Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices 9780415632010, 9780415632065, 9780203094341

Table of contents :
Cover
Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing practices
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: The study of comparative political thought
1 On the historicity of ‘the political’: Rajaniti and politics in modern Indian thought
2 Latin American approaches to ‘the political’
3 Communism, Confucianism, and charisma: The political in modern China
4 Lineages of political society
5 Acting and acting out: Conceptions of political participation in the Middle East
6 Citizenship after orientalism: Genealogical investigations
7 Forms of political participation in Muslim political heritage
8 On vernacular cosmopolitanisms, multiple modernities, and the task of comparative thought
9 When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?: Dialogues, (dis)continuities, creativity, and radical difference in Heidegger and Nishida
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Comparative Political Thought

This edited book introduces students and scholars to comparative political thought. Featuring contributions from an excellent international line-up of esteemed scholars it examines issues including: • • • • • •

Is political theory ‘Western-centric’? What can we learn from non-Western traditions of political thought? How do we compare different strands of national and regional political thought? Political thought in China, India, the Middle East and Latin America Islamic political thought Political thought in the wake of post-colonialism

This is a much-needed overview of this key emerging area and will be of interest to all those with an interest in political theory, thought and philosophy. Michael Freeden is Emeritus Professor of Politics and the founder of the Centre for Political Ideologies at the University of Oxford. Andrew Vincent is Honorary Professor at Cardiff University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield.

Routledge studies in comparative political thought Edited by Michael Freeden, University of Oxford, UK, and Andrew Vincent, University of Sheffield, UK This series’ aims are twofold: first, to encourage high quality scholarly works which move away from the singular focus on European and North American approaches to political theory to encompass also African, Asian and Latin American political thought; second, to suggest that the nascent field of comparative political thought is ripe for development, and to offer methodological tools for a rigorous scheme of comparison that will change some of the foci of political theory as currently conceived. The series is designed therefore to shift the balance and focus of research and scholarship towards the process of comparative thinking across political cultures and continents in order to appreciate the richness, diversity and complexity of such thinking. The series of single and multi-author texts will entail studies of both singular political cultures as well as more cross-cutting thematic or conceptually-based studies. The aim of the series overall is to change the landscape of political theory by encouraging deeper comparative reflection on the structure and character of the discipline and to arrive at a richer understanding of the nature of the political.

National Characterologies in Interwar Eastern Europe The terror of history Balázs Trencsényi Comparative Political Thought Theorizing practices Edited by Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent

Comparative Political Thought Theorizing practices

Edited by Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Selection and editorial matter: Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent. Contributors: their contributions. The right of Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Comparative political thought : theorizing practices / edited by Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent.    p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   1. Political science--Philosophy. 2. Philosophy, Comparative. I. Freeden,   Michael. II. Vincent, Andrew.   JA71.C566 2012  320.01--dc23                   2012012867 ISBN: 978-0-415-63201-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-63206-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-09434-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by HWA Text and Data Management, London

Contents

List of contributors Introduction: the study of comparative political thought

vii 1

M ichael F reeden and A ndrew Vincent

1 On the historicity of ‘the political’: rajaniti and politics in modern Indian thought

24

S udipta K aviraj

2 Latin American approaches to ‘the political’

40

L aurence Whitehead

3 Communism, Confucianism, and charisma: the political in modern China

60

R ana Mitter

4 Lineages of political society

70

Partha Chatterjee

5 Acting and acting out: conceptions of political participation in the Middle East

88

C harles T ripp

6 Citizenship after orientalism: genealogical investigations

110

E n Gin F. Isin

7 Forms of political participation in Muslim political heritage A bdulaZ iZ S achedina

126

vi  Contents

8 On vernacular cosmopolitanisms, multiple modernities, and the task of comparative thought

141

O livier R emaud

9 When is comparative political thought (not) comparative? Dialogues, (dis)continuities, creativity, and radical difference in Heidegger and Nishida

158

C hris Goto - Jones

Bibliography Index

181 195

Contributors

Partha Chatterjee was educated in Calcutta and received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Rochester in 1971. Having spent nearly four decades teaching and researching in the social sciences in India, he is currently Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, and Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His books include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), The Politics of the Governed (2004) and Lineages of Political Society (2011). Michael Freeden is Emeritus Professor of Politics, and the founder of the Centre for Political Ideologies, at the University of Oxford. His books include The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (1978), Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–1939 (1986), Rights (1991), Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (1996), Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (2003), Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and 20th Century Progressive Thought (2005) and The Meaning of Ideology: CrossDisciplinary Perspectives (ed.) (2007). He is the founder-editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies. He is currently completing a book on the nature of political thinking and working on a pan-European conceptual history project. Chris Goto-Jones is Professor of Comparative Philosophy and Politics at Leiden University, Dean of Leiden University College, The Hague, and Director of the Modern East Asia Research Centre. His publications include Political Philosophy in Japan (2005) and, as editor, Re-Politicizing the Kyoto School as Philosophy (2008). At present, he is working on a project about the ethics of violence in modern Japan for Cambridge University Press and he runs a major ‘VICI’ research project about political philosophy through visual, graphic and interactive media, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Engin F. Isin holds a Chair in Citizenship and is Professor of Politics in Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Open University. He is the author of Cities Without Citizens (1992), Being Political (2002) and Citizens Without Frontiers (2012). He has edited with

viii  List of contributors Greg Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship (2008). Isin is engaged with three different but related ‘genealogical investigations’: (i) concerning ‘oriental citizenship and justice’ with a focus on the Ottoman waqf; (ii) concerning ‘acts’ especially those that constitute subjects as claimants of justice traversing frontiers; and (iii) concerning ‘governing affects’ with a focus on the role of mobilizing emotion in politics. Sudipta Kaviraj is Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University. Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University. His books include The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (2000), A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (2004), for which he was named Times Higher Education Supplement Young Academic Author of the Year 2005, and Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (2008). Olivier Remaud is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He has served as a Director of the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond-Aron (EHESS-CNRS 8036). Abdulaziz Sachedina is Frances Myers Ball Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Dr. Sachedina, who has studied in India, Iraq, Iran, and Canada, obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto. He has been conducting research and writing in the field of Islamic Law, Ethics and Theology (Sunni and Shiite) for more than two decades. Dr. Sachedina’s publications include: The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (2002), Islamic Biomedical Ethics: Theory and Application (2009), and Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (2009). Charles Tripp is Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research interests include the nature of autocracy, state and resistance in the Middle East and Islamic political thought. He is the author of The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (2012), Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (2006) and A History of Iraq (2007), and the joint author of Iran and Iraq at War (1988). Andrew Vincent is an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University, Emeritus Professor, Sheffield University, Professorial Fellow British Idealism and Collingwood Centre, Cardiff University, Senior Research Fellow on several occasions Australian National University, former visiting Professor, Chinese University Hong Kong and co-Director, PSA British Idealism Specialist Group. He is author or co-author of nine books and three edited collections including: Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship (1984), Theories of the State (1987), Modern Political Ideologies (1993, 3rd edition 2009), A Radical Hegelian (1993), British Idealism and Political Theory (2001), Nationalism

List of contributors  ix and Particularity (2002), The Nature of Political Theory (2004), The Politics of Human Rights (2010), British Idealism: A Guide to the Perplexed (2011). Laurence Whitehead is an Official Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Senior Fellow of the College. His most recent books are Latin America: A New Interpretation (2006, revised edition 2010), and Democratization: Theory and Experience (2002). His most recent edited publication is The Obama Administration and the Americas: Shifting the Balance (2010), jointly with Abraham F. Lowenthal and Theodore J. Piccone. He is co-editor with John Crabtree of Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present (2008) and with Marcelo Bergman of Citizen Security in Latin America (2009). He is editor of the Oxford University Press series, ‘Studies in Democratization’, President of the Conseil Scientifique of the Institut des Ameriques in Paris, and belongs to the steering committee of the Red Eurolatinoamericano de Gobernabilidad para el Desarrollo.

Introduction The study of comparative political thought Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent

Why do we make comparisons? For two very different reasons: because we need to establish our own identity, and because we are inquisitive. First, we acquire selfknowledge when we no longer are passive and unconscious holders of identity and, dialectically, we find out more about who we are by realizing what we are not. Second, we are curious when we encounter strangers, whether in nebulous self-defence mode or because we are intrigued. The first step, that of comparing action and conduct is one thing, however. The second step, that of comparing the thinking of more than one individual, demands extra effort. Although thinking is a practice – that is to say, it is subject to some repetitive macro-patterns and it is therefore possible, up to a point, to generalize about such thinking – we cannot access thinking directly. Thinking is transmitted through language: speech, writing and – in an idiom that is sometimes more complex, sometimes less – non-verbal conduct or imagery. The latter, though arguably more accessible, is difficult for scholars to analyse as most of us have been trained primarily in verbal skills, and it is hence on language that we will focus. The comparison of thinking is consequently constrained by some ubiquitous features of language that impose themselves on its expression: ambiguity, indeterminacy, inconclusiveness and vagueness.1 The third step takes us to political thought or, rather, to a distinction between thinking about politics and thinking politically. The former refers to the concrete and substantive views and beliefs we have when we form or adopt ideological frameworks, when we are concerned with the central issues and challenges that societies encounter collectively: which method of social justice; which, if any, protection individuals should have from the state. The latter, however, relates to what marks out political thinking from other kinds of thinking. Thinking politically relates to at least six identifying features: (1) the unequal distribution of significance in ranking and valuing social phenomena – that is, the discourses of prioritization of value-assignment and of urgency; (2) the different ways in which support is bestowed on or withheld from collectivities; (3) conceptualizing modes of stabilizing societies or promoting conflict; (4) the prescriptive construction of collective plans and visions that are conjured up to fashion, justify or criticize communal ends; (5) arranging and regulating the relative competences and jurisdictions of various social spheres and establishing a prioritizing agent;

2  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent (6) forms of persuasion, rhetoric, emotion and menace that comprise the power intensities by means of which individual and group discourse attempts to influence diverse audiences, through endeavouring to make them receptive to imparted messages about collective organization and decisions. Most of the above features are universally discernible in the political life and thinking of any society, though their particular manifestations may diverge considerably, and the names they accord these thought-practices may vary. This combination of universality and specificity is fundamental to the viability of the practice under discussion: how to compare given instances of political thinking. It is also typical of some of the main political concepts we employ, though others will be of intense local value. In the macro-sense, no instance of thinking politically is so localized that it has no equivalents or parallels elsewhere. And no instance of thinking politically is so universal that it may be transferred from one site, or period, to another without modification. The crux of the matter is that when we study political thought in a comparative perspective, we study above all the nature of politics, long before we claim to study the thought and practices of a region, or state, or culture, or religion. That is the crucial point about how to approach comparative political thought. Experts as we may be in some area or local phenomenon, it is a mistake to cut ourselves off from the larger purview of what is the type of thought-practice we are investigating. That is to say, rather than seeing ourselves just as scholars of India, or the UK, or Chile, or Islam, we are investigators of human political conduct and discourse, who then rely on particular case studies. We all occasionally lose sight of that, wrapped up as we are in the details and the excitement of the small print of our scholarly enterprises. All the above constitutes the raw material, and the limiting and enabling conditions, within which the comparison of political thought must take place. It is of course a very tall order to expect scholars to be proficient in more than one or two societies. But there is another path, which is to put their material in the shape of problems or issues that could directly benefit the study of other societies as well as their own. It is not so much the specifics as the research questions and the identification of common, or at least adjacent, problematics that create the bases for comparison. In so doing, we will have to concede that not all the questions we pose are of global utility, and that part of the enterprise we have undertaken as students of political thought requires us to augment our acquaintance with the kind of questions that members of other political and cultural systems might ask under the rubric of ‘what constitutes political thinking?’ And, to complicate matters, that in itself raises three further problems: do we understand their categories properly; are those categories sufficiently important or useful to be integrated into the categories we already employ; and can we even answer the first two questions to a satisfactorily acceptable degree? This book emerged out of a project initiated by the Centre for Political Ideologies at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. The University’s Fell Fund gave a generous grant that enabled, among others, the organizing of a series of guest lectures with the dual intention of extending

Introduction  3 the canon of political theory as a discipline and developing new methods in the underdeveloped branch of comparative political thought. Most of the chapters in this book are the product of those lectures, and most are arranged under two themes: the nature of the political across cultures and societies, and conceptions of political participation. Our hypothesis was that conceptualizing the political, and engaging in the political, will be found empirically to have some universal features as a human practice, but that the term ‘politics’ may also evoke a very different range of meanings. Likewise, what constitutes political participation, and indeed assumptions concerning its very necessity, will possess an array of relative saliencies inside and outside the family of democratic practices. The various chapters in this book are meant to be illustrative of what should come under the heading of comparative political thought. They are not intended as a representative or balanced crosscut of political thinking across the globe, but as forays into the complexity of its contents and attendant methods.

Primary and secondary comparativism There is a rough and ready distinction between primary and secondary aspects of comparison. That is to say, primarily there are those who directly and selfconsciously aspire to and advocate a comparative method of study; second, there are also deep-rooted comparativist themes built into the very nature of theorizing itself. Not acknowledging this distinction may be the source of certain problems in dealing with comparative political theory itself as a category. Briefly – in the secondary sense – all theorizing identifies, classifies and compares. In both theory and comparison we are doing pretty much the same or comparable things. Thus, in theorizing comparison we are just theorizing theory or comparing comparison, as much as we are comparing theories or theorizing comparison. The background question raised here is: can we ever avoid comparison? Thus, in making any kind of claim to a unified disciplinary structure of knowledge, for example, using the categories literature, anthropology, geology, politics or philosophy, we are invoking comparison. If we say, for example, that the works of Tennessee Williams, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Molière are literature, we are directly comparing; that is, by analysing them and then comparing such works we subsume them under a homogenous elemental category which, in essence, makes the unfamiliar familiar. Thus, the history of political thought (which was largely a nineteenth-century diachronic comparativist invention), takes a large swathe of previously mainly unrelated theorists and unifies them in an analytical field, via detailed comparison. Thus, the crucial theme in the case of the category literature is the ‘unit of comparison’; that is what enables us to identify such and such a text as literature, or indeed political theory. The same point holds for most disciplinary structures, whether it be history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy or law. Hence, comparison is either overtly or covertly part of what we do when we theorize. Under the primary rubric, there have been a number of phases in the actual disciplinary acknowledgement of the idea and significance of comparison.

4  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent However, this is not necessarily always helpful in understanding the present interest in comparative theory. In fact it may well be a hindrance, partly because of the intellectual baggage embedded in each of these phases, which are: first the classical conceptions of comparison; second, the overt adoption of the historical comparative method in the nineteenth century particularly and the related use of explicit comparative ideas within the history of political thought; third, the development of empirically motivated comparative politics or comparative government from the 1960s; fourth, the much more recent rise of comparative political theory – as part of the rise of identity and cultural politics – in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This fourth theme will be investigated in the next section. We can call these the institutional, historical, empirical and cultural phases of comparison in politics. The classical institutional notion of comparison can be associated with what 1960s proponents of comparative politics would call the ‘founding fathers of political science’. Thus, theorists such as Aristotle or Montesquieu have usually gained a respectful nod from the academic establishment of comparative politics, Aristotle probably most notably with his comparative typology of constitutions. It is always slightly difficult to know quite what we are seeing here in the classical phase, partly because it has already been swamped in the self-consciousness of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century discipline, which has already anticipated an ongoing ancient lineage as part of its raison d’être. Aristotle and Montesquieu are thus already viewed as part of a singular continuous tradition (or set of traditions). We thus tend to view them through these traditions. We identify intellectual patterns (that is units of comparison) in them which enable us to call them ‘political thinkers’. In the second historical phase, the idea of comparison developed with politics as a recognized university discipline in the 1860s and 1870s. The influence of particularly German historical ideas was at the time very much in the air, affecting a wide range of disciplines such as theology, philology, law, history, political economy and the new sciences of sociology and anthropology. Key ideas were derived, for example, from comparative philology in the writings of Jacob Grimm and Max Müller, as well as the historical jurisprudence of Friedrich Karl von Savigny. It would be difficult to say that we were dealing with something straightforwardly political, as distinct from legal or historical studies.2 Aficionados of the historical comparative perspective such as William Stubbs, Henry Maine, Paul Vinogradoff, Clifford Leslie, Frederick Pollock, F.W. Maitland and later James Bryce saw the necessity for the comparative method of scholarly study. As John Burrow put it, for all of these writers, the ‘excitement lay, initially, in the adjective “comparative”’.3 Behind much of this historical comparative study though, despite its thoroughness, were a number of unexpected themes. For example, the historical method became, for many writers, closely mixed up with not just philology and linguistics, but also nationalist and more speculative race theories. Thus, progressive nations or races and their institutions were shown – by the historical method – to be the most advanced and progressive. In other words, the historical

Introduction  5 comparative method was pervaded by an underlying teleology. In the work of Henry Maine it was also recruited – in a Burkean vein – as a bulwark against political radicalism. Political wisdom could only arise ex post facto from a better knowledge of the true lines of movement which the political affairs of mankind had followed. A parallel movement developed in early anthropology and sociology. Lewis Morgan (a founding figure of nineteenth-century anthropology), amongst others, assumed like most in this field that societies moved from savagery or barbarism towards civilization. This underlying contrast underpinned a great deal of the work of the nineteenth-century historical, legal and social scientific authors. In this context, the historical method was recruited to show the development of civilization amongst certain national groups. In many ways this historical method – often focusing by the later nineteenth century on the state as the fundamental unit of comparison – also informed subtly the growth of the history of political theory as a discipline. The exclusive sense of political theory as a discrete discipline, which had a canon of esteemed thinkers and clear curricula, is largely an invention of mid-nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury comparative theorizing. Thus the very idea of the comparative canon of ‘great theorists’ began to be articulated in the mid- to-late nineteenth century and was developed much more concretely in the twentieth century. It was not though until the mid-twentieth century that it became more academically established. For example, a number of theorists over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly used such terms as political theory, political philosophy, the history of political thought and political science, synonymously. This was a common perspective taken by most commentators up to the 1930s in Britain and the USA.4 The third phase of comparative method takes us to the 1960s and the significant development of comparative politics or comparative government as crucial dimensions of the politics curriculum. In many ways this conception of comparison was premised upon a partial rejection of the first and second phases, specifically the normative character of the first phase. In this context, the ‘empirical’ dimension expanded massively. Some of the more famous of such studies were S.M. Lipset’s Political Man and Gabriel Almond and Bingham Powell in Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach. This was a phase which developed initially on a fairly explicit functionalist model, self-consciously identifying itself with an overt positivistic method. The units of comparison in this case became theoretical propositions drawn from apparently verifiable matters of fact, such as empirically-based statistical data on different polities. This positivistic method thereafter constituted the underlying substance to conceptions of comparative politics, political sociology, social anthropology and from the 1920s the new discipline of international relations. It also constituted the underlying theme of public administration and public policy studies. By the 1960s the older ‘historical comparative method’ had therefore mutated into an empirically-based comparative political science. Teleology was not lost, although it took on a more muted form, particularly in the context of the cold war.5 This was the disciplinary entity that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre famously

6  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent criticized in his article ‘Is a science of comparative politics possible?’ By the 1980s this conception of comparative politics was increasingly criticized as being too formalist. The onus thus shifted for a time towards an informalist approach. Politics, in the words of one scholar, had ‘come to mean less about states and structures, and constitutions and formal institutions, and more about the hard realities of informal political behaviour within political institutions’.6 Policy communities, regulatory networks, and the like, thus became the central theme for political studies. Comparison was not lost here but its role was more muted and diversified.

The recent pedigree of comparativism Comparative study does have a more recent culturally inspired pedigree. One strand relates to problems of translation, and that can equally refer to the domain of linguists as to historians and students of culture. A second strand identifies the by-products of conquest and imperialism in the conferring of a subaltern status on local modes of thinking.7 However, it exhibits two significant subdivisions: the first one looks at the social, ideological and ethical costs that follow intercultural domination, as in forms of colonialism, and seeks to redress them through exploring ways both of institutional and of ideological liberation from such controlling influences. Those range from detaching the society under scrutiny from oppressive, ‘unnatural’ and external modes of political thinking and subsequently, of political organization (say, the extolling of a particular culture as superior), to replacing them with less ‘exploitative’ categories that are still external (say, the introduction of radical feminist perspectives). The other offers a broad, if selective, welcome to some of the original ‘imported’ patterns of thinking as harbingers of modernity, or as providing ethical solutions to current misgovernment in the shape of increased democratization, accountability, the encouragement of political participation and the benefits of a rights-related civic culture – all the while subjecting them to the particular requirements of the society in question. The obvious epistemological issue behind these differences invokes the perennial question of whether we are dealing with universal features of good government and with a qualitatively ‘better’ political thinking that is independent of space and time, or whether the regional and cultural filters through which such general principles pass are just as significant in getting to grips with the manifold nature of local varieties of those principles, each with a compelling ideational and ethical foundation. Indeed, much of this has emerged as a third strand that subordinates a more general investigation of political thinking and practices to considerations of democratization and examines the trajectories of democratic thinking and practice as incipient processes, or as targets to be striven for – a mode of analysis particularly salient in Latin America. Clearly, a distinction exists between a comparative project that is transformative and, to use Andrew March’s phrase, ‘engaged’,8 and one that is interpretative. Of course, political theory should be both, but not necessarily at the same time.

Introduction  7 Comparison offers a basis of assessment and evaluation, and political theory rightly is a tool for promoting or testing ideas through which different outcomes may be attained, and the advantages and disadvantages of competing discourses explored. This leads to a fourth strand, which is of particular interest – and concern – because it is the only one of the above deliberately to describe itself as a project of comparative political theory. It aspires on the whole to the creation of a global network of mutual comprehension, involving the formation of what might be called a shared, or at least imbricated, normative pool from which all societies and cultures can draw. It sees itself primarily as dialogical rather than investigative. It does not rest content with greater inclusion, but wishes also to ‘foster a learning process that forces both participants [in a dialogue] beyond any one fixed world of meaning’.9 However, if we also wish to contend that political thought is the arena in which social values and normative frameworks for social cooperation are shaped, assessed, prescribed and promoted, such ethical and philosophical practice cannot sensibly occur unless it recognizes what it can do and what it cannot do, given the nature of its raw material. Moreover, the comparison of competing normativities is itself a challenging and revealing task, irrespective of any justificatory political theory. At present, most of the exercises in that fourth strand have bypassed the foundational ontology of political thinking and consequently vaulted to a dimension that overlooks or ignores ineliminable features of language and of politics. Some discussions of comparison believe that global dialogues can produce a convergence of local political languages.10 For certain proponents therefore forging this transcultural dialogue, via comparative theory, establishes the inherently comparative character of political theory. Appraisive terms such as ‘mutual enrichment’, ‘developing one’s own self-understanding’, or ‘meeting the challenge of the global village’, are usually distributed liberally in such comparativist prose. This kind of argument therefore sees the fundamental ‘unit of comparison’ as the cultural root to theorizing. Instead of Huntingdon’s clash, theoretical zeal is directed toward dialogue and mutual understanding of cultures. This latter argument is carried forward with the best of intentions, but it may happen that the best of intentions obscure rather than clarify what the characteristics of the subject-matter are. Attempts to draw different cultures together and to forge a common normative discourse and a universal register are not merely utopian exercises in impossibility but underplay the desirable diversity of the human mind, its languages and practices. Seeking imbricated mutual understanding is one thing; papering over differences in interpretation in the hope of establishing firm commonalities is another. We want to try and understand, explore, map, interpret and analyse long before we can offer unifying global visions. At a time when ecologists remind us continuously of the significance of biodiversity, should we not also encourage and preserve the form of ideodiversity on our planet, excepting perhaps those forms of intellectual life that are so harmful to other forms that they need to be contained? Methodologically, we need to distinguish the domain of politics from that of ethicists, of reformers, of educators or of cultural optimists. There is, in addition, a considerable difference

8  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent between urging participants to engage in dialogue – a widespread practice of political philosophers, as with regard to the utopian but now fading hopes vested in deliberative democracy – and urging scholars to supply the frameworks for such dialogue and then to instruct populations in that art, which is where we abandon our quest for understanding in favour of instruction. And the very concept of globalism may simply contain competing universalisms, each with a local or regional pedigree and with its peculiar rhetoric. For that reason, it is important to distinguish between the unifying prescriptive and ethical drive of what has come to be known as Comparative Political Theory, particularly in the United States, and the interpretative drive predominantly pursued in this book and in the series it launches, and that could be better termed Comparative Political Thought. Understanding and decoding, rather than searching for or creating a new theory or a new language that transcends differences, is at the centre of the latter project. Put differently, transformative projects should both be more modest – in taking on board the limitations of their desirable end-states – and more ambitious – in factoring in more complex understandings of the nature of the political. That can occur by means of examining what ideological and interpretative frameworks can and cannot deliver, rather than what their promoters think they ought to deliver. For transformation crucially does not entail the creation of commonalities. Borrowing and transfer, planting ideas in new soil and experimenting with diverging directions, certainly; but convergence on a particular ethical singularity, certainly not. The recognition of the inescapable diversity of political thought calls for the re-particularizing of its analysis. The common or overlapping patterns to be found are not necessarily those of a universal normative ethics but of some inevitable features of the political and of the patterns of political thinking, without which the sphere of the political is nullified. There are various reasons why issues such as democratization, transparency, reconciliation, human rights and cultural autonomy figure prominently on the agenda of political theorists today and are at the heart of contemporary political argument, but those are nonetheless specific time- and space-bound concerns in a potentially vast field, even if their durability is far-reaching. Their urgency, let alone their desirability from a liberal perspective, should not be confused with their typicality or with the exhaustiveness of what there is to compare in the field of political thinking – and that is a crucially important point. A Weberian Verstehen of such patterns – our intellectual curiosity about the good, the desirable, the misguided and the abhorrent – is a vital preliminary to the proper investigation of political thought and to the prescriptive paths we may then recommend.

The West and the rest: a fallible juxtaposition The study of comparative political thought is often thought to involve the juxtaposition of so-called Western and non-Western societies or cultures. That is undoubtedly part of it, but that does not necessarily capture the range or the possibilities of such comparison. True, the study of political thought as a professional discipline has on the whole been narrowly focused on Europe

Introduction  9 and North America, but it must be a main aim of comparison to extend this purview and to acknowledge that we inhabit a richly variegated planet in which manifestations of political thinking are far more diverse and subtle.11 But comparison is comparison, and the axis of West versus non-West or – to refer to a proper antonym – West versus East, constitutes only one, however important, dimension. The tools of comparison should be open to any application the scholar sees fit, without necessarily privileging the ostensible East–West divide. We might just as well compare political thinking in Serbia and in Sweden, in Kurdish Iraq and Kurdish Turkey, in Manila and Bangkok, or in Hampstead and in Brixton. More to the point, the overemphasis on units of space as the bases for comparison once again deflects from our responsibilities as political theorists. To illustrate, we may instead prefer to explore themes such as the reformulations of the role of the political through the standpoints of different religious traditions; the impact of local understandings on the presumed existence or interpretation of universal political principles; various cultural strategies for coping with incommensurable and zerosum political beliefs within a society, involving differences that are ineliminable; which forms of broadened political participation are deemed legitimate and which are not; is politics considered to be a co-operative or an adversarial venture; is the undifferentiated community, the interdependent group or the agentic individual the default social unit; and what diverse types of collective cooperation or contestation are culturally and ethically acceptable in various political cultures. Starting with spaces is not as obvious as those who open an atlas, or those who divide history into exercisers of colonialism and its recipients, may think. The emphasis on divided spaces also contains errors within its own analytical framework, in particular the common one of crude generalization that speaks monolithically of either East or West. There is no such thing as Western democracy or Western liberalism. The so-called West has harboured, and still harbours, many variants of either, some of which are mutually incompatible.12 There is therefore often a tendency, particularly in much post-colonial theory, to ‘essentialize’ the idea of culture. The culture that apparently dominates (in the post-colonial sense) is very loosely described as Eurocentric, or even more vaguely as Western. This commits the error of lumping everything into one vague notion of Europe or the West. Further, the apparently occluded pre-colonial culture remains inchoate. This whole argument is put together with astounding legerdemain. Edward Said’s and much subaltern work thus commit the opposite error of the colonial writings they criticize (namely, those writings that ‘essentialize’ the orient). They assume an essential occident, which a moment’s thought will tell one is meaningless. It is hard enough to make any sense of a national culture as a coherent or meaningful concept, let alone a Eurocentric culture. Thus, for example, is Argentina the ‘West’ or ‘non-West’? Is there something monolithically called Islam, or Asian populism? The problem is exacerbated in that the ‘non-West’ signifies a mere absence, whereas ‘East’ denotes a concrete cultural presence. Yet few would now sensibly use the term ‘East’ to run together India, Japan, Dubai, China and Iran. That said, the employment of the term ‘Western’ or ‘Oriental’, even if intellectually sloppy, is of great ideological significance.

10  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent The terms pass through a vast range of different filters on the reception side of political thinking. For example, the semantic fields they occupy in some kinds of radical political Islamic discourse will differ considerably from those employed by commercial elites, just as for external eyes to see the USA as the representative of Western civilization (usually for worse rather than for better) grates on some European understandings that have not infrequently regarded the USA – or at least many practices undertaken in its name, such as the death penalty – as the exception to Western civilization. ‘West’ emerges as a symbolic, not an empirical, term connoting a system of formalized beliefs highly abstracted from the actual thought-practices extant in the vague geographical area it apparently embraces. Nor should we be talking carelessly and over-emotively, in mea culpa mode, about Westoxication, as if Western political thought were a noxious and polluting phenomenon from which decent societies ought to be protected, or – equally simplistically – a culturally colonizing force that subjugates all in its path. It is of course the case that many unfortunate, even outrageous, practices and conceptual frameworks were imposed by colonizing empires on their colonies and it is quite understandable that many scholars – especially those with cultural affinities that lie outside Europe and north America – are frustrated and perturbed by the intellectual and emotional marginalization of their concerns and habitats. Moreover, they would be right to identify the many political-thought practices that originated outside Western traditions and were assimilated into them – we could after all begin with the major religions themselves, and continue from there! It is also reasonable to argue that clusters of political thought located in the socalled West may need to be cut down to size, but they are nonetheless there. There is a great difference between decentring, as and when necessary, and excluding or denigrating. Even were they to be considered noxious or domineering, the forays of diverse clusters of political thought emanating from Western societies into different cultural and ideological territory should still be of great interest to students of politics, both for what they bring into local discourses, and for what they take back from them. In sum, there is no excuse for an absurd blanket denigration of any kind of cultural influence. Exercises in ‘who thought of it first?’ are of great interest to cultural and conceptual historians but ought not to descend into an ideological contest among political theorists whose disciplinary cause would be better served by grappling with variety and complexity and enjoying the challenge. Difficult as it may be, we need to seek critical distance from our own positions and preferences, not only from those of others.

Dichotomies and asymmetries Comparison all too often proceeds through misleading or exaggerated dichotomies and binaries. Just as feminist theory has tended to revolve around antonyms such as reason/emotion, nature/nurture, justice/care, and poststructuralism around agonisms such as friend/enemy, or articulation/disorder, some perspectives that have developed in comparative political thought have introduced terms such as colonial/subaltern, religious/secular, oriental/occidental and the like.

Introduction  11 The problem with these categories from the perspective of political thought is that they do not reflect actual usage; in fact, they conceal and often force the multiple dimensions of political thinking that co-exist simultaneously into overly streamlined classifications. That is as likely to happen in the macro-structures of political discourse and ideology as in its micro-structures. Whereas prescriptive political theory, for instance, continuously refers to issues of obligation and quasicontractarian consent as the basis for political legitimacy and justified support of a regime or government, it overlooks the actual layers of political language that supply or withhold support and that are much more likely to invoke notions of allegiance, loyalty or commitment.13 In a comparative perspective those categories are in a significant sense universal – support (as well as, in parallel, the absence of destabilizing opposition) is an essential for the survival and functioning of a political entity, and discourses of support or resistance are fundamental to political language – but the substantive criteria that elicit, say, allegiance or loyalty will vary, and what count as patterns of thinking that can be understood in terms relating to allegiance or loyalty may differ as well, let alone the possibility that support and commitment may be rendered through alternative conceptualizations and thought-practices. One central problem in comparative political thought is the epistemological asymmetry that underlies assumptions of discursive equivalence. A key instance of that is the frequently asserted dichotomy between secular and religious cultures. That, however, is the view from the religious side of the divide, whose societies – and especially whose intellectuals – see themselves either as predominantly opposing, or as hoping to emulate, what they regard as some of the main identifiers of secularism: the privatization of religion, anthropocentrism, social constructivism, and the sovereignty of an (accountable) state/people. For many of them, religiosity is so central to the Weltanschauungen from which they derive, that its absence is not only salient but startling. However, from the socalled secular side, the salience of secularism recedes drastically, as the absence of religious belief is not one of the main self-definers of membership in a modern society, or an obvious attribute in the eyes of its members, so that its epistemological visibility is relatively low. As always in a careful analysis of political thoughtpractices, it is not just the presence or absence of a belief or value that constitutes the axis of comparative investigation, but the proportionately different weight assigned to the various components of a system of ideas. Secularism may be a recognizable analytical attribute of Western ideologies, but it is not at the top of the list of the vast majority of them, France possibly excluded. In addition, we run up against another kind of asymmetry. Thus in current Indian political thinking, secularism relates to the equal treatment of religious minorities by the state: … the unique Constitutional concept of secularism, raises the need for the protection and development of all sorts of weaker sections of the Indian citizenry – whether this ‘weakness’ is based on numbers or on social, economic or educational status of any particular group.14

12  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent In many European societies, to the contrary, secularism relates to the eschewal of religious belief – in which the state plays no part – not to its recognition, its subjection to equal treatment or even its formal privatization. The misunderstandings arising from these different approaches can be legion. The analytical challenge here is one of exploring a fourfold distinction: one is the self-understanding of the entity in question – what is (are) its selfconception(s)? The second refers to how the entity understands others. The perception or misperception that the political and social entity (or its significant voices) has of others or of itself will relate to broader backdrops: an historical setting, a spatial setting or a range of possible cultural contexts. These two dimensions involve the dual practices of interpretation and reconstruction – itself a particular mode of interpretation. The third distinction relates to our analysis of those political thought processes: how do they relate to the kind of political theory in which we have been trained? The fourth distinction is the most challenging dimension: does our political theory enable us to ask good questions? And that of course reflects back on our own thought practices, encouraging us to create sufficient scholarly distance from our subject matter to increase the potential of our insights. So there are intricate multi-dimensional levels that we have to take on board in any comparative exercise.

What (and how) to compare Comparative political theory is still in its infancy. All too often it engages in parallelisms rather than comparisons; in side-by-side explorations that lack a given methodology and that do not draw analytically profound substantive insights from the juxtaposition of cultures or regions. Thus, even in the work of dedicated comparativists, such as Anthony Parel, Ronald Keith and Roxanne Euben, comparative political theory is described as ‘the study of equivalence or parallelism’, that is between different cultural traditions.15 Unlike other branches of political study, political theory trails badly in endeavours to systematize, however crudely, the knowledge we accumulate about empirically-determinable political thought-practices. For instance, we are undecided on the units of comparison. That is an entirely non-prescriptive matter, except that we have a limited range of what unit to choose, and each kind of unit will do different work for us in the process of comparison: concepts and conceptual configurations; discourses; arguments; ideologies and other belief systems; macro-traditions; or thinkers – the latter often placed in a constraining canon. All of those may appear in written or oral texts (from books, articles and occasional features, through constitutions, laws, and speeches to conversations). Michael Freeden’s previous work has been particularly focused on the comparison of concepts and conceptual concatenations, simply because he contends that conceptual morphology – the common and inescapable arrangements of decontesting, ordering, allotting relative weight and including or excluding, concepts as well as components of a concept from a semantic domain – tells us a lot about the nature of political thought and discourse in each given case. This

Introduction  13 offers a very flexible unit of analysis and draws attention to the morphological micro-distinctions that any advanced interpretation of political thought must negotiate and process. In the most fundamental sense, social and political concepts are never found in isolation from each other. Rather, they are located in an environment of further sustaining or conflicting concepts that serve to endow the concept on which we have initially decide to focus with a particular meaning. The conceptual, as well as the cultural and historical, environment of concepts thus serves as a significant context – as part of a broader semantic field – within which to decode any selected concept and the interrelationships among concepts. Ultimately, to the extent that political thinking is focused either on conserving or changing public political vocabulary, its conceptual patterns assume the mantle of competing over the control of political language – that is one way of defining an ideology. By regarding political discourse as containing shifting combinations of conceptual arrangements, we can accept that the same term – denoting a specific concept – may appear in different patterns of thinking without indicating more than superficial similarity: the test is, rather, what (different) tasks that term attempts to discharge in each of the cultural contexts it is to be found. All that has to take on board the intriguing issue of the comparative study of practices of comparison or, in other words, the epistemologies through which comparison is effected. Temporality may serve here as an example of one such dimension. In some ideologies of sacralization, an ‘original position’ is that of the God-given text, and the temporal comparative perspective that emerges from within that tradition is one of degeneration or at least distancing from a moment of truth – in other words, a chronological decline or tapering off of intensity and inspiration. In ideologies of progress, to the contrary, quasi-teleological expectations vie with open-ended reform driven by the design of human agents. Yet other cultural conceptualizations of time include cyclical movements or slowly accumulative incrementalism. When political thinking is inevitably superimposed on such fundamental frameworks, it will itself have a major impact on the efficacy of comparison. In the first case, the uniqueness of a culture is linked to its perceived immutability, albeit subject to continuous reinterpretations of the original moment. Any spread of ideas will tend to be monolithic, and the practice of comparison confined primarily to the dogmatism-fluidity axis and to assessments of ethical and interpretative superiority and inferiority. The legitimacy of opposing methods of scholarship may be contested. In the second, the fluidity of a culture and its anthropocentrism will hold out the possibility of the humanly-controlled exporting and importing of political ideas, and the methodological choice of which kind of scholarly comparison is useful will be a matter of professional, even private, judgment. In cyclical understandings, change is linked to the natural rhythms of life and society and concrete introversion may discourage the practice of comparison as irrelevant. In accumulative interpretations of time, typical of some segments of conservative thought with their notion of the constraining of change, the core indigenous culture is identified and prioritized as a model for societies in general, and renders comparison highly concrete and specific, excluding the

14  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent pursuit of grander social visions. Alternatively, in culture-specific approaches, the very denial of the possibility of meaningful comparison is itself fed through a rejection of the universality of scientific findings and the appraisive ranking of significance that might entail. An epistemology of spatial relativism may be employed to protect an ideology of equally distributed cultural worth, particularly helpful to nascent, minority or ‘subaltern’ cultures wishing to claim their place in the sun. And to that we may add the insights of conceptual historians regarding complex diachrony, in which fields of meanings, embodied in clusters of ideas and concepts, move across time (and space), mutating internally all the while. The focus on indigenous versus foreign cultures is often another blind alley and it is notably filtered as much through ideological constructions of national identity as through academic perspectives. The shaping and reshaping of national identities may be aspirational as well as confrontational. Sometimes it involves an unconscious introduction of external elements; at other times there is a deliberate insistence on rephrasing political argument in terms moulded by other political epistemologies. The idea of an indigenous political culture is a slippery and controversial one, as it involves a ‘beginning of history’ thesis.16 The question is usually what the conceptual and ideological cocktail on offer is, rather than the issue of authenticity. Just as one would cast doubt on the originary meaning of a word or concept, it is highly questionable to entertain the idea of an originary political culture. This latter idea has been partially recognized in one idiosyncratic dimension of post-colonial theorizing, that is hybridity theory. This envisages a blending of the histories of colonizers and the colonized in terms of processes of emigration, demographic movement, diasporas and economic globalization. In this context, to search for pure essentialist cultures (occidental or oriental) becomes an increasingly futile exercise. Thus, Homi Bhabha maintains that the ‘post-colonial perspective forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of those often opposed political spheres’.17 The colonial mentality is thus more incoherent and ambivalent than many postcolonial cultural critics will acknowledge. It is far simpler intellectually to posit an originary pure colonial or subaltern perspective, exemplifying say Eurocentrism or India, than to do the really hard work and to recognize significant multifaceted cultural differences and interweaving within each perspective. Consequently, for Bhabha, the colonial identity ‘lies between colonized and colonizer’.18 Behind these considerations is another issue; namely, where does the quest for comparison come from and is it itself indicative of a particular view of the world, one of intellectual curiosity and of the need to reflect on one’s own social and ideational practices – a view that itself may not be exportable? Is it to be contrasted, for example, with the ideational autarchy and self-sufficiency seemingly practised in North Korea? Can we distinguish between keen comparison and reluctant comparison as a cultural trait, as well as marking differences among the comparative investigative drives of scholars? We also need to decide on the sources that are the most promising for such an enterprise: professional academic, journalistic, vernacular, governmental, literary,

Introduction  15 sacred, etc. and how to relate them to one another in different cultures and societies. We might further wish to explore which insights different disciplinary traditions from anthropology, sociology, geography, history and cultural studies, might afford, as well as those from politics. And we need to know the contextualized substantive issues that are the best indicators of what concerns a given political culture over time, how their cultural filters operate in a transmission process, and what should therefore attract our attention. Certain ideas may be blocked out, not due to censoring intent but because they fly under the epistemological radar of a particular culture and simply cannot be identified or picked up by it.

Language, translation and transmission To return to the question of language, comparison always involves the kind of generalizations that attempt to hold an attribute constant and to run it past more than one case-study. Yet the nature of thinking and conceptualizing will ensure that this is always inadequate, vague and blurred. Even as a thought-experiment, we cannot create an artificial conceptual world in which concepts are wholly precise (and hence comparable), because of the fluidity of meaning over both time and space, and the variable slippages in its consumption. Moreover, when it comes to really existing societies, we can never be sure that we are comparing like with like: a given word may relate to diverse meanings (semasiology), or similar meanings may be represented by different words (onomasiology).19 Note, also, that the very notion of similarity is already a concession: it foregoes (mathematical) identity or equality. Yet, we should pursue comparison to the best of our abilities not because we are engaged in accurately identifying equivalents but because comparison is a perfectly normal and ubiquitous means of orientation, of mapping, of gaining insight and of revealing features that remain hidden without the exposure that contrast brings in its wake. Even relative failures of comparison, inevitable as they are, will nonetheless provide an area of rough intelligibility. We have already noted the constraints operating on political language that need to be taken on board in the process of comparison, in particular indeterminacy and vagueness. Indeterminacy dismisses the possibility of interpretative closure, while vagueness refers to the impossibility of drawing hard and fast boundaries between concepts that may shade one into another. Those constraints, crucially, are not time- or space-specific features of language, but their ubiquity hardly makes the task of comparison easier. Indeed, the transplantation of an indeterminate term from one language to another, or even from the vernacular to the technical, may well involve an increased level of indeterminacy. Beyond that, a particularly challenging task is for the relatively sophisticated traditions that have emerged within various genres of Western political thought to be prepared to decentralize some of the assumptions embedded in their analytical and ethical classificatory systems. That is not primarily a question of a universal ethics but one of an entrenched epistemology. Are we prepared even to consider political theories and ideologies within which human rights are marginalized, or which refuse to bestow value on that notion? Can we negotiate through belief

16  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent systems in which individual liberty is not a fundamental desideratum? Can some traditional scholars appreciate societies in which religion plays at best a marginal role? Can we, in other words, abstract from our own traditions, political and ethical, or will they cause us to look in the wrong places when exploring different political cultures? The thorny problem of translation has attracted much debate. This is not just as one of the difficulties when seemingly similar words occupy non-identical semantic fields, or when words specific to one linguistic culture have no parallel in others. That can be very difficult, but it is sometimes surprisingly surmountable. Take the example of the English term ‘fairness’ – a word that exists in almost no other languages (which circumlocute by means of words such as decent, just, honest or equitable), but nonetheless a concept that is comprehensible in most. The conceptual space that exists in English between justice and fairness has been utilized by John Rawls (albeit, semi-consciously) to shift our understanding of justice from its usual designation as a macro-systemic attribute to one concerning individual intuitions. Yet despite the lack of vocabular space between the two notions in other languages, the difference of meaning may be clarified through circumlocution. Other problems of translation relate to the frequently deliberate vagueness and indeterminacy in the way words are used, even within their own language. Vagueness – though upsetting to some philosophers – is extremely useful, indeed indispensable, to the creation of ostensibly overlapping fields of meaning in situations of negotiation, when each side can take back an identical statement and invest it with meaning sympathetic to its own desired interpretation and to popular expectations. Crucially important points of comparison begin already in an intra-cultural setting, in particular the distinction between elite and vernacular languages. These raise questions of translation that are of equal importance to inter-linguistic and intercultural ones. In fact, the relevant issue is not just the movement from elite to vernacular languages but the need for a continuous navigation among a number of different professional elite languages (parliaments and academics produce different ‘elite’ languages) and among a number of vernacular languages (the popular press and street demonstrations produce different colloquial forms of speech), so that we are not just looking at vernacularization over time but at multiple vernacular and elite languages, with the further concomitant of reformulating vernacular idioms in new elite registers. Not least, as scholars we have to find an adequate technical language through which to analyse normal political speech and writing without undue distortion. From the viewpoint of professional political theory, which of course is usually formulated in elite languages, we must also be attuned to the vulgarization and simplification of complex political discourses and texts – the dissemination of Marxist ideas, for instance, has been rendered in a host of different registers. That involves two issues: the one refers to the level of penetration of a particular set of ideas. In part that is a sociological question: in terms of the groups that hold these ideas, that replicate these ideas, that distort these ideas, or that manipulate them. But as students of political language we need to focus on the changing

Introduction  17 ordering and prioritizing of the initial components of the elite discourse: how some concepts and ideas are marginalized or, on the contrary, overemphasized. The second issue refers to the levels of articulation of discourse, which involves appreciating that non-elite languages need to be taken as seriously as elite ones. In the wider field of the political thinking presented in a given society, the professional theorizing produced by philosophers, ideologues and academics is atypical; however, one of the most important tasks of political theorists embedded in the social sciences, rather than in ethics, is to have their finger on the pulse of how societies actually think. We ought not to restrict ourselves to an inbred, incestuous, community of political philosophers mainly talking to and writing for each other. Problems of translation are problems of cultural transmission, and such transmission frequently fails. Failures in translation, from the moderate to the serious, often not only reflect the inadequate skills of the translator but are also indicative of diverse social practices and cultural frameworks. The wellknown example of Talcott Parsons’ mistranslation of Max Weber’s ‘steel casing’ (Stahlhartes Gehäuse) as an ‘iron cage’ has produced a serious distortion of Weber’s intention to suggest the flexibility and ambiguity contained in the notion of a protective as well as a restrictive shell; and the catchiness of the phrase in English has led many scholars to elevate that idea to a central position in their interpretative work. But there has been a suggestion that Parsons had John Bunyan in mind when he proposed that translation, an allusion that only a person steeped in English culture would have proffered.20 There can be three kinds of errors in cultural transmission: the misinterpreted theory, the accidental author, and the abnormal text. In the first case, a text may be exported with considerable impact abroad, and its importance among recipient readerships may be heralded as beyond doubt while not attaining similar status in its original cultural context. An example is the influence of Herbert Spencer’s theories on social evolution in the USA and in the Far East, contrasted with their fast fading away in the UK where his view of the struggle for survival succumbed to rival Darwinian theories that talked of increasing social cooperation. In the second case, a text is resurrected by dint of being translated, even though its author is virtually unknown in the field outside the work’s geographical location. An example is the impact of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, a minor German philosopher whose translation into Spanish in the nineteenth century – ‘an intellectual accident’ – generated an entire movement in Spain, Krausismo. In the third category a particular text is taken as representative of an entire genre, when it is usually a very high quality representation of ideas that is uncharacteristic of the more general forms of the discourse. Mill’s On Liberty or Rawls’s Political Liberalism serve as examples of liberal thinking that are unrepresentative in their complexity, articulation, normative prescriptions or thoroughness. To assess liberalism through such books is to set standards of debate that liberal ideology, as a partly vernacular discourse, has not matched and cannot match. The first two categories are examples of success (of variable temporal duration) in the cultures of destination, these particular sequences of decontextualization and recontextualization being extreme instances of a common – in fact, inescapable – failure of control over the flow of

18  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent meaning, one that reception theory has already identified. That is their specific appeal to the study of comparative political thinking. The third category is one of a failure of mapping and of reliable contextual siting.21 These processes of siting and re-siting are explored in recent theories of ideology, in which the emphasis is on one of the most typical features of ideologies, namely, the attempt to control the flow of the public meaning of crucial political vocabularies. These decontesting and, ultimately, universalizing aspirations of ideology come up against major barriers in their disseminating missions, barriers that need to be explored closely in any serious project of comparative political thought. In all these cases, however, the point is not to complain about faulty transmission, or even to improve it, but to explore its illuminating consequences in the recipient political culture. Finally, the level of magnification is an important consideration in conducting comparisons and in accounting for poor transmission. There are two problems with the levels of magnification chosen by the scholar in investigating comparative forms of political thinking. One is on the dimension of complexity: it is easier to absorb something at a very small level of magnification, when just a general picture is available. The larger the magnification, the more complex it becomes, but then the more it inclines to the particular, so that one loses the perspective or the detachment from the text. Too many pixels covering a fraction of the image are themselves a form of decontextualization, and they may also constitute a hindrance to the scholarly detachment that is so central to the process of decoding. The second level of magnification is the question of distance. Geographical, or symbolic cultural, distance (even within the same society) frequently diminishes the desire to muster interest and to master detail, and often causes further distortions in transmission: the way in which national newspapers present foreign news is a notable example of the effects of both intellectual and emotional distance. And that is perfectly normal. It is inevitable that the question of proximity and distance in terms of understanding, not in terms of geography, is and will always be with us. We have to bear in mind that some of these distances are unbridgeable, because it is unavoidable to be more familiar with what is around us than with what is far away. As long as we bear this limitation in mind, comparative political thought projects can succeed. If we ignore the fact that distance counts, if we exaggerate universalism, sameness and our capacity to immerse ourselves in different forms of thinking politically, we will be creating illusion and self-delusion about the quality of our own research. Ultimately, not enough is done to distinguish between translation and interpretation. Of course all translation is also an act of interpretation, but the problem is more than reproducing the accuracy of the meaning of a word from one language to another. Translation tends to be micro – from word to word, or sentence to sentence. The problem in interpretation is a broader one: first, making sense of the larger epistemological claims and hidden codes in written and oral texts and, second, accepting the limitations of the variable consumption of a text. Translation is at the best of times a transient practice, temporally and spatially limited and, in principle, requires continuous retranslation.

Introduction  19

Thematic illustrations: participation and power We may briefly adumbrate – by way of illustration only – some possible comparative themes and how one might construct methods of approaching them. Take, for example, the theme of political participation or, more specifically, of the thought-patterns that concern political participation. To begin with, there is the simple issue of what counts as thinking about participation or, in other words, where do we locate participation on possible maps of political thinking? Participation intersects importantly with two core dimensions of politics: the process of arriving at decisions for collectivities, and – as suggested above – the mobilizing, or withholding, of support for collectivities and those who appear to act in their name. One axis of analysis is located between the poles of subcultures of assent and sub-cultures of dissent. The sub-culture of assent may itself mask forms of dissent, but traditional forms of government are based on passive conceptualizations of participation as acquiescence, with sporadic and largely unstructured theories of resistance at the disposal of groups (this may well include democracy insofar as it is perceived as a conventional form of government in existing so-called democracies). That line of thinking is typically expressed – even in proto-democratic thought – in the Lockean justification of revolution, which occurs not on any little misdemeanour, but only following an indeterminate ‘long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the same way’.22 Whereas political assent, at its minimal threshold, required only a low level of consent and participation is then conceptualized as accepting existing political structures; active and cognitive participatory thinking commenced through a vague right to dissent in late medieval times long before any culture of directive assent emerged. Does this model apply more broadly to societies across the planet? But then participation has also involved different conceptualizations of the realm of politics itself. Conventional liberal distinctions between public and private have reduced the sphere of political participation, only to be challenged in more recent liberal and post-structural theorizing. Both Judaism and Islam have invoked the notion of a religious community as the locus of collective participation, and have identified, for instance, acts of alms-giving as central forms of social solidarity and communal self-expression (whereas in secular versions of civil society charity has been relegated to the realm of the private by European welfarism). Moreover, differential participation for privileged groups is still a common social construct. Voting as a form of participation, although proffered as its standard twentieth-century apotheosis, is concurrently berated as a very thin type of participatory activity. The switch to human agency is one thing, far from typical as a legitimate manifestation of participation; the subsequent switch to voting as a sufficient indication of such agency is, however, a step too far. Both may well be rejected by other patterns of participatory political thinking. Another important comparative feature is the presence of power in language. We are not referring here to the differentials of status that are transmitted through language, but to the direct features of power in language itself. In political terms, language is an expression of intensity, namely, an attempt to have an effect on

20  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent a targeted audience or readership (though that may not be wholly deliberate). In a comparative mode, one focus of interest will be the rhetorical devices that a specified speech culture regards as particularly effective. Ratcheting up the intensity of language may involve rational argument, emotive expressiveness, threats, intimations of urgency and rhetorically aesthetic stylizing. What counts as central or peripheral expressions of each in different political discourses is up to the scholar to determine, using depositories of local knowledge. In addition, a variety of substantive messages will strike different chords that depend on local beliefs and ideologies (the manifold and often conflicting interpretations of the term ‘federalism’ in European Union discourse is a case in point). In each case, the speaker or writer who wishes to convey substantive messages efficiently may try to gear a discourse to the most probable range of anticipated reactions. The success of that activity is not, of course, guaranteed but then neither is the successful exercise of power. Undoubtedly, though, the diverse practices of intensifying the impact of discourse are a major dimension on which to assess the nature of political thinking. And the scholar is also left with the task of deciphering the surplus of meaning embedded in those discourses, the unintended but significant messages of which either speakers or recipients, or both, are unaware – some of which have significant impact. Here of course the art of interpretation comes into its own.

Brief overview In the re-examination of comparative political thought offered in this book we have rejected side-by-side disjointed juxtaposition, and have tentatively assembled the rudiments of a conceptual and discursive comparison – one of the many methods of comparison that we believe require systematic development – around the two themes of ‘the political’ and ‘political participation’. Those themes are undoubtedly central, and common, to the concerns of political theorists, but in the chapters that follow we have also encouraged their examination through multidisciplinary spectacles that abet the broadening and enriching of political theory. We will not attempt a summary of the chapters in this book, since to a large extent each study is a unique scholarly endeavour. There are though some common underlying intellectual themes which this collection exemplifies. One is that each essay has a generic commitment to the value of comparative political thought itself as a disciplinary enterprise. This does not dictate the content or precise methods. However it does indicate that we should, as a matter of course, as scholars of political study, take seriously the ideas and practices (both sophisticated and less so) of differing cultural traditions. Taking into consideration what has been argued above, we should not dismiss such ideas simply because of their strangeness or unfamiliarity. It is nonetheless recognized by all the chapters that such an enterprise is clearly fraught with a range of difficulties, as well as differences of approach and method. As indicated, both in this introduction and within a number of the essays in this volume, another key theme is that there is an underlying unease with the

Introduction  21 state of political science, political theory and political philosophy, as it has been practised in the Anglo-European dimension, certainly over the last century. There are though a number of subtle variations as to how this position is argued. Some essays – inspired for example by post-colonial themes – are much more overtly critical of the substance of normative political theory. Others see the need for subtle modification and adjustments, rather than outright rejection. All however suggest, directly or indirectly, that there has been a tendency in much philosophical and political theorizing in the Anglo-European forum to dismiss or just ignore apparently alien or foreign modes of thought. This latter tendency has not involved a total dismissal, but rather a sense that the critical rigour, secularity and logical precision of these other alien modes of thought are seen to fall short of the expected standards of the academy. The implication is that if such alien modes do not live up to these academic expectations, then they have to be treated within other categories and reclassified as, for example, subjects for antiquarian or possibly anthropological or ethnographic investigation. In this sense, for many Anglo-European theorists, such modes of thought cannot be classified as either genuine philosophy or political theory. This latter argument is seen by all the essays in this text as an inadequate response. Thus, for example, the notion of a modernity which is only defined by the standards of a critical secular rationalism (characteristic of a specific conception of Anglo-European thought), is seen as worryingly narrow. There are, in this reading, multiple modernities which have to be considered, each involving distinctive vocabularies. The understanding of modernity therefore has to be broadened, deepened and reconsidered in the light of these alternative thought structures. A third theme is that part of the worry over the more constrained AngloEuropean conception of modernity is that such ideas often claim a form of timeless ahistorical universality, particularly in speculations over politics, morality, justice, rights, freedom and so forth. On the one hand, in the course of these latter speculations, issues concerning colonialism, racism and imperialism have often been sidelined or just avoided. On the other hand, the ideal and universalistic character of such rationalistic theorizing often avoids the complex, often chaotic and messy, levels through which political languages actually function. Comparative theorizing thus acknowledges an implicit distinction between what might be called ideal and actual theory and it joins the concerns of some recent forms of political realism.23 This is an issue which arises both within and outside Anglo-European theorizing. Even within, the study of comparative political thought argues that the claims of politics do not just arise from within the scholar’s study; political ideas and language have a multifaceted existence in the world of practice. There is thus a world of political thinking and action which is not the same as political theory – in the more standard academic understanding of these terms. This domain of political thinking is as much a concern to comparative political theorists as the sophisticated world of political theory texts. Such urbane academic texts, although immensely important, cannot necessarily be taken therefore as simply transparent emissaries for political cultures. They may obfuscate as much as reveal the character of actual politics.

22  Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent Much more work therefore needs to be done here on both political thinking and political theory to provide a more complete picture. There is a fourth pervasive theme which lays stress on the intrinsic difficulty of comparative study itself. There is, in point, a minefield of problems in engaging in such an enterprise. Comparative theory steers a precarious course here. It involves both interpretative as well as transformative concerns. There is a strong risk at times, in some of the writings on comparative theory, that it will become either one or the other. The balance is thus intrinsically difficult to maintain. In some writings, there is an implicit morally transformative cosmopolitan project, which appears to dominate the whole enterprise, especially where dialogue becomes the central intellectual theme. However, in other writings there is an imminent danger of being simply co-opted into area studies, translation studies or comparative semantics. In this latter reading much of the transformative dimension disappears. In other writings – particularly some post-colonial work – there is strong argument for overall condemnation and emancipation from a particular pattern of thinking. Comparative theory wends its way along a treacherous pathway between an enthusiasm for cultural understanding, on the one hand, and a looming fear of its demise on the other. There is a recognition that we can never arrive at a complete understanding of other societies or even of our own. What we can though arrive at are certain insights, certain glimpses that make sense to us; sometimes they may even make more sense to us than to the dominant cultural understandings in the societies that we study. Ultimately, the pluralism of interpretation discloses its liberal epistemology; an epistemology that, although it may be decried by some as an insular product of ethnicity, has nonetheless widely come to support a standard of sound scholarship.

Notes 1 These issues have been addressed in greater detail in M. Freeden, ‘What Should the “Political” in Political Theory Explore?’, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 13 (2005). 2 Thus the first text of political science in the nineteenth century was written by a professor of law, see Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (London, Macmillan, 1890). 3 John Burrow, ‘The clue to the maze: the appeal of the comparative method’ in S. Collini, D. Winch and John Burrow (eds) That Noble Science of Politics: a Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.209. 4 Ernest Barker, in his 1929 inaugural Cambridge lecture for one of the first British politics chairs, also made this same terminological point. Political science, for Barker, was simply equivalent to political theory, understood as ‘a method or form of inquiry, concerned with the moral phenomena of human behaviour in political studies’, which could then be studied historically; Barker ‘The Study of the Science of Politics’ in Preston King (ed.) The Study of Politics (New York and London, Frank Cass, 1978), p.18. 5 Often culminating in American democracy being the summum bonum and totalitarianism being the summum malum, almost being an unwitting rerun of the older distinction between civilized as against savage or barbarous societies.

