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On ‘Innovation’: Professor Helga Nowotny’s Recent Gifford Lecture

01 Monday Jun 2015

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For participants in the Critical Religion network, Professor Helga Nowotny’s recent Gifford lecture, ‘Beyond Innovation. Temporalities. Re-use. Emergence’, delivered in the Edinburgh Business School on the 13th May this year is not without interest. The Gifford Lectures, were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland. The purpose of Lord Gifford’s bequest to the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen was to sponsor lectures to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God”. Since 1888 a remarkable and diverse range of contributors have maintained the enduring prestige of the Gifford Lectures. The summary notice circulated in advance of Professor Nowotny’s lecture stated that:

The quest for innovation has become ubiquitous. It is high on the political agenda and raises hopes where few alternatives are in sight. It continues to be equated with the dynamics of wealth and even job creation and is hailed as solution to the major challenges facing our societies. Yet, as Schumpeter observed more than one hundred years ago, innovation is not only disruptive, but can also be destructive.

A distinguished Austrian-born social historian of science, Professor Emerita Helga Nowotny of the ETH in Zurich set herself the task of exposing some of the paradoxical difficulties that attend the tensions between the rhetorical representation and the realities of ‘innovation’. Drawing in passing upon Marx and Weber as architects of ideas of modernity, Nowotny then settled as intimated upon a third figure, the Austrian economic thinker and historian of economic analysis J. A Schumpeter, and his conception of innovation as ‘creative destruction’. Innovation is not just technological but social, so that, for example, the quest for the quantum computer when successful will have a heavy impact upon the temporalities by which we live. We have to find a balance and trade-off between explanation and exploitation, whilst also being conscious that the reification of ‘innovation’ in an entrepreneurial culture (in particular that of the United States) can be misleading.

n reality, much so-called innovation is in fact ‘recombination’, and Nowotny illustrated this by reference to the ‘shock of the old’ in the juxtapositional work of the artist David Jablonski. In pointing out how mixed the outcomes of prediction can be, she also related her qualifications of the concept of ‘innovation’ to John Maynard Keynes’ optimistic vision in his Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), in which “I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of … traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable”. Technological unemployment might, Keynes foresaw, free humankind for a higher form of existence for which we had to prepare, but present day workplace realities are very different. In short, the most brilliant minds can get things badly wrong, and the gist of Nowotny’s message was that what may save us then we come to the fork in the road ahead of humankind is the capacity to resist binary division and develop informed both/and responses to global crises rendered deceptively manageable because of the inherent unpredictability of innovation. Innovation leads to paradoxical consequences: the ‘natural’ in a post-human world is extremely complex and fraught with problematic real world juxtapositions highlighted by, for example, the contrast between the rapid take-up of cellphones in India as compared with slow increase in levels of basic sanitation.

‘Theology’ in however a vestigial form was very difficult, indeed scarcely possible to detect in Professor Nowotny’s lecture which could not be was not readily assimilated under the rubric laid down by Lord Gifford. Of course such resistance is not without precedent, given that the eminent Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth made it an essential part of his life’s work to deny the possibility of ‘natural theology’, albeit from a very different standpoint. What was, however, very much in evidence was Professor Nowotny’s defence of a distinctive kind of truth-seeking. She argued for the necessity of fundamental research freed from the immediate and all-encompassing diktats of what we in the United Kingdom are required to register in the metrics of socio-economic ‘impact’. Above all, for this listener, Professor Nowotny’s Gifford Lecture was a plea for a renewed sense of global responsibility informed by the full panoply of the ‘human sciences’.

Whilst there was to be a discussion the following day facilitated by the former Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh, Bryan Smith, it was disappointing that no questions were posed following the lecture by any of the many theologians currently active in Edinburgh. For this listener, Professor Nowotny’s critical account of the concept of ‘innovation’ was compelling. The risks raised by the unpredictability and unintended consequences of innovation give rise to a conundrum. The character of innovation might suggest that education, and in particular higher education should serve to develop an informed and agile responsiveness to change. By contrast, the societal reality of totalising managerial modernity is manifested in the urge of governments to impose ever greater degrees of control over our lives, and to understand ‘Quality’ as ever more sophisticated protocols of conformity. If, however, innovation is unpredictable then how can we know what we are directed to do will be the right thing? The posing of this question provoked a ripple of recognition in the audience, but no adequate response from the admirable Professor Nowotny.

Fictions and Contentions

26 Monday May 2014

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The editors of a recent collection of essays entitled Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life begin their study with the following observation concerning the general state of political economy in the world today: “There is a growing consensus that the world today is in dire social and economic crisis that extends to housing, personal financial debt, and the absence of adequate health care and education, a crisis that finds increasing numbers of people vulnerable to dearth and death as the ability to secure daily life is eroded” (2011, p.1). In the book, scholars working in the fields of sociology, political science, and law examine the various ways that the recent financial crisis has contributed to an escalation of political violence that is not taking place primarily through acts of war or terrorism, but rather through a form of political violence that is being executed through the appropriation and privatization of society’s basic means of social reproduction. They define social reproduction as “the historically contingent processes by which we reproduce the conditions and relations of economic and social security. These include not only the technical means of reproducing the physical integrity of our bodies, but also the methods by which we reproduce ourselves as political subjects—that is the relations we legitimate” (2011, p.2). Although this crisis of reproduction is a global phenomenon, in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe, it is primarily being advanced through the ongoing implementation of a politics of austerity that has effectively shifted the financial burdens of the private banking and finance sector onto the wider population. Despite the fact that a number of economists have challenged the logic of austerity as a pathway to recovery, the narrative of profligate public spending and the need for greater sacrifices on the part of the average citizen continues to be a regular feature of the current government’s public discourse. What is perhaps most worrying about the ways that the crisis of social reproduction is currently taking place is the extent to which the underlying narrative of financial scarcity has become so difficult for many to contest.

