What is Mark Carney’s Visit to China Other than a Crucial Instance,,in the Liberal-Marxist Dialogue with Global Implications?

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Hugh Williams

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Jan 14, 2026, 9:03:29 AMJan 14
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What is Mark Carney’s Visit to China Other than a Crucial Instance

in the Liberal-Marxist Dialogue with Global Implications?

 

Many people have asked me my opinion of Mark Carney, and I have been reserved in my response. He has written a very thoughtful book on Value(s): Building a Better World for All (2021). I haven’t read all of it, in fact truth be known I have not read any of it. However, I have listened to a good part of it as an audio book while travelling around the Gaspe early this past fall. And at the time I was deeply impressed by the scholarship and his serious effort to help us understand ‘value’ and especially the value of money and its role in economy.

Thus, for me, this political leader’s visit to China is highly significant given the world situation and the crisis in World Liberal Order, i.e., capitalism. This leads me to share these somewhat lengthy reflections below much of which is a recycling of ideas that in my view warrant careful reconsideration.

---

In our view there clearly is what can only be called a revolutionary dimension to Lonergan’s work which has been given a special focus in Philip McShane’s reading and interpretation of this work, and which Christians in particular should be considering carefully. It can be given striking focus in two recurring questions that occur in McShane’s late writings. The first question is posed by McShane: “Do you view humanity as possibly maturing—in some serious way—or just messing along between good and evil, whatever you think they are?” The second question was posed by Lonergan in 1935: “What is to be done? Shall the matter be left to providence to solve according to its own plan, or does one consider that providence intends to use (us and) our leaders as conscious agents in the furtherance of what it has already done?” See McShane’s essay “Foundations of Communications” in Seeding Global Collaboration, Patrick Brown and James Duffy, Editors, (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2016) at pages 163 and 169.

 I believe then that there is very good reason for us to reconsider McShane’s efforts for us to be more programmatic in our discussions and work. My repeated references to Christian-Marxist dialogue, after my encounter with John and Pierre’s good text “Attentive, Intelligent, Reasonable and Responsible” have vaguely hoped for this. I recall and use these references upon the good and firm basis Lonergan gave us in saying his work could be interpreted as an effort to achieve some synthesis between Liberal thesis and Marxist anti-thesis. Let’s simplify this by referring to this as an ongoing tension between Liberalism and Marxism. I will at some point attempt to give some more technical precision to this ‘tension’ by some reference to the recent good efforts by Terry Quinn and John Benton to place again in front of us the two competing interpretations of economy in terms of one or two circuits/flows of economic activity. But for now I’d like to return to my own best effort to come to grips with the revolutionary dimensions of this project through an earlier draft of a paper “Reinterpreting the Motor Car Analogy in Bernard Lonergan’s For a New Political Economy” written for the Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis 12 (2020) pp.96-103) (see attached link).[1] In preparing this draft, James Duffy and I had an excellent and very rare exchange (see attached ...) that goes a long way towards bringing into the light the issue and what is at stake, at least in terms of how Phil McShane saw it, especially towards the end of his days with us …

Hugh


lonergan revolutionary dimension recycled.docx

Doug Mounce

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Jan 15, 2026, 3:00:51 PMJan 15
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Hi Hugh,
I believe what you write is an accurate characterization of what Phil hopefully expected, "We are to hope and work towards finding at each stage a global operator that will lift us towards the
next decade." although I think he was willing to consider change over time in centuries.  

I recall how an early critic of Lonergan complained that L's program wouldn't succeed unless it was comprehensive.  In that regard, I recall how Phil had hopes of at least finding a leading economist to help.  Maybe an AI superintelligence could be the "operator" although I doubt that's possible.  Doug



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Hugh Williams

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Jan 15, 2026, 7:09:56 PMJan 15
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Doug,

Yes, Phil, as I understand it,

was reaching with Lonergan (and Marx)

for a comprehensive revolutionary analytic ...

this often is what is hard for people to grasp

and even upon grasping - harder to accept ...

... but things change ...

----- 

do you think that AI has agency 

through conscious 'acts of understanding'

(as we've been attributing to Lonergan's notion of human understanding)?

Hugh

PIERRE WHALON

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Jan 16, 2026, 3:12:22 AMJan 16
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Hi Hugh,

Phil was certainly not afraid of Marx. Nor should anyone. Having an understanding of his concepts—even if you think they are wrong—is important historically, of course, but also for economics today.

And what can one say about a fellow who wrote his doctoral thesis on Epicurus, in Ancient Greek, no less…

As for AI, once an AI can ask questions solely out of curiosity, it is approximating human intelligence. « When a dog is bored, it goes to sleep. When a man is bored, he can ask a question."