Introduction  23 6 See Grant Jordan (1990) ‘Policy Community Realism versus “New” Institutionalist Ambiguity’, Political Studies, 37 (1990). 7 An excellent example is Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 8 A. March, ‘What is Comparative Political Theory?’ The Review of Politics, vol. 71 (2009). 9 L.K. Jenco, ‘“What Does Heaven Ever Say?”: A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement’, American Political Science Review, vol. 101, 743–744 (2007). 10 See e.g. F. Dallmayr, Border Crossings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999). 11 For a discussion of some of those issues from a vantage point that preserves a strong distinction between Eurocentrism and cosmopolitanism but maintains distance from normative comparative political theory, see F. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12 See M. Freeden, ‘European liberalisms: An essay in comparative political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (2008), 9–30. 13 See J. Shklar, ‘Obligation, loyalty, exile’, Political Theory, vol. 21 (1993), 181–197; D. Easton, ‘A re-assessment of the concept of political support’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 5 (1975), 435–457; M. Freeden, ‘Languages of Political Support: Engaging with the Public Realm’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 12 (2009), 183–202. 14 National Commission for Minorities (http://ncm.nic.in/constitutional_prov.html, accessed 22.9.09). 15 Anthony J. Parel ‘The Comparative Study of Political Philosophy’ in A.J. Parel and R.C. Keith Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1992), p.12. See also Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Euben basically argues that there are strong parallels between the critiques of modern rationalism in Western thought (vis-à-vis Rousseau or Weber) and that found in Islamic fundamentalists such as Qutb. 16 See M. Freeden, ‘Editorial: The “Beginning of Ideology” Thesis’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 4 (1999), 5–11. 17 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p.175. 18 Quoted in P. Childs and P. Williams (1997) An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London and New York: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf), p.125. 19 R. Kosellek, ‘Einleitung’, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, KlettCotta, 1972), pp. XXI–XXII. 20 For possible explanations of Parsons’ choice, see P. Baehr, ‘The “Iron Cage” and the “Shell as Hard as Steel”: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor’ in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, History and Theory, vol. 40 (2001), 153–169. 21 This paragraph has been published in Michael Freeden’s editorial ‘What Fails in Ideologies?’ Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 14 (2009), 1–9. For the Krause example see R. Carr, Spain 1808–1975, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 301. We are indebted to Laurence Whitehead for alerting us to this specific example. 22 J. Locke, Two treatises of government, second treatise, P. Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), #225, pp. 463–464. 23 See e.g. M. Freeden, ‘Editorial: Interpretative realism and prescriptive realism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 17, 2012, 1–11.

1 On the historicity of ‘the political’ Rajaniti and politics in modern Indian thought Sudipta Kaviraj

To ask what is the concept of the political is to ask us to think about our thinking – not merely about the way we think, but what we think with, how we think with the conceptual resources that are available to us. Usually, in analysis of politics, we take up analytical objects like the government, the state, even modern history and the conditions it creates as the targets of our reflection; but the very idea of ‘the political’, remains hidden behind these questions – an idea which is the most fundamental, but also the hardest to subject to critical analysis. But is clear that when people speak about ‘the political’ in different times and different spaces, it refers to different things. Thus, for political theory, thinking about the historically specific meanings of ‘the political’ must be a significant question; and it is also clear by the nature of the question itself that its answer has to be thought through comparative techniques.

On comparative political theory In the conventional discipline of political science, comparative studies used to have a strictly designated place. Some parts of political science as a discipline have an already practised orientation towards comparativity, like comparative politics, and some of the new conceptions of IR, but political theory is not generally seen as a comparative discipline. Is it right to suggest, first, that political theory should change its ways and become comparative? What shall we gain by becoming comparative in this sense? Whenever we try to make any discipline comparative we must find convincing answers to the scepticism expressed elegantly and forcefully by Alasdair MacIntyre in, ‘Is a science of comparative politics possible?’ Recently comparative analysis in political theory has begun to spur interest as a new discipline; what comparative political theory might mean is still a subject of discussion, rather than of consensus. But for this very reason it is important to think about what this comparison is about, and what, cognitively, it could accomplish. Any comparative enterprise must face the questions MacIntyre asked several decades ago: is comparison simply a false positivist conceit? Is a cognitive enterprise that seeks to compare objects to arrive at implausible general conclusions about them a pursuit of an intrinsically misleading, unattainable purpose? Are we

On the historicity of ‘the political’  25 aiming to produce something like what MacIntyre called a ‘general theory of holes’?1 Carl Schmitt, in trying to develop precisely such a general concept of the political comes to an exactly similar conclusion – the unhelpfully general and misleading idea that the general concept in politics is the idea of enmity. It does not accomplish much beyond expressing his prejudice against liberalism, because this would imply that liberalism tries to achieve something impossible.2 I wish to argue, by contrast, that there is a type of fruitful enquiry into political thought which cannot avoid ‘comparison’, though the more precise name for this kind of exploration would be ‘connected history’. There appear to be three different ways of doing ‘comparative’ political theory. Comparative political theory can mean two rather different things depending on the historical period. It is possible, when we are concerned with pre-modern ages of history, to take concepts which are comparable in time, or comparable in meaning, or comparable in their social reference, and closely study their conceptual structure and the political practices they sanction and sustain. It is possible, in this fashion, to compare Indian conceptions of the rajya and Aristotelian ideas about the polis, or the supposed similarities between Machiavelli’s Prince and Kautilya’s Arthasastra. Similarly, it is possible to compare distinct theories of the characterization and justification of royal authority across the Western, Islamic, Chinese and Indic cultures. Such comparisons are optional, and their cognitive value is not entirely clear. It is not always clear what we gain in knowing about China by knowing in addition something about India. Or to put it more negatively, what we would lose in our understanding of China if we do not compare it with similar concepts in other cultures. But as we enter the modern period, the situation changes significantly. Starting with European colonization, a second kind of comparison becomes necessary, almost unavoidable. Students of modern India, who study institutions and practices from the nineteenth century, must take into account the historical reality of both European institutions and practices introduced by colonial power, as well as the enduring legacies of pre-existing Indian practice. It is impossible to analyse the colonial Indian political society without looking at both aspects: ‘comparison’ in this sense is entirely unavoidable in the study of political ideas and ideals in the modern postcolonial world. The odd case of people armed with one set of conceptual tools facing and having to deal with institutions and practices based on concepts of a different culture has become a constant, repetitive fact of modern life. This is the case in the study of colonial states, and the rise of modern anti-colonial nationalisms as much as in the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and American hegemony. In this second sense, some use of political theory, in an unusual comparative manner appears to be cognitively essential for understanding the world in which we live. This second form of comparative political theory can be done in two ways – which make quite different technical demands on its practitioners. It is possible to study political theories or in Michael Freeden’s terms ‘ideologies’ – to analyse the historical origins and variations in liberalism within modern Western culture from the time of the English revolution, and to expand our cognitive vision to

26  Sudipta Kaviraj see how these liberal ideas moved across different parts of the world, to quite different fates in India, China or Russia. Technically, what is interesting here is the process of ‘translation’. How did Indian writers in the early nineteenth century perform a ‘translation’ of liberal ideas into the pre-existing language of political expression? Is translation possible only when generically similar ideas exist? An initial difficulty is that to translate a word, as structuralists have shown us, is to translate not a free-standing concept, but a network of adjacent concepts, something like what the Cambridge school characterized as a ‘language’, which in turn are embedded in social practices which sanction and confirm them. How is translation between radically different ideas possible? Clearly, the question ‘what is the political?’ is ambiguous between several different senses. Each of these is in itself significant, but they imply mutually distinct approaches. First, answering this question might indicate a primarily philosophical enquiry into what the political means as distinct from the economic or the moral, although the ethical has a close and troublesome interconnection with it. But politics is too essentially historicized a thing for a philosophical definition to be very useful: a philosophical definition must try to pitch it at a level of generality where the definition cannot be affected by historicity; but that precisely makes it less useful, because what the study of politics must capture are the historical specifics of state power and opposition to its demands. Second, it can mean distinguishing the political from the economic, or social, or thinking about the process through which, historically, thinking in terms of such an ‘ontology of spheres’ became increasingly common, and since movements of thought in such questions are usually connected to some innovative movements in practice, one might ask what new types of practices were being made possible by these conceptual changes. This chapter does not go into those lines of enquiry. It seeks to offer a more historicized and regional exploration of ‘the political’ in Indian intellectual traditions.

On the concept of the political in the Indian intellectual universe What is the nature and content of the concept of the political in India? There can be two responses to this question, both of which would reveal the inherent complexity of this problem. It could be said that India has a thriving clamorous political democracy, and Indians could hardly function as participants in democratic politics without some ‘conception of the political’. This idea might be practical, latent, a part of their tacit understanding of the world, not formulated in an explicitly theoretic form; the task of political theory is primarily to extract it from the connotative flux of common discourse and political practice. But there could also be a radically different response. It could be objected: how could there be a concept of the political in India? ‘Political’ is an English term, and Indians do their politics in the vernacular. There must be terms by which they refer to the political world, but how could we assume without a close examination, that the reference and connotative range of those vernacular terms bear the same meaning as the English word? This precisely is what is to be investigated, rather than

On the historicity of ‘the political’  27 assumed. What politics in Western languages denotes is a combination of effects of a long conceptual evolution that shadowed the political history of the West. Both the institutional history of power in India and the languages that shadow it are substantially different. It can be presumed, so the argument may continue, that there would be significant difference in meaning between the two sets of terms. Where does this place observers who write in English, but about a political world full of the rustle of vernacular meanings? In Indian political discourse, the idea of politics exists in complex linguistic form. This complexity works in two related ways: it leads first to a linguistic duality. Actors in Indian politics have to communicate usually in two languages – primarily in their regional vernacular, and in a cosmopolitan language, English or Hindi. The regional vernacular is the language in which they primarily communicate with their electorate. Usually this communication can take three different forms: in writing, in media communications of various kinds, and in direct political speech.3 Since most political actors, except those who have no ambition to get beyond the boundaries of their district, are under compulsion to communicate with a wider Indian political world, they have to make use of either English or Hindi for communication beyond their own linguistic region. Thus the conceptual content of the term for politics in these two languages affects the deep descriptive understanding of political actors: what politics means in these two languages determines not merely how people evaluate their political options, or constitute their political judgements, but how they conceive the very nature of the political world, what they think the whole activity of politics means. But this linguistic duality is also deeply marked by a deeper historical duality: the meanings of the two concepts in English and the Indian vernaculars bear the marks of two rather differently constituted historical worlds of social power, the English words containing connotations from its European genealogy,4 and the vernacular from the utterly different genealogy of the Sanskrit dharmasastras. In these two worlds, the configuration of social power was structured in entirely different ways; and the terms rajniti5 and ‘politics’ appeared to their users to capture this all-important difference between terms which are European and indigenous, and at the same time modern and pre-modern.

The two conceptions of politics In fact, the two terms rajniti and politics are not simply two terms in different languages referring to the same set of practices; rather, the two terms refer to practices that are internal to operations of power in two substantially different social worlds. Both terms referred to social practices of and around power, but the nature of those practices were significantly different, because of the very different structures of the relevant social worlds. Through processes of colonial modernity however these two types of political practice were merged, intermingled and joined to produce the peculiar characteristics of politics in modern India. Following the historicity of the concept of the political involves tracking the conceptual traces of this vast historical change.

28  Sudipta Kaviraj When new practices enter a historical world, people need linguistic reference to them. For proposing, defending, imposing, justifying, criticizing, dissenting, resisting, even ignoring the new phenomenon, they need to refer to it linguistically. How do people do it if it is a really new practice – like the introduction of a new conception of property, forms of representative government, institutions of democratic rule – that were practices not known earlier, and for which therefore there did not exist a readymade, already prepared vocabulary? This seems to happen in two ways – both of which are evident in the Indian case. First, this can be arranged by coining new words, drawing upon the astonishingly flexible generative vocabulary of classical languages. Sanskrit roots can be used to provide terms for rule by the people. The most common words are combinations of terms for people in their collectivity – gana, jana, praja and they are combined with the term for an institutional mechanism – tantra, or rajya/rastra – a state – to produce the familiar terms to indicate democracy and republican government.6 In my own language, Bengali, the Sanskrit derived term rajniti is commonly used to refer to the activity of politics. In Sanskrit, rajaniti is a compound of two words, raja and niti. Raja refers to either the ruler’s person or his power or the territory over which he exercises rule, usually a combination of all these connotations. This is a combination of semantic connotations similar to the meanings the term ‘state’ carried in early modern stages of European history minutely described in Skinner’s exposition.7 At a transitional point of this language, the state means both the person with his majesty, and an office which confers a new kind of impersonal dignity on its occupant. However, this semantic stage of the concept is the result of a significant historical evolution in the modern period. And to understand how modern political practice infiltrates the meaning of this term and changes its semantic content, it is necessary to grasp the pre-modern signification, and the conceptual field in which that meaning worked.

Pre-modern meanings of rajaniti In the language of pre-modern politics, raja or rajya has a clearly one-sided connotation. It implies that this business – called politics, rajaniti – simply concerns only those who wield power, and simply does not apply to others. In the pre-modern Hindu social world, there is a peculiar logic to this exclusion: it is not arbitrary, or seen to be based merely on crude force. It is a form of exclusion linked to caste society – which works on the basis of a peculiar conception of segmentary entitlement to social functions, according to the notion of adhikaribheda.8 Some functions can be performed only by the Brahmin – like officiating in a religious ceremony: a king, however powerful, is not entitled to perform that function, and is ‘excluded’ in that sense – in the precise sense that that function is not relevant to the way he leads his life. Some ceremonies in Hindu marriages can be performed not by the Brahmin priest, but only by a low caste barber. Animal hide can be handled and worked on only by those who are ‘entitled’ to do that particular function. Exclusion in this order is not exclusion by use of force, but the allocation of proper functions by a transcendent order to which all, including

On the historicity of ‘the political’  29 the rulers, are subject. In fact, the ruler’s enjoyment of his powers is due precisely to his fortune of being of the proper caste and proper birth which allocates the function of ruling to him. And since birth is an accident,9 despite his accidental allocation to this function, the ruler must acquire the three or four required disciplines of knowledge and training to perform successfully the function that fate has placed upon him. Exclusion here means that there is a function which is proper to some designated group or some individual: for others to perform that function is a trespassing of a transcendent order. This order is transcendent in the sense that the society does not recognize the capacity of any human agency to alter these dispensations. The meaning of the first part of the compound is linked to an equally specific conception of the term niti. In common Sanskrit, niti has a capacious meaning: one of its meanings can remind us of the general discussion of ‘imperatives’ in Kant immediately before he begins his exposition of what is a categorical moral imperative.10 Due to its wide and non-specific general meaning, niti can mean simply precepts of a purely practical character – like the famous advice from Canakya to avoid contact with rogues;11 but it is also commonly deployed with an ethical meaning, containing the idea of ought. Niti is therefore close to the concept of dharma – a much misunderstood idea, which refers to a set of rules which are ethically appropriate for a person with a specific social role to follow.12 The rules of rajaniti are also referred to in classical Sanskrit texts as rajadharma – the dharma specific to rulers or rajas. There is however a peculiarity to the idea of dharma which is highly significant. In the Hindu conception of the world ‘dharma’ – rules of proper (moral) behaviour – designates a universal order in a special sense that appears odd to the modern mind used to the Kantian notion of the moral universal.

Caste and the impossibility of a modern notion of ‘politics’ Dharma as a term requires some glossing: dharma carries the meaning of an order that is sanctioned by the divinely sustained ontological order of things – and it bears the connotation that an act is the proper thing to do, because of the status or station of the agent: but it also bears a distinct additional connotation that it is in the nature of an agent to do that act – the nature of a bird is to fly, the nature of a king is to rule. The difference is that for the bird there is no right and wrong way of flying, but for the king there is a right and a wrong way of ruling: therefore, the sense of dharma as nature has to be further governed by the second sense of dharma as a moral order, indicating a proper way of doing things. This proper way of doing things has to be learnt and critically assessed: the king thus has to learn the skills and the rules required for ruling, and his acts have to be assessed – by himself, if he is a thoughtful ruler; but, if he is not, by an impersonal public of his subjects, and if the public fails in that scrutiny, by an all-seeing and normatively infallible God. The bird, by contrast, does not have to undergo training to learn how to fly, nor does it have to engage in periodic reflection on whether the manner of its flying has been flawless.

30  Sudipta Kaviraj The order of dharma covers everyone – all human beings, from the king to the meanest candala (leatherworker) at the end of the chain of human hierarchy in the Hindu caste system; but their conducts are not governed by the same rules. Proper rules exist for each segment of the caste order; but precisely because of their segmentation, they cannot be governed by identical-universal rules. Rajadharma13 specifies the set of rules by which rulers’ conduct should be governed, which, if they are not followed, would bring the ruler to disrepute and eventually, because the natural and moral orders are interconnected, to destruction.14 Following the Arthasastra it could be argued that the dharma of the raja is to hold power, and therefore all the techniques of holding and extending one’s political power and authority – rajaniti – are a constituent part of rajadharma.15 In traditional usage, one of the crucial connotations of the term is to refer to something like nature. Vernacular users can say that the dharma of the bird is to fly, and of the fish to swim. When the Gita says svadharme nidhanam sreyah/ paradharmo bhayabahah, it has something like this in mind.16 In this usage, which is extremely common, particularly in traditional Sanskrit and vernacular use, the term indicates something close to nature: what things and beings are intrinsically inclined to do without further cultural instruction. To state the principles of rajadharma, using the term in both these senses, produces an immensely powerful image of the office of kingship. The ruler must follow these rules in order to be a ruler. If he does not follow these rules, he is not a real ruler, but a usurper of royal authority. True rulership is thus deflected from the criterion of correct birth and accession to a criterion of just rule. Rulership as an idea therefore seeks to link legitimacy to criteria which are more substantive than procedural. Procedurally, primogeniture is a legitimate way of becoming a king; but the second meaning of dharma also emphasizes the idea that even a procedurally correctly installed ruler, if he does not follow the substantive rules of proper government over his subjects, or does not bear the right character, loses legitimacy, and is unfit to be a king. And in most Sanskrit texts, there is a subtle argument that links value to fact, and suggests that if a ruler does not have those qualities, he is not merely morally unfit to rule, he would eventually lose his rulership in the real world. His position, though rhetorically designated as ‘sovereign’, is not sovereign in the sense of the Austinian definition of that concept. Some of the implications of this reasoning are significant for our argument. The first implication of this conception of rajaniti is its segmentary exclusiveness. These rules are niti – proper rules of guidance of conduct both prudential and ethical – only for the raja, the ruler or the rajanya – the political aristocracy who advise and service him.17 Politics is a clearly two-sided activity, which divides people who possess power appropriately and others who are appropriately subjected to its control. Rajaniti, the rules which govern the rulers’ conduct, refer to rules that govern only one side of this equation. Sometimes, the rules of rajaniti are given a somewhat more extended meaning, as in the rationalistic work of Kautilya, the Arthasastra. That text mixes normative rules which the ruler ought to follow with extensive discussions of purely practical imperatives of maintaining and extending power; instrumental advice about how a ruler can stay in power,

On the historicity of ‘the political’  31 and conquer more territory. But that does not alter the exclusivist meaning of the activity of politics. Politics is a princely and aristocratic activity reserved for the politically designated elites within the caste order. From the point of view of traditional political thinking, the subjects are not active agents in politics, though it is considered proper that they might complain if the rulership is oppressive. But unlike the expedients in Lockean theory, they do not have clear recourse against oppressive political rule.18 The traditional conception of politics also implies an absence of sovereignty in the modern sense – in two different ways. First, the owners of the state, because that is what they are – they are the adhikaris of political power – are themselves subject to these rules. The ruler is not the maker of these rules – he is bound by them as much as other groups are – so he does not have the relation that a sovereign modern ruler has to the laws he enacts. There are thus clear limits to what they can ordain. In the caste order, this injunction has an astonishing restraining effect on the nature and proper province of political power. A ruler can accumulate wealth and power, which could be used for or against individuals or groups, but he cannot alter the caste-ordained placement of groups and individuals in the occupational and thus the wealth structure of society. Primarily, rulers cannot even begin to propose a change in the caste-structure of society. Political authority is intended to preserve the dharmic order, not to judge it, and certainly not to alter it; because in any act of altering the social order – if it is not entirely unintended – there is an implicit prior act of judging it as having shortcomings. The king’s power is clearly marked as preservative and restorative, not legislative in the modern sense. If sovereignty, in the modern Austinian sense, is an unrestricted power of political authority to pass laws of any kind, this kind of entirely unrestricted absolutepower over society’s rules is not allowed by the pre-modern caste order. The older idea of politics thus rules out the modern sovereignty of the absolute ruler.19 A third implication of the traditional conception is even more significant for the contrast with modern politics. Under the modern dispensation, the state, especially if it is democratic, is considered the ‘representative’ of the society over which it presides. A democratically elected government is therefore a peculiarly modern device for the society’s reflexive action upon itself. Two aspects of this reflexive relation must be distinguished. First, there is a feasibility question: the vast elaboration of the apparatuses of the modern state – its bureaucratic, military, financial organizations and techniques internal to these – makes it feasible for the society to act upon itself and engage in a fundamental alteration of its structure. Second, there is a legitimacy question: it is precisely because the modern state is seen as a representative of the society that its proposals for acting upon itself – its self-reform – have a peculiar kind of legitimacy, parallel in fact to the liberal conception of the individual self. If an individual wishes to change something in her own life, no one else, except in exceptional and extreme circumstances, has a legitimate authority to object to or obstruct it. The state’s actions for society’s reform, in a democratic setting particularly, can be seen as self-reform – at least that is the way it is usually presented. Third, underlying all this, and working as a prior precondition is an idea of the social world as plastic, as amenable to

32  Sudipta Kaviraj willed transformation by individuals who collectively compose that society. Social relations and the structures made up of them are mundane and not divine. The modern political idea of sovereignty presupposes, from the early versions of social contract theory, the idea of plasticity of social relations, and, as Hobbes so shrewdly noted, a displacement of the divine by a mortal God. However, there are some powerful objections to this manner of primarily textual derivation of a historical picture of pre-modern modes of power. Two arguments significantly complicate our understanding of the nature of the premodern historical universe. The first is merely a troubling corollary of the longterm continuance of this dharmasastric tradition itself. The picture of political authority and the saptanga theory which elaborates its structure is associated with the structure of caste as varna, and is a stylized ancient or early-medieval construct. To what extent, it can legitimately be asked, might this textually derived portrayal of power accord with historical reality on the ground? Later evolution of the caste system produced a much larger number of jatis (sometimes misleadingly referred to as ‘subcastes’, as if these sub-castes fitted unproblematically into the larger, capacious containers of castes of the varna order), which suggests that this stylized and simplified picture becomes alienated from real historical life, and might produce a distorted picture of real society. Even in the seventeenth century, Sanskrit intellectuals were producing versions of the saptanga theory in a world in which political power often fell into the hands of lower caste military leaders. Second, and even more significantly, the later texts were composed in a political world of rulers who were feudatories to Mughal emperors and wholly subservient to their overriding authority. Yet the picture inside this textual world is one of a strange preternatural tranquillity of unchanging social relations. Viramitrodaya, a seventeenth-century compendium of dharamsastra, and one of the largest ever compiled, was prepared in the court of a Hindu feudatory ruler who acknowledged the suzerainty of the Mughal emperor.20 This seems to confirm the strange capacity of Hindu intellectual life to produce a textual universe which did not mirror, but almost acted as a foil to, the real historical world. The second argument that questions text-derived historicization of the political world asserts, on the basis of historical-anthropologic evidence, that by the late medieval period in much of the Indian political world, political power did not remain restricted to classically defined ksatriya (warrior caste) lineages. Successful military leaders, for instance in South India, established themselves in the rural society as political authority, establishing political lineages which continued for long periods. In two distinct senses, then, the picture of a varnabased order of society and its political rule had broken down, though Sanskrit texts continued to produce a misleading and in time definitely obsolete picture of untroubled continuance of the ancient order. Both these anti-textualist arguments present forceful objections to a textual reconstruction of political history. But, for our purposes, even if they are correct, we can derive a conclusion independent of their objection. It is true that in one sense these evidence a breakdown of the older dharmic order. But breakdown can mean two wholly different things: it can mean that the nature of royal power remained

On the historicity of ‘the political’  33 restrictive, subject to the characteristics we have identified; but the groups of people who could acquire this form of political power over principalities were now much larger; the caste restrictions which confined it to ksatriyas had broken down in a world in which it was not easy to determine incontrovertibly who was a ksatriya. In this world, it seems to have been easier to confer on wielders of actual political power, a ksatriya-like authority. Yet, it is still plausible to maintain in another respect that pre-modern structure had not broken down – in the relation between owners of political power and their subjects. Chronicles of Islamic historians – like the monumental Seir Mutaqherin which provides an account of the dissolution of Mughal power from 1707 to 1781 – conform to this view of the expansion of the claimants of political power to rule. In the pages of this massive canvas, three groups fight to seize control over territory – the declining Mughal rulers and high aristocracy, the Maratha power of Western India and the newest players in the field, European factors and military adventurers. Dharmic restrictions on political rulership are brushed aside entirely, and the field is now wide open. But the nature of political power has not changed fundamentally: it retains its character as an activity that concerns only rulers, not their subjects; it is a struggle over political power which does not claim modern sovereignty, and it is not interested, at least late into the colonial period in establishing a reflexive relation with the society over which it exercises dominion. One aspect of the political universe, its constitutive field of possibilities, had changed; yet another had not.

Politics and modern power Following on these implications, we can now offer a brief history of modern power. The state in the first phase of colonialism, when British rule was still not consolidated, took after its Mughal predecessor in many respects. But this could not last long. After all, the colonial state was an extended arm of the European state going, at this precise point in history, through a transformation from an absolutist to a proper nationalist state. Aspects of the disciplinary processes, which gave this state unprecedented power to transform society and affect the life of other societies through colonial control, were introduced into Indian society as well. A state which was affiliated to the most powerful political formation in modern Europe could not continue the pretence of not possessing sovereign control over its territory and the unrestricted power of interference over society this entailed, though as a matter of policy, it stayed away from excessive intrusion into the cultural and religious life of the society. Sovereignty, even without a pretence of representative institutions, altered the distant relation between the power of the rulers and their subjects, bringing rulers and the ruled into a much tighter, closer relation – typical of the modern state. The colonial state essayed a vast project of codification of customary laws; yet its acceptance of segmentary laws for different parts of society was limited. As the colonial state legislated more liberal measures, its legislative procedures acquired more universal application – bringing all subjects under a uniform relation to its legislative and administrative

34  Sudipta Kaviraj capacity. In its initial stages, the colonial state worked through a pre-modern conception of ‘representation’, dealing with various segments of this vast and diverse population through their ‘aristocratic’ representatives, who were treated as their communities’ ‘natural leaders’. As representative institutions expanded, this pre-modern conception of representation slowly turned towards more modern versions of the idea – of representatives selected through some form of voting procedure, though the electorates remained severely restricted. With the gradual rise of a nationalist movement, the field of political activity was fundamentally reshaped: it became a field of strategic manoeuvre between two dominant players – the colonial state on one side and the expanding, mass based nationalist movement on the other. The rise of mass politics, in the form of the Swadeshi movement, which overturned the colonial decision for the first partition of Bengal in 1905, altered the definition of political activity fundamentally and irreversibly. The revocation of the decision of the colonial state could not be accomplished by polite remonstration by a narrowly politicized elite. Only the politicization of the masses of the common people could accomplish this fateful action. This signalled a decisive end to the segmentary definition of the political activity. It could not remain a one-sided activity, relevant only for groups who controlled political power. Politics had become, irreversibly, an activity with popular participation. The contest between the colonial state, with the looming power of the British empire standing distinctly behind it, and the Swadeshi movement inaugurated the era of the modern in political life. The Swadeshi movement dissipated after it succeeded in getting the colonial administration to revoke the decision to partition Bengal; but it was followed within a few decades by a far more organized, sedimented, institutionalized form of mass nationalist movement in the form of the Gandhian Congress. Insightful observers have pointed out that although the colonial state, even in its final period, was not democratic, the nationalist movement which opposed it became a vast school for democratic politics. With the gathering strength of this movement, another underlying fact became irreversibly fixed and irrefutably apparent. The power of the national movement was predominantly predicated on its ability to mobilize ordinary people in large numbers – to persuade them to enter the arena of politics, which could not be done without breaking an immense conceptual barrier of viewing politics as an exclusively elite activity of ruling society. Contesting the power of those who rule became increasingly seen as an equal part of political activity. The state still represented the power of the social and colonial elites; but the contesting power of the nationalist movement was also clearly evident as a new form of organized and disciplined power; and politics is increasingly seen as an activity dealing with power – in using or resisting it. The final stage of this conceptual transformation of ‘the political’ arrived with the inception of real democracy – with the constitutional adoption of an elective representative government based on universal suffrage. The Constituent Assembly eventually decided on a fundamental historic transformation of Indian society, by legislating some forms of caste practice unconstitutional, and adopting a right to equality which outlaws discrimination on the basis of caste or gender.

On the historicity of ‘the political’  35 No doubt, the actual translation of such constitutional rules into everyday life is a complex and imperfect process. But this was a resounding declaration of the historical end of the pre-modern notion of politics. Democratic politics destroyed the pre-modern restrictive conception of politics as an elite activity in many ways. First, it made decisions of the state formally dependent upon the consent of ordinary people without caste-based privilege. Second, the constitution and subsequent parliamentary legislation revised the fundamental laws of Hindu society regarding the status of women, and caste discrimination. The promise of democratic politics, the vague sense that electoral politics could enable leaders from lower caste groups to advance into offices of the state through elections and then enact even more urgent reformist legislation, exerted a deep attraction on political actors from the lower castes. Eventually, by the 1980s, politicians from dalit groups, former untouchables under the traditional caste system, rose to positions of high formal office. A dalit politician was elected the President of the republic; but more significantly, lower-caste leaders occupied the position of the chief ministers of some of the largest states in the federation. By abolishing the formal distinctions between rulers and the ruled, establishing political equality, but furthermore, by energizing the entry of lower-order politicians in the democratic process, democracy confirmed the establishment of a new conception of ‘the political’. It was recognized as a field in which all groups participated to scramble for power: it became an activity of universal access, not restricted to elites; it was connected powerfully to the idea of ‘popular sovereignty’, the idea that a society had authority to decide what structure was just, and to alter conventional religiously-sanctioned social hierarchy; and finally, a predominant purpose of this state was precisely to undertake reflexively directed legislative action – to reorder its social constitution. Nothing showed the triumph of the new conception of ‘the political’ more clearly. It had, through the deep reconfiguration of power in modernity, become the most universal activity of all. Not only did elected politicians and innumerable aspirations for political office confirm this definition of the political: so did other kinds of political actors in India’s vast and complex field of political life. Armed radical movements seeking a violent overthrow of the state, secessionist groups which aspire to create states outside the Indian union, at one end of the political scale, and activist organizations which might agitate for single issues of perceived injustice, or demand state attention to poverty and discrimination – all confirm the universal nature of the political activity. But it is not merely the world of India which is marked by this new sense of possibility of ‘the political’. The world is generally conceived by political actors as a vast field of strategic activity of this new kind and an immense number of actors – ordinary citizens participating in democratic elections, or other equally ordinary citizens who hope to topple autocracies by sporadic protests, nongovernmental organizations protesting discrimination and disenfranchisement, terrorist groups seeking to end control over their territories by states they disavow, or militants acting against the power of dominant states in the international system, confirm by every single act that they share this modern political imaginary of politics as a universal field in which different individuals and groups seek to exercise power.

36  Sudipta Kaviraj

Translations and overlaps: on the historicity of words Disciplines of academic study at times produce cognitive objects for the purpose of study which, if taken too seriously, occlude the topography of real life. Language is a good example of this difficulty. Academic work explores the features of natural languages, and there is nothing more plausible than suggesting that that is how languages exist in the real world. Yet, in historical contexts like India, and possibly more generally in postcolonial societies, the actual existence of language is far more complex. What exists is a complex, often multiplanar linguistic economy consisting of complex combinations of functions and competences. In the 1950s the language of high political practice, like making speeches in Parliament or writing serious reports for government policy decisional processes, was almost uniformly English, though it can be surmised easily that the languages of gossip, debate, everyday comments on political decisions of common voters were vernaculars. The language of speech-making through which nationalist leaders who held office after independence originally inflamed popular passions to participate in the nationalist movement were the regional vernaculars. English and the vernaculars were the two separate languages of high political decision-making and of popular mobilization. Democratic politics fashioned a linguistic economy in which, in the constant communication between political leaders and ordinary citizens, this boundary between natural languages, while very real, was constantly crossed. Elite politicians often had to break into uneasy and ungainly vernacular expression, and lower-order voters, reciprocally, had to grasp some sense of crucial English concepts. The words that both captured this world, and its central process of exchange, and which constantly changed hands like currency, were of course the words ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, the words that referred both to this indispensable activity and the ‘field’ over which this activity was carried on. Language in a sense carries within itself an unfailingly accurate, though rather general, archive of historical developments. A defining mark of the historical triumph of the new, modern notion of politics in India’s social world is the extent to which in the connotative uptake of the term, the modern meaning has displaced and substituted the pre-modern traditional one. Although the term used to refer to politics is rājnīti21 in numerous vernacular languages, this now indicates the new field of strategic action open in principle to all, and the universal activity from which no one is formally excluded. Clearly, this is not an isolated change in the meaning of single, free-standing words, however significant, but part of a larger change in a ‘language’.22 But, on closer inspection, it appears that such changes do not happen in a global conceptual language as a whole. For individual words to alter their meaning there must be corresponding changes in the meanings of connected terms which are interlinked with the single term by a network of social practice. A significant example of such connection in a web of practice between two terms is between the words, ‘politics’ and ‘rights’. Similar to the concept of politics, and structurally parallel to it, vernacular languages had to find a word for carrying the heavy meanings of modern rights-based conceptions, without which a vocabulary of modern politics, not just its liberal version, cannot work. In most North Indian

On the historicity of ‘the political’  37 vernaculars the word that carries this meaning is adhikār,23 which comes from a pre-modern word adhikārī-bheda, the propriety in allocation of agents to specific types of social actions. Modern politics required a new vocabulary, and this was provided in the Indian linguistic economy by two methods: altering the meanings of a networked web of connected terms, or by using the English word ‘politics’ or ‘right’ within vernacular sentences. When the English term politics is used in a vernacular sentence, the meaning of the word is entirely clear; and it perhaps also implicitly suggests an underlying unease in the speaker that the older term rajniti might not fully convey the new meaning. But the much more common case of using the term rajniti is analytically more interesting. If language carries an archive – which is both entirely hidden and entirely open – a paleontologic activity on linguistic practice can bring out both the underlying history and complexity of practical change. Underlying shifts are in a sense hidden in open sight. Linguistic signs are open in the sense that they are being constantly used, and can be analysed by scholars. It is hidden in the sense that the common contemporary usage tends to overlay the older meaning, simply by the fact that in innumerable uses of the word, the modern meaning is constantly reiterated, obliterating the sense that there might be a stratum of vestigially effective connotative effect still carried inside the term; that there is at least a possibility that the older meaning infects and deflects the newer meaning of the word. This possibility – that the word, despite its shift of connotation still carries some debris of its pre-modern meanings and practical associations – is a most intriguing aspect of this history. It is a common complaint that Indian politicians work inconsistently: a large number of them behave in a way that seems to suggest that they believe that modern electoral politics is the only legitimate way of political recruitment, to entry into high political office; but once they acquire power, politicians should not be burdened with the restrictive rules of modern democratic institutions. Patterns of behaviour of elected politicians – chief ministers, members of the Union cabinet, of leaders of political parties, even of high-level bureaucrats – seem to suggest ‘princely’ or para-royal conduct. Such behaviour of high politicians is reciprocated by the voluntary abjection of those who are within the orbit of their power. This suggests a hidden, at least formally inexplicit, survival within the structure of modern institutions of ‘rule of law’, a continuing temptation for those who occupy political office to augment their power illegitimately by using an earlier language of pre-modern rule; and an answering tendency on the part of those who are subject to their authority to accept to act in appropriately supplicatory ways. The political world of modern India is a complex configuration of different ways of being political – in which officials try to invoke the older practical language to extend their power, subaltern individuals or groups sometimes accept it by acquiescing to it, and at times try to resist this illegitimate extension of power by invoking modern institutional rules. A concise history of this complex, multi-layered world lies inside the language that people use to describe this world and to navigate through its surprises. By analysing the concept of ‘the political’, we can see this vast, complicated world reflected in the grain of language.

38  Sudipta Kaviraj

Notes 1 A. MacIntyre, ‘Is a science of comparative politics possible?’, in Against the SelfImages of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre (London: Duckworth, 1971), pp. 260–279. 2 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 3 In the Indian political world, language as speech is particularly significant – because the electorate often has low levels of literacy, and second, because the language of speeches, in which language is enhanced by rhetoric, plays such an important role. 4 Of course the European genealogy of the term politics is enormously long and highly complex, stretching from ancient Greek thought through Roman, medieval and Renaissance thinking to modern times. In none of the pre-modern European cultures did the term ‘politics’ bear the connotation of a reflexive power over society – a power that is distinct from society organizationally, yet acts upon itself in its name. But in Indian political discourse, those earlier, pre-modern European connotations were entirely lost. The reason why the term politics is often used to refer to the modern activity of power is precisely because the English term appears to its users to capture that meaning forcefully and succinctly, while the translating Indian terms do not. 5 I use the form rajniti which is common in many Sanskrit-derived modern Indian languages like Hindi and Bengali rather than the proper Sanskrit form of rajaniti, because in the context of our discussion we are primarily concerned with the modern usages of this word. 6 Partha Chatterjee’s Bengali book, Praja O Tantra, plays subtly on this derivation by splitting the two words usually combined to denote democracy in Bengali, prajatantra: literally, this means peoples’ government. By splitting the two words, Chatterjee successfully produced a distinctly Foucault-like effect for the free-standing term, tantra to evoke the meaning of ‘governmentality’; Partha Chatterjee, Praja O Tantra (Calcutta: Anustup, 2005). 7 Quentin Skinner, ‘The state’, in Ball, T., Farr, J. and Hanson, R.L., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989). 8 Adhikari is an agent who is the proper actant for a particular function, as the Brahman is appropriate for officiating at a religious ceremony, and a barber is for grooming. Bheda is the activity of making proper logical – and here conceptual – distinctions. 9 Though in Hindu soteriology, birth is an accident to the person, not to God who allocates souls to proper roles that they have deserved by their acts in their previous birth. So birth is a combination of accident and necessity. 10 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 11 Durjanam parihartyavyo vidyayalamkrtoh’pi san/ manina bhusitah sarpah kim asau na bhayankarah [You should avoid the company of bad people, even though they are decorated by sophistication; is not a snake terrible, even though decked with a pearl?] Canaykyasloka. This is a general imperative of prudence, not of strictly moral conduct. 12 See P.V. Kane, History of the Dharma Sastras (HDS) (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental research Institute, 1973), Volume I, chapter 1, for an erudite and wide-ranging discussion of what is dharma. 13 Sanskrit literature contains a vast literature on dharmasastra, of which three of the most well known dealing with rajadharma are the Manusmrti, the Arthasastra and the Sukraniti. 14 Dharma also means ‘nature’ in the sense of characteristics which are peculiar to a particular class of things/beings and therefore define them – the dharma of the bird is to fly, and of the earthen pot to be fragile. 15 The term dharma is often translated as religion. This is slightly misleading – not because dharma does not cover the meaning of the English term religion: it does; but

On the historicity of ‘the political’  39 it covers connotations that are much wider, and some of those connotations cannot be captured by the English equivalent. 16 The Bhagavatd Gita, chapter 3, Karmayoga, verse 35. Kane, HDS, supports this reading of the sloka. 17 In Kautilya’s Arthasastra (London: Penguin Classics, 1992) there is a clear suggestion that the rules of rajaniti which are set down in the text are to be followed collectively, and collaboratively, by the ruler and a close group of advisers who assist him in the use of political authority. 18 John Locke, (ed.) Peter Laslett, Second Treatise on Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 19. 19 Interestingly, the historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar observed some of these basic distinctions in a general reflection on the nature of political authority in Mughal India. 20 For a discussion of these texts see Sheldon Pollock, ‘The ends of man at the end of pre-modernity’, Gonda Lectures, Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, 2006. 21 In most North Indian languages, the term is called a tatsama word, i.e. equivalent to the Sanskrit original, though its pronunciation is slightly altered. In Bengali and Hindi, for instance, the term used is phonetically, rajniti, instead of the Sanskrit form rajaniti. 22 In the sense in which the Cambridge School uses the term ‘language’. 23 Adhikar is now generally translated as right; in Sanskrit, adhikara carried two meanings: first, proper entitlement to a class of acts (like praying, or officiating in a marriage ceremony) and second, occupation (often of land or territory). The derivation of the modern meaning is primarily from the first branch of meaning of the pre-modern word.

2 Latin American approaches to ‘the political’ Laurence Whitehead

Introduction Generalizations about the political style of any large region are inevitably impressionistic and incomplete. Each is internally diverse, and an arena for the interplay of various competing projects. All such currents of opinion evolve over time, are hybrid and modified by regional or extra-regional influences. The only general claims that can be made are highly relative – a particular political style may be especially prevalent in one region (at least in major parts of it, or for substantial periods of time) but parallel practices, and even attempts to ‘export’ or ‘copy,’ can always arise outside it. Nonetheless, there may still be a ‘large region’ set of political characteristics. Seeking these out is a corrective to abstractly universalizing ‘large N’ studies in comparative politics, which often screen out history, language and collective memory. Such studies tend to take nation states as the core unit of analysis. They thereby attribute to them more internal unity and structural cohesion than may be justified; and they may also therefore marginalize region-wide interactions and commonalities. Just as we speak of the nation as an ‘imagined community,’ we might apply the same criteria to an assemblage of nations grouped around a common identity – such as the European Union, the ‘Arab world,’ or Central America. However, whether or not a large region really does constitute a distinctive entity from the comparative politics perspective should be decided by the evidence (and nature of the political phenomena under investigation) rather than by an arbitrary methodological fiat. It is on this basis that I have proposed to rescue the category of ‘Latin American politics’ from the oblivion of scientific abstraction.1 This is not a matter of isolating and measuring single variables, but rather of assembling an integrated picture – a ‘gestalt’ profile – of the political practices that characterize a large region, both in the eyes of external observers and in the self-understanding of the societies involved. I refer to this as a ‘configurative’ approach. It is not arbitrary. It can be compared with the cognitive processes by which we build up a composite picture of an individual, a family, or other larger groups. It involves putting together a stylized collection of traits which can be used as a checklist to compare and contrast candidates for inclusion and exclusion from the category in question.

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  41 In the case of Latin American politics, shared traits include a high degree of ambivalence over the observance of formal rules and a higher degree of acceptance of personalist leadership; a strong receptivity to foreign ideas and external models, particularly those in fashion in the ‘global north’; strong concerns over the region’s ‘peripheral’ status in international politics; a preoccupation with conflicts rooted in acute social inequality and exclusion; and a tradition of continuous institutional tinkering and cycles of never-completed reform, among others. Some would add features such as a high propensity for political conflict easily spilling over into violence; a passionate and at times apparently irrational involvement in political contestation (Albert Hirschman referred to a recurrent propensity for defeatism, or fracasomanía). As this list of inclusive traits is extended it progressively differentiates Latin America from other large regions. But critics also have a point, when they object that it can become increasingly stereotypical and open to doubt.2 As an alternative configurative approach one can also proceed from the other end, by exclusion rather than inclusion. Thus, unlike in most of Europe, Japan and the USA, Latin American citizen rights are not more or less reliably enforceable – they have to be campaigned for, they are aspirations rather than entitlements. But unlike in much of Africa, parts of the Middle East, or the caste-ridden parts of South Asia, they are widely accepted aspirations. Latin America is integral to the ‘new world’ and to the ‘far west’, meaning that for all its instabilities and inequities it is also a region of mobility, opportunity, innovative experimentation, and hopeful aspiration. To Nicola Miller’s query ‘when was Latin America modern?’ the best answer was ‘always’ – at least if modernity is conceived containing multiple and always incomplete projects for the future.3 Unlike much of Eurasia during the twentieth century, there are no gulags (even in Cuba, most dissidents are expelled rather than imprisoned) and there is not much exposure to international warfare. Barriers to the ascent of women within the political hierarchy are comparatively low, or have come down surprisingly fast. There is a loosely democratic and participatory system of political representation that extends considerably further than in various other large regions. But in many countries, orderly observance of procedures, timetables, and court rulings (as in North America) is not part of the routine, and a large proportion of the region’s population regards politics with scepticism or distrust; the most important solutions to life’s problems may come from the family or the local support group, from informed solidarity, not official programmes. On either of these ‘configurative’ accounts what constitutes the realm of ‘political’ thought and activity in Latin America is not self-evidently stable and universal across time and space. In a revolutionary situation, or following defeat in war, or external occupation, many social practices that had previously seemed ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’ may be recast as elements of a total political transformation. In post-revolutionary and post-conquest conditions the range of activities that are subject to directly public power-related determination and manipulation may be progressively reduced and restricted as the emerging regime becomes routinized or institutionalized. In constitutional regimes it may be through the articulation of a highly elaborated rule of law, and the stipulation of a judicially enforceable

42  Laurence Whitehead set of fundamental rights (meta-political – constitutional – rules) that the domain of routinely political decision-making (above all through legislation) is limited. In a neo-liberal marketized society citizens may be redefined as consumers, and public policies may be re-conceptualized as service delivery, all in an attempt to further whittle away the scope for what that school deems to be the rent-seeking and arbitrariness inherent in all political resource-allocation. Democraduras may suppress other manifestations of political curiosity on national security and ‘war on terror’ grounds. And very repressive dictatorships can take this to the extreme of viewing all politics outside the official line as fundamentally subversive. As this sketch survey clearly indicates, both the extended and the restricted conceptions of the political in Latin America are to a considerable extent the product of regime types which are themselves inherently impermanent and context specific. Moreover, even the most anti-political configurations are dependent upon regime choices that can themselves, from a comparative external perspective, be viewed as political decisions. Given this general understanding of the variability of the ‘political’ it is only to be expected that any large world region, viewed over a long (say two-century) period of observation, will display evidence of a diversity of political traits and outlooks. If so, the question inevitably arises whether any overall characterization of a large region’s orientation towards the political can be demonstrated, and if so, how the historical and geographical divergences that are bound to emerge can be synthesized into well-grounded configurative evaluations. We now address this issue for Latin America since independence. Although the twenty republics have experimented with the full range of regime types listed above across the course of the past two centuries, they have also displayed two major offsetting tendencies: episodic political instability, and interdependence. Thus no single region-wide model of boundaries to the political has ever been stabilized – not even oligarchic liberalism before 1914 or neo-liberal democratization in the 1990s. Instead, rival models have coexisted, competed and destabilized each other throughout the entire period, and this pattern continues to this day. But such rivalries also have some underlying structural regularities, as can be demonstrated both by the discourses they deploy and by the specific political practices (domestic as well as cross-border) that they invoke. Examples of shared discursive resources range from papal encyclicals to constitutionalist doctrines and enlightenment thinkers, also including poets such as Martí and Neruda, contemporary ‘boom’ novelists, film-makers and even songwriters, from Violeta Parra and Atahualpa Yupanqui to Ruben Blades and Gilberto Gil. Whatever the particular limits to the political being promoted at any particular time in any single jurisdiction, the bulk of these discursive resources remain available to anyone interested in promoting a rival model there. As for the political practices available to the contestants in such controversies, these too cover a wide, but not unlimited, range. There are no fatwas or gulags, but many street protests including road blockades, extensive procedural struggles not only in legislatures but also within universities and trade unions, and intense polemics in the print media and on the radio (but far less on television).

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  43 Again these tend to spill over from one regime to its neighbours, so that nowhere can be truly exempt. For example, the release of Cuban political prisoners following a hunger strike is an event of Latin America-wide significance, not a purely insular matter; similarly for Argentina’s default of 2001, or the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s first fully indigenous President. Thus, for all the political variability and instability of Latin America this large region merits aggregatelevel analysis. One of its large region features is that overall the boundaries of political life remain actively contested and always open to a high level of potential variability. This chapter seeks to make a contribution to this very broad and contested area of large region configurative analysis by focusing mainly on one limited strand of practice: the structure and development of political thought in Latin America since independence. This is a vast enough field of enquiry in its own terms, of course. But my purpose is only tangentially to contribute to the rich and rewarding literature it has spawned. It is the overall shape of political argumentation in the region that concerns me here. This is for several reasons. There is a distinctive set of political practices that sets this region apart from all others. Ideally we need a systematic inventory of these practices together with a detailed account of how they emerge from, and feed back into, the political discourses considered below. Here there is only scope for a highly selective review of some distinctive features of the region’s political thought.4 Even that is only possible because of the collaborative work of several generations of specialist scholars. Any account of the scope of ‘the political’ needs also to bring in some illustrations of how thought influences practice and vice versa, so I do make reference to current work on the politics of exile and on defensorías del pueblo, as examples of distinctively regional political practices. But this would require more extensive empirical elaboration in order to confirm the intuition that Latin America’s approach to ‘the political’ has an internal coherence and a logic of development though iterative argumentation, which gives it a ‘gestalt-like’ character. The key claim must be that it extends across the whole of the region, and is not confined to any one country or section.5 A broad take on ‘political argumentation’ in a large region requires a focus not on the most sophisticated and obscure of political writers, but on the most widely known and consequential of political debates. Some of these may be explicitly regional and native in focus (Mariátegui’s Siete Ensayos, for example) and may therefore seem superficially disconnected from international currents of political thought. But one of the key contentions in this chapter is that even when Latin America’s political argumentation seems most inward-looking it is, in fact, invariably rooted in an extra-regional context, and is usually strongly affected by what are believed to be dominant currents of thought in Europe and North America. Ensuing sections therefore sketch how this approach applies, first, to the nineteenth-century history of Latin American political thought and practice, in particular to republicanism, liberalism and constitutionalism; second, to the search for more authentically local and regional political traditions between the 1930s and the 1980s; third, to the region-wide embrace of conventional

44  Laurence Whitehead contemporary models of political democracy and open market democracies as the Cold War ended; and fourth, to the still ongoing dialogue and tension between these traditions in contemporary regional political argumentation.

Nineteenth-century political innovations The ideas that reshaped forms of government in post-independence Latin America were largely gestated from without. Neither the pre-conquest populations nor imported slave labour from Africa possessed the resources that would have been needed to formulate effective anti-colonial alternatives to the doctrines being generated in North America and Europe under the broad umbrella of the ‘Enlightenment’. The elites who inherited political control when the Iberian empires disintegrated under the impact of the Napoleonic Wars drew their inspirations from a variety of metropolitan sources, with only limited input from home-produced deliberations. Sarmiento described the (admittedly extreme) case of Buenos Aires as follows: Communication with all the European nations was ever, even from the outset, more complete here than in any other part of Spanish America … the native politicians who were as yet without any definite knowledge of political organization, could not be expected to know more than the great men of Europe … France was roused into insurrection by the paradoxes of the Social Contract; Buenos Ayres was similarly roused; Montesquieu designated three powers, and immediately we had three; Benjamin Constant and Bentham annulled power; here they declared it originally null; Say and Smith preached free-trade; ‘commercial–liberty’ were repeated; Buenos Ayres confessed and believed all that the learned world of Europe believed and confessed. Not till after the 1830 revolution in Europe and its incomplete results did the Social Sciences take a new direction and illusions begin to be dispelled.6 As even this text makes clear however, the ideas that circulated so intensely in that port city were far less influential in the hinterland. It could also reasonably be argued that what mostly shaped Latin American politics in the early postindependence period was not doctrine, or even loosely borrowed ideas, but rather the urgent self-preservation needs of scattered and diverse local interests, none of whom had much prior experience of constitutional design, or even of deliberative debate or local self-government. For all that, the significance of the foreign-derived ideas circulating among key elite groups should not be underestimated given that, ready or not, these new nations would have to invent their own forms of government, and that those few well-placed figures in the key centres of political power who could articulate the current stock of ideas provided by western political thought would therefore become the ‘founders’ of new political systems. Thus, looking beyond Buenos Aires, Simon Bolivar began reading Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau at the age of 16, when he first visited Europe in 1799. Lucas Alamán met Benjamin Constant during his stay in Europe (1814–20), and

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  45 transmitted his pouvoir conservateur into the forgotten Mexican Constitution of 1836. Vicente Rocafuerte translated Tom Paine’s Common Sense into Spanish and thereby transmitted anti-monarchism into the region’s constitutional mainstream.7 As a key theorist of constitutional monarchy Benjamin Constant was celebrated as much in Imperial Brazil as in Republican Argentina. Whereas the dominant view of what went wrong with these triangulated liberal and republican ideas has been that they did not match the social circumstances of the subcontinent, José Antonio Rivera has recently made a forceful argument that unresolved tensions and confusions within the imported doctrines were as important a source of their failures.8 From his perspective these were integral components of the Atlantic constitutional experiments of the time, and have been wrongly set aside as marginal to it. Central conceptual issues concerning the nature of representation, the role of the church, the status of rule by the people, or the role of emergency powers, had not been fully clarified by the time the Latin Americans came to apply these ideas. Other core issues, such as the role of political parties, the status of social as opposed to narrowly political rights and the balance between nation-wide rules and local autonomies, were not really confronted during the second half of the century. Thus, they had to engage in trial and error (with many errors) and the lessons that emerged deserve fuller incorporation into the mainstream of western liberal political theory. Recent comparative scholarship that includes southern Europe side by side with Latin America tends to reinforce this argument,9 while also indicating that similar social impediments to early adaptation of liberal ideas and practices to those identified in Latin America could be found in southern Europe. In the view of Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, it was the absence of citizenship, and the associated ethics of legal compliance and civic responsibility, that rendered futile the effort to govern in accordance with written rules. Focusing on nineteenth-century Mexico in particular, he distinguishes between regulatory principles that are supposed to prevail, in accordance with the constitution, the law and declared public morality, and the implicit norms of social life that actually shaped conduct in a manner incompatible with a republic of citizens.10 While his interpretation may be over-generalized it does help to account for the disconnection between aspirational civic virtues and the actual experience of real political behaviour during that century and it contains some vivid illustrations of the recurrence of ‘triumphant vices’.11 Dario Roldán stresses the diversity of liberal experiments undertaken across the region. While slavery, hereditary privilege and monarchy were all eliminated in the course of the nineteenth century, and while secularism and lay education also become generalized, that still left space for a variety of different types of liberal experiment to be undertaken in different parts of the subcontinent. Tulio Halperin has described Argentina as the one republic that was ‘born liberal’, not forged through opposition to powerful conservative counter-currents as in Chile and Mexico, or required to confront indigenous or peasant resistance, as in Mexico or Peru. On the other hand, whereas Mexican liberals responded to the experience of an imposed Emperor by embracing the model of parliamentary sovereignty

46  Laurence Whitehead with a weak executive, their Argentine counterparts opted for a strong presidency and a centralized federation as a reaction to the problems they encountered with post-colonial provincial authorities. In some settings liberals needed to ally with popular movements in order to combat powerful conservative interests, whereas Argentina’s more hegemonic liberalism failed to develop much social sensitivity. It was above all about the construction of a strong republic devoted to upholding the political rights of property-owners. Overall, the debate between centralization and federal decentralization also generated a wide variety of, often unstable, practices.12 Beneath all the apparent diversity, by the end of the nineteenth century it can be argued that what had begun as a set of tentative experiments to introduce liberal constitutional ideas into Latin America had matured (degenerated?) into a commitment to positivism. Most so-called liberal elites privileged order, and sought to administer politics according to scientifically approved principles, not to conduct rash institutional experiments. This anti-political trend in Latin American liberalism was accentuated by the shift of more radical liberals towards socialism and anarchism imported from, and legitimated by, Europe, just as liberalism and positivism, and indeed monarchism and Catholic conservatism, had also been. This brief and superficial survey of a rich and complex literature should at least serve to indicate the vitality and variety of political thought and practice in nineteenth-century Latin America. In terms of a ‘large region’ comparison one would highlight the precocity and prevalence of liberal and republican experimentation, at a time when Europe remained governed by imperial monarchies and much of the rest of the world was subject to colonial rule.13 Admittedly the anti-hereditary, constitutionalist, and separation of powers federalism that developed in Latin American was also – and more authoritatively – developing in the USA over the same period. But it is easy to mark the contrasts that also separate Hispanic from Anglo America. The conventional wisdom is that liberal constitutionalism arrived first, and most successfully, in North America, and that the Latin Americans tried to borrow from there but failed to transfer all that was needed to make it work, and therefore still need to catch up. However, that view overlooks some rather substantial legal details. For example, all the constitutional republics of the western hemisphere had abolished slavery by 1854, Peru and Venezuela being the last; except, of course, the USA. Today the USA alone retains the death penalty, and does not incorporate international humanitarian law into its system of rights. All Latin American presidents are directly elected by universal suffrage, whereas the US President is still indirectly elected. So at least in terms of comparative constitutionalism it would be more accurate to depict two divergent branches, with Latin America displaying common traits that contrast with the USA, and that in some respects may be more advanced.

Latin American politics turns inwards (1930–80) This sub-heading is a gross simplification, but it can serve as an organizing principle for exploring commonalities of political development in this large region during the period when liberal Europe seemed closest to submergence.

