Central and Eastern European Politics Research proposal Matei Nina Marina MCP 1

My research project, which I intent to make a part of my Dissertation theory, will be placed at the border of three research areas: the history of political ideas, religious philosophy and political theory. My Dissertation project hopes to analyze and reach a conclusion on the issue of convergence or parallelism between the political projects put forth by two 19th century thinkers, the post-Calvinist theologian and statesman Abraham Kuijper and Islamic thinker Muhammad Ben Badis. The research project at hand intends to focus specifically on a major element of the aforementioned research, namely the concept of sovereignty of God in relation to the issue of government legitimacy by social contract. The comparative view will touch upon the interpretation given to this concept by Kuijper and Abul Mawdudi, the latter being a 20th century Islamic intellectual and statesman directly influenced by Ben Badiss writings. The main question to be asked and hopefully answered is the following: To what extent did Abraham Kuijpers Calvinist perspective and Ab 'l-Al Mawdds Islamic oriented view produce a similar interpretation on the idea of sovereignty of God in relation to the concept of social contract? The working hypothesis that is intended to be either refuted or supported by the research states that: A situation of convergence is discernable in the evolution of Kuijiper and Mawdds thought regarding the relation between sovereignty of God and social contract. In the realm of political theory and history of political thought, research rarely included reflections on methodology, the questions of how and the why remaining in the backgroud by comparison to how this issue developed in other areas of social science research. Nevertheless there are aknowledged methods, from that of Leo Strauss to Quinten Skinner, Terrance Ball and George Gadamer. The research will be based mainly on the analysis, interpretation and comparison of the body of texts partaining to the two aformentioned religous thinkers and stateman. Leaving aside methods of pure political theory and focusing more on history of political thought, I will mainly relly on Quinten Skiners third way approach between strict textualism and contextualism, taking into account the texts before the authors, but also considering the context, both intelectual and socio-political, in which they appear.

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