African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity: Past Oppression, Future Justice? 9781474400411

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity

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Annual of European and Global Studies Editors: Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski, Johann P. Arnason and Peter Wagner An annual collection of the best research on European and global themes, the Annual of European and Global Studies publishes issues with a specific focus, each addressing critical developments and ­controversies in the field. Volume 1  Religion and Politics edited by Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski Volume 2  African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity edited by Peter Wagner

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Annual of European and Global Studies

African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Past Oppression, Future Justice? Edited by Peter Wagner

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© editorial matter and organisation Peter Wagner, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun­– Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11.5/13.5 Minion Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0040 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0041 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0512 6 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Introduction Peter Wagner

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Part I  Reconstructing the History of Atlantic Modernity   1. The American Divergence, the Modern Western World and the Paradigmatisation of History Aurea Mota

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  2. The Limits of Recognition: History, Otherness and Autonomy42 Àngela Lorena Fuster Peiró and Gerard Rosich   3. On Being in Time: Modern African Elites and the Historical Challenge to Claims for Alternative and Multiple Modernities64 Jacob Dlamini   4. The Sublime Dignity of the Dictator: Republicanism and the Return of Dictatorship in Political Modernity Andreas Kalyvas

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  5. The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: Between Reform and Revolution101 Alice Soares Guimarães

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Contents

Part II  Comparing Trajectories of Modernity in the South   6. Inconsistencies between Social-democratic Discourses and Neo-liberal Institutional Development in Chile and South Africa: a Comparative Analysis of the Post-authoritarian Periods125 Rommy Morales Olivares   7. HIV/AIDS Policies and Modernity in Brazil and South Africa: a Comparative Critical Analysis José Katito   8. Land and Restitution in Comparative Perspective: Analysing the Evidence of Right to Land for Black Rural Communities in Brazil and South Africa Joyce Gotlib

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Part III  Claims for Justice in the History of Modernity and in its Present   9. An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource Svjetlana Nedimović 10. Injustice at Both Ends: Pre- and Post-apartheid Literary Approaches to Injustice, Sentiment and Humanism in the Work of C. Louis Leipoldt, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the Film Invictus Riaan Oppelt 11. The Student Movement in Chile 2011–12: Rearming the Critique of Capitalism Beatriz Silva Pinochet 12. Indignation and Claims for Economic Sovereignty in Europe and the Americas: Renewing the Project of Control over Production David Casassas, Sérgio Franco, Bru Laín, Edgar Manjarín, Rommy Morales Olivares, Samuel Sadian and Beatriz Silva Pinochet

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Notes on the Contributors 288 Index 294 vi

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List of Figures

12.1 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire by Salvador Dalí, 1940 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació GalaSalvador Dalí, DACS, 2015 12.1 Students’ protest and occupation of Universidad de Chile’s main building, 2011. (Source: photograph by Beatriz Silva)

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Introduction Peter Wagner

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his second volume of the Annual of European and Global Studies addresses two central concerns of the field: First, it contributes to the recent efforts of linking the history of Europe more firmly to world history or, in a different terminology, of situating European modernity in global context (for examples of the former, see Baily, 2004; Osterhammel, 2008; for the latter, Delanty, 2013). It does so by detailed studies of the linkages between Africa, America and Europe, showing that what is often referred to as ‘the rise of Europe’ is better understood as the creation of an Atlantic world region with increasingly dense but highly asymmetric commercial and communicative ties. Economically speaking, the result was the systematic employment, underpinned by violence, of African labour and American soil for bringing about what has become known as the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In cultural–intellectual terms, elites in Africa and America came increasingly to look up and ahead to Europe as the source for viable directions in which to develop their own societies, all the while considering the particularities of their situation in relation to the apparent European ‘model’. Thus, one of the key concerns of this volume is a better understanding of why, from some moment onwards, ‘Europe’ and ‘the rest of the world’ entered into a particular relation, not merely one of domination by the former over the latter but one that was conceived as a kind of superiority, often more specifically as an ‘advance’ in historical time. This alleged particular position of Europe has underpinned the historical and sociological debate over modernity for the last 150 years, often conflating a particular history with the­– analytical and normative­– theorisation of society and politics. Reviewing the history 1

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of the relations between Africa, America and Europe, thus, secondly, invites one to reflect anew on the concept of modernity.1 Starting out from the asymmetric economic relations and the orientation of cultural–intellectual life towards a Europe that seemed to be ‘ahead’, our reflections here centre on the temporality of modernity, on the question of how far the supposed arrival of modernity in one place, Europe, alters the ways in which human beings situate themselves in time and history worldwide. Analytically speaking, this is the question about a direction of history which was central to philosophies of history up to the nineteenth century. This genre has largely been abandoned since, at least in academia, leaving the question not only without an answer but even without a fruitful way of posing it­– though it does not go away either. In normative terms, this is the question about progress in human history, about modernity as a progressive project that endows itself with the means for its own realisation, as expressed in some of the hopes and promises of the Enlightenment.

The Relation Between the History and the Theory of Modernity In recent debate about modernity, the entangling of history and theory has often taken the form of, on the one hand, claiming the historical existence of a normative project of modernity that held out promises for humankind and, on the other hand, stating that these promises have not­– or not yet­– been fulfilled. This theme has been discussed in numerous ways. In interpretations that focus­– implicitly or explicitly­– on the European experience, two perspectives have been dominant. On the one side, scholars have suggested that modernity’s promises have, indeed, been translated into modern institutions but that the process is incomplete, and that further claims for freedom and justice keep arising and need to be addressed (Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth among others). On the other side, authors have emphasised that new forms of domination and oppression have arisen with modernity and that, thus, the rise of modernity should be seen as a transformation in the form of domination and oppression rather than the advent of emancipation and liberation (Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman among others). Though this latter reasoning had originally been developed with the European situation in mind, it is most compelling when associating colonial domination with the history of modernity. Investigating the history of Africa and America, the era that, in Europe, is considered 2

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to mark the rise of modernity is clearly one of new forms of oppression originating with the European colonisers. In parts of the globe, this period does not signal the overcoming of the oppression in an un-Enlightened past, as a traditional European view suggested. Rather, modernity itself, so it seems, inaugurated a history of oppression. At the same time, the observation that modernity held out the prospect of liberation and emancipation is not refuted by this change of perspective. Movements for liberation in the colonised world often, though not always, appealed to the normative claims made in modern European reasoning and led their struggles against European domination in the name of these claims, from the Haitian revolution to the African National Congress. Thus, the horizon of future freedom and justice, as opened in a novel way during the European Enlightenment, was and remains a point of orientation in the history and present of modernity. This insight into the deep ambivalence of modernity­– inaugurating a history of oppression while, at the same time, serving as a reference point for resistance to oppression and struggle for justice­– translates into a need for revising the standard temporality of modernity. It is no longer straightforwardly possible to assume that the onset of modernity means the exit (not even the first step of an exit) from oppression and injustice on the long but linear way to reaching freedom and justice. If the reference to modernity, depending on the context, can lead either to increase of freedom and justice or increase of oppression and injustice, or even both, but for different groups or in different places, then modernity needs to be understood in a radically different way than the one maintained by standard historiography, sociology and philosophy. We may well preserve the historical reference to the Enlightenment and the subsequent revolutionary transformations; it would be difficult to write world history or theorise modernity without it. These events, however, should no longer be seen as having an indissoluble double meaning, with which free intellectual and political play is permitted, as being, namely, a breakthrough in normative philosophy, on the higher plane of reason, and at the same time leading the way for a progressive transformation of society and politics, in the this-worldly realm of power and interest.2 Instead, the philosophical proposals should be seen contextually as responses to sociopolitical problems generated earlier, such as, most importantly, the lack of certainty because of the co-existence of monotheistic religions with claims to exclusivity and the lack of justification for power in the absence of a common cosmology 3

