On Translation of D. Chakrabarty’s “Provincializing Europe”

Данная публикация представляет собой перевод первых вступительных разделов («Идея провинциализации Европы» и «Политика историзма») из монографии Дипеша Чакрабарти «Провинциализируя Европу». В этих разделах разбирается понятие «историзм» и его значение для формирования идеи европейского политического модерна. Чакрабарти критикует западный подход, который «отказывает» бывшим колониальным странам в становлении собственной модерности. The article presents translations of the first introductory chapters (“The Idea of Provincializing Europe” “Historicism and the Narration of Modernity”) of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s monograph “Provincializing Europe”. These chapters focus on the notion of historicism and its role in the formation of European political modernity. Chakrabarty criticizes the western approach that imposes Eurocentric modernity on former colonies.

Articulate the missing: The role of religion in political modernity

In this article, I argue that Habermas’s genealogical approach to modern reason and methodological agnosticism can lead us to a better understanding of the role of religion in our societies. I underline the relevance of Habermas’s awareness that ‘something is missing’ when we take faith out of modernity and consider the truths of philosophical reason to be infallible. Habermas succeeds in highlighting the complexity of the modern relationship between the religious and the secular domains, a relationship that is not merely epistemic, but also embodied in various practical relationships between religious and secular citizens. On this basis, and in the light of Habermas’s idea of modernity as an unfinished project, I argue that religion can be interpreted as a dimension allied to political modernity and democracy as well.

Postcolonial Political Theory

Postcolonial political theory is an emerging subfield of political theory, although its parameters and particular meanings are less than clearly defined and subject to contestation. Related to a more general critique of political theory’s traditional Eurocentric bias, postcolonial political theory is motivated by three key issues: first, how colonialism shaped the traditional Western canon; second, the broad silence on colonialism and its legacies in mainstream political theorizing; and third, the tensions, particularly within liberal political theory, between its universal pretentions and culturally specific Western location of articulation. The scope of inquiry in postcolonial political theory is broadly responsive to postcolonialism, a body of thought concerned with tracing, engaging, and responding to the cultural, political, social, and economic legacies of Western colonialism, particularly the period of European colonial rule between the 18th and mid-20th centuries. With a particular emphasis on the relationship between power and knowledge, postcolonial theories and approaches take the development of modernity as coterminous with European colonial and imperial projects, and therefore examine the ways in which modern systems of knowledge are implicated in colonial relations of power. Postcolonial political theory similarly treats political modernity as imprinted by Western colonialism and imperialism, making for distinct political dynamics, problems, and forms of injustice, on the one hand, and shaping the history of European political thought, on the other. In this regard, postcolonial political theory does not just call for a widening of the remit of political theory beyond the traditional European canon to include non-Western texts, voices, and perspectives. It also raises profound questions about the ways in which the categories, ideas, and assumptions of political theory have been complicit in and served to legitimize the domination of colonized peoples and indigenous, non-Western, and subaltern minorities. Postcolonial political theory seeks to articulate alternative modes of theorizing that can better speak to the concerns of justice for the formerly colonized, indigenous peoples, and those affected by the neo-imperial features of the current global order. An important element of this is concerned with methodology, in particular the use of multidisciplinary insights from history, cultural studies, and anthropology, among others, as well as thinkers and texts that would not conventionally be considered “political” according to dominant Western conceptions of politics.

Hobbes in the Anthropocene: Reconsidering the State of Nature in Its Relevance for Governing

The theoretical work of Thomas Hobbes marks the dawn of political modernity and thus also the beginning of modern reasoning about governing. In his Leviathan, Hobbes creates the modern space of the political through the exclusion of the world’s social and natural abundance. This crossroads of political thinking might not least be of relevance for the Anthropocene. After all, affirming the Anthropocene returns mankind to a cosmos of infinite human–nature interrelationships, which strongly resembles Hobbes’s conceptual depiction of the premodern state of nature and its incomprehensible, contingent, and precarious world, a world that Hobbes had intended to ban for good. In this context, this article reconsiders the state of nature’s internal dynamics in its relevance for governing in the Anthropocene—at the expense of the normative claims of modernist governing. After all, embracing the complex ontologies of the Anthropocene and the state of nature disperses agency among the human and nonhuman world, which questions the idea of ethical and political accountability. Without such a reference, governing runs the risk of becoming arbitrary and thereby another shallow projection of modernist conceptions. This article develops an interpretation of political subjectivity as a reference for governing, deriving from the materialistic world of the Hobbesian state of nature. On this foundation, the article elaborates on how this reading of subjectivity reconfigures the conception of political space and how this shift affects the scope of governing.

Conclusion

The conclusion sums up the main arguments of the book: the EU is not an association sui generis. Rather, it belongs to the political form of the federation: a discrete form of political association on a par with, though differentiated from, the other two forms of political modernity, namely, the state and the empire. The federation is a political union of states founded on a federal and constitutional compact that does not absorb the Member States into a new federal state. Federations come into existence because of the instability of the state as a political form. States decide to come together in a federation because they are incapable of maintaining their own political autonomy. Nevertheless, the federation is characterized by its own unique internal contradictions that always threaten its stability and survival. Federal emergency politics brings these contradictions to the fore by eroding the political autonomy of the Member States.

The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union

What type of political association is the European Union? From the start of the European integration process, this question has puzzled scholars. Many different answers have been offered, but in the absence of an agreed response, most scholars implicitly avoid the issue by suggesting that the European Union is sui generis. This book challenges the sui generis thesis by demonstrating that the European Union is not a unique form of association, but rather a federal union of states, or what this book calls a federation. This is a discrete form of political association on a par with, though differentiated from, the other two forms of political modernity, namely the state and the empire. Therefore, the federation cannot be understood on the basis of the theory of the state, hereunder the concept of sovereignty. The ‘statist’ worldview still dominates both the debates on federalism and the European Union, meaning that all federal polities are seen either as ‘confederal’ associations of sovereign states or as sovereign federal states. The book challenges the statist schism of ‘federal’ versus ‘confederal’ by demonstrating that the federation is a discrete political form with a discrete constitutional theory, characterized by its own strengths and weaknesses. The federation is a political union of states founded on an interstate agreement of a constitutional nature, a federal compact, that does not absorb the Member States into a new state. It is characterized by a double political existence and the internal absence, contestation, or repression of sovereignty.

ANALYSE SOCIOLOGIQUE DES PERCEPTIONS DES JEUNES BENINOIS SUR LA MODERNITE POLITIQUE DES ELITES

Political modernity is a negotiated reality, which requires adaptation, innovation. The representations or perceptions of young Beninese constitute variables of recognition of political modernity, even of the modernity of political figures or elites. These are criteria for the recognition and validation of political leadership. How do young Beninese build their criteria of political modernity? In addition, how do they state their perceptions of the modernity of elites or political figures in Benin? Essentially qualitative and based on comprehensive interviews carried out in Benin from a survey integrating about thirty (30) people, this research appropriates the dynamics of interpretative sociology and adopts the model of analysis based on the social construction of reality, with an opening on interactionism and strategic analysis. By postulating that the perceptions of young people on political modernity structure the relationships between their expectations and the behavior of elites or political figures in society, this work has made it possible to elucidate the social representations which guide the modernity of political elites in Benin. It revealed the over-intellectualization of the political arena, the pervasiveness of the bó or gris-gris, the emergence of a new relationship to way of life, to technology, then the modernization of public action and marginalization of the opposition.