Pierre

Hugh Williams

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Jan 17, 2026, 9:18:04 AMJan 17
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Pierre,

I certainly do not make reference to Marx hoping all or some become what Schumpeter called Marxologists. That’s not at all the point … It does somehow have to do with Phil’s relentless revolutionary efforts with and within the so-called ‘Lonergan school’.

I believe Phil’s interest in Marx and contemporary Marxist thinking towards the end of his days with us had to do with the major difficulty he along with the rest of us encountered in the 2011-2017 online seminars. The central problem as I understood it was cast as the inability of the group to sustain an effective research focus. And this was because of the absence of any serious grasp of a ‘standard model’ which by contrast he felt was present in the physical sciences but almost totally absent from philosophy and theology in our time.

This means that the desire for ‘cumulative and progressive results’ for an effective human science remains extremely difficult. This in my view is where Marx and Marxism come in for Phil, in that it does by and large have a highly developed analysis and perspective on what we may call the standard model, and it is ‘liberal capitalism’, or let’s call it ‘economic liberalism’. In Lonergan’s more technical terms, it is this insistence upon a one circuit view of economy as Quinn and Benton just recently laid out for us again.

However, this story of ‘the standard model’ takes on some additional complexity, where if we fast forward to Phil’s publication of “Piketty’s Plight and the Global Future” after the relative wide success of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, we have Phil offering a solid critique of Piketty’s Marxist inspired analysis of the problem with the ‘standard economic model’ being solely or largely understood in terms of growing inequality. Not that inequality is not the social problem Piketty says it is, but that the analysis of the problem’s causes and remedies in terms of re-distribution for the most part is seriously incomplete.

Despite this, in Phil’s critique of the Piketty critique, I believe we do have Phil looking earnestly for allies in this effort to foment the revolution required to overcome the ‘dominant model’ and its disastrous consequences for our future on this planet. And in this search, I believe Phil felt he might be as likely to find this solidarity as much among thinkers sympathetic to the Marxist tradition of thought and practice as he would among the Lonergan school and its often-Christian adherents.

This is why I’m putting such emphasis on this seemingly ‘old’ and even 'odd' category of Christian-Marxist dialogue as a very general zone of inquiry that might aide some of us to carry on and deepen the struggle Phil was committed to and to introduce us to new partners from whom we can learn. 

Thus, I’d like to believe Carney’s visit to China can be seen or interpreted in this promising light.

Hugh

PIERRE WHALON

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Jan 17, 2026, 12:20:31 PMJan 17
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Hugh,

Phil and I exchanged a lot about Piketty’s book and his response. The one-circuit critique was key, and Phil didn’t mince words. Much of my impetus in joining John to write our impossible book came from those discussions.

And I agree that there is still much to be mined from Christian-Marxist dialogue, even if that sounds really passé. Marx is not passé, just some marxists…

I think Carney is like de Gaulle who used to always say, « Il faut regarder les choses en face, telles qu’elles sont. »

Pierre



Hugh Williams

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Jan 18, 2026, 12:53:28 PMJan 18
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Pierre et al,


When Joseph Schumpeter talked about his plan for his History of Economic Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1954) he goes out of his way to carefully and respectfully consider the unique challenges any treatment of the Marxist system might pose for his plan of approach. There is something about the ‘whole’ of Marxism as a comprehensive system that is lost when one begins to break it apart for a certain type of analytical treatment of the parts. He is willing to concede that this is to some degree a problem with other economic thinkers as well. This is because the whole of an able thinker’s thought is more than the sum of its parts. And yet there are these extraordinarily seminal thinkers like Marx where you have this ‘totality of vision’ that is uniquely present and asserts its rights in every and all parts. This powerful interrelationship between whole and parts in a thinker like Marx is especially unique and Schumpeter says it is likely the source of this profound attraction or fascination so many have found, both friend and foe, in attempting any serious engagement and study. Schumpeter ultimately admits to being unable to do justice to Marx’s work and yet he will proceed to include him in his history of economic analysis because in fact there is much economic analysis in Marx’s work though most orthodox Marxists will unlikely be satisfied with his treatment.