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and in the presence of multiple states with claims to sovereignty (see Wagner, 2001: ch. 1; 2008: ch. 9). And the sociopolitical transformations, which, true, occurred in the wake of the new philosophy, should not be seen as the straightforward implementation of philosophical maxims but as interpretations of such philosophy that were open to contestation on conceptual grounds, as well as partial mobilisation on grounds of power and interest. In other words, and as a first step of reconsideration, rather than accepting the claims of the European philosophy of modernity to suprahistorical validity, we should see its propositions as the outcome of the human faculty of imagination applied to the particular problems of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, as perceived by Europeans. Saying this is not to deny specificity to European thought from Descartes and Hobbes to Kant and Hegel. To the contrary, reading these authors in context suggests that the problems they were addressing­– lack of epistemic certainty, lack of ultimate sources for justification­– were seen to be of such a kind that they required the radical criticism of prevailing views on certainty and justification that were found wanting. And, subsequently, the response to the shortcomings of earlier thinking was the explicit construction of alternative routes to certainty and justification that were less reliant on unsustainable presuppositions, thus showed less need for external support while requiring greater internal coherence. Radicality and explicitness are key features of at least the ‘canonical’ authors of the European philosophy of modernity. One may suggest that such radicality and explicitness are constitutive features of all modernity; that they are what makes modernity one (see for some such argument recently Skirrbek, 2012). This would be consonant with the denial of external and stable sources for certainty, such as in Immanuel Kant’s sapere aude but also already in Socrates, and also with the commitment of modernity to autonomy, to self-determination and self-alteration, as emphasised by Cornelius Castoriadis (1990 and elsewhere). But none of these features makes the substantive results that such a questioning philosophy arrives at ‘correct,’ neither in the sense of providing adequate solutions to the existing problems nor in the sense of obtaining universal validity. To give a key example: the European philosophy of modernity created the concept of the rational subject as an atomistic individual. It did so in response to the quest for certainty under conditions of high uncertainty. But, while it is making universal claims, an atomist social ontology is not very compelling, and the individualist political theory that is derived from it has shown 4

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to carry deep normative ambiguities. Accordingly, this philosophy has never been as widely accepted in European intellectual and political history as both its followers and its postcolonial critics have later often claimed. Every single proposition of Enlightenment thought has been criticised at its time, and not merely in ways that can be denounced as rejecting the ‘modernity’ that was upcoming with this new thinking, but also by showing flaws­– inconsistencies, ambivalences, paradoxes­ – in the reasoning. The second step of our reconsideration concerns the idea of applying or implementing the new commitments of the philosophy of modernity. The above-mentioned flaws are one reason why the philosophy of modernity has not been­– could not be­– straightforwardly implemented in the further course of European and world history, not even slowly or incompletely. The other reason is resistance by those who were likely to lose in the ensuing sociopolitical transformations, such as those who made unquestioned claims to certainty or unjustifiable claims to power. The critical debate about modernity has suffered from the common assumption that, once such resistance was overcome, an unambiguously modern sociopolitical order could and would be created. This assumption underestimates the openness of the commitments of modernity to interpretation. There is widespread agreement that the key commitments of modernity­– its ‘imaginary signification’ (Cornelius Castoriadis)­– are to freedom and reason, in philosophical terminology, or to subjectivation and rationalisation (Touraine, 1992), or to autonomy and mastery, in more sociological terminology (Arnason, 1989; Wagner, 1994). There is still too little recognition, though, of the degree to which the conceptual elements of this signification entertain tensions with each other or, to phrase the issue more widely, too little reflection about the relation between these conceptual elements. Autonomy means giving oneself one’s own law. Arguably, therefore, the idea of autonomy already contains a reference to mastery, namely to establish the law that henceforth is to guide one’s own action. In the same move, a tension is created: once there is a law to be followed, there is a limit to autonomy, to freedom. The temporality of human action is at the core of the matter; we may have freely established the law to follow at one moment but, at the next moment, this law turns into a constraint. Cornelius Castoriadis referred to this tension as the relation between the instituting moment of social life, giving the law, and the instituted moment, facing the law that already exists. At that later moment, though, the self 5

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may no longer be the same as the one that gave the law. That is why every institution needs to be open to reinstituting­– under conditions of modernity, that is, of autonomy. Furthermore, the commitment of modernity to autonomy is insufficiently specific to suggest any institutional model of modernity. The concept of autonomy contains within itself the tension between individual and collective autonomy; the concept of mastery begs the questions about the object of mastery­– oneself, others, or nature­– and about the mode of mastery­– instrumental control or hermeneutic understanding, to suggest only two such modes. These tensions and the lack of specificity cannot be overcome by conceptual reasoning alone, as much as social and political philosophy have tried over the past two centuries and more. The ways in which these tensions are being addressed in practice, in turn, lead to a great variety of different interpretations of modernity, as specifications of the basic imaginary signification. Rather than implementing unambiguous principles, therefore, the history of modernity should be seen as the work of interpreting the imaginary signification of modernity with a view to sedimenting them in institutions, and to reinterpret modernity in the light of experiences made with modern institutions and of the critique of their falling short of expectations.3 These reflections guide the rereading of modernity as proposed in this volume through a look at the entangled trajectories of modernity in Africa, America and Europe, starting out from the suggestion to reconsider the supposed onset of modernity in Europe as the creation of an Atlantic sociopolitical constellation.

Atlantic Modernity J. G. A. Pocock’s celebrated book The Machiavellian Moment (1975) quite rightly extended the discussion of political modernity in time, moving the focus from the late eighteenth century and the French Revolution to the early sixteenth century, and in space, from an exclusively European concern towards the identification of an ‘Atlantic republican tradition’ culminating in the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies, the so-called American Revolution. It is surprising to see, however, that, despite the label ‘Atlantic’, the analysis finds its limits with the Northern Atlantic, whereas republicanism was the dominant ideology of the Southern American independence movements and the dominant political form of the independent states, with the only exception of Brazil, thus was much more successful than 6

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in Europe after the restoration of the Old Regime with the Vienna Congress of 1815.4 Inadvertently, thus, the intellectual historian Pocock employs an idea of ‘the West’, which geographically designates only the northern shores of the Atlantic and which politically comes into widespread use only after World War II. By this sleight of hand, he integrates the United States of America fully into a history of modernity, for which there are good reasons, but, at the same time, shrinks the Atlantic which, across the very same period, became politically, economically and intellectually closely connected. This is much more than a geographically inappropriate description; it is a conceptual decision that, despite the originality of Pocock’s proposal in other respects, follows a preceding ‘paradigmatisation of history’ that erroneously equates the Northern Atlantic West with the origins of modernity. Aurea Mota, in Chapter 1, provides a reconstruction of the conceptual, rather than geographical, separation of ‘the Americas’ into a North America and a South America with clearly distinct sociopolitical connotations. ‘In the beginning all the world was America’, John Locke famously remarked. This claim permitted the elaboration of two similarly unfounded but highly consequential assumptions: in temporal terms, it moved the contemporaneous native populations of America into an earlier time from which they descended without any change; in conceptual terms, it supported the hypothesis of a ‘state of nature’ from which human beings could exit to reach higher echelons of civilisation in the progressive course of history. Less than one-and-a-half centuries after the Salamanca–Valladolid debates between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Locke forgot about the actual encounter between the European seafarers and settlers and the native people of America and the reflections this provoked about the nature of humanity, the recognition of the other, and the actual rights of human beings in encounters under conditions of asymmetrically distributed resources (see Pagden, 2000). As Àngela Lorena Fuster Peiró and Gerard Rosich show in Chapter 2, however, the meeting of absolutely unknown people raises questions about the ways in which someone can be recognised­– as human, as equal, as free­– who is not already part of the intellectual horizon of those who might consider recognition, an assumption that theories of recognition tend to make. The ways in which the colonised recognised, or not, the coloniser has been even less in the focus of attention than the problems of recognition for the coloniser. For too long it has been assumed, by 7

