Reflections on the relation between theory and practice for our times* Jayant Lele Queens University Kingston,

Canada

The telos of tolerance is truth (Marcuse 1965:90) Since the turn of the century a globally a sense of fear and uncertainty about life and livelihood has been spreading together with the polarization of populations along the affluence-deprivation axis. The end of the Cold War has brought not the anticipated golden age of perpetual peace and global prosperity but a period of random, turbulent and chaotic tensions, confrontations and wars between nations and peoples and an increase in organized non-state armed violence. The latter licenses the state to take unprecedented liberties with the rule of law. Together these trends destabilize the lives of ordinary citizens everywhere. There is an all encompassing global sense that this is an era in which unfathomable risks, pervasive uncertainty and endemic unpredictability haunt all our actions, individual or collective, private or public. Does political theory need to respond? What are the ways in which political practice and political theory have been affecting each other? The governing ideas of western political theory emerged during the European Enlightenment. Central among them were those of justice, equality and liberty. The development of natural sciences and a new understanding of reason as human reason, as opposed to divine reason, were the driving force.1 The Enlightenment was the last major
* I am grateful to Dr. Mangesh Kulkarni for his insightful comments, patient insistence and careful correctives throughout the preparation of this paper and to Drs. Radhika Desai, Amod Lele, Nissim Mannathukaren and Rajendra Singh for their thoughtful critical comments. I am alone responsible for the various inadequacies that still remain. 1 The European Enlightenment has remained organically linked, in the Western intellectual culture, to modernity, perceived as uniquely European in origin and understood as a break from tradition, as the end of something old and the beginning of something radically new. It is believed to have later spread to

marker for these ideas in the long process of transition from feudalism to capitalism. With the rapid growth of capitalism in the country where it first emerged and the triumph of its bourgeoisie as the ruling class, two relatively distinct traditions of interpretation of Enlightenment ideas emerged. The liberal tradition developed new, shifting and apologetic interpretations of liberty, equality and justice and thus affirmed the new sociopolitical and economic order.2 The liberal tradition treats the existing order as a system that can and will gradually reform itself from within through piecemeal adjustments to the institutional nexus of democracy and the rule of law. Reforms are believed to result in response to formal and informal pressures from citizens active in the public sphere. Theorys relationship to practice is mediated through the institutions of formal democracy. Its task is to reflect on the way they work and to reform them so as to enhance their capability. It is also expected to provide situation-specific reinterpretations of the basic principles (of liberty and equality) such as freedom of speech, electoral participation and open access to the public sphere for all citizens. Liberalism, in affirming the virtues of capitalist democracy, recognizes that the two, liberty and equality, must remain in a contradictory tension3 since it anchors liberty in private property which is treated as part of the natural order.

the rest of the world with varied consequences. The complex links between, the Enlightenment and capitalism and between the latter and thus conceived modernity are usually glossed over. This cultivated opacity in the western understanding of the very idea of modernity has now become thoroughly globalized. (Lele 2000:46-55).
2

Wood (2000:425) disentangles the Enlightenment project from the culture of capitalism. The country in which capitalism triumphed much before Western Europe was England. She points out that while commentators will often talk about English influences on, or precursors of the Enlightenment (such as Bacon, Locke or Newton), there is in our scholarly conventions no English Enlightenment. This is explainable by the fact of the presence of capitalism in England and its absence elsewhere. When the universalistic, egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment came within the orbit of capitalism, the English and Locke in particular were indeed pioneers in constructing a theoretical justification of inequality on a foundation of natural equality. 3 Barber (2004: ix) refers, in a rhetorical flourish, to a delicately dialectical relationship between liberty and equality, community and the individual and between participatory and representative democracy. They maintain a precarious balance in liberal democracy. He does not see that the balance, already reduced to formal (political) equality and liberty, swings away from equality with cyclical turns and crises in the fortunes of capital.

Private property as the prerequisite of individual liberty features in all versions of liberalism. The most emphatic claims are utilitarian and link organically to the defense of capitalism in consequentialist terms: it fosters growth, guarantees liberty and upholds justice. It accepts those moral and legal rules which promote happiness. It projects a benign and virtuous capitalist free market order of production and exchange as the guarantor of greatest amount of aggregate societal welfare. Objections to the utilitarian doctrine have come, within the liberal tradition, from those who argue that utilitarian political and economic practice is prone to sacrificing the wellbeing of some individuals to achieve aggregate welfare and thus a source of injustice. They justify private property rights as natural, through a number of assumptions about nature, society and human nature, the most basic of which is the notion of an autonomous rational (and moral) individual. The critical tradition, on the other hand, recognizes the potential inherent in capitalism to eliminate want and oppression for humankind but also its inherent incapacity to do so from within.4 It points to the contradiction between labor and capital and between wages and profits as the necessary driving force of capitalist development. The only way to simultaneously and fully actualize the potential for liberty and equality is, therefore, its transcendence through transformative action. The concept of crisis underscores critical theorys relation to practice. Its tasks: to analyze the situation as it exists but in terms of what it can be and is not, to specify when possible, those whose everyday experience5 may motivate them to identify the

For the liberal view is generally characterized by the belief that the system is not really total in that sense, that we can ameliorate it, reorganize it, and regulate it in such a way that it becomes tolerable and we thereby have the best of both worlds (Jameson 1999:207). 5 The relationship between experience, an awareness of its contradictory nature and a sufficiently intense need or desire to overcome it is not automatic. Where critical theory remains only at the level of ideology critique, it can be justly criticized, as by Rorty (1998:227) or Habermas (1979:96-97). Where parodying of contradictions has become a way of life, as among pacified citizens of affluent capitalist societies, mere immanent critique of the old paradigm is rather ineffective. Robert Lynd made the point in 1939. He gave us a list of the wealth of contradictory assumptions that Americans have learnt to live with. It includes such gems as: patriotism and public service are fine things, but a man has to look after himself or the American judicial system ensures justice to every man, rich or poor but a man is a fool not to hire the best lawyer he can afford, and, of course, honesty is the best policy but business is business. The task for

contradiction between what is and what can be, to analyze the crisis conditions under which it mostly occurs, to engage them in dialogue and thus act as a catalyst in the acceleration of reflection and action towards emancipation. Marxs critique of political economy explained crises in capitalist societies as the inevitable outcomes of the fundamental contradiction between social production and private appropriation, between labour and capital, in short, showed how they manifest themselves in all the dimensions of social life. The state and society both contribute to the resolution of crises. Each such resolution produces consequences from which neither can escape. The socio-political and subjective dimensions of such crises were further developed by Gramsci. What is often called a crisis of authority erupts when the ruling classes are no longer hegemonic. A class that no longer leads but merely dominates must exercise coercion; it can no longer rely on the consent of the masses. The masses, even though disenchanted with ruling ideologies, do not necessarily develop counterhegemonic ideas so as to act in order to transform the stagnant order with revolutionary acts. In such a situation, says Gramsci, when the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear (1971:276). The task of theory then is to expose the operative forces that lie hidden behind the malaise and not merely criticize or try to ameliorate the symptoms. It must seek the enlightenment of and with the victims of the malaise whose awareness of contradictions may, through such deliberations, lead to informed action. A major creative tension within the critical theory tradition is centered on the delicate dialectic between spontaneity and organization, agency and system or voluntarism and determinism. The self-reflexive nature of the tradition enables it to create imaginative and productive reinterpretations of major ideas for relevant understanding of the changing political practice.

theory is, therefore, to identify the likely moments of realization of discrepancies, namely the recurring cycles of the crisis of capitalist production.