For an outsider, finding a point of entry into the world of economic theory is no mean feat. Although there are countless introductory texts for the subject, macroeconomic theory often begins by elaborating a theoretical language that relies very heavily upon terminological agreement. As it turns out, like so many other disciplines, economists fail to agree upon the definitions of some of their most fundamental terms and concepts. Likewise, texts written from the perspective of micro-economics tend to move very quickly into the baffling world of econometrics and mathematical formulas that are also highly debated by experts in the field. Fortunately, the economic historian Mary S. Morgan has offered those of us who are less mathematically proficient a way of approaching the discipline through her assertion that economic theory is primarily a modelling science that relies upon visual and literary representations of the world which are essentially fictional. Although the curved lines in a classic econometric diagram of supply and demand may be based upon personal experiences of purchasing and some casual observation of market behaviours, according to Morgan, the lines of course do not reflect actual observations of supply and demand because such invisible phenomena are not there to be seen in the world. Instead, as Morgan suggests, “Each curve shows how economists imagine what consumers and producers imagine they might buy and supply at different prices; and what might cause these curves to shift.” There is therefore a double-layer of imagination reflected in these diagrams which reflects the highly speculative and fictional nature of economic modelling. According to Morgan, the answer to the question, “How do economists use models? is, in one sense, easy to answer: they ask questions with them and tell stories! Or more exactly: they ask questions, use the resources of the model to demonstrate something, and tell stories in the process” (2012, p.217-18). The narrative power of these fictive models enables them to function as epistemic instruments which present and represent the world to minds of those who rely upon them for evaluating and predicting behaviour in the so-called “real world.” There is a striking similarity between the way that Morgan describes the hermeneutic operations which characterize the ways that economists interpret their models and the notion of the self-interpreting bible which emerged during the time of the Reformation. When economists read their own diagrams, they entertain the illusion of self-mastery and self-presencing that accompanies the experience of reading an all too human text that has nonetheless been imbued with divine powers.

In addition to the fictive quality of the ways that economists visually represent economic behaviour, at a philosophical level, modern economic theory also relies upon a certain fictional description of human nature—the figure of “man” the rational maximizer of economic satisfaction also known as homo economicus. According to Morgan, this simplified depiction of the human in economic theory developed as the discipline became increasingly concerned with constructing explanatory models. Although the figure of homo economicus has been criticized and assailed from practically every vantage point in the humanities, and it has even been challenged by economists themselves who acknowledge it as an oversimplification of human behaviour, this fictional character remains popular, particularly among scholars of a distinctly neoliberal persuasion. In his book Economic Analysis of Law, the ever-prolific legal scholar Richard Posner begins his study with the assertion that “economics is the science of rational choice in a world—our world—in which resources are limited in relation to human wants. The task of economics, so defined, is to explore the implications of assuming that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions—what we shall call his ‘self-interest’”(2003, p.3). (It is worth noting that Posner insists on using masculine pronouns throughout his study; problematically, he claims that they “are used in a generic rather than a gendered sense.”)

In an effort to respond to one of the common criticisms of rational choice theory, which is that human consumption is rarely motivated by conscious calculation, Posner claims that “Economics is not a theory about consciousness. Behavior is rational when it conforms to the model of rational choice, whatever the state of mind of the chooser” (2003, p.3). It appears that Posner is capable of disregarding the fictional nature of economic analysis through his uncritical acceptance of the myth of homo economicus. The appeal of this myth for Posner as well as other advocates of law and economics is that it offers a simplified narrative of human behaviour which allows for a supposedly scientific approach to making legal decisions that may otherwise appear ethically complex when considered within the larger context of human social interactions. But when the maxim that what is economically efficient is most beneficial for society is introduced as a hermeneutic framework for making legal decisions such ethical and moral complexities apparently recede from view. Like lines upon a graph, the creation and application of law comes to represent a theoretical model of human life that exists in a supposedly scientific vacuum that is increasingly isolated from the complexities of everyday life and the reality human suffering.

The fact that theoretical abstractions have a tendency to disguise or otherwise disregard the complexities of human life is of course not a new insight for those working in fields which take seriously the particularity human subjectivity. And for scholars working in the fields of theology and religious studies, this has meant challenging in theory and in practice a great number of dogmas and philosophical traditions which have historically sacrificed the irreducible complexity of human life for the sake of elaborating highly debatable answers to life’s most perplexing questions. From the perspective of Christian theology, questions concerning the meaning and sources of human suffering, poverty, and evil have led many to abandon the project of theodicy altogether. And yet still others set out from strong ideological or theological positions to wager conclusive answers to such questions. Frankly, these people scare me.

Following David Cameron’s rather infamous opening speech at the annual Downing Street Easter reception, many Christians were troubled by his assertion that the Big Society was in fact invented by Jesus; others took issue with his proclamation that Britain is in fact a Christian country. Although I find both of these statements troubling, Cameron made another point that I find both insightful and disturbing. Commenting on the similarities between the challenges that churches face in Britain and the challenges facing political institutions, he suggests:

“We both sometimes can get wrapped up in bureaucracy; we both sometimes can talk endlessly about policies and programmes and plans without explaining what that really means for people’s lives. We can sometimes get obsessed by statistics and figures and how to measure things. Whereas actually, what we both need more of is evangelism. More belief that we can get out there and actually change people’s lives and make a difference and improve both the spiritual, physical and moral state of our country, and we should be unashamed and clear about wanting to do that.”

It feels strange to say that I mainly agree with the Prime Minister on this point. The only problem of course is that the world that he wants to create and the one that so many who are opposed to him would like to create are so very different. Perhaps it would serve Mr. Cameron well to remember that evangelism is not simply a matter of ideological fervour, it is a matter of sharing good news; in terms of the gospel story which presumably forms the basis of his notion of spiritual and moral health, to use the Greek term, it is a good news that is directed specifically at the anawim, who, as Terry Eagleton provocatively suggests, are “the dispossessed or shit of the earth who have not stake in the present set-up, and who thus symbolize the possibility of new life in their very dissolution” (2001, p.114). The good news means loving your neighbour as yourself, even when that neighbour fails to reciprocate in kind. The fact that the Prime Minister would have us disregard statistics and instead allow ourselves to be swept away by the spirit of philanthropy is an all too convenient ploy. When we look at the consequences of austerity for those who are most vulnerable in society, the numbers and graphs do tell a story that is worth reading. They tell a story of shifting geo-political relations, desperate attempts at securing the stability of a faltering banking and finance industry, concerted efforts at privatizing health care, education, and public housing, and most importantly a strategic attack on the advances made by labour movements throughout the twentieth century. Narratives of economic crisis and the myth of homo economicus have largely supplanted the narratives of equality, human rights, and social responsibility which emerged in the wake of the First and Second World Wars. Challenging the politics of austerity requires a thoroughgoing reassessment of the values that have thus far shaped the notion of political liberalism in western society and a re-examination of the fictions which necessarily bind us to the neighbour we so rarely see.

Works Cited:
Eagleton, Terry. 2001. The Gatekeeper: A Memoir. London: Penguin.
Feldman, Shelley, Charles C. Geisler, and Gayatri A. Menon, eds. 2011. Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Morgan, Mary S. 2012. The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Posner, Richard A. 2003. Economic Analysis of Law. New York: Aspen Law.