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mainstream historiography and postcolonial studies alike, that the colonisers overwhelmed the indigenous population with such military, political, economic and theologico-philosophical force that the question about indigenous world views can hardly be posed any longer soon after the first encounters.5 This assumption, however, neglects the creative agency of those subjected to colonisation and underestimates their resilience in the face of the powerful colonisers. Jacob Dlamini, in Chapter 3, investigates the ways in which African elites define their relation to the Europe with which they were confronted by the settlers in both appreciative and combative terms. Starting out from the obvious contemporaneousness with the dominating settlers, significantly, the reflections work through the suggestion that the settlers are two millenniums ahead of the native population but, while accepting the chronology of Christianity, challenge the idea of an unbridgeable gap. The analysis demonstrates that the ‘entanglement’ of forms of modernity should be seen less as occurring between constituted societies than, rather, through the interpretative agency of human beings. In the wake of Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment, to which we alluded earlier, a whole current of historiographical and politico-philosophical work emerged that revived republicanism as a more fruitful underpinning to political modernity than individualist liberalism (Pettit, 1997; Skinner, 1998), on the one hand, and claimed the European origins of putting freedom in and of states at the centre of political thought, on the other (see, for instance, Skinner and van Gelderen, 2005; 2013). Acknowledging the reconstructive merits of this endeavour, one nevertheless needs to note that, while eliminating blind spots in political theory and history, new biases have been created. Republicanism has been hailed as providing a more sound concept of liberty than liberalism but a nuanced retrieval of the long-term tradition of republican thinking since ancient Rome, as offered by Andreas Kalyvas in Chapter 4, shows that ‘neo-Roman’ (Quentin Skinner) political thought also appropriated a concern for the non-ambivalent establishment of political authority if need be, known throughout as dictatorship. This insight suggests that the political history of the past two centuries, far from witnessing the decline of republicanism, cannot be written as one of the linear rise of liberal democracy, neither in thought nor in practice. The frequent establishment of­– often military­ – dictatorships in Europe and Latin America across the twentieth century can be understood against this background. More particularly, the fact that anticolonial liberation movements, once successful, often 8

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turned into one-party regimes as well as explicit dictatorships is not an aberration of modern political practice that typically happens outside of Europe but occurs by recourse to the will of the people as assumed to be embodied by the liberation movement (Chipkin, 2014). The status of dictatorship in the framework of republican political thought can be understood, in the terminology used here, as a particular interpretation of modernity which privileges­– at least within temporal limits­– the mastery of political crises over the expression of collective autonomy. Unlike what the more harmony-oriented thinkers within the Enlightenment tradition thought, the tension between these two commitments is constitutive of political modernity. In political practice, we witness both the increase in liberties across the European seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rationalisation of the state apparatus, towards greater efficiency and control. Both of these changes are inspired by, broadly understood, Enlightenment thought. This insight opens the eyes for recognising varieties of Enlightenment there where they had hardly been identified before.6 Alice Soares Guimarães, in Chapter 5, demonstrates how transformations of state–society relations in eighteenth-century Portugal, not least focusing on the rationalisation of the state, can be analysed in relation to Enlightened political debates of the time. Those transformations, in turn, had an impact on the shaping of the relations between Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth century and on the debate about the political form of independent Brazil, as well as on the intra-Brazilian struggles over this form before and after independence.7

Varieties of Modern Trajectories The chapters in the first part of this volume underline, without claim to exhaustiveness, some of the historical and conceptual issues that had been neglected or misrepresented in most of the established history, sociology and philosophy of modernity. Taken together, they provide key elements for a novel view of what is often referred to as the rise of modernity as an Atlantic sociopolitical constellation rather than events in European history that bring forth the dynamics of further evolutionary progress. Within this Atlantic constellation, one can then observe, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sedimentation of a variety of specific interpretations of modernity, each dealing with some of the central problems of modern sociopolitical ­organisation in specific ways. In all due brevity, and thus in a rather 9

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schematic way, these interpretative–institutional varieties of modernity can be characterised as follows. Within Europe, the political form of empire remains significant at least until the end of World War I but, in the political imaginary and increasingly in institution building, it gradually gives way to the form of the nation state­– never without ambiguities and neither in any coherent way,8 but enhanced by a combination of normative and functional aspects. In normative terms, the nation state is seen as the institutional embodiment of collective self-determination, equating the ‘nation’ with the ‘people’ that embarks on collective autonomy. In functional terms, the economic elites of rising capitalism enlisted major parts of the population in the productive process, the emerging working class, requiring socialising institutions towards that end (for education, training, discipline). As a consequence, European polities came to set strong boundaries towards the outside and build relatively high levels of inclusion inside, two issues historically known as the national and the social question respectively. At the same time, imperial domination was hardly questioned at all in European debates over the relation between Europe, Africa and parts of Asia. Thus, collective self-determination was denied to Africans and Asians under colonial rule, and no autonomous interpretation of modernity could emerge until the success of anticolonial liberation struggles. In Africa, the rather few cases in which significant numbers of settlers of European descent lived together with a majoritarian indigenous population­– Algeria and its war of independence from France; Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and the Unilateral Declaration of Independence; and, in particular, South Africa with segregationist policies and apartheid and the resistance against those­– have generated intense and explicit debates about the interpretation of modernity. These debates, though, were constrained and given shape by the persistence of colonial domination until well into the second half of the twentieth century. In America, what we may call ‘settler interpretations of modernity’ were created that were based on varieties of relations between the descendants of the settlers and native and slave populations, all of which sustained the dominance of the settler group. At the extremes, we find, on the one hand, a modern self-understanding that presented itself as liberal and republican while annihilating the indigenous population and oppressing the slave population until long after the formal abolition of slavery, with the United States as the exemplary case (Henningsen, 2009), and on the other, the idea of mixing and fusion 10

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of the three population groups in the creation of a new ­civilisation and polity, with Brazil’s discourse about ‘racial democracy’ as the ­exemplary case. In comparison with the intra-European interpretation of modernity, both the American and the imposed African interpretations are distinct in two key respects: both give historically much less significance to the implication of the whole population into any ‘project of modernity’, and, at the same time, they are much less concerned with the definition and closure of the boundaries. To speak in European terms, neither the national nor the social question acquires constitutive significance for the interpretation of modernity, even though in Latin America more so than in North America and Africa. In turn, migration and social inequality become key features of the sociopolitical settings of American and African varieties of modernity.

Novel Interpretations of Modernity in Africa and Latin America This picture begins to change from the 1960s onwards, with the success of the anticolonial movements in Africa and the strengthening of political contestation of oligarchic rule in Latin America. Even though these movements face strong elite opposition, going as far as military coups d’état in Brazil and Chile and elsewhere, and the violent oppression of anti-apartheid protest in South Africa, by the end of the 1980s their success is on the horizon. The Brazilian military dictatorship ends in 1985, and a new constitution is passed in 1988; Chile’s dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, suffers a defeat in a referendum and leaves the presidency in 1990, trying, nevertheless, to eternalise the authoritarian constitution which remains unchanged to the present day; negotiations about the end of apartheid start in the late 1980s, culminating in the first inclusive democratic elections in 1994, with the victory of the African National Congress and the passing of a new constitution in 1996­– to mention only the key events in the three societies for which this volume provides detailed analyses. We can thus suggest that a novel interpretation of modernity is being elaborated in these American and African societies, featuring inclusive–egalitarian democracy, often with a high intensity of participation, and facing the legacy of high social inequality and, more generally, a hiatus between the elite perception of societal self-understanding and the living conditions of the majority of the population. 11

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Three comparative case studies deal with specific aspects of the new interpretation of modernity in the course of being elaborated in Brazil, Chile and South Africa. At the current moment, more than twenty years after the demise of oppressive regimes, a question that tends to impose itself is the one about the degree of continuity or discontinuity with the earlier situation. This question will not find the same answer everywhere; it will differ between societies, problem areas, and fields of political action. One area in which expectations for change could reasonably be high, given the democratic impetus, has been the relation between economic policy and social solidarity. The post-authoritarian political majorities in Chile and South Africa, the Concertación and the African National Congress respectively, for instance, have emphasised new policies of social inclusion and have succeeded in reducing poverty. But neither of them took strong measures to reduce social inequality, and both have been careful not to lose credibility in a worldeconomic context dominated by globally operating finance capitalism.9 Against this background, Rommy Morales Olivares, in Chapter 6, searches to identify the mechanisms that explain the relatively high degree of continuity in economic policy-making in both countries. Another area of high expectation has been health policy in which the challenge is to extend high-quality medical care as a public service or at affordable cost to the whole of society instead of to a small minority.10 At the moment of transformation, in addition, the HIV/AIDS epidemic emerged as a health issue for which no adequate approaches were at hand anywhere and which was added to an already overloaded agenda of sociopolitical reform. From a rather similar starting situation in the mid-1980s, a striking divergence in ways of dealing with the epidemic occurred between Brazil and South Africa for some time, with Brazil becoming a model country for combating HIV/AIDS and South Africa showing a deteriorating situation, even, for an extended period. Beyond differences in institutional structures and state–society relations, José Katito, in Chapter 7, accounts for the difference in policy response also in terms of historical legacies of societal self-understanding. In Brazil, HIV/AIDS was seen rather quickly as a society-wide problem for which a society-wide solution at the highest level of medical and policy competence needed to be found. Against the background of formal exclusion under apartheid, in contrast, the early ANC governments in South Africa were suspicious of ‘neutral’ expert advice by a medical science tainted by colonial experience and, in turn, were inclined to emphasise sociohistorical, rather than medical, sources for a problem that affected 12