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  47 My initial exposure to Latin American politics was prior to the 1982 debt crisis and the beginnings of the current surge of democratization across the continent. From the late 1960s onwards it was standard fare to be told that liberalism had reached its apogee and then been definitively discredited by the 1929 depression.14 Only nostalgic foreign-oriented residues still harboured illusions about binding constitutional restraints, civic-minded individualistic citizens, free and fair electoral processes, and the rotation in office of law-abiding and accountable politicians. The deeper realities of Latin America’s inherently conflictridden, ideologically structured, groups organized and transformative political confrontations had been uncovered by a succession of activist-writers who had shed the fantasies of foreign liberalism and replaced them with locally-grounded holistic interpretations, which seamlessly fused description with prescription and steeled the competing forces for the battles they were bound to engage in. Sometimes it seemed that these fresh insights into the nature of political reality, although distilled from Latin American experience, were in fact general truths that also unmasked the illusions of western political thought in general. (Latin America could thus be seen, not only by Marxist theoreticians such as the young Regis Débray but also by liberation theologians and, indeed, some ideologists of the national security dictatorships, as a privileged region in that universal bourgeois illusions were more readily exposed as false in this setting.) For other theorists (probably the majority, although this was seldom made explicit) all that mattered was to generate an effective and lucid account of what drove local political realities. For them the question whether Latin America was representative or atypical of global options or models was a side issue and an irrelevance. For some, such as Haya de la Torre on ‘Indo-America’, or Vasconcelos in Mexico, and later the theorists of an Andean ‘cosmovisión’, all that mattered was regional authenticity, not universalism. This concern with ‘authenticity’ can also be observed in the radical and guerrilla left, which attempted to legitimate itself by claiming to be directly descended from national foundational republican heroes. Historical revisionism by the revolutionary left, which aims to capture the high ground by appealing to the collectively imagined republican past, is part of the Hispanic tradition in the subcontinent. Examples include the claim by the breakaway Maoist wing of the Peruvian Communist Party to be the authentic vehicle of the ‘luminous path’ to Peruvian socialism that they alleged they had inherited from Mariátegui; Fidel Castro’s exaltation – and Miami Cubans’ counter-appropriation – of José Martí; the celebration of the legacies of Sandino in Nicaragua, of Farabundo Martí in El Salvador, of Alfaro in Ecuador, of Zapata in Mexico and of Bolivar in Venezuela today. The fundamental structure of these ideological reconstructions is symbolic rather than historical, and reflects the need of revolutionary Marxists to embed themselves within local republican iconographies. As must already be apparent, there was a rich stock of pre-existing social and political thought (including sophisticated reflections about liberal and conservative political theory) well before the 1930s.15 But nearly all of this was framed in terms of universal principles, and how to apply them in a particular regional or local

48  Laurence Whitehead context. The inward-looking perspective considered in this section had a different centre of gravity. It took some interpretation of Latin America’s distinctive realities as the foundation, and sought to derive conclusions from within, as it were, rather than from without. Whether such conclusions were also applicable outside the region was often not their principal concern. At least, that is how it is remembered, although on closer inspection the contrast seems somewhat exaggerated. It is certainly the case that insurgent political forces such as Peronism, Vargas, and APRA consciously self-identified as distinctively regional movements, with doctrines rooted in local realities. (Perón even referred to his ‘justicialism’ as a ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism as the Cold War deepened across the rest of the world.) But such movements had also arisen in some parts of the subcontinent even at the height of liberal international ascendancy (such as Battlism in Uruguay before the First World War); and the Mexican version emerged from the 1910 Revolution with back references to various nineteenth-century precursors. For that matter, even in the twenty-first century, at the height of the era of globalization and socalled unipolarity, the Bolivarian transformation of Venezuela has taken on a vigorously regionalist complexion, and won supporters in some neighbouring republics such as Bolivia and Ecuador. Moreover, all of these apparently ‘inward-looking’ repudiations of dominant international orthodoxies were in fact actively engaged in debates over political principles that had some currency outside the region, as well as within. In contrast to the Mahdi in Sudan or the Boxer rebellion, all these movements were deeply rooted in the traditions of western political thought. They merely sought to affirm local variants of that tradition as a corrective to what was felt to be a non-inclusive and locally inauthentic mainstream. This meant that the theorists associated with such movements were keen to innovate within the western canon, and aspired to establish their pedigrees and credentials outside the region, as well as within their own country.16 José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, first published in Lima in 1928, provides a revealing illustration. His book was not just an intellectual exercise. It was received as a call-to-arms (in the same year he founded the Peruvian Socialist Party, committed to Marxist-Leninist ideas as he then understood them, and became its first Secretary-General). He also founded the CGTP, which subsequently became Peru’s overarching labour confederation. He died prematurely in 1930, and thus became sanctified as the father of the Peruvian left. Although raised in poverty, hardship and ill-health, he was descended from an eminent forebear of the independence period, who had propagated Rousseau’s ‘social contract’ and helped write Peru’s first liberal constitution. Mariátegui was not unique.17 Other Latin American thinkers in the Mariátegui tradition might include José Vasconcelos, who was Mexico’s Education Minister in 1920–3 and a hugely influential promoter of nationalistic education, and the muralists; Pablo Neruda, famous for his poetry, but also a leading member of the Chilean Communist Party, whose ‘Canto General’ could be classified as the archetypical regionalist manifesto; Gabriel García Márquez; Mario Vargas Llosa,

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  49 Nobel Laureate, but also defeated candidate in the Peruvian presidential election of 1990, and now a well-known scourge of ‘infantile leftism’ in Latin America; and Brazil’s Paulo Freire. The ‘inward’ turn was as much cultural – reaching out to the masses and embracing their preoccupations – as political, and international celebrity and recognition in mainstream western cultural circuits was a recurrent feature in the curricula of such regionalist political innovators. As a radical troublemaker with a distinguished surname, at the age of twentyfour Mariátegui was a precursor to all that. He was exiled to Italy (from 1919 to 1923) where he encountered Croce and D’Annunzio, among others. He also visited Gorky and Sorel during his years in Europe, and reported on the creation of the Italian Communist Party and the rise of fascism. Thus, his prologue to the famous Seven Essays acknowledges that ‘there is no shortage of those who suppose me to be “un europeizante” alien from the facts and issues of my country’. However, his materialist analysis of the sources of Peruvian backwardness, and his identification of the emerging social forces whose mission would be to overcome it, captured the imagination of subsequent generations and helped structure the next half-century of Peruvian political life. And yet this classic of national self-discovery was peppered with comparative observations, such as the similarities linking Peruvian ‘indigenist’ literature with the nineteenth-century Russian mujik equivalents. Many of the references are to Latin America-wide stirrings of self-assertion, from the ‘cosmic race’ promoted by Vasconcelos in Mexico to the porteño culture of Borges. However, in political terms perhaps the most fundamental comparison is with the two Spains. For Mariátegui there is a backward-looking medieval Spain that never had any sympathy for Latin American aspirations. But there is also the progressivist current in the Spanish tradition, outward-looking and universal, and therefore a source of inspiration. The Spanish civil war pitted these opposing tendencies against each other in a way that profoundly re-shaped the terms of debate in Latin America. Peronism can be understood at least in part as an effort to divert Argentina from the path followed by Spain. Allende’s Chile was also understood as something of a reenactment of the drama of the Spanish Republic, with Pinochet assuming the role of the Caudillo. The Cuban Revolution was to a significant extent a delayed ‘Republican’ victory. And, of course, the democratization of Spain under moderate auspices after the death of Franco played a crucial role in alerting Latin American opinion-makers to the renewed possibilities of constitutional compromise, as Cold War polarization subsided. Prior to the re-emergence of a broad – if shallow – region-wide consensus on constitutional democracy, followed by moves towards open liberalism after the end of the Cold War, most political analysis of Latin America was preoccupied with what were considered area-specific deviations from presumed international norms. Violence (guerrilla wars, human rights violations, military coups) received priority attention, together with other manifestations of disorder (such as general strikes, zero sum distributive conflicts around inflation and devaluation, insecure property rights and states of emergency). Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s these came to seem staples of a distinctively Latin American political style, in the 1990s

50  Laurence Whitehead it was increasingly believed that such manifestations of political dysfunctionality were successfully being overcome. From the perspective of 2010, however, it may be more realistic to conclude that neither the earlier stereotype of widespread disorder nor the subsequent image of liberal convergence fully reflected the entire picture, which remains both ‘kaleidoscopic’,18 and subject to abrupt mood changes. I have reviewed various ‘configurative’ attempts to capture the underlying dynamics involved, and set out a synthesis of my own.19 Rather than repeat that here, it may serve the purposes of this section to recall the contribution of Alain Touraine, a leading French political sociologist who attempted to sum up his assessment of underlying distinctive features of the region’s politics shortly before the end of the Cold War. As he notes, ‘modes of social and political action in Latin America are almost never dominated by a single principle’ given the tensions between free market and external dependence, the difficulty of class politics in a region with less of a working class than a mass of excluded poor people and a middle class that appeals to broadening political participation, and the absence of cultural, religious and ideological homogeneity. In this context, ‘the great Latin American temptation has always been populism’.20 In contrast to the errors of both modernization theory and dependency theory, Touraine insisted that collective action in Latin America has its own internally coherent characteristics, three of which he underlines: subordination of social action to state intervention; the combination of a defence of economic interests with a struggle against external domination and a drive towards national integration in all political action; and the disarticulation of economic action, political organization and ideology.21 In his view, the mixed features of collective action made it very fragile, ‘as though the passions can produce brief and violent dramas more easily than long term organized action’.22 Some of this is no doubt too loose and over-generalized, and such sweeping claims inevitably obscure as much as they highlight. Nevertheless they serve as an approximation to the distinctiveness of Latin American politics in the pre-liberalization period. To what extent have they since been superseded by post-crisis ‘normalization’ and convergence around liberal democratic open market standards?

Democratization after the Cold War: situating Latin America comparatively Between 1978 and 1990 the whole of South America embraced conventional liberal democratic forms of government, coupled with more stable and open markets and reduced state interventionism. In other words, even before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall these countries converged on what was soon to become the standard orthodoxy of 1990s ‘globalization’. They were precocious, and they moved in relative harmony. By contrast, in other parts of the world similar tendencies began later and proceeded more fitfully. Even in Mexico and Central America the progression was delayed until after 1990, and of course in Cuba it has still not occurred. But, by large-region standards, Latin America was

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  51 in the vanguard of a de-radicalizing version of democratization (in contrast with South Africa or post-Soviet east-central Europe, for instance, which involved much larger redistributions of power). In fact, the Latin American shift was in many respects a return to earlier endeavours: a re-democratization after authoritarian interruptions, another attempt to give long-standing institutions of liberal constitutionalism more substance. But this time, in contrast to earlier episodes, the shift towards a more impersonal, inclusive and rights-based system of politics was more comprehensive and durable. Even so, twenty years later the outcome is no ‘end of regional political history’.23 Although Latin America has been strongly engaged with a powerful and international current of political reform it continues to operate according to locally distinctive political styles and dynamics.24 This section takes the ‘convergent’ aspects of regional democratization as given, and focuses its attention instead on some key shared features of political differentiation separating it from other large regions. For a start, democratization confirmed the strength of interaction effects across the whole of the subcontinent. In the western hemisphere, regime change in one country greatly increases the pressure on the others, in contrast to South Africa, which had limited influence over the rest of its region; or to Turkey, which does not transmit its reforms to its neighbours. Indeed, regional institutions such as the OAS and the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights have acquired a degree of external democratic leverage well in excess of that evident in most other large regions – other than the far more integrated European Union. It does not make sense to study the politics of any one Latin American country in isolation from this broader context. Another common feature well illustrated by democratization is the importance of drivers of change ‘from above and without’.25 Just as fascism and communism flourished most in Latin America when they were on the upsurge in Europe, so also regional opinion leaders became more insistent advocates for democracy at home as they observed its rise overseas. Of course this is not a pattern unique to one region, but it is particularly evident in a ‘new world’ setting where the dominant strata are distinctively open to elite immigration, and where fashionable modernism often trumps the claims of fealty to ancient traditions. But politics is not just about elite orientations, and twentieth-century Latin American politics has been strongly characterized by demands for social mobility and the incorporation of previously excluded sectors in national life. Democratization is largely about the terms of such opening up of political arenas to (substantially) all comers. In Latin America, as we have seen, promises of popular sovereignty have been made for almost two centuries, although delivery fell far short of paper entitlements. Over time, a larger and more diverse range of social actors did acquire stakes in the political system, but this was selective, uneven and subject to periodic reversal. The turn towards authoritarian rule in the 1960s and 1970s was experienced by major groupings as a brutal withdrawal of rights they were just beginning to exercise. In this setting democratization was not a matter of suddenly extending universal suffrage to a long disenfranchised majority, as in South Africa. Nor

52  Laurence Whitehead was it an anticipatory manoeuvre to pre-empt future pressures from below, as in some Asian authoritarian regimes. It was a long overdue and much demanded restoration of rights that had been intermittently honoured in the breach. From the standpoint of the mass of the citizenry, therefore, experience dictated suspicion. How long will this last? Will it really apply to us this time? This does not reflect the way democracy was experienced in post-war Japan, West Germany, or in other western settings, but it is a recurrent issue in Latin America, given the volatility and variability of political rights in the region.26 For the architects of these new regimes, therefore, a key problem has been how to broaden, deepen, and routinize the delivery of universal rights in such a manner as to overcome this demotic scepticism/resistance, and to convince popular political forces that even in the absence of mobilization and agitation the new rules can be trusted to operate impartially and reliably. The distinctive style of democratic politics in contemporary Latin America, to a considerable extent, can be traced back to this specific configuration of collective attitudes and memories, which are, of course, underpinned by the continuing severe social inequalities and fragmentations that still disfigure nearly all of these societies. Let us illustrate with the example of exile the preceding very broad interpretative suggestions about the socio-historical context of regionally distinctive political behaviour. The Politics of Exile in Latin America27 offers a rich comparative analysis of a regionally distinctive pattern of political career trajectories across the entire subcontinent over two centuries, which traces this method of controlling dissidence back to the colonial period. With regard to presidential exile, the authors identify: the ubiquity of the phenomenon throughout the two first centuries of inde­ pendent Latin-American states. Institutional exclusion has been a recurrent experience for rising politicians and presidents … Presidents and future incumbents have suffered ostracism as the result of the limited and exclusionary character of most Latin-American politics, regardless of formal provisions.28 Significantly overall, as we compared the nineteenth-century rates of post-presidential exile to the twentieth-century levels, we do not see a significant change, despite the higher institutionalization of the political system and of the presidential role. Up to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, presidents have fled their countries, or have been exiled, even under democracy.29 Perhaps this will now change, but so far thirty years of democratization have yet to break this deep-rooted political tradition. Beyond the top leadership level, political exile blurs into other types of more or less forced out-migration which also strongly affect patterns of political behaviour throughout this large region. As the authors put it

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  53 some of the contemporary democracies still generate exile. In Latin America the link between democracy and inclusion has been compounded by ethnic, socio-economic, religious, ideological, and other migratory factors. The consideration of this is central if these polities, which are still strongly factionalist and contain strong tendencies towards polarization even under democratic rule, are to overcome situations such as those that produced political exile; namely, situations in which individuals and groups feel menaced enough to leave the country as a result of the radicalization of the political rhetoric, discourse, and decisions of those in power.30 A related pattern of political behaviour that remains strongly embedded in the traditions of the region, even after three decades of democratization, is the propensity for wholesale and continuous manipulation of the rules structuring political competition in such a way as to benefit those taking the decisions (the ‘ins’). Of course some of this takes place everywhere, but the frenetic and institutionally destabilizing character of this practice is much accentuated in Latin America. One simple indicator of this is to consider the frequency with which politicians elected to a public office for a predetermined fixed tenure in fact depart either before or after the specified cut-off date. A recent study of presidential breakdown in Latin America makes the point that under democracy it is now normal for these to occur without signifying any overall regime breakdown. However, the extra- institutional factors causing presidents to resign, flee, or face impeachment are sufficiently powerful and recurrent to discredit any suggestion that there is only one ‘game in town, particularly in those countries where presidential breakdown is most common’.31 The same considerations apply with equal force to the high incidence of ‘presidential extensions’. Here an incumbent elected for, let us say, a single non-renewable four-year term, throws his weight behind an amendment either to lengthen the term, or to permit a second consecutive election, with the explicit intention of thereby evading his own termination date.32 Constitutional theory is open to politicians arguing in favour of rule changes to improve the functioning of the system. But there is a sharp distinction between a change that benefits the system and one that is designed to favour the current incumbent. In the Latin American political tradition such impersonal constitutional reasoning lacks traction. Advocates of reform feel that they cannot afford to jeopardize their immediate priorities on behalf of a hypothetical longterm principle. To argue otherwise would typically be dismissed by most of their backers as ‘angelism’. I regard this as an understandable reflection of longstanding collective regional experience: rules are not expected to become timeless and sacrosanct; no one power contender can safely practice self-denial when rivals can be relied on to take advantage; if you want durable compliance with agreed procedures you need to build in a considerable margin of flexibility and discretionality. Whereas, for example, modern German constitutionalism (and its EU extension) is rigid and strictly rule-based, and US constitutionalism delegates much of the rule modification to a Supreme Court that is ostensibly neutral, south

54  Laurence Whitehead of the Rio Grande the distinction between a political actor and an adjudicator has always been shifting and blurred. A third illustration of this looseness of fit between written rules and lived political practices is provided by the region’s current experiments with defensorías del pueblo.33 If presidents and top politicians are not tightly constrained by the formal rules governing their terms of office, then still less can ordinary citizens have confidence that their rights and obligations will be reliably available to them. The resulting perception of unfulfilled civic promises can give rise to disaffection, protest, and even non-cooperation with public authorities viewed as untrustworthy or abusive. A widespread device to address these concerns has been the creation of defensorías, publicly constituted but independent bodies charged with taking up citizen grievances and seeking redress from delinquent government offices. But in Latin America, in contrast to Europe where the institutional innovation of the ombudsman originated, the defensorías can acquire extraordinarily wide mandates, and may intervene in high-profile, and perhaps highly sensitive, political controversies. The office of the defensor has the potential to generate a large amount of political capital, and may also attract powerful enemies as well as committed supporters. In a few cases it has even served as a trampoline to top political office. The range of citizen hopes and expectations that can in principle be channelled through this agency is far greater than in more settled and institutionally structured political systems. Managing such a responsibility inevitably involves a high degree of political discretionality, and great presentational skills. This is another symptom of the distinctive political style that typifies most of this large region. Where rights are ‘aspirations’ rather than ‘entitlements’, and where liberal constitutional rhetoric is prevalent, but not collectively very believable, it is hardly surprising if a public institution tasked with bridging those gulfs may tend to over-reach its original functions and become charged with ‘populist’ overtones. Nor, therefore, should official efforts to tame or ‘recapture’ such an entity be unexpected. This chapter has emphasized commonalities of political style and practice across the subcontinent since re-democratization. But most in-region comparative research is concerned with tracking and explaining variations, not resemblances. Most republics fiddle neurotically with their constitutions; but some are more frenetic than others. Most have signed on to the fashion for defensorías. Populist responses to citizen dissatisfactions take diverse forms, and in some cases also there is no response. The features sketched here are therefore tendency statements, allowing much leeway for differentiated reactions from country to country and from time to time. My claim would be that these varied patterns are directed towards managing a common set of political concerns, rather than that they necessarily lead to uniformity of outcomes. At present the region seems to display less political convergence than was the case a decade ago. To some extent this may reflect the greater diversity of external political influences and models from which competing local elites may draw. But it also expresses an underlying disappointment with the results of the ‘one size fits all’ political reforms of the 1990s. Whereas a majority of republics, including the most

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  55 important two, Brazil and Mexico, are still attempting to build on, and incrementally modify, the de-radicalized versions of democratization inherited from that period, a significant minority have embraced a much more revisionist approach. This shift is as much about relations with the global market and to the USA, as about domestic political structures, but for our purposes it is the latter aspect that requires discussion here. Some Andean republics have recently ‘re-founded’ their constitutions according to what they consider decolonizing and participatory principles, in opposition to the elite-dominated and anti-national models embraced by the majority of their neighbours. Only time will tell how far this divergence may grow, and how well these ‘alternative Bolivarian’ experiments will perform compared with their competitors. The important point here is to note that whatever the outcome of these rivalries, the debate is of region-wide significance. Thus, for example, if Peru is currently in the vanguard of resistance to what its government regards as pernicious influences emanating from Caracas, the intensity of its reactions reflects an awareness that chavismo has a potentially powerful appeal to many of its own people. Reciprocally, Caracas is aware that the opposition in Lima still has considerable support in Venezuela. And this Peru–Venezuela tussle is just one dimension of a much more widespread competition for allegiance and leadership, the ultimate repercussions of which could be continental.

Family resemblances within a large and diverse regional political community ‘Politics’ is a lively, distinctive and contested domain in Latin America. Elsewhere I have highlighted one doctrinal strand that I believe has deeper roots in this part of the world than in many others.34 Latin America’s liberalisms (note the plural) can be summed up with five Ps: precocious, prevalent, precarious, peripheral and deeply persistent. That interpretation is tenable provided one adopts a sufficiently broad and encompassing view of what the liberal tradition can include, and provided popular aspirations and local practices are given as much attention as elaborated doctrines. To my mind, what anchors these traditions is the well-developed and highly organized structure of a series of liberal professions, including jurists, journalists, liberal academics (even economists).35 The varieties of liberalism arise partly from the competing agendas and failures of coordination between these corporate interests and the now governing civilian political class. Whereas in Anglo-Saxon democracies there is a considerable amount of specialization and compartmentalization between these liberal professions and the political class, in Latin America the two domains are much more closely interpenetrated. Moreover, language, history, shared educational and cultural traditions, mutual support across national boundaries all serve to knit these loose confederations into a region-wide, as opposed to inwardly national, political community. However, a configurative portrayal of the role of the ‘political’ in Latin America needs to bring in further distinctive common features beyond the interplay of the liberal professions. There is something restless and unstable about the region’s overall orientation to politics. Although some of the bitter confrontations and

56  Laurence Whitehead cruel outcomes of past struggles for power are now fading from view, their legacies remain latent and periodic ‘irruptions of memory’ are still to be expected. Ethnic, regional, religious and class differences retain the potential to mobilize large and impassioned constituencies, and while strictly ideological divisions are no longer so salient, identity politics remains capable of developing a similarly sharp edge. A better educated and more cosmopolitan younger generation of middle-class consumers may now be more disposed to live within established institutional constraints, but distrust of formal structures and an inclination towards direct action still characterize the outlook of substantial popular sectors in many countries. Restlessness can also be detected among a range of opinion-formers and leadership strata, in part reflecting shifts in the international balance of power and associated external sources of inspiration and opportunity. So long as the USA was seen as truly the sole leader, and the only available reference point for emulation, this source of unrest was contained. But that hegemony proved to be brief, and the region now confronts the question of alternative models once again. As so often in the past, contemporary Latin America faces a renewed need to rediscover – or redefine – itself, to stabilize its location in the international hierarchy. As before, this predicament is unsettling and a source of friction between competing projects and approaches. By and large the answers are predictable. In broad terms Latin America will remain a somewhat peripheral region within the broadly western liberal family of nations; but that leaves scope for a good deal of political disagreement and jostling for advantage. The region is not in a position to assume full international leadership responsibilities – as China or even India might do – but it is also too weighty to accept a marginal and subordinate status, as may perhaps be the case for sub-Saharan Africa, for example. Latin American political elites may be willing to accept foreign help and advice, and increasingly also to pool experience from within their own region, but they also expect their voices to be respectfully heard in world fora. Obviously they are not alone in finding that their contributions are not fully appreciated, but the Latin American family of nations is a large and rather fractious peripheral grouping. That may be a further reflection of the underlying political style depicted throughout this chapter – an expressive, argumentative and somewhat unstable manner of operation, which combines a substantial degree of freedom and diversity with sometimes excessive voluntarism and insufficient strategic discipline. All this could be seen as reflecting the ‘five Ps’ of this region’s many variants of liberalism.

Notes 1 Latin America: A New Interpretation (London: Palgrave, second edition, 2009). 2 For example, whenever I hear the oft-repeated claims that Latin America has the highest rate of social inequality and/or the worst homicide levels in the world, I question the comparability of the data. Uruguay is very Latin American, but has

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  57 European levels of inequality; and high homicide rates much reflect the existence of a more or less reliable nationwide system for reporting and accounting for violent deaths. 3 Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart (eds), When Was Latin America Modern? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The ‘always’ answer expresses the notion that the New World as a whole, and post-independence Latin America in particular, both meet Reinhart Koselleck’s key criteria for modernity, i.e. a new quality of time produced by the widened gap between past experience embodied in traditions and belief in the transforming quality of the future. R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 4 This distinctiveness can be illustrated indirectly by contrast with, for example, Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Despite its title, this collection is actually only concerned with European political thought, bringing out the sharp divisions separating English, French, German, Italian and other national priorities and presuppositions. Latin America’s distinctiveness emerges in three domains: its exclusion from this canon; its greater transnational permeability; and its closer engagement with regional political realities. 5 Everyone interested in Latin American politics is aware that Fidel Castro made a famous speech ‘History will absolve me’ in 1956, and whether or not they have any sympathy with the Cuban Revolution that is part of their repertoire in the same way that US politics is geared to the Federalist Papers, or, if that example seems slanted, Sarmiento’s Facundo and Cardoso’s ‘dependency theory’ are equally widespread common property. Obviously, all of these also have resonances outside Latin America, which like any large region also transmits symbolic messages to the world as a whole, but their global significance is heavily dependent on their regional salience. 6 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 115–116, originally published in Chile in 1845. See also Frank Safford, ‘Politics, Ideology and Society in Post-Independence Spanish America’ in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America. Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 367–368. 7 These anecdotes are extracted from the much more thorough and sophisticated analysis to be found in Jose Antonio Aguilar and Rafael Rojas (eds) El republicanismo en hispanoamérica: ensayos de historia intelecual y política (Mexico City: CIDE, 2002), pp. 268ff on Bolivar, and pp. 318ff on Alamán and Rocafuerte. See also Roberto Gargarella, Los fundamentos legales de la desigualdad: El constitucionalismo en América (1776–1860) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005). 8 José Antonio Rivera, En pos de la quimera: reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional Atlántico (Mexico City: CIDE, 2000). 9 Marcela García Sebastini and Fernando del Rey Reguillo (eds), Los desafiós de la libertad: transformación y crisis del liberalismo en Europa y América Latina (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2008), particularly chapter 2. 10 Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, Ciudadanos imaginarios: memorial de los afanes y desventuras de la virtud y apologia del vicio triunfante en la república mexicana (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1992). 11 For a close insight into the vagaries of political debate in Mexico City over the appropriate form of government, at a particularly acute moment of national doubt and crisis (after the US invasion) see Eliás José Palti, La política del disenso: la ‘polémica en torno al monarquismo’ (Mexico 1848–1850) …. Y las aporías del liberalismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economía, 1998). 12 Dario Roldán in Sebastiani et al., pp. 65–67. 13 For more depth and follow through see Marcello Carmagnani, El otro occidente: América Latina desde la invasión europea hasta la globalización (Mexico City:

58  Laurence Whitehead Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), especially on the period between 1880 and 1929; and Eduardo Devés Valdéz, El pensamiento latinoamericano en el siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos (3 volumes), 2000, 2003 and 2004), whose extensive survey of twentieth-century Latin American thought (not solely political), highlights the distinctiveness and vitality of regional debates. 14 At least in the case of Mexico it can be credibly asserted that liberalism – as a centrally-directed project or set of ideas – had been eclipsed much sooner, say with the assassination of Madero in 1912. Despite some superficial liberal features, the 1917 Constitution in fact enthroned a quite illiberal and eclectic alternative – ‘revolutionary nationalism.’ 15 Actually well before Independence as well. See David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (1492–1867) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 16 The parochial roots of many Latin American political movements, from the ‘Montoneros’ of early nineteenth-century provincial Argentina onwards, must certainly be given due consideration. But, almost invariably, whenever a locally grounded political movement reaches the scale that requires a doctrine, extraregional credentials come into play. On the right, monarchists always needed a European dynasty to provide leadership and legitimacy; clericals turned to the Vatican, and today’s evangelicals tend to invite guidance from California. On the left, the inspiration might be anarchist, Trotskyist or just Bolshevik. Even the most inward-looking and anti-cosmopolitan of left extremists around comrade president Abimael Guzmán described themselves as Maoists. Thus virtually all Latin America’s articulated political ideas are international rather than purely regional in character. 17 For an instructive comparison between the leading political thinkers of Peru and Venezuela in the 1920s see Omar Astorga ‘Tensiones y Escisiones; El Ensayismo Poliitico de Laureano Valenillla Lanz, Jose Carlos Mariategui y Octavio Paz’ in Pensar Iberoamerica (eds Antonio Hermosa Andujar and Samuel Schmidt) (Prometeo Libros, Buenos Aires, 2009), pp. 234/263. Astorga contrasts the authoritarian positivism of the Venezuelan with the communitarian Marxism of the Peruvian, but he also brings out the resemblances. Both were interrogating their national histories in the light of the respective European social theories they had mastered. So both struggled to reconcile supposedly universal theory with intractable regional deviations, and both plunged from analysis into direct political involvement with strikingly powerful results. Octavio Paz comes later, but displays parallel characteristics in Mexico. 18 Laurence Whitehead ‘Alternative Models of Democracy in Latin America,’ The Brown Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 17, Issue 1, Fall/Winter 2010. 19 Latin America: A New Interpretation. 20 Alain Touraine, La parole et le sang: politíque et societé en Amérique Latine. (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1988), p. 12. See also Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), particularly the chapter on ‘el pueblo.’ 21 Ibid., p. 157. 22 Ibid., p. 158. 23 To the contrary, Mainwaring and Scully round up their latest regional overview by identifying a ‘combination of glaring deficiencies in achieving effective democratic governance’ which makes ‘the ongoing persistence of competitive regimes something of a puzzle to them.’ In no other region and at no other time have competitive regimes survived so long as they did in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s in the face of grinding poverty and poor government performance. They attribute these failings mainly to weak states, gross inequalities and the ambivalence toward democracy of some powerful political actors. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully (eds), Democratic Governance in Latin America (Stanford, CA: University Press 2009), pp. 368–369. However John A. Booth and Mitchell A. Seligson, using contemporary survey research findings from an overlapping but distinct grouping of Latin American

Latin American approaches to‘the political’  59 republics, believe they have solved this ‘legitimacy puzzle’: ‘political discontents stay in the democratic game and play harder to advance their goals.’ The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Political Support and Democracy in Eight Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 261. 24 See for example Yves Dezalay and Bryan G. Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists and the Contest to Transform Latin American States (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002). 25 Laurence Whitehead, Latin America: A New Interpretation. 26 Laurence Whitehead, ‘Variabilidad en la aplicación de derechos: una perspectiva comparada’ in United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Contribuciones al debate II: estado, democracia y ciudadanía en América Latina (Lima, Peru: Myrza Editorial, 2007). 27 Mario Sznadjer and Luis Roniger, The Politics of Exile in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 28 Ibid., p. 285. 29 Ibid., pp. 275–276. 30 Ibid., p. 322. 31 Mariana Llanos and Leiv Marsteintredet (eds), Presidential Breakdowns in Latin America: Causes and Outcomes of Executive Instability in Developing Democracies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). As pointed out by Mustapic in that volume, ‘of the 18 Latin American presidential regimes that qualify as democracies or semidemocracies, eight (or 44 percent) experienced early presidential salidas, be it through resignation or ousting of the president. As regards the total of 15 cases [examined], 66 percent (10 cases) took place in only three countries: Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador.’ Ana María Mustapic, ‘Presidentialism and Early Exits: The Role of Congress,’ in Mariana Llanos and Liev Marsteintredet (eds), Presidential Breakdowns in Latin America, ibid. 32 Not only Presidents Fujimori and Menem, but also the more highly rated President Cardoso, pursued this route in the 1990s, a precedent that has since been widely followed, and indeed enlarged upon, not only by such radical figures as Chavez, Correa, and Morales, but also by Washington-approved Uribe and Fernández. 33 Cf. Thomas Pegram, The Global Diffusion of National Human Rights Institutions and their Political Impact in Latin America (Oxford University, D.Phil thesis in Politics, 2010), which contains extensive material on the large region specificity of Latin America’s Defensorías. 34 Timothy Garton Ash et al., ‘Liberalisms in East and West,’ Medical Informatics Unit, University of Oxford, 2010, pp. 19–28. 35 See, for example, Dezalay and Garth, op.cit., or more generally Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2009, 2010). The first volume (2009) is edited by Jorge Myers, and the second (2010) by Carlos Altamirano.

3 Communism, Confucianism, and charisma The political in modern China Rana Mitter

After all, what does Communism mean? … First, taking good food and not merely eating one’s fill. At each meal, one enjoys a meat diet, eating chicken, pork, fish or eggs … delicacies like monkey brains, swallows’ nests, and white fungi are served to each according to his needs … Tan Zhenlin, Chinese Minister of Agriculture, at the start of the Great Leap Forward in 19581

The binarized nature of Chinese politics through much of the early twentieth century meant that the struggle between the Nationalists and Communists (CCP), a story told essentially as the clash of rival ideologies which dominated the historical terrain, has become the accepted metanarrative of Chinese history in the twentieth century. Of course, there is a counter-argument that the metanarrative has been hijacked by two actors who agree more than they disagree: two differing versions of Enlightenment modernity, one of which cloaked itself in a thin veneer of supposedly Confucian values late in its life, but both of which were essentially secular, centralizing, and embraced some idea of ‘modernity’ as a teleological goal for China’s development. In addition, the story of twentieth-century Chinese politics has been written, particularly in retrospect, as the collapse of the ‘traditional’ Confucian society and the imperialism of the western (and Japanese) powers, in the face of an ultimately victorious nationalist modernization, most successfully under CCP rule. The grand narrative of Chinese modernization through radicalization of the peasantry and the establishment of a Chinese state that, in Mao’s words, ‘stood up’ has been a staple of liberation discourse in the global south for decades, even at a time when the Maoist economy has long since disappeared under corporatist marketization. Yet the certainties that seem to shape the notion of what ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ have been in modern China looked much less solid a century ago, when the debates that shaped the idea of what political modernity meant in China were under way. The term politics itself (zhengzhi), imported via Japan, is a late nineteenth-century neologism (‘ordering governance’) that expressed the need to think about the ‘political’, with its implication of parties, mass involvement, and global comparators, in a different way from the old statecraft of the premodern era, when Chinese norms spread through what Joshua Fogel has termed the

Communism, Confucianism, and charisma  61 ‘Sinosphere’.2 This chapter will use two thinkers as a focus for the wider question that animated Chinese politics in the past century: how should China cope with the breakdown of the premodern society that had shaped China for two millennia, and find a replacement that would be both Chinese and modern? It looks at the writing of two figures: the first, Mao Zedong, is well known; the second, Zou Taofen, less so, although his reputation has been rising again in China in recent years. Their writings in the crucial ‘May Fourth’ or ‘New Culture’ period from the 1910s to the 1920s provide an important microcosm of how the political was rethought in a variety of modes. These conflicts have not disappeared in the later part of the century, and are re-emerging in various forms today.

The political Confucian in the modern world One person, Zou Taofen (1895–1944) expresses much of the turmoil over the nature of the political in early twentieth-century China. He is a particularly interesting figure because his pre-1930s political writing was so heavily marked by a hybrid of indigenous and imported ideas – Mencian/Confucian, Social Darwinist, Deweyan liberal – but he was, unlike his contemporaries, not yet heavily marked by the intellectual assumptions of Marxism. Zou was a figure at the heart of the modern transformation of China. He was one of the single most influential journalists in the mass-market press which emerged in the 1920s, and was in large part responsible for fuelling popular sentiment for resistance to Japan in the wake of the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s. Zou would, after 1931, take a position highly sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But his ideological journey was lengthy. Zou’s period of prominence came during the New Culture or May Fourth Movement of the 1910s and 1920s, also known as the ‘Chinese Renaissance’. His thinking during that period is an example of how a Chinese thinker dealt with the modern political concepts such as nation and state, and the international system. In addition, Zou provides useful insight into the ways in which strands of Confucian thought and varieties of modernity combined. Although the increasing domination of Marxism in the 1930s halted the development of concepts based primarily on indigenous repertoires of political thought, Zou’s attempts show indications of an alternative path. This includes, for instance, an explicit link between the personal behaviour of the individual (xiushen, or ‘cultivating the person’) and the fate of both the state and the nation (as separately identified entities) in their encounter with other states and nations. Zou, unlike some of his New Culture colleagues, did not regard Confucian values purely as an oppressive, patriarchal straitjacket; instead, he put forward its humanistic values as ones of particular value to China at a national/state level as well as a personal one. To put it at its most simple, if China could not compete in terms of military power, it should exercise its cultural power of superior virtue (daode), an idea which has echoes in Mencius, among others. In this view, politics, morality and virtue were linked in a very traditional way. Zou’s willingness to engage with premodern moral and political values was in large part because of one particular influence: the nationalist revolutionary leader Sun Yatsen. Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary credentials were in many ways highly

62  Rana Mitter anti-traditional, and his central programme of the Three People’s Principles of ‘democracy, socialism, and nationalism’ was largely western in inspiration. He drew important parts of his support, however, from premodern constituencies, such as the heterodox secret societies, and his writing sought to find a synthesis between the values of the past and the present. In one of his most important works, his 1924 speeches on the Three People’s Principles, Sun declared: If in the past our people have survived despite the fall of the state [to foreign conquerors], and not only survived themselves but have been able to assimilate these foreign conquerors, it is because of the high level of our innate morality. Therefore, if we go to the root of the matter, besides arousing a sense of national solidarity uniting all our people, we must recover and restore our characteristic, traditional morality.3 In explaining this morality, Sun had advocated the importance of zhongxiao ren’ai, concepts which drew on Confucian–Mencian values of how to order society. Versions of these concepts had been the subject of dispute among the earliest philosophers. The hierarchical structure of obligation which underpinned the Confucian worldview had nonetheless become dominant over the centuries, all the way up to the modern era.4 Thus in the early twentieth century, Sun could stress the importance of zhongxiao [loyalty and filial piety], in which the latter quality (devotion to family elders) was made cognate with the former (obligation to the ruler). Yet Zou’s response to the three crises he mentioned was not couched in terms of the anti-Confucian ‘totalistic anti-traditionalism’ which Lin Yusheng ascribes to Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, and other radical luminaries of the May Fourth era. Shenghuo saw Zou continue with his theme of how the Chinese nation should be restored. ‘If we want to restore our nation’s position,’ he wrote, ‘we must restore our innate morality [daode], knowledge, and ability, at the same time as studying the specialized abilities of Europe and America.’ What did Zou mean by this combination? He wrote: The most important part of China’s innate morality is zhongxiao, xinyi, ren’ai and heping [loyalty and filiality, trust and righteousness, benevolent love, peace and stability]. Some people have misunderstood, and considered that whereas in the monarchical era, there was loyalty, now in the republican era there is no loyalty. But why isn’t loyalty to the country [guo] loyalty? In fact, with regard to these several good moralities, we should not only preserve them, but also develop and expand them, and solidify our national base. Aside from our innate morality, there is also our innate wisdom [zhishi]. We ought to recover this, and honestly and sincerely cultivate [xiushen] principles of ordering the family and regulating the country. This is the most precious item of the innate wisdom of China.5 The conceptual repertoire here is clearly Confucian–Mencian and is a creative attempt to use that repertoire in the service of the modern republican state. The

Communism, Confucianism, and charisma  63 explicit cognate links between the hierarchy in the family and that in the state, which at first glance seem hard to transfer to the rational bureaucracy of the modern state, were emphasized by Zou (and Sun before him) rather than rejected, as radical May Fourth thinkers would have done. Since the source of legitimacy in imperial China was the emperor, it had been appropriate to display loyalty toward him; now that the republican state defined its legitimacy as stemming from the people who constituted the nation, it was appropriate simply to transfer that loyalty. This argument also provided a way for the individual to be granted agency in the face of an impersonal, modern state. There was a problem as well as an opportunity, however, in the fact that the Confucian model was so explicitly linked to personal behaviour. How did Zou find a framework that would let him apply it to the impersonal structure of the modern state? The general tone of Zou’s journal Life [Shenghuo] was didactic and dedicated to the idea of xiuyang, or moral cultivation, which, as Wen-hsin Yeh has pointed out, ‘is inseparable from the long history of Confucianism’, although it was used to ‘praise such un-Confucian activities as the pursuit of national political prestige and the advancement of personal economic ambition’.6 The mixture of recently imported and indigenous political strands of thought in Zou’s writings shows the kind of creative hybrid that the era could produce. Zou proceeded to explain his desire to improve the position of the body politic of China in the international system through the Confucian–Mencian ‘cultivation of the self’ [xiushen] and a Social Darwinist literalism about the improvement of the individual cells of that body politic, informed by ideas of race. One particular theme of the essays shows the clearest adaptation of a determinist Social Darwinist definition of race and nation into a voluntarist advocacy of personal and state self-improvement on Mencian grounds: Zou’s emphasis on China’s responsibility for its own salvation. While anti-imperialism is a strong strand in his writing, Zou also spends a significant amount of time in criticizing the Chinese nation for its reluctance to summon up enthusiasm to fight back in the evolutionary struggle. Again, Zou was not original in this; for instance, he echoed Yan Fu, the first figure to translate Social Darwinist thought into Chinese, who had suggested that 70 per cent of China’s problems were of its own making, but rejected Spencerian views that the hierarchy of nations was fixed and immutable.7 Social Darwinism inspired thoughts of the importance of collectivity over the individual (the qun or group beloved of Yan Fu, among others) whereas Confucianism defines the individuals within the collective more clearly, if in a different way from the self in western thought; furthermore, Social Darwinism is about dynamic, inexorable change (to stay still is to die), whereas Confucianism is about stability. Therefore, it might be fair to say that Zou found the clearest declaration of China’s problem in Spencerian Social Darwinism, but its solution in a modernized adaptation of Confucianism. The stress on individual ‘cultivation of the self’ was in strong contrast with the Marxist analysis which argued for the importance of classes and social groups, and provided an approach to the question of China’s crisis that appealed to Zou’s Mencius-like faith in the ability of humans to improve themselves. Sun Yatsen’s interest in the ideas of ­­pan‑Asianism, then

64  Rana Mitter even more popular in Japan and India, may well also have inspired Zou’s thought on modern ways to categorize non-European societies and thought.

Maoism: the political and the charismatic Mao Zedong (1893–1976), of course, needs much less introduction than Zou Taofen; it is with Mao, more than any other single figure, that the notion of the political has been associated in modern Chinese history. However, the origins of the elements that eventually became part of one of the twentieth century’s most important political ‘brand names’ – Maoism – need to be understood against the same turmoil that produced Zou’s hybrid thinking on politics. First, Maoism is, and must be, considered as a mode of Marxist thought. However, it was a Marxism shaped by a grassroots understanding of China’s nature as an agricultural society which could not be changed by a Bolshevik-style urban-based revolution.8 Additionally, Maoism is a strategic approach: this was characteristic of political thought in China over the twentieth century. Between the late 1920s, when the alliance with the Nationalists (Kuomintang) was abruptly ended, and victory in 1949, guerrilla techniques and strategic withdrawals became a necessary part of survival. The corollary of guerrilla tactics was a need, enforced both by ideology and practicality, to become ‘close to the people’. However, Maoism, it is clear, became from the 1930s onwards a project based significantly in charismatic leadership. This combination of the pragmatic and the charismatic was a key facet of what defined the political in China in the last century. Mao was not the paramount leader of the party until the mid to late 1930s, and it was the pragmatic Mao who manoeuvred past hostile political enemies and murderous internecine Party feuds before that time. The periods during which Mao’s charismatic leadership seem to have had the greatest impact were, first of all, during the Rectification Movements of 1941 to 1944, while the Party’s major base was in the Northwest of China, and then during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the most extreme period of which lasted from 1966 to 1969. David Apter has suggestively analysed the Rectification period as one where the Party, and Mao in particular, used ‘revealing’ texts to created ‘discourse communities’ which had a ‘transformational sense of their own difference, messianic’. Through a process of ‘exegetical bonding’, the Party was able to create ‘symbolic capital’ on which it could draw.9 His interviews suggest that for CCP members of the time, ‘Yan’an was the total and totalizing experience, the moral moment of the revolution and in their own lives.’ What defined charismatic Maoism? First of all, it was dependent on a cult of personality. Mao himself became the centre of ideological correctness and his work, codified as ‘Marx–Lenin–Mao Zedong thought’, positioned him in a line of succession to the canonical Marxist thinkers. Charismatic Maoism was also dependent on the cultural currents which had shaped Mao himself during his early life, and which are clearly visible throughout his life. Well before he became a Marxist, Mao was shaped by those same attacks on premodern

Communism, Confucianism, and charisma  65 Confucian norms which convulsed the political and intellectual climate of late Qing dynasty and early Republican China. The ‘New Culture’ movement, closely related to the ‘May Fourth Movement’ of the 1910s and 1920s, has been retrospectively canonized for being the birthplace of China’s supposed vehicle of destiny, the CCP. Yet the other aspects of western-derived thought, in particular a mystical romanticism based on the projection of the ego, also had a profound effect on many of the young thinkers of the era, Mao among them. Imperial cults had existed for centuries, and powerful emperors certainly propagated their own images enthusiastically. Yet these cults were different from the essentially modern cult of personality that Mao developed. However personally powerful the emperors had been, their power ultimately derived from the institution of emperor itself, with its fulcrum role between heaven and earth. The emperor embodied the concepts of order and orthodoxy which the stable Confucian state demanded, although of course, religious practice did on many occasions go beyond the bounds of state-defined practice. These premodern precedents were not irrelevant to Mao and Maoism (and post-1949, when it was useful to him to do so, Mao compared himself to previous emperors). But they were not the basis on which Mao’s authority primarily depended, and it does a disservice to the modern project in China to dissociate Maoism too strongly from similar projects of renewal in the twentieth-century world. For a start, although his authority derived from his participation in the leadership of the CCP, it was not in his role as party chairman that his authority lay. Instead, the system of thought, Marx–Lenin–Mao Zedong thought, which he developed, reflected his own personal background and preferences, with which the party then came partly or fully into line. Hans van de Ven has observed: Personality cults are common to many revolutionary … regimes and seem more modern than traditional. Can one imagine the Kangxi emperor holding mass peasant rallies? To understand the personality cult of Mao, would it not be more helpful to examine the political environments that produced Stalin, Hitler, and Nasser than to compare Mao with China’s past emperors? … Similarly, the reading and discussion of texts may have been features of dynastic China … But again, the CCP shares its text-centeredness with other modern revolutions.10 Mao’s earliest writings, which predate his turn to Marxism, follow up the Social Darwinist assumptions that shaped so much of late Qing and early Republican thinking. His essay ‘On Physical Exercise’ (1917) is one of the clearest examples of how the connection between the individual body and the body politic was made in Mao’s mind, as it was for other radicals of the era. He declared: The superior man’s [i.e. the Confucian ideal gentleman’s] deportment is cultivated and agreeable, but one cannot say this about exercise. Exercise should be savage and rude. To charge on horseback, amid the clash of arms,

66  Rana Mitter and to be ever victorious; to shake the mountains by one’s cries, and the colors of the sky by one’s roars of anger … all this is savage and rude and has nothing to do with delicacy.11 Mao ended the essay by giving a practical schema for implementation of this bodily (and thereby political) transformation: I have … put together a system of my own, from which I have derived considerable benefit … Make fists, alternately extend the arms to the front and retract them. Left and right, successively, three times … Unclench the fists. Alternately raise the whole body to a standing position, and return to a squatting position. While squatting, the heels should more or less touch the buttocks, three times.12 The replacement of an ethical and ordered Confucian norm which disdained exercise with an amoral Social Darwinism that equated physical prowess with dynamic progress seems, on the surface, to be a clear change in norms. But one should be wary of an assumption that there was a move from a purely premodern to a modern political mode of thinking in twentieth-century China: Mao’s thoughts reflect in part a much more longstanding Confucian technique of xiushen, or ‘bodily cultivation’, that also made a link between individual self-reflection and improvement and the health of the body politic. This is certainly not to say that Chinese society remained essentially ‘Confucian’ throughout the twentieth century. Rather, the ostensible and real shift to modern practice was carried out in ways that reflected the assumptions of Confucian behaviour, consciously or unconsciously. Mao was, like Zou Taofen, a child of his time, the very late Qing dynasty and the early Republican era. The whole of that period was marked by a political culture where ‘the new’ and ‘renewal’ were an integral part of the discourse. The most prominent example of this was the development by the late Qing political activist Liang Qichao of the idea of the ‘new citizen’. The ‘new citizen’ was contingent on the idea of a ‘new people’ [xinmin], and the definitions of the terms showed the debate between ideas of nationalism which were defined racially or in civic terms.13 From the mid-nineteenth century, Yan Fu and other thinkers brought powerful ideas of evolution and Social Darwinism to a troubled Chinese political class. However, the May Fourth era took these ideas yet further. In the interwar era, the internationalist climate, rise of nationalism, and new global obsession with youth and renewal helped to give wider context to China’s attempt at intellectual and political regeneration.14 May Fourth era thought was influenced by a variety of western concepts both rational and romanticist, as well as influences from figures such as Gandhi and Atatürk who seemed to provide a non-European way forward against imperialism.15 What brought the May Fourth movement together, however disparate its elements, was the conviction that Confucian culture needed to be changed as China coped with modernity. For the most iconoclastic of that generation (such as Mao and the writer Lu Xun), this meant the complete destruction of the old

Communism, Confucianism, and charisma  67 Confucian norms, while the more moderate (such as Zou Taofen) argued for the adaptation of Confucian values in a hybrid modern form. A common thread among all of these, as well as the more conservative groups who lamented the arrival of the Republic and refused to accept modernity, was the conviction that the old ethical core of the Confucian value-system had disappeared and that something new had to take its place. For the moderates, this ethical gap meant that they had to find a way of reconciling Confucian assumptions with modernity. For radicals such as Mao, however, the ending of the old world provided an exhilarating opportunity to recast ethics in a mould completely in opposition to the old norms; youth, violence, and dynamism became part of an anti-Confucian message of intoxicating potency. Mao became part of the group that would eventually seek a political solution in Marxism. But no May Fourth experience was felt in isolation: though Mao was a Marxist, he was also a romanticist, and that brush with the exhilaration of irrationality as part of modernity shaped his life from then on, all the way to the Cultural Revolution. Pragmatic Mao (and Maoism) and charismatic Mao (and Maoism) were not at war with each other. They were merely different facets of the May Fourth experience and of the contrasts that shaped the politics of modern China.

Crisis and revolution Thinkers in the May Fourth era had differing approaches to the solution to China’s crisis because they had different ideas about what the problem itself actually was. The vagueness of some of the keynote phrases of the era emphasize this problem. ‘Warlordism and imperialism’ were the ills from which they needed to ‘save China’, and the tools to do this were ‘science and democracy’. Each of these contains a list of hidden assumptions: ‘-isms’, ideological terms assuming a positivistic definition of problematic issues. Zou and Mao have been presented above as contrasting points on a spectrum. But Zou shared Mao’s revolutionary aims in significant measure. The May Fourth and New Culture movements had emerged in large part because of the perceived failure of the 1911 Revolution, after which the attempts to institute a republican government fell victim to the dictatorship of Yuan Shikai, the militarist president who took over in 1912. To understand the difference in the politics advocated by Mao and Zou, one point of similarity must be noted: both were revolutionary writers, although Zou, of course, was not a Marxist revolutionary during the 1920s. However, both Mao and Zou had been disillusioned by the 1911 revolution, which they felt overthrew the imperial system without bringing about any greater changes within society. The swift descent of the new Republic into militarist rule was a further source of dismay for both men, as was the attempt by the dictatorial president Yuan Shikai to declare himself emperor shortly after dissolving parliament in 1913. Mao, famously, spent the May Fourth years in and around Beijing and joined the ‘study societies’ that would coalesce into the Chinese Communist Party. For this group, the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution was crucial: the 1917 revolution was by no means the point of origin for Chinese socialism, but it was

68  Rana Mitter certainly a catalyst.16 However, Bolshevism was not a mainstream position in the early 1920s. For those who were disillusioned with the failure of the 1911 revolution, there was one rather more obvious vehicle of destiny: the Nationalist (Kuomintang) party of Sun Yatsen. The party was outlawed by Yuan Shikai, and Sun spent the next few years in exile before returning to an uncertain future under the variable protection of various militarist leaders in southern China. In fact, he would never be in serious contention for power before his death in 1925. However, for an emergent public becoming disillusioned with the politics of militarism, the Nationalists became the repository of hope for the continuation of the revolution: ‘the revolution’, declared the stamp on Nationalist documents, ‘is not yet complete’. In other words, the revolutionary mode of politics, and the understanding that a complete change was needed in the nature of the polity itself, and that it had to change fundamentally, was common even to two thinkers whose mode of thought ostensibly seems divided across the pro-Confucian/anti-Confucian axis.

Conclusion Both Zou and Mao were part of the debate about what a modern Chinese politics meant, a debate that is by no means over even today. From its origins in the late Qing, the modern mode of Chinese politics was always hybrid and dealt with the reality that China found itself between worlds: Confucian and imperialist, urban and rural, free and unfree. Both Mao and Zou recognized that the simplistic declaration that the old values were dead and gone, however convincing they might seem to May Fourth radicals in the cities, bore little resemblance to the much more long-standing persistence of a culture based on ritual norms, hierarchies, and ideas about the relationship of the individual to society and the state that did not derive from modernity. The continuing twentieth-century crisis of the modernizationist project, whether under the Nationalists or the Communists, is largely due to the modernizers’ failure to engage with a system of power relations that was always more resilient than they had wished to admit. The Communist victory in 1949, of course, removed all forms of politics other than variations of the ruling ideology from legitimate consideration, and even in the post-1978 era which Deng Xiaoping promoted as an opportunity for fresh thinking, there has until recently often been a curious barrenness at the centre of much Chinese writing on politics. Considering the history that brought the Chinese Communists to power, this emphasis is perhaps unsurprising, but it has certainly been a restrictive context in which to try and construct a new mode of political thinking in China. That has begun to change, with new work by major Chinese political thinkers such as Li Qiang, Yu Keping, and Wang Hui which has in some ways continued a debate that began in the 1920s and 1930s, and was then interrupted for the decades when Mao ruled China. Other ‘marginalized’ societies have used a combination of indigenous and westernderived thought to reinterpret domestic politics and international society. Perhaps new attention to the writings of Zou and others like him might be a worthwhile

Communism, Confucianism, and charisma  69 starting point for further explorations. Of course, neither Social Darwinism nor Sun Yatsen’s thought are per se intellectually vibrant causes in the present day. Yet the issues embedded in Zou’s worldview in some ways echo concerns in contemporary politics, and its engagement with the relationship between state and society. Nor, in an age when transnational theorists are particularly interested in diasporas (the Chinese one certainly included), is it irrelevant to keep in mind a perspective which separates nations and states as entities.17 It would be intriguing if Chinese theorists were to reassess Zou and his like not just as thinkers who threw off ‘traditional’ thought to find enlightenment through Marxism, but also as experimenters, if tentative ones, with a mixture of indigenous and imported thought which might help in that longlasting, never-resolved Chinese quest to define just what ‘the political’ actually is.

Notes 1 Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London: John Murray, 1996), p.59. 2 Joshua Fogel, Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time (Harvard University Press, 2009). 3 Wm. Theodore De Bary et al., Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 771. For the Chinese text, see Sun Zhongshan xuanji [Selected works of Sun Yatsen] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1956), vol. 2, p. 660. 4 De Bary, pp. 110–112. 5 Zou, ‘Zenyang huifu minzu diwei’ (orig. Shenghuo 2:33, 19 June 1927), Taofen sanwen, p. 17. 6 Wen-hsin Yeh, ‘Progressive Journalism and Shanghai’s Petty Urbanites: Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo Weekly, 1926–1945’, in Frederic Wakeman and Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), p. 197. 7 James R. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 162. 8 As ever, brief summaries of this sort do scant justice to the highly complex and sophisticated debates that have been conducted on the origins of the Chinese Communist revolution and the nature of Mao’s contribution to the rural revolution. 9 David E. Apter, ‘Discourse as Power: Yan’an and the Chinese Tevolution,’ in T. Saich and H.J. van de Ven, eds, New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, (Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), p. 195. 10 Hans van de Ven, ‘Introduction,’ in Saich and Van de Ven, New Perspectives, p.xx. 11 Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), vol. 1, p.125. 12 Schram, Mao’s Road, 1: pp. 125–126. 13 Joan Judge, Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 14 There is a wealth of scholarship on the May Fourth movement, including key works such as Chow (1960) and Schwarcz (1986). An attempt to bring together some of these threads of interpretation about the Movement and its legacy is Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 15 See Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, pp.129–133. 16 On this topic, see Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Hans van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Origins of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and S.A. Smith, A Road is Made (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). 17 See Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, ed., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997).

4 Lineages of political society Partha Chatterjee

The mythical space of normative theory It is sometimes said that modern political theory of the normative kind takes place in an ahistorical timeless space where perennial questions about the right and the good are debated. In fact, that is not quite the case. Rather, it would be more correct to say that these normative debates take place in a time-space of epic proportions which emerged fully formed only after the victorious conclusion of an epochal struggle against an old order of absolutist, despotic or tyrannical power. There is, thus, a definite historical past that is posited by modern political theory as an era that has been overcome and left behind, even if it appears only as an abstract and negative description of all that is normatively unacceptable today. Sometimes, this abandoned past is given a location in real historical time, as, for instance, the absolutist order of the ancien régime overthrown by the French Revolution, or the restricted rules of suffrage extended by the Reform Acts in Britain in the nineteenth century, or the regime of racial discrimination undone by the Civil Rights legislation in the United States. But it is also clear that in its abstract and negative character, this historical past is limitlessly elastic in its capacity to include virtually any geographical space and any historical period and designate them as the past that must be overcome for modern politics to become possible. The curious fact is that this negatively designated historical past could even be found to coexist with the normatively constituted order of modern political life in a synchronous, if anomalous, time of the present. Thus, when the demand became vociferous in many Western countries in the early twentieth century for unrestricted voting rights for women, the existing restrictions were described as unacceptable remnants of a past order. If there is, in some not too distant future, a serious campaign for the abolition of the House of Lords, the existing upper house of the British parliament will, I am sure, be similarly consigned to a premodern past. Thus, even in its apparent indifference to the historical mode of argument, modern political theory of the normative kind uses a definite strategy of historicization in order to demarcate and serially redefine its own discursive space. If I am permitted to adopt, somewhat insincerely (but only partially so), a position of externality in relation to the space-time of Western political theory and take a panoramic view of its progress since the beginning of the modern age,

Lineages of political society  71 I would end up with the impression that there is an elemental sameness in all of modern political theory in the last three hundred years. It is as if all the major political developments of the modern world were anticipated, indeed foretold, at the birth of modern political theory in late seventeenth-century England. Thus, whether we speak of the abolition of feudal privileges, or independence from an imperial power that refused to grant representative government to its colonial subjects, or the abolition of slavery, or universal adult suffrage without discrimination on grounds of religion, race, class or gender – the basic structure of arguments appears to be contained within modern political theory from the moment of its formation. Consequently, it doesn’t really matter if John Locke could not even imagine women as fully rational members of the commonwealth, or if Immanuel Kant could do little more than hope that the Prussian monarch would be enlightened enough to rule according to the dictates of reason. Those views of individual political philosophers were remnants of a pre-modern political order that had managed, in a purely empirical sense, to coexist in the same contemporaneous time-space as modern political life. They could, by an appropriate historicizing strategy, be explained away from the normative space of modern political theory which would then be left free to traverse the entire discursive field opened up by its epic victory over absolutism. Needless to say, this discursive field can only be abstractly constituted. As someone from the postcolonial world introduced from a very young age to the normative verities of Western political theory, I must confess that I have found all this quite baffling. How was it possible, I have asked myself, that all of the bitter and bloody struggles over colonial exploitation, racial discrimination, class conflict, the suppression of women, the marginalization of minority cultures, etc. that have dominated the real history of the modern world in the last hundred years or so, have managed not to displace in even the slightest way the stable location of modern political theory within the abstract discursive space of normative reasoning? How is it that normative political theory was never pushed into constructing a theory of the nation, or of gender, or of race, or indeed of class, except by marginal figures whose efforts were greeted at best with bare courtesy, and more often with open hostility? How could those contentious topics have been relegated to the empirical domains of sociology or history? How could it be that all of the conceptual history of modern politics was foretold at the birth of modern political theory? I have often heard it said, to the accompaniment of derisive sniggers, that Hegel’s confident pronouncement in the early nineteenth century that ‘what the spirit is now, it has always been implicitly … the spirit of the present world is the concept which the spirit forms of its own nature’1 was only a piece of idealist mystification, or worse, German delusion. I am not sure that Hegel’s detractors among contemporary political philosophers are necessarily free of that defect, even if they do not share the same national cultural traditions. Having searched for several years both within and outside the domains of normative political theory, I think I now have the outlines of a possible answer to the question ‘how has normative political theory as practised in the West managed to fortify itself against the turmoil of the real world of politics and assert the continued

72  Partha Chatterjee validity of its norms as pronounced at its moment of creation?’ The answer will take us well outside the philosophically well-tempered zones of the Western world.

