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ID:
108021
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In his essay on Arendt's "antiprimitivism," Jimmy Casas Klausen partly agrees
with scholars such as Anne Norton and Norma Claire Moruzzi who suggest
that especially the discussion of "Hottentots" in The Origins of Totalitarianism
is replete with racial prejudice.
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Yet, to the extent that racial explanations cannot fully account for why and how Arendt also targets "Boers," Klausen argues,
these criticisms are lacking. He contends that what is ultimately the problem is
Arendt's antiprimitivist notion of culture that chastises Boers for their indolence and turns Hottentots into barely human primitives without history. In
what follows, I take issue with this characterization of Arendt as an antiprimitivist situated in the German tradition of culture as Bildung. Arendt's essays
on culture, which Klausen cites to support his argument, actually include several criticisms of this tradition. More importantly, it is hard to maintain this
charge of antiprimitivism given that these essays, in line with the arguments in
The Human Condition, raise serious concerns about using the realm of cultural
production as a yardstick of humanity.
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| 2 |
ID:
108019
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
How do we conceptualize distinctions between religious-political territories in the contemporary world when old categories-such as Islam and the West, or dar al-Islam and dar al-harb-precipitate misunderstandings and conflicts? In this essay, I consider Tariq Ramadan's argument that Muslims must enact an intellectual transformation along the lines of Kant's Copernican revolution and thence create concepts-such as the space of testimony (dar al-shahada)-to facilitate interreligious dialogue, cooperation, and respectful contestation. The essay aims to illuminate the nature of Ramadan's political theory and dispel the claim that he is a Muslim Martin Luther; to imagine the contours of a future political-intellectual movement that integrates elements of the European Enlightenment and the Arab Nahda; and to envision how Muslim and non-Muslim political theorists may combat political Manichaeanism without denying the reality and importance of contending ethical visions and political identities.
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| 3 |
ID:
108020
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay argues that fulfilling the promise of participatory democratic theory requires ways for citizens to reconstruct the world, not simply to improve its governance processes. The concept of public work, expressing civic agency, or the capacity of diverse citizens to build a democratic way of life, embodies this shift. It posits citizens as co-creators of the world, not simply deliberators and decision-makers about the world. Public work is a normative, democratizing ideal of citizenship generalized from communal labors of creating the commons, with roots in diverse cultures. Shaped through contention with forces which threaten shared ways of life and their commons, grounded in an understanding of human plurality, public work has political qualities that unmask sentimentalized civic discourses of modern elites. Public work places citizens, not markets or states, as the foundational agents of democracy. It opens a path beyond the political crisis.
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| 4 |
ID:
108018
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The principles of liberal political theory are often said to be "freestanding." Are they indeed sufficiently detached from the cultural setting where they emerged to be intelligible to people with other backgrounds? To answer this question, this essay examines the Indian secularism debate and develops a hypothesis on the process whereby liberal principles crystallized in the West and spread elsewhere. It argues that the secularization of western political thought has not produced independent rational principles, but transformed theological ideas into the "topoi" of a culture. Like all topoi, the principles of liberalism depend on other clusters of ideas present in western societies. When they migrate to new settings, the absence of these surrounding ideas presents fundamental obstacles to the interpretation and elaboration of liberal principles. The case of Indian secularism illustrates the cultural limitations of liberal political theory rather than showing its universal significance.
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| 5 |
ID:
108022
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| 6 |
ID:
108023
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