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black South Africans more than white ones, thus causing a delay in the widespread use of antiretroviral drugs. Both the 1988 Brazilian constitution and the 1996 South African constitution provide more than the basic institutional architecture of the new democracies, combining individual rights, collective selfdetermination, and the rule of law. They furthermore acknowledge that the new polities emerge from a long-lasting history of injustice reaching up to the very immediate past and contain clauses to address such injustice. Among such clauses, in both cases, the one that provides for land restitution is a most significant one, both in economic terms and in terms of collective self-understanding. South Africa adopted a liberal–legal perspective on the matter and clearly defined possible claimants as those having been deprived by unjust means of a right to land. Brazil, in contrast, favoured a historico-cultural perspective, giving the right to restitution to communities of descendants of slaves with common practices and ties to the land, enlisting anthropological expertise to verify claims. Joyce Gotlib, in Chapter 8, offers a detailed comparative analysis of two cases of claims for land restitution, in Brazil and South Africa respectively, in this light.

Claims for Justice in the History of Modernity and in its Present The fact that situations of entrenched injustice in formal institutions have been overcome only relatively recently in a large number of societies turns the dealing with historical injustice into a core topic on the political agenda of the present­– with South Africa and its unprecedented Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a key example. If one takes a closer look, it indeed becomes evident that numerous polities define themselves against the background of past injustice. Historically, this constitutive reference takes the form of an account of ‘success’ as the liberation from oppression and injustice, from the national liberation from empires in Europe (Greece, Finland, Ireland, among others) to the liberation from colonial domination up to the recent past. More frequently nowadays, however, the reference­– sometimes officially acknowledged, often not­– is to injustice committed within the polity among its current members (or their descendants). This reference, too, is constitutive; it underpins the transformation of a dictatorship into a democracy, of racial oppression into equal freedom. But the constitution of a new polity does not do away with the past injustice 13

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among its members, which remains present. Formal equal freedom in the present is unequal in the light of past injustice that remains of present significance. In this sense, the past is in general a constitutive feature of a modern self-understanding that submits itself to the need for justification, against the tendency for abstracting from history in liberal thought (Mills, 2012). Along those lines, Svjetlana Nedimović, in Chapter 9, surveys the recent debates about ‘transitional justice’ and argues against attempts at ‘overcoming the past’ or ‘settling the past’. Their sociohistorical existence, rather, is the source from which societies can create their own self-understandings and can embark upon processes of selfalteration as autonomous societies. One could say that Riaan Oppelt, in Chapter 10, applies this very perspective to an historical reading of injustices in the history of what is now South Africa. Reading fictional accounts as pieces of evidence for societal self-understandings, he maps the injustice of the sociohistorical constellation after the South African war on to the one during apartheid. While the Afrikaners defeated in the war became the oppressors of the native population once in power, Riaan Oppelt tries to show that African humanism can be the resource in the present for history not to repeat itself. While Chapters 9 and 10 focus on the relation between the past and the present, the subsequent Chapters, 11 and 12, turn their attention towards the relation between the present and a possible future by looking at current movements of contestation. Beatriz Silva Pinochet, in Chapter 11, reads Chilean history since the coup d’état in 1973 as the imposition of an interpretation of modernity based on understanding merit and individual economic rationality as the principal elements for resolving every social problem, that is, efficiency, social injustice and development, as a model for society that goes a long way beyond the mere free market principle of economic organisation apparently featured in neo-liberalism. Appearing without alternatives to the main political forces after the end of the dictatorship, this model temporarily emptied out the space for critique in society (see Boltanski, 2009). With the student contestations of the past few years, however, one witnesses how the protest against a particular understanding of education and the educational system can enlarge into a power of criticism that touches the underlying ideas of society and aims to elaborate a novel interpretation of modernity through contestation. The collectively authored Chapter 12 aims to identify a similar force in the new wave of protest movements in Europe and Latin America 14

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that critically address the current form of capitalism and its consequences. The present situation is characterised by the termination of a kind of contract between the economic elites and the population which was ‘signed’ in Europe and North America at mid-century (as reflected, for instance, in the American term ‘New Deal’) and was partly prepared and expected in South America. Evidence for the cancellation are the rising inequality and increasing insecurity in labour markets; and the protest movements consider such cancellation as one-sided and derive from it the right to return to claims that go beyond the earlier contract. The contributions to the second part­– Chapters 6, 7 and 8­– demonstrate the processes at work in transforming institutionally entrenched interpretations of modernity based on inequality and oppression into novel forms that are shaped by the drive to inclusive–egalitarian collective self-determination, whereas those to the third part­– Chapters 9 to 12­– underline the historicity of any form of modernity. Rather than entirely stepping out of a past marked by oppression and immaturity into a new era of equality and freedom, any modern form of sociopolitical organisation will always be a reinterpretation of the normatively loaded but institutionally underdetermined commitments of modernity to autonomy and mastery. In our time, such reinterpretation will never be able to situate itself at the beginning of modern times as some Enlightenment scholars imagined. It will be created against the background of the experiences with, and struggles over, earlier interpretations of modernity, none of which has been entirely free from oppression and injustice. All chapters, and the volume as a whole, have been elaborated in the context of the research project ‘Trajectories of Modernity: Comparing Non-European and European Varieties’ (TRAMOD), funded by the European Research Council as Advanced Grant no. 249438. I should like to thank all members of the TRAMOD research group for participating in this volume as contributors and as discussants of the contributions and of this introduction. Furthermore, I should like to thank the TRAMOD visiting scholars Johann Arnason, Gerard Delanty, Rubén Lo Vuolo, and Ivor Chipkin for their extended comments on some of the chapters. Special thanks are due to Alexandros Philippides who accepted at short notice the arduous task of editing a volume for which the majority of the contributions were written by non-native speakers of English.

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Notes 1. With its emphasis on varieties of interpretations of modernity (on which more detail below), this volume intends to contribute to what has become known as the ‘multiple modernities’ debate. This intention notwithstanding, it does not have worldwide coverage and, in particular, does not contain any analysis of Asian societies, and this for two reasons. First, the theorem of multiple modernities has been developed with a focus on Asia suggesting that the multiplicity of modern self-understandings emerged from the encounter of established cultural programmes in the East with European modernity. As we have argued elsewhere (Wagner, 2011), such conceptualisation, as fruitful as it has been in opening a debate, tends to overestimate the internal homogeneity and temporal continuity of ‘cultures of modernity’. Second, the standard views of modernity give undue emphasis to endogenous developments in Europe leading allegedly to the first historical emergence of a modern sociopolitical configuration. We have taken issue with this view in a parallel analysis (Wagner, 2014a) and continue the discussion in this volume, shifting the emphasis to the novel connectedness of the Atlantic region. Rather than moving the focus of ‘modernity studies’ away from Asia, however, our suggestion is that, in future research, Asia is to be reincluded with a similar emphasis on the connectedness of world regions (see Gupta, Hofmeyr and Pearson, 2010, for studies of Indian Ocean connections between Africa and Asia, for instance) and overcoming the idea of coherent cultural programmes reproducing themselves in isolation from each other. 2. For the emergence of such a distinction of two realms and its significance for sociocultural transformations, see the so-called Axial age debate, in particular as recently reassessed by Arnason et al., 2005. 3. In the ambitious research programme pursued by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Axel Honneth and his colleagues focus on ‘normative paradoxes of the present’ (Honneth and Sutterlüty, 2011) which are conceptualised as promises of modernity being counteracted in the process of historical realisation. This suggests that the paradox emerges in the encounter between (a clear-cut?) theory and (a messy?) history. Our reasoning, in contrast, suggests that there are unavoidable ambivalences­– rather than paradoxes­– in the theory of modernity that are open to interpretation in historical contexts. No interpretation will relate to the theory as the only adequate one; and each interpretation may generate unintended outcomes, also in normative terms. 4. Suggesting a widening of the temporal perspective similar to Pocock, Enrique Dussel’s history of political philosophy in Politics of Liberation (2007) systematically considers Iberian and Southern American debates as crucial for the forming discourse of political modernity. 5. To give two examples: in his comparative study of ‘settler societies’, Louis Hartz (1962) gives due and nuanced attention to the issue but rules it out for his own approach. Enrique Dussel (2007) makes a sincere attempt but runs up against the scarcity of sources. 6. The Skinner/van Gelderen (2013) two-volume collection contains no discussion at all of events in the Iberian peninsula. 7. More ample discussion of the transformations of political modernity and