An equally important and creatively disputed issue is that of the relationship to the past. Marxs own ideas appear, on a superficial reading, to display ambivalence and have often been interpreted as antagonistic to the past, as dead weight on the present that must be overthrown to usher in a new social order. A more sensitive reading by seminal thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch presents a nuanced view of Marxs thoughts on the revolutionary potential of the traces and memories of past traditions that remain alive, although in distorted forms in the present.7 I have been arguing for sometime along similar lines, mainly through a reinterpretation of Indian traditions. Tradition, any tradition, I suggest is capable of generating from within, under conditions of crisis, a critique of an oppressive social practice, as a critique of its legitimating ideology. Such critiques are grounded in a rational recognition of ideologically encrusted and practically denied potential social order. Where an adequate material basis for an epochal transition has emerged, it points to a concretely imaginable future in which existing oppressions can be overcome. Where such preconditions have yet to emerge a critique appeals to the anchoring principles of tradition and demands that unnecessary oppression, socio-culturally determined within the specific parameters of a given tradition, be abolished. Such an approach to the past requires that its excavation, within the context of a future-oriented understanding of the present, be undertaken through critical hermeneutic method (see Lele 1995, 2008).8 This reinterpretation of the past entails a reexamination of the concept of modernity. According to Marxs critical insight, human beings live simultaneously in the two worlds

This is most obvious in Marxs critique of religion. While he was firm in his conclusion that religion as an institution must be transcended in practice, his idea of transcendence is to be understood dialectically. It sustains the kernel of truth that animates the inherent human urge to remember, trust and believe and yet goes beyond the institutionally entrenched ideological trappings in which organized religion encrusts it with dogmatic and exclusive interpretations. 8 Militant identity politics invoke the past through selective reinterpretation and rearrangement of historical narratives and texts and use it for mobilizing large numbers with the promise of a return to the glorious past said to be full of virtues and values missing from the sordid socio-political order of the present times. The space is left wide open for such appropriation by a modernist tendency that dismisses tradition as an inert mass of past memories and nostalgia that obstructs the otherwise rational march of modernity towards greater material prosperity and even greater freedom, justice and equality for humankind.

of nature and culture, (in and as nature, in and as society), and as mindful bodily (sentient and sapient) beings, they live their biographies; make sense of nature, selves and of others, within the symbolizing universe of culture and society. The three defining elements of the human condition: ones self (as subjectivity), the relationship to other humans (as intersubjectivity) and to the life and matter that exists in and outside, before, after and beyond us, as the objective third, form a dialectical unity that varies and differentiates in response to or by changing material conditions. We live this creative tension, to borrow from and adapt Ricoeur (1986), in the growing awareness of our own finitude and the relative infinitude of nature and society into which we arrive and remain embedded but which we also make, through our everyday existence of creative social labor. With Ricoeur (1978:222) I also see as inherent to the human condition a struggle, within the self, between a believer and an atheist. However, unlike Ricoeur, I see the urge to suspect and to believe at the same time, as inherent to being human. It is not a unique property or condition of the Western woman/man of the post-Enlightenment age but a human attribute. It is the basis of our creative-reflexive endeavor to reach out to and shape both nature and society as creators of objects and meanings at the same time. This is human modernity. As social beings, we explore, confirm and question our selves and the world in our everyday experience. Thus understood, modernity is neither a gift nor a curse, as it is often depicted, from the West to the rest of humanity but a human attribute, a human faculty with which we suspect and believe. The Enlightenment thought also saw it as a universal human attribute and called it reason.9 One of the unique and profound expressions of human modernity came in Europes transition from feudalism to capitalism. It had epochal consequences, some rather disastrous, for the entire world. However, given its truncated self-understanding and its misunderstanding of the past, its own and that of other civilizations, its universality was abridged by the west through Eurocentric evolutionism. Modernity was thus turned into the Wests unfinished global project.
9

Habermas (1975:15) sums it up as our automatic inability not to learn.

This drastically abridged outline of the two traditions and their somewhat starkly opposed politics is my starting point for discussing political theory and its relationship to todays practice. We live today in such a prolonged period of crisis and a number of critical political economists have produced a detailed and varied account of the origins of the current crisis. The challenges that have emerged engulf all aspects of life. Today, two morbid symptoms constitute the most formidable challenge: economic and cultural fundamentalisms. I offer a brief sketch of the crisis and these two symptoms and follow it up with a brief discussion of the theories of three of the most distinguished political thinkers of our times: John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Jacque Derrida. All three have greatly influenced the way we make sense of the world of politics. All have produced incomparable outbursts of intellectual energy across disciplines. My selection is guided by their relationship to the critical theory tradition: with Rawls it was studied abstinence, with Habermas a matter of rich, varied and systematic withdrawal from once intense engagement and with Derrida, there was a single, forever delayed, encounter with Marx. I shall look specifically for their responses to the current crisis. The paper ends with some reflections on the adequacy of their responses. The three most pertinent aspects of global postwar political practice until the 1970s were: American hegemony, the Cold War rivalry and the primacy of the state in all Three Worlds of Development.10 Having emerged as the most powerful economic and military power in the world, the United States presented a new vision of a world order of peace and stability. The Soviet Union rose from the ravages of the war and posed a serious challenge to American hegemonic aspirations while struggles for national liberation contested colonialism. American hegemony rested, at this point, on countering the appeal of communism worldwide through promotion of development and democracy in the
10

Despite all their other differences the common feature of all three worlds, during this period, was the positive recognition of the role of the state as the monitor and the regulator if not the initiator and implementer of the strategies of rapid industrial growth (see, Esping-Andersen. 1990, Altvater 1993 and Worsley 1984).

Third World than on its coercive supremacy as a superpower (Silver and Arrighi 2003:329) since it saw clearly that the more the USSR extended its influence beyond its borders, the more territory would be lost to US capital (Desai 2007:448). Important parts of the Third World became the theatre of violent superpower contestations. In the First World the welfare state, through Keynesian public policies and Fordist Taylorist production techniques, managed to eliminate mass unemployment, improve the living standards for the two-thirds society (see Glotz 1986:335) and pacify class antagonism for the majority of workers. In the socialist states Stalinism brought a modicum of improvement to the life of citizens at a heavy cost of inefficiency and loss of freedom. In the Third World outcomes varied between stellar (as in East Asia) and minimal growth (as in most of Africa) and deeper dependency on the Western markets for all. The success of the capitalist welfare state in these golden years of capitalism became a serious challenge for liberal political theory which was still anchored in utilitarian ideology. Its response was fully articulated for the first time by Rawls. In the critical theory tradition also several revisionists questioned the relevance of some of Marxs concepts and of value theory of labor in particular. In both traditions the sphere of production was relegated to the background while the bureaucratic state, inefficient market and mass consumption became the domains of primary theoretical interest. Beginning in the late sixties the capitalist global political economy entered into a prolonged crisis, triggered by the escalation of the Vietnam War and its effects on the US balance of payments, the challenges of labor- capital relations globally and competition between American, German and Japanese capitals. The United States was forced to make drastic changes in its economic policies which produced catastrophic consequences for the world. The response to the crisis by both capital and the First World states produced consequences that are often subsumed under the rubric of globalisation.

When this global reorganization of capitalism occurred, the United States had already established its position as the diffuser of cultural signifiers such as consumption patterns, lifestyles, branding and design and technological tropes. The three dimensions of American dominance: its predominance in the capitalist system, its preeminence as a military-technological power and its status as the locus of high and low cultural modernity came together once again after 1991 into an effective hegemony. (Golub 2004:769). Globalization, as a response of capitalism to crisis, was also a class project. It involved internationalization of the production process through information-communication technology. The result was the decimation of the bargaining power of the working class globally through fragmentation, casualization, feminization and polarization which made it invisible as a class with consequent difficulties in imagining solidarity.11 Despite the consolidation of class power in the hands of capital through financialization, concentration and transnationalization, the hegemonic discourse of the global financial managers continues to assert and get away with make-believe ideological claims that the free market will create a stakeholder society under a rapidly democratizing capitalism in the emerging era of peoples market (Harvey 2000:43)

The impact of globalisation on all major dimensions of life came through their complex interpenetration. It produced a range of diverse, locally specific effects (Jameson 2000). In the economic domain, for example, the now massive parallel (underground) economy intersected with, supplemented as well as challenged the formally legitimate economic transactions of transnational corporations, nation-states and the international financial institutions. Politically the state has been retooled to suit the needs of capital.

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the global restructuration of production and the introduction of radically new technologies - that have flung workers in archaic factories out of work, displaced new kinds of industry to unexpected parts of the world, and recruited work forces different from the traditional ones in a variety of features, from gender to skill and nationality - explain why so many people have been willing to think that classes have disappeared from the older capitalist countries (Jameson 1999:319).