Two senses of the norm Although the epic time of modern political theory appears to begin in seventeenthcentury England, the conceptual innovations that enabled that abstract timespace to be constructed and secured against the incursions of the real world of politics appeared, I think, only around the turn of the nineteenth century. By then, European countries had, of course, had the experience of conquering and ruling over vast territories in the Americas. But the European empires in the Western hemisphere never seriously posed the problem of having to incorporate within a European political order the forms of law, property and government of the indigenous American peoples. The latter were not regarded as having a credible political society at all that needed to be integrated into the new imperial formation. Only the colonial settlements of Europeans and mestizos mattered – and these came to be organized on the most modern European normative principles of the time. In fact, the indigenous societies of the Amerindian peoples frequently served as examples of the pre-political natural condition of mankind that had to be superseded for the political and commercial societies of civilized people to emerge. But the European conquests in Asia that began in the second half of the eighteenth century posed entirely different problems. The existing political institutions of those defeated Oriental kingdoms could not be entirely set aside, for utterly ‘real’ political reasons. They had to be given a place within the new imperial order of European rule over its Eastern colonies. Thus began a new journey of normative Western political theory. A key moment in the British history of the emergence of its modern empire was the debate in Parliament from 1781 to 1792 over the conduct of Warren Hastings as governor-general of India. Charged with corruption and high crimes, Hastings, in his defence, argued that India could not be ruled by British principles. If he had, in his own conduct, deviated from British norms, it was because Indian conditions demanded it. ‘The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power … Sovereignty in India implies nothing else [than despotism].’2 Edmund Burke, in his reply, was merciless: … these Gentlemen have formed a plan of Geographic morality, by which the duties of men in public and in private situations are not to be governed by their relations to the Great Governor of the Universe, or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude.3 This was a licence for corruption and abuse of power. ‘My Lords,’ Burke thundered in Parliament, we contend that Mr Hastings, as a British Governor, ought to govern upon British principles … We call for that spirit of equity, that spirit of justice …

Lineages of political society  73 that spirit of safety, that spirit of protection, which ought to characterize every British subject in power; and upon these and these principles only, he will be tried.4 Burke’s claim was that Indians had their own ancient constitution, their own laws, their own legitimate dynasties. A British governor, ruling by true British principles, ought to have respected those institutions and customs and not, like Hastings, arrogantly cast them aside in order to introduce British forms with the substance of despotism. The impasse created by debates such as this in the domain of normative theory was resolved, in the tumultuous age of revolutions, by a set of conceptual innovations that had little to do with the great political conflicts of the time. Writing his Principles of Morals and Legislation in 1789, Jeremy Bentham declared that the methods and standards of legislation he was proposing were ‘alike applicable to the laws of all nations’.5 More interestingly for us, in an early essay on ‘The Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation’, Bentham proposed the following method: I take England, then, for a standard; and referring every thing to this standard, I inquire, What are the deviations which it would be requisite to make from this standard, in giving to another country such a tincture as any other country may receive without prejudice, from English laws? … The problem, as it stands at present, is: the best possible laws for England being established in England; required, the variations which it would be necessary to make in those of any other given country, in order to render them the best laws possible with reference to that country.6 In providing an instructive example of this method, Bentham chose a country that presented ‘as strong a contrast with England as possible’. Such a contrast we seem to have in the province of Bengal: diversity of climate, mixture of inhabitants, natural productions, force of the country, present laws, manners, customs, religion of the inhabitants; every circumstance, on which a difference in the point in question can be grounded, as different as can be … To a lawgiver, who having been bred up with English notions, shall have learnt how to accommodate his laws to the circumstances of Bengal, no other part of the globe can present any difficulty.7 But Bentham also insisted that ‘human nature was everywhere the same’ and that different countries did not have ‘different catalogues of pleasures and pains’. Then why should not the same laws hold good for all countries? Because the things that caused pleasure or pain were not the same everywhere. ‘The same event … which would produce pain or pleasure in one country, would not produce an effect of the same sort, or if of the same sort, not in equal degree, in another.’8 But these grounds of variation were not all of the same kind either. Some were

74  Partha Chatterjee physical, such as the climate or the nature of the soil, and these were invariant and insurmountable. Others, no matter how difficult or inexpedient, were subject to intervention and change, such as ‘the circumstances of government, religion, and manners’.9 Different sets of laws would be appropriate for different circumstances. Further, by the application of appropriate laws, the mutable circumstances could be subjected to the forces of change. Bentham thought of these variations as amenable to more or less precise and detailed qualitative and quantitative comparison – that is to say, they were all subject to some common measure. He suggested that the legislator should be provided with two sets of tables relating to the country for which he was legislating. One set would consist of the civil code, the constitutional code, a table of offences and punishments, etc. and the other set would comprise tables of the moral and religious biases of the people, a set of maps, a table of the productions of the country, tables of the population, and the like.10 Armed with these, he would be able to devise the best possible laws for any country. Reading Bentham today, one can almost imagine an anticipation of the statistical handbooks of social indicators with which any undergraduate of the twenty-first century is now able to rank the countries of the world according to standards of living, mortality rates, quality of governance, human development and dozens of other evaluative criteria. Unlike in the writings of eighteenth-century historians and travellers brought up on Montesquieu, cultural difference here is no longer incommensurable. Rather, it can now be seen in terms of its consequences, plotted as deviations from a standard and hence normalized. Governments everywhere have been brought within the same conceptual field. All deviations between states were now comparable according to the same measure. States could be divided into ranks and grades. Moreover, once normalized, deviations could be tracked over time; the deviation of a state from the norm could close or widen. Thus, in time, a country could conceivably enter the grade of ‘advanced societies’ or drop out of it. The important innovation here was the handle that was afforded for the intervention of ‘policy’ to affect the distance of an empirical state from the desired norm. Indeed, as the philosopher Ian Hacking has shown, the statistical elaboration of the idea of normality in the nineteenth century would establish two senses of the norm: one, the normal as the right and the good – the normative, as political philosophy, for instance, would have it – and the other, the normal as the empirically existent average or mean, capable of improvement.11

Norms, deviations and exceptions The significance of this conceptual innovation for the emergence of the new practices of government in the nineteenth century has not been adequately stressed. We see the concepts elaborated for the first time in Jeremy Bentham and his ‘utilitarian’ theories of legislation. But these formal properties of the comparative method would become part of the background assumptions of virtually all schools of thought on the subject of modern government, including many that had no

Lineages of political society  75 truck with the baggage of utilitarianism as a political philosophy. Notwithstanding Bentham’s exaggerated confidence in the ability of his method to provide exact and unimpeachable solutions to every policy problem, what it did mark out was a conceptual field that could in principle integrate into a single theoretical domain all questions of governance in every society that exists in the world. Its comparative method of normalization would establish an enduring modality of relating the domain of the normative to that of the empirical, something that would long outlast the limited appeal of utilitarian political philosophy. The norm-deviation structure has provided, from the nineteenth century to the present day, an enduring framework for addressing policy questions of improvement, progress, modernization and development. However, Bentham’s comparative method would also establish a second global paradigm. If constitutionally established representative government was to be recognized as the universally valid normative standard, then the universally valid and legitimate exception to that norm could only be some form of enlightened despotism. Despotism is unlimited and arbitrary power, unconstrained by constitutional rules. In this sense, it was often distinguished in the classical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from absolutism which was unlimited power but legitimately constituted within certain fundamental laws. The form of government recommended by the new normative theory for European colonies in the East was absolutist in the sense that while it did not recognize any limits to its sovereign powers within the occupied territory, it did claim to be constituted by, and to function within, certain fundamental laws. But it was despotic in its foundational assumptions since the authority that was to lay down those fundamental laws was arbitrarily constituted and was not in any way responsible to those whom it governed. But when despotism claims to be enlightened, it places a limit on itself and promises itself to be responsible: it becomes limited by and responsible to enlightened reason. When that happens, there is effectively no difference between despotism and absolutism. Despotism has to justify its actions to itself by their results.12 Since the empirically prevailing average social conditions in the ‘backward’ colonies were different from those in the advanced countries, the normative standard of the latter would have to be altered to suit the former. The universally valid norm would have to be withheld in favour of a colonial exception. This structure of norm and exception can be seen in virtually every justification of colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The puzzle posed by postcolonial political theory – by Uday Singh Mehta, for example – of liberal democratic governments of Europe holding overseas territories under their despotic rule, thus apparently contradicting their cherished normative principles, dissolves when one realizes the power of the norm-exception construct.13 Thus, John Stuart Mill, one of the greatest liberal political theorists of all time, while making an extended case for the universal superiority of representative government, specifically argued that it could not apply, at least not yet, to dependencies such as India or Ireland.14 The latter were exceptions; hence there was really no contradiction in Mill’s normative liberal theory. He recommended

76  Partha Chatterjee a paternal British despotism for those countries, until such time as their peoples became mature enough to govern themselves. Of course, neither Mill nor any other liberal could suggest an impartial way of deciding when and if such a stage had been reached. Apparently, there was no alternative but to rely on the good sense of the paternal guardians to grant self-government to their wards. Or rather, the only alternative was to acknowledge the right of a subject people to announce its attainment of maturity by rebelling against its masters – a right somewhat incompatible with liberal doctrines of good colonial governance. From the nineteenth century, therefore, the two senses of the norm encoded the basic political strategy of relating the normative to the empirical. The normdeviation structure would establish the empirical location of any particular social formation at any given time in relation to the empirically prevailing average or normal. The corresponding normative framework could then provide, by means of a norm-exception structure of justification, the ground for the application of ‘policy’ to intervene and bring the empirical average closer to the desired norm. Normalization was the theoretical key to this political strategy. The norm-deviation method as a crucial aspect of modern disciplinary practices is, as Michel Foucault has shown, ubiquitous in the operations of the modern regime of power.15 The norm-exception formula too is used widely to deal with the exigencies of heterogeneity and uncertainty in a policy field that has been presumably normalized. What I am also suggesting through my thumbnail sketch of the conceptual history of political institutions in the modern West is that, contrary to the long enshrined received narrative, those institutions and their normative principles were not the products of an exclusively endogenous development but the result of Europe’s encounters with its colonial territories, first in the Americas and then in Asia and Africa. Let me now move to our contemporary times and look at the formerly colonized parts of the world to see how the universal verities of Western political theory have fared in those places.

The civil and the political in alien spaces I will have to be somewhat schematic in laying out the background conditions that made postcolonial political theory possible. The period of decolonization following the end of the Second World War made the nation-state the universally normal form of the modern state. Popular sovereignty became the universal norm of legitimacy: even military dictators and one-party regimes began to claim to rule on behalf of the people. But decolonization was achieved not necessarily because the paternal guardians decided that their immature wards had at last achieved adulthood. On the contrary, in most colonial countries, the people declared their determination to rule themselves by rebelling against their masters. This meant that the pedagogical role of those who were the guardians of the norm and the declarers of the exception came to be questioned. As we shall soon see, this would have important implications for the relation between the norm and the exception. The normative principles of modern politics as established in the West held enormous sway over the new ruling elites in postcolonial countries, not least

Lineages of political society  77 because of the influence of colonial education. But decades of colonial rule did not necessarily close the deviation of the empirical social indicators from the universally desirable norm. The sociologically grounded theories that now came into vogue rephrased the old arguments of colonial difference in a new language of modernization, calling the deviation a historical lag that had to be made up. Underlying these theories was, as Sudipta Kaviraj has recently pointed out, an assumption of symmetrical development, that is to say, an expectation that all of the functionally interrelated processes within modernity should emerge simultaneously.16 If they did not, then it was a case of imperfect or failed modernity. A little reflection will show that this expectation of symmetrical development is not unrelated to the abstract homogeneous discursive space cleared out and occupied by normative political theory. But soon there began to emerge arguments about alternative or multiple modernities. These, Kaviraj has shown, are better understood as implying a sequential theory of development. This theory suggests that the particular sequence in which the different processes of modernity occurred in Western history need not be repeated elsewhere. In that case, the resultant forms of the modern in those places might look quite different. Thus, to take an example, if the particular sequence ‘commercial society – civic associations – rational bureaucracy – industrialization – universal suffrage – welfare state’, which may be taken as a schematic representation of the trajectory of the modern democratic state in the West, is replaced by a sequence in which rational bureaucracy and universal suffrage precede the others, then it is likely that the form of the state that would result would not be a replica of the state in the West. It is from a consideration of these alternative sequences of modernity rather than from that of multiple or post-modernity that postcolonial political theory was born. But this raised entirely new theoretical problems regarding the relation between the two senses of the norm, viz. the empirical average and the normatively desirable. Let me illustrate this with reference to two sets of issues: the first, of legality, and the second, of violence. Leaving out the white settler colonies, the domain of civil social institutions and modern representative politics was, in most parts of the colonial world, restricted to only a small section of the colonized population. Mahmood Mamdani has described how in Africa, there emerged a modern civic space that was racially divided but regulated by a modern code of civil law, while a huge domain of traditional society was organized under customary law. Following independence, the conservative regimes de-racialized civil society while leaving the traditional sphere of customary law largely intact, while the radical regimes tried to impose uniform citizenship on all by authoritarian methods, leading to resistance and conflict.17 In India, the new republic was founded on a liberal democratic constitution, universal suffrage and competitive electoral representation. But the space of politics became effectively split between a narrow domain of civil society where citizens related to the state through the mutual recognition of legally enforceable rights and a wider domain of political society where governmental agencies dealt not with citizens but with populations to deliver specific benefits or

78  Partha Chatterjee services through a process of political negotiation. In some of my recent work, I have described the anomalies that result in the application of the norm of equality of all citizens before the law and how those anomalies are sought to be resolved through the intervention of politics.18 Take the familiar example of squatter settlements of the poor in numerous cities of the postcolonial world. These urban populations occupy land that does not belong to them and often use water, electricity, public transport and other services without paying for them. But governmental authorities do not necessarily try to punish or put a stop to such illegalities, because of the political recognition that these populations serve certain necessary functions in the urban economy and that to forcibly remove them would involve huge political costs. On the other hand, they cannot also be treated as legitimate members of civil society who abide by the law. As a result, municipal authorities or the police deal with these people not as rights-bearing citizens but as urban populations who have specific characteristics and needs and who must be appropriately governed. On their side, these groups of urban poor negotiate with the authorities through political mobilization and alliances with other groups. On the plane of governmentality, populations do not carry the ethical significance of citizenship. They are heterogeneous groups, each of which is defined and classified by its empirically observed characteristics and constituted as a rationally manipulable target population for governmental policies. Consequently, if, despite their illegal occupation of land, they are given electricity connections or allowed to use municipal services, it is not because they have a right to them but because the authorities make a political calculation of costs and benefits and agree, for the time being, to give them those benefits. However, this can only be done in a way that does not jeopardize the legal order of property and the rights of proper citizens. The usual method is to construct a case such that the particular illegality associated with a specific population group may be treated as an exception that does not disturb the fundamental rule of law. Governmental decisions aimed at regulating the vast populations of the urban poor usually add up to a huge pile of exceptions to the normal application of the law. Populations respond to the regime of governmentality by seeking to constitute themselves as groups that deserve the attention of government. If as squatters they have violated the law, they do not necessarily deny that fact, nor do they claim that their illegal occupation of land is right. But they insist that they have a right to housing and livelihood in the city, and, if they are required to move elsewhere, they must be provided with rehabilitation. They form associations to negotiate with governmental authorities and seek public support for their cause. This becomes a major form of political participation for these groups, invoking their status as formal citizens but acting in ways that often contravene the approved practices of civic life. Their political mobilization involves an effort to turn an empirically formed population group into a moral community. The force of this moral appeal usually hinges on the generally recognized obligation of government to provide for the poor and the underprivileged. This obligation may be seen as part of the general democratic temper of our age. But I believe it

Lineages of political society  79 is also specifically a consequence of the anti-colonial movement that overturned the paternal despotism of imperial rule and established the formal sovereignty of the people. If we consider the example of elections in India, for instance, we will find that the overwhelming bulk of the political rhetoric expended in election campaigns concerns what governments have or have not done for which population groups. The function of rhetoric here is to turn the heterogeneous demands of populations into the morally coherent and emotionally persuasive form of popular demands. In this sense, as Ernesto Laclau has argued, populism is the only morally legitimate form of democratic politics under these conditions.19 It is important to emphasize that unlike the symmetrical theory of modernity which would regard such populism as a perversion of modern democratic politics, the sequential theory would consider it with utter seriousness as a new and potentially richer development of democracy. It is also worth pointing out that one of the persistent findings of election studies in India is the relatively high electoral participation of voters belonging to the poor and underprivileged sections of the electorate.20 However, the negotiations that take place in political society frequently involve an invitation to the authorities to declare an exception. Thus, when squatters claim that they be allowed to occupy their settlements, or hawkers that they be allowed to set up stalls on the streets, they do not demand that the laws of property be abolished or that all trade licences and regulations be set aside. Rather, they demand that the authorities make a political judgement to use the sovereign power of the state to declare their case as an exception to the norm laid down by the law. It is true, of course, that the law is also frequently broken by the propertied and the wealthy, that is, by those who claim to be proper citizens inhabiting civil society. Thus, municipal building regulations, trade regulations and tax laws are widely believed to be broken by the urban rich, many of whom, being influential and well connected, even flaunt their impunity. But these violations are unable to mobilize the moral justification that the illegalities of the poor manage to do in the arena of democratic politics. Hence, they are dealt with through corruption, evasion or the blatant use of force. They fail to become issues of negotiation in political society. We should also remember that vast sections of the poor in postcolonial economies find a living in the so-called informal sector of employment which is largely unregulated and in which production or service units frequently violate labour, tax and environmental laws. Quite often, these enterprises have owners who are themselves workers and it is not unusual for them to value the survival of their units and the livelihood of their employees above the objective of making profits for further accumulation. They frequently use collective political mobilization and seek the help of political parties and leaders to ensure the conditions of their survival, often by demanding that the usual tax, labour or environmental regulations not be applied in their case. Here again, politics intervenes to suspend the norm and create an exception, supposedly in a justified cause. This raises another interesting problem for contemporary political theory. Is justice better served by the non-arbitrary procedures of the equal application of

80  Partha Chatterjee the law, or by the contextual and possibly arbitrary judgement that addresses the peculiarities of a particular case? It is useful to recall here an observation of Alexis de Tocqueville from the time when the modern democratic state was in its youth. Distinguishing between tyranny and arbitrary power, he says, ‘Tyranny may be exercised by means of the law itself, and in that case it is not arbitrary; arbitrary power may be exercised for the public good, in which case it is not tyrannical.’21 We could say that political society, operating under conditions of electoral democracy in India, affords the possibility of inviting the arbitrary power of government to mitigate the potentially tyrannical power of the law. As a matter of fact, it could even be said that the activities of political society in postcolonial countries represent a continuing critique of the paradoxical reality in all capitalist democracies of equal citizenship and majority rule, on the one hand, and the dominance of property and privilege, on the other. It is relevant to point out, for instance, that this critique has a genealogy going all the way back to the origins in the eighteenth century of British colonial attempts to impose a regime of the non-arbitrary rule of law in the newly conquered territories of India. Ghulam Husain Tabatabai, the most perceptive Indian historian of the eighteenth century, and Mirza Abu Taleb, who travelled to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, both wrote extensively and critically on what they thought was an expensive, slow, distant and unconscionably inflexible judicial system introduced by the British in Bengal. Both thought that direct access to an impartial judge who was knowledgeable about and sensitive to the specific circumstances of a case was far more likely to serve the cause of justice.22 The critique has continued to inform popular beliefs and practices about the judicial system of modern India. Thus, for example, one of the most sought after services of elected local bodies in rural West Bengal is arbitration in property, family and community disputes. Even though this is not one of their statutory functions, elected local representatives are preferred by rural people for resolving conflicts than the slow, non-transparent and frequently corrupt institutions of the police and the courts.23 The latter are seen as instruments that only the wealthy can manipulate to their advantage; the poor avoid them to the best of their ability. It is also worth mentioning here, in a comparative spirit, the analysis offered by Achille Mbembe of the postcolonial state in Africa. He argues that the specific form of sovereignty claimed over the territory and resources of Africa by the colonial powers frequently led to the authoritarian postcolonial state form characterized by the étatisation of society, the socialization of state power and the privatization of public prerogatives. These three features of the postcolonial state were all marked, Mbembe says, by the socialization of arbitrariness.24 Although the Indian state is nowhere near as authoritarian as many of the African states, the continuing social legitimacy of arbitrary power is an important and under-researched aspect of the practices of Indian democracy. If one then thinks of this widely shared popular critique of the modern normative idea of the non-arbitrary and equal application of the law within a sequential rather than a symmetrical framework, one could be led in some

Lineages of political society  81 unexpected directions. Thinking symmetrically, one might conclude, like many conservative colonial officials of British India, that the impersonal procedures of rational law and bureaucracy were unsuited to backward societies used to customary rather than contractual obligations and that the exercise of personal but impartial authority was more appropriate. This would be the familiar declaration of a colonial exception. But if we take the sequential logic more seriously, we might be moved to suggest not the irrelevance of the norm of the impersonal and non-arbitrary application of the law but its critical re-evaluation in the light of emergent practices in many postcolonial countries that seek to punctuate or supplement it by appealing to the personal and contextual circumstances. It is important to stress that the normative principles of Western political theory continue to enjoy enormous influence all round the world as models that are worthy of emulation. But the actual practices of modern political life have resulted not in the abandonment of those norms but in the piling up of exceptions in the course of the administration of the law as mediated by the processes of political society. The relation between norms and practices has resulted in a series of improvisations. It is the theorization of these improvisations that has become the task of postcolonial political theory. One other area where such improvisations have led to a distinct reformulation of the received norm is that of the secular state. The French republican ideal of laïcité, having travelled to Turkey as laïque, has in recent years provoked much controversy and conflict over state recognition of religious practices without as yet producing any redefined norm.25 In India, while the secular state is a central feature of the constitutional structure, its practice has come to mean neither the mutual separation of state and religion nor the strict neutrality of the state. Rather, an altogether new norm of the modern secular state seems to have emerged, which Rajeev Bhargava has theorized as that of principled distance, which implies disestablishment but not the strict non-intervention of the state in religion.26 In this context, one must also mention the massive but as yet untheorized process of the establishment of modern secular states all over East Asia, apparently without any serious debate over the question of secularism. What is it about the sequence of modernity in that part of the world that made this possible?

The political management of violence A study of squatter settlements in the city of Calcutta carried out by Ananya Roy brings out an interesting gender dimension of political society.27 The livelihood of families living in these illegal settlements greatly depends on the employment of women as domestic help in neighbouring middle-class houses. This is, of course, an informal sector of employment lacking any form of self-organization of labour. The men of the settlements often do not have regular jobs. But they form associations to seek the support of political parties in order to protect their settlements. The associations are entirely male. The reason is not merely that political work is traditionally seen as a male pursuit, but also because politics in

82  Partha Chatterjee the slum neighbourhoods is thought to be dangerous, involving frequent incidents of violence. Political society, consequently, tends to be a masculine space. The point is illustrated graphically in Thomas Blom Hansen’s study of the Shiv Sena in the towns and cities of Maharashtra, especially Mumbai.28 The political effectiveness of the Shiv Sena as a right-wing populist party claiming to defend Marathi interests and Hindu dominance has crucially depended on its control over the urban slum population and the informal sector of labour. Hansen shows that a key figure here is the local dada, the strongman who builds a personal network of loyalty and protection and projects the image of masculine, assertive and often violent power. The modality of this power is performative; it is effective precisely to the extent that it works as a demonstrated threat that brings about the desired result. The issues on which the Shiv Sena intervenes are everyday matters of political society among the urban poor – jobs, housing, living conditions in the slums, prices of essential items of consumption, dealing with the police and the authorities. The methods are direct and often theatrical: the image of local strongmen projecting raw power to secure instant justice is what is expected to attract their followers. For the most part, the actual violence is kept within carefully controlled limits. Only rarely is there widespread organized violence and that too only after a decision of the central leadership of the party, as in the 1992 killings of Muslims in Mumbai. The subject of violence brings into view the dark underside of political society. It is clear that the real world of politics is quite far removed from the Weberian ideal of the state having a monopoly of the means of legitimate violence. Since many of the practices of political society involve the transgression of the law, it follows that agents other than the state authorities must also acquire the means of using force to defend those practices when necessary. Once again, political parties and leaders try to mobilize such means, with or without the acquiescence of the authorities. This is undoubtedly the principal reason why there has emerged the phenomenon of what is often called the ‘criminalization’ of politics, that is, the increasing presence of persons with criminal records among elected representatives at local, state and even national levels. That violators of the law can become legitimate representatives of the people is not necessarily a symptom of popular foolhardiness or of the perversion of electoral democracy. Rather it is a sign of the inability of the normative regime of law to fully bring under its order the real heterogeneity of power relations in society. It is also significant that in most local formations of political society, a certain ‘normal’ level of violence tends to be established which represents some sort of empirical equilibrium among prevailing power relations and that there are recognized thresholds beyond which violence would be regarded as having crossed the limits of normality. On the other hand, when a situation has to be demonstrated as intolerable or outrageous, there is frequently a spectacular show of violence, usually involving the destruction of public property or attacks on government institutions and personnel. Violence here is not mindless or blind, but rather, even in its most passionate expressions, calculated to elicit the desired response from the government and the public.

Lineages of political society  83

Redefining the norms A consideration of postcolonial politics against the background of Western normative theory might suggest that moral norms should be abandoned in favour of realist politics. However, this would mean a trivialization of the challenge posed for postcolonial political theory. Even though the demand for realism has much merit, it cannot mean, as Raymond Geuss has pointed out, the claim that morality has no place in politics.29 Rather, as we cannot fail to see in numerous accounts, postcolonial politics frequently presents a moral critique of the normative standards upheld by Western political theory and improvises practices that run parallel or counter to the approved forms. The theoretical challenge that is thereby posed is twofold. The first is the challenge to break the abstract homogeneity of the mythical time-space of Western normative theory by emphasizing the real history of its formation through violent conflict and the imposition of hegemonic power. The second is the even greater challenge to redefine the normative standards of modern politics in light of the considerable accumulation of new practices that may at present be described only in the language of exceptions but in fact contain the core of a richer, more diverse and inclusive, set of norms. As far as the first challenge is concerned, the work of many historians and literary scholars has brought together in recent decades a mass of evidence that shows that several key political and economic institutions of the modern West were produced not endogenously but through interaction with the colonial worlds across the Atlantic and in the East. Thus, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that the idea of universal citizenship was indeed first posed in the age of revolutions by the Haitian uprising of black slaves.30 Susan Buck-Morss has pushed the argument further by showing that the consciousness of emancipation that inspired the idea of equal citizenship in the modern state, as elaborated by philosophers such as Hegel, was directly the product of an engagement with the challenge posed by the Haitian revolution.31 Buck-Morss has also drawn our attention to the fact, long known to scholars of colonial trade but never remarked upon, that the factory, that central institution of the industrial revolution, was invented as the European merchant company’s foreign trading station.32 We also know that the joint stock company, another pillar of modern capitalism, was first developed as an institution of colonial trade, the English East India Company being the most successful pioneer.33 Such instances can be multiplied and extended to institutions of bureaucracy, diplomacy, international law, penal administration, surveillance, crowd control, emergency relief and a host of other aspects of modern government. The point is not merely to insist upon an acknowledgement that the institutions of economic and political life in the modern West have a historical genealogy that extends into the formerly colonial world. It is to explore the further implication of that history for the authoritative status of the normative claims of Western political theory for our contemporary world. If we know that the principal hegemonic strategy for establishing the universal claims of the normative standards of

84  Partha Chatterjee Western political institutions is to combine a norm-deviation paradigm in the empirical domain with a norm-exception paradigm in the policy domain, what has been the consequence of decolonization and the emergence of postcolonial thinking for the continued relevance of this strategy? One has heard several voices in recent times that reject, on ideological grounds, the claims of normative Western political theory. Thus, representative electoral democracy has been rejected as Western or bourgeois and therefore unsuited to conditions in non-Western countries. The idea of human rights has been similarly rejected as Western or Christian and therefore inapplicable to other societies. There have been claims on behalf of ‘Asian values’ or ‘Islamic principles’ as having greater universal validity than the Western norms of modern democratic government. While the conflicts rage over these questions in the field of ideology, what should be of greater interest to political theory are the ways in which actual practices in the field of government and politics cope with the realities of power in a world in which no society has the option of entirely escaping the tentacles of modern economic, political and cultural institutions. Once we recognize this, we have no alternative but to return to the problem of symmetrical versus sequential accounts of modernity. If by tracing the historical genealogy of Western political institutions we have established the sheer historical contingency of Western modernity, there can be no reason left to demand the symmetrical repetition of that configuration of institutions in other parts of the world. Hence, political theory is left with the task of describing the varied products of different sequences of development in different countries as novel but ineluctably modern practices of government and politics. Such descriptions cannot avoid the question of normative evaluation. However, since many of these practices imply a critique of the normative standards of Western political practice, political theory cannot any more proceed with its normal business of endlessly elaborating and refining its normative principles supposedly established from the moment of its birth. That is the challenge posed by postcolonial politics. The second task of redefining the universal normative standards set by Western political theory in the light of the experience of postcolonial politics involves serious moral evaluation. We have noticed that the divergent practices that have emerged in postcolonial countries are frequently justified as exceptions to the normative rule. Could the accumulation of exceptions justify a redefinition of the norm? Take the example of citizenship. The normative rule under the Indian Constitution is equal citizenship for all. But from the very beginning, exceptions were made to provide for special representation and reserved places in government service and education for scheduled castes and tribes and for the personal laws and special educational institutions of minority religious communities. Initially, these exceptions were justified as transitional measures to be removed when a reasonable equality of opportunity was established between all groups and communities. As these practices have unfolded in the last half century, even though the constitutional language of exceptions continues, the democratic politics of caste and religious minorities proceed by taking these

Lineages of political society  85 exceptional provisions of differentiated citizenship as enduring background conditions that lay the ground for new strategies of negotiation with government. The question is: can the contemporary practices be framed as a redefined norm that endorses differentiated citizenship as the normative standard for the modern state? The question becomes more worthy of our attention when we realize that differentiated citizenship has, in some form or other, become normal practice in the empirical sense in most Western countries, even though it is still described as exceptional in relation to the legal norm. Thus, the practices that have evolved to deal with new immigrants, including undocumented ones, in the countries of Western Europe and North America are no different from what we have described as characteristic of political society in postcolonial India. Has there been a redefinition of citizenship in actual practice that is awaiting a political theorist to put into normative language? Interestingly, the growing phenomenon in contemporary Western democracies of deep and pervasive mistrust of elected representatives and apparent voter apathy has led theorists to look closely at practices such as popular vigilance, denunciation, negative coalitions, mock trials, etc. Pierre Rosanvallon has called such non-electoral forms ‘counter-democracy’.34 If one turns to postcolonial democracies, one will find many of these counter-democratic forms in the domain of civil society of the urban middle classes, as seen most recently in the campaigns that led to the ousting of the popularly elected government in Thailand. In India, while mistrust of representatives and the forms of counterdemocracy can be widely observed, the urban middle classes show a marked lack of faith in the efficacy of elections, while those who most use the instruments of political society to deal with government – the poorer sections of people in both cities and villages – are the ones who persistently vote in large numbers. Once again, the postcolonial is marked by difference. The emergence of postcolonial states in the latter half of the twentieth century appeared to affirm the determination of formerly colonial peoples not to allow the imperial powers to point to an empirical deviation from the norm and declare an exception in relation to the universal normative standard. But, as we have seen, the postcolonial regimes have adopted the same norm-deviation and norm-exception paradigms in governing their own populations. Not only that, the politics of the governed operates within the same paradigms and invites governmental authorities to declare an exception and suspend the norm in their case. The question that pervades postcolonial politics today is: who is it that should get to declare the exception? That is the question that is debated every day in this part of the world, not always, I might add, by entirely peaceful means. The question that appears to have receded from view is one that used to be asked in the twentieth century: is it possible to think of modern politics outside the norm-deviation and normexception paradigms? That question does not seem to be thinkable today except in a non-realist theoretical mode. Since I am able to deal with politics only when it is real, whether in the past, present or future, I will not attempt to answer that utopian question.

86  Partha Chatterjee

Notes 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, tr. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 150. 2 Speech by Warren Hastings in his defence in the House of Commons on May 1, 1786, cited in Marshall, ed., Speeches and Writings of Burke, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 348–349. It is speculated that these passages in Hastings’s defence were actually composed by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. See Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry and the Millennium (1983). 3 ‘Opening of Impeachment’, February 16, 1788, in Marshall., ed., Writings and Speeches of Burke, vol. 6, p. 346. 4 Ibid., pp. 345–346. 5 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ch. xvii, § 2. 6 Bentham, ‘Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation’ in John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), p. 171. I have been unable to determine the exact date when this essay was written. It appears to be sometime in the early 1780s. 7 Ibid., p. 172. 8 Ibid., p. 172. 9 Ibid., p. 177. 10 Ibid., p. 173. 11 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 160–169. 12 Leonard Krieger, An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 39. 13 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 14 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), ch. xviii. 15 Especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 16 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, Archives européennes de sociologie, 46, 3 (2005), pp. 497–526. 17 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 18 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 19 Ernesto Laclau, On Popular Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 20 Yogendra Yadav, ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in the Electoral Politics of the 1990s’, in Francine Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and Balveer Arora, eds, Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 21 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, tr. Henry Reeve, revised by Francis Bowen, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 262. 22 Abu Taleb Khan, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Years 1799 to 1803, tr. Charles Stewart (1814; New Delhi: Sona Publications, 1972), ch. xxii, p. 196. There is a four-volume edition of the 1788 translation of Ghulam Husain’s work Sair ul-mutakkherin published in 1902: A Translation of the Sëir Mutaqherin; or View of Modern Times, being an History of India, from the Year 1118 to the Year 1194, (this Year answers to the Christian Year 1781–82) of the Hedjrah; etc. by Seid-GholamHossein-Khan, vols. 1–4 (Calcutta: R. Cambray, 1902). A facsimile edition of the 1926 edition is now available from New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1986. 23 Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, Partha Chatterjee, Pranab Kumar Das, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Manabi Majumdar and Surajit Mukhopadhyay, Strengthening Rural Decentralization (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 2006).

Lineages of political society  87 24 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 24–65. 25 Nilufer Gole and Ludwig Ammann, eds, Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University, 2006). 26 Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 27 Ananya Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 28 Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 29 Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 30 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 31 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 32 Ibid., pp. 101–103. 33 K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Frank Cass, 1965). 34 Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

5 Acting and acting out Conceptions of political participation in the Middle East Charles Tripp

The Middle East has been a particularly exasperating area for students of comparative politics. In part this is because the region itself is ill defined, or rather its definition is changeable, depending on the preoccupations, even prejudices, of whoever happens to be writing about it. In part it is also because many of these same prejudices have given rise to the idea of ‘Middle East exceptionalism’. This tends to bring all meaningful discussion of comparative politics to a grinding halt, obscuring any serious analysis of power with untheorized essentialist claims about how people in the Middle East behave because they happen to be in some sense ‘of’ the Middle East. Annoying as this may be, it can, however, act as a stimulus to more fruitful reflection on comparative political thought and political processes. It was not surprising that Edward Said should have made studies of the Middle East his primary targets in his critique of ‘orientalism’. But, as Sadiq al-`Azm’s concerns about some of the conclusions of his thesis made clear, there was a deeper epistemological problem here, from which Said himself could not entirely escape.1 In other words, in the Middle East, no less than in other parts of the world, it is important to take distinctive histories and cultural productions seriously. Equally, awareness of the assumptions brought to the task of analysis can be a useful corrective to the imperial ambitions of Western political science, but by no means invalidates comparative politics as a method. In both of these respects thinking about ideas of political participation in the Middle East can be particularly productive. It can illuminate developments in the region, however defined, and also bring out the variety of meanings attached to notions of participation. In this way, political experiences in the Middle East can be used to reflect critically upon some of the assumptions underpinning usage of the term in comparative politics and to test its analytical utility. Comparing the ways in which people in different settings, geographically and historically, may conceive of ‘participation’ will develop a better understanding of the varied resonances of the term itself and of the political processes shaping that variety. In this sense, distinctive aspects of the histories of Middle Eastern societies and peoples can be used to strengthen the comparative method by bringing out features that have echoes, indeed parallels, in other settings. Thus ‘Middle East exceptionalism’ is turned on its head to demonstrate how developments that may

Acting and acting out  89 seem specifically tied to the region in fact bear a close structural – one could say family – resemblance to events and developments beyond this region and the peoples that inhabit it.

Understanding political participation In any era and any region, the idea of political participation raises some basic questions about the understanding of the politics in which people might participate. In any political community, where power is exercised over others, there will be rules to determine who may and who may not take part in decisive activity, as well as the different kinds of activity appropriate to their status. In the Middle East, no less than elsewhere, this has been a sphere historically hedged around with criteria of inclusion and exclusion, with varying sets of rules used to decide what kinds of activities should constitute the political realm.2 As elsewhere, there have been sharp conflicts between professed ideals and the actual organization of power. Exclusion may work along lines that are implicit, but are understood by all and ruthlessly enforced. Similarly, as elsewhere, political challenges have taken the form of open defiance of the rules of the political game, throwing into question the nature of the rules themselves or, more frequently, the right of the particular rule makers and enforcers to wield power. However, even where there is general agreement about what constitutes politics – and this cannot be assumed to apply equally across all times and places, whether within the general area of the Middle East or not – there remains the question of what is understood by participation in a specific context. Clearly connected with understandings of the political, the notion of participation raises the question of what it is that makes a certain set of actions meaningful as participatory acts – what causes them to be seen specifically as participation in some political process. It also raises the question of whether participation necessarily implies intentional behaviour. This is a debate which has marked the field. There are those who claim that participation must, to qualify as such, involve the intentional action of an individual, acting alone or in conjunction with others, making a decision to act in some way that affects the dispensation of power. In this respect, meaningful participation is closely tied up with the idea of autonomous, sovereign individuals making conscious efforts to involve themselves in the political sphere.3 It thus becomes the task of the investigator to establish what it is that people are being asked to participate in and, furthermore, how they are being asked to participate. In this approach the investigation of intentions and how they are formulated becomes central. Underpinning such a conception of participation lies an understanding of the autonomous actor, making conscious decisions, based upon his or her reading of a situation and the demands it makes. The idea has a long ideological pedigree and in some respects matches a commonsensical grasp of what it means to participate in a process. Nevertheless it may suggest a restricted view of political participation. Effectively, participation would be confined to certain (arbitrarily?) designated

90  Charles Tripp spheres and would require a number of assumptions about the constitution of the individual. These might be hard to justify as universal qualities, based as they are on quite particular readings of specific historical and social contexts.4 More productive for an understanding of political participation that is less in thrall to methodological individualism, would be an approach that retains the idea of people responding to given situations and thus shaping the nature of their participation, but reconfiguring that idea within the broader understanding suggested by the notion of interpellation. This removes the association of participation with a purely voluntarist activity, the product of a sovereign will, since it throws into doubt two features of that thesis. It questions both whether people can in fact always choose to participate and whether they can freely choose the method of their participation. On the contrary, it is argued that in many situations people are ‘always already’ participating in a given social and political order. They may accept this, take it for granted and not even think about it. Or they may, through a sequence of alienating and disruptive events, come to reject it and work against it. Furthermore, it is argued that in a variety of settings people tend to be assigned roles that licence specific forms of participation, not necessarily through formal rules enforced by the political authorities, but through social expectations and sanctions based upon constructions of gender, age, race, class and so forth. It is this ‘thick’ understanding of the relationship between the interpellated individual and the many facets of the social order that allows one to think about the ways in which he or she may participate in the reproduction of that order.5 Powerful as such formative processes may be, this is not to say that the idea of interpellation implies wholly determined subjects, unable to reflect upon their condition or challenge the roles they have been assigned. On the contrary, there is always the possibility, illustrated by innumerable historical examples, that they may actively reject their ascribed roles. This can come about through any number of circumstances – social, political and individual – that may combine to create the conditions for someone to look askance at the forms of participation they are expected to follow.6 This may in turn result in the creation of new avenues of participation in an existing order, or may lead to participation in movements that seek to bring in a new order of power entirely. Then the question becomes: why should these people have responded in this way to the multiple interpellations of social existence and what repertoires of resistance can they draw upon to challenge the dominant order? The answer to this lies partly in an understanding of the relationship of conceptions of the political and of political participation with the practices that are associated with them and help to reinforce them, giving them meaning and making them hegemonic. Here the analysis of discourse, understood as the mutual constitution of conceptions and practices, highlights the need to examine the settings in which such practices take on meaning and the ways in which such meanings become dominant. In many respects, it is such an approach that lies at the heart of any truly comparative political thought. In this field political ideas are not treated merely as intellectual productions, but as socially constituted frames of

Acting and acting out  91 reference that make sense of people’s lives and help to define their engagements with power. Thus, the focus turns to the constitution of the imagination and to the subject’s repertoire of actions, the ways they may be sustained, but also ruptured by particular histories, by continuities and discontinuities, as well as the place of the performative in shaping such possibilities.7 It is the contention here that performances and the norms associated with them are central to subject formation. They can reinforce through repetition and habituation, as well as through narrative coherence and emplotment, the power of norms and the plausibility and thus acceptance of specific roles. In doing so, they make sense of social life normatively and actively, providing the guidelines for specific forms of participation, assigning them meaning and moral weight, as well as designating the theatre in which it is appropriate that differentiated roles may be played out. By the same token, of course, performance contains within its structure the potential for its own decay and transformation. Conventions change, repetition can engender boredom and rejection as well as familiarity and acceptance, settings can be questioned and innovation – the shock of the new – is a tried and tested dramaturgical device of great social power.8 It is in such a setting that people participate in the variety of activities that make up the vast repertoire of political behaviour and, in doing so, act upon and help to constitute their conceptions of meaningful participation.

Varied conceptions of political participation in the Middle East It is with the foregoing concerns in mind that the subject of participation and the ideas surrounding it in any region can be usefully approached. In this instance, the intention is to explore the ways in which such understandings have been played out in the Middle East. Given the diversity of peoples, languages, cultures, religions and countries within the Middle East it would be counter-productive to suggest that the region itself is associated with a particular conception of participation. On the contrary, the aim here is to select three distinct understandings of political participation that illustrate diversity and the ways in which distinct political fields and discursive practices create the ideas of participation appropriate to their context. The suggestion is that common political histories may link different parts of the Middle East to one another, but also that these processes throw up parallels with other parts of the world. It is by no means intended that these should be regarded as exhaustive of understandings of political participation in the region, but they have, in their various ways, been prominent features of its recent political history. Participating in the nation state An enduring theme in Middle Eastern politics from the nineteenth century onwards has been the association of political participation with the introduction of the modern nation state as the main organizing structure of political life. The long Ottoman engagement with Western Europe’s emerging nation states and

92  Charles Tripp ideologies began to make itself felt by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the changing political discourses of the Ottoman metropolis and provinces.9 This was accelerated and made a reality for hitherto relatively isolated communities across the region by the active involvement of the European powers, first in commercial terms and, increasingly, in terms of political and military interventions, bringing European administrative principles into the heart of the Middle East. Inevitably, therefore, ideas of political participation were geared to the practices of state formation, nation building, constitutional reform and public administration associated with the European state and with the continuing struggles for political representation and emancipation that were so characteristic of European politics at the time. The Ottoman, Persian, Egyptian and North African students and intellectuals who were sent on educational missions in ever larger numbers witnessed these struggles in Europe and were caught up in the intellectual ferment of the time. The effect of such experiences is vividly captured in the journal of one of these students, the young Egyptian Rifa`a Rafi` al-Tahtawi. Sent on a five-year mission to Paris, he witnessed at first hand the debates and the political upheaval of 1830 that culminated in the overthrow of the Bourbon monarch Charles X and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe.10 These young men were thus introduced to new ways of thinking not simply about the technical subjects they had been sent to study, but also about the nature of society, the political field and the great debates of the day concerning rights, justice and liberty. It was inevitable that they should begin to look at their own countries through a similar prism, bringing a powerful critique to bear on the political order that prevailed in the courts of Istanbul, Tehran, Cairo or Tunis. Ideas of participation and political engagement were linked to the emergence of a distinctive politics of the territorial nation state with its associated ideologies of liberalism and nationalism, promoting ideas of representation and voluntarist political behaviour. In this respect, ideas of participation were echoing and running parallel to developments in Western Europe where the upheavals of 1848, the struggle to extend the franchise or to overthrow reactionary princely houses were so marked a feature of the political landscape. In the Middle East, this found expression as the nineteenth century progressed in various struggles against tyranny and the despotism of dynastic rule. European struggles for liberty against reactionary monarchies resonated with many in the region. Their aim was precisely to redefine the political by wrenching authoritative decision making out of the hands of the sultan, khedive or shah and to extend the sphere of the political by expanding the categories of those allowed to participate. In these movements and in the writings of those who championed the idea of a written constitution that would limit the powers of the sovereign and guarantee the rights of ‘the people’ to participate in political life, there were, of course, as in Europe, different understandings of ‘the people’ as a political actor. As the debates of the time indicate, there were still many restrictions on those deemed qualified to participate in the new constitutional order, based on criteria relating to gender, class, age, education and sometimes religion.11

Acting and acting out  93 But restrictive as some of these qualifications might be from a contemporary perspective, the debate had been opened and the imaginative field of politics extended in ways which could not leave the old order untouched. Whether in the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, in Egypt or in the Qajar Empire in Persia, what had begun as a process of state sponsored modernization, based on technical education and the mastery of new military and industrial technologies, had developed by the latter part of the nineteenth century into constitutional movements for political change. Greater political participation was now demanded by the articulate spokesmen of these movements, backed in many cases by emerging new social classes, beneficiaries of the economic transformation of the region that had been occurring since the early nineteenth century.12 For constitutionalists and nationalists in the Middle East, it soon became clear that they were fighting against a twofold tyranny – that of the local dynastic ruler and of the European power that stood behind him, to which he was generally indebted. As direct European control grew, the struggle against colonial rule and imperial domination intensified, especially after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War. One effect of this was a growing definition of ‘the people’ as a political community – initially Turkish, Egyptian, Iranian and Arab, but increasingly, as the colonial enterprise deepened, or the nation state model was imposed upon the Middle East in the system of League of Nations mandates, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese or Palestinian. This was in part an externally oriented process – defining the people who should participate in the making of their destiny against the European colonialists who actually dominated them militarily and politically. However, it was also an internal process, in which the nature of the community itself was being debated, making the question of who should be included as qualified political actors a matter of contention. Echoing women’s suffrage movements in Europe at the time, in Cairo in 1919, Huda Sha`rawi and her associates led the first women’s nationalist demonstration. They called for an end to British occupation and for immediate Egyptian independence, and later famously cast aside their veils to signal a dramatic break with the past. Pursuing the most visible form of public political participation open to Egyptians under British occupation, Sha`rawi was also helping to argue, through her practice, the right of women to equality with men in jointly deciding the political future of the country.13 It was in this period, prior to the withdrawal of the European powers from much of the region in the 1940s and 1950s, that ideas of political participation developed, initially phrased in a language of rights that claimed universal validity within a political sphere recognized by the colonial powers themselves. In the wake of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points – which had been seized upon by nationalist movements across the region from Egypt to Kurdistan – the assertion of the right of the nation to participate fully in its political constitution, free of foreign control, had been as much a strategic practice as an ideal aspiration. As in other colonial encounters, it was to be used precisely to gain recognition by the European powers that colonial subjects possessed the right to play a full part in the political process, marking the transitions from colony or mandate to nation state.14

94  Charles Tripp Of course, as the political experience of the post-independence era in the Middle East showed, claiming the right of an abstract collective entity like the ‘nation’ to participate in the making of its own future was considerably less contentious than ensuring the meaningful participation of each of its members in shaping their own political destinies in accordance with their varied interests and ideas. The mechanisms of recognized participation might have been established in the form of parliaments and elections, but, as in many other parts of the world, this did not necessarily guarantee meaningful and effective participation for all equally. Power was still in the hands of the narrow circles of the privileged classes, whose wealth, standing and family relationships gave them access to decision-making processes that were wholly denied to the vast majority of the population. As the records of these parliamentary regimes in the so-called ‘liberal constitutional’ era in Middle Eastern political history made clear, rigged elections and chambers packed with the privileged were the norm, excluding the majority of people from deciding upon their own future as effectively as in the colonial period.15 A sense of this era is conveyed in the memoirs of Muhammad Husain Haikal, a member of the Liberal Constitutional party in Egypt. Coming from these same circles of men who expected politics to be restricted to people like himself, he found the intrusion of a different kind of political public with a broader participatory base difficult to accept. He and his party had been no less vociferous than the mass-based nationalist party of the Wafd in calling for the first general elections in 1924 to mark Egypt’s emergence as a sovereign state. However, the reality of these elections – perhaps the most free in Egypt’s twentieth-century history – was harder to swallow. In a memorable passage, he describes how he and his fellow party members were sitting around listening to the election results that indicated an overwhelming majority for their Wafdist rivals. Depressing as this was, the thing that struck him most was the fact that the newly elected members of parliament were virtually all ghair ma`ruf [unknown].16 In other words, they were from outside his own circle and promised the intrusion of a very different kind of public into the hitherto narrow and familiar political world. As the political history of Egypt and of many other Middle Eastern states with formal representative institutions – Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Turkey – tended to show, political struggles in the years that followed revolved precisely around attempts to ensure that these institutions would remain in the hands of the ‘known’ people, defined by membership of a distinct class or party and subordinate to the control and patronage of the executive. For those who were excluded from this process, the only meaningful forms of political participation lay either in public protest of various kinds, or in joining clandestine organizations working towards the violent overthrow of the whole political order. With representative institutions effectively closed to most and controlled by those who wielded de facto power, it was not surprising that ideas of political participation should have turned towards the notion of the revolutionary vanguard of the select few. Whether secular or Islamist, of the socialist left or of the nationalist right, it was claimed that only such a strategy could break down the barriers of privilege and open up the political field to meaningful participation by the nation, the workers and

Acting and acting out  95 peasants or the Muslim community – depending upon the particular ideological programme being espoused.17 In many of the Arab states of the Middle East, at least, these were indeed the political forces which came to power, breaking the hold of the landed classes, overthrowing dynastic rule and sweeping aside parliamentary institutions in the name of the people. Operating generally from within the officer corps of the armed forces, they established themselves in power. However, they soon made it clear that the circles of the powerful were to be as narrow as ever, confined to small groups of army officers and/or to the politburos of vanguard parties, Ba`thist, Arab nationalist, Nasserist or, more rarely, Marxist. For these new revolutionary, Arab socialist republican regimes, political participation was to mean the top down mobilization of the people on behalf of the nation and the revolution. The people were to play their part in this, but in a highly organized way, through the roles assigned to them by those in power, appropriate to the plans for economic development, political consolidation or military enterprise espoused by those who controlled the government. For the most part, this was driven by a corporatist vision of politics. The corporatist state demanded participation through the performance of prescribed roles. This was encouraged, and often made obligatory, in a performative politics integral to the ordering of power, not simply for public display, but to foreclose other options, to occupy political space and to ensure that more voluntarist and open-ended alternatives did not threaten the hegemony of the party or regime.18 When parliaments, elections and the apparatus of allegedly representative life were re-introduced after some decades’ absence, for instance in Egypt and Iraq, they were used as national stages for the president, providing yet one more arena in which people could play out the roles allotted to them, participating thereby in the illusion of unquestioned domination.19 Participation through protest Of course, not everyone was willing to accept these roles unquestioningly. The repression, as well as the economic and military failures of these same regimes, provoked protests across the region with new demands for effective participation. As in the era of the old regimes of rigged parliaments and complacent elites, there were few avenues of participation open for the expression of political opposition or outrage. Consequently, the streets of major cities across the Middle East became contested arenas for the participation of many in violent and demonstrative politics. In the 1980s and 1990s, from Casablanca to Sana’a, Cairo to Tehran and Beirut to Algiers, people came out onto the streets to protest at the failures of unaccountable government. In many cases demonstrations became riots as people vented their anger on symbols of affluence and power, or as they responded to the heavy handed and violent practices of the security forces. Labelled in much of the Arab world as demands for the restoration of dimuqratiyyat al-khubs [the democracy of bread] these were seen as expressions of people’s outrage that the corporatist state had not kept its side of the bargain.

96  Charles Tripp Originally people might have accepted a form of participation that helped maintain a corporatist order which, however undemocratic, at least guaranteed people a job and access to the basic necessities of life. When these goods were no longer forthcoming, and when people could see that a privileged few had effectively appropriated public resources, they were unwilling to continue to play their part. The anger, the sense of betrayal and the absence of any officially instituted political spaces for voicing criticism meant that the mobilized public found new ways to participate in political protest. In doing so, they conveyed a powerful message to the government and gave the lie to the impression of the smooth functioning of power so beloved of the corporatist state.20 Inevitably, the reanimation of the public sphere beyond the control of government gave rise to movements championing civil rights and civil society. Decades of repression, censorship and control by governments that were manifestly failing to deliver in other areas and were thus encountering criticism from across the political spectrum, gave heart to those who spoke up once more for ideals of wider and more meaningful forms of political participation. Often repeating demands that had first been heard in the earlier part of the twentieth century, requesting legal recognition for spaces and forms of participation in an extended public sphere, movements emerged across the Middle East that tried to wring concessions from the powerful. Their demands generally revolved around the issue of effective participation. They called for elections to become meaningful opportunities to choose representatives, thus transforming rubber stamp parliaments into bodies that would hold governments accountable, and for legal protection for those who tried to exercise their right to take part in the public sphere. In the absence of such guarantees or possibilities, events like the demonstrations in Iran following the 2009 presidential elections, or the riots that have gripped Bahrain since 2003, or the ‘Cedar revolution’ in Lebanon of 2005, or the Aden riots of 2008 and 2009 all conveyed messages of outrage to the authorities. As the tumultuous events of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 showed, it seems that the authorities in most of the region’s states failed to get the message, or believed that they could suppress it through the usual mixture of violence and co-option. This was not to be. Mass demonstrations in Tunisia ended in the flight of its president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, bringing to an end his 24-year rule. This in turn helped to inspire a massive protest movement in Egypt that led to the popular occupation of the centres of the major cities and to the overthrow of the president, Husni Mubarak, after 29 years in office. Across the region in the weeks that followed, mass protests erupted in most of the Arab states, leading to a civil war in Libya, the disintegration of the presidency in Yemen, and ferocious and violent repression by the authorities in Syria and Bahrain. A striking feature of this rolling wave of protest was the participation of large numbers of people in direct action, for the most part through peaceful occupation of public space, despite the risks of retaliation by the security forces. For those taking part in these demonstrations, participation was meaningful in two ways. First, public displays of collective solidarity and protest made sense as a political act, given the restrictions on other forms of expression, in order to communicate

Acting and acting out  97 with, possibly to intimidate and even to overthrow the ruling authorities. Second, the principal demands of protestors across the region were for more effective forms of participation – the holding of free and fair elections, the protection of civil rights, the establishment of institutions that would be publicly accountable.21 In this respect, therefore, the genealogy of such conceptions of political participation can be traced back directly to the struggles of the nineteenth century both in Europe and in the Middle East. Indeed the methods used, although they now face a modern armoury of advanced technologies of repression, are not that different. Public participation in protests to gain institutional access and legal guarantees of wider and more effective participation in the political process has been associated with the emergence of the liberal, pluralist idea of the state in European history, as in the recent history of much of the rest of the world. It is not surprising therefore that this has been the form of voluntarist participation recognized and encouraged by established democracies that have been in a position to aid the emergence of a certain kind of civil society organization in the Middle East and thus to widen effective political participation. This aspect of their policies echoes the ideological predilections of the liberal nation state, and corresponds with dominant understandings of political participation that are so much a feature of liberal theory.22 At the same time, the behaviour of these powers also displays the ambiguity and even contradictions within the liberal project when linked to the strategic interests of powerful states. Where the outcome of wider participation has been perceived as disorder or the emergence of contentious politics, critical of the role played by these same states, there has been a marked toning down of democratic advocacy. This was well exemplified by the fate of the Bush administration’s ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’, launched with such fanfare in 2004 but which ran aground within a few years. It was irreparably damaged both by the Western reaction to the victory of the Islamist party Hamas in the parliamentary elections in the occupied Palestinian Territories in 2006 and by the dire predictions of the initiative’s effects by some of the USA’s closest autocratic allies in the region. The same concerns became apparent in the initial faltering responses of the Obama administration to the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 when these engulfed strategic allies of the USA. Participating in a Muslim community Historically, long antedating the colonial moment in the Middle East but manifesting itself from time to time in the contemporary era, is a conception of participation that revolves around the idea of maintaining and protecting the Islamic community. It is the latter that forms the focus of political endeavour, in the sense of being the relevant community the welfare of which must be safeguarded through observance of the shari`a, the laws of conduct derived from the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad some fourteen centuries ago, interpreted and reinterpreted since then by the schools of Islamic jurisprudence. As such, it is a set of conceptions regarding the nature of participation that draws upon a

98  Charles Tripp specifically Islamic understanding of the ends of human conduct and the need for individuals to make a conscious choice to take part in public life as Muslims. The specific injunction that encapsulates this idea has been present since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, although the sentiment at its heart has been evident in a great variety of pre- and non-Islamic religious and ethical traditions. It enjoins all Muslims to ‘command good and forbid evil’ [al-amr bi-l-ma`ruf wa-l-nahi `an al-munkar], making it the duty of the individual Muslim to concern himself or herself with the morals, conduct and general comportment of his or her community.23 In this sense it is a conception of participation which requires every Muslim to take part in the formation of a pious community, guided by the shari`a. The Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya [d. 1328] was full of disdain for those religious people who ‘abstain from all participation in political life and forbid it to others’.24 In a secular context, it would be called ‘civic responsibility’, but in building the Muslim community it is a responsibility assigned by God, commanding individuals to perform a role that will be integral to its maintenance and which has a strong flavour of delegation. As Ibn al-`Arabi [d. 1148] remarked, ‘all individuals are God’s deputies [nuwwab Allah]’. It is thus more than a mere exhortation and becomes instead a divine command.25 Both the sphere of participation and the form it should take are referred to in the hadith literature [collections of sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad] and in the historical accounts of individuals who acted upon such an injunction. They are generally – if not universally – held up as admirable examples of good Muslim behaviour. The concerned Muslim is supposed to advise and guide his or her kin and neighbours, thereby reinforcing the community in its dedication to the ideals of Islam. But, insofar as the reach and awareness of the individual extends beyond his or her immediate environment, the community-minded and activist Muslim is supposed to take these concerns out into the community at large, engaging if necessary with the powerful in order to ensure that those who rule are equally aware of the difference between right and wrong. Indeed, such an engagement even with the ruler of the state was thought to be so praiseworthy as to be the subject of a hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: ‘The finest form of struggle [jihad] is speaking out in the presence of an unjust ruler’ – and in some versions this was followed by the ominous phrase: ‘and getting killed for it’.26 In other words, it was acknowledged that in political systems where participation or indeed the questioning, let alone admonishing of authority, was neither part of common practice nor open to all, for an ordinary individual to speak out in this way would be an act of supreme courage. In this sense, therefore, a certain tradition of Islamic thought clearly contains a strong conception of meaningful participation, the ends to which it should be geared and the various settings in which it is not merely appropriate, but also strongly advocated. As the hadith literature makes clear, the sphere of such participation is only bounded by the limits of God’s concern for the spiritual well-being of humanity as a whole. In practice, of course, it was more likely to be limited to the Islamic community and, more specifically, to those closest to the concerned Muslim, geographically and in terms of common identities.