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Introduction its current state can be found in the forthcoming volume The Trouble with Democracy: Political Modernity in the 21st Century (Rosich and Wagner 2015). 8. In various ways, imperial situations persisted in the cases, among others, of Northern Ireland, the Basque country and Catalonia, the complex situation of Yugoslavia and its predecessor and successor states, and Soviet socialism after World War II, which probably is more adequately seen as an imperial constellation than as an alliance of nation states. 9. For more ample discussion on the politico-economic constellation of our time, see Casassas and Wagner 2016. 10. Hall and Lamont (2009) have taken health policy as an exemplary area for identifying ‘successful societies’.

References Arnason, J. P. (1991), ‘Modernity as a Project and as a Field of Tensions’, in A. Honneth and H. Joas (eds), Communicative Action, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Arnason, J. P., S. N. Eisenstadt and B. Wittrock (eds) (2005), Axial Civilizations and World History, Leiden: Brill. Baily, C. A. (2004), The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914, Oxford: Blackwell. Boltanski, L. (2009), De la Critique, Paris: Gallimard. Casassas, D. and P. Wagner (eds) (forthcoming) Modernity and Capitalism, special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory, 2, 2016. Castoriadis, C. (1990), ‘Pouvoir, politique, autonomie’, in Le Monde Morcelé: Les Carrefours du Labyrinthe III, Paris: Seuil, pp. 113–39. Chipkin, I. (2013), ‘Can the People Govern? Popular Sovereignty and the Sovereignty of Ordinary People’, lecture, International Sociology Debates at the University of Barcelona, December 2013. Delanty, G. (2013), Formations of European Modernity, London: Macmillan. Dussel, E. (2007), Política de la Liberación: Historia Mundial y Crítica, Madrid: Trotta. Hall, P. A. and M. Lamont (eds) (2009), Successful Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartz, L. (1964), The Founding of New Societies, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Henningsen, M. (2009), Der Mythos Amerika, Frankfurt/M: Eichborn. Gupta, P., I. Hofmeyr and M. Pearson (eds) (2010), Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, Pretoria: UNISA Press/Delhi: Penguin India. Honneth, A. and F. Sutterlüty (2011), ‘Normative Paradoxien der Gegenwart’, Westend. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 8: 1, 64–85. Mills, C. (2012), ‘Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy’, presentation at the TRAMOD conference ‘Political Modernity in the 21st Century’, Barcelona, 2012. Osterhammel, J. (2008), Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Beck. Pagden, A. (ed.) (2000), Facing Each Other, 2 vols, Farnham: Ashgate. Pettit, P. (1997), Republicanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosich, G. and P. Wagner (eds) (2015), The Trouble with Democracy: Political Modernity in the 21st Century, forthcoming.

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Skinner, Q. (1998), Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. and M. van Gelderen (eds) (2005), Republicanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. and M. van Gelderen (eds) (2013), Freedom and the Construction of Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skirrbek, G. (2012), ‘Alternative Processes of Modernization?’, in J. P. Arnason and B. Wittrock (eds), Nordic Paths to Modernity, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 167–89. Touraine, A. (1992), Critique de la modernité, Paris: Fayard. Wagner, P. (1994), A Sociology of Modernity, London: Routledge. Wagner, P. (2001), Theorizing Modernity, London: Sage. Wagner, P. (2008), Modernity as Experience and Interpretation, Cambridge: Polity. Wagner, P. (2011), ‘From Interpretation to Civilization­– and Back: analysing the trajectories of non-European modernities’, European Journal of Social Theory, 14: 1, 89–106. Wagner P. (2014), ‘Europe and the Sociology of Modernity’, in A. A. Kyrtsis and S. Koniordis (eds), Handbook of European Sociology, London: Routledge.

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1 The American Divergence, the Modern Western World and the Paradigmatisation of History Aurea Mota

T

his chapter is an invitation to rethink some narratives about the emergence of the modern Western world­– restricted to Europe in the beginning and then expanded gradually to encompass the United States of America­– and the ways in which this process has been explained through historical accounts at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an attempt to return to a societal process that was left aside when what was happening in a ‘borderline’, liminal time and space became the status quo. More to the point, the focus here is on some aspects of what was regarded as America, the ‘New World’, before and after the modern ruptures that occurred in the liminal ‘age of revolutions’ (Wagner, 1994; Armitage and Subrahmanyam, 2010). It is argued that America went through a process of bifurcation, or divergence, of North and South, at exactly the point when certain historical events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries started to be seen as inaugurating the modern times. In this process, many of the links which were used to make the New World as a whole a significant idea started to change in the early nineteenth century, became strongly separated out in the second half of this same century, to become irreconcilable after the first decades of the twentieth century. America as a whole did make sense and had its significance expressed in the way in which the relation between the New and the Old World was conceived between the sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. This was stronger for the closest ones­– mainly Europe and Africa­– and weaker for the distant­– the so called ‘Asia’­– (Dussel, 2007). In the first section of this chapter, I explore the significance of the New World in a two-fold way: firstly, by exploring some p ­ hilosophical 21

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approaches of the two centuries after the ‘discovery’ of the New World which reveal an aspect of this meaningful space. As one can see in the use of this term in the philosophical schema of John Locke, the qualitative distinction between the areas of America was not taken for granted since the appearance of the new continent on the world map. Secondly, later, with Alexander von Humboldt’s travel writings of the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is argued that, despite the historical differences between the colonisation and the process of emancipation of different parts of the New World, America was still conceived as one whole continental area and did make sense as such; a space in which the main distinctions that were possible to identify were not based on cultural, developmental and linguistic terms but on physical ones (Humboldt, 2011, 1995).1 It is argued here that what used to be understood as the New World went through a process of divergence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this divergence was appropriated by instituting different significant categories by the narratives of the enlargement of the modern Western world in the twentieth century. As a way to see how this divergence has been connected with the accounts about the historical emergence of the modern Western world, the second section of this chapter explores briefly some of historical transformations that have opened the door to the constitution of the new modern social imaginary in America. A general view of some aspects of the Thirteen British Colonies’ struggle for independence and what became known as the ‘American Revolution’ with its notions of ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ will be analysed in light of the other American revolutions of the period and its development. It is by putting the ‘American Revolution’ within the context of the other revolutions in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries­– the San Domingo Revolution, above all, but also other ‘Latin American struggles for independence’– and the divergence which was happening at the same time, that the argument about what I call paradigmatisation of (some) history/ies will be developed. It is argued here that one of the key elements in understanding what became regarded as the ‘modern Western world’ in the twentieth century is a process of separation of ‘paradigmatic’ historical events from ‘secondary’ ones. The consequences of this separation were appropriated into history and the interpretations of the modern world.2 Strangely enough, key events which are also part of the process of making the ‘new’ come about were consigned to the margins of history. 22