Popular resistance to these changes requires that the state develop new strategies of legitimation and coercion. It begins to rely on elements of culture in service of jingoistic patriotism. It mines and reshapes popular memories and wraps them in an ethnonationalist garb. Militant self-assertions of latent cultural identities also emerge, as national, pan-national, language, religion, or ethnicity movements.12 The state can now use war on terror, for the rapid expansion of its coercive apparatus for domestic use. Socially, there has been a massive reorganization of consumption where the seduction of the market engulfs large numbers through the culture of consumption. A vast percentage of global surplus of resources flows to the North. The grotesquely uneven 86 percent of total annual global consumption, by only 20 percent of worlds population living in the North (Bartolovich 2003:180), no way changes the ecological and social inequalities embedded in increased global consumption (Banerjee and Linstead 2000:697), even though it pacifies some of the discontent simmering underneath. The two fundamentalisms: Most of debates on the concept and content of fundamentalism centre on religion as a unique object of fundamentalist appropriation rather and not as a special case of the larger cultural turn under the postmodern condition with its intimate links to late capitalism and its vicissitudes or the associated resurgence of identity politics under conditions of its most recent crisis.13 According to Habermas (in Borradori 2003:31) every faith has a dogmatic kernel of belief, a worldview, which presents itself as orthodoxy when backed by an authority (such as the Pope). It turns fundamentalist when it seeks or wields power to enforce the received interpretation as the only acceptable one

12

Fear and anger that follow capitalist penetration which forces homogenization of lifeworlds, uproots habitats and livelihoods and eliminates local ways of living and thinking, produces inchoate responses of localized resistance that are easily suppressed or ameliorated through temporary measures of rehabilitation or compensation. When these also fail the new identity politics mobilize and deflect that anger on to targets other than the real ones. In the end they too fail to create sustainable alternatives.
13

On the larger context of late capitalism its crisis tendencies and the rise of identity politics, see Jameson (1999), Harvey (1990). On the complex relationship between the current crisis of capitalism, the Reagan recovery and the deteriorated elements of the postmodern see Anderson (1998:92).

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in a world characterized by a plurality of faiths and epistemic frameworks. Riesebrodt (2000:271), in his careful sociological analysis of religious fundamentalism points to other important dimensions: a subjectively perceived sense of crisis and an urge to preserve or restore an imagined, idealized past social order. If we take the basic elements of these conceptions of fundamentalism: a movement to enforce a singular authoritative interpretation of the past, under conditions of crisis with violence if necessary and despite the presence of contradictory beliefs or evidence, a number of not specifically religious movements display these traits and fall within the purview of this concept. In any case fundamentalism has been already subject to a large number of diverse uses and interpretations. Attempts to limit it to religion or even more specifically to Abrahamic faiths and to resist its empirical widening and political instrumentalization (Riesebrodt 2000: 270) seem unwarranted. Cultural fundamentalism, given the diversity of cultures, takes a variety of specific forms. Depending on the specific context it may originate from, in defense of or against authoritative claims of a currently dominant orthodoxy. What they all have in common, as fundamentalisms, is the claim to a singular authentic interpretation of the past and a willingness to resort to militancy including violence for its enforcement.14 The dogmatic kernel of belief in liberal economic theory is the isolated autonomous and economically rational individual that Marx had aptly ridiculed as the 18th century robinsonades. The term market fundamentalism is now in vogue and refers to the belief in the perfectibility of the market which, it is claimed, will deliver just deserts, when left to itself, by rewarding rational individuals while punishing the irrational ones. Here the individual appears as a stand alone market guiding consumer. This belief is matched by an entrepreneurial twist of a quasi-mystical objectivistic individualism of the Ayn Rand variety. Nef and Robles (2000:33) list a few other ubiquitous beliefs that make up the neoliberal economic fundamentalism such as neoclassical economics and rational
14

On the use of cultural fundamentalism by the state to bolster declining legitimacy under conditions of economic crisis see Lele A. (2004).On cultural fundamentalism as the politics of exclusion of the excluders by the excluded see Castells (1997:9). On the new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe as cultural fundamentalism see Stolke (1999).

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choice theorizing, monetarism and fiscal restraint, neoconservatism and Social Darwinism. Together they work towards a clear political aim of favoring the interests of transnational capital, especially finance capital, and influencing decision making at the highest levels within the group of Seven Nations and beyond.15 There is sufficient evidence in critical literature to show that, starting with the Reagan years and the deepening of the economic crisis, neoliberal orthodoxy moved from a mere dogmatic interpretation of economic reality and liberal theory, sustained by American and European think tanks during the lean years of the development era, to its political imposition on often unwilling nation-states through authorities such as the World Bank and the IMF, using the structural adjustment programmes (SAP) and leading to violent disruptions in livelihoods and survival of the deprived sections of the populations. It continues to assert and impose its faith while denying the validity of all contradictory evidence (see, for example, Wade 1996, 2001). Fundamentalism flattens history. Economic fundamentalism essentializes the existing structured relationships: economic, political and cultural, as universal truths. It invests impersonal natural power in the market so as to claim benign consequences from its freedom. It demonizes the state. It creates the illusion of equality by focusing on the consumer in a world that necessitates inequalities of class, race and gender. In order to accomplish this it glosses over the creative dynamic of structure and agency. It reinterprets the past in the image of the present. It produces one fits all models and enforces them with the power of capital and the empire. Cultural fundamentalism also flattens history in constructing identities as unity or difference. It essentializes, as forgotten and ignored, a manufactured image of the past to which it appeals as the source of a new sense of community. This newly constructed comradeship is angry and vengeful about a past that is claimed to have been violated by the enemy it must also create. It blames the Other: be it modernization, the secular state,

15

On the history of neoliberalism and its movement from the margins to the centre of economic dominance under the conditions of crisis, see Harvey (2005), Peters (2001), Barry, Osborne and Rose (1996).

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or innocent and helpless or reawakened and recalcitrant minorities in its midst. It renders opaque the historical and material specificity of a grievance or of an experience of domination and oppression so as to employ it in identity politics of manufactured suspicion and hostility. It thus manages and deflects their anger and hopes away from the real sources so as to either sustain or enhance entrenched privilege. With the crisis of the seventies the symbiotic relation between cultural and economic fundamentalism became most visible. In the United States Christian fundamentalism, dormant in the first two decades of the post-war years came alive along with neoliberalism, during the Reagan years (see, e.g. Bruce 1990, Bronner 1993, Jacobs 2006). The dogmatic kernel of neoclassical economics, belief in the autonomous individual as prior to society, is foundational to Neoliberalism. It still wields a strong influence on political liberalism; although its interpretations have become increasingly flexible. As the fortunes of capital shift, it undergoes the necessary adaptations along the liberal spectrum. Under the current crisis it reversed the positive image of the welfare state by appealing to the pervasive liberal suspicion of the state while portraying the market as the ideal, just and fair distributor of rewards and punishments for individual and corporate actions, in the classical liberal idiom. Fundamentalist identity constructs are not sheer postmodern inventions without links to ancient ways of life as Jameson (1998:66) suggests. They are not mere aesthetic fiction. They are crafted through a systematic distortion of the past. While the quest for power often motivates those who mobilize, those who follow do so in the hope of a better, more just and free future. The dynamic moments of past struggles in the history of a tradition are reinterpreted along with the texts, symbols and rituals by the former to construct a hostile and evil Other. These are then transformed into spectacular acts of symbolic or real violence against the Other through effective use of the postmodern trappings of image and media barrage of mass media culture and entertainment industry (Jameson 1998:64).

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Rawls: Rawls lived and wrote during the golden age of capitalism and through the rise of the morbid symptoms that came with its crisis. His massive impact on the professional world of political theory makes sense when placed in the context of the changing political practice in the United States. His contributions in the fifties and the sixties brought the issue of justice to the centre. They appeared revolutionary in the context of the McCarthy witch-hunt of the late forties and the fifties and the nascent but smoldering discontent that exploded into the first quiescent and then radical civil rights movement. In reality most of Rawls essays on the subject and the culminating Theory of Justice (TJ), acclaimed as a timely response to Berlins accusation that no commanding work in political theory has appeared in the 20th century (Gunnell 1986:33), remained anchored in a firm belief in liberal reformism through public deliberations and, if necessary, ordered protests. Echoing Habermas nostalgia for the bourgeois public sphere, he argued for reasonableness of competent moral judges in developing principles of justice. Such principles would survive, however, only if they could evoke free and willing allegiance through gradual convergence and agreement of citizens.16 Rawls responded, in TJ, to the changes in economic theory that corresponded to changed practice. Political theory was still treating citizens as a collection of utility maximizers out to satisfy their own aims and desires. He was the first modern liberal political philosopher to address the problem of justice while explicitly accepting the orientation of modern welfare economics, where social equity assumes priority over property rights (Clark and Gintis 1978:309).17 Rawls argued for the conception of the moral individual:

16

In his early outline for the moral theory of justice, Rawls (1951) used the medieval Inquisition as an example of unreasonable decision procedure leading to unjust outcomes. His reference to the damned and to the inquisition could not be read without summoning the horrors of McCarthy (damned communists). Despite his studied abstinence from direct references to contemporary political practice in the United States, his admirers and critics were quick to note how it was reflected in his writings. Fishkin (1983:152) for example, in his critique of the liberal approach to equality, coupled Lyndon Johnsons Great Society Speech as the most important policy initiative in modern American history with Rawls TJ as the most influential work of liberal political theory to appear recently in America.
17

The seductive ambiguities of his principles of liberty and justice generated speculations even about his possible (and dangerous!) socialist affinity.