The ‘Secularity’ of Neoliberalism in India

20 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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The on-going campaigns for the upcoming 2014 Parliamentary elections in India have put Mr Narendra Modi as the National Democratic Alliance candidate (NDA) headed by the right-wing political party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The coalition currently in power, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) headed by the Indian National Congress party, has been mired in various corruption scandals, a reason for increasing favorability for the NDA. But Mr Modi has been a very controversial politician. As a four-term (and current) Chief Minister of the north-western state of Gujarat, Mr Modi has been accused of expressing discriminatory opinions against minorities, specifically, Muslims. He is a member of the right wing Hindutva group, Rashtriya Swayam Sevak. In fact, a year into his first term as the Chief Minister in 2002, Gujarat saw a period of horrific communal violence that began when Muslim groups were accused of burning a train coach in Godhra that killed Hindu activists, which spiraled into violence against Muslim communities. Mr Modi has long been dogged by allegations that he refused to prevent the post-Godhra retribution committed against the Muslim communities after the train-burning incident.

Despite such a controversial history, Mr Modi’s polls numbers are indicating an increase in popularity and favorability as the next Prime Minister of India. As Desai has argued in this article, there is an issue of middle-class voters not opposing (at least openly) the Hindutva ideology of Mr Modi and the BJP. Importantly, Mr Modi’s campaign rhetoric has touted the neoliberal economic policies that he adopted in his home state of Gujarat that has seen significant growth of its economy. He has presented this as a divide between caste and religion on the one hand and development on the other; and he is presenting himself as a candidate pro-development. Thus, neoliberalism is used to show the seeming ‘secularity’ credentials of Mr Modi. He has repeatedly argued that his ideology of ‘inclusivity’ has been central to Gujarat’s trade policies, thereby ‘leveling the playing field’ for all and transcending differences in caste and religious identities. In fact, such a notion was put forward by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, a popular Indian-American proponent of neoliberalism, who has argued that Gujarat’s (and in fact, India’s) economic growth has transcended political, caste and religious differences. To an electorate experiencing a series of corruption scandals under the UPA government and stagnant economic growth, one can see why this rhetoric seems appealing.

However, this raises a question whether neoliberalism can be seen as a ‘secular’ ideology that transcends those identity markers in India that are often associated with ‘religion’ such as the caste system. The question of understanding economics as ‘secular’ science has been dealt with on many occasions in this Critical Religion blog. My focus here is to reflect on what understanding of neoliberalism pertaining to India one should consider. On the ‘new India’ that Zakaria sees as emerging, he wrote:

Starting in the early 1990s, New Delhi has been overturning the license-permit-quota raj and opening up the economy. The result is an India that is quite different from the one its founders might have imagined—a motley collection of communities, languages, and ethnicities living together in an open political and economic space.

This kind of narrative furthers the idea that Friedman argued in his now famous text, The World is Flat, that somehow, ‘secular’ economics would triumph and transcend the underdevelopment that exists on the ground because of ‘religion’, specifically caste and closely associated with that, class. Critiques of Mr Modi have pointed out how uneven the development brought in by neoliberalism in Gujarat has been. For instance, Desai argues that despite Mr Modi’s claims, his economic policies have benefitted the already existing middle-class Hindu communities whilst poverty and malnourishment has affected minority communities, especially the Muslim communities. Similarly, an article in First Post has argued that the Dalits continue to experience discrimination in society.

Workings of neoliberal policies are embedded in the social context. To look at these economic policies as the ‘secular’ solution towards development is problematic. Both Mr Modi and Mr Zakaria are disembedding the capitalistic benefits of these policies for their own ends. Within the context of India, neoliberal policies do not transcend caste or class identities but are shaped by them and politicians who have the power to administer and shape these policies. This is not to mean that the UPA government, as a ‘secular’ alliance, would have made these policies work better for minority communities. The ‘season of corruption scandals’ certainly did not leave the electorate reassured. But looking at neoliberalism as something that is removed from its social contexts, as Zakaria does in his essay, only lets campaigns such as Modi’s reframe the narrative to conceal the reality on the ground, that neither these policies nor Modi’s approach ensure ‘inclusivity.’ Zakaria himself says “Economic growth has created one more common element in the country—an urban middle class whose interests transcend region, caste, and religion,” which begs us to question, what about those communities that are being left behind? What is even more problematic with the Modi campaign and the BJP is that in addition to ‘lower’ class and caste communities being left behind, the BJP’s Hindutva connection reframes neoliberal development into a development of Hindu communities by a) emphasizing the superiority of the ‘Hindu’ identity; b) deliberately leaving other minority communities behind.

Hence, it is important to scrutinize (as some news outlets, such as the ones I have referenced above, have been doing) the rhetoric of the Modi campaign to ensure that development is not presented as an abstract concept that would render certain communities voiceless.

Austerity and the Language of Sacrifice

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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Journalists frequently invoke the language of sacrifice when describing the consequences of the austerity measures currently being implemented in Britain and across much of Europe. Similarly, politicians have long recognized the rhetorical force of the word ‘sacrifice’, but they often find more subtle ways of embedding the language of sacrifice within speeches by fusing their rhetoric with sacred symbols and ideals which derive their power from longstanding notions of national identity. Thus national symbols that have traditionally garnered powerful sentiments of loyalty to the state are rhetorically translated into an implied sense of fidelity to the prevailing political ideology of the present. In his recent speech at the opening of Parliament, David Cameron made a quick transition from acknowledging fallen British soldiers who “have made the ultimate sacrifice” while fighting in Afghanistan to applauding the government for cutting the national deficit by a third. The implication seems to be that, like the good soldiers who died for their country, British citizens must also be willing to make great sacrifices in order to secure the economic future of their nation. By juxtaposing the deaths of British soldiers with the supposed success of his economic policies, Cameron unwittingly reveals the extent to which the sacrificial rhetoric of austerity is invariably associated with very real human costs. In terms of the UK government’s current policies, these costs are directly linked to an erosion of socio-economic rights in Britain.