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Perspectives on the New World before the Divergence It is possible to dispute the idea that ‘John Locke was the first modern philosopher to discover the New World and to make its existence the major component of a political philosophy’ (Lebovics, 1986: 567). To be sure, Locke was the first philosopher to make use of the idea of the New World as an historical demonstration of a state of nature, an idea that used to be appropriated only on a very abstract level. As Dussel (2007: 190) argues, however, talking about the emergence of a modern philosophy, one cannot disregard the fact that, before him, Descartes was a student of the Spanish Jesuits versed in the American context and the influence that it had exercised on the birth of modern thought.3 In fact, before Descartes, Montaigne was the first to challenge the Hellenistic philosophical world by using its perspective to analyse what was ‘going’, or common currency, after the New World appeared. Montaigne was sure that the philosophical conceptions and desires should be reoriented after this discovery (Pomer, 1996). Not only because another space, with its inhabitants, suddenly appeared but because, through the experience of getting to know what was going on in the New World, a better understanding of human existence would be possible. He explored the issue in a clear way in his Of Cannibals, published in 1580 (Montaigne, 1993:105). In this piece, reflecting upon some experiences that the world was going through after the discovery of the ‘other world’, Montaigne claimed that barbarism, a very important theme at that time, is everything that one is not accustomed to. He was, however, far away from any kind of moral relativism. By showing that Europeans have behaved in a manner that could also be regarded as barbarism,4 he wanted to show that the Tupinambás5 were not worse than the Europeans because they ate human bodies. Montaigne’s point is that the rules of reason which people take to be universal about human action have their justifying roots in a specific context. Thus, in their specific contexts, Montaigne and Locke were making philosophical and moral claims based on the discovery of the New World and its relation to the Old World. Descartes, without making it explicit, could be seen as someone who was also reorienting modern philosophy bearing this experience in mind.6 This is just to introduce the point about how there was an entirely new world guiding some philosophical claims in the couple of centuries just after the discovery. John Locke, particularly with his Second Treatise of Government­ – which begins with the famous sentence ‘In the beginning all the World 23

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was America.’­– is a key thinker in understanding the idea that America as a whole was the significant area that informed the relation between the Old and New Worlds up to the eighteenth century. Locke was a keen reader of travel literature in general but with a special interest in the travel narratives from people who had been to Asia and, above all, to the ‘new entire globe’ on the other side of the Atlantic. For Talbot (2010), travel books on America, in particular, were used by Locke in his attempt to see the current political situation which he was living through in the light of a broader context. Bearing in mind that the travel literature he had in his library was seen by him as ethnographic sources, it is remarkable that Locke used the expression ‘all the World’ in the opening sentence of his book. This is because it makes a strong affirmation about a supposed empirical equal point of departure that nonetheless underwent different societal and political developments. The ethnographic materials were used by him to compose a natural philosophy which was historically contextualised but which presupposes a point of departure that could be represented by what was going on in the New Atlantic World. The metaphor of the world as America in the beginning and his state of nature are an outcome of this procedure. Despite the variation observed in the social and institutional contexts and expressed in the narratives which Locke used to inform himself, America as a whole was what he saw.7 The argument about the divergence which started to divide the New World by the end of the eighteenth century does not presuppose that a whole unified historical area existed as something significant for the natives before. To assume that would be completely wrong. As Ribeiro (1971) points out, there are at least four different cultural matrices that are possible to find in the continent which were a product of the process of the encounter between the New and the Old Worlds. For each of these matrices, at least a general picture of what a shared area means could be formed. Certainly, the formation of a single big nation by the whole continent was an idealistic and artificial idea, shaped during the historical moment of the struggles for emancipation in America. The point that is worth emphasising here is that, during almost three centuries after the discovery of America, there was a whole space that oriented perspectives which were seen as representing the ‘new’ and by this process made possible its relation to the ‘old’. This remained the dominant view until the very end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, just before an internal divergence occurred in the area. The work of Alexander von Humboldt, as 24

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expressed in his travels around the new continent at exactly this period, can help us show how this divergence began. Humboldt left Europe (from La Coruña, Spain) for the new continent on 5 June 1799. He arrived in Cumaná on 16 July of the same year. He travelled to areas of what later became Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and its Amazonian border with Brazil, Cuba and, at the end of his trip, just before going back to Europe in 1804, he went to Mexico and to Washington in the United States. Humboldt was mapping and making statistical calculations of the vast area of the new continent in more detail than anyone else before him. But, besides this, his novelty consists in his relating cartography and statistics to the human lives that he found in each place. His views of the ‘new continent’ were laid out in parallel to what he was observing in terms of political developments and human agency.8 For Fernando Ortiz, who wrote the introduction to the Cuban 1960 translation of his Political Essay, Humboldt was someone who not only recognised the importance of the whole western hemisphere for the world but a person who can also be regarded as one of the first ‘historians of America’, one who took its history in a positive direction. It can be said that ‘while Humboldt’s political philosophy was no doubt a product of Enlightenment thought, his views of the Americas as a natural and cultural space radically diverge from the dominant discourse about the New World as inferior to Europe’ (Kutzinski and Ette, 2001: xiii). He sees there, as everywhere in the world, the bridges that connect the changeable with the unchangeable and with the work of people, thus forming a whole integrated cosmos. Humboldt is also offering a work that expresses another important feature of this threshold time. In his writings it is possible to find aspirations of a way of seeing the world that had been losing strength in his time. According to Walls (2009), Humboldt was writing at a moment when literature and science were becoming increasingly separated. But he himself had made an effort to remain part of a romantic generation for which this separation was not important. Humboldt’s solution to the problem of how to relate the phenomena of life, as dynamic entity, and inanimate nature, was ‘to fuse scientific fact with poetic imagination’ (Walls, 2009: 164), giving an integrated view of social and physical phenomena as constituting an entire integrated system. His work can be seen as continuing the romanticist ideals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that sought to understand the basic historical form of a phenomenon and combine it with the experience of a detached self (Taylor, 1997: 370). In this perspective it is by looking 25

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at the particular that it is possible to see the general. This perspective, however, was about to become increasingly disregarded. As Walls puts it, ‘before modernity could come into being it had to kill and dismember Humboldt’s cosmos’ (2009: xi).9 The experiences of leaving the Old World and exploring the New shaped his perspectives for life. For the purposes of this chapter, however, Alexander von Humboldt was, above all, the first thinker to challenge the nineteenth-century view about what was going on in the new continent during that period by making a public call to use a more ‘convenient, consistent and precise’ nomenclature to designate the new nations that were forming in America (Humboldt, 2011: 209). He was talking about the process of calling by the name ‘America’ only a single space, the United States, and not the whole meaningful continent that had informed him and his predecessors. When he makes this claim of the dangers involved in the appropriation of the name America by a single country, it was not because of any conceptual over-refinement but because he was aware of what could happen in political, economic and epistemic terms in the relation between the free nations of the continent among themselves, as well as with the Old World.10 Thus, it is in the first half of the nineteenth century that, to describe the free nations of America, categories other than ‘the United States’ appeared. As a meaningful name for the agents inserted in its reality, ‘Latin’ America is a category that will appear in the middle of the nineteenth century.11 As it is possible to see by the following examples, however, the divergence did not come as a straightforward reality for the subjects involved in the process. In 1828, the Venezuelan, Simón Rodríguez, who was one of the main leaders of the struggles for emancipation in Spanish America, felt comfortable in writing a book called Las Sociedades Americanas (The American Societies). He shows the advantages that his America­– the New World­– would have, in relation to Europe, in achieving the aim of becoming an enlightened society.12 As will be explored in the following section, this very idea of ‘experiencing novelty’ is going to be appropriated by the narratives about the notion of ‘American exceptionalism’. Justo Arosema, who was a statesman, lawyer, and writer from Panama, wrote a book in 1840, entitled Apuntamientos para la Introducción a las Ciencias Morales Políticas por un Joven Americano (Notes for the Introduction to Moral Political Science by a Young American) and in 1870 another book, Estudios Constitucionales sobre los Gobiernos de América Latina (Constitutional Studies about the Latin American Governments).13 To 26