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someone who is responsible for his or her own goals (Rawls 1999a: 279) When placed under the veil of ignorance, he argued, such moral individuals will, universally, accept his two principles and with these, Rawls believed, they could overcome the liberal paradox of liberty and equality. In the seventies, the context changed from the golden years to a deepening crisis of capital. With neoconservatives leading the charge, a composite Right consisting of hawkish foreign policy supporters from the Northeast, the old anti-communist conservatives, the traditional opponents of the civil rights movement and the resurgent religious right from the South, together mobilized voter discontent enough to secure Regans victory. Rawls response to the onslaught was to reiterate his faith in social contract and cooperation between reasonable citizens. His Political Liberalism (PL) asserted the possibility of cooperation even for those holding deep personal beliefs in comprehensive doctrines. New concepts like overlapping consensus and public reason make their appearance to give the revised theory of justice the same universalizing aura. PL distinguishes between reasonable and fundamentalist beliefs. It lists the basic elements of the prevailing liberal consensus on political values and affirms the coexistence of the reasonable beliefs and those values as the norm. It then suggests that except for certain kinds of fundamentalism, all the main historical religions admit of such an account and thus may be seen as reasonable comprehensive doctrines (1993:167-170).18 His overlapping consensus is not an outcome of compromise, he insists, nor does it involve transcendence of what Gadamer describes as prejudices. It is only a result of reasonable citizens treating their comprehensive doctrines as modules.
18

Only recently noted by liberal scholars such as Martha Nussbaum and Jurgen Habermas, this idea did not prompt any of the three to investigate the possibility that perhaps world religions harbor in them a certain dialectic between fundamentalist assertions and critical revolts leading to reevaluations and reinterpretations of dominant interpretations of texts (The Word), dogmatically asserted as universal and eternal. None of the liberals, including Habermas have since then attempted to excavate such a possibility. This is understandable given their relative ignorance of the history of non-Abrahamic religions. Even then, a critical hermeneutic rethinking about Reformation would have alerted them to this possibility. Here I believe their misunderstanding of modernity stands in the way.

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Political justice becomes just another module to which they can adapt their reasonably believed comprehensive doctrines. The idea of public reason reaffirms the liberal belief that individuals in formal democracies are capable of living a double life by splitting themselves into private individuals relentlessly pursuing their often antagonistic private interests while being able to leave them behind and, as public citizens, willingly proposing and abiding by terms of cooperation, that require them to curb their pursuit of such interests (Rawls 1993: 49). When the challenge is that of gross inequality, they will accept the reasonable solution given by the distributive principle of charitable justice, for the severely deprived, while protecting the right to private property as the institution necessary for liberty, even though it must necessarily entrench material inequality under capitalism. The global context of American politics changed, once again, with the decline and fall of the Soviet bloc. The anticipated peace dividend through substantial reduction of the nuclear arsenal did not materialize. The uneasy peace of the Cold War era was replaced by rampant sub-national, national and pan-national wars wearing religious and ethnic mantles. Religious and nationalist comprehensive doctrines were now being employed or advocated by fundamentalist state and non-state actors and were beginning to threaten the weakened but now unrivaled American hegemony of a destabilized world order. Rawls' Law of Peoples (LP, 1999b) divides the peoples19 of the world into three categories: well ordered and decent liberals, well ordered but non-liberal decent peoples and the non-decent, illiberal peoples who advocate fundamentalist causes and try to impose them beyond legitimate and established national borders. LP poses the question: how are the well ordered liberal people to relate to well ordered non-liberal but decent peoples of the world as well as the indecent, illiberal peoples. Rawls argues that just relationships between liberal and non-liberal decent people are possible even though the latter live in hierarchical societies and enforce comprehensive
19

His peoples closely resemble contemporary states, says Buchanan (2000).

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doctrines, as long as they respect basic human rights, ensure basic subsistence and security for all citizens as well as protect property and a measure of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. If such agents were to seek conditions of justice from behind a veil of ignorance, they would produce a contract, a law of peoples, similar to those that exist between liberal peoples. Although the liberals can deal with the well ordered hierarchical peoples the same way as the other liberal peoples, the distribution principle does not apply to them even if that means one ignores the prevailing material and capability inequalities, no matter how enormous. The reason: the welfare of a person is more often at risk from a distorted and corrupt political culture than from a countrys lack of resources. The remedy for that is to make the political traditions and culture of all peoples reasonable and able to sustain just political and social institutions that secure human rights (LP: 64). The non-decent ones are burdened societies, that lack the political and cultural traditions, the human capital and know-how and often the material and technological resources needed to be well-ordered, (LP: 106). The liberal peoples have no equity obligations towards them. The project of pushing polyarchy (Robinson 1995), initiated by Reagan for decent illiberals and pursued with devastating militancy by G.W. Bush, against the indecent rogue states, when coupled with minimal humanitarian aid, finds its total endorsement in LP. Invasions are justified to set the human rights record straight. There is no indication anywhere of an awareness or refutation of the mass of critical literature that points to the responsibility for the past and current predatory practices of the colonial and imperial regimes of decent and liberal democratic states for the burden of the burdened societies. The underlying basic concern of all of Rawls major works and his numerous papers (Rawls 1999b), despite his studied abstinence from engagement with the political practice of his times, either in the written work or through political activism, was the defense and preservation of well ordered liberal societies against threats from unreasonable peoples within and beyond. The founding principle of liberalism, an uneasy compromise between the basic Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality, with a heavy tilt towards the

17

former, was central to all of his writings even as he adjusted his conceptual architecture to meet the demands of the changing times.20 What lessons can we draw from Rawls opus for our concern with the challenges of fundamentalism? While TJ is mostly concerned with upholding the changes in the American political practice ushered in by late capitalism, both LP and PL directly address the threat of cultural fundamentalism, domestic and international. Their message is clear. Rawls affirms the basis of earlier American hegemony, initially in terms of its proclaimed mission of promoting development and democracy around the world. As that basis begins to fade, the tone shifts rather decisively towards legitimation of economic and military domination in a recalcitrant world. The hawkish conservative drift of his post Cold war writings is unmistakable.21 His language of the outlaw states seemed to echo the rhetoric of the Department of Defense that was demanding an arms build up bigger than that of the Cold War era (Paris 2002:697-98). Habermas: Habermas left liberal activism has remained decidedly to the left of Rawls theoretical stance.22 The context of his early writings was set by the American occupation of Germany and its project of a free market democracy substantially modified by the anticommunist agenda23. His adulation for the American political culture and his gratitude to America for acquainting Germany with the radical democratic spirit of the American pragmatism of Peirce, Mead and Dewey (1985:76-77) dates back to this era24. From the
20

While Rawls liberal detractors want to uphold either agonism or community embedded individualism against his contractarian constitutionalism, they still share his commitment to the liberal compromise that insists on limiting equality by hyphenating it as political equality. 21 It was also obvious to his sympathetic former students: Pogge (2001) and Beitz (2001). 22 Reflecting the flexibility of the liberal spectrum is the fact that while Rawls is considered to be a left liberal (even a hidden Marxist, by some) in America, in Europe he is seen only as a mainstream liberal. 23 The democratic state that actually emerged was a bourgeois bloc that implemented the agenda of anticommunism, political Catholicism and economic liberalism under the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union. Its ideology was ordo-liberalism, an equivalent of the American neo-conservatism that fed into the later Neoliberal ideology. A product of the Freiburg School, which inherited the right dimension of Webers analysis of capitalism, it stood juxtaposed to his left dimension, inherited by the Frankfurt School with which Habermas was initially associated (see Dore, Ronald, W.Lazonick, M. OSullivan 1999, on Foucaults critique of the two schools, see Lemke 2001). 24 It is understandable, given that at the end of World War II, for the first time, representative democracy based on universal suffrage as the normal and stable structure of the State was established in all of major

