Edmund Burke,Strauss, and the Straussians

In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss accused Edmund Burke of being ignorant of the nobility of last-ditch resistance; defending a conception of history that set the path for historicism; and discarding a vision of politics as it ought to be. By separating philosophy from politics, Burke, according to Strauss, helped lay the intellectual foundation for modern political ideologies. While a number of scholars have attempted to vindicate or refute Strauss' criticisms through textual exegesis, my article aims to lay a sharper emphasis on particular historical episodes of Burke's political life in which his political thought and statesmanship calls into question Strauss' interpretations. I argue, moreover, that Burke's legislative activities retain a closer resemblance to Strauss' conception of classical statesmanship than Strauss suggests in Natural Right and History. I conclude by maintaining that Straussian scholars could enrich their framework of the Western canon by giving greater attention to Burke's political thought.     

ITALIAN LEGACIES1

This paper discusses David Roberts's latest book in which he seeks to throw some light on urgent postmodern historiographical issues from the angle of Italian historicism, led by Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). Focusing on the relationship between theory and practice, Roberts argues that there was a close relationship between Italian historicism and fascism. On the basis of the principle that “reality is nothing but history”, both Croce and Gentile sought to develop a philosophy that connects historical thinking to action. In this context, Gentile's presentist interpretation of the historical sublime eventually led to totalitarianism, whereas Croce's radical historicism formed the basis of a more liberal view of society. In his discussion of the reception of the Italian tradition, Roberts rejects Carlo Ginzburg's and Hayden White's “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, and concludes that Italian historicism is still relevant to modern historiography. In this paper I show that Roberts, by renouncing an exclusively philosophical approach to the Italian tradition, tends to overlook the underlying issues. In order to redress the balance, I argue that the political issues between Croce and Gentile went back to profound philosophical differences concerning the relationship between philosophy and history on the one hand and between past and present on the other. From this perspective, Ginzburg's and White's debates about the relationship between history and politics, and the role of the historical sublime in historiography, should not be viewed as “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, but as mere variations on the themes of their predecessors. The relevance of the Italian tradition is therefore not primarily to be found in its response to postmodernism, but in setting the agenda for rethinking the relationship between history and practical life in the contemporary world.     

Pauline Hanson,the Mainstream,and Political Elites: The Place of Race in Australian Political Ideology

Pauline Hanson is well known for claiming that Australia's major political parties are out of touch with 'mainstream' Australia on issues related to race. Parallel surveys of the electorate and candidates in the 1996 federal election allow this claim to be tested, with items tapping general ideological dispositions, but including questions about Aboriginal Australians, immigration, and links with Asia. I make three critical findings: the electorate holds quite conservative opinions on these issues relative to the candidates, and is quite distant from ALP candidates in particular; attitudes on racial issues are a powerful component of the electorate's political ideology, so much so that any categorisation of Australian political ideology ignoring race must be considered incomplete; racial attitudes cut across other components of the electorate's ideology, placing all the parties under internal ideological strains, but the ALP appears particularly vulnerable on this score. The data show the coalition parties to be the net beneficiaries of the ideological tensions posed by race. Racial issues thus resemble a realigning ideological dimension, with possibly far-reaching consequences for the conduct of Australian electoral politics. Racism is as Australian as lamingtons and sausage rolls but the real political leader is the man or woman who can appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature'. Robert Hughes (Lamont 1996)     

Theoretical reflections

The article starts with a discussion about the frequent statement that culture is a marginal area in politics. It proceeds with an analysis of the phenomenon and concept of “the cultural turn” and its possible consequences for cultural democracy. Then there follows a reflection on the potential power of religion and culture in political developments. After these introductory sections I present and discuss what I call five “democracy dimensions” of cultural policy: norms and ideologies; distribution of economic resources; institutional structures and decision‐making procedures; agents and interests in the policy‐making process; and access to and participation in cultural life. The conclusion is that under certain circumstances culture may mobilise huge masses of people in political actions but this is unlikely to happen in Western European democracies where culture in a long historical process has been privatised and isolated from big politics by the establishment of a specific sphere with its own structures, norms, logics and discourses. It is questionable if cultural policies will be more democratic under the reign of global capitalism and new liberalism. “The cultural turn” is an ambivalent phenomenon which cannot by itself bring about more cultural democracy. The future of cultural democracy cannot be decided for by cultural life or the cultural policy system themselves, it is dependent on what will happen to democracy as a total political system, of which cultural policy is only a small part.     

Equation and Adequation: The World Traced by the Phillips Curve

This paper considers the power of abstract formalization in capitalism, via an account of the politics and geography of an equation. The equation in question lies behind the Phillips curve, which describes the relation between price inflation and unemployment or output. I examine the evolution of the equation and its relation to macroeconomics' renewed emphasis, since the late 1960s, on long‐run monetary neutrality. Considering the Phillips curve and its theoretical and technical armature as social practice, I discuss some of the political and distributional questions that arise from the mode of spatial and temporal abstraction particular to modern macroeconomic analysis and policy‐making. The paper has three parts: a brief history of the Phillips curve, an examination of its modern equation‐form, and an analysis of its part in the dialectical process of “real abstraction”, through which logical space and time prioritize and produce both the spatial “macro” and the temporal “long‐run”.     