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show why we should denaturalise the idea of a smooth consolidation or evolution of the idea about America and Latin America, the example of Justo Arosema is even more illustrative than the previous one. Living in Panama, he saw himself as a young American and, from this perspective, able to talk about moral political science. Later on it did not make sense for him to talk about the whole continent as his own. In a short time, his space started being ‘Latin America’; an inferior area that should devote itself to a continuous catching-up process. Humboldt was concerned about the ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ consequences for the citizens of the other emancipated countries in America, if this imprecision remained (Kutzinski and Ette, 2011). That is why, it is argued in this chapter, Humboldt’s idea indicates an aspect of the American divergence as well as the consolidation of at least two different meaningful worlds on the same continent. Therefore, to be living at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is not a simple external fact in a Humboldt biography. Humboldt met Simón Bolívar when he returned to Europe in 1804 and, during his travels to Latin America, he met other figures known for their attempts to liberate the continent. Indeed, during his stay in Villa de Cura, in Venezuela, he was hosted by a family whose members had been persecuted after the 1797 Conspiración de Gual y España (1797–99) in Caracas.14 By witnessing the revolutions that were taking place in America during that period, Humboldt indeed sees a difference between the United States, the only free (non-colonial) nation that he visited during his trip to America, and the other countries of Spanish America. ‘When we reflect’, he wrote, ‘on the great political upheavals in the New World we note that Spanish Americans are in a less fortunate position than the inhabitants of the United States, who were more prepared for i­ndependence by constitutional liberty.’ (Humboldt, 1995: 13) Having seen what was happening in the new continent, Humboldt regards the ‘American Constitution’ and the ‘Bill of Rights’ as programmes that would make the British Thirteenth Colonies’ independence considerably easier to maintain compared to other liberated American countries. He believed that this formal arrangement was probably the only one which could protect against abuses of power people of different races living together. The advantage that the United States had in relation to other countries in America was based on the affirmation of its formal constitutional principles but not on the advancement and application of them. For Humboldt, the persistence of slavery, as well as the imperial era that the United States went 27

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through after the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the internal wars of expansion, were incompatible with such principles. Therefore, he did not write anything approaching an argument in favour of the ‘take-over’ and dominance by the United States­– at that point far less than half its current size­– in relation to the rest of the continent. As Walls (2009: 180) has shown, the historical sources of the problem were the same in ‘both Americas’15 and the way out of it would be the concretisation of the spirit of liberty everywhere in the region. As soon as Humboldt came back to Europe, he started working on his American findings. From 1804 almost to the end of his life in 1859, he worked on the natural and social history, trying to understand how the dynamic of life is related to inanimate nature. America, as the new continent, played a central role in his work from the beginning to the very end. America was part of a societal transformative process in which the horizons of freedom, liberalisation, and new forms of government legitimacy were driving action, in a context marked by strong patterns of racial inequality, misrecognition of the other, nonEuropean subjects, and traditional and new forms of oppression.16 These processes were reconfiguring the continent in itself and in its relation to the Old World. From Humboldt’s perspective, new bridges were being built between pre-existing worlds. Formal political liberty­ – mainly for white, ‘middle-class’ men­– and open access to new continental markets, which used to be controlled by colonial powers, were elements of a phenomenon that Humboldt saw as part of the historical developments found in the New World. An understanding of these historical paths allows us to see how the process of divergence occurred.

The American Divergence in the Age of Revolutions The Thirteen British Colonies of America declared their independence from Great Britain on 4 July 1776, after a year of battle. Their representatives signed the ‘Declaration of Independence’ guided by the formal principles of equality between all men, inalienable rights­– such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness­– as well as the right to rebel in the case of a ‘long train of abuses and usurpations’ carried out by despotic government. Because the British Crown did not accept this, the process continued (1775–83) and became known by the paradigmatic term ‘The American Revolution’, as given it by Thomas Jefferson (Nash, 2007). The area encompassed by this process of independence was much less than a quarter of what is now the United States. The ‘Declaration 28

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of Independence’ functioned as formal political framework up to the proclamation of the Constitution of the United States in 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1789. Despite some resemblance in the main aspects of the political agenda present in the ‘Declaration of Independence’ document, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights were much more influenced by the Constitution of Virginia (1776). That document differs from traditional constitutions mainly because it was based on the idea of ‘constituency power’ as a new principle of governmental legitimacy. Despite the long-term effect of what has come to be called the ‘American Revolution’ on the making of the modern world, as in Palmer’s (1959) account, its immediate impact should not be overestimated (Wagner, 2001; Nash, 2010). More specifically, its impact on Europe was felt in areas where connections were already established with the United States as part of an existing colonial world. Actually, for Nash (2010: 2–3), the wars of independence in other countries of the Americas, ‘considered as an overthrow of colonial masters, would have much more influence­– though haltingly­– than the “American Revolution”, an internal struggle to remake America along very different lines than had previously existed’.17 The struggles for independence in America shared the same principle of the creation of modern forms of individual and collective autonomy, with variations in the way that it was pursued (Nash, 2007; Wagner, 2012). In the part of the world that became known as ‘Latin America’, the self-government project was inspired by republican and liberal principles mainly after the first decades of the nineteenth century.18 It is, indeed, important to remark that, from the very beginning, slavery was prohibited in some Latin American constitutions as, for example, in Bolivia in 1826. In those countries where slavery was not prohibited after the first constitution, it was abolished and prohibited, in general, earlier than in the United States. Slavery is a key aspect in thinking about this process of divergence within America and its relation to what became referred to as paradigmatic developments in modern world narratives. To understand this relation, it is, first of all, worth looking at the British Thirteen Colonies’ Revolution in the light of the San Domingo Revolution of 1791–1804. Both revolutions represented important ruptures that brought about what is understood by modernity in this chapter. Compared to the San Domingo Revolution, however, it could be said that the ‘American’ Revolution represented a continuity that came to be regarded as important. The argument put forward here 29

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could be laid out in Sahlins’s (1985) terms when he claims that any social transformation is a form of structural reproduction. In this case, the revolution outside Europe, which came to be regarded as a ‘paradigm’ in the accounts about the birth of modernity, was the one in which the ruptures brought about were more able to sustain some continuity for the people who had something to lose in the event of radical change. The so called ‘American Revolution’ was a white, bourgeois, ‘middle-class’ revolution which relied on black and poor people to sustain it. The same elite who promoted the revolution, however, became the immediate beneficiaries of it (Hodgson, 2009: 32).19 This rupture could represent a strong new political agenda but with a continuity of economic and epistemic (societal) order, in contrast to the San Domingo Revolution.20 The latter revolution represented a change so radical that it simply did not suit the current historical context. In that historical context, independent Haiti found it difficult to be accepted as such for a long time, and it was not the only one in this struggle to have a black independent republic recognised. Liberia, which was the second self-governing black nation to become based in constitutional law, had, as happened with Haiti, a long way to go before it was recognised as an economic and political nation, by the United States government in particular. As Wesley (1917: 376) shows, European states were a little faster than the United States in granting recognition to Haiti. This was also the case for Liberia. Haiti remained diplomatically isolated and suffered many attempts, over a prolonged period, to have its ideology silenced by its northern neighbour (Dunkel, 2004). What Buck-Morss (2000) has shown about such silence in relation to blacks, in general, and black slaves in particular, in the history of the struggle for freedom, especially during the Enlightenment, is something that could be examined in the light of a discussion about the modern world involving the problem of, what I call, the paradigmatisation of history. For her, the Haitian Revolution represented the fact that the spirit of liberty . . .could be catching, crossing the line not only between races but between slaves and freemen, [and this] was precisely what made it possible to argue, without reverting to an abstract ontology of nature, that the desire for freedom was truly universal, an event of world history and, indeed, the paradigm-breaking example. (BuckMorss 2000: 845–6) 30

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If this account, based on the statement by Rainsford (1805) that the Haitian Revolution represented the ‘true’ cause and manifestation of the ‘spirit of liberty’, is not completely wrong, why is this process not regarded as, at least, equally important in all the accounts about the birth of the modern world given by human sciences narratives? It could be because of the rule of modern constitutional law, based on the principle of universal rights. This answer is not satisfactory, however, because, indeed, the Haitian Constitution of 1801, written in a spirit of loyalty towards the French Republic,21 was the first one to contain the powerful idea of equality between men and its connection to citizenship. An historical event can help us understand the transition that took place during this moment of colonial emancipation as well as the new order that was established among the nations of the New World and its relation to the Old World. In 1826, Simón Bolívar was the principal organiser of a congress in Panama for the newly independent states in America­– as well as others not yet independent. Under the umbrella idea of ‘the integration of peoples’, Bolívar (2007) aimed to construct some practical bridges to facilitate the project of an American League­– one great nation to encompass the whole continent. His wish was that it would prove possible to form ‘in America the greatest nation of the world, less for its size but for its freedom and glory’ (Bolívar, 2007). The agenda for the meeting also included the issue of the recognition of Haiti and the matter of European interference in the region. The United States was among the countries invited for this congress in Panama but the US representatives arrived late owing to the internal discussions that had taken place at home. As Wesley (1917: 373) has pointed out, The southern point of view . . . was that disaster awaited the Southern States, if the United States should send delegates to a congress in which Haitian representatives would sit, and which would consider the separation of Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain and the cessation of slavery. This point of view met with support in the public sphere; United States newspapers of that time highlighted the same issue. The main reason why the government sent its delegates to the congress was because President Adams saw this as an opportunity to realise his aim of expanding commercial power over as much of America as possible. 31