18

outset, it may be argued; his work displays an abiding faith in the virtues of liberal democracy as the best practical expression, notwithstanding all its faults, of the (Kantian) Enlightenment ideals. It remains, for Habermas, the most advanced (modern) form of organization of social life, where free citizens can arrive at a consensus on the common good, through a communicative exercise of public reason. Even in his earliest important work, on the structural transformation of the public sphere (STPS 1962/1989), Habermas displayed, like his Frankfurt School predecessors, a deep concern about the decimation of and continuing threats to the survival of constitutional democracy in the capitalist world; hence, perhaps, his unrelenting preoccupation with the assertion of its virtues and the downplaying of its faults. 25 Defending democracy has entailed, for Habermas, the need to prove the inadequacy and/or irrelevance of Marxs analysis of capitalism, of its inherent crisis tendencies and of its relationship to the state and bourgeois society. This has been central in much of his work and has involved several moves that have been full of rich and insightful meanderings into philosophy and social theory. We will examine all too briefly only three of these moves here: his turn to social evolutionism, his linguistic turn and the adoption of systems theory of Talcott Parsons and Nicholas Luhmann. During the seventies Habermas (1979:95-177) engaged himself in a theoretical project, designated as a reconstruction of historical materialism.26 This was the most direct attempt to reinterpret Marxs work, not as what it was: a practice-oriented critique of political economy of capitalism, but as a theory of social evolution. The aim was to

capitalist countries, a fact often forgotten by the students of Anglo-American democracy (Anderson 1976:47). 25 Even in STPS (89-140) Habermas treated Marxs critique of the bourgeois public sphere, even though situated within his comprehensive critique of the capitalist mode of production, as a socialist model comparable to and competing with the liberal model of democracy. Both models proved incapable, he claims, of forestalling the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere that came with the gradual transition to organized capitalism. During and since his liberal turn references to the organic link between liberal democracy and capitalism have become muted in his writing on democracy. 26 The relevant essays were translated and included in Communication and Evolution of Society (hereafter CES) published in 1979 by Beacon Press of Boston.

19

challenge the centrality of social labor in the simultaneous interaction of human beings with nature and society. Marxs analysis of capitalist society, Habermas argued, when viewed as an immanent critique of the normative domain of bourgeois ideals, has lost its relevance with the transition to organized capitalism. Those ideals had gone into retirement and bourgeois consciousness has become cynical27. Using relevant anthropological findings, Habermas also argued that labor or work (sensuous human social activity for Marx) should be understood as governed only by instrumental rationality, since it emerged at the hominid stage of evolution and is limited to the domain of nature while interaction, as an activity related to the social-symbolic domain (emerging only with Homo sapiens), is to be seen as governed by communicative rationality. The former produces rules of technical knowledge while the latter is governed by norms calling for a distinct form of justification (CES: 96-97). The idea of human reason split into two has been central in much of Habermas theorizing. It feeds into his reinterpretation of Webers notion of structural differentiation, filtered through the system-theoretic lens of Parsons and Luhmann. He accepted Webers understanding of life under capitalism as based on differentiation into three value spheres (science, morality and art) and linked it with three generalized symbolic media of money, power (or domination) and language. The first two are to be treated as the steering media of the systems world of societal management, organized through the economy and the state. Language is the generalized (universal) medium of everyday communication in the life world. Thus the linguistic turn and the systems theoretic turn come together.

27

In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas argued that although under liberal capitalism the loyalty of the subordinate classes was secured, not through these ideals but through their traditional ties, fatalism, ignorance and naked repression, bourgeois ideals still had integrative power as the ruling ideas. Under organized capitalism, the welfare state had already pacified the passions of the subordinate classes and hence the power of critique emanating from the domain of production had been thoroughly decimated.

20

The system-theoretic conversion of the capitalist mode of production allowed Habermas to reject the relevance of the wage-profit contradiction (and the associated law of the falling rate of profit) under organized capitalism, on the grounds that the classical fundamental categories of the theory of value are insufficient for an analysis of governmental policy in education, technology and science (Habermas1976:56). Made in the context of an era of the welfare state and the wage-profit compromise, Habermas has shown no inclination to change his assessment and revise his theory even after that compromise started to fall apart. His faith in his old analysis seems unshaken even under the continuing crisis of capitalism and the rising threat of liberal democracys descent into new forms of barbaric state terror. Although he could ignore these implications of the rise and spread of economic fundamentalism, Habermas cannot ignore the challenge of cultural fundamentalism, especially its religious manifestation. Withdrawal of religion from the public domain, through Weberian rationalization of comprehensive worldviews, was the keystone of his theory of social evolution and modernity. Fundamentalism is only the most extreme expression of a more general and more troubling religious turn in Western philosophy as well as in the everyday life of citizens in the West.28 Habermas rethinking on religion has been prompted by the new challenges of our times, religious fundamentalism being one of them. He treats it as an extreme manifestation of a widespread disenchantment with the Western models of modernization. The other serious challenge for him is biotechnologys unrelenting march into the danger zones of human self-identity as species-being. Habermas had cut off the bodily dimension of human sociality through the splitting of instrumental from communicative reason so as to devalue the centrality of labor in human sociality. He celebrated the fragmentation of life under capitalist modernity as evolutionary differentiation. Now he wonders if the persistent meaningfulness of religion as a comprehensive, unfragmented worldview may
28

Religious categories and concepts now occupy prime positions in the writings of political philosophers from Levinas to Taylor and many others in between. Most of such writing emerges from the vicinity of Marx and may be a part of a wider cultural commitment to renew, reinvoke, repossess Marxism as a revolutionary moral tradition in which conscience and judgment play a defining role It cannot be dismissed as a conservative reaction to modernization. Roberts (2003:36).

21

be the only source remaining to appeal to for putting this humpty-dumpty of reason, back together again. Habermas refuses to recognize todays cultural fundamentalism for what it is: a morbid symptom emerging out of the continuing crisis of capitalism.29 Surprised by the fact that religious traditions and communities of faith have gained a new, hitherto unexpected political importance (2005:2), he still refuses to accept the possibility that they may contain an unforeseen integrative potential that can be critically interpreted in terms relevant to our times. In his work we note a desperate search for accommodating them in the liberal political public sphere but only on somewhat defunct secularist terms. All the soul searching reflected in these writings and the resulting proposals do not go very far. 30 One such moment of soul searching, potent with a rare possibility, occurred in the early 1990s. In an interview about the debates on the first Gulf War, Habermas (1994:20) wondered if the principles of international law were so West-centric that they are of no use for the non-partisan adjudication of international conflicts and whether the concept of human rights simply conceals an especially subtle and deceitful instrument of domination. Unwilling to accept such self-condemnation he pins his hope on Rawls supposition (1993:170) that there must exist an overlapping consensus within .religious right.31 interpretations of deep feelings and elementary experiences of communicative action and goes on to affirm his faith: I am convinced that Rawls is

29

His faith in the virtues of proper modernization and its culmination in liberal democracy remained unshaken even after bin Ladens forces had just demolished the World Trade Center in New York. He admits of the structural violence of unconscionable social inequality, degrading discrimination, pauperization, and marginalization in the peaceful and well-to-do societies of the West. The admission is buffered, however, because he claims, the praxis of our daily living together rests on a solid base of common background convictions, self-evident cultural truths and reciprocal expectations and hence when conflicts erupt, it leads to the breakdown in communication and lands in court or at the therapists office. 30 It has spawned more grist for the liberal academic paper mill, mostly critical of the inadequacy of Habermasian proposals but without new insights into the real basis of the strength and resilience of religious traditions (see Cooke 2006, 2007, Chambers 2007, for example). 31 To the best of my knowledge, Habermas never returned to this idea in his subsequent attempts to accommodate religion in the public spheres of the Fortress West.

22

Taking that insight seriously and investigating it fully will require more than a simple hermeneutic exercise of examination and translation of the interpretations of the doctrines and texts that are currently propagated or believed in dogmatic ways. It will require a dynamic, historicized critical hermeneutic exercise (see Lele 2008) of excavating the struggles that challenged the then dominant dogmas.32 Their successes or failures often remain hidden in symbols, rituals, deities and demons behind currently accepted meanings. They are part of the living traditions with millennia of continuous past behind them. The necessity and value of such an effort has remained beyond the horizon of even the most insightful liberals of our times.