The erosion of socio-economic rights that is currently underway is perhaps difficult to detect in the political discourse of austerity because its rationale is framed within the language of economic recovery. In recent speeches, Cameron has continually referred to the need for Britain to regain its competitiveness in the global marketplace. Improving Britain’s competitiveness means making it into the sort of place where corporations and investment firms want to do business. Two of the most direct ways of accomplishing this aim are cutting corporate tax rates and creating what is often referred to as a ‘more flexible labour market.’ Although economists may suggest that there are complex theoretical and mathematical contingencies underlying these institutional policies, the sacrificial logic of these two issues is not difficult to ascertain. Within the so-called developed economies of the West, corporations do not equate to the job producing powerhouses of manufacturing that once drove the industrial economy. The most profitable industries are banking and finance, and thus corporate tax breaks equate to lightening the tax burdens for the very institutions that played a significant part in bringing about the financial crisis in the first place.

Creating ‘a more flexible labour market’ is essentially economic jargon for reducing the employment protection legislation which ensures that employees are treated fairly and paid appropriately. A recent report from the OECD suggests that changes to employment protection legislation which make it easier for employers to terminate jobs should be accompanied by the development of public policies such as job-search assistance programmes and unemployment benefits that help to minimize the social impact of unemployment. A combination of public spending cuts and loosening of employment protection legislation has contributed to even greater economic uncertainty for many workers in Britain. If the current government’s policies are implemented, Britain will be according to one perspective a better place to do business, but it will be a rotten place to work.

As it stands, the conflict between society’s commitment to social welfare and the maintenance of the financial services industry is at the forefront of political debates in Britain and across the globe. And although it seems that these debates are more fierce than ever, from the earliest times the pursuit of money has had a polarizing effect upon society not simply because it goes hand-in-hand with the attainment of social status, but perhaps most importantly because the accumulation of wealth is also a means of securing political power. In his pseudo-historical novel Picture This, Joseph Heller explores the inherent antagonism that exists between the culture of speculative investment and the pursuit of the public good. In Heller’s own vitriolic fashion, the novel’s narrator describes the sociological and cultural consequences of the invention of money:

With the invention of money by the Lydians in the seventh century before Christ the possibility of profit spread, and as soon as there was profit, there were people who wanted to make it, more than they wanted to make anything else. And whenever there is more money to be made from money than from anything else, the energies of the state are likely to be devoted increasingly to the production of money, for which there is no community need, to the exclusion of those commodities that are required for health and well-being, and contemplation. . . . There will be many who flourish in this environment of finance, and a great many more who can go straight to hell (1989, 55–56).

Contrary to the fundamental doctrine of economic liberalism which maintains that in the free market everyone is a winner, Heller’s narrative highlights the ways in which the pursuit of monetary wealth within a society has a tendency to draw the energies of the state away from matters of social well-being and redirect its political energy towards the maintenance of financial institutions. The speculative activities that pervade the ‘environment of finance’ result not only in a highly unstable economic basis for society, but the inevitable costs associated with these activities, in the end, come at the expense of public funds formerly dedicated to the welfare of the state. Thus, according to Heller’s account, the ‘environment of finance’ that is made possible through the invention of money is not only presented as a risky basis upon which to build a nation’s economy, but most importantly, such speculative activity  has a deleterious effect upon the socio-economic rights that are essential to a civil society.

The literary critic Ian Gregson suggests that a pervasive theme in Heller’s work is the “impact of institutions on what is conventionally taken to be ‘the individual’—how thoroughly the supposed autonomy of that individual is compromised by far larger political and cultural forces”(2008, 31). In Picture This, the narrator’s suggestion that those who do not flourish in a world dominated by the uncertainties of the environment of finance “can go straight to hell” could be considered more than merely a crass turn of phrase. In reality, those who end up the casualties of market forces not only suffer financially, but they also suffer a loss of political and social agency in a culture where wealth has become a measure of personhood. Falling off the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder is tantamount to a descent into hell. Meanwhile the financial institutions and administrative overseers who facilitated these exchanges have only been subject to legal action in a handful of extreme cases. Their redemption, it seems, is predicated upon the fact of their irreplaceability—the environment of finance assumes the status of a self-perpetuating system that constantly seeks to transform every loss into a gain by shifting the sacrificial costs of its own existence onto a substratum of society to whom it bears no binding moral obligations.

Since the beginning of the credit crisis in 2008, austerity measures targeted at reducing public spending and supposedly stimulating economic growth have resulted in a substantial erosion of socio-economic rights in Britain and throughout the European Union. In his 1974 study of Third World socio-economic development and political ethics, Peter Berger claims that “The history of mankind is a history of pain” (1974, 163). And he describes the principles that guide politicians in the development of economic policy as a “calculus of pain.” Decisions that often result in actual physical and psychological trauma are considered “in terms of costs and benefits, of input and output.” According to Berger, “Such analysis is typically very technical, and generally borrows concepts and techniques from economics, even where non-economic phenomena are involved” (1974, 164). Most importantly, he points out the rather obvious but nonetheless crucial fact that underlying the economic data on unemployment and income distribution there is the reality of human suffering and death.

In a recent study of the impact of austerity on public health inequalities, researchers concluded that “the burden of budget cuts is falling most greatly on disabled, low-income and unemployed persons”(Reeves et al. 2013). Focusing primarily on already economically depressed parts of the United Kingdom, the study reports a substantial increase in suicide rates which correlates with increased rates of unemployment particularly among public sector workers. It also predicts that changes to disability allowances and housing benefits will have a detrimental effect upon individuals who are already among the most economically deprived in Britain. Consequently, the study concludes that “austerity policies can be expected to impact health in several ways, each difficult to reverse or avoid in the absence of strong social safety nets” (Reeves et al. 2013, 4). These findings point to the real costs underlying the sacrificial rhetoric of austerity. The socio-economic rights which have arguably served to define Britain as a civil society are currently under threat, but it remains to be seen whether or not the nation will seek a viable alternative to the risky sacrificial games that must be played in the ‘environment of finance.’ Reflecting upon the internecine conflicts that plagued Western Europe in the 16th century, the narrator of Picture This notes that “If they were fighting over money, Aristotle could have told them that it was not worth the struggle” (Heller 1989, 186). If money alone is not worth the struggle, then perhaps it is time to ask Aristotle what is.

Works Cited:

Berger, Peter L. 1974. Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Gregson, Ian. 2008. “Joseph Heller’s Allegories of Money.” In Character and Satire in Post War Fiction, 31–53. London: Continuum.

Heller, Joseph. 1989. Picture This. London: Pan Books; Picador.