Acting and acting out  99 Nevertheless, it was conceded that such an understanding of participation in the project of reforming and maintaining the community was necessary at all levels of social organization. As well as touching, if the opportunity presented itself, the highest echelons of state power, it was equally valid as an idea and a practice within the smaller face-to-face environment of local neighbourhood communities, associations and villages.27 Of equal significance was the associated idea that the notion of ‘commanding good and forbidding evil’ should not be the exclusive concern of the ulama [qualified scholars of Islamic jurisprudence] but of each and every Muslim, acting upon their own intimate acquaintance with Islamic values. It was thus the basis of a participatory politics, unsystematic in many respects, but nevertheless all inclusive. At the same time, however, historical accounts of the actual exercise of this duty did point out the danger of this becoming a busybody’s charter and, worse still, an ill-informed busybody’s charter, leading to wrong-headed advice and having the potential for social discord.28 Thus, praise for the courage and virtue of the upright and outspoken individual Muslim acting upon this injunction was often balanced by a general recognition that there was a need for the ulama to bring their years of skilled training in the arts of jurisprudence to determine what in fact truly accorded with the shari`a [the guide to allow Muslims to distinguish good from evil] in any given situation. Without such guidance, it was felt, there would be an anarchic free-for-all as various interpretations, many conflicting, were acted upon, often on the basis of poorly perceived situations or half-formed understandings of the Qur’an. As various incidents from the history of the early Islamic empire indicated, governments did not always welcome such forthright and potentially critical forms of participation on the part of individuals in the public life of the community or in the delivery of political advice to the ruler.29 One solution was to develop and extend the public office of the muhtasib – a key figure in the civic life of successive Islamic states whose duties combined those of the inspector of markets, especially in weights and measures, censor and monitor of public morality. Precisely to deflect or avoid the disruptive and anarchic potential of mass participation in the regulation of the community, the ruling authorities devised this means of delegating the duty to ‘command good and forbid evil’ to one individual – who had the merit, as far as they were concerned, of also being a public servant on their payroll.30 However, with the collapse of traditional Islamic states in the modern era, the duties of the muhtasib were delegated instead to a range of civil servants performing recognizable functions within the public administration. It was always less clear who would pick up the duty to monitor public morality in the sense of carrying out the injunction to ‘command good and forbid evil’. In some respects, it could be said to have been reclaimed by the public at large, or by those members of it most concerned by this key aspect of participatory public life in a Muslim community. If one adds to this the erosion of the authority of the ulama, especially those sponsored by the authorities, one can begin to see how this notion of participating, as a religious duty, in ‘commanding good and forbidding evil’ had such radical potential in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century politics.31

100  Charles Tripp In the contemporary world, one of the marked features of modern Muslim societies has been not simply widespread literacy and education, but, partly as a consequence, the emergence of self-driven interpretation and action, unmediated by deference to the ulama. Armed with such an injunction, and unrestrained by traditional and possibly more conservative or cautious interpretations of Islamic obligation, it is not surprising that the idea has become a powerful part of the indictment of governments across the region by those dissatisfied with the poor observance, as they see it, of the obligations of Islam. For Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb in the mid-twentieth century, this lay at the heart of his political project. For him, the rightly guided Muslim had an obligation to re-create the activism and share the immediate knowledge of right and wrong that had been so marked a characteristic of the ‘Qur’anic generation’, as he put it. For him, the example of continual participation by all Muslims, demonstrated by the early followers of the Prophet Muhammad, bringing the message of Islam to all around them, was the example that all should strive to follow. It implied a constant engagement in the political life of the community since it embodied the right of all to intervene whenever they saw a sin being committed.32 In recent times, this has been a recurrent feature of different manifestations of Islamist politics in various settings. When Ibn Sa`ud was consolidating his kingdom in Saudi Arabia he destroyed the ideologically driven and ferocious Ikhwan whose zeal had helped him in the years of conquest but who had become a liability as he sought to gain recognition for his state in the region. Instead, he brought this same fervour under control by instituting the mutawi`in – the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. As paid officials of the state, it is their duty to enforce the public observance of the strict interpretations of Islamic law in force in Saudi Arabia. In this they are joined by numerous volunteers whose only apparent qualification is their desire to ‘command good and forbid evil’. Over the years they have become a very visible and notorious aspect of public life, especially in Saudi cities. Perhaps inevitably, their claim to be acting in the name of virtue was not sufficient to prevent abuse of the system and the social resentment they generated, or to allay the authorities’ concerns about the nature of their activities and their members’ loyalties, leading to some rather ineffective attempts to rein them in since 2006.33 In Egypt, since the 1980s, various Islamist groups have invoked the injunction to ‘command good and forbid evil’, some to galvanize the Egyptian authorities through the courts to restore ‘public morality’, others to justify direct and violent action against symbols of moral corruption. Whatever the method used, all have claimed that their activism was due to their obligation, as Muslims, to ensure that the government of the country takes Islamic values seriously and that their compatriots should be brought back to the right path of an Islamic community.34 In Afghanistan, when the Taliban set up their government in Kabul in 1995, they established a Department for Commanding Good and Forbidding Evil, with the express mission of ensuring that their own particular interpretation of Islamic law should be enforced. By this means, the political leadership of the Taliban, like Ibn Saud earlier in the century, was seeking to harness the zeal of a mobilized Islamist

Acting and acting out  101 cohort, but at the same time to bring it under control, seeking to ensure that participation in the Islamic mission was nevertheless directed towards ends that served their ideas of statecraft, not allowed to become the basis for an anarchic free-for-all.35 These examples show that, within this idiom, and pursuing this reading of a distinct Islamic tradition, there is a strong sense of the need for individuals to participate, individually and collectively, in shaping the politics of the community, both its forms of behaviour and the content of its legislation. In fact, one of the more noteworthy aspects of the politics of Islam in the modern world is not simply the struggle of such Islamist activists against the secular authorities of the state, but the struggle within the ranks of Islamist activists to establish the qualifications of those who may participate fully in this endeavour. In particular, the debate that revolves around gender qualifications is a marked feature of the effort by women in Iran, Morocco and Turkey to establish that they are as qualified as men to participate fully in the formation of a distinctively Islamic public sphere. This means not simply questioning the roles assigned to them by their male coreligionists, which have generally confined them to the ‘guarded sphere’ of the household and the family, but also to assert their right to participate fully in the ijtihad [exercise of interpretative powers in relation to the shari`a] which must lie at the heart of any well-informed and considered notion of Islamic obligation.36 In these examples, therefore, we have vibrant and engaging understandings of participation as a social and political activity that are central to the lives of many in the Middle East, which nevertheless diverge considerably from those outlined in the liberal tradition. Participating in the neo-patrimonial state The foregoing examples – the idea of participation associated with the forms of participatory politics in the nation-state and the conception of participation grounded in an Islamic tradition concerned with safeguarding the community – tend to support a voluntarist view of political activity. Here the act of participation is apparently driven by an intention on the part of political subjects, individually or collectively, to involve themselves in some way in shaping the public, political world. Of course, in both cases, feelings of the need, even obligation for conscious involvement in these processes may be due in large part to the milieu that has shaped the political subject, influencing perception, consciousness and evaluation. In other words, it is only because of such experiences that their participation in various ways is meaningful for the actors concerned. It is within this framework that taking part in elections, going on protest marches or joining a group seeking, by whatever means, to impose their views of correct Islamic behaviour, make sense. The actors themselves are making a decision, they are not automata, but they are acting within a distinct universe of meaning. There is, consequently, an echo of the idea of interpellation that was raised at the outset. However, the Middle East is not alone in throwing up systems which illustrate even more effectively some of the features of ‘interpellated participation’

102  Charles Tripp that help to define the relationship of the political subject with the forms of power that surround him or her. This presents a rather different perspective on ideas of participation, but one which may be implicated in what some have seen as the resilience of authoritarian power structures in the Middle East. In this respect, despite the upheavals and regime collapses of 2011, the concentration in the Middle East of relatively long-lived authoritarian regimes, monarchical and republican, has been remarkable. However, there is nothing exceptional about the forms of participation underpinning systems of power that owe nothing to the notions of political action associated with the liberal democratic ideal.37 In this context it is the endurance and ubiquity of the neo-patrimonial state that creates the environment in which practices of participation in an imagined common venture – even one that is deeply hierarchical – become widespread, helping thereby to reproduce the structure itself. It is associated with and creates the arena for forms of patrimonial control that are both material and imaginative. In other words, control of material resources, both economic goods and instruments of coercion, form the core of a system of unequal power, but this is set within a moral universe that helps to validate these systems, thereby co-opting large sections of the population. Thus, the dispensation of favours by the powerful may be part of the equation, but so too are ideas of reciprocity, honour and social approval that constitute the narratives of both patron and client. Violation of these practices and norms of collusion can be met by sanctions of varying kinds, helping to keep the system in place. This may work more in favour of the powerful patron in the short term, but in the longer term it may lead to a decay, indeed a disappearance or, as the events of 2011 demonstrated, an active revolt of the client-base.38 The hierarchy is maintained in part by its continuing ability to deliver the goods that the system demands. This was visible for instance in the response of the government of Saudi Arabia to the upheavals across the Arab world in 2011. King Abdullah, as well as boosting the police and security force presence in towns across the kingdom, also decreed a startling $37 billion package of benefits for lower- and middle-income Saudis in February 2011. In part, however, the patrons need be seen to act according to the norms that make such a system an integral part of the common sense of everyday life for all concerned. Underpinning this are notions of participation: all are expected to play given roles in the reproduction of a system that is never represented as purely utilitarian or instrumental but draws upon an ethical repertoire of ‘proper’ conduct. Sometimes this is hedged around with the symbolic language of religion. At other times it can be the kinship grouping, the village or provincial setting that will provide the terms of moral approval, making it seem the right thing to do in the circumstances. In some contexts, such as in Iraq, for instance, the very word used to denote these kinds of relationship – al-intisab – has implicit within it notions of something fitting or proper.39 However, at the heart of it is the notion of participation within clearly defined limits. It is the public validation of a system of unequal power that is often ruthlessly maintained. President Bashar al-Asad of Syria, when faced by widespread uprisings and protests in May and June 2011, made both facets of

Acting and acting out  103 this clear in his speeches and in the actions of his security forces. As thousands of Syrians discovered, anyone seeking to challenge such a system and daring to imagine that the individual can assume a role beyond the well-defined spheres of action faced death or imprisonment. Wherever you are situated in the hierarchy, it makes demands upon you, expects you to participate by playing a certain role, allowing individual escape only under specific circumstances. Some of these may be tied up with particular negotiations by specific political actors. But in the Lebanese case, for instance, two other avenues of escape have presented themselves. One has historically been emigration or internal migration, even though the latter has often resulted in the exchange of one patron for another. The other came from the opportunities created by the terrible violence of the country’s protracted civil war. Disruption, flight and the use of violence to acquire new sources of wealth brought with them new possibilities for some. However, as the politics of the past few decades has shown, they used the opportunity not to alter the basis of this kind of expected participation, but to improve their own chances within it, making demands of a client base of their own. With this often came forms of justification, ideological and sectarian, which would validate the parts people were expected to play.40 Indeed this could be said to be a constant preoccupation of governments across the Middle East: creating the structures and the imaginative frameworks in which political subjects are encouraged to participate in ways that maintain regimes of unequal power. In some respects this can be seen as creating the conditions of complicity, whereby political subjects are ensnared in a system in which they cannot do otherwise than act along lines very similar to those who govern them. Whilst this might seem to contravene the principles of the ‘public state’, the laws of which can be used effectively but also selectively as sanctions against those who do not play this game, such a form of complicit participation is a vital component for the ‘shadow state’ that stands behind and among the public institutions and constitutes the true locus of power in the country.41 Such a ‘shadow state’, rarely acknowledged in public discourse, but always to the fore in people’s calculations when assessing the risks of action in relation to the powerful, crucially depends upon the micro-practices of descending power that implicate greater and greater numbers, entangling them in a web of association, profit and sanction that becomes effectively the order of the day. This will involve the entrepreneurs of patrimonial politics whose access to resources, from the highest level down to the most modest neighbourhood, will constitute the framework of involvement that demands participation of those who wish to negotiate survival in a setting where rights are unenforceable. By the same token, such a framework provides the client-base, the petitioners and those whose participation in the system ensures its and their own survival, with any number of strategies of involvement, evasion, acquiescence, obstruction and negotiation with the ‘everyday state’ that forms part of the fabric of their daily lives.42 Nor is such a form of complicit participation incompatible with more publicly recognizable forms of participation, such as parliamentary elections. Indeed, as examples from different parts of the Middle East have shown, governments

104  Charles Tripp have been keen to ensure people’s participation in such processes. In Jordan, for instance, Lust-Okar has demonstrated that such activities form an important arena for ‘competitive clientelism’, and as such play a role in the maintenance of the authority of the Hashemite state.43 Similarly, in Egypt, Kassem’s study of the role of parliamentary elections in the 1990s, indicates that, far from being a sham devoid of significance, they provided an important opportunity for the symbolic display of state power and played a key role as a disciplining mechanism for the ruling National Democratic Party, thereby enhancing the already formidable powers of the presidency.44 For those overseeing this process, the intention is to maintain haibat al-dawla [awe of the state] of this curiously dual state – public and shadow. This involves establishing and maintaining, if necessary with exemplary violence, but by preference through conceded authority, the boundaries and forms of participation. In the process, close attention is paid to the criteria applied to those who may participate and in what kinds of process. These may change over time and are subject to varying pressures, constantly preoccupying those who encourage complicity and licensed participation. Such conceptions of participation, possibly shared by large portions of the population, are linked to unequal forms of power. This may in turn create fertile ground for dissatisfaction, encouraging people to break out of the given, ascribed forms of behaviour and to take part in public manifestations of rebellion and rejection. This has been demonstrated often enough in Middle East politics, most spectacularly in the widespread uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011. However, while the hegemony of the assigned roles is maintained, these ideas of scripted participation are congruent with those practices that constitute both state power and its subjects – interpellating them, it could be said, in ways that they recognize and, in responding, reinforcing, even though they may not be conceding authority to the power they ostensibly support.45

Conclusion Throughout this exploration of the varied ideas of participation in the Middle East, it has become apparent that they are all associated with distinct fields of meaning in which participation, or the act of abstaining from participation, make sense to the political subjects. Many factors go into the constitution of such meanings, some of them intentionally deployed and crafted to suit the interests of specific groups of people, others the outcome of discursive processes that simultaneously shape the political subject. Indeed, in the Middle East, as elsewhere, this variety produces the range of meanings that have come to be associated with the very idea of politics, with political behaviour and thus with notions of participation. In the region under study, three distinct languages or fields of meaning have been explored, each associated with different discursive practices and thus capable of generating various ideas about what it means to participate in political processes. Each of them has historically coexisted in the same countries, although there have been significant variations in their relative weights and their locations within public discourse at different stages of those countries’ histories. This has

Acting and acting out  105 given a variable salience to the capacity of each to shape the politics of the state. They have also been drivers of political conflict as the champions of one form of participation come up against the resistance of those who hold to a very different idea of the proper ordering of politics and thus of tolerable political behaviour. Thus the emergence or the imposition of the nation state from the nineteenth century onwards as the dominant form of political organization introduced those understandings of participation associated with it. Revolving around ideas of the nation, as both a community of ethnic identity and a community of citizens, it gave birth to the politics of nationalism and to the ideal of the right of all citizens to participate in their own self-governance, asserted against European colonial powers and against local tyrannies. Bringing in its train the forms of participation familiar from other histories, such as the politics of demonstration and protest, as well as electoral politics and competition for representation, this has remained a powerful strand in the contentious politics of the region. By turns suppressed and subverted by those whose exclusive hold on power would be threatened by any such open-ended form of participatory politics, it nevertheless remains a tenacious ideal. It is an aspiration that has the power to mobilize people even against great odds. This was visible in the events of Iran in the summer of 2009 following the ‘stolen election’ of President Ahmadinejad. It was even more dramatically illustrated in the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011.46 Equally contentious at other times has been the notion of participation grounded in ideas derived from Islamic traditions that stress the moral imperative for believers to participate in the processes that will ensure the spiritual health of a self-regulating community. Certain governments have embraced this idea and have tried to project themselves as the political agency that will permit – and oversee – such forms of moral self-correction. But it is not welcomed by all. Precisely because of the assertion of the duty of all to participate in the regulation of the community, up to and including the governing authorities, it has potentially subversive implications for those who want to monopolize power. Yet the very repression associated with government responses has intensified for some the need to pursue the ‘neglected duty’ and to struggle until a political order has been established that fully complies with their reading of Islamic obligations.47 However, it is also noticeable that both these forms of active engagement and assertion of the right and the duty to participate have come up against an array of unequal power, expressed in hierarchies of patronage. In many parts of the Middle East these constitute the political world that people need to negotiate, precisely because of the overwhelming power which they represent. In doing so, not only are people up against formidable powers of co-option and coercion, but they are also trying to disentangle themselves from a world of meaning that has been discursively reinforced over time and which has the capacity to interpellate them as moral agents, as well as political actors. Recent literature focusing on the resilience of authoritarian forms of rule in the Middle East has found reasons for its persistence in a variety of sources, structural, moral and imaginative.48 It would be too pessimistic, as well as fraught with epistemological problems of the kind outlined at the beginning of the chapter, to suggest that such an

106  Charles Tripp organization of power is overdetermined by the confluence of factors that have worked so systematically throughout the region. Indeed, in the light of the ongoing struggles to bring such forms of power to public account it would tend to underplay the capacity of political agency in the Middle East. Nevertheless, it remains a powerful factor in the politics of a number of states in the region, calling forth distinct forms of participation and associating them with a range of ideas that appear to sanction such behaviour. In this respect, it serves as a reminder of the power of interpellation in any understanding of political participation. In those many cases where people have rebelled against their ascribed roles, at considerable risk to themselves, their acts of resistance have underlined their capacity to draw on other resources – ideas of citizens’ rights, or ideas of Muslim rectitude – to reject such notions of complicit participation. The widespread upheavals of 2011, in which millions of men and women from all sections of society participated, also serve as a reminder that interpellation in this way should not be equated with crude determinism, in which the subject is deprived of autonomy. On the contrary, the unfolding sequence of events across different Arab countries and the possibilities they opened up for purposeful action, as well as the commonly remarked upon evaporation of fear, could be said to be another aspect of the power of events to interpellate individuals who find themselves in broadly similar situations. These events have opened out the possibility of reconstituting the political field itself, bringing a different understanding of politics and thus a different and possibly contrary view of what it means to be a political subject and a participant in the political process. This emphasizes the fact that underlying any notion of participation, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, there must be a distinct idea of the political in which ideas of ends and means are intimately connected, as are the strategic and ethical concerns of the political subjects. It equally points to the strong possibility that in any given situation people will hold contrary views of both politics and its proper conduct. In the wake of the upheavals and regime collapses in the Middle East during 2011, the expression of such differences is one of the main challenges to the emergence of a civic order in which the plurality of politics can take shape. Whether in the states where autocracies have fallen, or in those where the old practices continue, debates such as these will continue to be the stuff of contentious politics across the Middle East. At their heart lie very different views of what it means to participate in the political process, of who should have the right to participate and by what authority.

Notes 1 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Sadiq al`Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East 8 (1981) pp. 5–26. 2 Alastair Hannay, On the Public (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 6–24, 42–46; Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: private interest and public action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) pp. 63–65, 112–117; Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007) pp. 61–71.

Acting and acting out  107 3 Samuel P. Huntington and Joan M. Nelson, No Easy Choice: participation in developing countries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) pp. 1–15. 4 See the implications for such a position of the post-structuralist critique in Caroline Williams, ‘The Subject and Subjectivity’, in Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Valentine (eds), Politics and Post-structuralism – an introduction (Edinburgh: EUP, 2002) pp. 34–35; N. Nelson and S. Wright, ‘Participation and Power’, in N. Nelson and S. Wright (eds), Power and Participatory Development (London: IT Publications, 1995) pp. 1–16; M. Mayo and G. Craig, ‘Community Participation and Empowerment: the human face of structural adjustment or tools for democratic transformation’, in G. Craig and M. Mayo (eds), Community Empowerment (London: Zed Books, 1995) pp. 1–6. 5 Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the renewal of Marxist social theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 208–220. 6 Resch, Althusser (1992), pp. 221–223. 7 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [tr. D. Nicholson-Smith] (New York: Zone Books, 1995), pp. 12–20, 36–38; J.F. Lane, Bourdieu’s Politics (London: Routledge, 2006) pp. 47–65, 71–74. 8 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: a politics of the performative (New York: Routledge, 1997) pp. 141–160; Richard Merelman, ‘The Dramaturgy of Politics’ The Sociological Quarterly Vol 10/2 (Spring 1969), pp. 216–241. 9 Niyaz Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 89–132; Kemal Kerpat, The Politicization of Islam (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 308–327. 10 Rifa`a Rafi` al-Tahtawi, Kitab takhlis al-ibriz fir talkhis bariz in Al-‘a`mal al-kamilah li-Rifa`a Rafi` al-Tahtawi [ed. Muhammad `Umara] (Beirut: Al-mu’assasat al`arabiyah li-l-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1973), Part II, pp. 201–224 – also in an excellent English translation by Daniel L. Newman An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–31) (London: Saqi Books, 2002). 11 See the comprehensive account of these trends in Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983). 12 See Vanessa Martin, Islam and Modernism – the Iranian revolution of 1906 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989) and Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: social and cultural origins of Egypt’s `Urabi movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 13 Margot Badran, Feminism, Islam and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 74–88. But it was not until 1956 that women were given the right to vote in Egypt – some years after most of the major Middle Eastern countries. 14 See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment – self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism (Oxford: OUP, 2007). 15 A. Hourani, ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables’, in W. Polk and R. Chambers (eds), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962) pp. 41–68; Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987); P.J. Vatikiotis, The History of Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), pp. 247–432. 16 Muhammad Husain Haikal, Mudhakkirat fi al-siyasat al-misriyyah [Memoirs in Egyptian politics] Part 1, 1912–1937 (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahdat al-Misriyyah, 1951), p. 176. 17 Ali Shari`ati, What is to be done? [ed. Farhang Rajaee] (Houston, TX: IRIS, 1986), pp. 16–17; Sayyid Qutb, Ma`alim fi al-Tariq [Signposts on the road] (Cairo: Dar alShuruq, 1988), pp. 52–61; Michel Aflaq Fi Sabil al-Ba`th [On the path of renaissance] (Damascus: Dar al-Tali`ah li-l-Taba`ah wa-l-Nashr, 1959) pp. 91–5, 126–131; Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt’s Liberation – The Philosophy of the Revolution (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1955), pp. 32–45, 70–78. 18 Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism – associational life in twentieth century Egypt (Oxford: OUP, 1989), pp. 72–157; Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of

108  Charles Tripp Syria under Asad (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), pp. 133–203; Steven Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 106–133. 19 Mark N. Cooper, The Transformation of Egypt (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 126–234; Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge, CUP, 2007), pp. 215–221. 20 J. Walton and D. Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 37–54, 170–199; Larbi Sadiki, ‘Popular Uprisings and Arab Democratization’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000), pp. 79–95. 21 Nadia Marzouki, ‘From People to Citizens in Tunisia’, Middle East Report 259 (Summer 2011), pp. 16–19. 22 Mark Palmer, Breaking the real axis of evil: how to oust the world’s last dictators by 2025 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Sheila Carapico, ‘Foreign Aid for Promoting Democracy in the Arab World’, Middle East Journal Vol 56/3 (Summer 2002), pp. 379–395. 23 Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), represents the most authoritative and exhaustive contemporary discussion of this tradition and its various manifestations. 24 Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought – from the Prophet to the present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 155. 25 Cook, Commanding Right (2000), p. 365, n 53; The Qur’an [translated into English by Alan Jones] (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007), Sura 3, verses 104 and 110; Sura 9, verse 71; Sura 31, verse 17. 26 Cook, Commanding Right (2000), p. 6. 27 Cook, Commanding Right (2000), pp. 10–12. 28 See for instance the historical treatment of the Kharijites – who could be said to have been acting on this precept from the earliest years of the Islamic order – and the contrast with more contemporary views of their actions. Hussam Timani, Modern Intellectual Readings of the Kharijites (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). 29 See A.J. Cameron, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari: an examination of his image in the hagiography of Islam (New Delhi: Adam, 2006). 30 See Niqula Ziyadah (ed.), Al-Hisbah wa-l-Muhtasib fi al-Islam [The hisbah and the muhtasib in Islam] (Beirut: al-Matba`ah al-Kathulikiyyah, 1963). 31 Louis Gardet, La cité musulmane: vie sociale et politique (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1961), pp. 184–188; Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 60–106. 32 Qutb, Ma`alim (1988), pp. 14–23. 33 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ‘Morality Police under Pressure’, Arab Reform Bulletin, June 2007; http://www.carnegieendowment.org/ arb/?fa=show&article=20910 34 Salwa Ismail, Rethinking Islamist Politics – culture, the state and Islamism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 58–81. 35 Ahmad Rashid, Taliban: Islam, oil and the new great game in Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 105–116. 36 Afsaneh Najmabadi, ‘Feminism in an Islamic Republic’ in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John Esposito, Islam, Gender and Social Change (1998), pp. 62–84; Anne Sofie Roald, ‘Feminist Reinterpretation of Islamic Sources: Muslim feminist theology in the light of the Christian tradition of feminist thought’ in K. Ask and M. Tjomsland (eds), Women and Islamization (Oxford, 1998), pp. 25–44. 37 Ellen Lust-Okar, ‘Taking participation seriously’, in E. Lust-Okar and Saloua Zerhouni (eds), Political Participation in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008), pp. 1–8. 38 Laila Alhamad, ‘Formal and informal venues of engagement’, in Lust-Okar and Zerhouni, Political Participation in the Middle East (2008), pp. 34–36, 40–45. 39 Nazar Tawfik Hasso, Administrative Politics in the Middle East: the case of monarchical Iraq 1920–1958 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1983), pp. 60–66.

Acting and acting out  109 40 Michael Johnson, All Honourable Men: the social origins of war in Lebanon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 25–69, 227–259; Brigitte Rieger, Rentiers, Patrone und Gemeinschaft: soziale Sicherung im Libanon (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 69–95, 371–385. 41 Tripp, Iraq (2007), pp. 259–267. 42 Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 41–73; Salwa Ismail, Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: encountering the everyday state (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) pp. xvii–xlvi. 43 E. Lust-Okar, ‘Competitive Clientelism in Jordanian Elections’, in Lust-Okar and Zerhouni, Political Participation (2008), pp. 75–94. 44 Maye Kassem, In the Guise of Democracy: governance in contemporary Egypt (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1999). 45 Driss Maghraoui, ‘The Dynamics of Civil Society in Morocco’, in Lust-Okar and Zerhouni, Political Participation (2008), pp. 193–215; Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: politics, rhetoric and symbols in contemporary Syria (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). 46 Kaveh Ehsani, Arang Keshavarzian and Norma Claire Moruzzi, ‘Tehran, June 2009’, Middle East Report Online, 28 June 2009, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero062809. html 47 Johannes Jansen, The Neglected Duty: the creed of Sadat’s assassins and Islamic resurgence in the Middle East (New York: Macmillan, 1986). 48 See O. Schlumberger, Debating Arab authoritarianism: dynamics and durability in nondemocratic regimes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) and M. Pripstein Posusney (ed.), Authoritarianism in the Middle East – regimes and resistance (Boulder,CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005).

6 Citizenship after orientalism Genealogical investigations Engin F. Isin

Introduction The title of this chapter draws from the research I have been undertaking for nearly a decade now. It was sparked by Being Political which raised some issues about the orientalist origins of citizenship and how it depended on a distinction made between the occident and the orient.1 While raising these issues Being Political did not address them since its main focus was to provide genealogies of (‘occidental’) citizenship to produce a different image of citizenship against its others, what I called its strangers, outsiders and aliens.2 This was a pluralist and relational (or dialogical) history of citizenship read against the others on which it depended to exist. Almost simultaneously, I also published an essay on the orientalist origins of citizenship entitled ‘Citizenship after orientalism’.3 Little did I know then that with that title I was embarking on a decade-long research programme at the end of which I would still remain only at the surface of the question I articulated (or rather stumbled upon). The centre of my attention became Max Weber who, more consistently and explicitly than any scholar, not only thought that citizenship was a unique occidental institution but that it also provided the foundations of modernity and capitalism. For Weber citizenship as political subjectivity enabled the performance of a ‘pure and simple’ identity that was above and beyond any other affiliation or belonging.4 For Weber then citizenship as ‘political subjectivity’ means to conduct oneself as a rights-bearing subject with no obligations other than those that are connected to those rights that one bears. Was Weber right in thinking that citizenship was a uniquely occidental (as he termed it) ‘political subjectivity’? This question appears at first rather a benign, if not banal, question. (I hope it will not remain that way for too long in this chapter.) But the more I dwelt on the question and tried to understand what Weber may have meant by this distinction and what importance he may have attached to it in the context of his broader comparative historical sociology, the more I became concerned (perhaps obsessed) with a latent assumption of his thought: orientalism in the sense of assuming that there was indeed a fundamental distinction between occidental (European) and oriental (Chinese, Indian and Islamic) political subjectivities and identities. Moreover, this distinction was not only fundamental but also explained why capitalism would develop in the occident and not in the orient.

Citizenship after orientalism  111 While considering it a troubling aspect of Weber’s thought, many scholars still refuse to be drawn into discussing ‘Weber’s orientalism’. While there is a very strong argument in Weber’s work that citizenship constitutes the foundations of capitalism and explains its origins in the occident, with some exceptions on his interpretation of Islam,5 this remains largely a mute issue.6 Significantly, Said makes only a brief mention of Weber. (Though that should not be surprising given Said’s background in humanities rather than political theory or social science.)7 Yet, while Weber’s orientalism and the interpretations of citizenship as the foundation of (occidental) capitalism may still appear as a rather obscure scholastic question, we have witnessed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries new colonial wars and occupations (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq). They depended on – and were possibly justified by – the assumption that oriental cultures ‘lacked’ citizenship (and its ostensible accompaniment democracy).8 Still more broadly we have been made aware of internal colonizations of indigenous and African peoples who suffered and endured what might be called ‘internal colonialisms’.9 Moreover, the development of international human rights law and its deployment as cloaked citizenship law is amongst the most contentious issue of politics in the world today.10 Thus, returning to Weber’s orientalism in interpreting citizenship and more broadly tracing the origins of the orientalist interpretation of citizenship is anything but a benign or banal question. It enables us to ask rather fundamental questions about some key concepts of (occidental) political thought albeit with a focus on citizenship. I have discussed some of these issues elsewhere.11 Yet the aim has never been a ‘critique’ of Weber. Rather, the question is how do we go about investigating citizenship (as political subjectivity) without (or after) orientalism? The focus of this chapter is the methodological dimensions of this question rather than empirical or substantive matters. I am drawn to Michael Freeden’s challenge to political theorists to think through cross-cultural comparisons. I suggest that, while not the only plausible way, Nietzsche–Weber–Foucault inspired genealogical investigations are capable of cultivating ‘styles of thought’ that Freeden invites political theorists to investigate, what he calls ‘actually existing political thought’. An outline of the relevant aspects of Freeden’s challenge follows. A discussion of how genealogical investigations respond to this challenge with examples drawn from research on Ottoman civic gift-giving practices illustrates the main argument. A proposal to expand these investigations to Chinese, Indian, Islamic and indigenous conceptions of political subjectivity concludes the chapter.

Cross-cultural theory about actually existing political acts Michael Freeden issued a strong challenge to political theorists to think in crosscultural ways.12 While Freeden does not explicitly argue this, the underlying assumption in this challenge is the acknowledgement of the western bias in political theory – a bias that has led to many cul-de-sacs. For Freeden cross-cultural political theory should be:

112  Engin F. Isin driven by the belief that the balance of research and insight of political theory must at least in part detach itself from the almost exclusive focus on Western Europe and North America if we are to accumulate knowledge on what it means to think politically across cultures and continents and if we are to appreciate the richness and diversity of such thinking. Yet, Freeden argues, such comparisons cannot simply replicate ‘west’ versus ‘east’ comparisons. Going beyond such gross comparisons: will require identifying and assessing various units of comparison – discourses, concepts, epistemologies, themes, etc. Most so-called comparative studies in political thought have to date suffered from being side-by-side expositions without a genuine endeavour to engage in critical micro-comparison. For Freeden one reason for this is that ‘Many political philosophers are too focused on asserting the universality, or nigh-universality, of reason, discourse, concepts or values to pay much attention to temporal and spatial variations’.13 To put it simply, Many historians of political thought are ill-equipped to make detailed comparisons between more than one tradition of political thought and, when they are so equipped, may talk in general terms about mentalities, climates of opinion and varying national experiences as a backdrop to the detected differences in political thinking, rather than compare texts and utterances directly.14 By contrast, The aim of comparative investigations of political thinking would by no means replace the other approaches to, and methods of, studying political thought, but it could lead to an additional body of theory about political thinking that may shed light on its more unobserved and underplayed features; and it could equip us with cross-cultural and intra-cultural tools to be applied regularly, if no doubt loosely, to various instances of political thought.15 Freeden’s matter-of-fact style is deceptive. His challenge is formidable. Freeden is not only challenging political theorists to think across cultures but to do so with genuinely reformulated comparisons. For this he also issues a programme. Freeden insists on studying actually existing political thought that focuses on: … the political thinking actually taking place within political entities: the thinking produced by human beings in their political capacity as decisionmakers, option-rankers, dissent and conflict regulators, support mobilizers, and vision creators; and the thinking consumed by them in that capacity. Politics may have been termed the art of the possible, but it is a ‘possible’ based on the ‘feasible’ and its study has always focused on the here and now, whether in complacent or critical mode.16

Citizenship after orientalism  113 For Freeden the study of actual political thinking or thought involves two dimensions.17 First, it involves investigating political thinking in actually existing practices, situations and institutions. The focus here is to investigate how thought is deployed in concrete instances geared toward achieving specific objectives (and exercising power) whether these are consciously articulated or articulable or not. Second, it also involves studying thinking about politics embedded in ideational configurations. The focus is here the thought that is geared toward achieving policies, programmes, visions, arrangements, rules and entities that function as contested and contestable ideational or ideological configurations. Two dimensions of studying actually existing forms of thought are interrelated and complement each other for a critical and reflective political theory. While all subjects engage in political thinking, thinking about politics is open to only those subjects whose authority (status and position) allow them to engage in production of language broadly defined as all aural, visual or textual statements. These are ideological configurations not in the sense of distorted representations of realities but in the sense of being constitutive elements of making realities. Freeden’s challenge for what we might call a ‘cross-cultural theory about actually existing political acts’ is both welcome and timely. For nearly a decade now I have been attempting such a political theory by studying ‘citizenship’ in Ottoman political practices with as yet no discernible breakthroughs. Yet, like Freeden, I am determined that we must overcome orientalism in political thought (for many more reasons than I can explore here). That is why revisiting Weber is so crucially important as he was also driven by the belief that we must think across cultures and comparatively. So if I am convinced that Weber could not go beyond orientalism we have to start with him to think about citizenship after orientalism. ‘Citizenship’ is associated with political subjectivity in a paradoxical way. While at its face value we might think that political subjectivity would be meaningless without citizenship, we also know that political subjectivity is enacted without citizenship (i.e. by those who do not hold the status). If citizenship is a bundle of rights, political rights, amongst which perhaps the most important is the right to political subjectivity (the right to conduct oneself as political, as a claims-making, rights-bearing subject), are an essential component of that bundle. Is political subjectivity merely a synonym for voting and, perhaps more broadly, franchise? This paradox arises from at least two meanings associated with political subjectivity. The first is, of course, voting (or franchise). As Marshall demonstrated, political rights are associated with the nineteenth century and the expansion of the franchise to working classes and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, voting (and franchise) are expressions of a broader right, the right to have rights, and this is the second meaning, which means to partake in decisions (or at least have a say in them) that affect our lives and the lives of others.18 Taken together, these meanings (formal and substantive) of political subjectivity make it the kernel of citizenship in the sense that citizenship can be exercised by those who do – as well as who don’t – hold legal status. The ways in which Weber conducted his comparison and reached his conclusions with

114  Engin F. Isin his studies of India, China, Judaism and Islam are beyond the focus of this chapter, as I discussed these elsewhere.19 How do we investigate citizenship as actually existing political acts with genuine comparisons across different cultures?

Genealogical investigations about actually existing political acts The first aspect of these investigations is a genealogical approach to historical sociology and politics. Genealogy in historical sociology and politics is both a perspective and a method that emerged with Nietzsche and was developed most prominently by Foucault in a series of original studies on asylums, prisons and hospitals.20 Simply put, genealogical investigations address the question ‘how did we get here?’ in a given social, political, cultural or economic ‘thing’.21 Yet, that question is more complex than it appears. Genealogical investigations are neither about a search for origins nor about giving accounts of a development or progress. Rather, these investigations enable us to trace how many ideas, practices, techniques, and tactics emerge in different contexts to address different problems and which can be assembled to address yet another set of problems. Raymond Geuss usefully contrasted Nietzschean genealogy with ‘tracing a pedigree’, which involves finding a single line of descent in any given thing, creates a continuous and unbroken development, attempts to find a single unitary origin of the thing, and functions as a legitimizing or naturalizing force.22 Geuss argues that ‘tracing a pedigree’ has five characteristics that genealogy opposes. First, tracing a pedigree is interested in the positive evaluation of the thing in question. Second, it starts with a singular origin. Third, it interprets that singular origin as though it is the source of the value of the thing whose pedigree is being traced. Fourth, it establishes an unbroken linear development for that singular origin to the thing itself. Fifth, it assumes that in its development the thing maintains or preserves (or even enhances) its positive value that was posited at the outset.23 By contrast, for Nietzsche, … the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consists of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or obliterated.24 For this reason Nietzsche doubts that the purpose of law can help us understand the history of the emergence of law. He posits this as the most important proposition of historical research.25 Similarly, Foucault emphatically asserts that: Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is

Citizenship after orientalism  115 not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of people. By contrast, as with Nietzsche, Foucault affirms that … to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us …26 If genealogy attempts to delineate multiple lines of descent, reveals indirect, fragmented and fractured lines of development, eschews single origins and is critical rather than legitimizing, it is particularly useful for genuine comparisons since it does not begin with an already-assigned value of a thing. If genealogy aims to focus on problematizations that mobilize a thing and how these assemble strategies and technologies appropriate to governing it, it is particularly useful for cross-cultural comparisons since it does not begin with an already-defined scope for a thing. It can be argued that Weber was the first serious student of Nietzschean genealogy before Foucault.27 This makes it even more important to investigate not only his thoughts on the development of citizenship through cross-cultural comparisons but also how he arrived at them. In his earlier work he argued that ‘a genuinely analytic study comparing the stages of development of the ancient polis with those of the medieval city would be welcome and productive’. 28 Yet, what is even more revealing is that he cautioned against gross comparisons: Of course, such a comparative study would not aim at finding ‘analogies’ and ‘parallels’, as is done by those engrossed in the currently fashionable enterprise of constructing general schemes of development. The aim should, rather, be precisely the opposite: to identify and define the individuality of each development, the characteristics which made the one conclude in a manner so different from that of the other. This done, one can then determine the causes which led to these differences.29 Was Weber drawing a similar contrast between pedigree and genealogy as Foucault did much later in the twentieth century? Clearly, Weber was aware of the pitfalls of ‘comparison’ and thought that a ‘genuinely’ analytic comparison would involve careful consideration of differences of descent and development. A further discussion of genealogy and its trajectories through Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault would require another occasion than this chapter. It must be emphasized, however, that genealogy is not ‘merely’ a method (otherwise it would raise questions about using a ‘western’ theoretical method to attempt

116  Engin F. Isin overcoming orientalism) but also a perspective – a perspective that questioned Christian values in the development of knowledge about the West and the East. Genealogy documents the origins, emergence and development of values, or rather, the value of values and it itself originated as a way to understand Christian morals as values.30 Nietzsche expressed this early when he said ‘if Christianity has done everything to orientalize the occident, Judaism has always played an essential part in occidentalizing it again: which in a certain sense means making of Europe’s mission and history a continuation of the Greek’.31 It is also important to remember that Said’s Orientalism was made possible by his encounter with Nietzsche and Foucault.32 Thus, the insistence on genealogy has both methodological and political aspects.

Ottoman citizenship as gift-giving acts ‘Citizenship after orientalism’ is about rethinking that subject called the ‘citizen’ without orientalist or Eurocentric assumptions. The citizen both in name and practice existed long before there was a debate on human rights or even democracy. It is well worth remembering that Ancient Greeks invented ‘citizenship’ before they invented various forms of government such as ‘oligarchy’, ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’. Similarly, citizenship as both status and practice existed in medieval and early modern Europe long before democracy, let alone liberal democracy of the nineteenth century. Perhaps more importantly, rights-bearing subjects existed without the name ‘citizens’ before Greco-Roman polities. Yet, since the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the discourse on citizenship has interpreted it as a uniquely occidental invention without pedigree or lineage beyond those aspects of history that is considered occidental. As we shall see below, it also interpreted citizenship as the origins of capitalism. The relationship between orientalism and citizenship has not received the attention it deserves in either postcolonial or citizenship studies. It is well known that orientalism involves dividing the world into two ‘civilizational’ blocs, one having rationalized and secularized and hence modern, and the other having remained religious, if not factitious, and hence traditional. Some scholars have demonstrated how the orient has been produced as representations especially in occidental art and literature. Others have argued that what was produced was not only representations but also the orient itself, materializing through orientalizing discourses. Some scholars have argued that indeed Said (in his Orientalism book) was ambiguous on the difference between the orient as representation and the orient as real, sometimes assuming that the orient was simply the former, sometimes assuming that it was a distorted version of the latter.33 Moreover, Said was more insistent on orientalism as a dominant and dominating discourse rather than focusing on it as a relation. What concerns me is that for orientalizing discourses the essential difference between the occident and the orient can be partially attributed to citizenship understood as a contractual arrangement amongst unencumbered and sovereign citizens, associated with each other and capable of acting collectively, and creating modern capitalism. In other words, we are not

Citizenship after orientalism  117 concerned with how the orient was represented but how a difference was produced through orientalizing practices involving both occidental and oriental genealogies and geographies. It is this relationship between citizenship and orientalism that has not engaged scholarship. The reasons for this neglect is complex and the fact that Said, whose book was so influential in instigating studies on orientalism, did not concern himself with orientalism in the social sciences may have contributed to this.34 As Fred Halliday has recently argued, the orientalism of humanities rather than social sciences still dominates scholarship.35 It is open to debate whether Weber was an ‘orientalist’.36 Again, what concerns us is not to enter into that debate but to acknowledge the fact that his interpretation of citizenship as a distinctly western institution inaugurates a social science tradition where the origins of ‘city’, ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’ are etymologically traced to the ‘Greek’, ‘Roman’ and ‘medieval’ cities and affinities between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ practices are established and juxtaposed against oriental societies – Indian, Chinese and Islamic – as societies that failed to develop citizenship and hence indigenous capitalism. As social scientists we now often insist that polis, politics and polity, civitas, citizenship and civility, and demos and democracy have ‘common roots’. We often provide images of virtuous Greek citizens debating in the agora or ecclesia, austere Roman citizens deliberating in the forum or the senate, and ‘European’ citizens receiving their charter as a symbol of contract in front of the guildhall. Moreover, the modern European nation-state claims inheritance of this invented tradition. As Weber would claim, ‘the modern [European] state is the first to have the concept of the citizen of the state’ according to which the individual, for once, is not, as he is everywhere else, considered in terms of the particular professional and family position he occupies, not in relation to differences of material and social situation, but purely and simply as a citizen.37 When Weber says ‘everywhere else’, he has in mind specific geographies of orientalism: the orient. These images we provide following Weber then do not just invent one, but two, traditions: a superior way of being political as ‘simple and pure citizen’ and an inferior tradition that never sorted out the contractual state or the citizen. What these images mobilize is an invented tradition: that the occident is somehow an inheritor of a unified tradition that is distinct and superior to an oriental tradition. All the same, these images provoke and assemble an ‘occidental citizenship’. For the occidental imagination some images are now such ways of seeing: that democracy was invented in the Greek polis; that the Roman republican tradition bequeathed its legacy to Europe and that Europe Christianized and civilized these traditions. The image of the virtuous citizen is ineluctably linked with the occidental tradition whether it is told through political thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, St Augustine, Locke and Rousseau or through narrating epic battles where citizenship virtues were discovered. While in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this narrative was told as

118  Engin F. Isin a seamless web, constituting an occidental tradition of citizenship, in much of the twentieth century, its seamlessness was called into question, with liberalism, republicanism or communitarianism claiming different strands as their own. Yet, until the present, this narrative has held its sway: liberalism,38 republicanism or communitarianism,39 are really different ways of telling the same occidental narrative. Many tenets of orientalism in the social sciences regarding citizenship either rely upon or reproduce this one essential difference between the occident and the orient. This is why Freeden’s challenge to political theory as discussed earlier is ‘formidable’. For when we begin to think across cultures we realize that we have actually been thinking across cultures but in orientalist ways. To abandon orientalism has significant stakes in challenging not only the ostensible universalism of some of the most coveted concepts of political theory but also demonstrating their orientalist origins as unique occidental achievements. It turns out that Freeden’s challenge is nothing less than pulling the rug out from under political theory as we practise it in western (and westernized) academic centres and circles. To recall Nietzsche, the challenge for genuinely cross-cultural political thinking is perhaps to refuse both occidentalizing the orient and orientalizing the occident. I have attempted such a comparison by investigating Ottoman civic gift-giving as acts of citizenship.40 This research focused on an Islamic institution known as waqf (pl. awqaf) through which many Ottoman social services were provided. The most revealing aspect of this research was its illustration of what Freeden calls ‘thinking politically’ in deeds that were drawn up by benefactors laying out the foundation of the waqf and the ways in which it was to be governed and managed. Such deeds were acts in both social and legal meanings of the term and it enabled subjects to constitute themselves as political. The focus on deeds (or acts) by Ottoman women has been especially illuminating. The dominant image of Ottoman women as ‘oriental subjects’ suggests that they were passive. The prevailing image of Ottoman women portrays them as veiled, out of sight and out of depth. Similarly, the dominant image of the Ottoman city as a species of ‘oriental city’ suggests that it lacked civic identity and collective institutions.41 The waqf as a gift-giving practice of solidarity and the active role women played in founding and maintaining waqf endowments as benefactors belie both images. While there has been considerable research published on women and waqf, by moving beyond investigating or interpreting the ostensible motives that are always intertwined with women’s role as ‘family caretakers’, I attempted to argue that, interpreted as acts of piety, awqaf became institutions by which women cultivated (in themselves and others) civic identities, and articulated solidarities as citizens of and for their cities. The deeds that they enacted understood both as their acts of piety and their laws expressed the will to become subjects. I have interpreted these acts as articulations of the will to constitute themselves as citizens. Yet this does not mean that women were citizens in the way in which modern (orientalist) citizenship is understood. Nor were they civic in the way in which the modern city is understood. To make either of those assertions would amount to reverse orientalism in the sense that

Citizenship after orientalism  119 we would recognize certain practices as citizenship only if they conformed to already-understood western norms. Rather, to suggest that Ottoman women were able to act as citizens (or right-bearers or claimants) means that I explored possibilities of interpreting their acts of piety as different acts of citizenship and thus reconsidering whether this difference can illuminate what modern citizenship and civic identities might mean in contemporary societies. But why interpret the waqf as civic gift-giving? What is the relationship between civic gift-giving and citizenship? To answer these questions we need to briefly discuss French historian Paul Veyne’s work on ‘euergetism’ to delineate specifically Greco-Roman civic gift-giving. The word itself was not used as such by either the Greeks or the Romans but was created from the wording of the honorific decrees of the Hellenistic period by which cities honoured persons who did good to the city. The general word for benefaction was euergesia.42 For Veyne, euergetism means that cities expected the wealthy to contribute to public expenses. The question is what compelled the rich to give so spontaneously and willingly? While it may have been a noble virtue to give, Veyne insists that euergetism must be distinguished from patronage, ostentatious consumption, immortalization, charity, alms, investment in public offices, and, above all, liturgies. While euergetism shared a lineage with all these forms of gift-giving and incorporated elements into its workings, it is not reducible to any of them.43 Veyne argues that euergetism was also not a tax by any other name and that it was not a system of redistribution. It was not merely a response to debt, slavery and inequality. Rather, euergetism was a gift to the city, a civic gift that was meant for the entire city and its inhabitants, citizens as well as non-citizens.44 The importance of this is that euergetism created a unique tradition of competition for gift giving and citizens and non-citizens alike began interpreting these gifts as due to them. The ‘failure’ to give had social and political consequences. For Veyne this is how an ostensibly ‘individual’ quality, munificence, became a public institution, beneficence; he concludes, ‘beneficence creates the benefactor, and not the opposite’.45 It is this transformation from munificence to beneficence and how it creates the subject position of benefactor that becomes crucial for interpreting the waqf as an act of citizenship. For if citizenship is an institution that regulates and modulates the relationship between subjects, citizens and governors (the most basic definition of citizenship being the capacity to rule and being ruled) and if civic gift-giving simultaneously creates both obligations and rights through expectations, then it is possible to argue that the waqf as a civic gift-giving practice must have created similar expectations. There is considerable evidence that the waqf became just such a modulating institution with the expectation to deliver public services. The most overwhelming evidence is that the waqf, rather than being an irregular practice, became a systematic mechanism of governing cities by providing various services in planned zones (külliye or imaret) through which a definitive shape was given to them. It is impossible to imagine Ottoman Istanbul without Süleymaniye, Fatih, Şehzade, Eyüp Sultan and Lâleli külliyes as zones for regulating, maintaining, enhancing and controlling circulation of bodies, uses, needs and exchanges. Throughout the empire, thousands of madrasas, schools, libraries, mosques,

120  Engin F. Isin caravanserais, commercial centres (hans), bazaars, fountains, bridges, hospitals, soup kitchens or almshouses, lodges, tombs, baths and aquaducts were founded either as part of such külliyes or imarets or as stand-alone buildings. Awqaf could include immovable property such as rural land, which yielded income, as well as movable property, such as cash, books and other valuables. Taken together the ‘waqf system’, as it came to be designated, comprised a significant component of both economy and society.46 It certainly became much more widespread and systematic than its religious or philanthropic interpretation would appreciate. As Kuran says, ‘The reason the waqf is considered an expression of piety is that it is governed by a law considered sacred, not that its activities are inherently religious or that its benefits must be confined to Muslims’.47 The other overwhelming evidence to support the contention that the waqf, as a gift-giving act, functioned to regulate subject, citizen and governor relations is its ‘authority structure’. The formation, approval and authorization of awqaf were left to local courts and there was minimal central juridical control over these foundations for centuries, especially in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was only in the nineteenth century that awqaf were brought under central control with uncertain success.48 For most its history founding a waqf meant endowing privately held property for public use in perpetuity for functions set out in its founding deed (vakfiye; waqfiyya) and according to the conditions specified therein. The waqf deed also set out the way in which the property would be administered and maintained. The deed was registered and authenticated by a local judge (kadı; qadi) and did not require further approval. The principles underlying the waqf, then, were self-sufficiency, perpetuity, autonomy and beneficence. Amongst waqf founders were prominent sultans, sultanas, pashas, as well as much less prominent members of the Ottoman governing and merchant elite. More significantly, there were notable numbers of women and non-Muslim waqf founders. The comparison between waqf and euergetism as civic gift-giving acts is an attempt at genuinely cross-cultural comparison. It raises many questions about their convergent and divergent genealogies. We will now broaden this research and investigate similar practices that have hitherto been interpreted either as insignificant or even contra-citizenship in both occidental and oriental cultures. Such practices in Indian, Chinese, Islamic and indigenous societies need to be staged in a genuinely comparative context. The objective is to start with Weber and move beyond his assumptions and investigate practices that display features and characteristics of citizenship understood as the negotiation of differences amongst (and sometimes within) social groups. Following Veyne’s findings on euergetism in Greco-Roman cities where the elite felt obliged to make civic gifts to the city, I illustrated that similar (though not identical) practices existed in Ottoman cities with waqf foundations. By staging euergetism and waqf together the aim was to illustrate that practices have genealogies and geographies that intersect, connect, and inform each other in unexpected and surprising ways. What other practices can we recover from India, China, Africa and indigenous histories with similar effects but with different trajectories?

Citizenship after orientalism  121

Genealogical investigations: India, China, Africa and indigenous peoples To conduct genealogical investigations about various citizenship practices in Western, Indian, Chinese, Islamic and indigenous histories as comparative historical sociological studies is a difficult task. There are issues of translation not understood as transcription or transliteration but as rendition and transference. If, for example, the concept and term has not been used in these histories, would there still be a legitimate use of ‘citizenship’ to describe them? When studying waqf I responded to that question affirmatively, but it will depend on the practices studied and acts interpreted to make that transference possible and effective. Similarly, without having an overall perspective on the knowledge accumulated by these cross-cultural practices, what will the knowledge of these practices (and acts) amount to? Is it enough to bring into light practices hitherto remaining as hidden or concealed from view at least as citizenship practices and acts? One of the risks of cross-cultural genealogical investigations is that we cannot answer these questions until after we conduct them. To recall Freeden, to investigate how thinking politically is embedded in certain citizenship practices and acts and how political thinking about them is articulated in various texts is only the starting point. Such investigations will have to make two moves. First, a negative move through which we recover and illustrate how those citizenship practices and acts that were conceived by orientalism to be absent were indeed present, albeit in forms that we were not able to perceive when viewed from orientalist perspectives. The argument, for example, that Ottoman cities ‘lacked’ civic identity can be called into question by investigating various practices that indeed had given civic consciousness to its inhabitants, if not ‘citizens’, by enabling them to constitute themselves as both benefactors and beneficiaries. Second, a positive move through which we begin to assemble practices and acts that can be considered as citizenship but not in ways that we have already configured and understood. To investigate euergetism and waqf together becomes an instance of this move. Consider, for example, an argument that Weber made about China: that sibs (kinship groups) impeded the development of confraternization and therefore the city as an association in ancient China did not develop.49 We will need to review scholarship on modern China and how citizenship is conceived.50 Can we establish affinities between forms of thinking politically in guilds and sibs? Various possible genealogies of sibs within Chinese traditions can be indicated and a genealogy of a practice of political thinking can be undertaken as an illustration of how a different understanding of citizenship could have developed. When Weber was writing in 1920 that the Chinese lacked a conception of citizenship at least understood as a collective, Mao Zedong was addressing the Chinese and saying ‘Citizens Arise!’51 Genealogies of gongmin (public-people), guomin (state-people) and shimin (citypeople) that came into use in the nineteenth century and the ways in which they came to constitute the conflicting origins of modern Chinese citizenship are still awaiting interpretation against orientalism.

122  Engin F. Isin Again, consider Weber’s argument that in ancient India caste impeded the development of citizenship-as-confraternization and that citizenship practices emerged only with British colonization.52 Weber cast a long shadow on interpretations of caste and the role it played in impeding citizenship and capitalism.53 As Kantowsky illustrated, the translation of Weber’s work has had a misleading history that itself impeded our understanding of caste and its relationship to citizenship. Instead, Weber has been incorporated into 1960s-style ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ studies and has been portrayed as almost a neocolonialist, advocating widespread adoption of Western institutions, including citizenship for Indian modernization. Genealogies of not only the way in which citizenship emerged in India but also the way in which layers of interpretation that constructed an India that required Western modernization would contribute to the work that subaltern studies has already initiated.54 As Turner illustrated, Weber thought that ‘fissiparousness’ impeded the development of the city as an association in ancient Islamic societies and that modern Islamic societies are under the burden of these ancient origins.55 Research can indicate various possible genealogies of the conception of rights, both human and citizen, within Islamic traditions and societies that can belie such an assumption. I have already illustrated this with Ottoman awqaf as acts of citizenship. A possibility exists here to undertake research on non-Ottoman awqaf in Indonesia, Malaysia, or Singapore. Another possibility is to focus on the development of rights, especially ‘human’ rights in Islamic jurisprudence and its relationship to citizenship.56 Indigenous peoples have not been orientalized explicitly but they appear to be peoples without political subjectivity. For this reason for some scholars ‘indigenous citizenship’ is a contradiction in terms and it involves incorporation of exogenous (colonial) institutions into societies where such concepts not only did not exist but also were hostile to indigenous practices.57 Others argue that indeed indigenous societies are now deeply embedded in human rights and citizenship rights regimes and that it is possible to conceive a kind of citizenship that can be called ‘indigenous citizenship’.58 The significance of this debate for citizenship after orientalism is that during the formation of the Judeo-Christian conception of citizenship, indigenous peoples did not even appear as peoples with histories and thus traditions. The debates about indigenous human rights and citizenship rights throw into sharp relief some of the orientalist assumptions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while displaying all the difficulties of defining an indigenous regime of rights without it. This is really the first step toward an opening. After examining Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian conceptions of human and citizen, the objective would then be to connect postcolonial studies with indigenous studies from the perspective of the relationship between human and citizenship rights.

Conclusion This chapter attempts to illustrate how we might respond to Freeden’s challenge to practise cross-cultural political theory that focuses on both political thinking embedded in everyday practices (and acts) and thinking about politics that arise

Citizenship after orientalism  123 from and are, related but not reducible, to such political thinking. I have drawn from ongoing research on citizenship as political subjectivity in which I have been trying to outline a conception of citizenship that is not dependent upon an orientalist assumption of its uniqueness in the West and that draws on cross-cultural contrasts and comparisons. In the field of citizenship studies that has emerged in the past twenty years the orientalist origins of citizenship are neither acknowledged nor even debated. If Freeden thinks that cross-cultural theorizing about politics in general is in its infancy, we suggest that cross-cultural theorizing about citizenship is struggling to be born.59

Notes 1 See E.F. Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 2 See E.F. Isin, ‘Engaging, Being, Political’, Political Geography. 24 (2005), pp.373–387. 3 See E.F. Isin, ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’, in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, (eds) E.F. Isin and B.S. Turner (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 117–128. 4 Max Weber, The Religion of India, trans. H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1917), p.103. 5 See M.R. Nafissi (1998) ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, Economy and Society. 27, (1), (1998), pp. 97–118; B.S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, International Library of Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 6 See J. Love, ‘Max Weber’s Orient’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Weber, (ed.), S.P. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.172–199. 7 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), p.259. 8 See J.M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 9 See Barry Hindess, ‘Citizenship and Empire’, in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, (eds) T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 241–256. 10 See C. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart, 2000) and C. Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007). 11 See E.F. Isin, ‘Ottoman Awqaf, Turkish Modernization, and Citizenship’, in Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracy, (ed.), E.F. Keyman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), pp.3–15; also E.F. Isin, ‘Beneficence and Difference: Ottoman Awqaf and “Other” Subjects’, in: The Other Global City, (ed.), S. Mayaram (London: Routledge, 2009). 12 Michael Freeden, ‘What Should the “Political” in Political Theory Explore?’, Journal of Political Philosophy. 13, (2), (2005), pp.113–134; also Freeden, ‘Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking’, Journal of Political Ideologies. 12, (1), (2007), pp.1–9; Freeden, ‘Thinking Politically and Thinking About Politics: Language, Interpretation, and Ideology’, in: Political Theory: Methods and Approaches, (eds) D. Leopold and M. Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.196–215. 13 Freeden, ‘Editorial’, p.1. See also the Introduction to this volume. 14 Freeden, ‘Editorial’, p.1. 15 Freeden, ‘Editorial’, pp.2–3. 16 Freeden, ‘What Should the “Political”’, p.115. 17 See Freeden, ‘Thinking Politically’. 18 E.F. Isin, ‘Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen’, Subjectivity, (29), (2009), pp. 367–388.

124  Engin F. Isin 19 E.F. Isin, ‘Who Is the New Citizen? Toward a Genealogy’, Citizenship Studies. 1, (1), (1997) 115–132; Isin, Being Political; Isin, ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’; Isin, ‘Beneficence and Difference’. 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1887]); Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998 [1971]); Y. Sherratt, Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 21 R. Visker, ‘Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology’, Parrhesia. 5, (2008), pp.9–18. 22 Raymond Geuss, ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy’, in: Nietzsche, (eds) J. Richardson and B. Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 322–340; Sherratt, Continental Philosophy, p.137. 23 Geuss, ‘Nietzsche’, p.324. 24 Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy’, p.55. 25 Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy’, p.55. 26 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy’, p.146. 27 D. Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge, 1994); Tracy B. Strong, ‘”What Have We to Do with Morals?” Nietzsche and Weber on History and Ethics’, History of the Human Sciences. 5, (3) (1994), pp. 9–18. 28 Max Weber, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, trans. R.I. Frank (London: New Left Books, 1909), p.385. 29 Weber, Agrarian Sociology, p. 385. 30 R. Guay, ‘The Philosophical Function of Genealogy’, in: A Companion to Nietzsche, (ed.), K. Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp.355–357. 31 F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 [1878]), p.175. 32 D.M. Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, Publications on the near East (Seattle, WA; London, University of Washington Press, 2007). 33 M. Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.15–20. 34 B.S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, International Library of Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); B.S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978); B.S. Turner, ‘Outline of a Theory of Orientalism’, in: Orientalism: Early Sources, (ed.), B.S. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.1–31. 35 Fred Halliday, ‘Orientalism, Empire and Eccentricity’, Archives Europeennes De Sociologie. 47, (3), (2006), p.488. 36 Love, ‘Max Weber’s Orient’, pp.172–199; also M.R. Nafissi, ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, Economy and Society. 27, (1), (1998), pp. 97–118. 37 Weber, Religion of India, p.103. 38 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 39 See Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 40 See E.F. Isin, ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’; Isin, ‘Ottoman Awqaf’. 41 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, trans. G. Roth and C. Wittich, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 [1921]), pp. 1223–1224, 1233. 42 P. Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism, trans. B. Pearce (London: Penguin, 1990 [1976]), p.10. 43 Veyne, Bread and Circuses, pp. 18–19.