Derrida: Derridas first major works appeared in 1967 in the context of a political practice highly polarized between a bourgeois bloc of the ruling right and a militant working class organized mainly under the Communist Party of France (PCF) under the influence of Stalinist ideas of organization. Derridas early studies of Heidegger, his close association with his mentor Althusser and the latters critical involvement in PCF, and the emerging wave of denunciation of Stalinism and the associated critical rethinking of Marxism in Europe were also part of that political context along with the memory of the prewar liberal descent into barbarism. They have had a lasting impact on Derridas work. The diversity of the texts and themes, and the complexity and richness of imagination and play with which Derrida has dealt with them, makes it impossible to meaningfully summarize or systematize his work. Much of his earlier critique of philosophical texts contains suggestive insights on political theory and practice, and has been so used by several scholars. His more direct interventions in political theory began, however, only in the 1990s. They were provoked, simultaneously, by the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the emergent question:
32

There have already been several highly publicized assemblies of globally recognized celebrities of World Religions which have produced declarations documenting an ecumenical consensus of the Rawlsian insight, not too dissimilar to the Washington consensus on the Neoliberal political practice. It is precisely this kind of understanding of religion that would have to come under the critical eye of the kind of hermeneutic inquiry I am proposing.

23

whither Marxism, as well as the rise and spread of cultural fundamentalist conflicts and the religious turn in the political practice of western democracies. Common to his earlier and later work has been, I suggest, an intense commitment to spontaneity in the binary: spontaneity-organization. Although it has been at the root of so many debates in western philosophy and political theory, Derrida has been by far the most influential from among the sons of Nietzsche.33 In the early years, his thinking on Marx and Marxism had remained ambivalent enough to discourage him from submitting Marx to deconstruction. His much noticed abstinence was also a response to the political context of his times. While admitting that the critique of idealism and self-reflexivity were the main bond between dialectical materialism and deconstruction, he claimed that an encounter with the materialist text, although absolutely necessary, would be of no benefit, theoretical or political, before the conditions necessary for such contact were rigorously elucidated (1973:33). That encounter finally came as Spectres of Marx. Derrida (1994) labeled it as several hypotheses on the nature of responsibility (Spectres: x). Spectres registers its relief for the demise of the Soviet bloc and that of the totalizing stranglehold of the dogma machine and the ideological apparatus of the state, the party, the cells and the unions. It reflects the old disenchantment of the left, in Western Europe, with Stalinism and its impact on their communist parties. It denounces, at the same time, the self-congratulating, End of History triumphalism of capitalism, liberalism and parliamentary democracy (15), and contrasts it to the ten plagues of globalization that have been unleashed and that span all aspects of human life: economic, political and cultural (81-84). This state of our times leaves no excuse, says Derrida, for turning away from the responsibility to read and reread Marx. A detailed examination of the ideas and claims in Spectres is beyond the scope of this paper. The response to Derridas work spans the whole spectrum of scathing criticism

33

The debates on the relationship between spontaneity and organization have taken a variety of forms (agency vs. structure, singularity vs. universality, for example).

24

and fawning adulation that is also spread along the left-right spectrum. I shall limit my comments only to a set of conclusions that seem to emerge from reading Spectres along with a few other writings that relate to and have implications for the challenges of our times. The strategy Derrida adopts in Spectres is that of purging all other spirits of Marx so as to establish the primacy of, and a commitment to the only spirit that seems to him capable of releasing human spontaneity from the bonds and constraints of organization. This means, for Derrida, that it must be freed not only from the constraining organizational arrangements such as the party, the state or the union but also from the concepts that entail organization, namely social labor, mode of production and social class. And yet, the relationship of spontaneity to organization is also an aporia, as is the case with all other binaries that Derrida excavates and deconstructs in his writings. The purge is, therefore, accompanied by a promise to never abandon the only spirit of Marxism that is to survive: that of critical self-reflexivity as the critical idea of the questioning stance a prerequisite for liberating spontaneity, but also an intimate relation to practice: its emancipatory, messianic affirmation and promise to produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organization and so forth (89). This, one assumes, for Derrida, is his democracy to come (65), expressed as a messianic hope. On offer, as organization is the concept of the New International, purged of all old organizational residues of all previous Internationals. The label is invoked, nonetheless, only rhetorically, so as to silently denounce them. The New International seems to reiterate the liberal reformist faith. Derrida asks the New International to continue to exert pressures to bring about changes to the international law so as to extend and diversify its interventions. As a radical gesture, however, it is also accompanied by a link of affinity to an unnamable, thoroughly indeterminate agency, emptied of any definable content: without status, without title, without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, out of joint, without coordination, without party, without country, without national community and without common belonging to a class

25

(85). It is difficult to avoid the temptation to imagine Derrida seeing that link of affinity reflected in the sporadic and ineffective eruptions of anger and celebration of ephemeral solidarity, found among the scattered anti-globalization activists and the participants of the World Social Forums. Spivak (1995) was incisive in her critique of Derridas lack of understanding of the nature and substance of todays capitalism.34 Jamesons sympathetic critique also chided Derrida for the lack of a more nuanced understanding of class before declaring its irrelevance. Spivak went further to criticize Derrida for his empty reference to Marxist critique, the critique of the market, of the multiple logics of capital without recognition of the vicissitudes suffered by the organized opposition to the global managers of capital, such as the Group of Seven and without a researched account that refers to the longstanding global struggle from below. Why should the South she asked feel any degree of confidence in the project of the New International when the Human Rights and International Law lobbyists tend to be only the irreproachably well-bred (69)? As far as politics is concerned, the self-reflexivity of deconstruction35 addresses histories and traditions of concepts through deconstruction of texts. In the work of the 1990s Derrida superimposes his textual discoveries on to the political practice of our times. What is gained in the process is an enriched understanding of what is, in terms of what it can be, counterfactually as it were, in ways that take us beyond the conceptual and methodological apparatus of political economy and is still consistent with the sketch of critical theory project sketched earlier. What is lost in the process, because of Derridas studied refusal to do so, is a necessary engagement with the materially grounded understanding of political practice, in terms of the origins and the trajectories of the crises of capitalism and the response of the institutional nexus that draws on one of the two sides of the binaries of these concepts for its legitimation.
34

The adequacy of that critique, as it focuses on the distinction between commercial and industrial capitalism and a particular interpretation of the concept of use value is not of concern here. Relevant is the fact that Derrida blissfully ignores the insights of the several critical political economists because of his aversion to the other spirits of Marx and hence fails to connect effectively his ten plagues to the crisis and the morbid symptoms, particularly the rise of economic fundamentalism. 35 It is the self-reflexivity of the critical tradition that Derrida has always claimed provides the bond between the spirit of Marx and deconstruction.

26

Because of an obsession with the tendency of philosophical and political binaries to secretly resolve themselves into domination of one term over the other, and a desire to unsettle them, so as to expose the way they are used to serve the ideological function of entrenching hierarchy and oppression, Derrida prefers to construe them as aporias. Understood as contradictions they would remain open for a critique of the present in terms of a glimpse beyond, into futures made possible through practical transformative action. However temporary and fleeting, which is what they will invariably turn out to be, their anticipated coming alone sustains hope. Bloch locates hope, as a principle, in the events and expressions of everyday life.36 Derrida, however, is convinced that all such moments of transformation must inevitably result in some form of totalitarian organizational takeover. His fear of organization haunts his advocacy of spontaneity in ways that lead to this hasty closure As a result Derrida opens himself to the legitimate accusation of depoliticization of politics and its debilitating impact on the political practice of our times. In the end he has nothing of value to say with respect to the challenge of economic fundamentalism. In Spectres and since, the notion of the messianic has played a crucial role in Derridas political writings. His interest in religion was stimulated particularly by Benvenistes (1973) reflections deriving from the recognition that Indo-European vocabulary does not present a common term for religion. Faith and Knowledge (FK) (Derrida, Vattimo 1998:1-77) deals extensively with Derridas own derivations from this discovery. His deconstruction of religion in FK also responds to the immediate concerns of our times, through the direct relationship between faith and teletechnoscientific reason and thus religions inseparable connection to knowledge, fundamentalism and violence.

36

Following Bloch (1986) one could demonstrate that guided by its wishes, needs and hopes, humankind produced moral-practical actions throughout its history. Traces of their memories, of their triumphs and failures, of celebrations and mourning are scattered in the histories of all human communities, congealed into rituals, rites, myths and fables that eventually become organized as religions. These tendencies, I suggest, are revealed in their profuse richness in the histories of those ancient societies that have retained their continuity into the present.