Reeves, Aaron, Sanjay Basu, Martin McKee, Michael Marmot, and David Stuckler. 2013. “Austere or Not? UK Coalition Government Budgets and Health Inequalities.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (September 11)

Critical Politics

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Our blog ‘critical religion’ receives contributions from many people, and they usually have the terms ‘critical’ and ‘religion’ in them somewhere. Some are much more clearly theorised than that. My own understanding of ‘critical religion’ is specific. For me, ‘critical religion’ is always about ‘religion and related categories’, because I argue that religion is not a stand-alone category, but is one of a configuration of categories. On its own, ‘religion’ has no object; it only seems to do so. Religion is a category that is deployed for purposes of classification, but it does not stand in a one-to-one relationship with any observable thing in the world. In modern discourse, ‘religion’ works as half a binary, as in ‘religion and secular’ or ‘religion and [secular] politics’. When we talk about religion today, there is always a tacit exclusion of whatever is considered to be non-religious. If, for example, we talk about religion and politics, we have already assumed they refer to different things, and to mutually incompatible ones at that. Politics is secular, which means non-religious. Religion is separate from politics. If the two get mixed up and confused, then there is a problem.

One thing to notice here is that there has been a massive historical slippage from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. What started in the 17th century as an ‘ought’ – viz. there ought to be a distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘political society’ – has long become an assumption about the way the world actually is. In public discourse we have become used to talking as if ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ refer to two essentially different aspects of the real world, that we intuitively know what a religion is and what politics is, and we imagine that if we wanted to take the trouble we could define their essential differences. And yet of course the rhetorical construct of ‘ought’ keeps appearing, as for example when we insist that a nation that does not have a constitutional separation of religion and politics is undeveloped or backward; or when Anglican Bishops make moral pronouncements that seem uncomfortably ‘political’.

But what does ‘politics’ actually refer to? If the meaning of a word is to be found in its use, then we surely all know the meaning of ‘politics’. We use the term constantly. We have an intuitive understanding about what politics is. If we didn’t, how would we be able to deploy the term with such self-assurance? How, without understanding the term, would we be able to communicate about our shared and contested issues? We discourse constantly about politics, whether in private, or in the media, in our schools and universities, or in our ‘political’ institutions – and we surely all know which of our institutions are the political ones. Careers are made in politics. We join political parties, or we become politicians, or we enrol and study in departments of political science, and read and write textbooks on the topic. How could there be a political science if we did not know what politics is? There are journalists and academics that specialise in politics, journals dedicated to politics, distinct associations and conferences for its study, and thousands of books written and published about politics. Historians research the politics of the past. There is a politics industry. There are commercial companies that analyse and provide data on the topic of politics. Media organisations employ many people to produce programmes dedicated to politics and to political analysis, discussion and debate.

Yet the ubiquity of politics is our problem. For politics and the political is so universal that it is difficult to pin it down. Are there any domains of human living that cannot and are not described as being political, as pertaining to politics? If we try to find some definitive use of the terms ‘politics’ and ‘political’ by searching through popular and academic books, newspapers, TV representations, or the discourses on politics on the internet, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that everything is politics or political. We can find representations of the politics of abortion, the politics of hunger, church politics, the politics of sectarianism, political Islam, the politics of universities and university departments, the politics of medieval Japan, the politics of the Roman or the Mughal empires, the politics of slavery, class politics, the politics of caste in colonial and contemporary India, the politics of Native Americans in the 16th century, the politics of ancient Babylon, the politics of marriage, the politics of Constitutions, and so on and on. And we surely know that politics is as ancient as the hills.

This apparent universality of the political, its lack of boundaries, seems to place a question mark around its semantic content. If we cannot say what is not politics, then how can we give any determinate content or meaning to the term? This lack of boundaries can also be seen in the problem of demarcating a domain of politics from other domains such as ‘religion’ and ‘economics’. If we try to find a clear distinction between politics and religion, we find a history of contestation, but one that only seems to go back to the 17th century – a point to which I return in a moment. We find claims that politics and religion have – or ought to have – nothing to do with each other, yet in contemporary discourse we find many references to the politics of religion, and also to the religion of politics.

The term ‘political economy’ also points us towards this problem of demarcation. Some universities have departments of politics, some have departments of economics, and some have departments of political economy. How are they distinguished? This is especially perplexing when one finds books written by specialists on the politics of economics, as well as on the economics of politics. Add in works on the religion of politics and the politics of religion; or the religion of economics and the economics of religion: we seem to have a dog’s dinner of categories. You notice these things when you read outside your normal disciplinary boundaries.

It is also of interest that all of these can and are described as sciences: viz. the science of politics, the science of religion, and the science of economics. We cannot in practice easily if at all distinguish between the categories on which these putative sciences are based. Yet all of them have their own specialist departments, degree courses, journals, associations and conferences.

Another point is that all these ‘sciences’, based on concepts so difficult to distinguish and demarcate, are ‘secular’, in the sense of non-religious. Describing a science or discipline as secular reminds us that we have another demarcation problem. If all secular practices and institutions are defined as non-religious and therefore in distinction to ‘religion’, we need to have some reasonably clear understanding about what we mean by religion to be able to make the distinction in the first place. Without such an understanding, how would we know what ‘non-religious’ means? This paradox is magnified when we consider that for many centuries ‘secular’ has referred mainly to the ‘secular priesthood’ in the Catholic Church, and the priesthood are hardly non-religious in the modern sense.

We thus find that in everyday discussions and debates, and also in the more specialist discourses, we deploy concepts with a largely unquestioned confidence that on further consideration seems unfounded. Speaking personally, I entered academic work through religious studies, also known as the science (or scientific study) of religion, the history of religions, or the plain study of religions. Yet I cannot tell you what religion is, or what the relation between [singular] religion and [plural] religions is. I have made it a point over many years of tracking down a wide range of definitions of religion, and found them to be contradictory and circular. There is no agreed definition of the subject that so many experts claim to be researching and writing about. I suggest this is the situation in politics as well. Attempts that I have read to define politics, for example in text-books written for students of politics, seem always to be circular in the sense that they define politics in terms of political attributes, just as religions are defined in terms of religious attributes.

I suggest that the perceived self-evidence of politics as a meaningful category derives from an inherent ambiguity – and in this it is a mirror-image to religion. On the one hand, the term ‘politics’ generally simply means ‘power’ or ‘contestations of power’, and since power is probably one of the few universals in human relations we can see why it might appear intuitively convincing. However, on that understanding, it is difficult to see what is not about politics, because it can surely be argued that all human relations have always been about contestations of power. We gain such ubiquity at the expense of meaning. Surely, political science has a more specific and determinate meaning than power studies? You might just as well say that the study of politics is the study of humanity.