 

This unusual admission by Schumpeter, I think, has a certain philosophical-epistemological significance. It has significance in the sense that we may be facing a profound pluralism in our efforts to give a comprehensive account of 'our' social reality. There may well be what Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus very recently called this need for a ‘robust pluralist realism’. This realism in its pluralist dimension would acknowledge that given the world’s dynamic complexity we can’t forget that when we try and account for natural systems through various efforts at mental formalization (modelling) we meet with only partial success. It seems there are always aspects that our paradigm/formalization fails to capture. This failure, or epistemological limitation, tells us of the inability of any one formalism to adequately capture the full complexity of the ‘real-world system’. Thus, it may very well be that there are plural ways of interacting with complex systems. Distinctly different in the sense that when we make successful models, the formal systems needed to describe each distinct aspect are not derivable from each other, thus there is a robustness of the pluralism.

 

Might it be then that there is no one formalization for describing our social reality, and yet there may very well be many formalizations that correctly describe various aspects of this reality? This I surmise is the philosophical position or question of Charles Taylor’s robust pluralist realism that he has developed with Hubert Dreyfus in a little but mighty text entitled Retrieving Realism (2015). It is a position making three fundamental claims: 1) there may be multiple ways of inquiring into reality – thus the pluralism; 2) these ways reveal truths independent of us in the sense that we will be required to adapt and revise our thinking in order to grasp things, this is the robustness of the realism; and 3) we may yet fail in bringing these different ways of inquiry into a single unified mode of inquiry or model – thus the robustness of the pluralism.

This philosophical-epistemological consideration, for which Schumpeter gives us some slight but serious sense of in his careful and cautious approach to Marxism, may prove to be highly relevant for any serious effort to engage in Christian-Marxist or Liberal-Marxist dialogue.

I'm not sure Phil McShane would have been entirely comfortable with what he might consider as these 'post-modern' musings of mine that inevitably arise when one honestly confronts a thinker like Marx ... (or perhaps even a Xi Jinping).

Hugh

PIERRE WHALON

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Jan 19, 2026, 5:31:37 AMJan 19
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Thanks for this, Hugh.

I do think Phil would be comfortable with your « post-modern musings. » I also think that Lonergan would insist on the inevitability of models failing. The notion of the « empirical residue » is not only what the model doesn’t account for, it is the eventual source of new questions that move the enterprise forward. Or if you will, there is no unrestricted act of understanding except God. 

Please keep on!

Pierre

Hugh Williams

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Jan 19, 2026, 9:34:50 PMJan 19
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Pierre et al,

Perhaps you or anyone else can assist us then by commenting upon Phil's concern that came to a head for him and perhaps others 

during the period of the 2011-2017 online seminars where he said at one point fairly early in the exercise

as I recall 'that a large problem in starting functional collaboration is that 'we' may be decades away from the emergence of a standard model'.

I am quite clear now that I really did not understand his point at the time, over a decade ago.

And there still may be some confusion in that the meaning of 'standard model' still may be ambiguous.

Today, I interpret Phil as referring to prospective collaborators' understanding of a 'standard model' as perhaps being all over the place,

thus there was no clear agreement on the 'standard model'.

Can we agree that he was referring to the 'standard model' for economy and economics?

I would further suggest that today the real world 'standard model' is capitalist (liberal capitalist), and thus one attraction in Marxism is that it is a long and strong tradition of thought

that in general and for the most part agrees upon this.

If this can be established as somewhat close to the truth, then both Marxist and Lonerganian economic and/or social theory clearly are working to change, overcome, transform, and even overthrow this

'standard model' with an 'alternative model' ... and the programmatic collaborative work is, or would be, in how best/most effectively to do this. And here there is much work to be done,

much discussion, and much debate. But this would be very different as a methodology than the typically academic, in the bad sense, of non-functional idle comparisons of viewpoints.

This then also makes Phil's Pickety's Plight of some special relevance as to the direction Phil, after Lonergan, was trying to point us towards ...

But there is the belief/hope that the problem being tackled becomes actually more manageable with at least some degree 

of 'agreement as to this standard model' and the challenges it poses for us, while the discernment of authentic contributions for the struggle now can be based upon some comparison with actual achievements

(assessed as contributions towards an alternative to this 'standard model'), ... achievements that are both theoretical and practical ...

Does this make any sense perhaps in relation to what might be called a more promising and even realistic heuristic ... ???

Hugh

re...@yahoo.com

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Jan 20, 2026, 7:58:10 PMJan 20
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Standard model refers to physics theory of forces. Phil wanted something akin to that for functional collaboration in MIT. MIT as a work is flawed. A standard m odel would fix that getting us on the same anticipatory page

Hugh Williams

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Jan 20, 2026, 10:19:38 PMJan 20
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John et al,

I'm assuming this brief note below on the significance of the 'standard model' is from John ...

but then ... how is it we are to coordinate and harmonize this with the sense I get from the Lonergan quote (CWL22, p.464) below that Phil often used

to present the 'standard model' as something once agreed upon as something then to be overthrown, overcome, moved beyond

by way of the working out of some alternative? 