Citizenship after orientalism  125 44 Veyne, Bread and Circuses, pp. 94–95. 45 P. Veyne, Writing History, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 203–204. 46 See M. Çizakça, A History of Philanthropic Foundations: The Islamic World from the Seventh Century to the Present (Istanbul: Bogaziçi University Press, 2000); N. Öztürk, Türk Yenileşme Tarihi Çerçevesinde Vakıf Müessesesi (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995). 47 T. Kuran, ‘The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of Waqf System’, Law & Society Review. 35, (4), (2001), p. 842. 48 See Öztürk, Türk Yenileşme. 49 See O.B.V.D. Sprenkel, ‘Max Weber on China’, History and Theory. 3, (3), (1964), pp. 348–370. 50 P. Harris, ‘The Origins of Modern Citizenship in China’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint. 43, (2), (2000), pp. 181–203. 51 Harris ‘The Origins’, p.181. 52 H. Gorringe, ‘The Caste of the Nation: Untouchability and Citizenship in South India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology. 42, (1), (2008), pp. 123–149. 53 D. Kantowsky (1982) ‘Max Weber on India and Indian Interpretations of Weber’, Contributions to Indian Sociology. 16, (2), (1982), pp.141–174. 54 See D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 55 See Turner, Weber and Islam and Marx and the End of Orientalism. 56 M.I. Malik, ‘The Concept of Human Rights in Islamic Jurisprudence’, Human Rights Quarterly. 3, (3) (1981), pp. 56–67. 57 See T. Biolsi, ‘Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle’, American Ethnologist. 32, (2), (2005), pp.239–259. 58 See N. Peterson and W. Sanders, Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 59 See Freeden, ‘Thinking Politically and Thinking About Politics’.

7 Forms of political participation in Muslim political heritage Abdulaziz Sachedina

In recent years a number of studies on political participation in the Muslim world have been published, each a case study on a single Muslim country. These studies have provided us not only with general information but often also with insight into the structure of society, the political processes, and the character of political leaders involved in them. The case method, although very important, is not enough for an assessment of an overall picture of the political culture that has dominated these Muslim countries for many centuries. A broader understanding of Muslim political culture is needed to understand various forms of participation that support or reject the political sphere dominated by the regimes and the leadership that have rationalized or legitimized the existing order. In a comparative study of Muslim political thinking about structures and their underlying social forces we need to correlate religious and cultural aspects that intersect various forms of political participation throughout the social-political history of Muslim peoples. I want to contend in this chapter that Islam is not the only source of beliefs about political participation; a number of traditions, Arab tribal, Persian–Byzantine among others, have influenced the ways in which Muslims have conceived of their political space and their participation in them. And, although the Muslim world has increasingly blurred the line between religion and politics with major implications for political consciousness and participation in modern times, it is my contention that some sort of functional secularity has always predominated in negotiations about political space independent of religious presuppositions about its management. More pertinently, I will demonstrate, contrary to the views held by a number of political analysts, both Muslims and Westerners, that the terminology of the classical legal tradition of Sharī‘a is not very helpful in garnering norms and values that are operative in the political culture of Muslim societies to gauge the forms of participation that have been present in spite of the lack of consensual politics in Muslim countries. Let me also clarify from the outset the distinct sense in which I use ‘political participation’ in an Islamic context. I avoid ‘instrumentalist’ understandings of the phrase common among traditional political theorists. By political participation they refer to public acts of private individuals with the intent or effect of influencing government action either directly by affecting the making or implementation of public policy or indirectly by influencing the selection of people who make those

Muslim political heritage  127 policies. In the Islamic context, even under the influence of modernization and secularization, we need to identify plural forms in which political participation takes place depending upon what Muslims understand by what they are doing in the public sphere as members of the community. In the classical Islamic sources one reads about the duty to acknowledge the lawfully established authority within the category of the religious obligation imposed by the Sharī‘a on its followers. Among the Shī‘ite minority the idea that the sole legitimate authority was invested in a rightful successor of the Prophet, the Imam, became the source of oppositional political activity in the community. The Shī‘ites invariably regarded the historical caliphate as usurpatory and illegitimate. Even among the Sunni Muslims, who were not engaged in resisting the Sunni caliphal authority as such, opposition to tyrannical or unjust rulers was regarded as obedience to God. Political quietism or a policy of quiescence and acceptance of existing circumstances until a qualified leader could establish an ideal Islamic polity was regarded by both the Sunnis and the Shī‘ites as a political strategy to avoid the greater evil of chaos in society. Further reflection on political quietism indicates that among the Shī‘ite minority a religiously sanctioned practice of ‘prudential concealment’ or ‘precautionary dissimulation’ to await a more opportune time to overthrow tyrannical rulers functions both as a principle of survival and a strategy for political regrouping. The religiously sanctioned duty to uphold justice at all levels of social–political interaction puts the burden on the adherents to engage in what has been identified in the books of Islamic social ethics as the duty to ‘command good and forbid evil’ (al-amr bi-l-ma‘rūf wa nahy ‘ani-l-munkar). While it is true that the question of justice, however subjective and contingent upon different points of view that both the leaders and the people bring to their understanding of the human condition, informs Muslim political culture in its context-dependent political action, it has served as an important doctrine in Islamic public theology. On this view, religiously required prudential concealment among minority groups counts as an act of resistance to unjust authority because the conceptual meaning derived from this kind of political quietism that incrementally leads to overt political action qualifies as a kind of political endeavor to challenge the unjust authority. According to its practitioners, the ‘wait and see’ activity under its dissimulation strategy is regarded as the only legitimate and prudent activity that is going to influence the policy about the change of regime. In order to account intelligibly for covert acts under autocratic regimes as concealed oppositional acts in Muslim political culture – a culture that is actually dominated by repressive politics and a total absence of observable participation of the people in the state’s political processes – political participation is entrenched within its constitutive context. It is in the constitutive contexts that one can discover the guidelines and instruments of legitimate political behavior in Islamic thought.1 These constitutive contexts reveal distinct groups of political participants in Muslim societies. Moreover, it is these groups that negotiate their political space with sensitivity toward their religious beliefs, which direct their choices under the repressive political systems that are generally averse to the overt public participation in determining their political ends. In other words, political

128  Abdulaziz Sachedina participation in the Muslim community is not limited to casting one’s vote at the polls; rather, as political activity under prudential concealment reveals, it includes religiously sanctioned political activity that sustains a public order that is not necessarily just and legitimate, and yet regarded as religiously necessary for the well-being of its membership. As such, my interest in the phenomenon of prudential concealment goes beyond textual discussion to include empirical observation that uncovers incremental political participation under adverse conditions imposed by Muslim autocratic rulers. Within the limits set for this chapter, obviously, I cannot go into the historical development of Muslim political culture in the context of taqīya-oriented strategies of minority survival in all its periods. Moreover, the limited scope of the study does not allow me to examine the Sunni–Shī‘a polemics concerning this strategically important practice among the Shī‘ite communities under various intolerable political conditions.2 The main objective of bringing up prudential concealment as a political strategy is to demonstrate that although in the early period when the Shī ‘taqīya figured almost as a required obligation, in the subsequent centuries when the Shī‘ites had gained political power (sixteenth century onward) taqīya lost its strategic value and was considered as not only in abeyance but, by some, as forbidden.3 The exception, however, is for the Shī‘ite minorities living under governments such as Saudi Arabia, for instance, when taqīya functions as some kind of ‘political correctness’ under favorable conditions, otherwise as a survival strategy when the religious authorities of these countries engage in systematic demonization of and discrimination against the Shī‘ites living among the Sunni majorities. In fact, since the 1978–79 Iranian revolution, following the political gains of Hizballah in Lebanon, and the Shī‘ite political ascendancy in Iraq since the American occupation, according to the majority of the Shī‘ite scholars, taqīya is null and void because the community does not live in fear anymore and there is no need to practice prudential concealment of one’s true beliefs.4 Having recently completed two studies in the area of democracy and human rights, I can explain participatory acts with a particular reference to the frameworks of the participants, be they individual or collective, to indicate the conceptual development that reveals political participation in Muslim societies to depend on the conceptual template that we use to interpret political activity. Without imposing the theoretical framework that is extraneous to the culture under discussion it is possible to observe diversity in individual political acts in their cultural and religious contexts.

Individual and society in Muslim political culture Modern political discourse with its secularist universalistic appeal has the tendency to devalue communitarian identities founded upon collective constraints and sanctions that provide the necessary social environment for practical connections between individuals and groups. To obscure the very pattern of their connection is detrimental to the development of individualist assumptions of moral autonomy, which actually depends upon an individual’s ability to function as a member of

Muslim political heritage  129 society. Without ignoring the tensions that are part of social existence caught up by contradictory patterns of social agency, participatory politics can ill afford to absolutize individual moral agency by freeing the individual from collective restraints that are needed for the smooth functioning of political order. Issues of political participation under the autocratic political systems in the Muslim world are faced with contradictions in terms of concern for valuation of diverse religious and communal identities, commitments and desiderata. In many ways, political culture in the Muslim world is in competition with contemporary liberal politics because historically Arab tribal culture was first and foremost where arguments for political participation were articulated in terms of human responsibility to institute the good and prevent the evil. Moreover, early Qur’anic references to the human natural constitution (fitra) articulated the human ability to know right from wrong and to advance in building a society that reflected such an ethical presupposition in its public order. Paradoxically, although universalist in their ethical presuppositions, political cultures that emanated from religiously formulated ideas of political activity were both relativist and locally sensitive. The Muslim community from its inception had to reconcile the universality of its claims with the particularity of its Arabic culture and ethical idiom that played a dominant role in forging human relationships as the critical core of their collective and individual identities. Like any other transcultural and transnational community, the Muslim community had to settle the contradictory injunctions that pointed at times to the inclusive universal language of Islamic revelations, and at other times to the exclusive particular communal system which defined the group’s adherence and identity as the bearer of the historical message. Consequently, the ramifications of communitarian ethics and the dynamics of local particularism were part and parcel of Islamic political culture in the context of a world-wide community made up of different nations and cultures. Here we are face to face with claims and counterclaims of rights and obligations in the political sphere informed by religious commitments and responsibilities. This is the core problem in the acceptance of religious claims as having legitimate place in the public forum. The secular political discourse is based on the so-called public versus private distinction which would place religious commitments and grounds for action in a sphere isolated from that of public discourse and public choice. At stake is the place of various religious considerations into both public discussions about political activity, ranging from individual Muslims on religious grounds publicly condemning such acts as homosexuality or the collective Muslim denial of women’s right to marry outside the community in accordance with the religious duties in the Sharī‘a. A public discourse claims to have an integrity of its own and requires the Muslim community to abide by a neutrality requirement of the secular public order to maintain peace and harmony in society. This secular demand for public discourse is founded on the premise of universal reason which actually excludes making moral and metaphysical claims bearing on political choices in terms understandable only in the context of Islamic revelatory guidance embedded in the Qur’an and the Tradition. Traditional Muslim leaders have a problem with the position that rejects the rights of the people to decide

130  Abdulaziz Sachedina political questions by what they regard as the best reasons rooted in a transcendent sphere of Islamic revelation. The issue of proper public discourse and choice is of concern for all religious communities who must share a public forum with other religious groups, without insisting on the idea of the whole truth connected with their own truth claims. Religion, in general, is not oriented around autonomous dictates of self-regarding and rights-bearing consciousness. Rather, it seeks to define the self as constituted by the experience of transcendence. It is in this connection that the religious perspective of Muslim traditionalists becomes critical to explore. In the absence of the ecclesiastical authority mediating between God and humanity in all those acts that one performs as part of one’s direct relationship to God, the Muslim tradition defined the communal context to include only interhuman relationships. In this manner, Islamic public discourse defined itself by leaving individual autonomy within its religiously-based public order by freeing the individual to negotiate his/ her spiritual destiny without state interference, while requiring him/her to abide by the public order that involved the play of reciprocity and autonomy upon which a regime of claims and entitlements is based. Religious sensibilities, however, are firmly founded upon a language of duties and responsibilities which define one’s direct or indirect participation in the political sphere.5 When injustices occur in the public sphere the critical religious question that functions as pangs of conscience in Muslim culture is whether an individual should undertake to oppose such acts openly to redress the situation, or should he/she wait for an appropriate time to do so under a legitimately recognized authority. Under the rubric of rebellion against unjust authority in the Islamic legal tradition one can examine a variety of rulings dealing with the requirement of individual political participation when certain conditions pertaining to leadership, intention and the principle of proportionality – in terms of success in deposing tyrannical rulers – are fulfilled. That a distinction in sensibilities exists between religious and secular discourse in the matter of legitimate political activity in the public sphere cannot be denied. The definition of the individual as a rights-bearing citizen – a concept that is absent in Islamic legal discourse – is of a different nature from the definition of the inviolable self (nafs dhī ḥurma) within the Islamic legal idiom. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the secular and religious estimations of individuals do not trump one another. The emphasis on individuals bound by obligations (mukallaf) does not necessarily negate the notion of an individual possessing freedom to act in his/her own interest in the context of communal existence. In fact, it is important to underscore plurality in the estimation of human personhood and its relation to the community. Indeed, this plurality exists not only in Islam but also within different interpretations of secularism about an individual’s relation to one’s religious commitments and community and to the overarching secularized public sphere in the modern nation-state. It is for this reason that it may prove useful to inquire into the Islamic idiom for a new or different way of framing the terms of human valuation and worth, one that may well allow a mediation between public and private desiderata not always given to the categorization of political activity.

Muslim political heritage  131 The problem with individual political action informed by religious commitments and desiderata is the potential for the entanglement of these commitments with public discourse and public choice that affect other individuals, whether religious or not. There are certainly boundaries in the public sphere that must be recognized, without insisting that others agree with particular choices made, individually or in a group, on the basis of their religious reasons that necessarily apply only to those who have declared their commitment to abide by its dicta. Thus far, the attitude of hostility, intolerance, and militancy against those who reject a particular response to the political issues has been the main source of conflict in Muslim societies. Is there something in the public theology of Islam that can mitigate this hostile attitude by clearly demonstrating the classical heritage? Is there something that recognizes the existence of a private realm separate from the public one, one that allows for ethical pluralism to determine interhuman relationships, without diminishing the role of religious commitments in developing what John Rawls calls a social democratic constitutional polity?

Decoding Islamic secularity Traditional Muslim leaders have viewed secular political language and its demand for neutrality in the public sphere as detrimental to the development of moral sensibilities in the communal context of political activity. For them, the major step in the development of particularly Muslim political discourse is to disestablish the secular character of public discourse and public policy that, for all practical purposes, aggressively acts and speaks in public as if God or religion did not exist. Muslim reformist discourse has, to a large extent, pursued a secular agenda by raising a number of objections to the intrusion of Islamic juridical and religious claims into the public forum. In this section of the chapter, I want to explore the Islamic tradition’s relationship to the public sphere, and to argue how one might plausibly appreciate the nature of the public forum to determine what Muslim leaders must consider an improper intrusion of religious claims qua Muslims into the public forum and public policy that affects all citizens in a modern nation state. This I will do by exploring the Islamic tradition and the manner in which historically Muslim religious commitments became functionally attuned to the public forum in being primarily oriented to proper governance in which the right to individual worship and belief became part of the religious ethos of Islam. My argument is built upon the classical Muslim legal theory that clearly circumvented any human intrusion in the realm of an individual’s spiritual relation to God, leaving it in the private domain of human social existence. Moreover, despite the fact that Islam treated the private and the public realms as an integrated whole, it is significant that the legal tradition that developed in detail Islam’s relation to power recognized by default functional secularity with separate jurisdictions for the individual’s relation to God (spiritual). It also recognized the individual’s relations to other humans and society (temporal), thus keeping the plausibility of construing the public forum and its discourse separate from the private domain of the individual’s connection with transcendence.

132  Abdulaziz Sachedina It is important to keep in mind that Islam acknowledges functional secularity as a default arrangement to allow for the emergence of a civil structure that is not overburdened by its comprehensive doctrines. From its inception, the Muslim polity had to deal with cultural and religious diversity in society even when the political authority was exercised by Muslims. Muslim scholars had to grapple with the issue of the meaning of what the Muslims call niẓām ‘urfī – loosely translated as ‘customary social order’ or even ‘secular system’ without denying God or religion a say in its overall functioning. Muslim scholars laid down the basis for organization within the community by distributing the tasks in the two categories of individual (farḍ ‘ayn) and collective duties (farḍ kifāya). Individual duties were those duties for the performance of which each individual was personally responsible, whether others performed them or not. In contrast, most of the duties that one performed in relation to other individuals were regarded as necessary to maintain the public order. The principle of secularity in the sense of an absence of religious control over public discourse, individual choice, and community life, as would obtain in a limited democracy was formed on the basis of the relation of the community to non-adherents. Under this principle the sectarian character of religious claims was exchanged for social stability through supporting a multifaith polity. Hence, the adherents of other religions were allowed to continue in their own religious allegiance, as protected subjects, as long as their form of public life was not too blatantly inconsistent with the public order that recognized the general good of all as defined by Islamic values (not very different from the Rawlsian defence of a social democratic constitutional framework). Thus only those who had personally undertaken the obligations of Islam were expected to live in accordance with the teachings of Islam in their personal and public lives. Here the public theology of Islam regarding the self-subsistent moral worth and agency of every human person, independently of revelation, forms the cornerstone of the integrated and yet distinct private individual conscience and the communal tradition as a bedrock of a good Muslim life. This doctrine supports the internalized moral authority of human conscience; but it generates the sense of responsibility towards others as an important step for an individual in the pursuit of perfection within the orders and institutions of the community. The relationship between individuals in the community provides the terms of group membership that takes into consideration social definitions of community in such a way that community does not function as the antithesis of individual interests and concerns. Rather, the community strengthens a sense of solidarity that requires individual acts of worship to translate into new meanings to provide motivations for men and women for the development of an ideal social order reflecting this-worldly and other-worldly prosperity. To speak about Islamic functional secularity derived from its public theology raises an important epistemological question: whose version of Islam supports the phenomenological integrity of an inclusive public forum, leaving the privately and individually constituted conscience to determine its spiritual destiny without the intrusion of any secular or religious authority? I do not intend to gloss over the diversity that exists among Muslim scholars about special claims of Islamic

Muslim political heritage  133 revelation on its adherents, societies, and states that claim to be founded upon Islamic political values. To determine what Muslims must hold to consider themselves legitimately tolerant about the special claims of Islamic tradition on individuals, societies, and public order, it is important to recognize the diversity of Muslim religious appropriations for public discourse. For the purposes of this chapter, I will identify three variable categories of Islamic tradition that appear to be prevalent in the community at large: a. Islam as a civilization and its influence as a culture throughout the regions of the world where it spread as a religious tradition. As one of the highly successful civilizations and the major global cultural traditions, Islam is acknowledged as an influential component of the political order seeking to establish justice and inclusive spirituality. As a significant force in shaping the presuppositions of a universal world civilization and as a cultural tradition that has shaped and adjusted its own moral understandings in different social and political environments, this Islam seeks guidance from its own history. Indeed, by stepping back from many of the traditional cultural prohibitions (empowerment of women in general, including the licitness of their assuming public role, and other related issues), as well as by not insisting on literal adherence to traditional Islamic notions (the doctrine of predetermination, submission to authoritarian rulers for the sake of avoiding the greater evil of dissension and chaos), this form of Islam tends to reduce the judicial and the dogmatic to the mystical (different forms and orders of Sufi affiliations and communal celebrations), cultural public rituals (fasting of Ramadan and other festive public celebrations), and well-staged public rituals (Friday and Festival worship attended by rulers and public officials and now the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, as a show of Muslim unity and power in the divided world of nation states). b. Islam as a religion and philosophy for humankind. Islam, in this sense, is acknowledged as possessing the fullness of God’s revelation to humankind, offering unique insight into the importance of God’s merciful justice and concern for humanity. Though the revelation is particularistic and addressed to a specific community in their language, the grounds for moral conduct and the substantive moral discernment are available to all human beings through their natural constitution created by the Almighty and All-compassionate God. Since a good moral life is taken to be a sufficient condition for attaining this-worldly and other-worldly prosperity (falāḥīya), Islam does not regard itself as the only repository of human salvation, and, in this sense, it cannot make exclusivist claims (e.g. the claim that Islam is the privileged way to the divine truth and salvation). Furthermore, because ethical knowledge is grounded in human nature informed by intuitive reason, Islamic morality shares moral sensibilities with all other human beings equally endowed with that divinely ordained nature (fiṭra). Islamic morality develops its moral principles guided by conventional wisdom and moral insight discerned by living with others in society. Strictly speaking, this form of Islam has no peculiarly Islamic morality, only a special

134  Abdulaziz Sachedina ground or motivation for moral conduct disclosed through revelation (e.g. ‘instituting the good and preventing the evil’ and the reward and punishment for acting against the divinely ordained natural constitution). The underlying thesis of this genre of Islam is that because the rationality of Islamic ethics is held to be the same as that of moral secular viewpoints, it subscribes to a general secular progress in moral insights. Those in turn establish religious insights as compatible with public reason. Since this genre of Islam affords centrality to the overlapping consensus in the matter of moral commitments that affect not only communal bonds but also advance intercommunal relations in the public forum, the moral premises and rules of evidence are culturally inclusive and capable of advancing received moral commitments for the public good. c. Islamic tradition as the unique and exclusive experience of the Truth. This genre of Islam is popular among Muslim seminarians. Islam, according to this account, is the only complete revelation of God to humankind. Islam not only offers a special motivation for moral conduct, but the full content of the religious life which, if properly lived, could lead to salvation. In order to be saved, one needs the right belief, which should precede right conduct. Living a good moral life for virtue’s sake is recognized as insufficient for salvation, in that salvation requires obedience to God’s revealed guidance. Human prosperity in this and the world to come is achieved by bringing the world to affirm what is disclosed by revealed reason, not merely that disclosed by secular reason acting independently of divine guidance. Moral progress is achieved insofar as secular morality comes to conform to religious morality (e.g. by instituting the good and preventing the evil as required by the Tradition). This account of Islam is exemplified by what I have identified in this chapter as traditional Islam. This traditional Islamic perspective maintains that moral truth is the result neither of sensory empirical evidence nor of discursive reason. Truth as a rightly ordered relationship with transcendent God is beyond discursive rationality. As a result, its traditional commitments cannot be brought into question by supposed moral progress grounded in developments in philosophical and metaphysical reflection.6 Finally, this traditional form of Islam recognizes the external forms of religious practices – the rituals – as secure and sufficient means to affect salvation without any need to relate them to the moral progression of the individual or the community. These three categories are not in any sense exhaustive. They simply enable outsiders to understand the source of religious conflicts in the Muslim world when it comes to limit or delimit religious discourse in Muslim societies. When it comes to the demand for neutrality requirement for the public discourse it is the third genre, the traditional perspective, that poses the most significant threat to the public forum that aspires to bind persons apart from any religious commitments. More to the point, in the context of this chapter, in order to advance the argument that political activity in Muslim societies must be understood in its constitutive

Muslim political heritage  135 context, there is a need to sit in dialogue with the kind of Islam that regards religious considerations as critical in shaping the public forum and its discourse. The dominant culture of secular liberal agnosticism is marked by an affirmation of the priority of liberty as a value, as well as by an affirmation of equality of opportunity as a central societal goal. In the public forum, as Rawls argues, reasons, considerations, and interests must be articulated in general secular terms involving no claims to special knowledge (supernatural revelation, for instance) or transcendent considerations like God’s will in the religious law so that the demand for women’s participation in public life, for instance, may not be viewed as deviation from God’s established tradition. Accordingly, the goal of secularity in the Islamic tradition is to broaden the scope of traditionally exclusive claims of a privileged status and access to moral and metaphysical truth. In this sense, Islamic revelation regards religion, morality, and community working in unison to advance an individual to recognize that through creation morality becomes grounded in universal intuitive reason geared to reflect discursively to access reasons for one’s beliefs and actions. From its inception Islam shaped its public discourse by grounding its morality in a critical rationality that sought a correlation between revelation-based and rational premises to forge an important doctrine that religious and secular reasons are not at odds when it comes to determining the public good. Unlike Christians, who as citizens must separate themselves according to the demands of secular rationality not grounded in the Christian tradition, Muslims could and did articulate their public discourse with reference to reciprocal religious and secular reasoning as citizens.

From individual integrity to community-centered salvation Let me now turn to the theology of community-centered salvation and its negative impact upon the development of political participation among Muslim peoples. The main purpose of this theology was to neutralize the sense of outrage that people felt towards the corrupt Muslim rulers, and shift individual attention from demands of their reform or removal to an autonomous ideal community under the Qur’an and the Tradition. The process was gradual, but it was carefully crafted by the ulema, who, although in agreement with the public sentiment against the ruling dynasties, found the regime change and the ensuing political turmoil far more dangerous to the survival of the community. This was the genesis of the transformation of the Qur’anic emphasis on individual integrity and morality to a deceptive sense of salvation through membership in the community. This shift from individual to collective salvation could not have come about without inculcating an unquestioning submission to absolute political authority, the Imam, with whom, according to the Qur’an, the people will come in God’s presence to be judged collectively. The Qur’an spoke about both individual as well as collective final judgment when God will call people with their leader (imam). However, the communitycentered salvation also required the ulema to centralize the salvation by limiting it to only one of the several communities that had sprung up under various political

136  Abdulaziz Sachedina leaders and Imams. In the absence of an ecclesiastical body that could speak on behalf of the entire community, Muslim jurists sought to gain the support of the rulers to uphold one school of legal thought as the official theology of the state, whose nominal head was the symbolic caliphate devoid of any real power. This process centralized disparate groups under the title of ‘People of Community and Tradition’ (ahl al-sunna wa al-jamā’a) whose main spokespersons were the jurists under the patronage of the rulers, who depended on the jurists to provide them with religious legitimacy to exercise political authority over the community. Minority groups that refused to join the main community were either marginalized or forced to go underground. This laid the foundation of internal hostilities and intolerance of any dissension within the Muslim community. The history of Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries is replete with instances of intracommunal hostilities between the followers of different rites and schools of thought. Today, SunnīShī’ite sectarianism and the violence generated by exclusive claims are very much entrenched in this centralized communal piety that has proven to be least tolerant to minority claims to salvation. There are two concepts at the heart of the theoretical and practical formulations about the Islamic order that provide incontrovertible evidence about the political shift from individual to community-centered rights and responsibilities for creating and maintaining just order on earth. Both these dimensions are important to understand the Islamic framework as well as the ideological changes that have taken place in the Muslim world today. In the Islamic order, which is inclusive of the private and the public, these two concepts are composed of the theoretical creed and political philosophy. As a member of the community the individual cannot claim obedience as his right. It is actually his duty. In contrast, obedience is the right of God, his prophet and those who are invested with authority. However, if obedience is the right of these authorities because of this investiture, then due to the fact that individuals in the community live under their governance it becomes a duty on them, a duty they cannot avoid to start with. As for disagreement, it is part of an individual’s right in the group that is formed around a well-defined creed and specific practice. But these two founding concepts, that is, obedience and disagreement, cannot be applied without restriction, since everything is implemented in accord with certain prerequisites, restrictions and conditions. Islamic society emanates from an indisputable foundation, which is that the ruler’s restraining power is an inevitable condition for the establishment of this society. Ghazālī, speaking about the absolute necessity of political power to manage human affairs, maintained that religious public order cannot be achieved without secular public order, which needs an imam (leader) who is obeyed (al-imām almuṭā’). Earlier than Ghazālī, this opinion was already formulated in the juridical tradition where the necessity of appointing an Imam who is obeyed was well established. To be sure, assertion of the importance of religious order was the first condition in such a society, but without political backing it was insufficient on its own. Forceful political power, hence, guaranteed the social-political legitimacy relying on the religious order for its rightness and its success. Nonetheless, this

Muslim political heritage  137 could not be accomplished except by means of just politics which was formulated by Muslim thinkers in their works on the principles of governance, and governance in accord with the Sharī’a based on the following verse: God commands you to deliver trusts back to their owners; and when you judge between the people, that you judge with justice. Good is the admonition God gives you; God is All-hearing, All-seeing. O believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. If you should quarrel on anything, refer it to God and the Messenger, if you believe in God and the Last Day; that is better, and fairer in the issue. (Q. 4:58–59) Muslim commentators do not have a problem in the matter of obedience to God and the Prophet, since it is clear that the execution of God’s commands and prohibitions are dependent upon obedience to the Prophetic practice. However, they have raised questions about the identity and obedience to those ‘invested with authority.’ Who are they? While that question has entangled the political history of the Muslim empire, the other fundamental question that has occupied the jurists is the extent of the obedience to this third category. Is this obedience to those ‘invested with authority’ obligatory under all circumstance and all times? In other words, is there a right for a Muslim to dissent from this obedience and defy the authority of those ‘invested with authority,’ and thereby endanger the unity of the community and its perpetuity under such leaders? If the rejection of obedience is legitimate, in what sense it is so? Anas b. Mālik, one of the early and prominent associates of the Prophet, relates a tradition in which the Prophet advises Muslims regarding their rulers: ‘Listen and obey, even if a black slave with a shaggy head rules over you!’ In another tradition, the Prophet is reported to have said: ‘The one who obeys me obeys God; and the one who disobeys me disobeys God. The one who obeys the ruler (amīr) obeys me, and the one who disobeys the ruler disobeys me.’ There are numerous traditions like these in which obedience to the ruler is linked to the obedience to God and obedience to the Prophet, hence legitimating this political act through religious justification. The fact is that limitation on the absolute authority of the rulers was applied only in the situation of strife among the community members, whereas obedience was required in conformity with one’s ability to obey at all times. Nevertheless, some traditions cautioned against claims that justified the duty of obedience to those in authority, while divesting the people of the right to dissent, thereby necessitating the estrangement of the ruled from the ruler in the event of the ruler demanding obedience in the matters that led to the disobedience of God’s laws. Obedience to the ruler was obligatory and effective as long as he did not command disobedience to God’s laws, because there was no obedience in that matter. However, the prevailing state of affairs among the Sunnites from the early times was to counsel the rulers, on the one hand, and to discourage armed insurrection leading to civil strife, on the other. By issuing a verdict against the people’s right to depose a ruler even if he is wicked, Muslim jurists rejected the right to rebel against the ruler.

138  Abdulaziz Sachedina This trend of silencing the individual’s right as part of one’s religious commitment has continued in the modern times. Instead of demanding reform of the ruler to comply with democratic politics, the religious establishment has ignored particular moral commitments in favor of authoritarian communal politics. Among the leading contemporary Sunni scholars Muḥammad Sa’īd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī has reasserted the classical juridical vision regarding the ruler and the ruled without critically analyzing the rights language that is at stake in this political discourse: The Imam is the guardian over all matters that affect the generality of Muslims. It is for this reason that he is the protector of all those who do not have a protector. Therefore, his discretion in their affairs is conditional upon the assessment of the public good; that is, they do not become effective unless its public interest aspect becomes apparent. However, God has imposed a duty on the people to obey him with a view to this exercise of authority (wilāya) which he enjoys through investment, and which stands validated as long as he keeps in mind the good of the people and endeavors to implement it wherever necessary. In other words, obedience to him is not because of his domination (siyāda) which he enjoys over them; rather it is exclusively because of his efforts in implementing the people’s general welfare and the people making it possible for him for ordering the good of the people through this investiture.7 To recapitulate the public theology that advocates obedience of the rulers, both among the ancient and contemporary Muslim leaders, it maintains obedience and prohibits armed insurrection as two important political strategies. In their communal life Muslims must adhere to the public order validated by Islamic juridical tradition as part of their religiously sanctioned responsibility. The right of any individual to oppose such power is undesirable, in spite of the fact that there is an explicit ruling prohibiting obedience of the government in the event of such obedience leading to disobedience of God. Yet, this does not mean approval or endorsement of the wicked. As a matter of fact, denying the right to engage in armed insurrection did not mean negation of other forms of protest or passive resistance. Historical accounts dealing with the Muslim political experience present examples of passive resistance that resemble peaceful civil disobedience. There are situations of silence or reticence which in themselves publicize the disobedience to the rulers. It took many forms, including the refusal to work for these unjust governments, or visiting those in power, or reconciling oneself to persevere under their banner, or avoiding civil strife, or leaving the announcement of their opposition to these unjust rulers for the Day of Judgment. These attitudes and stances were matched with attitudes of those who are described by Ghazālī as ‘relentless in their religion’ (al-mutaṣallabīn fī al-dīn) who in the political history of Islam represented ‘opposition power’ that struggled against the hostile government and strove to attack it with weapons or secret revolutionary organizations. They justified their insurrection by means of particular claims or through traditions of the Prophet in the vein of the ascetic Muslim leader in the eighth century, Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 728):

Muslim political heritage  139 The best martyr of my community will be a man who stands up to an unjust ruler and commands him to do good and forbids him from doing evil, and the ruler kills him for that. Such a person is the martyr (al-shahīd). His station in the paradise will be between Ḥamza and Ja’far [the Prophet’s uncles who were killed in the battlefield]. This well-known dissenting force in the history did not become obsolete with the end of the classical age of Islam. It has emerged once again in the modern period among the militant Muslim movements. These are the movements which have taken the duty of preventing evil to its extreme, not limiting it to tongue and heart; rather, they have taken it to the use of force as in the early period, following the advice regarding the duty of preventing evil which says: Anyone among you who sees evil should change it with his hands, that is, by force; if he cannot, then with his tongue; and if still he cannot, then with his heart. This is the weakest expression of the faith. This did not shackle coerced obedience or passive disobedience and prevent civil strife and seclusion. It simply maintained limits over revolution and armed insurrection.

Concluding remarks To summarize, obedience to God, the Prophet and those invested with authority is obligatory. There is a difference of opinion on its limits and actual manifestation in the society. This is captured in those traditions which describe the legitimacy of the power that is used by the government to coerce obedience. However, any person who is compelled to submit to this authority is conceived as the possessor of rights – some natural and some legal. As for the individual’s natural rights they are related to his capacity (al-istiṭā’a), since if obedience to God, the Prophet, and those invested with authority is the goal of religious commitment and responsibility, then this can be attained as long as that individual has the capacity to obey. Naturally, this capacity is potentially responsible for the totality of principles and rules that enable a person to bring about the fulfillment of the duty of obedience. In this connection, investigation of other aspects of Islamic religious-ethical thought is indispensable. These include: the question of justice, the principle that rejects the imposition of obligation beyond one’s capacity, the condition that the government or the ruler or the one invested with authority are bound to obey God and the Prophet, that is, the ordinances of the Sharī’a, and so on. Since these conditions cannot be fulfilled, the repudiation of obedience, insurrection or armed resistance become a legitimate solution, and the implementation of human rights becomes possible. This means that lack of commitment on the part of the ruler or the government to implement God’s rights and the rights of people or citizens, as treated in the details of the books dealing with the principles of governance and social management, leads directly to the right of an individual to dissent and to oppose, as a legal-moral necessity.

140  Abdulaziz Sachedina Obviously, as the principle of correlation demands, if obedience is treated as a duty then its opposite, that is, dissent, must be regarded as a right. However, the community-centered theology does not treat dissent as any kind of intellectual disagreement. It treats it as a social and political threat to the well-being of the entire community. Its religious integrity is allusive, since it is treated as a moral-civil offence with sanctions that clearly violate an individual’s human rights to the free exercise of religion. This is one of the fundamental problems in the classical tradition where dissent is treated as an evil act requiring restraint by political authority. This problem also extends to apostasy which, if treated as a purely religious offence, according to the Qur’an, does not carry capital punishment. Human courts have no jurisdiction over such cases which strictly fall under the human–God relationship. But, if this expression of personal freedom in choosing one’s religious community becomes translated as a political act of repudiation of one’s communal affiliation, then the punishment for it clearly leads to a human rights violation.

Notes 1 Khalid Abou El Fadl, ‘Aḥkām al-Bughāt: Irregular Warfare and the Law of Rebellion in Islam,’ in Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 162 cites all the relevant juridical sources on the issue. 2 The polemical literature on the subject has been examined by Etan Kohlberg in his studies on the Shī‘ite practice during the classical and medieval periods of the Shī‘ite history. See, for instance, ‘Some Imāmī-Shī’ī view on Taqiyya,’ in Journal of American Oriental Society, Vol. 95 (1975), pp.395–402. 3 In recent years, more particularly, after the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, a number of Shī‘ite scholars have regarded taqīya as redundant. See: Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍl Allāh, al-Islam wa manṭiq al-quwwa (Dār al-Islāmīya, 1979). It is important to keep in mind the constitutive context of the Shī‘ite community in Iran and Lebanon at this time when the Iranian revolution was at its peak and Israel had invaded south Lebanon. Accordingly, an active political response was prescribed to overcome the passive resistance suggested by taqīya. 4 In the contemporary literature there is hardly any discussion about taqīya, especially under the powerful religious leadership in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. The political gains have actually translated into open confrontation with Sunni leadership. Iran’s newly established University of Muslim Legal Rites (madhāhib-e islāmī) now invites Sunni scholars in al-Azhar for intra-faith dialogue. 5 Hence, the works on Islamic jurisprudence as a rule categorize religious duties in terms of their being obligatory (wājib or farḍ) and the penalties, whether in this world or in the hereafter, that an individual accrues if he misses them. See: Abdulaziz Sachedina, Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 151. 6 Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazali: The Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), critically evaluates modern Muslim revivalist attitudes to rational inquiry in the light of classical traditional debate between theologicaljuridical and philosophical discourses. 7 Muḥammad Sa‘īd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī, ‘Alā ṭarīq al-awda ilā al-islām: rasm li-manāhij wa ḥall li-mushkilāt (Beirut: Mu’assasa al-Risāla, 1992), pp. 64–65.

8 On vernacular cosmopolitanisms, multiple modernities, and the task of comparative thought1 Olivier Remaud

The phrase cosmopolitanism has re-emerged in the past two decades and reinvented a well-known observation that experiences of the elite – in business, academia, government and civil society – are different from the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ people. In response, many debates about cosmopolitanism attempt to find a middle path between two apparently incompatible positions of argument: the first states that a cosmopolitan rationale remains the best ethical attitude to challenge excessively selective loyalties; and the second believes cosmopolitanism should acknowledge the significant social frameworks behind their reasoning. In contemporary discussion, the tension between these statements assumes a fascinating paradox: the more intensely we feel the magnetism of ‘cosmopolitanism from below’, the less appealing does the designated ‘cosmopolitanism from above’ become. Has scholarly attention turned away from the cosmopolitanism of the educated ‘global’ travellers to the more silent cosmopolitanisms of ‘local’ or ‘subaltern’ workers? Have all academics realized that an international airport zone is not only a locus amœnus for cultural world-view intellectuals and jet-setting managers, but may also appear as an uncharted land for many people, even a trap for migrants?2 I suggest not. Instead, I argue that this change in focus means that the existing consensus about what it means to be a ‘world citizen’ is no longer current in traditional terms. It has become hard to describe the diverse ways in which people carry out their lives. Applying the universalistic dimension of cosmopolitanism – from which the traditional theme of ‘deterritorialization’ derives – remains a good way to confront languages of ethnocentrism and cultural homogeneity. What seems to prevail in the modern debates, however, is an argument that global changes do not affect people to the same extent universally, and therefore a new kind of local cosmopolitanism is slowly taking the place of the old one. In this chapter, I suggest that the ‘everyday turn’ of cosmopolitanism is a symbol of our present time which links together the ideas of ‘multiple’ and ‘vernacular’ modernities or cosmopolitanisms. From that perspective, I attempt to provide insights to the problems concerning the synchronous emergence of a nationalist ‘alternative identity’ and the task it presents to comparative thought.

142  Olivier Remaud

Cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitanisms? I begin with a question. Have we entered an age in which a social imaginary tends to endorse the ‘ordinary’ over the ‘organizational’ and the ‘everyday’ aspects of globalization over the bureaucratic agendas of global governance? Many scholars now call attention to connected ‘social identities’ and contrast them with ‘disembedded contractarian’ individuals.3 It is not just a matter of comparing a situated form of cosmopolitanism with an abstract one, but also of understanding the emergence of a multi-polar world. Such an understanding is rooted in the assumption that the ‘political’ in our contemporary world requires considering plural modes that bring social systems into existence. Rediscovering the many faces and places of power has a large influence on the discourse on cosmopolitanism both for scientists and for people generally. Recent literature tends to amend the ‘mono-centric’ Western mode of thought by collecting ‘vernacular’ formulations of other cosmopolitan practices. Globally recognized social scientists with an interest in political theory can display these practices. A focal point of this discussion is how non-European narratives are arranged and in some cases may provide what I call spaces of resonance for the sake of comparison. In making these comparisons, however, we must be aware of deeper divisions. In discussing the ‘everyday’ aspects of contemporary societies, we must accept that from time to time people experience two conflicting forms of cosmopolitanism. One form is related to practices – it is both resourceful and polymorphous. The other, meanwhile, is associated with ideas, linked only to the Western imagination and articulated in only one language. Thus, rejecting Euro-centrism takes the form of an opposition between ‘doing’ and ‘talking’. Sheldon Pollock points to the antagonism between action and ideas: [It is] to think about cosmopolitanism and vernacularism as action rather than idea, as something people do rather than something they declare, as practice rather than proposition (least of all, philosophical proposition). This enables us to see that some people in the past have been able to be cosmopolitan or vernacular without directly professing either, perhaps even while finding it impossible rationally to justify either. By contrast, the attempt to vindicate cosmopolitanism or vernacularism – the production of the very discourse on the universal or the particular – seems to entail an objectification and abstraction, and their associated political practices, that have made the cosmopolitan so often take on the character of domination and the vernacular, that of inevitability.4 This contrast between action and ideas leads to two further points. First, cosmopolitan practices display a property that, according to Pollock, cosmopolitan ideas do not have: they do not intoxicate the mind with justifications of universalism – or of particularism. Second, one is not opposed to universalism, but instead to the attitude of professing universalism. Pollock argues convincingly

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  143 that to ‘declare’ universalism does not solve distortions of the argument – which means conversely, I assume, that not preaching universalism is the best way to experience it. This leaves us with questions. From now on, should we see the relationship between cosmopolitan rhetoric and modernity theories as old-fashioned? Are the main aspects of the theorized processes of modernization no more modern? To be universal (without preaching it), should we not keep on reading narratives by the fathers of modernity, such as Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Talcott Parsons?5 Does the same logic apply to particularism? Is it conceivable to be particular without professing particularism? If the answer is yes, then what should that mean precisely? What is called ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ is associated with an anti-elitist position. Nevertheless, the ‘everyday’ approach takes many forms. Let me unpack a few of them to illustrate the basic view I would like to put forth. Advocates of ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ reject arguments that consider movement as the key aspect of globalization. For instance, they do not wish to limit the analysis to a narrow study of global business elites, refugees and expatriates as the prototypal cosmopolitans. They do not take the ability to choose one’s lifestyle, or for expatriates to return home, to be itself significant. For example, the ‘sedentary glocals’ and the ‘sedentary underclasses’ – representatives of different types of cosmopolitans – would be left out in such a narrow study.6 From a sociological viewpoint, these cosmopolitans take a different approach and attempt to ‘fix the flow’ and point out boundaries in the flux of globalization.7 Such an anti-elitist vision is realistic. It argues that to be a citizen of the world requires living within a social milieu. Additionally, to feel responsible still necessitates the presence of a nation state. In this view, it would be quite odd to see world citizenship functioning as a laboratory for moral isolation or social exclusion. Local cosmopolitanism is opposed to the metaphor of nomadism, to other traditional indicators of cosmopolitan lifestyles (including food and tourism), and also to the ‘excessive theorization’ of related studies. The main argument I am actually trying to unravel is whether cosmopolitanism is a matter of beliefs and attitudes or a matter of movements. If understood as beliefs then, no doubt, ‘any measure of cosmopolitan attitudes must differentiate between the[se] mundane or “unreflexive” forms of cosmopolitanism and what can be referred to, somewhat problematically perhaps, as authentic and “reflexive” cosmopolitanism’.8 But this approach assumes the privilege of reflexivity by relating it to a sense of authenticity. Within the discussion of mundane and authentic concepts there is a contrast between ‘unreflexive’ and ‘reflexive’ categories that echoes a Heideggerian vocabulary. This is problematic. Should we qualify things like food, tourism, clothes and music as definitely ‘inauthentic’ and ‘unreflexive’ modes of experiencing cosmopolitanism? Is there, conversely, some sort of ‘authentic’ and ‘reflexive’ way to consume? How do we evaluate both sociologically and politically the need for a reflexive opening onto the world? These are questions that any ‘modernist call for a social science specification of cosmopolitanism’ should answer.9

144  Olivier Remaud Another type of anti-elitist approach draws precisely from the exploration of ‘ordinary cosmopolitanisms’ defined as the ‘strategies used by ordinary people to bridge boundaries with people who are different from them’.10 By collecting experiences and discussions from white and black workers in America and white and North African workers in France, social scientists try to capture social differences. It seems that the Americans consider the market to be the ‘legitimate arbitrator of worth’, which contrasts with the social-democratic French model in which the ‘market produces inequalities that must be remedied by the state’. In France, a sense of social solidarity eschews the market-orientated motto. Socioeconomic success is not a criterion of social belonging. In the United States of America, ‘having high-status occupations can make blacks equal to whites’. They give people the feeling that you are ‘in’; therefore, ‘working and consuming are individual strategies for coping with racism, in that they signal that one “belongs”’.11 In a sense, cosmopolitan research is reinvigorated when it is stated, first, that none of the questioned group members ‘grounds human equality in cultural relativism or calls for multiculturalism. Instead, they more readily point to the equalizing power of work and competence, or to the universality of human nature’. Second, data responses invoke a kind of ‘multicultural identity’, but speak of fundamental human sameness in order to overcome racial difference in their lived experience […] they do not couch it in the language of identity. In so doing, they behave as true cosmopolitans by going beyond their racial characteristics and stating their rejection of xenophobia. As a concluding remark, the authors argue that the social sciences must now ‘contemplate the existence of non-intellectual forms of inclusive thinking and acting’.12 Two challenges are thus confronted. On the one hand, it is claimed that ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ is a cultural set of ‘particular universalisms’ by which people capture their similarities. The logic of social recognition where a good worker gets high marks does not imply any specialized language of communal membership. The argument of humanity as an experience of sameness seems to be entirely sufficient. But on the other hand, it is argued that this type of cosmopolitanism does well in passing over the multicultural agenda that tends to substantiate the vocabulary of identity. The difference between the elitist approach and the anti-elitist approach then comes to be seen as a difference not only in emphasis, but also in substance. In terms of emphasis, the expression ‘my culture made me do it’ (and its unlimited consequences) is a non-starter. In substance, there is no specific definition of universalism, but rather a general perception of sameness. As already suggested, the cosmopolitan approach ‘from below’ has something in common with rejecting a ‘hidden Eurocentric and class bias’, since diasporas are elites that are often socially and culturally isolated. The promotion of this kind of cosmopolitan life means that

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  145 even working-class labour migrants may become cosmopolitans, willing to ‘engage with the Other’; and that transnationals – Hannerz’s term redefined to encompass migrants, settlers and refugees as well as occupational travellers – inevitably must engage in social processes of ‘opening up to the world”, even if that world is still relatively circumscribed culturally. A distinction is made here between ‘transnationals’, who are ‘people who move and build encapsulated cultural worlds around them’, and ‘cosmopolitans’, who ‘familiarise themselves with other cultures and know how to move easily between cultures’. It is interesting to note what the author obtains from the descriptions of these individual experiences. She writes that, the working-class labour migrants discussed here are primarily transnationals, living in their enclosed cultural worlds wherever they travel, but the paper also shows how it is possible to be a working-class cosmopolitan person who gains knowledge and familiarity with other cultures.13 Werbner supplements her analysis with the example of a man accustomed to communal and religious rules who migrates from India to the Arabian Peninsula to work for a Japanese company. This man wishes to become ‘competent’ in the languages and traditions of others. The example shows the distinction between ‘transnational’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ and echoes the long-established contrast between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), a dichotomy borrowed from Henry Maine and Ferdinand Tönnies. This reminds us that a diaspora always depends on the subtle dialectic between ‘community’ and ‘society’, and we know, as Thomas H. Eriksen put it well, that ‘one can be a full member of either without belonging to the other, which means that a society may be culturally open and socially closed’. For instance, children of Pakistani immigrants in Oslo are rather integrated in the Norwegian educational system, but most of them have great difficulties getting jobs.14 In Werbner’s terms, one immigrant can be ‘cosmopolitan’ in the sense that he acquires linguistic and cultural competence through schooling, while also remaining a ‘transnational’ confronted with unemployment. The challenge for the ‘cosmopolitanism from below’, however, does not lie in becoming a radical cosmopolitan who resembles an individual without any skills or particular loyalties. The challenge is rather to find the right balance among varied and overlapping allegiances within familial, social and employment contexts and to get a sense of the meaning of one’s life from a multiplicity of sources. That is not an easy task. Werbner also uses the example of arranged marriages between members of the diaspora and the home population to illustrate her reasoning, concluding that geographically disparate immigrant groups can lead to family ruptures. Given this, local relationships might be more advantageous. Cases like this allow us to understand why ‘cosmopolitanism does not necessarily imply an absence of belonging but the possibility of belonging to more than one ethnic and cultural localism simultaneously’.15 Therefore, the merging of ‘transnational’

146  Olivier Remaud aspects and ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes is more of interest than any knowledge of cultural encapsulation. But on the one hand, not all the members of diasporas are cosmopolitan or transnational in the same sense. Often, adult immigrants engage a new culture gradually and adapt to a foreign society in different ways. On the other hand, the dynamics of acculturation reveal the constitutive diversity of all cultural groups. In a book provocatively titled Liberals and Cannibals, Steven Lukes points out, I think correctly, that in any cultural group there will not only be ‘identifiers (that is, those who identify themselves as belonging to it)’ but also ‘quasi-identifiers, uncertain-identifiers, ex-identifiers, non-identifiers, multiidentifiers and anti-identifiers. People in all these categories make, explicitly or implicitly, differing reasoned judgements about their “identities” and how they interpret and relate to local norms’.16 Calling attention to the overlapping allegiances experienced by non-Westerners also allows us to examine closely the various forms of migration, ranging from people to knowledge in the post-colonial world. Let us consider, first, the example of the Senegalese Murid Brotherhood17 and, second, the case of non-European cultures produced by non-Western elites in the Sanskritic pre-colonial world.18 In the first case, a Senegalese Islamic group eschews the logic of assimilation, even whilst working in an economic culture as peanut merchants as a way of developing Islam’s version of ‘economic cosmopolitanism’ during the colonial period. In the post-colonial period, Murid migrants were able to trade on a global level and also at the same time preserved some sort of a closed cultural identity. They lived a difficult communal lifestyle of migrants in very small flats, but did not struggle against globalization. Since ‘the logic of ideological enclosure is accompanied by a territorial enclosure […] Murid diasporic culture is homogenized in a way that excludes foreign values by dramatizing and acting out Murid rituals in a systematic and exclusive manner’.19 In this sense, Murid members ‘domesticate the global’. They are not ‘hybridizing’ themselves, and there is no way to find any ‘dissolution of the local in the global’ or ‘any annexation of the global by the local’. What is at stake, rather, is a ‘vernacular contribution to cosmopolitanism’ that promotes ‘pluralization of cosmopolitan forms and of local variations of world time’.20 Thus, Mamadou Diouf shows how Murid people constructed their singularity. The second example, a historical study of post-colonial countries, is a critique of modernity by a ‘minoritarian modernity’ or by ‘minoritarian cosmopolitanism’. These concepts mean primarily an attempt to ‘provincialize Europe and […] seek cosmopolitical genealogies from the non-Christian Sanskrit world’, and a wish to be ‘involved, at the same time, in a vernacularization of a great tradition and the amplification of a petit récit’.21 The challenges here are presented explicitly. The first challenge asks ‘how radically we can rewrite the history of cosmopolitanism and how dramatically we can redraw its map once we are prepared to think outside the box of European intellectual history’. The second asks ‘how manifold is the range of practices that might allow for new and alternative theorization’.22 Considering the circulatory networks of Sanskrit literature in pre-colonial Asia, Pollock understands cosmopolitan and vernacular

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  147 to be ‘modes of literary communication’ – against ‘incommunication’ it appears through the dynamic of vernacularization – and ‘practices of literary culture’ that are ‘practices of attachment’.23 Agreeing with Norbert Elias, he uses a macrohistorical methodology to criticize the social science ‘retreat into the present’. What is most important to capture here is that the word ‘cosmopolitan is not necessarily to be equated with a cultural–political form of universal reason, let alone with a universal church or empire, any more than vernacular is to be taken to be synonymous with national’.24 If this is true, then, comparing Sanskrit and Latin cosmopolises proves fruitful. This leads Pollock to the conclusion that the contrast is not between European universalism and Asian particularism, but between a ‘coactive’ cosmopolitanism and a ‘voluntaristic’ cosmopolitanism; or also, between a ‘vernacularization of necessity’ and a ‘vernacularization of accommodation’.25 The statement is explained more simply: In Europe, we find everywhere a necessary correlation between people, polity, and language. In South Asia, by contrast, there appears to have been some linguistic and cultural accommodation to the conditions of a region on the part of those who entered it; and if power typically expressed itself in the language of place, power did not make that language instrumental to its own self-conception, let alone to the being of the citizen-subject.26 These two approaches – Diouf’s and Pollock’s – represent two different trends. Nevertheless, each of them finds its own path to override the multicultural language of identity. One strand (Diouf) presents cosmopolitanism as a practice of culture in a sociological manner. Murid trajectories are a very interesting illustration of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’. They re-enact in the same way as the classical formulation of Edward Burnett Tylor who saw ‘culture’ as a coherent and holistic package. Kwame A. Appiah, meanwhile, recently proposed that we refer to the membership of a community as a continuous act of making identities through constructed frameworks of life.27 He has added a sense of ‘social identity’. I would say that Murid migrants combine the substantial as well as nominal perception of their own culture with a remarkable capacity to engage the culture market. This perfectly illustrates the case of ‘flexible citizenships’ that arise from international migrations.28 Once again, the language of multicultural identities, or even that of ‘hybridity’, no longer works; nor is it even suggested that communal culture is the only source of one’s identity. Culture appears to be one of the multiple ways to connect individuals, since they belong to a plurality of modes of existence, including those generated by market rules. But this poses two questions: does it mean that Murid migrants are ‘transnational’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ at the same time, or should we think that they have succeeded in making their ‘transnational’ lives cosmopolitan in Werbner’s terms? The other strand (Pollock) presents cosmopolitanism as a philological practice of culture that has political implications. It opposes the view that cosmopolitanism derives from Europe and European intellectuals alone. By criticizing the uniqueness of Europe and its declarations of universalism, this strand attempts

148  Olivier Remaud to resist ‘the preconcepts of nationalized, colonialized, and orientalized thinking, and even perhaps of normal science’.29 The aim is to manifest different forms of cosmopolitanisms by taking into account pre-modern vernacular traditions that avoided the modern and Western biological correlation of language, collective identity and political order. Additionally, Pollock states that an Indian academic will never consider using his mother tongue.30 Its usefulness aside, Pollock’s article has one limitation from my point of view: the Sanskrit tradition he refers to belongs to the high and sophisticated culture that the ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ approach precisely tries to refute. Pollock does not consider the point. But that aside, the example does show how everyday and vernacular cosmopolitan trends may diverge and how attention to other vernacular processes of knowledge may help develop a critique of the patterns of the ‘cosmopolitanism from above’ theory. Obviously, Pollock speaks in praise of macro-historical ‘comparativism’. The methodological challenge is quite clear: Delineating the particularities of the past and presenting ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanisms will allow social scientists to minimize the hegemony of the European lens in studying non-Western societies.

Vernacular cosmopolitanisms and theories of modernization In this next section I will avoid a number of pitfalls. I will not examine the elitism predicate too often associated with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism; nor will I discuss questions about the epistemic domination of the West. Instead, let me put on the table a set of remarks related to the recent contributions to the cosmopolitan debates outlined in the first section. First, the notion of ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ may sound contradictory: the basic ethic of cosmopolitanism is universalism, while antagonism to such a ‘moral cosmopolitanism’ is often considered relativistic. Nevertheless, it has become obvious that the alternative between a relativistic position and a universalistic commitment appears all the more artificial since the discussions concerning the various dimensions of cosmopolitanism largely contribute to blurring the boundary between the two positions. Global trends that modify not only cultural and political but also judicial and sociological parameters illustrate the fact that the universal idea of humanity – or ‘sameness’ – is evoked simultaneously to an attempt to clarify the goals of an approach that is sensitive to the ‘vernacular’ and capable of determining new norms from particular cases. Vernacular cosmopolitanism is used then to qualify the logic of the global modern ‘everyday’ in diasporic lives, creating an ‘oxymoron that joins contradictory notions of local specificity and universal enlightenment’.31 Second, the notion of ‘vernacular’ or ‘everyday’ cosmopolitanism is similar to the idea of ‘multiple modernities’ in that both rethink categories associated with the Enlightenment vision. Indeed, people are cosmopolitan in very different ways. On the one hand, we are all human in ‘doing’ rather than in ‘arguing’, belonging to localities and social relationships rather than to an abstract category of humanity. On the other hand, globalization does not imply that an awareness of situated identities disappears at all.32 Cosmopolitans are not all nomads and

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  149 migrants. Regarding the tension between ‘sedentarianism’ and ‘nomadism’, cosmopolitanism should cautiously be distinguished from globalization as a process without internal variants. Third, the concept of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ proceeds historically from anti-colonial struggles. The aim was to empower subjugated people in post-colonial societies and to make them ‘contemporary’ on the basis of ‘alternative’ temporalities. As Homi Bhabha put it, the alternative aspect of their lifestyles derives from the ‘everyday forms’ of ‘vernacular cosmopolitan negotiations between the home and the world’, far beyond the categorical similarities of humanity. It opens the door to a ‘politics of the experiential’, which requires one to consider the ‘many circles narrower than the human horizon’ (Bhabha, quoting Appiah’s comments at the 1994 Nussbaum debate, published in the Boston Review).33 Many approaches to ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ reject the supposedly unquestioned individualism of the liberal tradition. At the same time, however, they assume that the legacy of cosmopolitanism found in literature, for example, no longer provides a relevant way for thinking about the modern world. In that sense, these approaches renounce visions of modernity as a social form considered ‘ethically synchronous and politically symmetrical’ given the fact that we are aware of the ‘terrible asymmetries of the idea of modernity itself’.34 What is interesting is the attempt to catch the right levels of concern that involve examining various spheres (state, country, town, street, family, craft, profession) rather than the merely ‘human horizon’ and the formal language of humanity. The correlative assumption is that these smaller worlds contribute to making the world as a whole. Fourth, the promotion of the ‘ordinary’ versus the ‘organizational’ is partly the product of the now widely disseminated idea of ‘multiple modernities’. To put it simply, the notion entails at least two statements: first, the very distinctive features of modernity are constantly re-codified in all parts of the world; and second, ‘modernization’ and ‘Westernization’ are not corresponding concepts.35 What is at stake is how we reconsider the abilities of local cultures to appropriate and to suggest a cultural turn for political studies. In my opinion, the key underlying idea is this: dealing with the topic of modernization, rather than those of Westernization and modernity, offers a framework to examine alternative modernization processes. As Nilüfer Göle put it whilst studying the Islamic veil issue, Turkish middle- and lower-class women want to get into the public sphere, but they do not refer either to the republican agenda of secular elites during the modernization of the Turkish nation or to contemporary religious comprehensions of the veil. As a social practice, the veil becomes an argument to refute not only the homogenizing Turkish logic of modernization, but also the anti-modern means of some Islamic ways of behaving.36 In such a context, modernity does not show itself as monolithic. The differences that emerge from a society in constant transition manifest themselves, on the contrary, as multiple. To speak of modernity in the plural has one consequence at least: it implies that modernization can no longer be seen as a mere effort to duplicate modernity in the singular. Fifth, the correlative notion of ‘alternative modernities’ is in keeping with the position that past modernity theories are too ‘culture-neutral’. This is why

150  Olivier Remaud many of them were attracted by a general critique of culture that implied ‘a sort of ethnocentrism of the present’ and, consequently, a kind of ‘inability to perceive the differences in our contemporary world’.37 It remains unclear, however, in some of Charles Taylor’s comments to what extent the necessity of considering the ‘differences among today’s multiple modernities [that] are understood in terms of the divergent social imaginaries involved’ are compatible with the paradoxical position stating that ‘modernity is not specifically Western, even though it may have started in the West’.38 Instead, Taylor writes, ‘it is that form of life towards which all cultures converge, as they go through, one after another, substantially the same changes’.39 Do we have to understand that the convergence theory speaks mainly of the institutional aspects of change (adopting thus a culture-neutral organizational disposition of European allegiance) and that divergence theory addresses the ordinary experiences and the social imaginaries that shape non-western contexts? Is the ‘alternative modernities perspective’ that attempts to ‘complicate this neat dichotomy by foregrounding that narrow but critical band of variations consisting of site-specific “creative adaptations” on the axis of convergence (or societal modernization)’40 sufficiently defined? Are we dealing with an understanding of other cultures and societies ‘through translation’ of European patterns or with an understanding ‘through familiarization’, namely, through a more anthropologically oriented process of cross-pollination of cultures?41 If it is true that through familiarization we may only happen to consider other cultures according to their own specific meanings, the vernacular cosmopolitan viewpoint should require that familiarization precedes translation. But as a consequence this may reject theories of convergence. Thus we can pose the following question: how do we methodologically combine the view that the successive stages of globalization have generated convergent contexts of development with another observation that some of those forms of experience nevertheless may differ in substance from one society to another? I call this the ‘convergence–divergence paradox’. My sixth and last proposition is this: is an anti-convergent theory of vernacular cosmopolitanism on its way to becoming definitely ‘post-liberal’ and ‘postuniversalistic’? This is to ask whether it is defined in terms of ever multiplying and overlapping allegiances against the ‘fetishization of liberal individualism’.42 Surely we have to keep on reading the authors of modernity (among them Elias, Weber, Tönnies and Parsons), but what the ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ approach clearly shows is that the analysis of the three dynamics of differentiation, rationalization and secularization must now operate on the level of ordinary interests. Traditionally, to be a citizen of the world has signified living in an urbanized age as a free-willed individual capable of existing in a social milieu. This liberal understanding of cosmopolitanism does not take into account the ordinary dimensions of social life. More than ever, the modern problem of multiple belongings illustrates how social actors may adroitly adapt to shifting contexts. However, is a culture-sensitive form of universalism unconceivable? Is such a form not implicitly assumed in the scenario where the same individual frequently claims a set of identifications that originates from a plurality of cultures?