Our sense that there is a more determinate nuance seems justified when we discover that the discourse on ‘politics’ has a specific genesis in the English language in the 17th century. Though we can find a few (probably very few) references to ‘politicians’ in Elizabethan drama, ‘politics’ is even rarer, and I cannot find a sustained discourse on politics as a distinct domain of human action earlier than John Locke’s late 17th century distinctions, developed in his Treatises on Government, between ‘man in the state of nature’ and ‘political society’. Here Locke explicitly distinguishes between man in the state of nature and political or civil society on the one hand; and also between politics and religion on the other. In his religion-politics binary, Locke links politics to the outer, public order of the magistrate and governance, and religion to the inner, private relation of the individual to God. (What he means by ‘god’ is itself a conundrum, for the evidence is that, like Newton, he was a heretic, either a Unitarian or a Socinian. ‘God’ is another of those endlessly contested categories. If you try to define ‘religion’ as ‘belief in god’, you find yourself in another infinite regress of meanings).

It seems significant that this politics-religion binary is a modern, Enlightenment one, because Locke was arguing against the dominant understanding of Religion at the time. For his own reasons he wanted to reimagine ‘religion’. When the term religion was used at all (rarer than today) it meant Christian truth, and there was no clear sense (despite Locke’s claims) that Christian truth was not about power, or that it was separated from governance. The King was the sacred head and heart of the Christian Commonwealth, and what fell outside religion in this dominant sense was not a neutral non-religious domain but pagan irrationality and barbarity. In other words, what fell outside religion in the dominant sense of his day was still defined theologically and biblically in terms of The Fall. His privatization of religion to make way for a public domain of political society was an ideologically-motivated claim about how we ought to think about religion, not a neutral description of some objective facts.

It was especially in his attempt to legitimate new concepts of private property, and the rights of (male) property owners to representation, that Locke needed to completely revise people’s understanding of ‘religion’ as a private affair of the inner man (women were not much in the picture), in order to demarcate an essentially different domain called political society. This new binary found its way into written constitutions in North America, and is now naturalised in common speech and common sense. Today it seems counter-intuitive to question the reality of politics as a distinct domain of human practice. But this rhetorical construction was deeply resisted. Even the French Revolution did not succeed in formally separating religion and the state until the end of the 19th century. England was an Anglican confessional state until well into the 19th century.

Locke’s formulation was thoroughly ideological but has become naturalised through repeated rhetorical construction until now it seems to be ‘in the nature of things’. I suggest that, whenever we use the term politics with intuitive ease we catch ourselves and ask, in what sense am I using the term? Am I using it in the universal sense of ubiquitous power and contestations of power in all human relations? Or as referring to a specific ideological formation of modernity underpinning a historically-emergent form of private property-ownership and representation of (male) property interests? The elided slippage between the historically and ideologically specific formulation, and the empty ubiquity of ‘power’ as a universal in all human relations, lends the term its illusory quality of intuitive common sense.

Critical Religion and Economic Discourse

06 Monday May 2013

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In Britain and throughout much of Europe, the “age of austerity” persists. Likewise in America the economic future remains enveloped in political turmoil and fiscal uncertainty. It appears that the western world has begrudgingly entered a new economic age. The ever-changing predictions of economic advisers and politicians have in many cases proven to be little more than fruitless surmising.  Like Samuel Beckett’s Estragon, who removes his boot anticipating some hidden object to appear from the emptiness within, politicians in Britain and America have desperately sought to relieve themselves of the collective weight of national deficits and public spending only to find that despite these efforts—“There is nothing to show.” As difficult economic decisions are contentiously deferred in the hope of better times to come, it is perhaps worth considering the possibility that like Godot the economic stability we long for is not destined to arrive. Notwithstanding our present difficulties, now is not the time to adopt a position of economic apocalypticism.

While political factions in Britain and America struggle to reassert the social and economic hierarchies of the past, scholars from numerous disciplines have begun to vigorously investigate alternatives to the prevailing ideologies which have underwritten western society’s approaches to managing the costs of existence. If scholars working in the humanities have something to say about cultural production and the values of contemporary society, then it seems more than reasonable that they may be capable of making important contributions to current economic debates. Critical Religion may be able to offer certain intellectual resources for critiquing the political and economic models which are currently being outstripped. But in order to open up the field of economics to alternative modes of discourse, it is necessary to challenge the intellectual and disciplinary boundaries which have historically served to distance modern socio-economic theory from other forms of intellectual inquiry.

In an essay entitled “Knowing Our Limits” (2010), Rowan Williams suggests that executing a theological incursion into the field of economics entails a critical investigation of the language and epistemological assumptions which constitute the study of economics:

In asking whether economics and theology represent two different worlds, we need to be aware of the fact that a lot of contemporary economic language and habit doesn’t only claim a privileged status for economics on the grounds that it works by innate laws to which other considerations are irrelevant.  It threatens to reduce other sorts of discourse to its own terms—to make a bid for one world in which everything reduces to one set of questions (2010, p.20).

Williams’ assessment of the totalizing force of economic discourse may just as easily be applied to his own discipline of theology—formerly known as the “The Queen of the Sciences”. To avoid a mere inversion of the relationship between economics and theology, the notion of Critical Religion provides a vital starting point for examining the heterogeneity that exists between seemingly disparate modes of secular and religious discourse. One way of challenging the privileged status of economic theory is to excavate the theological and religious principles upon which this supposedly secular science has been established. In doing so it may be possible to uncover the ways that religion and secularity are at times complicit in western society’s efforts to construct and justify social and economic hierarchies.

It is not coincidental that the field of Critical Religion has emerged during a time of religious as well as economic crisis. Times of crisis have the potential to instigate positive cultural and intellectual transformations. Presently, the absolute triumph of so-called secular reason over religious faith has not only failed to come to pass in western society; religion and secularity have found themselves in a common state of disarray. Over the past decade, the secularization thesis has not been proven false because religious thinkers and secularists have somehow made peace with one another; instead, the economic and political foundations underlying the conflict between these mimetic foes have shifted dramatically.

