ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, the Radical Orthodox theology of John Milbank has offered significant theological tools for the analysis of contemporary liberal politics. At the centre of Milbank’s account is the persistent claim that liberal societies represent a traumatic rupture with a holistic Christian past which was generous to both locality and tradition. In an effort to deconstruct this potent theological dichotomy as ahistorical and simplistic, this chapter performs a close theological reading of the thought of the British Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond (1913–1993). Key to this portrait is the recognition of Grimond’s debt to an older the Aristotelian notion of the ‘mixed constitution’. As a liberal generous both to aristocracy and democracy, Wood illustrates the ways in which Grimond’s liberalism is both developed and sustained by a pre-modern Christian past.
