Political Theology,Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how citizenship is not just a legal status that entails certain rights and duties, but also denotes an identity, a performance of politics, and a shared rationality. Third, I identify the dominant ways in which citizenship is understood in the contemporary context, namely, through either a nationalist or cosmopolitan framework, contrasting these with a consociational conception of citizenship. And lastly, I lay out how a consociational framework provides a more generative basis for conceptualizing religious diversity.     

An archive to build a future: The recovery and rediscovery of the history of socialist associations in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

This paper chronicles the ongoing efforts of several groups of Bosnian activists, artists and academics, to create archives of the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Postsocialist archives in other parts of Eastern Europe have typically been motivated by the need to ‘settle accounts’ with communism, understood in this context to be a totalitarian project. By contrast, these ongoing archiving efforts in the postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, are created in order to recuperate and repurpose the unrealized potentials of Yugoslav socialism, and to use this history to reseed contemporary political imaginaries. I show how these post-Yugoslav activist-archives are working to recover a form of transformational historical subjectivity which seems profoundly necessary in the current political moment, marked by political disenchantment and the devastating effects of the postsocialist transition.     

Interpretive approaches and the study of Italian politics

This article asks why, despite their doubtful utility, the categories used in accounts of contemporary Italian politics are almost universally negative in character. It is suggested that at least part of the explanation has to do with the ontological and epistemological assumptions informing the accounts, together with the social circumstances that have given rise to their production. More fruitful, less uncritically negative analyses require the adoption of approaches informed by alternative ontologies and epistemologies, that is, interpretive approaches. These seek to account for social phenomena by rendering intelligible the meaningful action in which the latter are rooted and, as the example of corruption shows, yield less negative accounts by allowing researchers to imagine themselves acting, given similar circumstances, in ways similar to those they study.     

On Recent Developments in Scholarly Engagement with (the Possibility of an) Orthodox Political Theology

Exotic as the very notion of an Eastern Orthodox political theology at times seems to be, a fair share of attention has been recently directed to the possibility of it through a number of conferences, workshops and publications. In this Review Essay, I am discussing three recent edited volumes on Orthodox political theology, broadly conceived. These exhibit a certain continuity between them and, as edited volumes should, are characterized by a hermeneutic framework, in the context of which particular contributions/chapters appear. Apart from presenting the books and their content, I will be discussing their framework and rationale. Focusing on the books’ treatment of contemporary Greek political theology, I argue that an observable trend in these recent attempts consists in forcing valuable individual contributions into a grand, yet narrow, narrative that is limiting the project’s scope rather than the other way around – and this, in spite of the important contribution that these volumes without question constitute. Liberated from such objectives and frameworks, as well as of certain by now obsolete schematizations of intellectual currents in mainly Orthodox countries by taking into account more recent research, the quest for exploring the possibilities of an Orthodox political theology could prove to be considerably more fecund.     

The Meaning and Value of Freedom: Berlin contra Arendt

This essay considers the theoretical disagreement between Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt on the meaning and value of freedom. Berlin thinks that negative liberty as non-interference is commendable because it is attuned to the implication of value pluralism that man is a choice-making creature and cannot be otherwise. By contrast, the political freedom to act is in Arendt’s view a more fulfilling ideal because it is only in political action that man’s potentiality is actualised, his unique identity manifested and his being-in-the-world-with-others reaffirmed. What lies beneath the two thinkers’ dispute over the most satisfactory meaning of freedom, I argue, is a deeper disagreement over human nature itself. The implication of this analysis for the contemporary debate between pluralist liberals and their agonistic critics is briefly discussed in conclusion.     

Forgiveness and reconciliation in Hobbes’s natural law theory

Thomas Hobbes’s laws of nature dictate the making and keeping of the social contract. In addition, Hobbes’s natural law theory considers traditional moral virtues, such as mercy and gratitude, as being conducive to peace. Some Hobbes scholars have argued that these other natural laws call for ‘forgiveness’ and facilitate ‘reconciliation’. However, as this essay shows, Hobbes does not use these terms to mean the reparation of broken relationships between victims and perpetrators. Rather, Hobbesian reconciliation refers to efforts to propitiate enemies in order to win their favour, while forgiveness is a synonym for pardon, in the sense of punishment-forbearance. It is argued that neither of these requires true remorse and reparation of the wrong done. By contrasting Hobbes’s conception of anger with that of Aristotle, the article provides an explanation for why Hobbes maintains that the rage of enemies could be appeased by instrumental calculations of expected benefits, thus ignoring more deep-seated resentments caused by moral wrongs.     

Archaeometry and materiality: materials‐based analysis in theory and practice*

Due to the diversity of contemporary archaeology, the aims and approaches of archaeological scientists and archaeological theorists are often at odds. I suggest that this position is problematic, both intellectually and methodologically, as both groups are fundamentally engaged in the same task: an understanding of past societies through the medium of material culture. This paper offers a review of the intellectual positions of both groups, with a brief discussion of the history of archaeological theory and an appraisal of its current trajectory. I will discuss how and why contemporary theoretical perspectives have fundamentally diverged from the perspectives of archaeological scientists and how the recent theoretical emphasis upon materiality offers a rapprochement between theoreticians and archaeological scientists.     

