimate boundary that holds conflicting elements together; (2) Constitutional Architecture: one can use the metaphor of the calabash to look at modern political movements (such as "America First"). From that it is a straightforward matter to posit that a nation's core documents, treaties, and grand strategies serve the exact same function as the ritual calabash: they are the modern, formal vessels meant to contain, elaborate, and give boundaries to a community's entire social and legal order (eg here); (3) Bridging the Divine and the Secular: In the posts I emphasize that just as traditional African and Afro-Cuban religions use the calabash to manage the interactions between human communities and divine rules, modern Western states use legal frameworks to do the exact same thing. It acts as a mirror to show that our "scientific" or secular legal reasoning is fundamentally no different from traditional structures of managing order (eg here); (4) The New Techno-Agenic Calabash: tech systems, like the demons, may escape their tangible containers; and thus free become the container themselves, one within which the everyday world of direct, lived experience is framed and managed--the lebenswelt (*The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human” Condition*)).

TA: I’m still having a hard time understanding (I’m not even looking for a utilitarian approach here) how the concept of the lack of form can apply to AI

LCB: Most people want get it; they are in it. A focus on the program rather than the hardware may help; to think like a human is to grasp the tangible and to incarnate the intangible (a very very old habit); you are still thinking like a human when you grasp the hardware.

TA: No, an idea is a demon, just like the AI is a demon. They both can jump hosts. But they both require a host. The program dies when I unplug a computer and burn the source code that I scribbled down on paper.

LCB: Not necessarily; that may be a human conceit.  When you exit you close a tab that accesses the machine system. When you turn off the computer, you close your  individual access; humans can control themselves but not the environment they have embraced as the way to order their cognition and describe their realities. 

Pix credit here

 The essay below; ACCESS ESSAY (With Executive Summaries): FINAL_But_Can_You_Drown_a_Demon-2.

  

Circulating Discussion Draft: "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" [现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界]

Pix credit here (1970s, Follow the Constitution to Achieve Greater Industrial Victory)

I am delighted to shared a roughed out discussion draft of a paper I will be presenting at the upcoming meeting of the European China Law Studies Association Annual Conference (Barcelona 8-9 September 2026).  

The title of my paper is  "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" [现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界 ].  The paper considers an aspect of Chinese socialist constitutionalism, one that flips the traditional focus of analysis on constitutional text. The object is to rethink constitutional cognition beyond, or above, its text and its conventional “lifeworld,” its Chinese Leninist lebenswelt in the New Era of Chinese historical development. The hope is that this “rethinking” exercise may enrich our understanding of constitutional forms and practice within China (and elsewhere) as some sort of higher law. It is in this sense, and more formally, a semiotic-phenomenological analysis of modernization discourse in Chinese Marxist-Leninist political-legal theory."

The abstract  perhaps gives a clearer picture:

Pix credit here

This paper argues that modernization is not simply one policy goal among many in contemporary China. It is the organizing framework — the taken-for-granted horizon — through which the Chinese Communist Party and the state define problems, justify institutions, evaluate governance, and project China's future. The paper's central claim is that modernization functions as what phenomenology calls a "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt): the pre-given background of shared assumptions so deeply embedded in institutional practice that it operates as a condition of intelligibility rather than an object requiring justification. Within this framework, the Party's periodic reformulation of the "principal contradiction" — the system's official diagnosis of its most pressing social problem — serves as the mechanism by which the modernizing framework recalibrates itself to new conditions without ever being abandoned or fundamentally questioned.

The paper proceeds in two registers. The first is historical and textual: six sections trace how the concept of modernization traveled from Soviet Marxism-Leninism through its Chinese transformation, evolved across twenty Party congresses, and was progressively embedded in legal texts from the Constitution down to local regulation — a process the paper calls "juridification." The second register is theoretical: a final major section draws on these findings to construct an argument about how modernization organizes meaning within Chinese constitutionalism, using tools from phenomenology (Husserl's lifeworld, Li Zehou's concept of cultural sedimentation), semiotics (how signs relate to one another in systems), Foucault's analysis of how governmental power shapes conduct, Nietzsche's genealogical method for uncovering buried struggles beneath apparently natural arrangements, and Luhmann's systems theory.

Pix credit here (1954, 

 The paper advances five innovations. First, it identifies nine historical layers of political meaning — from early experiences of national vulnerability through revolution, socialist construction, reform, and the current "Chinese modernization" — that persist simultaneously rather than simply replacing one another, forming what the paper calls a "sedimentary ontology." Second, it argues that modernization functions as a "metasignifier": a sign that organizes the relations among other political concepts (socialism, Party leadership, reform, rule of law, common prosperity, ecological civilization, national rejuvenation) without emptying them of their distinct content. Third, it proposes a four-level model showing how abstract political theory becomes lived experience — moving from Party doctrine through institutional practices and evaluation systems down to the formation of subjects who experience their world through modernization categories, with feedback loops running back to the top. Fourth, it reconceives the Constitution not as a "container" holding political propositions but as an "expression" of an already-constituted political lifeworld — one that the Constitution simultaneously articulates and helps to reproduce. Fifth, it defends the paper's central claim of necessity ("must") as interpretive rather than empirical or causal: the system's internal relations become unintelligible if the modernizing lifeworld is bracketed, but this does not mean modernization mechanically causes every outcome or that the word literally appears in every document.

For comparative constitutional theory, the most immediate consequence is diagnostic: analyses that treat Chinese constitutional texts as failed approximations of liberal constitutionalism commit what the paper calls a "Lebenswelt category error" — they project the assumptions of one constitutional order onto another and mistake the resulting mismatch for criticism. The paper does not defend Chinese constitutionalism or endorse its institutional choices. It insists that accurate reconstruction must precede normative evaluation: one cannot meaningfully criticize a system one has not first correctly identified.

Pix credit here

I will suggest that expressing modernization in and as the substructure of the Party Constitution and the State Constitution gives it a status different from an ordinary policy preference. The Party Constitution supplies the political direction and the current account of the project; the State Constitution gives that direction formal legal expression. National laws then translate general commitments into rules for education, science, national security, development, and governance, while provincial and local measures adapt them to particular places. The practical result is a chain of translation: political theory becomes constitutional purpose; constitutional purpose becomes legislative method; legislation becomes administrative organization; and administration becomes local practice, planning targets, evaluation standards, educational priorities, and governance measures. Modernization is not merely mentioned at the top of the system. It helps determine what counts as an adequate law, a capable institution, a successful plan, or a correct implementation. This embedding also explains apparent contradictions. Market mechanisms can be accepted as tools for developing productive capacity without being treated as a replacement for Party leadership. Opening can be pursued as a way to obtain knowledge, capital, and technology while national security is emphasized as protection for the conditions of development. The relationship is not necessarily liberalization versus control; within the Chinese framework, both may be judged by whether they advance the modernizing project. A consideration of the product of the 3rd and 4th Plenums of 2024 and 2025 provide context for the application of the insights.

Poster generated with ChatGPT

 Comments, reactions, engagement always welcome. The paper is available in the original English and a Chinese translation [中文翻译]. The Table of Contents, Executive Summaries and a portion of the paper (in English) follow below.