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  151

Anti-cosmopolitanism: a case study As already suggested, the notion of vernacular cosmopolitanism is a severe critique of certain aspects of convergence theories about modernity. Consequently, this critique of the European view holds that there is also an efficient argument to describe non-Western forms of fundamentalism. For instance, by quoting Jeffrey Herf, Sheldon Pollock assumes that the Indian BJP and RSS movements rejuvenate the ‘reactionary modernism’ that is familiar to interwar Europe with notions of destructive universalism. Furthermore, vernacular cosmopolitanism shows a unique comprehension of humanity, as well as a critique of economic valuations and various institutions.43 Pollock’s argument about the culture of resentment in the various forms of Indian fundamentalism draws from the reinvention of a deviant form of modernism. This asks other questions: In a multi-polar world are deviations like this a threat to modern societies that try to reformulate their social agenda to escape the modernization theory? To what extent do theories of convergence that preserve some space for divergences protect contemporary societies from resurgent nationalist discourse? Are present anti-cosmopolitan trends the best enemies of the multiple modernities thesis? And at the same time, are they the best friends of an ideal of reformed imperial modernity? Let me consider briefly the case of ‘culturology’ in Russia. The concept of culturology (kul’turolgija) represents one of the most profound evolutions in the Russian intellectual world of the past few years. This concept is contemporary to the great resurgence in globalized theories about the fate of civilization. The term culturology denotes an academic reality that emerged in academic literature following the 1991 political upheavals and is not limited to the conditions under the current Russian Federation. It rapidly became an entirely separate discipline, placing itself into the knowledge landscape alongside sociology, mathematics and linguistics. Culturology eventually found its way into certain academic programmes as well as into the general stream of more specialized publications. It is possible to write doctoral theses in that field and study the subject at universities in Moscow, Rostov-on-the-Don, Krasnoïarsk and also in diverse institutes within the former republics of the Soviet Union: Tartu, Kiev and Almaty. According to Jutta Scherrer, in 1999 alone the Russian state library recorded 1,146 new titles that could be classified under this culturology programme.44 Culturology represents a type of global philosophy that seeks to find a synthesis of cultural activities. Differing from the American cultural tradition or the German Kulturwissenschaften, which primarily address micro-social practices, the concept of culturology is defined as a science of identity, favouring a ‘civilizational paradigm’. Breaking with theories in preceding decades, it reconstructs the dividing line between the social sciences and classic humanities in order to better understand the Russian cultural existence and the creative quality of its ‘soul’. Culturology’s followers include ardent Marxist-Leninists, who quote at will from Nietzsche, Spengler, Berdiaev, Freud, Sorokin, Ortega y Gasset, and more recently Arnold Toynbee, Leslie White and Samuel P. Huntington. They also add to this group works by the founders of the pro-Slavonic movements of the

152  Olivier Remaud second half of the nineteenth century, in particular a book on Russia and Europe published by Nikolaï Danilevskij in 1871 – reprinted several times including a newly re-edited edition – that engenders a balanced critique of Euro-centrism. By reading Scherrer’s work, one understands that culturology is visible in the reinterpretation of several old debates. Interestingly, it skips over 1917 and prefers to reabsorb the Stalin epoch and the entire Soviet era into the historical context of ‘totalitarian’ cultures that have touched Germany, Italy and Spain. This concept goes against the grain, favouring ‘Eurasianist’ doctrines that traditionally associate the Russian spirit in opposition to the purportedly corrupt rule of modern Western thought. But in foreign policy circles, it inspires a form of neo-Eurasianism that is greatly interested in cultural and political transformations in Central Asia. Culturology also brings up the subject of Orthodox religion – an indispensable component of the Russian culture – as a means to halt the advance of Western materialism. Contrary to the Marxist vision of linear historical progression, culturology develops theories of cyclical history and suggests that civilizations are individual entities with a lifespan punctuated by rises and falls in fortunes. It is no surprise that this concept promotes the providential role of national history. Scherrer observes in her 2003 book that the ‘culturology’ taught in universities since 1997 is divided into four specialty areas: a theory of culture, historical culturology, heritage conservation and applied culturology. This last area highlights not only the intellectual but also the political issues of the discipline. The author mentions an eloquent example effectively characterizing the style of the 1990s: during the summer of 1996, following his re-election, President Yeltsin launched a competition entitled ‘An Idea for Russia’. Essentially, the idea was to answer the fundamental questions: ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ In justifying this initiative, Yeltsin declared that Russian history went through several periods, each dominated by a different ideology (monarchy, communism, perestroïka) and that the time had come to reinvent a concept of the state which could once again mobilize a sense of national identity. A historian and parliamentary representative of Vologda won the competition and came up with an idea of Russia based upon six points, each of which renewed the fight between Orthodoxy and the pitfalls of Western individualism. Therefore the ‘circle of power’ in Russia explicitly borrows from the culturology thesis (as also illustrated by the ‘Governmental Program for the Patriotic Education of Citizens of the Russian Federation’ designed by President Putin in March 2001). This circle of power aims its political gaze and prospective studies into the distance in the search of an identity that can assert itself in the long term. In addition, governmental elites borrow ideas from intellectual elites in an attempt to evaluate Russia’s global role, work out the limits of its future power and guarantee its universal mission. In this context, political elites renew the imperial discourse that currently pervades the Russian political spirit. Therefore, culturology as a new state doctrine managed to overcome political cleavages and even found a way into both Zjuganov’s and Zirinovskij’s proposals. It is probably still too early to suggest that this concept defines an authentic Sonderweg for Russian society, an evolution specific to the Federation. However,

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  153 it is evident that culturology fills a great void, rooting itself in a desire to prescribe the moral and political norms heading into the twenty-first century. By replacing Marxist–Leninist economic determinism with a cultural determinism based on a strong spirituality that upholds Russia’s destiny, culturology expresses a new need for an all-encompassing historical account and a search for durable existential categories. This civilization-based approach towards society’s problems is a consequence of the difficulties many individuals have in orientating themselves in the present while attempting to master an incomprehensible future. In a postSoviet world denied traditional bearings, culturology is a means of rewriting history and fulfilling an ‘ersatz-ideological function’.45 Many interrogations arise from such an anti-cosmopolitan discipline that function as an exact counter-type to the literary vernacular cosmopolitanism that Pollock examines: Can a discipline that considers the ‘Eurasian civilization’ as the common concept for describing the world be that scientific? If we take the official discourse further, towards what kind of political history might this neoimperial discipline lead to in Russian civil society? The idea of an ‘alternative identity’ (I borrow from the title of an article by Laruelle)46 implies that the mutual implication of centre and periphery that operates in the everyday cosmopolitanism is missing. Local and global levels are not integrated into a transformative process or a creative combination of various forces, since the notion of ‘alternative identity’ applied to the Russian case describes the world in terms of a closed and anti-cosmopolitan soul instead of one of openness and plurality. Culturology tends to globalize a feeling of a neo-imperial spiritual home and applies both these new and old mottos to the country’s present social challenges. Thus, an analysis of the migrations of central Asian workers in Russia, for example, is evidence to the continuity of the former imperial power, even in its ‘stabilizing role by absorbing a part of the economic and social current difficulties of Central Asia’.47

The need for comparativism By way of trying to open up my conclusion, I would like to suggest two ways in which we might think about the task of comparative political theory in a multipolar world. On the one hand, it has become obvious that a modern form of cosmopolitanism faces specific disagreements concerning morality. The widening challenge to the social significance of our practices reveals the ‘everyday turn’ of cosmopolitanism. Most sources of public conflict appear in the guise of empirical considerations rather than on the level of general principles or worldviews. What Amartya Sen has called the ‘universal value’ of democracy is confronted with a variety of political contexts as well as an intersection of cultural behaviours.48 Democracy’s future will probably depend on the concrete conditions of its use, since the abstract formulation of such a value cannot respond to the recurrent arguments about experiences lacking common measure in the modern world. We may admit that overcoming disagreements depends increasingly on constantly negotiated compromises between competing behaviours and habits, rather than on a consensus of high-level general principles. Democracy must work on the level of

154  Olivier Remaud practice. Nevertheless, the culturology example proves that worldviews and ideas (even bad ones) are still competing with cosmopolitan commitments. A modern democratic state endowed with neo-imperial values and a strong sense of its ‘alternative identity’ is an easy substitute for universality. With new nationalisms, we face hybrid phenomena that tend to duplicate the negatives of modernity. The challenge of political hybridity is a large one for any form of vernacular cosmopolitanism or ‘multiple modernities’ theory. There is a second point, though: we know that cosmopolitanism is always caught in a subtle dialectic between the detachment necessary for analysing politics or justice on the international level and the concerns of the everyday life of the individual. While the abstraction of international matters does not appeal to all citizens, neither do local daily concerns always reach the core of political thinking. Cosmopolitanism may testify to a shift in orientation from macro-politics to micro-practices; or it still can be attracted by the representation of a transnational community. However, it is not protected from the risk of indifference and from the tendency to withdraw into domestic or local values, thereby reducing a global open-minded attitude to things like food or tourism. But how does one deal with the ‘coexistence of stylistic cosmopolitanism with political nationalism’, that is with the tendency to substitute style for ‘deeper senses of politics’?49 As Craig Calhoun puts it, I think correctly, cosmopolitanism should not be only a matter of cultural flavour or even moral choice. He goes on to say that it must be a matter of institutions and a matter of connections. Certainly, thinking in terms of the abstract equivalence of human beings is helpful – in theories of justice and human rights, for example. But cosmopolitanism shouldn’t be equated with such universalism. Cosmopolitanism becomes richer and stronger if approached in terms of connections rather than (or in addition to) equivalence. And cosmopolitans who think in terms of connections – and their incompleteness and partiality – are less likely to turn a blind eye to the material inequalities that shape the ways in which different people can belong to specific groups while still inhabiting the world as a whole.50 The aim is to make political theory more socially oriented, even more mundane perhaps. But if formulating in this way relates to the vernacular approach, something would go missing: one cannot obtain the political specificity of vernacular cosmopolitanism with a sense of connections only. The critique of the idealistic connotation of cosmopolitanism is intended to give more space to the view of heterogeneity in public debates. Heterogeneity is a constitutive part of the ‘political’ as a set of cultural, social and institutional processes from which the society always reformulates and appropriates itself under new conditions. What remains unclear at this point is the extent to which the vernacular proposal of a ‘located’ or ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism can become, or not become, an argument for a reinvigorated relation to universalism. In my opinion, the vernacular dimension that includes the various frameworks through which people compose

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  155 the general meaning of their identity as social may contribute to a balance between ‘connections’ and ‘equivalence’. Let me now make three brief concluding points regarding the task of comparative political thought. My first point is that the attempt to define the political specificity of a vernacular approach can be based on an understanding that cosmopolitanism requires considerations of all cultures and practices, including those in European societies. Marc Bloch once stated that European borders are not easily understood, and that we never actually know where to put the dividing line between intra-cultural and inter-cultural comparisons.51 By revisiting the ‘grand partage’ between tradition and modernity in present contexts, and by relating it to the conjunctures from previous modern epochs, we may be able to obtain a more fine-grained approach to identifying state differences in politics and attitudes on various issues and also make analytical projections within a wider framework. Put in another way: if it is true that European societies are still structured with an opposition between modern and traditional values, and therefore do not easily subscribe to a secular singlecivilization definition of modernity,52 then maybe we should also entertain the idea of ‘multiple modernities’ in Europe as well. Second, this comparative task would assume, then, that in each society, either Western or not, modern and traditional elements are intertwined. In short, all societies have multiple cultural dimensions. Moreover, political thought must embrace the many levels of social commitment and therefore consider more deeply the complexity of everyday situations. Following this line of thought, we can argue for instance that the concept of citizenship, with its original universalistic definition, would appear situated ‘under the conditions of its experiential testing’.53 My proposal is to decipher the multiple means of experiencing the system of social interactions in order to contribute more comprehensively to what I would call the reflexive cosmopolitization of the vernacular. Finally, my third point argues that we may catch a glimpse of a political type of vernacular cosmopolitanism through an experiential comparativism. Methodologically speaking, experiential comparativism would insist on the vernacular remodelling behaviours of individuals in a society under the condition of plurality, and also try not to escape the ‘convergence–divergence paradox’ mentioned above (see fifth point, pp. 149–150). This paradox derives from the fact that societies never exist as isolated entities, but always exist in specific situations of communication and exchange. As we know, to be both consistent and relevant, the social scientist involved in comparative work must distinguish comparable contexts from non-comparable contexts and put the former in corresponding space and time. The art of selecting the right scales of analysis to determine ‘partial’ and ‘asymmetric’ comparisons domain by domain would be rightly essential to ‘experiential comparativism’.54 Two consequences would follow: first, a comprehensive extension of the vernacular viewpoint would involve the thesis that the West is no longer in opposition to ‘the Rest’; second, such a comparativism would also be based on contexts of ‘experiential democracies’ where the modalities of dealing with modernization frameworks indicate ‘the

156  Olivier Remaud various forms and expressions of incorporation and inscription into the process of globalization on the basis of a significant locality’.55 Perhaps such a comparative perspective is the one way in which to reduce and render thematic the tension between the global governance trend of existing political cosmopolitanism and the more social vernacular approaches of cosmopolitanism.

Notes 1 Substantial parts of this paper were first presented at the workshop on Comparative Political Thought in a Multipolar World organized in October 2009 by S. Macedo and J.-W. Müller at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, then at a guest lecture in November 2009 at the University of Oslo (Department of Social Anthropology, Research Programme on Cultural Complexities–CULCOM, Th. H. Eriksen). I would also like to thank Alexander Ewing and Andrew Sartori for their final revisions of my essay. 2 Craig Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), (2002), pp.869–897. 3 K.A. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 4 Sheldon Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History’, Public Culture, 12(3), (2000), p.593. 5 Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan’, p.621. 6 Z. Skrbis, G. Kendall G. and I. Woodward, ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism. Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 21(6), (2004), p.121. 7 B. Meyer and P. Geschire, ‘Globalisation and Identity. Introduction’, in B. Meyer and P. Geschire (eds), Globalisation and Identity. Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p.7. 8 Meyer and Geschire Globalisation, pp. 129–130. 9 Skrbis et al., ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism’, p.132. 10 M. Lamont and S. Aksartova, ‘Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries among Working-Class Men’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 19(4), (2002), p.1. 11 Lamont and Aksartova, ‘Ordinary Cosmopolitanism’, p.7. 12 Lamont and Aksartova, ‘Ordinary Cosmopolitanism’, pp.17–18. 13 P. Werbner, ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23(2–3), (2006), pp.18 and 20. 14 Th.-H. Eriksen., ‘Complexity in Social and Cultural Integration: Some Analytical Dimensions’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), (2007), pp.1055–1069. 15 P. Werbner, ‘Global Pathways. Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology, 7(1), (1999), p.34. 16 S. Lukes, Liberals and Cannibals: The Implication of Diversity, (London, New York: Verso, 2003), p.20. 17 M. Diouf, ‘The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12(3), (2000), pp.679–702. 18 Sheldon Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History’, Public Culture, 12(3), (2000), pp.591–625. 19 Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, p.695. 20 Diouf ‘Senegalese’, p.702. 21 Sheldon Pollock, H.K. Bhabha, C.A. Breckenridge and D. Chakrabarty, ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, Public Culture, 12(3), (2000), p.582.

On vernacular cosmopolitanisms  157 Pollock et al., ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, p.586. Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan’, pp. 593–594. Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan’, p. 596. Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan’, pp. 606–607. Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan’, p. 614. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity. A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 29 Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, Daedalus, Vol. 127(3), (1998), p.4. 30 Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan’ pp.612–613. 31 P. Werbner, ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23(2–3), (2006), pp.496–498. 32 G. Paulgaard, ‘Re-centring Periphery: Negotiating Identities in Time and Space’, in Mobility and Place. Enacting Northern European Peripheries, J.O. Bærenholdt and B. Granås (eds) (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008). 33 H. Bhabha, ‘Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in G. Castle (ed.), Postcolonial Discourses. An Anthology, (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001), p.50. 34 Pollock et al., ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, p.582. 35 S.N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus, 129(1), (2000), pp.1–29. 36 N. Göle, The Forbidden Modern. Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 37 Charles Taylor, ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, Public Culture, 11(1), (1999), p.171. 38 Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14(1), (2002), p.91. 39 Taylor, ‘Two Theories’, p.169. 40 D.P. Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative modernities’, Public Culture, 11(1), (1999), p.16. 41 J. Valadez, (2001), Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy and SelfDetermination in Multicultural Societies, (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), p.91. 42 Pollock et al., ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, p.581. 43 Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan’, p.618. 44 J. Scherrer, Kulturologie. Russland auf der Suche nach einer zivilisatorischen Identität, (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). 45 Scherrer, Kulturologie; see also M. Laruelle ‘Central Asia Labor Migrants in Russia: The “Diasporization” of the Central Asian States?’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, Vol. 5(3), (2007), pp.101–119. 46 M. Laruelle, ‘Alternative identity, alternative religion? Neo-paganism and the Aryan myth in contemporary Russia’, Nations and Nationalism, 14(2), (2008), pp.283–301. 47 Laruelle, ‘Central Asia’, p.119. 48 A. Sen, ‘Democracy as a Universal Value’, Journal of Democracy, 10(3), (1999), pp.3–17. 49 Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness’, p.109. 50 Calhoun, ‘The Class Consciousness’, p.113. 51 M. Bloch, ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, in M. Bloch, Histoire et historiens, textes réunis par É. Bloch (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999). 52 O. Galland and Y. Lemel, ‘Tradition-modernité: un clivage persistant des sociétés européennes’, Revue française de sociologie, 47–4, (2006), pp.687–724. 53 P. Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, S. Moyn (ed.), (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p.46. 54 J. Osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats. Studien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich, (Göttingen, Vandenhœck & Ruprecht, 2001), p.34. 55 Diouf, ‘The Senegalese’, p. 680. 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

9 When is comparative political thought (not) comparative? Dialogues, (dis)continuities, creativity, and radical difference in Heidegger and Nishida Chris Goto-Jones Introduction: What is comparative political thought? The field of comparative political thought (CPT) exists in a twofold state of anxiety, not only because its ostensible concern with the so-called ‘non-Western’ immediately places it on the margins of mainstream disciplinary concerns in the modern university, but also because it is not very clear (even to those selfconsciously engaged in it) what CPT actually is. In other words, it faces its death everyday and shrouds this angst in a form of missionary zeal: the proclamations of inclusivity and globality of CPT often go hand-in-hand with accusations about the exclusivity and ethnocentricism of the disciplinary mainstream, which is presented as either illogically unacceptable or even morally defunct. However, while I have great sympathy for this position, it is not clear to me that an orientation around the ‘non-Western’ is helpful, either epistemologically or ethically. In fact, it seems that when deployed in this West vs. non-West paradigm, comparison actually functions to separate, differentiate, caricature, and exclude rather than to include, blend, synthesize, or even dialogue. Indeed, this kind of framing evokes the timelessly troubling sentiments of Kipling, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’.1 An emphasis on origination is probably an obstacle rather than a tool of CPT. What appears to be missing from this sense of the function of comparison is the post-colonial consciousness of the interdependence and cross-penetration of self and other, not only in the modern period but also throughout history.2 Comparison in CPT cannot refer to a dialogue between discrete, hermetically sealed regional traditions, since there is no such thing, unless the function of CPT is to create such traditions itself as ideal types for instrumental purposes. In other words, there is politics and violence at work in such a move, but we should not reject it out of hand as a feature of CPT – indeed, we should consider whether this kind of violence is actually essential to the enterprise. To some extent, this tendency towards instrumentalization in CPT reflects a collusion with certain types of politically co-opted Area Studies, where political thought simply becomes another type of data set (like material culture, social

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  159 organization, or language, etc.) to be employed in the mapping of variation and difference around the world, either as simple and quaint curiosities or in order to help ‘us’ to understand (confront or even defeat) ‘them’.3 In other words, political thought becomes enwrapped in the question of culture, and its purpose shifts from being to interrogate questions of political theory per se to being to use political ideas as a lens through which to view different cultures. CPT ceases to be PT, and instead becomes a species of Area Studies or even Anthropology.4 In this scheme, the value of CPT is the way in which it can contribute to refining a map for the ‘clash of civilizations’,5 not the way in which it can contribute to our understanding of the meaning, dimensions and purpose of political philosophy or political theory themselves.6 To be clear, this issue is separate from the ongoing debate about meaning and context in the history of ideas7 – I do not claim that historical context is irrelevant to the meaning of texts and ideas, but I would claim that this historical context should not necessarily determine the usefulness of those ideas to the process of thinking about politics and the problems of political thought today. That is, ideas are not only useful and interesting in their point of origin (although their use and value may change as their historical and cultural context changes). Sensitivity to historical method in the quest for meaning need not lead us to exclusionary, ethnocentric practices in the present: just as a focus on context in the history of ideas should not lead to antiquarianism, so a focus on cross-cultural inquiry should not lead to essentialism or Orientalism. Ironically, as we will see, one the figures most often cited in the literature of CPT, Martin Heidegger, provides one of the most powerful arguments against the utility of ‘foreign’ thought.8 In some ways, it is this collusion with a certain type of (but not all) Area Studies that explains why CPT remains on the margins of PT: it means that much work that aspires towards CPT takes place in different parts of the university from PT, often in environments that de-privilege theory and fetishize language, and sometimes in environments that are alive with the problematics of representation and becoming.9 Conversely, PT takes place in environments that generally de-privilege language and difference, and aspire towards universal theory. Given the institutional and epistemological complexities of this overdetermined field, it becomes difficult to know when or whether we are actually participating in it and when we are, in fact, doing something quite different. In particular, as in some other comparative fields, such as comparative literature, the term ‘comparative’ appears to exist in complex interrelationships with other terms such as: global, international, cross-cultural, transnational, connected, un-connected, similar, different, continuous, discontinuous, disruptive, coincident, synthetic, dialogic, and kindred. Whilst in general all the senses of ‘comparative’ seem to involve traversing borders (of various kinds and with different purposes), this overdetermination makes it very difficult to know when and why CPT takes place, not only in terms of recognizing it but also in terms of engaging in it. That is, this is a methodological as well as a theoretical problem. More often than not, it is assumed that comparison occurs as a matter of course whenever we juxtapose two (or more) national languages and literatures,

160  Chris Goto-Jones geographical regions, authors, or themes, and rarely do critics stop and ponder what the gesture of comparison consists in, amounts to, indeed realizes and reinforces.10 One of the central problematics for CPT is, then, how it is performed and for whom (or for what) it occurs. As we have already noted, the tendency in the literature is to emphasize the difference of the Other – what Heidegger would term ‘wholly other’ – and to use CPT as a lens through which to view this difference from the standpoint of the European canon, as though this thoroughfare of political thought were the trunk from which all branches of political thinking deviate, or as though European political thought were the star around which all Other thought orbits (even if the planets appear disconnected and separate and of a fundamentally different nature from the star).11 This tendency (to utilize CPT as a way to re-entrench the centrality of the European tradition by establishing it as the standard against which all Other thought should be ‘compared’) should be resisted as a form of parochial narcissism: it is not the case that comparison should be a code word for colonial tolerance. Rather, the significance and impact of comparison should be a multi-directional process; the disruptions, discontinuities, and ruptures that occur in the process of traversing borders should feed back into and contribute to the redefinition of the disciplinary highways of political thought in Europe. In other words, we must be willing to read Europe back through the comparative lens and refashion our understanding of its political ideas in new terms, that is in terms unfamiliar to the traditional canon of political thought. For it to be inoffensive, comparison must rest upon de-centred foundations and seek to traverse borders that are not simply cultural, regional or linguistic, but are instead theoretical, conceptual, and even cosmological. It seems that the practice of comparison in CPT is allied to a creative process of violence to texts, bringing them into conversations in which they were not intended to participate. This means that the practitioner of CPT is encouraged to engage in many practices that good historians of political thought have long been trained to avoid: putting thinkers into dialogue with people, texts, and ideas that they did not or could not converse with, asking them questions that they never sought to answer, and then using them to provide new, innovative answers that belong to us rather than to them. In this sense, CPT becomes a type of imaginative, destructive creation.

Comparison and Heidegger and dialogue In recent years, Martin Heidegger has been the subject of more comparative attention than just about any other European philosopher. In particular, his work has been associated in various ways with so-called ‘Asian philosophy’, with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, with specific schools of thought, such as the Kyoto School of Philosophy, and even with individual thinkers, such as his approximate contemporary Nishida Kitarō – the so-called ‘father’ of modern Japanese philosophy and progenitor of the Kyoto School.12 Hence, the case of

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  161 Heidegger (and Nishida) is especially useful for exploring some of the issues pertinent to the meaning and practice of ‘comparison’ in CPT. In the first instance, the existing literature demonstrates some of the problems of commensurability in the levels of analysis that often afflict the field. The tendency to compare an individual European thinker with a generalized Other at the scale of an entire supra-national region, ‘Asia’, when such a region not only contains myriad intellectual traditions and individual thinkers of differing persuasions but also is itself the product of the European imagination,13 is particularly virulent. This raises a basic question for CPT: what are comparable units of comparison and when are units actually incomparable by nature? Is it really appropriate, for instance, to compare Heidegger with ‘Asian philosophy’, with Buddhism or even with Zen, all of which are surprisingly common? One of the many dangers of doing this is simply that of vulgarity: the implication that Zen (let alone ‘Asia’) sustains a coherent political theory is silly, since Zen is a wide discursive, theoretical, philosophical and religious territory containing a range of debates and problematics in the sphere of politics and ethics. If we compare Heidegger with Zen, what (or whom) do we take to represent Zen (while we expect Heidegger to represent merely himself)? Taken as a whole, Zen has no voice or conceptual integrity, and the logic of ‘representation’ here is dangerous. Hence, to make this kind of comparison appears likely to be a mistake grounded in an ignorance (or a dismissal) of the incommensurability of the categories involved: this may reflect a merely passing acquaintance with Zen (and hence amounts to a call for more substantial scholarship) or a deliberate denial of the sophistication of Zen and its traditions (and hence amounts to a call for more attention to the politics of knowledge and the problematics of Orientalism).14 These kinds of incongruous comparisons also provoke the question of their purpose: what is a comparison of Heidegger and ‘Asian philosophy’ supposed to demonstrate and why should we care about it? In general, the literature appears to be searching for sufficient similarities to be able to talk about resonances between Heidegger and Asian thought, Confucianism or Buddhism. Sometimes these resonances are called ‘continuities’, sometimes ‘coincidences’, or sometimes (borrowing one of Heidegger’s own phrases) they are referred to as revealing a ‘deeply concealed kinship’.15 Whilst such resonances, if indeed they are there, may be interesting in their own right, it is not immediately clear why they should be interesting to the enterprise of CPT: how would the existence of such a ‘kinship’ change the way we read Heidegger’s political thought or the political discourse within the Zen tradition? In general, the literature shies away from answering these (potentially fascinating) questions and restricts itself to considerations of historical and transnational influence, seeking to show either that Heidegger has had an impact on (modern) Asian thought (especially modern Japanese philosophy) or even, more controversially, to argue that East Asian thought had an (unacknowledged) impact on Heidegger.16 Again, however, while a demonstration of impact in this way (particularly in the latter case) may be historically interesting as part of the narrative of the globalization of philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is not clear what evidence of such influence

162  Chris Goto-Jones should mean to our reading of Heidegger’s political thought, if anything. In other words, is the study of resonance or influence really the appropriate focus of CPT, or do they belong in the realms of history? In fact, when most commentators talk about comparison they are usually talking about some form of dialogue, in the sense that they are seeking to bring (at least) two different positions into conversation with each other in the hope/ expectation that this (new) interaction (performed by the commentator rather than necessarily by the sources themselves) will accomplish insights both new and exciting. This is dialogue as a dialectical or synthetic process – in other words, this dialogue, which is a type of conversation in which both sides move, learn, and change, seeks to establish comparison as a species of provocation or disruption or tension: it brings in voices from outside with the purpose of changing the inside (and the outside) and hence rests on the assumption that both sides can learn from each other. This assumption is complicated by political as well as epistemic issues: it relies on the willingness to acknowledge the other as a conversation partner, and it relies on the possibility of communication and comprehension between the partners, or at least on the broad comprehension of a third party commentator who creates a dialogue between positions that did not (or could not) talk directly to each other. On a series of different levels, this raises the question of language: can the partners speak to each other with sufficient sophistication to enable dialogue to be meaningful? This is not only about face-to-face conversation (indeed, given that comparison is usually performed by a commentator rather than a participant – bringing together thinkers or texts that didn’t directly speak to each other historically – this type of encounter is actually less central to ‘comparison’ than we might think), but also more fundamentally about whether the ‘houses of being’ built from different languages are actually commensurable.17 That is, does residing in a different language also mean that one resides in a different reality? Or perhaps better: under what conditions does residing in a different language also mean that one resides in a different reality? This provokes some fascinating questions for translation studies and cultural studies, as well as philosophy and CPT.18 Heidegger himself was not silent on these issues. Indeed, his text, ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer’ is one of the most important and oft-cited sources in debates about the possibility of a so-called ‘East–West dialogue’.19 It is also one of the reasons why Heidegger is so often implicated as a key figure in CPT – indeed, the common perception that Heidegger was interested in East–West comparisons and dialogue rests on some of his own claims in this text, where he discusses having detected a ‘deeply concealed kinship’ between his thought and that of his ‘Japanese’.20 In fact, however, it seems that ‘A Dialogue on Language’ is actually a red herring for our purposes, since it appears to participate in a rather specific sense of ‘dialogue’ that renders it into monologue, apparently foreclosing the possibility of the kind of conversations for which CPT is looking. Before looking at the ‘Dialogue on Language’ in a little more depth, however, let’s first consider some of the ways in which Heidegger and Nishida have been brought together as likely bed-fellows for CPT.

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  163

Heidegger, Nishida, and comparison as analogy It is not unusual to see the names of Nishida Kitarô (1870–1945) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in the same sentence, at least in the literature of comparative philosophy or Kyoto School studies. To some extent, the connection between two of the most innovative philosophers of the twentieth century has been illustrated anecdotally by the undeniable popularity of Heidegger in Japan and by the role played by Nishida’s students in cultivating this ‘Heidegger boom’. For example, the first substantial Heidegger commentary in the world was published by Tanabe Hajime in 1924, before even Germany had seen such a study.21 Then, nine years later in 1933, the world’s first book-length Heidegger study was also written by a Kyoto scholar, Kuki Shûzô.22 Again, only a few years later, in 1939, the first non-German edition of Sein und Zeit appeared, and it was in Japanese. By the time the first English translation had been published (1962), there had been a further four Japanese translations.23 In recent years there has been a surge of interest (particularly in the West) into the political thought of Nishida and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, which he originated during his tenure as professor at Kyoto Imperial University (1911–28). Until the mid-1990s, the Kyoto School in general, but Nishida in particular, were seen as essentially apolitical thinkers. Whilst it was (reluctantly) acknowledged that some of these thinkers were involved (to some degree) with the imperialist regime in wartime Japan, any such involvement was seen as disconnected from their philosophical systems – hence their presentation as apolitical was a strategy to salvage the intellectual and moral respectability of their thought. The idea that political involvement itself indicated a political disposition was uniformly (and conveniently) overlooked. What happened to change this situation? Interestingly, the approach of commentators to the politics of the Kyoto School was not transformed by any new or profound insight into the work of the Kyoto School itself. Indeed, scholars of the Kyoto School had long relied on an external analogy to justify their bifurcated approach to Kyoto School Philosophy, on the one hand, and Kyoto School Politics, on the other. This analogy has been termed the ‘Heidegger factor’,24 so-called because it mirrors the dominant approach taken to the philosophy and politics of Martin Heidegger in Nazi Germany. Heidegger, it was alleged, might have engaged in egregious political actions, but this should not be essentially connected to the integrity of his philosophical system. Even if we leave aside (for the moment) this dubious cordon sanitaire between political action and political thought, there is something implicitly political about the Heidegger–Nishida analogy itself: the respectability (or otherwise) of Nishida and the Kyoto School has been derived from the reputation of one of Europe’s greatest twentieth-century philosophers by comparison (asserting the primacy of Heidegger over Nishida and of Europe over Japan). Hence, the current vogue for Kyoto School studies, and especially for studies of Kyoto School political thought, can trace its origins to the so-called ‘Heidegger controversy’,25 which erupted in the 1980s when the full extent of Heidegger’s

164  Chris Goto-Jones involvement in Nazi politics became evident – endangering the integrity of the cordon sanitaire between his actions and his thought.26 In a slightly oblique and confusing way, the Heidegger controversy has been seen as a ‘rude awakening’27 in Japan Studies, apparently revealing the deep-seated fascist complicity of the Kyoto School philosophers. This is guilt by analogy.28 Jan Van Bragt puts it well: ‘Heidegger’s rather close and long-standing links with Nazism appears [sic] to lie at the bottom of the accusations against the Kyoto school in the West’.29 Whilst most commentators seem content to accept this plausibly intuitive connection between Heidegger and the Kyoto School, very few seem to have asked why Heidegger’s links with Nazism (whatever those may have been) should have anything to do with the alleged complicity of Nishida or the Kyoto School in Japanese fascism (whatever that was). To put it another way, why has the Heidegger controversy become analogous with what Arisaka Yôko has called the Nishida enigma – the question of whether Nishida was a fascist sympathizer or a frustrated ‘liberal’?30 Comparison as analogy appears deeply problematic. In general, there appear to be three strategies of connection emerging from the analogy. The first simply states that Heidegger demonstrates a general principle: the complicity of apparently unimpeachable intellectuals in authoritarian regimes. The second suggests that Heidegger’s thought might have influenced the Kyoto School – infecting it with the disease of fascist complicity. Peter Dale, for example, notes (but does not specify) the ‘impact of Heidegger’s ideas on such men as Kuki Shûzô and Watsuji Tetsurô’.31 Others, such as Evan Thompson, have gone so far as to suggest that Nishida’s protégé Nishitani Keiji (1900–91) should be considered an ‘‘heir’ of Heidegger’,32 implying that he should take his place with Arendt, Löwith, and Marcuse as one of ‘Heidegger’s children,’ to borrow the phrase from Richard Wolin’s book.33 The idea that ‘Nishida’s children’ should be considered his own rather than Heidegger’s seems to fly in the face of the primacy of Europe over Japan. A third strategy might be characterized by Reinhard May’s fearless book, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, which attempts to argue that Heidegger was actually influenced by ‘the East Asian way of thinking’.34 May’s book is provocative and interesting: he suggests that Heidegger may have borrowed some of his ideas, particularly those about death and nothingness from Taoist and Buddhist traditions, and that he was rather grudging about acknowledging these influences. However, May’s emphasis on the influence of a fairly generalized ‘Asian’ worldview on Heidegger’s philosophy is unevenly convincing, and risks re-entrenching the primacy of the category of the individual European thinker as against the nonEuropean region as a whole. If there are interesting and meaningful connections between these two great philosophers, it seems that these connections are not clearly revealed by the language of analogy. Furthermore, to some extent, the analogy functions as a political device to subordinate the Japanese philosopher to the German. It constitutes a projection of the parochialism of European intellectual historians who have defined ‘innovation’ in terms of deviation from the corpus of Western philosophy by Western thinkers; innovation from within, if you like. Hence, Heidegger was

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  165 innovative in his attempts to overcome Western metaphysics and Nishida was simply Japanese. As a consequence, Heidegger was important and Nishida was the Japanese Heidegger: comparison as analogy does not seem promising as the basis for CPT, and the politics of analogy appears to cut off the possibility of innovation from the Other and hence render the practice of CPT pointless.

Heidegger, Nishida, and comparison as historical connection The prevalence of the analogy should not obscure the fact that there were some concrete connections between the two philosophers in question, and that the connections seem to provide strong bases for comparison between the two. The first thing to note about the biographies of Nishida (1870–1945) and Heidegger (1889–1976) is that they were approximate contemporaries and hence lived through a similar historical context in revolutionary societies. Both lived through the so-called ‘crisis of reason’ in Western society,35 both were concerned with philosophy in its ‘pure sense’ and with overcoming metaphysics in particular – politics came to them as a problematic interlude at approximately the same time, in the mid-1930s. In both cases, their political involvements have come to be associated with a kind of ‘turn’. They each lived in the heady days of ultranationalism, and they each sustained (at best) an ambiguous relationship between their thought and the historical world around them. In this regard there is an important proviso: whilst Heidegger explicitly embraced the Nazi party in 1933, making speeches himself in support of Hitler (and never apologized for his poor judgement), Nishida’s alleged complicity rests upon the use to which a number of his texts were put by others in the 1940s. Indeed, Nishida’s private documents (his diaries and correspondence) reveal a generally negative attitude towards Japanese imperialism. Unfortunately, Nishida died as the bombs rained down on Tokyo in 1945, so we are deprived of his postwar reflections.36 There are also some direct biographical connections between the two men. Nishida Kitarô was in occasional correspondence with the eminent German philosophers, Husserl and Rickert, under whom Heidegger studied in Freiburg and Heidelberg in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Nishida dispatched a number of his students and junior colleagues to work in Germany under the supervision of his correspondents. These ryûgakusei included the most eminent thinkers in interwar and transwar Japan: Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, Watsuji Tetsurô, Kuki Shûzô, and Miki Kiyoshi. Beginning in 1921 with Yamanouchi Tokuryû, each of these men met Heidegger during the 1920s or 1930s. Nishida himself, however, never left Japan and Heidegger declined an invitation to teach in Japan for three years.37 Although Nishida and Heidegger never met, they were aware of each other and each other’s work.38 Interestingly, Tanabe Hajime was invited by Husserl to give a series of lectures on Nishida tetsugaku at the University of Freiburg in 1923.39 We know that Heidegger attended these lectures and that he and Tanabe subsequently struck up a friendship – Tanabe even stayed in Heidegger’s home and received private tutorials in German philosophy. The encounter between Kyoto School thinkers

166  Chris Goto-Jones and Heidegger continued into the 1930s, when Nishitani Keiji visited Freiburg (1938) and made a gift of D.T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism. He discovered that Heidegger had already read it, and he famously remarked to Nishitani: ‘if I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all of my writings’.40 Nishitani also reports that Heidegger extended an open invitation to his home for discussions about Zen as a method for ‘overcoming metaphysics’.41 Perhaps the most interesting twist in this biographical tale is Heidegger’s persistent ambiguity about his contact with Asian thought – even denying the existence of ‘resonances’ (accidental or otherwise) between his work and Asian thought in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1949.42 The first hints of a confession of Heidegger’s debts to Japanese thought came in 1959 with the publication of his ‘A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer’, in which Kuki Shûzô, Tanabe Hajime (and even Nishida himself) are mentioned by name. Biographies of Heidegger make almost no mention of Japan – the excellent biography by Rüdiger Safranski, for example, uses the word ‘Japan’ only once (in 500 pages); he refers to a ‘conversation with a Japanese colleague’ about the natures of philosophy and poetry (in about 1917).43 Other biographers have made occasional references to Heidegger’s ‘Japanese students’ (although this is hardly a suitable appellation for philosophers of the standing of Tanabe or Kuki, both of whom were older than Heidegger and already well established – and published – by the time they met) – the phrase intimates a teacher–student relationship between ‘West’ and ‘East’ as much as between Heidegger and Tanabe. Interestingly, as we will see, Heidegger’s ‘confession’ (as May sees it) in ‘A Dialogue on Language’ has had a rather misdirecting affect on scholarship in this area, encouraging commentators to see Heidegger as embracing inter-cultural dialogue and CPT where in fact he is rejecting it.

Nishida, Heidegger, and comparison as resonance There is neither the space nor the need here to develop a close reading-together of Nishida and Heidegger in order to show where there are resonances between their thought and where there are differences. Needless to say, such attempts have already been made.44 Here it is useful primarily to note some similarities in the philosophical and political projects of both thinkers. At the end of the nineteenth century, European philosophy was facing a ‘crisis of reason’. Following the lead taken by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Weber, Heidegger became a vocal exponent of anti-rationalism – arguing that science, rationality and especially technology had effectively become an ‘iron-cage’ (to use Weber’s term) imprisoning the European spirit, de-experiencing and de-humanizing man’s existence. Unlike Nietzsche, who had suggested that modern metaphysics had developed too far and now needed to be overcome, Heidegger began to argue that the whole enterprise of metaphysics had been misconceived from the start – metaphysics itself, the core of the European philosophical tradition – the core of Being in Europe – not merely modern metaphysics, needed to be overthrown – Western philosophy as a whole had been ‘tainted by a deficient understanding of Being’.45

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  167 Both Heidegger himself and most of his commentators phrase his movement in terms of a struggle to overcome or (in his own words) ‘twist free’ of the traditions of Western metaphysics. Indeed, this is often held up as Heidegger’s greatest achievement.46 Whilst it is now rare for commentators to argue that Heidegger’s critique emerged out of a cloudless sky, it is generally accepted that his immediate precursors were Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (both of whom, incidentally, made no secret of their interest in Asian thought). That is, he tried to overcome the ‘Western’ tradition from within it.47 Kisiel’s monumental study, ‘The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being & Time’ (1993) for example, locates the origins of Heidegger’s revolution as far back in the Western tradition as Aristotle. In fact, Kisiel makes a tantalizing start when, on the very first line of his 600-page book, he quotes from ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer’: ‘“And so you remained silent for twelve years” remarks the Japanese visitor to Martin Heidegger.’ Japan does not feature again in Kisiel’s work. For many commentators, Heidegger adopted Nietzsche’s search for the ‘modern pagans’ – those peoples outside the pollution of modern Western culture – a search characterized by the slogan, ‘where are the barbarians of the twentieth century?’48 Arguably, it was this search that led him to the National Socialist party, its violence and its wars, but this was also the search that led him to a process of ‘going-back’ to the source of Western culture, prior to the forgetting of Being. However, it seems naïve to suggest that he did not notice the existence of the increasingly powerful and visible non-Western Other in Asia … or even the existence of the eminent Japanese scholars visiting him and attending his classes.49 After all, the ‘yellow peril’ was the very definition of pagan barbarism for early twentieth-century Europeans. Meanwhile, in Japan, Nishida Kitarô was part of an intellectual culture that was equally conflicted about its relationship with Western philosophy, which had arrived in its modern form in the second half of the nineteenth century. For many in Japan at that time, as for Heidegger (albeit for different reasons), ‘philosophy’ was inextricably entwined with the so-called ‘West’ – it was a distinctive approach to knowledge that (for them) seemed to emphasize rationalism, individualism, materialism, and technology.50 These characteristics were variously contrasted and compared with (and variously evaluated against) apparently ‘indigenous’ systems of thought, such as Buddhism, which seemed (on the whole) to emphasize intuition, cooperativism, idealism, and nature.51 The relative merits and utility of these different bodies of thought and approaches to life (even as presented in such vulgar forms) were the subject of heated debate in the public sphere, and it would not be true to say that there was an overall consensus. Nonetheless, by the 1930s and 1940s, Nishida and his Kyoto School had developed a coherent and innovative philosophical standpoint that drew on the philosophical language of Europe (particularly German idealism) and on intellectual traditions of East Asia, especially Mahayana Buddhist ideas. In a very real sense, they were already engaged in what we might today call CPT or comparative philosophy, searching for synthetic unities through dialogue between Japan and the non-Japanese world (particularly the so-called ‘Western’ world).

168  Chris Goto-Jones By the early 1940s, the philosophy of the Kyoto School was being deployed under the banner of ‘overcoming modernity’ (kindai no chōkoku), which amounted to the assertion that European Enlightenment ideas, particularly its metaphysical claims (as well as Western culture as a whole), insulted the dignity of Being (particularly of Japanese Being) by reducing it to predictable, material, everyday phenomena.52 Overcoming this ideational force (in its guise as modernity) was seen as essential to the preservation of authentic Japan, Japanese ideas and values, just as overcoming the military power of the democratic nations of the West came to be seen as essential to the material preservation of Japan. Like Heidegger in Germany, Nishida and the Kyoto School seemed to find allies in their quest to overcome metaphysics in the perpetrators of violence against the West; for a time, both seemed to confuse a philosophical mission for a political mission, or at least to conflate them. Both Heidegger and Nishida were associated with anti-democratic, authoritarian regimes, and the philosophies of both men were used to justify these regimes as world-historical heroes – saving mankind (and Being in general) from the slow atrophy and undignified death caused by a fundamentally flawed and essentially delusional metaphysics. The ‘West’ and its philosophy had apparently forgotten how to Be. This was the politics of Being – Seinspolitik or sonzaiseiji. Whilst Heidegger may not have been willing to recognize his intellectual allegiance with Nishida or the Kyoto School, Kyoto thinkers identified Heidegger as a likely ally in the global fight for authentic Being. The unlikely Axis Alliance between Germany and Japan, so contradictory on many ideological fronts, could be justified by the comparative politics of Being. While Heidegger seems to have found his sources of philosophical innovation within Western philosophy in the ancient Greeks, Nishida looked for comparable innovations at least partially from within a different house of Being, in particular in hundreds of years of Buddhist philosophy. Like Heidegger, he claimed to have revealed an alternative worldview that overcame our forgetfulness of authentic Being – he suggested that his ‘philosophy of nothingness’ was fundamentally different from Western metaphysics as a whole because it did not recognize the primacy of the distinction between subject and object but rather resided in a ‘place of nothingness’ (mu no basho) prior that distinction.53 Western metaphysics, he insisted, simply clouded and shrouded our ability to understand this originary location – it made us forget the truth of our Being. It is a historical coincidence of no small significance, then, that Heidegger became exposed to Japanese thought at exactly the time that Nishida was giving it a genuinely philosophical voice. This was exactly the time that Heidegger was searching for the ‘modern pagans’, and a number of years before he set out his revolutionary views in Sein und Zeit. One particularly fascinating aspect of this story for our purposes here is the way in which both Heidegger and Nishida sought to step outside of their own intellectual traditions in order to provoke innovations that would overcome philosophical metaphysics. In the case of Heidegger, whose own tradition consisted in philosophical metaphysics, this meant stepping out and ‘going-back’

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  169 (unless we believe that he also engaged in inter-cultural comparative thought); nonetheless, this move has made Heidegger infamously difficult to read from within mainstream philosophy in Europe, since he was forced to invent an entirely new vocabulary in order to make his escape. Intriguingly, Heidegger’s escape (or at least his trajectory for escape) was quickly recognized in Japan, and it was in respect to him (as well as Bergson and a few others) that the Kyoto School would use the term ‘pseudo-Oriental’.54 Conversely, in the case of Nishida, the process of overcoming philosophical metaphysics required first that he find his way into the (European) realm of philosophical metaphysics in the first place. Indeed, because he developed his thought in accordance with the categories and frameworks of philosophy, his work was often criticized by contemporaries as being too ‘Western’, despite its ostensible goal to overcome Western metaphysics. It is a measure of his success in residing in philosophy that Heidegger once said of him, ‘Nishida is Western’,55 but Japanese commentators (including, famously, Kobayashi Hideo) have found his writing ‘grotesque’, and Peter Dale quotes Shimomura Toratarô as ‘proudly proclaiming’ that Nishida is ‘the most difficult (thinker) in the whole history of philosophy’.56 Presumably Heidegger is his competition in these stakes. The real point here is that neither Nishida nor Heidegger can easily be located within a single intellectual tradition, since both deliberately (and successfully) sought to leap out of the one in which they might have been expected to inhabit. If we are to believe him, Heidegger’s escape is a flight of creative imagination, a leap into a better site, an innovative transformation from within. In Nishida’s case, on the other hand, this feeling of foreignness, which in Japan is equally a reason for the admiration as well as for the lack of comprehension of Nishida’s philosophy, is expressed in the fact that Nishida’s philosophy does not stand in seamless continuity with the Japanese tradition. His thought does not allow comprehension simply from out of it [the Japanese tradition].57 Equally, his philosophy does not stand in seamless continuity with the tradition of Western metaphysics. Instead, his work occupies a new space between the two. More than Heidegger, Nishida appears to be a practitioner of CPT or comparative philosophy (in the sense that comparison is mobilized by intercultural movement), in the sense that he uses dialogue to create new, synthetic spaces in which to reside and think. If, however, we take seriously Heidegger’s imaginative escape and view comparison as occasioned by metaphysical or cosmological boundary crossings (rather than simply as cultural crossing), then we might also claim that Heidegger was involved in CPT in a different way – CPT within a regional tradition. In any case, both appear to end up in a similar location: to speak of placing Nishida and Heidegger against each other as comparative subjects in CPT appears misguided, since they appear to be engaged in similar rather than radically different enterprises and languages. They stand together and converse.58

170  Chris Goto-Jones One of the key differences between the two thinkers, however, was their view on the possibility and utility of inter-cultural dialogue and the enterprise of CPT and comparative philosophy itself. For Nishida, as we might expect, dialogue, confrontation and even antagonism between different units of identity (individuals, nations, civilizations etc.) was natural and constructive, giving rise to greater, synthetic levels of unity.59 However, Nishida always insisted that the attainment of greater levels of unity did not require the abandonment or vanishing of previous levels, indeed he talked constantly of ‘absolutely contradictory selfidentity’ (zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu) in which multiple particulars and universals exist simultaneously. He called the particulars ‘particular worlds’ (tokushu sekai), and envisioned their growth and development through history, through creative interaction and dialogue with each other. Hence, for Nishida, dialogue between different (even radically different) entities and systems of thought was not only possible but also an absolute good. For Heidegger, on the other hand, the situation is not quite so optimistic for CPT. Indeed, his ‘Dialogue on Language,’ in which so many commentators have invested such hope for CPT and the enterprise of inter-cultural dialogue in general, appears actually to destroy all such hope. It is to that text that we turn now.

Heidegger, comparison, and dialogue as monologue One of the key features of this famous ‘Dialogue on Language’ that is often conveniently overlooked by those searching for an icon of CPT is its fictional nature. Research has shown that the dialogue is not (and was not intended to be) an accurate account of the conversation that Heidegger had with Tezuka Tomio in the mid-1950s, despite the fact that this is what Heidegger’s ‘inquirer’ claims in the dialogue itself.60 Indeed, Heidegger has taken such liberties with the text that it has become an original composition rather than an account, which has been presented in the form of a dialogue for rhetorical effect, giving the impression of dialogue without actually having to dialogue, hence reinforcing the conclusion (that dialogue between East and West is not really possible). Graham Parkes calls it an ‘almost entirely free composition’, and Reinhard May calls it a ‘pseudo-dialogue’.61 That is, the form of the dialogue is a device employed to demonstrate Heidegger’s position, not a negotiation of that position or a creative engagement with it. In the end, Heidegger’s dialogue takes place in the space between, on the one hand, his observation of the ‘wholly other’ house of Being represented by Japan and, on the other hand, the ‘deeply concealed kinship’ that he appears to share with that house.62 As we have seen, this has encouraged some commentators to argue that Heidegger himself saw resonances between his philosophy and that of East Asian thinkers, despite the fact that elsewhere Heidegger is very clear that there is no philosophy in China or India (for instance).63 Indeed, Heidegger is adamant that philosophy itself is intimately tied not only to Western civilization but also (and essentially) to the Greek and German languages themselves.64 Philosophy is simply alien to all other cultural and linguistic realms and cannot exist there; in fact, Heidegger goes so far as to claim that the tendency for Japanese thinkers to

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  171 ‘chase after the European conceptual systems’ is actually dangerous for Japan,65 as though doing so would constitute a form of abandonment of their authentic selves compounding their forgetfulness of Being. Even if it were possible to learn the conceptual systems of others, it would be wrong to do so. The theme of the danger of language and of inter-cultural dialogue in particular is central to Heidegger’s text, and it is also central to any attempt to understand its implications for CPT. On the one hand, the danger refers to the way in which linguistic variation confounds the possibility of properly understanding the meanings and significations of others, since, for Heidegger, language is both a mode of communication and the house of Being itself. That is, the problem is not simply being unable to understand the words of another language, but, on the other hand (and more fundamentally), that being part of another house of Being means that one can never truly understand what an Other is talking about, even if the language itself has been learnt.66 In fact, expressing ideas from one house of Being in the language of another is not only impossible but also dangerous because the meaning of the idea is destroyed and it is possible that people will go on as though it were sustained, unaware as it were. Hence, there is the danger that such dialogue smuggles incoherence into our own systems of thought and leaves us worse off than we were before. Inquirer: The danger of our dialogues was hidden in the language itself … Japanese: Now I am beginning to understand better where you smell the danger. The language of the dialogue constantly destroyed the possibility of saying what the dialogue was about. I: Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastasian man. J: Assuming that the languages of the two are not merely different but are other in nature, and radically so.67 I: And so, a dialogue from house to house remains nearly impossible.68 While it does seem wise to be cautious about the conceptual violence that can accompany translation (particularly bad translation), Heidegger’s position goes much further than warning the Japanese not to accept Western philosophical systems in an unreflective (and poorly translated) manner – his reasoning is not simply about poor comprehension but rather about ways that such would be damaging to their very Being. It is important to reflect at this point that Heidegger’s mission was an overcoming of metaphysics (and its forgetting of Being) through a process of ‘going-back’ to the ‘great beginning’ that lay at the start of what he termed the ‘European–occidental–grecian’ tradition.69 In other words, Heidegger believed that ‘going-back’ through the classical canon of Europe was the authentic pathway to Being, exploring the house of Being as thoroughly and truthfully and purely as possible. This ‘return’ to the source would only be possible through the re-creation of a philosophy that was not the forgetting of Being.

172  Chris Goto-Jones Although he does not explicitly say that East Asia or Japan has a comparable tradition leading back to the ‘great beginning’, Heidegger is clear that Japan had a different beginning from Europe, and hence that its own ‘going-back’ would not involve philosophy or other European ideas – hence his warning that the Japanese should not chase after European systems of thought (or philosophy itself). Thus, we might conclude that Heidegger’s position is that East–West dialogue, if it is anything at all, would become a possibility only after the two complete their goingback through fundamentally different realms, differentiating themselves totally as separate houses of Being built upon the (same?) great beginning.70 This would be the fullest realization that they are ‘wholly other’ and yet springing from the same wellspring. That is, commonalities will not be found and progress will not be attained through dialogue, criticism, comparison and synthesis in East–West dialogue in the present or future (as it would for Nishida), but rather commonality (and hence the possibility of a Heideggerian dialogue) will only be found at this essential source before all else, at the ‘wellspring’ of both (all?) realms, at the site of the remembering of Being.71 For some, such as Stella Sandford, this implies that East Asia is interesting to Heidegger only in its classical forms and that meaningful comparison with modern East Asia would be impossible. This is a position that, she argues, ‘sails dangerously close to that orientalism for which “the East” signified the ancient in distinction from the modernity of “the West”’.72 However, it is not clear that Heidegger was even interested in classical East Asia, but rather that he thought classical East Asia should be interesting to modern East Asia, paralleling the interest that modern Europe should have in ancient Greeks. To the extent that either infringes on or contacts or converses with the other, their concepts and ideas are immediately destroyed and assimilated into the language of the ‘here’, making them part of an ongoing monologue that reaches back to the great beginning, never genuinely representing the original meaning from the language of the Other. In other words, cross-cultural philosophy (especially between languages that are different in nature, or radically different) is both impossible and undesirable.73

Conclusion: When is comparative political thought (not) comparative? The case of Heidegger and Nishida reveals a number of aspects of the nature of CPT. In particular, it maps some of the ways in which ‘comparison’ can be interpreted as a way to bring together two thinkers who did not talk directly to each other. In certain respects, then, it reveals some of the ways in which CPT can create a dialogue where none existed in history; it provokes us to envision CPT as an imaginative and creative exercise. In more formalistic ways, this pairing enables us to see some of the ways in which ‘comparison’ is operationalized as analogy or as the search for historical influence, conceptual resonance, and finally as difference. The comparison of Heidegger and Nishida reveals at least two frames of reference for CPT. One of them, which appears to be associated with the dilemmas

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  173 of origination discourses, posits the radical difference of different cultural entities and hence maintains that dialogue between them is both impossible and undesirable. To the extent that radical differences can be mediated into commonality, this must happen at some point prior to their differentiation – in the wellspring of Being, in the great beginning, or in the place of nothingness. Although this priority might be understood as ontological rather than historical, the emphasis on origination pushes this kind of framework towards cultural conservatism and exclusionism and hence threatens to foreclose the enterprise of CPT as anything other than comparative culture or Area Studies. The other frame of reference emerging from this comparison is one that tends towards the future rather than the past and emphasizes the creative possibilities of dialectical synthesis. In this scheme, dialogue between different agents, even radically different agents, is possible although it is sometimes violent. The emphasis is less upon attaining an authentic or pure understanding of a particular tradition of thought and more on discovering whether the creative integration of more than one tradition might yield useful or interesting results. Hence, this scheme is open for CPT as a form of intercultural dialogue, although it is also open to the notion that radical difference can be found within as well as without particular traditions/regions. Both of these frames draw attention to the question of whether CPT should really phrase its interests in terms of inter-cultural discourse or whether ‘comparison’ might more profitably be understood as something that takes place across radical difference of any kind, perhaps termed as ontological or cosmological difference. A more inclusive phrasing in this way leaves the field open to inter-cultural dialogue (where such dialogues actually breach cosmological differences rather than simply geo-political borders) but also to intra-cultural dialogue (where radical difference is expressed by thinkers from within the same geo-political region). The salient difference here is ontological, not (only) ontic. Hence, one of the key features of CPT is the creative role played by the commentator. Heidegger and Nishida could have stood together in a similar place and conversed, but they didn’t – CPT creates a point of contact and discourse where there was none. In this way, the practice of CPT implicitly rejects the kinds of methodologies that good historians of philosophy are trained to embrace: CPT deliberately puts thinkers into conversations they didn’t have, in languages they didn’t know; it gives them access to texts they never read and ideas they didn’t think about in order to answer questions they didn’t ask. CPT is then about using these thinkers as resources to provide innovative and new answers for ourselves. In other words, a possible answer to the question of when CPT is not comparative is to reinterpret CPT as Creative Political Thought. When it is comparative, we might rephrase it as Cosmo-Political Thought in order to indicate that its concern is not merely inter-cultural, since inter-cultural political thought is not necessarily comparative in any meaningful sense for political thought at all (but rather for Area Studies).