TRUTH AND MEANING IN HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION: A DAVIDSONIAN APPROACH

This essay argues that Donald Davidson's work in philosophy sheds light on debates about truth, meaning, and context in historical interpretation. Drawing on distinctions between Davidson's project and that of his mentor, W. V. O. Quine, I aim to show that certain ambiguities that have arisen in the methodological reflections of Quentin Skinner and Frank Ankersmit, to take representatives of contrastive approaches to intellectual history, are clarified once we reckon with Davidson's ideas. This discussion leads to a case for the broader pertinence of Davidson's work to historical writing, which insists that his focus on the centrality of truth to disagreement bears salutary consequences for thinking about what constitutes compelling historical scholarship.     

Manent and Perreau-Saussine on MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism

This essay examines Pierre Manent’s and Émile Perreau-Saussine’s critique of Alasdair MacIntyre. Both criticize MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism as an apolitical Aristotelianism, arguing that it is a deficient because it neglects Aristotle’s question of the best regime. In examining MacIntyre’s narrative biography of Justice O’Connor in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, I show the merit of this critique, in that it obscures what the applications of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism are in the modern polity. While MacIntyre is not without a strong reply to their objections, I conclude that the deeper, unresolved disagreement MacIntyre has with Manent and Perreau-Saussine is over how to characterize modernity.     

THE USES OF WALTER: WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE COUNTERFACTUAL IMAGINATION

Many authors, both scholarly and otherwise, have asked what might have happened had Walter Benjamin survived his 1940 attempt to escape Nazi‐occupied Europe. This essay examines several implicitly or explicitly “counterfactual” thought experiments regarding Benjamin's “survival,” including Hannah Arendt's influential “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” and asks why our attachment to Benjamin's story has prompted so much counterfactual inquiry. It also explores the larger question of why few intellectual historians ask explicitly counterfactual questions in their work. While counterfactuals have proven invaluable for scholars in diplomatic, military, and economic history, those writing about the history of ideas often seem less concerned with chains of events and contingency than some of their colleagues are—or they attend to contingency in a selective fashion. Thus this essay attends to the ambivalence about the category of contingency that runs through much work in intellectual history. Returning to the case of Walter Benjamin, this essay explores his own tendency to pose “what if?” questions, and then concludes with an attempt to ask a serious counterfactual question about his story. The effort to ask this question reveals one methodological advantage of counterfactual inquiry: the effort to ask such questions often serves as an excellent guide to the prejudices and interests of the historian asking them. By engaging in counterfactual thought experiments, intellectual historians could restore an awareness of sheer contingency to the stories we tell about the major texts and debates of intellectual history.     

Three Paradoxes Concerning Causality and Time: Parmenides,Leibniz, Einstein/Schrödinger

Abstract

Parmenides’ Poem on Nature contains a proof that the world could not have come into being in time, because no explanation could be given for why it would do so at a given time. This same proof reappears in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, where it is directed against Newtonian absolute time. Newtonians, Leibniz explains, believe that time is homogeneous and absolute, but this makes it inexplicable how God could have chosen to create the world on a given day. Similarly, in his correspondence with Schrödinger in the 1930s, Einstein suggests that certain quantum mechanical occurrences, such as the spontaneous decay of a radioactive atom, are absurd, because they cannot be assigned a definite location in time. In Schrödinger’s version on Einstein’s argument, we must say that the cat dies twice: first, inside the box; yet, second, when we open the box. But both accounts cannot be true. Since each of the authors discussed was aware of the approach of his predecessors, they share a structure. In this article, I develop a unified account of all three.     

THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR AND THE CALLING OF HISTORY

What happens to history as a set of practices and intellectual protocols when the assumed subject of our historical narratives is not a product of the European Enlightenment? Such has been the question motivating much of Dipesh Chakrabarty's work for almost thirty years. This essay offers a largely chronological account of Chakrabarty's major works. It begins with his first book, published in 1989, which provided a culturalist account of working‐class history in Bengal. It then tracks his movement in the early 1990s toward a position positing radical disjuncture and even incommensurability between the worlds of Indian subalterns and Western moderns, and his subsequent attempts to soften and blur precisely this kind of disjuncture. Meditating on the problems posed by the experiences of subjects who did not live within the time of history led him to answer in the affirmative the question of whether there are experiences of the past that history could not capture. Soon thereafter, however, he drew back from the most extensive articulation of this claim, suggesting that the experiences of the non‐Enlightenment subject could function as a positive resource and not merely as the source of a profound and destabilizing critique. I argue here that this solution to the problem of incommensurability is not entirely satisfactory, for it relies implicitly on precisely the kinds of argumentative asymmetries of which his earlier analysis taught us to be wary. Chakrabarty himself, meanwhile, has continued to step further away from the radicalism of the early 1990s; his most recent book may be read as a defense of rationalist history in the face of contemporary threats posed by the rise of a politics of identity in India.     