Historicism and constructionism: rival ideas of historical change

ABSTRACT

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization.     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

2. IN DEFENSE OF PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE: A RESPONSE TO CAROLA DIETZE

This response to Carola Dietze's critique of Provincializing Europe takes up for examination three key expressions or ideas on which the original argument of the book was founded: hyperreal Europe, historicism, and political modernity. I appreciate the spirit of Dietze's engagement with the book, but I show that her critique is based on a degree of misapprehension of these three central ideas. While clarifying the details and the degree of my disagreement with Dietze, I provide my own critique of Dietze's proposal of “equal histories” by arguing that Dietze has not named or explained the unit with respect to which different histories could be considered equal. I also argue that Dietze's proposals about judging societies only by their “own” standards, and basing human dignity on the idea of a “human nature” that could be seen as a “constant,” do not solve the problems she sees with my book and are themselves open to some serious historical and logical criticism.     

The good and the bad of the same: On the political value of historical repetition in Angola

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss processes of investment in historicity as an ideological, political and moral problem. Focusing on the study of religious and political movements in Angola, I address the problem of historical repetition as a form of ‘acting upon time’ which, in similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s citation a l’ordre du jour, contests the idea of temporal irreversibility. I propose that this contestation is multiplex and can produce ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ historical repetitions.     

A WORLD CONNECTING? FROM THE UNITY OF HISTORY TO GLOBAL HISTORY

Global history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill‐reflected. My article seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the “world” has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific mode of world‐making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the “world‐historical process,” a cognitive framework that co‐emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article investigates how this process‐template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. The format of the world‐historical process was central to Enlightenment historians' assertion of the secular and scientific prestige of their craft, as much as to its ability to discern global epochs, in particular the modern and the premodern. My article traces the fortunes of this template through historicism up to present‐day global history. Current global history remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to “connectivity.”     

La cohabitation de longue durée: Studying the 1997-2002 experience

This article examines the politics of what the French call 'cohabitation' in the period 1997-2002. It identifies two different ways in which cohabitation is studied. The first assumes that each of the three periods of cohabitation has occurred under a unique set of political circumstances. The second argues that there have been institutional similarities between each of the three periods of cohabitation and that fundamentally the political situation during each has been the same. The article provides evidence that supports both approaches, and concludes by suggesting that the second approach is the more useful.     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

‘Eternity's commissioner’: Thomas Carlyle,the Great Irish Famine and the geopolitics of travel

In 1846 and again in 1849 the Scottish born historian and social critic, Thomas Carlyle, travelled Ireland accompanied by the Irish nationalist Charles Gavan Duffy. Significantly, these dates profile the beginning and the deadly culmination of the Great Irish Famine. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that Carlyle's published memoirs of his travels and his various pamphlets on Ireland have merited little scholarly attention. As well as addressing this oversight this paper attempts to place Carlyle's travel writing within the ideological contours of the Great Famine and, to this end, I outline a specific example of what I call the ‘geopolitics of travel’. Principally this paper offers an empirical and theoretical analysis of how powerful political rationalities are produced at the ‘contact zone’ of two cultures. I consider Carlyle's shift from being a critic of laissez-faire to being a defender of property and argue that this parallels his propensity to qualify what amounts to human value through environmental and racial readings of the Famine. Finally, I briefly suggest that such calculations take us into the domain of ‘governmentality’ and capitalist political economy, perhaps the two most powerful forces directing the course of the Irish Famine.     

Theorising 'Difference' in Aotearoa/New Zealand {1}

This paper discusses theoretical and political tensions that emerged for me as a result of exploring the implications of 'positionality'. The discussion is set in debates about the differences within and between women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Many New Zealand feminists, both Maori and Pakeha, have become concerned with the task of establishing an autonomous existence premised on unique identities. While recognising the political imperative that informs this politics and theorising, my own work has led me to theoretical understandings about the constitution of identities that could easily be construed as antagonistic to local aspirations. My dilemma, therefore, is how to produce feminist theory that compromises neither political or intellectual credibility. Positionality, I argue, involves not just positioning in a theoretical and ideological place, but also in a geographical location and, by implication, the politics of that place.     