Influential thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and numerous others have already begun to explore the notion of post-secularity as a way of describing not simply the historical epoch which has followed postmodernity, but rather the specific challenges that religious and secular institutions currently face as they renegotiate their claims to moral truth and political authority. Noting the frustration which many theorists, critics, philosophers, and economists experience when faced with the problem of religion’s survival, Hent de Vries argues, “The post-secular condition and its corresponding intellectual stance consist precisely in acknowledging this ‘living-on’ of religion beyond its prematurely announced and celebrated deaths” (2006, p.7). Because religion survives within contemporary society in increasingly spectral forms, De Vries suggests that “In order to track its movements, new methodological tools and sensibilities are needed” (2006, p.7). In his recent book On the Sacred (2012), Gordon Lynch takes up the task of elaborating a new approach to detecting the continuing presence of religion in society. Lynch reconfigures the traditional opposition between religion and secularity by arguing that various manifestations of the sacred form the basis of all social life. The sacred, according to Lynch, may be defined “by what people collectively experience as absolute, non-contingent realities that exert unquestionable moral claims over the meaning and conduct of their lives” (2012, p.32). He argues that human rights, the responsibility of caring for children, and nationalism, may all be considered sacred forms which are common to both religious and secular life.

However, the category of the sacred does not simply represent that which society seeks to protect or preserve—as the work of René Girard has so effectively evinced, the sacred also represents that which is unquestionably sacrificable. In a sacrificial economy, the individuals who are most likely to suffer at the expense of prevailing notions of the sacred are those who exist on the margins of society. The practice of Critical Religion not only offers certain intellectual benefits which comes from exploring the boundaries between various disciplines; but it also offers an opportunity to respond to a pressing social responsibility to critically question the strategies by which religious and secular communities have sought to secure for themselves a tomorrow which is less than certain for many. By acknowledging the heterogeneity of religion and the ambivalence of so many cultural manifestations of the sacred, Critical Religion is capable of bringing to light the myths and rituals which underwrite our most problematic forms of economic decision-making.

In his contemplation of the future of religious poetry in a post-secular age, the poet Michael Symmons Roberts suggests that the intellectual relativism that characterized much of the literary and academic discourse of postmodernism has declined in recent years—“Politically and financially the world is a volatile place, and relativism will no longer do. Above all, perhaps, our exit from the hall of mirrors is driven by ecological concerns. Relativism simply collapses in this context” (2008, p.71). Moral and intellectual relativism is of course not the solitary contribution of those various strands of cultural and critical theory which have come to represent postmodernism. However, Roberts’ larger point remains important: the most significant epistemological questions of our time are inspired by all too real ontological challenges. In this regard, the field of Critical Religion is uniquely positioned to apply the modes of critique and cultural analysis, which are the legacy of postmodern discourse, to the task of elaborating alternative ways of inhabiting a world where existence costs.

The breadth of Critical Religion

09 Friday Nov 2012

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We have asked Timothy Fitzgerald to write a short piece reflecting on why we want to broaden the Critical Religion work that we are doing, and so he seeks here to examine the wider significance of Critical Religion.

The relevance of Critical Religion

The first issue to mention is relevance: that ‘critical religion’ is not only concerned with ‘religion’ as a category, or with religious studies as a discipline. We are equally concerned with other leading categories such as ‘politics’, ‘economics’, ‘political economy’, and the ‘nonreligious secular’. In fact one element of our position is that these apparently separate categories are really parts of a system of representations which have no meaning in themselves, but rely on an under-lying binary construction with the religion-secular dichotomy as its constitutional expression. What we have developed is a theory, a method and an attitude towards the critical deconstruction of modern categories. We therefore claim relevance for interdisciplinary work throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences. This is because we are questioning the ideological components in the disciplinary structures of the academy as a whole, and the ways these act for the maintenance of liberal mythology more widely.

When someone says or writes that they are studying ‘politics’, for example, we have our own line of questions about what this could mean. The questions are rather similar to the ones we would ask if someone claimed to be studying ‘religion’ (or economics). This approach converges well with – but goes constructively further than – much critical and postcolonial theory. Yet it makes unwelcome reading (judging by some of the reactions which have been encountered) for those who are deeply invested already in the established disciplinary structures, and feel that their careers might be damaged if they question the basic assumptions which their discipline works with.

We have sympathy with academics in that position, but the logic of argument raises problems with the arbitrariness of many over-lapping domains. It suggests that the divisions which keep academics corralled in separate departments, journals, conferences, and professional organizations share at least one rarely acknowledged purpose, which is to stop us noticing each other’s work. Specialization, say between ‘religion’, ‘economics’ and ‘politics’, reifies segments as though each had an independent reality of its own, related by only by externalities, rather than by an organic encompassment of all analytical parts in the whole. We are thus encouraged to proceed in a way reminiscent of the Indian fable of the blind persons each holding one part of an elephant. The one holding the trunk or the tail or the hoof or the ear will imagine the whole in terms of that part. This presumably (and to stretch the metaphor) is what is meant by ‘the elephant in the room’, when all one has is the trunk or the tail or the ear or some other part of the joined-up anatomy of the organic whole in one’s hands.

A term like politics is sufficiently ubiquitous to appear as an intuitive reality of everyday life. Through the eyes of politics specialists, just about everything will seem political. To me the category looks like an ideological place-holder for whatever the dominant interests require from its deployment. By looking at the historical processes whereby the modern categories religion and politics were invented through mutual exclusion since the late 17th century, we can see how an illusion of positive knowledge arises. The emergence of political economy as a secular science complicates but adds additional force to our account.

We would therefore welcome contributions from colleagues in politics, or economics, or any other discipline such as International Relations to explore this. We are not looking for some kind of illusory feel-good victory, but for dialectical innovation through shared work with any colleague in any discipline who understands (but does not necessarily agree with) our paradigm.

Self-regulating markets, the All-Male Holy Trinity, and other Divinities

One feature of our own standpoint is that markets are the mystified objects of a faith-system not essentially different from what are typically classified as ‘religious’ beliefs. We agree with the position of activists in the global pressure group On the Commons, that the emergence of the myth of political economy as the ‘really real’ is a grave and present danger to global survival. The concept of self-regulating markets may be as incomprehensible to us as the Holy Trinity appears to have been to Isaac Newton and John Locke – both apparently anti-Trinitarians – even though to believers in both cases such doctrinal formulations have been inherited or adopted as the real truth. The theology of liberation through the self-regulating market – a theology represented (without a trace of irony) as the science of economics – requires for its self-realisation the methodical (or unmethodical) destruction of what Karl Polanyi referred to as the ‘social substance’. Polanyi published his book The Great Transformation in 1944, the same year as another important book, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, which had such an influence on Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the IMF and so on. Neo-liberal readings of this and other works published by the Austrian school (see, for example the excellent Ludwig von Mises webpage) can be connected historically and theoretically to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, whose activities have been described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.