27

We cannot dwell here on the entire range of Derridas insightful engagements with religion and must remain satisfied with brief, rather starkly judgmental observations on those. Politics of Friendship is also at the same time politics of faith. Much of Derridas work in the 1990s has been political and religious at the same time. Spivak (2001:12) remembers Derrida as a teacher and finds in PF, and in its reference to the event of the text Nietzsche, a text that is not to be deconstructed but to be enacted in the classroom. Caputo (1999:197) discovers in PF a Zarathustra who is also a Dionysian rabbi and a preacher who comes to preach to us about friendship and democracy. In Spectres democracy to come is conveyed as a messianic hope along with a promise to preserve the messianic in Marx but without messianism. Purged of all messianisms he says, of all religions, but the ones Derrida knows something about are, of course, only the Abrahamic ones. These engagements, starting with Spectres, are best understood as an attempt (like that of Marx37) to go to or at least point to a place beyond religion: hence the messianic without messianism. In FK (38) Derrida exposes the limits or salience of what constitutes itself under the label religion and, more specifically, the Christian prevalence that has imposed itself globally within the said Latinity that goes with it. He goes on to indicate the necessity/impossibility for the debate on the return of religion so as to think a situation in which, as in times past, there will perhaps no longer exist, just as once it did not exist, any common Indo-European term for religion.38

37

Marxs scattered references to religion and the tenor of some of his writings have been the subject of interpretation for decades. At first glance they may appear linear and evolutionary but when placed within the context of the history of human communities over millennia they reveal their evocative power (spiritual aroma, sigh of the oppressed creature, expression of real suffering) that fuelled the creative meditations of thinkers such as Bloch and Benjamin. He treated all his writings as work in progress, this was particularly the case when he was dealing with pre-capitalist societies (see Marx 1972, Krader 1977). Unlike Derrida, he was dealing with relatively meager knowledge and quite primitive methodologies of research on these societies available at the time (see Barnard 2004). 38 Anyone familiar with the history of the construction of the term Hindu as a name for religion that did not exist and the subsequent manufactured ethnicist fossilization being attempted within it, will have no difficulty recognizing the critical hermeneutic potential of this insight (see Lele 2000:43-45).

28

Despite widespread allusions to and suggestive hints about potential points of entry, in his encounter with religion, Derrida in the end declares, rather hastily I believe, that his messianic has and will have nothing to do with tradition, any tradition. His fear of organization, and hence that of organized religion, drives a hard bargain. Aware of fundamentalism that lurks in the shadow of every tradition, with its penchant for dogmatic assertions and claims to universality based on exclusion, Derrida dissociates himself from all of them, in all their manifestations. He thus shuts himself off from their inner dynamics and their historic responses to challenges from within and outside. Thus he remains oblivious to what I have called the modernity of tradition (see Lele 1981, 2000). Instead of engaging them, historically and in their material contexts, he takes shelter in language theory and the structure of the speech act in order to retain the singularity intact while opening himself to the considerations of universality. Yet another opportunity he almost creates for himself and then emphatically rejects.39 Spivak (2001:14) revised her earlier critique of Derrida after reading Spectres along with Politics of Friendship (2005) and seems to have discovered an equivalent of Marxs revolutionary class in the indefinite, unrecognizable, yet active-in-silence collectivity, with no possibility of coming together across insuperable linguistic and spatial divides. She anchors in it her hope for the possibility of resistance in the far-flung global grassroots. She still rejects the New International since it remains susceptible to the risk of being assimilated to that self-styled international civil society. Inspired by the idea of teleopoiesis Spivak reads in it the shocking potential to affect the distant through imaginative remaking without guarantees. As a messianic structure it is, to Derrida, an invitation to the silent and distant future philosophers to whom he offers a hand of friendship in anticipation of their becoming future philosophers. It will be, says Derrida, perhaps a community of those without community. To understand what this means we have to remember Derridas reading of Schmitt: there can be no politics
39

Habermas also relies on the structure of language to make claims about the primacy of the intersubjective over the subjective dimension of human condition. Neither he nor Derrida make the next necessary move, to link the structure of a speech act to the human condition as a totality and the creative tension of the subject in its relation to the objectivity of nature and the intersubjectivity of symbolic human interaction.

29

without community, no community without friendship and there can be no friendship without an enemy. To Spivak, the idea of teleopoiesis suggests a politics of identity which can be employed in bringing about a slow but tenacious change of mind so as to reach towards the distant other by the patient power of imagination. Her interest is pedagogic. Teleopoiesis is to be enacted in a classroom: in the North with new/old ways of reading the literature from the South so as to sustain alterity and to overcome the now common tendency to domesticate the other. In the South teleopoiesis would involve a classroom full of unexceptional rural teachers where their teacher must invent new pedagogic techniques to work with them (14). When placed in the context of the pedagogic violence that fundamentalists are inflicting on the future philosophers in the South (Lele 1996) this is indeed an important and welcome gesture. In the North similar violence comes from too quick familiarization and commodification of the otherness of foreign literature (Spivak 2003). Missing from this proposal, however, is a glimpse, a window on how this dialogue with the future philosophers can be made to work. With their current beliefs congealed into prejudices and convictions, nurtured through dogmatic indoctrinations, the teacher must take on the role of a heretic seeking a dialogue with a confirmed believer.40 What then are the requirements of such a dialogue to be potentially successful? We will return to this question towards the end of this paper. Jameson (1999:29) views Derridas New International as a new kind of political intervention for which globalization sets the stage. He views the idea with deep sympathy as it points to the possibilities, through new teletechnology, for the networks of radical intellectuals on a world scale analogous to those of Marxs times who communicated using the print media.

40

Admittedly, Spivak (2003) is rich with examples of what such dialogues can be in an elite university classroom in the North. I am concerned here about the necessary prerequisites for such dialogues in the classrooms in the South.

30

These mildly radical overtures of Spivak and Jameson are of interest as they read in Derridas work hints of a possible counterhegemonic political practice for our times. Without them the idea of the New International and the proposals for gradual reforms to international law and enforcement of human rights, through civil society pressures, seem dangerously similar to those reiterating the cosmopolitan project of formal democracy, emanating from the two liberal protagonists we have been looking at in this paper. Spivak (1995:69)) offers precisely the same criticism. Constituted as aporetic binaries, the concepts of hospitality, friendship, forgiveness and justice have produced interpretations that range from conservative to radical. Despite Derridas cultivated ambivalence and seductive ambiguities his major conclusion, reinforced in his Borradori interview, seems unmistakably similar to Schmitts decisionism. His aporias, when combined with an unhesitating conclusion that decisions must be made and made prematurely and in the dark leads, not surprisingly, to conservative conclusions about what is to be done in the political practice of our times. A call to act responsibly in everyday life in the full tragic knowledge that whatever you do does not really matter and the show must just go on, as it did in the past and so it will in the future, until perhaps, someday, somehow a messianic event will change it all but then, it may be not! At best it teaches humility and at worst total indifference. 41 Derridas rejection of tolerance: as a form of charity and paternalism, as the good face of sovereignty (Borradori 2003:127), has been widely noted. He invokes pure hospitality as a contrasting vision to tolerance, but only as a standard for criticizing it. But pure hospitality, pure justice and pure friendship without an enemy are impossible, at least in our times and perhaps forever, without determinate action for which there is to be no planning. So we must learn to live with them, tolerate them in the awareness of their impurity which at best means without arrogance.
41

McCormick (2001:417), for example draws this conclusion from The Forces of Law (1990): it encourages us to wait for justice, not by shirking responsibility or reveling in arbitrary violence but rather by living a life according to law. Derrida demonstrates that a world without violence is our most enlightened aspiration, if not an instrumentally attainable goal. But this insight encourages us to think about living according to law formulated and enforced in less violent ways. Teubner (2007:43) echoes this sentiment and concludes that whatever you decide in law will end in injustice and guilt.

