To Change the World by James Davison Hunter, Part 2

To Change the World (continued)

4. World-changing, Hunter concludes, is most intense when the networks of elites and the institutions they lead overlap–for example, when cultural capital overlaps with economic and/or political capital.

Again Hunter refers to the story of Wilberforce and the Clapham Circle. It is the story of overlapping elites and institutions. Wilberforce brought moral charisma and political capital to the table, but Hannah More used her literary capital to start a very successful school for the poor. Henry Thornton (a merchant banker) contributed the necessary financial capital, while Granville Sharp and Zacharary Macaulay had the intellectual capital and the extensive social networks within the reform movements of the day.

Hunter summarizes his findings so:

Again and again, we see that the impetus, energy, and direction for changing the world were found where cultural, economic, and often political resources overlapped; where networks of elites who generated these various resources, come together in common purpose . . . in common purpose—something we should never forget.

I’m still wrestling with Hunter’s conclusions. It implies that, if we want to change the world, we have to take power seriously. But it’s not political power or power in the conventional sense, Hunter makes clear. It’s the power to define reality in ways that sustain benevolence and justice. And that takes cultural elites who must help exemplify the meaning of that reality in time and space.

To be honest, I don’t like the elite focus of Hunter’s arguments, nor his notion of overlapping capitals. But I’m having trouble explaining them away.

Was the early Christian movement successful because a network of disciples took an alternative way of life to the provincial center of Jerusalem and then, within a generation, to the center of the ancient world Rome?

Were the first churches the new institutions at the heart of a changing Roman world?
Source:
James Davison Hunter is Wm. R. Kenan Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, University of Virginia