This problem/problematic, as I understand it, was applied to the economy and its economic formalization ...

"And you can have teamwork insofar, first of all, as the fact of reciprocal dependence is understood, and appreciated. Not only is that understanding required, one has to be familiar with what is called the acquis, what has been settled, what no one has any doubt of in the present time. You're doing a big thing when you can upset that, but you have to know where things stand at the present time, what has already been achieved, to be able to see what is new in its novelty as a consequence."

Hugh

re...@yahoo.com

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Jan 21, 2026, 7:57:27 AMJan 21
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This is Dave Oyler. This requires a longer conversation. I think The Structurre of Scientific Revolutions would be helpfut.



On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 8:19 PM, Hugh Williams

Hugh Williams

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Jan 21, 2026, 7:51:41 PMJan 21
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David et al,

Permit me to attempt the following for some reaction/response from you and others - 

allow me to take up the quote below that I believe is from Lonergan and that I received from Phil McShane

in the midst of his efforts to get some degree of functional collaboration going with others. I believe it is highly relevant for the GEM-FS methodology's effective implementation as a 'science'. Allow me to paraphrase it as follows -

'And you can have functional collaboration insofar as people's transdisciplinary interdependence is understood and appreciated. But this is not all that is required, one has to be familiar with what is called the acquis, what has been settled as the dominating standard model ... what no one has any doubt of in the present time. This for us must be liberal capitalism must it not? And we will be doing a very big thing when we can upset that (theoretically and practically), but first you have to know where things stand at the present time, what has already been achieved (in both grasping the 'settled' and discerning the 'upsetting'), this is definitely necessary to be able to see what is new in its novelty as a consequence.'

Commentary:

This would be to answer the 'what' of functional collaboration. This would be to do 'a very big thing'. This is why I feel "Piketty's Plight" (see attached) is, among McShane's many later publications, so important. Because it assumes the dominance of liberal capitalism. Let's call it the 'thesis', and then he proceeds to critically consider, by way of Lonergan's theory of economy, Piketty's own (very popular at the time not that long ago) effort to articulate the alternative - a Marxist inspired anti-thesis. This, if I have the 'story' right, is to be on the (long) way to some 'new' possible (alternative) synthesis. Without at least entering into this very roomy dialectical structure, 'we' will be 'all over the place' and tragically ineffective. This I believe was Phil's problematic that he wrestled with during the online seminars from 2011-2017. I further think he quietly believed Marxism as a tradition of thought really had the best grip on the 'settled' nature of the dominating standard model of our social reality. But that when it comes to the 'upsetting' ... i.e. 'upsetting' on the way to a viable alternative Lonergan had something very important and unique to contribute ...

Hugh

McShane Piketty's Plight and the Global Future_final book.pdf

PIERRE WHALON

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Jan 22, 2026, 5:01:20 AMJan 22
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Hello All,

It seems to me that Hugh’s paraphrase is a private note from Lonergan to Phil. 

I don’t think there is any question that L’s economics is liberal capitalism: a well-functioning economy rewards all « with a generous hand. » 

Not the misery of kleptocratic capitalism…

Pierre

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lonergan_l/3c24e89c-aba8-40a9-9971-ed760392940a%40nbnet.nb.ca.
<McShane Piketty's Plight and the Global Future_final book.pdf>

David Bibby

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Jan 25, 2026, 5:33:02 PM (14 days ago) Jan 25
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Dear Hugh,

Returning to your question:

do you think that AI has agency 

through conscious 'acts of understanding'

(as we've been attributing to Lonergan's notion of human understanding)?

I think the short answer is no, in the sense that it is not conscious and has no agency. However, it does display what we may term a virtual act of understanding, which can lead to an actual act of understanding once a connection is drawn between the meaning of the understood act, and its relation to an element of concrete reality.

In humans, this link is mediated by our perception of the external universe, and systematised by the collaborative scientific enterprise.

These virtual acts of understanding can therefore be very helpful, not for AI to perform conscious acts, but to assist humans in rising to the complex challenges posed by our existential situation, i.e. they can help us understand.

The role of Lonergan could therefore be to act as a facilitator to humans for using AI intelligently, because it is conditioned by our ability to interiorise the knowledge so gained.

Best wishes,

David




On 16 Jan 2026, at 00:09, Hugh Williams <hwil...@nbnet.nb.ca> wrote:


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