174  Chris Goto-Jones

Notes 1 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Ballad of East and West.’ 1889. The third and fourth lines of this famous poem (which rather change the force of the verse) are often forgotten: Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! 2 Ulrich Beck makes a compelling case that our present period of ‘second modernity’ is characterized more by self-consciousness of and reflection on the transnational and cosmopolitan state of our world, rather than the state itself, which has in fact always been the shape of things. Beck, Ulrich, ‘The Truth of Others,’ Common Knowledge. 10:3 (2004), pp. 430–449. We will see a way in which Heideggerian dialogue confronts this later. 3 This critique of the instrumentalization of Area Studies after WWII is now well known. Leading examples of this kind of critique are Naoki Sakai and Harry Harootunian, who published a fascinating dialogue: ‘Japan Studies and Cultural Studies’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 7:2 (1999), pp.593–647. 4 A similar claim has been made about comparative literature by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto: ‘I would even venture to argue that comparative literature is less a discipline of literature than a type of area studies, a counterpart to East Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, Latin American studies, etc.’ Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, ‘Questions of Japanese Cinema: Disciplinary Boundaries and the Invention of the Scholarly Object,’ in Harootunian, Harry and Miyoshi, Masao (eds), Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p.393. 5 Huntington, Samuel, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, 72:3 (1996), pp.23–49. I note that the logic of the clash (i.e. that all the different units exist within the same overall, realist system) is itself a product of the ‘West’ (as characterized by Huntington), suggesting that Huntington is not interested in difference per se, but only in managing it and sealing it off from the hegemonic culture. This interpretation is developed in Jones, Christopher, ‘If not a Clash, then what? Huntington, Nishida Kitaro and the Politics of Civilizations,’ International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 2 (2002), pp.223–243. 6 This argument is developed in Goto-Jones, Christopher, ‘A Cosmos Beyond Space and Area Studies: Towards Comparative Political Thought as Political Thought,’ in Boundary 2, 38: 3 (2011). An earlier version is ‘Comparative Political Thought: Beyond the Non-Western,’ in Bell, Duncan (ed), Ethics and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7 Recent influential accounts of the state of the discipline have suggested that this pivotal debate ‘seems to have run out of steam over the last decade’ because ‘the case against contextual readings in the history of political thought is increasingly hard to make’ (David Runciman, ‘History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (April 2001): p.84). A discussion of whether the field has really come to grips with the implications of this apparent victory is Goto-Jones, Christopher, ‘The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan,’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 17:1 (2009), pp.13–42. 8 Here ‘foreign’ signifies not only difference but also difference in nature; ‘alien’ might be a better term. 9 Rey Chow makes a compelling case about the problems of linguistic fetishism in Chow, Rey, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Harry Harootunian

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  175

10 11

12

13

14

15

and others have discussed the covert urge to ‘become’ in Area Studies and connected it to the ethical and political problem of ‘representation’: Sakai and Harootunian are damning about the ways in which some scholars ‘want to fantasize about themselves as representatives of the native population, somewhat heroically articulating and defending the interests of the natives who, just like infants or junior partners, are incapable of either expressing or defending their own interests’ (Sakai in Harootunian and Sakai, ‘Japan Studies,’ p.634). At one level, this position is collusive with the self-identity of scholars in Area Studies as translators. However, on another level, this argument also acts in collusion with nativist discourses of knowledge (such as the infamous Nihonjinron, or essays on Japanese uniqueness), which emphasize the crucial importance of being native in order to properly understand the area or its culture: i.e. authentic knowledge of an area can only be produced by natives of that area. Hence, professors become those who have most successfully become of the area that interests them. Chow, Rey, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p.72. The question of a ‘common source’ or ‘great beginning’ is central to Heidegger’s inquiry, although he is finally ambiguous about it when it comes to the origin of nonEuropean cultures. For Nishida, on the other hand, commonality lies in the future not the past (albeit in a temporal future that enables an awakening to a condition prior to the kinds of thinking that have developed through human history), and discourses about origination (even those that fall back into a ‘great beginning’ or singularity) are divisive in effect. Important contributions to this field include: Parkes, Graham (ed), Heidegger and Asian Thought (University of Hawaii Press, 1987); May, Reinhard, Ex Oriente Lux: Heideggers Werk unter Ostasiatischem Einfluss (Wiesbaden: Frans Steiner Verlag, 1989), translated by Graham Parkes as Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work (London: Routledge, 1996); Ma, Lin, Heidegger on East–West Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2008); Buchner, Harmut (ed), Japan und Heidegger: Gedenkschrift der Stadt Messkirch zum hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1989). For this chapter, the following were particularly useful: Ma, Lin and Van Brakel, ‘Heidegger’s Comportment toward East–West Dialogue.’ Philosophy East & West, 56:4 (2006), pp.519–566; Weinmayr, Elmar, ‘Thinking in Transition: Nishida Kitaro and Martin Heidegger’ Philosophy East & West, 55:2 (2005), pp.232–256; Weinmayr, Elmar, ‘Nishida to Haidegaa – hikakutetsugaku no kokoromi.’ Shisō, November 1995, pp.88–106. It is well known that the term ‘Asia’ was first used by the ancient Greeks to describe the world to the ‘east’ of them. Since then, its scope and meaning has fluctuated, largely according to the politics of Europe. A recent re-interrogation of the coherence and meaning of the term is Duara, Prasenjit, ‘Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for our Times,’ in a special issue of Journal of Asian Studies, 69:4 (2010), pp.963– 983. Of course, the opposite tendency is equally prevalent, with Nishida being compared with ‘Christianity’ or even with ‘Western philosophy’ as a whole. In general, these comparisons are rubbished by scholars in the so-called West, as reflecting a provincial and imperfect understanding of the meaning and content of Christianity and the West. Rigsby, ‘Nishida on Heidegger.’ Continental Philosophy Review, 42 (2010), pp.511– 553, is so convinced by the prevalence of ideas about ‘continuity’ that he even goes so far as to base his paper around the (slightly bizarre) assertion that: ‘although still largely unrecognized, significant differences between the political and metaphysical stance of Heidegger and his perceived counterparts in East Asia most certainly exist’ (p.511). The term ‘deeply concealed kinship’ is from Heidegger, Martin, ‘A Dialogue on Language’ (1971) (in ‘On the Way to Language’) p. 24.

176  Chris Goto-Jones 16 May, Reinhard, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources. 17 The inquirer says to the Japanese interlocutor: ‘Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastasian man.’ Heidegger, Martin, ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,’ in On the Way to Language (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), p.5. More recently, Charles Taylor laments that ‘we shall be in a quite different predicament if we oppose two philosophical views emanating from quite different cultures and histories … clearly we set off without the remotest idea how even to go about arbitrating [between them].’ Indeed, Taylor remarks that even an extra-terrestrial from Sirius would take flight back to his home planet if asked to engage with both a Buddhist view of the self and a ‘Western conception of personality’ simultaneously. The key problem for the alien, apparently, is the lack of a common language shared by these two traditions. There are no points of contact. Before the alien could judge between them, Taylor suggests that East and West ‘would have to grow together as civilizations.’ See Taylor, Charles, ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984/98) p. 30, and for a discussion of Taylor and this problem of talking across borders, see Goto-Jones, Chris, ‘If the past is a different country, are different countries in the past? On the place of the non-European in the history of philosophy’ Philosophy, 80 (2005), pp.29–51. 18 Sakai explores some of these issues in Sakai, Naoki, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 19 Heidegger, Martin, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Neske, 1959), translated as Heidegger, Martin, ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,’ in On the Way to Language (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971). 20 ‘I sense a deeply concealed kinship with our thinking, precisely because your path of thinking and its language are so wholly other,’ is from Heidegger, Martin, ‘A Dialogue on Language’ (1971) (in On the Way to Language) p. 24. 21 Tanabe Hajime, Genshôgaku ni okeru atarashiki tenkô: haideggâ no sei no genshôgaku (originally in Shisô, October 1924 reprinted in Tanabe Hajime Zenshû vol.4). 22 Kuki Shûzô, Haideggâ no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1933). 23 The first complete Chinese translation appeared in 1987, by which time there were five complete Japanese versions … and still only one in English. 24 Yusa, Michiko, ‘Reflections on Nishida Studies,’ The Eastern Buddhist, 28:2 (1995), p.295. 25 Wolin, Richard (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). 26 One of the key triggers was the controversial book by Farias, Victor, Heidegger and Nazism (Temple University Press, 1987/1991). 27 Heisig, James and Maraldo, John (eds), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). 28 In a forceful polemic, Parkes has taken this analogy to task by revealing the lack of substantiated connections between Heidegger, Japan and fascism. Parkes, Graham, ‘Heidegger and Japanese Fascism: An Unsubstantiated Connection,’ in Heisig, James and Bouso, Raquel (eds), Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy 6 (Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 2009). 29 Heisig, James and Maraldo, John (eds), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), p.243. 30 Arisaka, Yôko, ‘The Nishida Enigma: The Principle of the New World Order.’ Monumenta Nipponica, 51:1 (1996), pp.81–105. 31 Dale, Peter, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p.215.

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  177 32 Thompson, Evan, ‘Planetary Thinking/Planetary Building: An Essay on Martin Heidegger and Nishitani Keiji.’ Philosophy East & West, 36:3 (1986), p.237. 33 Wolin, Richard, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). This strategy seems to be a symptom of the same Western parochialism that assumes the primacy of Heidegger over Nishida as an original thinker: the scholarship of Nishida Studies, for example, is riddled with references to Heidegger, but pick up any book on Heidegger and Nishida’s name never fails to be completely absent from it. Indeed, most Heidegger scholars are unlikely to have heard of Nishida at all. One of the advances made by this approach, however, is the insight that there are some substantial and interesting resonances between the thought of Heidegger and that of the Kyoto School (with a focus on its second generation). However, we would do well to note at the outset that any attempt to argue that the foundations of Nishida tetsugaku (and thus the foundations of Kyoto School Philosophy) were influenced by Heidegger are unequivocally incorrect: such arguments are simply chronologically impossible. Nishida’s seminal work, Zen no kenkyû (which is widely regarded as establishing the foundations of Nishida’s philosophical system) appeared in 1911, some 16 years before Heidegger’s influential masterpiece, Sein und Zeit (1927) – indeed, this was two years before Heidegger even received his doctorate (1913). Graham Parkes observes in passing, in a footnote: ‘It may be fair to say that Nishida is the only major figure in Japanese philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century not to have been influenced by Heidegger’ (Parkes, Graham, ‘Rising Sun over Black Forest,’ in May, Reinhard, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, pp.108–109). 34 May, Reinhard, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, p.26. 35 Burrow, J.W., The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 36 The most sustained treatment of Nishida’s politics in English is Goto-Jones, Christopher, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and CoProsperity (London: Routledge, 2005). Nishida’s diaries and biography are treated admirably in Yusa, Michiko, Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). 37 Issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education, via Miki Kiyoshi in 1923. 38 Nishida’s ambiguous view of Heidegger is considered by Rigsby (‘Nishida on Heidegger’). Rigsby concludes that Nishida’s view of Heidegger was not positive, seeing him as (after all) trapped in the conventions of Western philosophy. Heidegger’s view of Nishida (and other ‘Asian’ thinkers) is considered in Lin, Ma, Heidegger on East–West Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2008). Elsewhere, Pöggeler (‘West–East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao-tzu,’ in Parkes, Graham (ed), Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987) cautions that we should not take too seriously the kinds of impromptu and informal remarks that have been recorded about Heidegger’s views on non-European thought and thinkers (p.49). 39 The lectures took place in Husserl’s home. I am indebted to Graham Parkes for much of this information about Heidegger’s exposure to members of the Kyoto School. 40 This famous and oft-quoted scene is related in Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929–1976 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p.167. Pöggeler’s warning (in ft. 38) applies here too. 41 Yomiuri shimbun, 27 May 1976. 42 See Parkes, Graham, ‘Rising Sun over Black Forest,’ in May, Reinhard, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, p.102. The late Heidegger appears to have been more open to the possibility of resonance, but still very sceptical about the possibility of dialogue, as we will see. 43 Safranski, Rudiger, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.81.

178  Chris Goto-Jones 44 Elmar Weinmayr is perhaps the most successful in a pair of articles: Weinmayr, Elmar, ‘Thinking in Transition: Nishida Kitaro and Martin Heidegger.’ Philosophy East & West, 55:2 (2005), pp.232–256; Weinmayr, Elmar, ‘Nishida to Haidegaa – hikakutetsugaku no kokoromi.’ Shisō, November 1995, pp.88–106. 45 Wolin, Richard, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.22. 46 Although some, most notably Derrida, have suggested that he ultimately failed to do so. 47 Lorenz Krüger makes the case that Heidegger sought to escape Western physics without stepping outside the narrative of Western philosophy. Indeed, following Gadamer, Krüger suggests that Heidegger’s search for alternatives within European history was part of a conscious attempt to locate (or place) himself within European history (within that house of Being) despite his violent challenge to its hegemonic discourse. ‘This is a reason why Heidegger does not turn to extra-scientific wisdom of [just] any kind, say Buddhism, but to the Pre-Socratics.’ Krüger, Lorenz, ‘Why do we Study the History of Philosophy?’ in Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984/98), p.97. 48 Wolin, Richard, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.22. 49 A fascinating and provocative comparison might be made with Buck-Morss’s groundbreaking study of Hegel’s exposure to the contemporaneous events in Haiti as he was working on his master–slave dialectic, and the reluctance of European historians to acknowledge this: Buck-Morss, Susan, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 50 There was also an identifiable tendency to view philosophy as a metadiscipline that integrated all the other bodies of knowledge that came from the ‘West’ during this period; it was sometimes seen as the essential expression and storehouse of the Enlightenment. Of course, such a view was premised upon a very selective reading of the restricted range of sources available in Japan at that time. 51 These kinds of comparison seem complicit in Orientalist discourses and have sometimes been identified as a form of self-Orientalism. 52 An ambitious and creative treatment of Japan’s engagement with various aspects of modernity, which takes it title from the controversial debates of the early 1940s of the same name, is Harootunian, Harry, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 53 Still the best introduction to Kyoto School Philosophy in English is Heisig, James, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on The Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). 54 Various authors, ‘Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon,’ Chūōkōron (January 1942) p.154 (giji tôyôshugi-sha). 55 Heidegger reportedly said this to Nishida’s friend and colleague, D.T. Suzuki in 1953. See Parkes, Graham, ‘Rising Sun over Black Forest,’ in May, Reinhard, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, pp. 99–100. 56 Dale, Peter, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p.35. 57 Weinmayr, Elmar, ‘Thinking in Transition: Nishida Kitaro and Martin Heidegger.’ Philosophy East & West, 55:2 (2005), p.245. 58 Although this conversation never took place and we have to create it and give voice to it for ourselves. 59 Nishida’s relationship with Hegel and dialectics is complicated, but there is clear influence from Hegel in this kind of dialectical history. Nonetheless, Nishida’s philosophy embracing a radical sense of contradictory self-identity is really a fundamental critique of Hegelian dialectics. There is no space or need to elaborate

When is comparative political thought (not) comparative?  179 this here. A recent treatment of the relationship is Suares, Peter, The Kyoto School’s Takeover of Hegel: Nishida, Nishitani, and Tanabe Remake the Philosophy of Spirit (Boston: Lexington Books, 2010). 60 Heidegger, Martin, ‘A Dialogue on Language’ (1971) (in ‘On the Way to Language’) p.199. Tezuka calls attention to the variations between Heidegger’s account of the dialogue and his own account, and also outlines the inaccuracies concerning Heidegger’s account of the aesthetic term ‘iki,’ on which a significant portion of the dialogue is based. Tezuka’s account (‘An Hour with Heidegger’) is reproduced in May, Reinhard, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources. An analysis is in Lin, Ma, ‘What Does Heidegger have to do with an East–West dialogue,’ in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 4:2 (2005), pp.299–319. 61 May, Reinhard, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, p.ix (Parkes), p.51 (May). 62 This representation and deployment of Japan as ‘wholly other’ or ‘radically different’ combines with the fictional nature of the dialogue to play into a typical instrumentalization of the Other characteristic of Orientalism. To the extent that the dialogue contains anything of Japan, it contains a particularly Heideggerian Japaneseness. 63 This famous claim (there is only Western philosophy, there is no other, neither a Chinese nor an Indian philosophy) appears in Heidegger, Martin, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1951/2). 64 ‘Philosophy is in essence so originally Western that it carries within itself the history of the Western world.’ Heidegger quoted in Ma, Lin, ‘What Does Heidegger have to do with an East–West dialogue,’ in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 4:2 (2005), p.306 (slightly altered). 65 Heidegger, Martin, On the Way to Language, (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 3. Heidegger goes on (p.37) to wonder why East Asian thinkers do not call back to their minds the venerable beginnings of their own traditions rather than chasing after European ideas as thought they were fashions. He discusses how the meaning of the important aesthetic term ‘iki’ is destroyed in European languages – indeed, his own understanding of it is rather idiosyncratic. 66 It is, perhaps, in this spirit that we must understand Heidegger’s slightly bizarre claims about people in Europe and the USA not understanding Japanese or Chinese. In the letter he wrote to decline to attend a conference in Hawaii (held to honour his birthday by considering the connections between his work and Asian thought), he wrote: Again and again it has seemed urgent to me that a dialogue take place with the thinkers of what is to us the Eastern world. The greatest difficulty in this enterprise always lies, as far as I can see, in the fact that with few exceptions there is no command of the Eastern languages either in Europe or in the United States. A translation of Eastern thought into English remains – like every translation – a makeshift. May your conference, however, prove fruitful in spite of this precarious circumstance. Nagley, Winfield, ‘Introduction to the Symposium and Reading of a Letter from Martin Heidegger,’ Philosophy East & West, 20:3 (1970), p.222. 67 Again, here, the concept of ‘alien’ perhaps best suits the sense of ‘radical difference’. 68 Heidegger, Martin, ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,’ in On the Way to Language. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), p.5. 69 ‘Going-back’ is discussed in Sandford, Stella, ‘Going-Back: Heidegger, the East Asian and “The West”,’ Radical Philosophy, 120 (July 2003), pp.11–22. 70 The idea that a nation or region has a coherent and sealed history participates in the myth of univocal histories and ignores the everyday reality transnational processes throughout history (see ft. 2). Heidegger does not resolve the question of whether the great beginning is a singularity or whether we really live in a multiverse with real aliens. His intimations

180  Chris Goto-Jones are contradictory about this … he could easily have said that China shares the ‘great beginning,’ but instead talks simply of ‘a beginning’ or a ‘time-honoured beginning.’ In other places, he talks about their being only ‘a few great beginnings,’ suggesting that there may be more than one. The implications of a singular common source or of multiple sources are radically different (one edging towards a constructivist sense of reality and the other towards the existence of contradictory universes). Heidegger appears ambiguous on this. 71 Heidegger, ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,’ in Heidegger, M. On the Way to Language (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), p.24, relates how the Japanese translator of the dialogue often felt as though he were wandering back and forth between two different language worlds (houses of Being), such that at times he seemed to be bathed in the radiance of a sense of the wellspring of Being itself, feeling that both languages arose from the same source. When challenged about whether he sought to find a new, synthetic or general concept under which European and East Asian languages could be subsumed, the Japanese responded ‘Absolutely not,’ presumably because the wellspring of Being lay prior to the two language worlds rather than in their synthesis. As Lin Ma observes, ‘one cannot help wondering whether this logic of going back to one’s own beginnings may serve more to further distance the East and the West than to bring them into mutual interaction.’ Ma, Lin, ‘What Does Heidegger have to do with an East-West dialogue,’ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, IV: 2 (2005), p. 318. 72 Sandford, Stella, ‘Going-Back: Heidegger, the East Asian and “The West”,’ Radical Philosophy, 120 (July 2003), p.20. 73 Elsewhere I have wondered why Japanese or Chinese should be considered more radically different from, say, English, than ancient Greek and whether making such an argument is simply a type of knee-jerk ethnocentricism (Goto-Jones, Chris, ‘If the past is a different country, are different countries in the past? On the place of the nonEuropean in the history of philosophy’ Philosophy, 80 (2005), pp.29–51). However, Heidegger’s case is more sophisticated than I have given him credit for, since his position suggests that the pathway from Greek to modern European languages (he is rather disparaging about English and always talks about German) constitutes the construction of the European house of Being, while Chinese (for instance) is always outside that house. Hence, interactions with Chinese or Japanese etc. will always involve the kind of destruction of meaning that comes with our inability to comprehend the radical other – the ‘East’ will always take on ‘Western’ meanings in Western discourse, and these meanings will have more to do with Ancient Greek than Chinese. Hence, Heidegger’s argument is not ethnocentric per se, but rather historical. The persistence of transnational flows throughout history is not ignored in this case, it is simply irrelevant, since anything that flows into a house of Being takes on its structures of meaning.

Bibliography

Aflaq, Michel (1959) Fi Sabil al-Ba`th [On the path of renaissance] (Damascus: Dar alTali`ah li-l-Taba`ah wa-l-Nashr). Aguilar, Jose Antonio and Rafael Rojas (eds) (2002) El republicanismo en hispanoamérica: ensayos de historia intelecual y política. (Mexico City: CIDE). al-`Azm, Sadiq (1981) ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East 8 (1981) pp. 5–26. Alhamad, Laila (2008) ‘Formal and informal venues of engagement’, in E. Lust-Okar and Saloua Zerhouni (eds) Political Participation in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner). al-Tahtawi, Rifa`a Rafi` (1973) Kitab takhlis al-ibriz ila talkhis bariz in Al-‘a`mal alkamilah li-Rifa`a Rafi` al-Tahtawi [The Complete Works of Rifa`a Rafi` al-Tahtawi] [ed. Muhammad `Umara] (Beirut: Al-mu’assasat al-`arabiyah li-l-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1973) Part II. Altamirano, Carlos (2010) Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina. (Buenos Aires: Katz). Appiah, K.A. (2005) The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: NJ, Princeton University Press). Apter, D.E. (1995) ‘Discourse as Power: Yan’an and the Chinese Revolution,’ in T. Saich and H.J. van de Ven (eds), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe). Arisaka, Yôko (1996) ‘The Nishida Enigma: The Principle of the New World Order.’ Monumenta Nipponica, 51:1 (1996), pp.81–105. Astorga, Omar (2009) ‘Tensiones y Escisiones; El Ensayismo Poliitico de Laureano Valenillla Lanz, Jose Carlos Mariategui y Octavio Paz’ in Antonio Hermosa Andujar and Samuel Schmidt (eds) Pensar Iberoamerica (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros). Badran, Margot (1995) Feminism, Islam and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Baehr, P. (2001) ‘The “Iron Cage” and the “Shell as Hard as Steel”: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, History and Theory, vol. 40 (2001) pp.153–169. Barker, Ernest (1978) ‘The Study of the Science of Politics’ in Preston King (ed.) The Study of Politics (New York and London: Frank Cass), pp. 16–33. Bary, Wm. Theodore De et al. (1960) Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press). Beck, Ulrich (2004) ‘The Truth of Others,’ Common Knowledge. 10:3 (2004), pp. 430–449.

182  Bibliography Becker, Jasper (1996) Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London: John Murray). Bell, D. (1993) Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bentham, Jeremy (1843) ‘Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation’ in John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843). Bentham, Jeremy (2009) Principles of Morals and Legislation (original 1789) (New York: Dover Publications). Berkes, Niyaz (1998) The Development of Secularism in Turkey (New York: Routledge). Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge). Bhabha, H. (2001) ‘Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in G. Castle (ed.), Postcolonial Discourses. An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell). Bhagavadgita (2007) ‘Chapter 3: Action, Yoga Vidya’, tr. Lars Martin Fosse, (Woodstock, NY: YogaVidya.com). Bhargava, Rajeev (ed.) (1998) Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Bhattacharya, Dwaipayan; Chatterjee, Partha; Das, Pranab Kumar; Ghosh, Dhrubajyoti; Majumdar, Manabi; and Mukhopadhyay, Surajit (2006) Strengthening Rural Decentralization (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences). Bianchi, Robert (1989) Unruly Corporatism – Associational Life in Twentieth Century Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Biolsi, T. (2005) ‘Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle’, American Ethnologist. 32, (2): (2005) pp.239–259. Black, Antony (2001) The History of Islamic Political Thought – From the Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Bloch, M. (1999) ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’, in M. Bloch, Histoire et historiens, textes réunis par É. Bloch (Paris: Armand Colin). Booth, John A. and Mitchell A. Seligson (2010) The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Political Support and Democracy in Eight Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brading, David (1991) The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (1492–1867). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Buchner, Harmut (ed.) (1989) Japan und Heidegger: Gedenkschrift der Stadt Messkirch zum hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke). Buck-Morss, Susan (2009) Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press). Burrow, John (1983) ‘The clue to the maze: the appeal of the comparative method’ in S. Collini, D. Winch and John Burrow (eds) That Noble Science of Politics: a Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Burrow, J.W. (2000) The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914. (New Haven: Yale University Press). Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: a politics of the performative (New York: Routledge). Calhoun, C. (2002) ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), (2002), pp.869–897. Calhoun, C. (2008) ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary’, Daedalus, 137(3), (2008) pp.105–114. Cameron, A.J. (2006) Abu Dharr al-Ghifari: an examination of his image in the hagiography of Islam (New Delhi: Adam). Carapico, Sheila (2002) ‘Foreign Aid for Promoting Democracy in the Arab World’, Middle East Journal Vol 56/3 (Summer 2002), pp. 379–395.

Bibliography  183 Carmagnani, Marcello (2004) El otro occidente: América Latina desde la invasión europea hasta la globalización. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica). Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2007) ‘Morality Police under Pressure’, Arab Reform Bulletin, June 2007 http://www.carnegieendowment.org/ arb/?fa=show&article=20910 Carr, R. (1982) Spain 1808–1975, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Castiglione, D. and I. Hampsher-Monk (eds) (2001) The History of Political Thought in National Context. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Chatterjee, Partha (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press). Chatterjee, Partha (2005) Praja O Tantra (Calcutta: Anustup). Chaudhuri, K.N. (1965) The English East India Company: The Study of an Early JointStock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Frank Cass). Childs, P. and P. Williams (1997) An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London and New York: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf). Chow, Rey (2006) The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Chow, Tse-tsung (1960) The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Çizakça, M. (2000) A History of Philanthropic Foundations: The Islamic World from the Seventh Century to the Present (Istanbul: Bogaziçi University Press). Cole, Juan (1993) Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s ’Urabi Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Cook, Michael (2000) Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cooper, Mark N. (1982) The Transformation of Egypt (London: Croom Helm). Dale, Peter (1986) The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press). Dallmayr, F. (1999) Border Crossings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). Danilevskij, N. (1871) Rossiâ I Evropa [Russia and Europe] (Moscow: Drevnee i sovremennoe). Debord, Guy (1995) The Society of the Spectacle [tr. D. Nicholson-Smith] (New York: Zone Books). Dezalay, Y. and Garth, B.G. (2002) The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists and the Contest to Transform Latin American States. (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Diouf, M. (2000) ‘The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12(3), (2000) pp.679–702. Dirlik, A. (1989) The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press). Douzinas, C. (2000) The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart). Douzinas, C. (2007) Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge-Cavendish). Duara, Prasenjit (2010) ‘Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for our Times,’ special issue of Journal of Asian Studies, 69:4 (2010), pp.963–983. Dussel, Enrique (2008) Twenty Theses on Politics. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

184  Bibliography Easton, David (1975) ‘A re-assessment of the concept of political support’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 5 (1975), pp.435–457. Ehsani, Kaveh, Arang Keshavarzian and Norma Claire Moruzzi (2009) ‘Tehran, June 2009’ Middle East Report Online, 28 June 2009 http://www.merip.org/mero/mero062809.html Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000) ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus, 129(1), (2000), pp. 1–29. Eriksen, Th.-H. (2007) ‘Complexity in Social and Cultural Integration: Some Analytical Dimensions’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), (2007), pp. 1055–1069. Euben, Roxanne (1999) Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Farias, Victor (1987/1991) Heidegger and Nazism. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Fogel, J. (2009) Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time (New Haven: Harvard University Press). Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Foucault, Michel (1999) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press). Freeden, M. (1999) ‘Editorial: The “Beginning of Ideology” Thesis’, Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 4 (1999) 5–11. Freeden, M. (2005) ‘What Should the “Political” in Political Theory Explore?’, Journal of Political Philosophy. 13, (2): (2005) pp.113–134. Freeden, M. (2007) ‘Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking’, Journal of Political Ideologies. 12, (1): (2007) pp.1–9. Freeden, M. (2008a) ‘European liberalisms: An essay in comparative political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (2008) pp.9–30. Freeden, M. (2008b) ‘Thinking Politically and Thinking About Politics: Language, Interpretation, and Ideology’, in D. Leopold and M. Stears (eds) Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.196–215. Freeden, M. (2009a) ‘Languages of Political Support: Engaging with the Public Realm’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 12 (2009) pp.183–202. Freeden, M. (2009b) ‘What Fails in Ideologies?’ Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 14 (2009) pp.1–9. Galland, O. and Y. Lemel (2006) ‘Tradition-modernité : un clivage persistant des sociétés européennes’, Revue française de sociologie, 47-4, (2006), pp. 687–724. Gaonkar, D.P. (1999) ‘On Alternative modernities’, Public Culture, 11(1), pp.1–18. Gardet, Louis (1961) La cité musulmane: vie sociale et politique (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin). Gargarella, Roberto (2005) Los fundamentos legales de la desigualdad: El constitucionalismo en América (1776–1860) (Madrid: Siglo XXI). Garton Ash, T. (ed.) (2010) ‘Liberalisms in East and West,’ Medical Informatics Unit (Oxford: University of Oxford). Geuss, Raymond (2001) ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy’, in J. Richardson and B. Leiter (eds) Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.322–340. Geuss, Raymond (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Godrej, F. (2011) Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (New York: Oxford University Press).

Bibliography  185 Gole, Nilufer (1997) The Forbidden Modern. Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Gole, Nilufer and Ludwig Ammann (eds) (2006) Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University). Gonzalbo, Fernando Escalante (1992) Ciudadanos imaginarios: memorial de los afanes y desventuras de la virtud y apologia del vicio triunfante en la república mexicana (Mexico City: Colegio de México). Gorringe, H. (2008) ‘The Caste of the Nation: Untouchability and Citizenship in South India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology. 42, (1) (2008) pp.123–149. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005a) ‘If the past is a different country, are different countries in the past? On the Place of the Non-European in the History of Philosophy’ Philosophy, 80 (2005) pp. 29–51. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005b) Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity. (London: Routledge). Goto-Jones, Christopher (2009) ‘The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan,’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 17:1 (2009) pp.13–42. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2010) ‘Comparative Political Thought: Beyond the NonWestern,’ in Duncan Bell (ed.), Ethics and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press) pp. 219–38. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2012) ‘A Cosmos Beyond Space and Area Studies: Towards Comparative Political Thought as Political Thought,’ Boundary 2, 38: 3, pp.87–118. Guay, R. (2006) ‘The Philosophical Function of Genealogy’, in K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche (Malden, MA: Oxford, Blackwell, 2006), pp. 353–370. Hacking, Ian (1990) The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Haikal, Muhammad Husain (1951) Mudhakkirat fi al-siyasat al-misriyyah [Memoirs in Egyptian politics] Part 1, 1912–1937 (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahdat al-Misriyyah). Halliday, F. (2006) ‘Orientalism, Empire and Eccentricity’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie. 47, (3) (2006) pp. 483–488. Hannay, Alastair (2005) On the Public (London: Routledge). Hansen, Thomas Blom (2001) Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Harootunian, Harry (2000) Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Harris, P. (2002) ‘The Origins of Modern Citizenship in China’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint. 43, (2): (2002) pp.181–203. Hasso, Nazar Tawfik (1983) Administrative Politics in the Middle East: the case of monarchical Iraq 1920–1958 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International). Hay, Colin (2007) Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press). Headley, J.M. (2008) The Europeanization of the World : On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Hegel, G.W.F. (1975) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, tr. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Heidegger, Martin (1971) ‘A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,’ in Martin Heidegger On the Way to Language. (San Francisco: Harper & Row). Heisig, James (2001) Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on The Kyoto School. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Heisig, James and John Maraldo (eds) (1995) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press).

186  Bibliography Heydemann, Steven (1999) Authoritarianism in Syria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Hindess, B. (2005) ‘Citizenship and Empire’, in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, (eds) T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp.241–256. Hirschman, Albert O. (1982) Shifting Involvements: private interest and public action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Hourani, Albert (1962) ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables’, in W. Polk and R. Chambers (eds) Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962) pp. 41–68. Hourani, Albert (1983) Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, 72:3 (1996), pp.23–49. Huntington, Samuel P. and Joan M. Nelson (1976) No Easy Choice: participation in developing countries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Husain, Ghulam (1902) Sair ul-mutakkherin. A Translation of the Sëir Mutaqherin; or View of Modern Times, being an History of India, from the Year 1118 to the Year 1194, (this Year answers to the Christian Year 1781–82) of the Hedjrah by Seid-Gholam-HosseinKhan, vols. 1–4 (Calcutta: R. Cambray). A facsimile edition of the 1926 edition is now available from New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1986. Isin, E.F. (1997) ‘Who Is the New Citizen? Toward a Genealogy’, Citizenship Studies. 1, (1) (1997) pp. 115–132. Isin, E.F. (2002a) ‘Citizenship after Orientalism’, in E.F. Isin and B.S. Turner (eds) Handbook of Citizenship Studies (London: Sage, 2002), pp.117–128. Isin, E.F. (2002b) Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Isin, E.F. (2005a) ‘Citizenship after Orientalism: Ottoman Citizenship’, in F. Keyman and A. İçduygu (eds) Citizenship in a Globalizing World: European Questions and Turkish Experiences (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.31–51. Isin, E.F. (2005b) ‘Engaging, Being, Political’, Political Geography. 24 (2005) pp.373–387. Isin, E.F. (2007) ‘Ottoman Awqaf, Turkish Modernization, and Citizenship’, in E.F. Keyman (ed.), Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracy, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), pp.3–15. Isin, E.F. (2009a) ‘Beneficence and Difference: Ottoman Awqaf and “Other” Subjects’, in S. Mayaram (ed.), The Other Global City, (London: Routledge). Isin, E.F. (2009b) ‘Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen’, Subjectivity, (29): (2009) pp.367–388. Isin, E.F. and A. Lefebvre (2005) ‘The Gift of Law: Greek Euergetism and Ottoman Waqf’, European Journal of Social Theory. 8, (1) (2005) pp.5–23. Isin, E.F. and E. Üstündağ (2008) ‘Wills, Deeds, Acts: Women’s Civic Gift-Giving in Ottoman Istanbul’, Gender, Place and Culture. 15, (1) (2008) p p. 519–532. Ismail, Salwa (2003) Rethinking Islamist Politics – culture, the state and Islamism (London: I.B. Tauris). Ismail, Salwa (2006) Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters – encountering the everyday state (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Jansen, Johannes (1986) The Neglected Duty – the creed of Sadat’s assassins and Islamic resurgence in the Middle East (New York: Macmillan). Jenco, L.K. (2007) ‘“What Does Heaven Ever Say?”: A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement’, American Political Science Review, vol. 101, pp. 741–755.

Bibliography  187 Johnson, Michael (2001) All Honourable Men: the social origins of war in Lebanon (London: I.B. Tauris). Jones, Christopher (2002) ‘If not a Clash, then what? Huntington, Nishida Kitaro and the Politics of Civilizations,’ International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 2 (2002) pp.223–243. Jordan, Grant (1990) ‘Policy Community Realism versus “New” Institutionalist Ambiguity’, Political Studies, 37 (1990) pp. 470–484. Judge, Joan (1996) Print and Politics:‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Kane, P.V. (1973) History of the Dharma Sastras (HDS) (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute). Kant, I. (1998) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kantowsky, D. (1982) ‘Max Weber on India and Indian Interpretations of Weber’, Contributions to Indian Sociology. 16, (2) (1982) pp.141–174. Kassem, Maye (1999) In the Guise of Democracy: governance in contemporary Egypt (Reading: Ithaca Press). Kautilya (1992) Arthasastra (London: Penguin Classics). Kaviraj, Sudipta (2005) ‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 46, 3 (2005) pp. 497–526. Kerpat, Kemal (2001) The Politicization of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Khan, Abu Taleb (1972 [1814]) Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Years 1799 to 1803, tr. Charles Stewart (New Delhi: Sona Publications). Khoury, Philip (1987) Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris). Kisiel, T.J. (1993) The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press). Koselleck, R. (1972) ‘Einleitung’, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: KlettCotta). Koselleck, R. (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. (New York: Columbia University Press). Krieger, Leonard (1975) An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kruger, Lorenz (1984/1998) ‘Why do we Study the History of Philosophy?’ in Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984/98). Kuki, Shûzô (1933) Haideggâ no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten). Kuran, T. (2001) ‘The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of Waqf System’, Law & Society Review. 35, (4) (2001) pp.841–898. Laclau, Ernesto (2005) On Popular Reason (London: Verso). Lamont, M. and S. Aksartova (2002) ‘Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms. Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries among Working-Class Men’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19(4), (2002) pp.1–25. Lane, J.F. (2006) Bourdieu’s Politics (London: Routledge). Laruelle, M. (2004) ‘The Discipline of Culturology: A New “Ready-made Thought” for Russia?’, Diogens, 204, (2004) pp. 21–36. Laruelle, M. (2007) ‘Central Asia Labor Migrants in Russia: The “Diasporization” of the Central Asian States?’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, 5(3), (2007) pp.101–119. Laruelle, M. (2008) ‘Alternative identity, alternative religion? Neo-paganism and the Aryan myth in contemporary Russia’, Nations and Nationalism, 14(2), (2008) pp.283–301.

188  Bibliography Llanos, Mariana and Leiv Marsteintredet (eds) (2009) Presidential Breakdowns in Latin America: Causes and Outcomes of Executive Instability in Developing Democracies. (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Locke, J. Peter Laslett, (ed.) (1988) Second Treatise on Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Love, J. (2000) ‘Max Weber’s Orient’, in S.P. Turner (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Weber, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.172–199. Lukes, S. (2003) Liberals and Cannibals: The Implication of Diversity (London, New York: Verso). Lust-Okar, Ellen (2008a) ‘Competitive Clientelism in Jordanian Elections’, in E. LustOkar and Saloua Zerhouni (eds) Political Participation in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008) pp. 75–94. Lust-Okar, Ellen (2008b) ‘Taking participation seriously’, in E. Lust-Okar and Saloua Zerhouni (eds) Political Participation in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008) pp. 1–14. Ma, Lin (2005) ‘What Does Heidegger have to do with an East–West dialogue,’ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, IV:2 (2005) pp. 299–319. Ma, Lin (2008) Heidegger on East–West Dialogue (London: Routledge). Ma, Lin and Van Brakel (2006) ‘Heidegger’s Comportment toward East–West Dialogue.’ Philosophy East & West, 56:4 (2006) pp.519–566. MacIntyre, A. (1971) Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (London: Duckworth). Maghraoui, Driss (2008) ‘The Dynamics of Civil Society in Morocco’, in E. Lust-Okar and Saloua Zerhouni (eds) Political Participation in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008) pp. 193–215. Mainwaring, Scott and T.R. Scully (eds) (2009) Democratic Governance in Latin America. (Stanford, CA: University Press). Malik, M.I. (1981) ‘The Concept of Human Rights in Islamic Jurisprudence’, Human Rights Quarterly. 3, (3) (1981) pp.56–67. Mamdani, Mahmood (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Manela, Erez (2007) The Wilsonian Moment – self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). March, A. (2009) ‘What is Comparative Political Theory?’ The Review of Politics, vol. 71 (2009) pp. 531–565. Marshall, Edward (ed.) (1991) Speeches and Writings of Burke, vol. 6, (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Martin, Vanessa (1989) Islam and Modernism – the Iranian revolution of 1906 (London: I.B. Tauris). Marzouki, Nadia (2011) ‘From People to Citizens in Tunisia’, Middle East Report 259 (Summer 2011). May, Reinhard (1989) Ex Oriente Lux: Heideggers Werk unter Ostasiatischem Einfluss (Wiesbaden: Frans Steiner Verlag). May, Reinhard (1996) Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. (London: Routledge). Mayo, M. and G. Craig (1995) ‘Community Participation and Empowerment: the human face of structural adjustment or tools for democratic transformation’ in G. Craig and M. Mayo (eds) Community Empowerment (London: Zed Books, 1995), pp. 1–11. Mbembe, Achille (2001) On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Bibliography  189 Mehta, Uday Singh (1999) Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Merelman, Richard (1969) ‘The Dramaturgy of Politics’ The Sociological Quarterly Vol. 10/2 (Spring 1969) pp. 216–241. Meyer, B. and P. Geschire (1999) ‘Globalisation and Identity. Introduction’, in B. Meyer and P. Geschire (eds), Globalisation and Identity. Dialectics of Flow and Closure, (Oxford: Blackwell). Mill, John Stuart (1993 [1861]) Considerations on Representative Government (London: Dent). Miller, N. and S. Hart (eds) (2007) When Was Latin America Modern? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Mitter, Rana (2004) A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Myers, Jorge (2009) Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina. (Buenos Aires: Katz). Nafissi, M.R. (1998) ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, Economy and Society. 27, (1) (1998) pp. 97–118. Nagley, Winfield (1970) ‘Introduction to the Symposium and Reading of a Letter from Martin Heidegger,’ Philosophy East & West, 20:3 (1970) p. 221. Najmabadi, Afsaneh (1998) ‘Feminism in an Islamic Republic’ in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John Esposito Islam, Gender and Social Change (1998) pp. 62–84. Nasser, Gamal Abdul (1955) Egypt’s Liberation – The Philosophy of the Revolution (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press). National Commission for Minorities, http://ncm.nic.in/constitutional_prov.html (accessed 22.9.09). Nederveen, Pieterse J. (2006) ‘Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda’, Development and Change, 37(6), (2006) pp.1247–1257. Nelson, N. and S. Wright (1995) ‘Participation and Power’, in N. Nelson and S. Wright (eds) Power and Participatory Development (London: IT Publications, 1995) pp.1–18. Newman, Daniel L. (2002) An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–31) (London: Saqi Books). Nietzsche, F. (1986 [1878]) Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Nietzsche, F. (1994 [1887]) On the Genealogy of Morality ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, tr. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press). Ong, Aihwa and Donald M. Nonini (eds) (1997) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese transnationalism (New York: Routledge). Osterhammel, J. (2001) Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats. Studien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich, (Göttingen: Vandenhœck & Ruprecht). Owen, D. (1994) Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge). Öztürk, N. (1995) Türk Yenileşme Tarihi Çerçevesinde Vakıf Müessesesi (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı). Palmer, Mark (2003) Breaking the real axis of evil: how to oust the world’s last dictators by 2025 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). Palti, Eliás José (1998) La política del disenso: la ‘polémica en torno al monarquismo’ (Mexico 1848–1850) Y las aporías del liberalism. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economía).

190  Bibliography Parel, A.J. (1992) ‘The Comparative Study of Political Philosophy’ in A.J. Parel and R.C. Keith (eds) Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), pp. 11–28. Parkes, Graham (ed.), (1987) Heidegger and Asian Thought. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Parkes, Graham (1996) ‘Rising Sun over Black Forest,’ in Reinhard May, (ed.) Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. (London: Routledge), pp. 79– 118. Parkes, Graham (2009) ‘Heidegger and Japanese Fascism: An Unsubstantiated Connection,’ in James Heisig and Raquel Bouso (eds), Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy 6. (Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture), pp. 347–372. Paulgaard, G. (2008) ‘Re-centring Periphery: Negotiating Identities in Time and Space’, in J.O. Bærenholdt and B. Granås (eds), Mobility and Place. Enacting Northern European Peripheries, (Hampshire: Ashgate), pp. 49–60. Pegram, Thomas (2010) The Global Diffusion of National Human Rights Institutions and their Political Impact in Latin America. (Oxford University, D.Phil thesis in Politics). Perthes, Volker (1995) The Political Economy of Syria under Asad (London: I.B. Tauris). Peterson, N. and W. Sanders (1998) Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand (1983) Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929– 1976. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Pöggeler, O. (1987) ‘West–East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao-tzu,’ in Graham Parkes (ed.), Heidegger and Asian Thought. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Pollock, Frederick (1890) An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (London: Macmillan, 1890). Pollock, Sheldon (1998) ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, Daedalus, 127(3), (1998) pp.41–74. Pollock, Sheldon. (2000), ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History’, Public Culture, 12(3), (2000) pp.591–625. Pollock, Sheldon (2006) ‘The ends of man at the end of pre-modernity’ Gonda Lectures (Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden 2006). Pollock, Sheldon, H.K. Bhabha, C.A. Breckenridge and D. Chakrabarty (2000) ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, Public Culture, 12(3), (2000) pp.577–589. Pripstein Posusney, Marsha (ed.) (2005) Authoritarianism in the Middle East – regimes and resistance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner). Pusey, James R. (1983) China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Qutb, Sayyid (1988) Ma`alim fi al-Tariq [Signposts on the road] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq). Rashid, Ahmad (2000) Taliban: Islam, oil and the new great game in Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris). Rawls, J. (1996) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Resch, Robert Paul (1992) Althusser and the renewal of Marxist social theory (Berkeley: University of California Press). Rieger, Brigitte (2003) Rentiers, Patrone und Gemeinschaft: soziale Sicherung im Libanon (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang). Rigsby, Curtis A. (2010) ‘Nishida on Heidegger.’ Continental Philosophy Review, 42 (2010) pp.511–553. Rivera, José Antonio (2000) En pos de la quimera: reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional Atlántico. (Mexico City: CIDE).

Bibliography  191 Roald, Anne Sofie (1998) ‘Feminist Reinterpretation of Islamic Sources: Muslim feminist theology in the light of the Christian tradition of feminist thought’ in K. Ask and M. Tjomsland (eds) Women and Islamization (Oxford: Berg, 1998) pp.25–44. Rocher, R. (1983) Orientalism, Poetry and the Millennium (New York: South Asia Books). Rosanvallon, Pierre (2006) Democracy Past and Future (New York: Columbia University Press). Rosanvallon, Pierre (2008) Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Roy, Ananya (2003) City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Roy, Olivier (1996) The Failure of Political Islam (London: I.B. Tauris). Runciman, David (2001) ‘History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (April 2001) pp. 84–104. Sadiki, Larbi (2000) ‘Popular Uprisings and Arab Democratization’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000) pp. 71–95. Safford, Frank (1986) ‘Politics, Ideology and Society in Post-Independence Spanish America’ in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America. Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Safranski, Rudiger (1999) Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Sakai, Naoki (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Sakai, Naoki and Harry Harootunian (1999) ‘Japan Studies and Cultural Studies’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 7:2 (1999) pp.593–647. Sandford, Stella (2003) ‘Going-Back: Heidegger, the East Asian and “The West”,’ Radical Philosophy, 120 (July 2003) pp.11–22. Sarmiento, F. (1998) Facundo or Civilization and Barbarism (London: Penguin). Scherrer, J. (2003) Kulturologie: Russland auf der Suche nach einer zivilisatorischen Identität (Göttingen: Wallstein). Schlumberger, O. (2007) Debating Arab authoritarianism: dynamics and durability in nondemocratic regimes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Schmitt, Carl (2007) The Concept of the Political, tr. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Schram, Stuart (ed.) (1992) Mao’s Road to Power (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe). Schwarcz, V. (1986) The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press). Sebastini, Marcela García and Fernando del Rey Reguillo (eds) (2008) Los desafiós de la libertad: transformación y crisis del liberalismo en Europa y América Latina. (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva). Sen, A. (1999) ‘Democracy as a Universal Value’, Journal of Democracy, 10(3), (1999) pp.3–17. Shari`ati, Ali (1986) What is to be done? ed. Farhang Rajaee (Houston, TX: IRIS). Sherratt, Y. (2006) Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Shklar, J. (1993) ‘Obligation, loyalty, exile’, Political Theory, vol. 21 (1993) pp.181–197. Singerman, Diane (1995) Avenues of Participation (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Skinner, Q. (1989) ‘The state’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 90–131.

192  Bibliography Skrbis, Z., G. Kendall and I. Woodward (2004) ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism. Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 21(6), (2004) pp.115–136. Smith, S.A. (2000) A Road is Made (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Sprenkel, O.B.V.D. (1964) ‘Max Weber on China’, History and Theory. 3, (3) (1964), pp.348–370. Strong, T.B. (1992) ‘”What Have We to Do with Morals?” Nietzsche and Weber on History and Ethics’, History of the Human Sciences. 5, (3) (1992), pp. 9–18. Suares, Peter (2010) The Kyoto School’s Takeover of Hegel: Nishida, Nishitani, and Tanabe Remake the Philosophy of Spirit. (Boston: Lexington Books). Sun Yatsen (1956) Sun Zhongshan xuanji [Selected works of Sun Yatsen] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe). Sznadjer, Mario and Luis Roniger (2009) The Politics of Exile in Latin America. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tanabe, Hajime (1924) Genshôgaku ni okeru atarashiki tenkô: haideggâ no sei no genshôgaku (originally in Shisô, October 1924 reprinted in Tanabe Hajime Zenshû vol.4). Taylor, C. (1984/1998) ‘Philosophy and Its History,’ in Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 17–30. Taylor, C. (1999) ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, Public Culture, 11(1), (1999) pp.153–174. Taylor, C. (2002) ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14(1), (2002) pp. 91–124. The Qur’an (2007) [tr. Alan Jones] (London: Gibb Memorial Trust). Thompson, Evan (1986) ‘Planetary Thinking/Planetary Building: An Essay on Martin Heidegger and Nishitani Keiji.’ Philosophy East & West, 36:3 (1986) pp. 235–52. Timani, Hussam (2008) Modern Intellectual Readings of the Kharijites (New York: Peter Lang). Tocqueville, Alexis de (1990) Democracy in America, vol. 1, tr. Henry Reeve, revised by Francis Bowen, (ed.) Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage). Touraine, Alain (1988) La parole et le sang: politíque et societé en Amérique Latine. (Paris: Odile Jacob). Tripp, Charles (2007) A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press). Turner, B.S. (1974) Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, International Library of Sociology. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Turner, B.S. (1978) Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: George Allen & Unwin). Turner, B.S. (2000) ‘Outline of a Theory of Orientalism’, in B.S. Turner (ed.), Orientalism: Early Sources, (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.1–31. Valadez, J. (2001) Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy and Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). Valdéz, Eduardo Devés (2000, 2003, 2004) El pensamiento latinoamericano en el siglo XX. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos (in three volumes). Varisco, D.M. (2007) Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, Publications on the near East (Seattle, WA, London: University of Washington Press). Vatikiotis, P.J. (1980) The History of Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Ven, Hans van de (1991) From Friend to Comrade: The Origins of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press). Veyne, P. (1971) Writing History, tr. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press).

Bibliography  193 Veyne, P. (1990 [1976]) Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism, tr. B. Pearce (London: Penguin). Visker, R. (2008) ‘Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology’, Parrhesia. 5: (2008) pp. 9–18. Walton, J. and D. Seddon (1994) Free Markets and Food Riots (Oxford: Blackwell). Weber, M. (1909) The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, tr. R.I. Frank (London: New Left Books). Weber, M. (1917) The Religion of India, tr. H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale (New York: Free Press). Weber, M. (1978 [1921]) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, tr. G. Roth and C. Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press). Wedeen, Lisa (1999) Ambiguities of Domination: politics, rhetoric and symbols in contemporary Syria (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Weinmayr, Elmar (1995) ‘Nishida to Haidegaa – hikakutetsugaku no kokoromi.’ Shisō, November 1995, pp.88–106. Weinmayr, Elmar (2005) ‘Thinking in Transition: Nishida Kitaro and Martin Heidegger.’ Philosophy East & West, 55:2 (2005) pp.232–256. Werbner, P. (1999) ‘Global Pathways. Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology, 7(1), (1999) pp.17–35. Werbner, P. (2006) ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), (2006) pp.496–498. Whitehead, L. (2007) ‘Variabilidad en la aplicación de derechos: una perspectiva comparada’ in United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Contribuciones al debate II: estado, democracia y ciudadanía en América Latina. (Lima, Peru: Myrza Editorial). Whitehead, L. (2009) Latin America: A New Interpretation. 2nd edn. (London: Palgrave). Williams, Caroline (2002) ‘The Subject and Subjectivity’, in Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Valentine (eds) Politics and Post-structuralism – an introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) pp.23–35. Wolin, Richard (1990) The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press). Wolin, Richard (ed.) (1993) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. (Cambridge: MIT Press). Wolin, Richard (2001) Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Yadav, Yogendra (2000) ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in the Electoral Politics of the 1990s’ in Francine Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and Balveer Arora, (eds), Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Yeğenoğlu, M. (1998) Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Yeh, Wen-hsin (1992) ‘Progressive Journalism and Shanghai’s Petty Urbanites: Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo Weekly, 1926–1945,’ in Frederic Wakeman and Wen-hsin Yeh (ed.), Shanghai Sojourners. (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies), pp. 186–238. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro (2000) ‘Questions of Japanese Cinema: Disciplinary Boundaries and the Invention of the Scholarly Object,’ in Harry Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi (eds), Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. (Durham NC: Duke University Press), pp. 368–402.

194  Bibliography Yusa, Michiko (1995) ‘Reflections on Nishida Studies,’ The Eastern Buddhist, 28:2 (1995). Yusa, Michiko (2002) Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), pp. 287–96. Ziyadah, Niqula (ed.) (1963) Al-Hisbah wa-l-Muhtasib fi al-Islam [The hisbah and the muhtasib in Islam] (Beirut: al-Matba`ah al-Kathulikiyyah). Zou (1927) ‘Zenyang huifu minzu diwei’, (orig. Shenghuo 2:33, 19 June 1927), Taofen sanwen, p. 17.

Index

al-Assad, Bashir 102–3 anti-cosmopolitanism 151–3 Appiah, Kwame A. 147, 149 Arab Spring 97, 105–6 Barghava, Rajeev 81 Bentham, Jeremy 73–4, 75 Bhabha, Homi 14, 149 Bolivar, Simon 44–5 Buddhism 161–1, 164, 167 Burke, Edmund 72–3 canon of political theory 3, 21 caste and politics 29–30 China and politics 61–9 Chinese communist party 61 citizenship 7,8, 83, 84–5, 110–23; Ottoman gift-giving and 116–20 civil and political 76–81 clash of civilizations 7, 159 colonialism 6, 33–4, 71–87 communism 60–9 comparative politics 4, 5, 6, 40, 88 comparative theory 2–23, 25–6, 75–6, 158–60, 172–3; anthropology and 5; area studies and 158–9; asymmetries and 10–11; colonialism 6, 33–4, 71–87; comparative political thought 8; creative political thought 173; culture and 6–10, 13–14, 22, 33–4, 71–87; difficulty of 22; essentializing orient and 9; ethnocentrism and 158; Eurocentrism and 9, 142, 144, 158; exaggerated binaries and 10–11; global transformative theory and 7, 8, 22; historical comparative method and 4; ideal and actual 21; identifying features of 1–2; language and 15–17, 171–2; modernity 21–2, 146; need for

153–6; parallelism of theories 12, 21; phases of 4–5; philosophy and 170–2; political science and 5–6; postcolonial theory and 9–10, 14, 71–87; primary and secondary comparison 3–4; subaltern studies 6, 14; temporality issue and 13; translation and 6, 15– 17, 36–7, 171–2; units of comparison 3, 12; history of 4–5; vagueness and 16; ways of doing comparative theory 25; Western and Eastern contrasts and 8–9, 10, 70–87, 158–60 conceptual morphology 12–13 Confucianism 60–69, 160; politics and 61; modernity and 66–7 Constant, Benjamin 44–5 constitutionalism 49, 53–4, 75, 84–5 cosmopolitanism 141–56 culture 33–4, 71–87; cultural transmission 17–18 culturology 151–3 deliberative democracy 8 democracy 8, 34–5, 50–3, 79, 83, 85, 132 democratization 47, 50–3 dependency theory 50 dharma 29–30 Diouf, Mamadou 146–7 Euben, Roxanne 12 euergetism 119–20 Foucault Michel 76, 115–16 Freeden, Michael 12, 25–6, 111–13, 118, 121–3 genealogy 80, 83, 114–15, 121–2 Geuss, Raymond 83, 114 global transformative theory 7, 8, 22

196  Index globalization 48, 142 governmentality 78–9 Hastings, Warren 72–3 Heidegger, Martin 159–73 Hirschmann, Albert 41 historical comparative method 4–5 historicity of words 36–7 history of political thought 3–4, 5 Huntingdon, Samuel 7 Husserl, Edmund 165–6 hybridity theory 14 India and politics 26–36, 71–87 Islam and politics 110–23, 126–40 Japan and politics 163–5 Kautilya 25 Kaviraj, Sudipta 77 Keith, Ronald 12 Kyoto school of philosophy (see Nishida) Latin America politics 40–59; democratization and 47 liberalism 19, 22, 42, 45–6, 49, 50, 74–6 MacIntyre, Alasdair 5–6, 24–5 Maoism 64–7, 121 March, Andrew 6–7 Marshall, T.H. 113 May the Fourth Movement 61, 62, 63, 65, 66–7 Mencius 61, 62, 63 Middle-East exceptionalism 88 Middle-East politics 88–109 Mill, J.S. 17, 75–6 modernity 21, 29, 61–2, 83 modernization 21, 50, 148–50

participation 3, 19–20; 88–109; methodological individualism and 90; Muslim society and 91–101, 126–40; nation-state and 91–5; patrimonial state and 101–4 ; protest and 95–7 political 2, 20–1, 26–7, 110–23; China and 61–9; India and 26–36, 71–87; Islam and 110–23, 126–40; Japan and 163–5; Latin America and 40–59 ; Middle-East and 88–109 political thought and thinking politically 1–3, 8–9, 12–13, 21–2, 42–4, 70–2, 111–13 politics 1–3, 21–2, 27–8, 33–4,111–13 Pollock, Sheldon 142–3, 146–8 postcolonialism 9–10, 14, 21,70–87, 146–7 Rawls, John 16, 132 religion 11, 13, 130–1, 139–40 Revolution 67–9 Said, Edward 111, 116 Schmitt, Carl 25 secular and religious 11–12, 128–9, 130–5, 139–40 Social Darwinism in China 61, 63–2, 65–6 sovereignty 32 state 33; colonial 33–4; 84–5, 91–5; neopatrimonial 101–4 ; shadow 103–4 subaltern theory 6, 14 Sun Yatsen 61–2, 63–4 Syria 102–3 Taylor, Charles 150 translation 6, 15–17, 36–7, 171–2 Verstehen 8 Veyne, Paul 119–20 violence and politics 81–2

neo-liberalism 42 Nietzsche, Friedrich 114–15 Nishida, Kitarō 160–72 niti 30 normative political theory 7, 11, 21–2, 70–2, 79–80, 83–5 norms 72–3, 75–6, 83–5

waqf (see citizenship) Weber, Max 8, 110–11, 115–16, 117, 120, 122, 143 Western and non-Western theory 8–9, 10, 70–87, 158–60; West and East 9–10,158; postcolonial theory and 9–10, 14, 21, 70–87, 146–7

orientalism 9–10, 110–23, 159

Zen Buddhism 161–1, 166 zhengzhi 60 Zou Taofen 61–3, 64, 67, 68, 69

Parel, Anthony 12