These books represent two powerful but very different readings of the historical emergence of liberal economic ideology. The central difference being that Hayek (unlike Polanyi) thinks markets are spontaneously emergent forces of nature which were ‘discovered’ by Richard Cantillon or Adam Smith sometime in the early 18th or even late 17th century. Polanyi instead narrates the often violent processes (very close to what Marxists mean by primitive accumulation) whereby powerful people passed laws which created artificial markets through dispossession of the means of subsistence. These processes continue today on a vast scale – some readers may have visited a country like India and witnessed its truly shocking disparities of wealth, and the huge social dislocations which have been occurring there as a result of the globalising mischief of market dogma and the ideological illusions that self-maximisers and self-regulating markets are the natural, rational, unavoidable and unstoppable conditions for progress and liberty. A central aim of this webpage is to identify and interrogate the globalising discursive mechanism behind the production of this naturalized orthodoxy.

What is politics?

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

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In thinking about politics, a chance encounter with an excellent pedagogical website at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, College of Arts and Sciences provides me with a starting point. In order to help students to write essays on “Political Science” and other topics, The Writing Center performs a valuable on-line service to pedagogy, a service which can be appreciated and profited from by readers, students and also lecturers such as myself in different parts of the world. Much of the practical advice on writing essays is excellent, and shows a high level of pedagogical competence. And they do this for a whole range of subjects, not only Politics. However, the advice given by the Writing Center embeds an uncritical and widely disseminated discourse about politics which in turn reflects the dominant structure of faculties in the university and the wider assumptions of modern America. These assumptions may be internalised and adopted by students in many different countries. My comments are not intended as criticism of the services offered by that webpage. My concern is both more general and more specific than this, with the theoretical and methodological problems in isolating and defining a domain of politics or political science in the first place.

The Writing Center at Chapel Hill has posted the following student-friendly hand-out on its webpage explaining what politics is:

At its most basic level, politics is the struggle of “who gets what, when, how.” This struggle may be as modest as competing interest groups fighting over control of a small municipal budget or as overwhelming as a military stand-off between international superpowers.

Politics is here characterized in terms of “struggle”, “interest groups”, and “fighting over control”.  Political science is constituted by the description and analysis of such struggles. This summary of politics, necessarily brief given the practical task of essay writing, but one which might be reproduced in many student essays around the world, indicates a specific domain characterised by conflict and competition over resources which might have been the subject matter of economics, human geography, social anthropology, religious studies and other disciplines as well. Furthermore, this characterization of politics in terms of competition over scarce resources may imply an assumption about ‘human nature’ which could itself be contested. It could be, for instance, that some historically-identifiable orders of power and theories of the good life have legitimated practices which promote radically different conceptions of human flourishing. While it is probably true that human life has always been characterized by contestations of power and conflict over resources, it should be held as a possibility that the contemporary celebration of individualistic self-interest requires an ideological illusion to make it seem more credible than alternative systems of collective representations. We can observe this very explicitly in modern liberal economic ideology, which, by placing self-interest at the centre of its theorizations, seems to have  greatly contributed to the very conditions of inequality, scarcity and want that economists hope to ameliorate. Its promotion of an ideology of individual self-interest, and the globalizing liberal belief that selfishness and greed promote an overall harmony of interests, may itself be partly the cause of the massive impoverishment of vast numbers struggling for survival in so-called developing nations, and the rapid degradation of the environment. Unfortunately, faith in progress acts as an ideological filter which makes the possibility of falsifying the paradigm seem counter-intuitive. It is in the context of these thoughts that I will go on in future blogs to ask why political theorists incessantly remind us that our ‘political’ categories come etymologically from Greek, and that Aristotle is the one who gave us the basis for modern political theory.

What then do political scientists do?

According to the advice given by the Writing Center at Chapel Hill,

Political scientists study such struggles, both small and large, in an effort to develop general principles or theories about the way the world of politics works.

This raises at least two significant issues.  Firstly, we might ask: in what sense does such a world of politics exist? “The world of politics” is not itself an observable phenomenon but a more-or-less arbitrary demarcation of the spectrum of human agency.  I say arbitrary, because – like the equally indeterminate ‘world of religion’,  there are no boundaries to what can and cannot be described as politics. There are no objective  limits, independent of the agent’s own imagined assumptions, which can tell you where a political practice ends and a religious or economic (etc.) practice begins. When I say ‘the agent’s own imagined assumptions’, I do not mean a purely subjective, solipsistic imaginary. I mean that there are no boundaries existing independently of what specific dominant interest groups and their control of media of communication declare there to be. For example, when Jefferson made his Declaration of Independence, it was precisely that, a declaration. He and a growing class of like-minded Americans were articulating an aspiration, not a fact. He was rhetorically promulgating a new imaginary world order. This new world order would be characterised by nation states protected from ‘religion’ by written constitutions which declare human rights. These human rights are part of the inherently rational order of the world, and are delivered to us through natural reason unfettered by traditional religious superstitions which deny such freedoms.

This Lockean imaginaire, which is encapsulated in his concept of ‘the state of nature’,* is essentially no different from a powerful myth which acts as a charter for action.  So when political scientists claim to be describing and analyzing the world of politics, I take it that they too are really making a proclamation about a world which ought to exist, rather than making objective descriptions about a world independent of our desires and intentions. They are in effect inventing and re-inventing ‘politics’ as they speak about it. I feel the same scepticism about the existence of such a world as I feel when religionists claim to be describing and analyzing a world of religion. I have discussed many cases of these apparently factual descriptions about religion which, on closer inspection, turn out to be constructing the objects of their own research. Beneath the blarney of neutral objectivity and precise description and analysis, they are constructing and reconstructing the imagined objects themselves, a reified idealization ‘politics’ which depends on the (often unconscious) exclusion of a mirror-image construction of another reified idealization, ‘religion’.

The second significant issue that I want to raise here relates to the question of objectivity and the question of ‘science’.  I will discuss this in the next blog posting. I also want to discuss the origins of ‘political theory’ in Aristotle, and why, despite the etymological connections which are incessantly flagged up by those looking for a respectable origin for their discipline,  modern politics seems to have little to do with the Greek master.

* Locke develops his concept of ‘man in the state of nature’ in various works, especially his Two Treatises on Government (1688 [1690]).  It is an exercise in theoretical abstraction intended to show that his own belief in the values of liberal individualism is justified within his interpretation of natural law and natural reason. In short, the liberal bourgeois myth of the rational individual as the source of all value is given narrative shape in the form of Adam and his descendants. Elements of the Lockean myth are derived from various empirical sightings of Native Americans and other colonized peoples about whom he speculates.