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Tag Archives: John Locke

Critical Politics

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

categories, church, Critical Religion, economics, India, Japan, John Locke, politics, religion, secular

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.

What is politics?

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ Comments Off on What is politics?

Tags

Aristotle, economics, John Locke, politics, religion

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.

Recent blog postings:

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