Augustine Against the Age of Identity - How an Ancient Saint Helps us Understand our Fragmented Politics

In this paper, Danube Institute Visiting Fellow, Dr Jonathan Price, argues that contemporary identity politics is best understood not as a departure from liberalism, but as the culmination of a deeper anthropological shift within modern political thought. Drawing on Augustine of Hippo’s account of interiority, the paper traces how modern politics moved from a shared conception of the human person toward a fragmented landscape of rival selves. It contrasts Augustine’s distinction between rightly ordered interiority—directed toward shared goods and common loves—with the modern sacralisation of the inner self, most decisively articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The paper shows how Rousseau’s transformation of conscience into an autonomous moral authority laid the foundations for identity politics, while simultaneously destabilising the universalist claims of post-war liberalism. Augustine’s political anthropology offers an alternative framework, in which societies are held together not by abstract rights or proliferating identities, but by shared loves that bind inner lives to common purposes. The paper concludes that without such shared goods, liberal societies risk permanent fragmentation.