The unintended consequences of emergency food aid: neutrality,sovereignty and politics in the Syrian civil war, 2012–15

This article dissects the role of emergency food aid during the current Syrian conflict. Drawing on Séverine Autesserre's concept of frames and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty, we argue that the neutrality frame, which undergirds the majority of humanitarian relief efforts in Syria, obfuscates the impact of emergency food aid, both on sovereign power relations and local political dynamics. While neutrality appears benign, it has had a tangible impact on the Syrian civil war. Through close scrutiny of various case‐studies, the article traces how humanitarian efforts reinforce the bases of sovereign politics while contributing to a host of what Mariella Pandolfi (1998) terms ‘mobile sovereignties’. In the process, humanitarian organizations reaffirm sovereign power while also engaging in similar activities. We then analyse how and why ostensibly neutral emergency food aid has unintentionally assisted the Assad regime by facilitating its control over food, which it uses to buttress support and foster compliance. By bringing external resources into life‐or‐death situations characterized by scarcity, aid agencies have become implicated in the conflict's inner workings. The article concludes by examining the political and military impact of emergency food assistance during the Syrian conflict, before discussing possible implications for the humanitarian enterprise more broadly.     

Liberty and Community: A Liberal Resolution

Much has been written in the last few years regarding Leo Strauss's political attachments, especially with respect to his purported influence over American neoconservatives. Problematically, Strauss scrupulously avoided explicit ideological entanglements, rarely addressed particular policy debates, and left little guidance for the statesman or thoughtful commentator interested in drawing practical political inferences from his philosophical writing. To add further ambiguity to already muddy waters, Strauss's discussion of the relation between prudence and philosophic insight coupled with the many and incompatible roles he assigns to the philosopher within the city make it unclear if there is anything at all that philosophy can teach us of political significance. The following essay aims to explain Strauss's view of the political function of philosophy in light of his distinction between classic and modern utopianism and what he calls in On Tyranny "philosophic politics."     

Complex Space or Broken Middle? Milbank,Rose, and the Sharia Controversy

Abstract

Remarks by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggesting that British law recognize Islamic law in some cases provoked a public outcry. I reflect on what may have caused the strong reaction to Williams's remarks by situating them between the work of John Milbank and the work of Gillian Rose. What Williams, Milbank, and Rose are struggling to articulate is a "politics of the middle," a political theory that does not privilege the sovereignty of individual or state, and which puts intermediary associations at center stage. A politics of the middle offers the only alternative to political theology, I argue. However, attempts to articulate a politics of the middle have remained cloaked in residual political theology. Critics of secular liberalism, who often content themselves with offering genealogies instead of presenting a constructive alternative, should explore the possibilities held by a politics of the middle, possibilities (and challenges) exposed by the sharia controversy.     

RESISTING MODERN TEMPORALITIES: TOWARD A CRITICAL HISTORY OF BREAKS IN TIME

This is an exceptionally sophisticated and wide‐ranging book on historical time, the construction of the past, present, and future, and the problem of periodization. Its major thesis is that temporal divisions of history are produced by social actors, including historians, who break up time from their distinct temporal positions. The book inquires about the theoretical underpinning and historical constitution of temporal breaks: the premises sustaining notions of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the relations constructed by these notions between historiography and other fields of knowledge; the specific articulation of shifting and mutually competing temporalities both within and beyond European history; and the political implications of temporal divisions. Throughout the book the breaking up of time is studied as a fundamental political operation. To engage with temporal breaks, the authors contend, is to engage with the historian's contemporary, to negotiate borders that act upon the present, including the border that safeguards the presumed autonomy of the time of history‐writing. Focusing especially on the temporality of European modernity, the book invites reflection on the politics of time as articulated through categories of historical totalization imposed on modernity's others. But it also suggests that this imposition gave rise to acts of resistance indicating how historical time defies the analytical categories through which social actors seek to organize and control it. This dialectic of imposition and defiance is made evident through the comparative study of temporal concepts that replace one another, compete with one another in certain historical settings without any of them constituting a final historical representation. It is also traced in the continuing significance of suppressed or “failed” temporalities, which are nonetheless still capable of challenging and qualifying our insights into historical time. The book's key contribution lies precisely in the attempt to intensify this challenge by translating the contradictory constitution of modern temporality into a language of self‐critique.     

Rethinking the Polis: Implications of Heidegger's questioning the political

Heidegger's thought has, in recent years, been relentlessly examined for glimpses of the political. This paper approaches that debate by looking at one of themes of Heidegger's lectures during the Nazi years: one which explicitly questions the notion of the political itself. This questioning, through a rethinking of the Greek word πóλις [polis], is a result of Heidegger's retreat from his own political involvement. Heidegger's active political career was theoretically underpinned by his interpretation of Plato's call for philosopher-kings: his rethinking is important in understanding his turn away from Nazism. In his rethinking Heidegger suggests that looking at the polis with our modern, political, eyes does not give us fundamental insights into the meaning of this word. Heidegger looks to the choral ode in Sophocles' Antigone, and focuses on a line which begins “hypsipolis apolis”. Through a detailed reading, Heidegger suggests that polis should be understood not as “city” or “state” but as “site”, the historical site of being. We cannot use our modern understanding of politics to understand the polis, but we can use our understanding of polis to rethink the notion of the political. The political, means relating to the site of abode of human history, and is therefore primarily spatial, or better, platial. Such an understanding allows us to understand Heidegger's work on technology from a better position; to distance ourselves from the modern, Schmittian notion of the political; and to rethink the principle concepts of politics with due attendance to the role of space, or place.