Introduction: Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World

Summary

This essay is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World’. The essay reviews why Iberian intellectual history, particularly liberal political thought, has been neglected in English-language scholarship. It offers suggestions for the incorporation of Portuguese and Spanish language texts into the broader canon. The essay then outlines persistent debates common to the study of liberalism in both Iberian and other national contexts, in an effort to instigate a dialogue between intellectual historians of Spain and Portugal and their counterparts elsewhere. It concludes with a consideration of the geopolitical forces, cultural trends, and social conditions that encouraged the forging of transnational liberalism in the early nineteenth century.     

Modern Liberty and the Moral Contents of Life: An Introduction to the Political Reflection of Pierre Manent

Abstract

Robert Faulkner's The Case for Greatness offers a lively, detailed discussion of Aristotle's magnanimous man and the statesman who embodies this ethical–political ideal. Faulkner's portrayal of the complexity and tensions within this classical portrait of magnanimity and in the souls of its ancient and modern exemplars is compelling, but missing from his discussion is any mention of magnanimity in the Jewish and Christian intellectual traditions and the resources they afford to mitigate and heal these tensions and provide an openness to fuller wholeness and happiness. One of these resources is the virtue of humility, which is discussed here as a support and a supplement to magnanimity. Various statesmen who seem to incarnate this humble yet arguably more magnanimous magnanimity are noted in the last sections of this essay.     

Prometheus Unbound: Southern Caucasia in Prehistory

This paper examines the intellectual traditions and recent advances in the archaeology of the Bronze and Iron Ages of the South Caucasus. The first goal of the paper is to provide an account of the scholarly traditions that have oriented research in the region since the mid-nineteenth century. This discussion provides a detailed case study of an archaeological tradition that arose within the context of Russian and Soviet research—traditions still poorly understood within Western archaeology. Yet archaeology in the South Caucasus was strongly influenced by international research in neighboring southwest Asia, and thus the region’s intellectual currents often diverged from the debates and priorities that predominated in Moscow. The second goal of this paper is to outline the primary issues that orient contemporary work in the region from the Neolithic through the Urartian period. My interest here is both didactic and prognostic. While I am concerned to fairly represent the primary foci of contemporary regional scholarship, I also make an argument for a deeper investigation of the constitution of social life. Such studies are critical to the advancement of archaeology in the South Caucasus over the coming decade.     

L'enfer tonique (Malthus et gobineau)

This article focuses on the Tacitist thought shared by Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius. Contrary to what his later works might suggest, in the years before the Dutch political crisis of 1618, Grotius appears willing to look at history and contemporary politics in terms of the Tacitist and reason-of-state-based categories defined in Lipsius's political works. A specific Lipsian inspiration seems present in Grotius's Amsterdam address of 1616, and his analysis of the early Dutch Revolt in the Annales et Historiae is determined by categories of thought which at the time were identified with Lipsius's intellectual legacy.     

The Prophetic and the Limitation of Authority in Modernist Islam

ABSTRACT

The “prophetic”, as a central concept in modernist Islamic political philosophy, has been invoked to show that Islamic political philosophy takes into account the spiritual as well as the material world. However, this expansion of the prophetic had remained relatively silent as to the authority that is granted to experiencing individuals. This essay is a story of these reinterpretations the “prophetic” by three major Muslim thinkers – Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), Ali Shari‘ati (d. 1977), and Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945). Writing in different periods and trying to respond to different questions, these authors engaged with the question of politics by reference to prophetic experience. I will explain their intellectual context, according to their cosmologies and their notions of language (participation vs. representation). Then, I will see how in different intellectual context, the force of a democratic notion of the prophetic was undermined by different reinterpretations.     

The Authoritative Medium: George Eliot,Ruin, and the Rationalized Market

This essay analyses the competing dynamics that shaped the formation of market relations in mid-nineteenth-century Britain: abstraction and rationalization, on the one hand, and embeddedness and personalism, on the other. It takes as its central case the mid-century debates over bankruptcy reform, focusing in particular on two textual representations of ‘ruin’: the system of certificates classifying bankrupts according to their culpability of character, established in 1849 and abolished in 1861; and Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, with its account of financial and sexual ruin. I argue that the debates surrounding the character certificates' intervention in market relations, and Eliot's explorations of abstract and embedded or sympathetic modes of knowledge were part of a larger concern to negotiate the tensions produced by the contemporary impulse toward market rationalization. Eliot's mode of omniscient narration – her construction of a simultaneously interested and disinterested, authoritative and sympathetic narrative voice – represented, I suggest, a novelistic instance of a broader cultural fantasy that an approach to character representation could be found that would mediate the changing marketplace. At the same time, her narration of the story of debt through familial and sexualized representations highlights the way that the personal continued to pose a challenge to the establishment of market rationality. However, despite the generic distinctions that can be traced, I argue that their shared interest in character provides grounds for the project of reading across genres, and suggest that the cultural history of the Victorian credit economy requires attention to what different genres have in common, as much as how they have diverged.