31

In the end, with all the cautionary words such as Tolerance remains scrutinized hospitality, always under surveillance, parsimonious and protective of its sovereignty (ibid:128), he feels forced to arrive at this conclusion: I would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the international institutions (ibid:113). We are back in the world of patience and tolerance. Rejecting Rawls and Habermas rather haughty Kantian notion of universal tolerance, one that distinguishes between decent liberal, decent illiberal, and illiberal rogue states and thus refuses to grant the same status to all within tolerance principle
42

, only

means embracing an humble and tragic tolerance, juxtaposed to and thus tempered by yet another Kantian notion of hospitality, itself tempered by the exposure of its aporetic nature. Tolerance so adopted is also to be kept open to criticism and is to be rhetorically pushed to its limits, demanding expansion. How to understand and interpret Marcuse when he says the telos of tolerance is truth? Both Habermas and Derrida, like Marcuse, know that there is no truth out there waiting to be dis-covered. Habermas (1974:243) had cited Vico to make the point: for there can nowhere be greater certainty than where he who creates the things also gives an account of them. Marx turns Vico on his head in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. This means, for us, that the truth, of a world beyond tolerance pure or tainted, has to be created by action: first by comprehending reality as it is in terms of what can be: hence the need for tolerance. It is a precondition for a dialogue between the heretic and the believer. Its telos: a new shared understanding of what is and what it can be and a shared commitment to change the world so as to make that newly shared sense come true. Creating a formally equal space for such a dialogue between materially unequal distant strangers, a consciously imagined mock level playing field, equivalent to Habermas
42

Anticipating such criticism of the tolerance of the mighty, Habermas (Borradori 2003:41) refers us to the constitutional state that relies on a formal, democratically derived, consensus and not paternalism (a consensus, between those who are materially unequal in resources and capabilities and therefore, one might say, between a lion and a lamb, but still a consensus!).

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utopia of an ideal speech situation, can only be the first step. Truth to be created is not in the consensus so arrived at but in the anticipated consequence of practical action that must follow. What, we must ask, are the preconditions for a dialogue between Derridas philosopher colleagues such as Spivak and Jameson on one hand, and his future philosophers? Spivak is right that the approach in the classrooms of the North and the South will have to be different. Let us limit ourselves, for the moment to those in the South. At the very least, I suggest, it calls for an ability on the part of the former to enter the lifeworld of the latter. In that world tradition, as a memory of past struggles still remains alive in the form of deeply held beliefs expressed through myths and folk tales and acted out in rituals. Their current understanding of those beliefs and practices may well be found congealed in the dogmatically transmitted interpretations rendered from above. Only because tradition is still alive it remains available for such manipulation by cultural fundamentalists, both legitimate and deviant. Its current ideological crust remains effective by concealing but keeping alive an opening to a future fulfillment of what has been denied in the past and in the present. If the teachers, as partners in such a dialogue, be they Jamesons intellectuals or Spivaks self-proclaimed speakers who claim the right to speak for the subaltern, are to seek such a dialogue, with a view to meeting the challenge of todays political practice, they will have to learn the art of listening and suspecting at the same time. Developing critical hermeneutic competence to listen to, believe in and understand todays believers who are also tomorrows philosophers, while suspecting their current understanding of belief is the precondition for that dialogue.43 But a community that will emerge in this exercise will have to begin with Derridas insight derived from Schmitt: no politics without collectivity, no collectivity without friendship and no friendship without an enemy. A dialogue of this nature will have to remain open to learning from the past experiences of
43

Spivak does invoke religion with reference to the Devi movement, at the ancient and indigenous level and to the reference to the extra potency gained by rebellion of the hill people from the worship of deities that were all man-eating goddesses and she goes on to conclude that in the current Indian context neither religion nor femininity show emergent potential of this kind without asking the question why.

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actions oriented to transformative practice without prejudice because of its past mistakes and by re-understanding its critical innovations. It must organize itself as a democracy within and even remain open to a dialogue with the enemy having clearly identified its nature and its limits. But when that fails it must prepare itself for action against its forces, not in self-annihilating ways but with a shared sense of enlightenment and a strategic openness. In Marxs own times the workers were supposed to organize themselves, as a democratic Communist party, thus: externally, in the face of the class enemy, strategic action and political struggle; internally, with respect to the mass of workers, the organization of selfreflection. The vanguard of the proletariat must master both: the critique of weapons and the weapons of critique (Habermas 1974:27). The classes made antagonistic by the very nature of the system they had become part of, were far more clearly identifiable then. Times have changed. In our times, a project of enlightenment with and of the subalterns will be possible, only through a critical hermeneutic engagement with tradition. It must combine the hermeneutic of belief with that of suspicion by being sensitive to the history of hegemonic appropriations of traditions, and the challenges that had emerged as a result, in the past. Only a unified critical excavation of the past, through the separation of the moments of dogma from those of critique and of the initiators of one from the other, will provide the access that the New International seems to take for granted. An elaboration of this claim is, however, beyond the scope of this paper. Conclusion: Rawls response to the challenge of economic fundamentalism was disappointing. He had, from the outset, declared disinterest in the project of transformative politics and hence in Marxs ideas on politics and society.44
44

The severe consequences of the

In a reply to the economist Musgrave, Rawls (1974: 654) observed: Marx seems to have thought that this precept (each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs), would apply only when the circumstances of justice are surpassed; for it belongs to a fully developed socialist society when work itself is lifes principal need (das erste Lebensbedurfnis) and the limitations of moderate scarcity no longer hold. Thus, in a sense, it is not a precept of justice but one for a society beyond justice. Rawls thus denied its relevance for his U.S. centred realistic utopia.

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Neoliberal onslaught had not yet unfolded while he was actively practicing his profession. However the signals emanating from both PL and LP are, as we saw, somewhat menacing. Habermas response has been to recognize but dissociate the effects of Neoliberalism from the basic source of its reemergence, i.e., as the ideological underpinning of the onslaught of ruthless capitalist expansion necessitated by its crisis and its virulent global spread backed by the older capitalist states. The history of capitalism, its tendency to go through cycles of civility and barbarism, has also been deleted from his consideration. His faith that a constitutionally entrenched democratic cosmopolitanism is on the horizon and the return of the golden age of capitalism is only a matter of the return of the public will remains unshaken. It needs to be cultivated with patience through institutional changes that will replace parochial nationalism with a gradually expanded internationalism for which the New Europe is to provide a model. It will, he hopes, also rein in the arbitrary decisionism of the American state. Capitalism will reform itself once the markets are tamed through rational, somewhat more egalitarian economic and social policies under pressure from assemblies of rational citizens both nationally and globally. Derridas vehement denunciation of the triumphant claims of the advocates of liberal democracy and capitalism in Spectres had raised hopes. They were rather quickly and summarily dashed, however, when visualizing an organization for counterhegemonic political practice. The only real organization that he was willing to signal with approval was the same as that of Habermas. He also endorsed and believed in the possibility of the states being able to tame the markets and to put Neoliberalism on a leash. And he joined Habermas in a joint appeal for the creation of a new Europe and to reiterate the call for the transformation of international law and its institutions, in particular the UN. (Habermas Derrida 2003:291). When we come to cultural fundamentalism, it is religion that preoccupies the minds of all three. Rawls turns, surprisingly, into a jingoist and endorses the American action plan for global security. For both Rawls and Habermas, the entry of religious and comprehensive

35

beliefs is welcome where there is a

possibility of such beliefs accommodating

themselves to the secular public space dominated by reasonable or rational citizens. It reassures them both of the claims of liberal tolerance and abiding civility of Western formal constitutional democracies. In addition, for Habermas, their rhetorical and emotion-passion binding power could only strengthen the claims of openness, inclusiveness and durability of these democracies. Both assert a claim about the humanity encompassing universalism of World Religions without even thinking about the need to excavate the reasons or validate the truth-value of that claim. Derrida, as always sensitive and skeptical, was moved to examine the complex relationship between religion and politics together and in terms of their mutually reinforcing and contradictory manifestations both historically and in our times. As a result he is responsible for some promising (as well as some rather pessimistic) attempts, by some of those who took his [him?] seriously, to meet the challenges of our times. His own conclusions, as we saw, turn out to be rather disappointing. I have argued that his own early political context may well have shaped his deep suspicion of organization and his over-protective preoccupation with spontaneity. The final question we are left with then is about the promising pedagogic initiative emerging from Derridas work. If the telos of tolerance is truth to be arrived at and implemented through dialogue and practical action, what is to be the nature and substance of that truth? We will be compounding the mistake repeated over and over again by the critics of Marxist utopias if we were to treat the arrival of such a moment of truth with a sense of finality. Marx was forever insistent that every moment of arrival will also in that very instant turn into a moment of anticipation. The unceasing creative, reflexive, productive activity of socially embedded human beings, their social labor, will begin to produce consequences, with or without the awareness at this point, of its criticaltransformative potential. The fruits of that labor will begin to bring every just established shared sense of truth into question. Therein lies, I believe, the secret of human modernity. ----------

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