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He did not have any particular desire to become part of an American League (Wesley, 1917). This event and time could be seen as a crucial, central moment in thinking about the American divergence, not only because of the position adopted by the United States but also because it happened at this decisive moment when the countries of the continent were aiming for different objectives. As mentioned above, the United States sent a delegate to the Panama congress because of its expansionist projects. These were embodied in the notion of a ‘manifest destiny’, a belief that stems from the idea of the hand of Providence shaping the fate of the ‘American Republic’ into a mission to spread its free course and development ‘over the whole continent’. As Pratt (1927: 795) shows, the origin of the idea of ‘manifest destiny’ and its appearance in the public sphere for the first time in 1845 served as a ‘convenient statement of the philosophy of t­erritorial expansion’ of that period. The Thirteen Colonies’ expansion to the west and to the north and south of the continent had, as its ideological foundation and justification, the search for facts and narratives that could corroborate this ideology. By looking at the changing configurations of the map of the United States during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, it is possible to see how this expansion materialised in practical terms. The doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’ was appropriated and transformed by the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’ in the twentieth century. Together those notions became one of the main manifestations of ‘American’ nationalism (Weinberg, 1968). Through what Hodgson (2009) regards as an ‘ideological’ way to build an historical narrative, ‘exceptional America’ has been taken to be not only the richest and most powerful state in the world but also, indeed, as politically superior to all others. Martin Seymour Lipset, a US political sociologist who has written extensively on comparative democracy in the modern world, has argued in favour of a qualitative difference between ‘America’ and the other democratic countries of the world. In his last major work, he defends the relevance of the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’ and tries to account for it by tracing it back to the historical roots of the independence movement and the rise a universal democratic ideal.22 He believed that, since the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘American creed’ is based on the ideas of liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. For him, ‘these values reflect the absence of feudal structures, monarchies and aristocracies. As a new society, the country lacked the emphasis on social hierarchy and status differ32

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ences characteristic of post-feudal and monarchical cultures’ (Lipset, 1996: 19). For exactly the same reasons, as was shown above, Rodríguez (1840) maintained that America, as a whole, would carry out an important role in the modern world by making possible the creation of societies led by Enlightenment principles, in a context where the task is not to reform institutions but to create them anew. Another feature that Lipset attributes to ‘American exceptionalism’ is the absence of ‘socialism’ in the development of ‘American’ modernity.23 This alone, however, cannot explain the so-called ‘exceptionalism’ of the US trajectory: firstly, because the absence of socialism can be seen in many parts of ‘America’ and, secondly, because the empirical observation of socialist experience in the modern world, in view of the lack of a shared political agenda, cannot easily be taken as an explanatory variable. To conclude this discussion, one of the consequences of following this kind of interpretation about ‘American exceptionalism’ is that it ‘minimises the contributions of the other nations and cultures to the rule of law and to the evolution of political democracy’ (Hodgson, 2009: 10). This is one instance of a more general problem that can be seen in terms of the sort of interpretation about the modern world that we arrive at if we insist on following analyses which take for granted categories that disregard how societal processes have been happening through the course of history.

Final Words on the Paradigmatisation of History in Modern Narratives In his major work Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor tries to investigate the sources of modern identity. The book contains a substantial study of how transformations at different moments within modernity, or before, have shaped our understanding of what a ‘self’ is; in particular, transformations that have occurred in Europe, with the exception of specific processes in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, that reshaped the conception of the modern self. In Taylor’s view, the United States was affected by, and, at the same time, contributed to, the fundamental transformation of Enlightenment and Romantic notions, a process that lies at the core of his explanation of the modern self. For him, only a few educated people in ‘America’ and Europe were deeply affected by such processes. Taylor believes that, since 1800, modern history has been the history of a slow and continuous dissemination­– from inside (Europe 33

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and America) to outside, from top (highly educated middle class) to bottom­– of the Romantic sensibility and enlightened way of thinking about the world, a dissemination reaching towards new nations and classes (Taylor, 1997: 504). He cites a Thomas Jefferson discourse about the United States Declaration of Independence to illustrate his point that, in the contemporary world, ‘everybody’ would agree that the slow and non-timed process of awakening of the people through enlightened knowledge is essential to the attainment of freedom and self-governance. In a completely different direction, Michael Mann (1993) does something ‘methodologically’ similar in building a historical sociological theory of the modern state by investigating what he calls the ‘long nineteenth century’. Again, the only non-European state which appears to occupy a decisive role, according to his approach, is ‘America’. In Mann’s view, the ‘American Revolution’ was responsible, on its own, for instituting, indeed for the ‘institutionalisation’ of, a liberal federal capitalism during this time. The success of the United States in the consolidation of its modern state in the two centuries after the revolution is due to the development of liberal infrastructural powers that enabled the mobilisation of resources to develop it. Mann (2006) indeed believes that the failure of Latin American states in comparison to ‘central’ modern states is due to their incapacity, on the one hand, to build a strong infrastructure that could guarantee the consolidation of a modern state and, on the other, to institutionalise social conflicts. The problem here is not the comparison itself. When we read Mann’s work carefully it is possible to see that he bases his comparison on things that are ‘taken for granted’ in historical accounts, on things that remains unchangeable. It seems, first of all, as if Palmer’s (1959) account of democratic revolutions covered all aspects of what was taking place at the turning point of this age; it seems more and more as if the United States has always been ‘America’, that its ‘exceptionalism’ is true in sociological and historical terms, and that its ‘real’ development is due to the uniqueness of its historical trajectory. The other side to this history, Latin America and the Caribbean, is just, and has always been, its opposite. The list of similar approaches is quite long and it also encompasses the main literature on modernity by Latin American authors. One of the best examples is what has become a classic account of the state in the region. The Chilean, Claudio Véliz, with his The Centralistic Tradition in Latin America (1984), makes the claim that, 34

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not having gone through an ‘industrial’ and ‘political’ revolution, the Latin American states remain within the same secular tradition that was developed there during the colonial period. For him, different from what has happened in United States, the development of the state in Latin America was achieved through the work of a private aristocratic elite. What is curious, though, is that he does not develop any historical discussion about the United States. He simply takes it for granted that the democratic ideals which form part of the narratives about that country were made concrete and enshrined in its political institutions from the very beginning. Véliz (1984) seems to be quite sure that the colonial rupture which took place in Latin America did not break with the previous political tradition; ‘our northern neighbour’ found its way of making its rupture and constructing a modern liberal state but Latin America remained attached to the centralism inherited from Spain and Portugal. In different ways, critiques based on historical sociological approaches about modern institutions in Latin America follow the same approach of being guided by what has become the status quo of narratives about the modern world and the place that Latin America occupies in them­– as it is possible to see in the works of Larraín Ibañez (1996), Centeno (2002) and Domingues (2008). From the end of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, revolutions, reforms and emancipatory movements took place all around the world. Without forgetting that the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century play a central role in this history, the aim of the present discussion about the American case has been to pay more attention to how those ideas have been incorporated into interpretations of the modern world. This is not meant to discount the exhaustive list of studies about individual national trajectories that have played a decisive role in the shaping of the modern world but to consider the extent to which such interpretations are versatile and general enough to be able to accommodate other trajectories that are part of the same societal process. I am not advocating the perspective put forward by Bayly (2004) whose account of the birth of the modern world does not place importance on the ‘American’ Revolution and its affirmation of constitutional rights for modern discourses and practices. The point that is being made here is a very simple one: to understand modernity, a broader historical perspective, which pays attention to events that have been hidden, should be welcomed; by doing so, more attention can be given to a denaturalised conception of the world. In this account, what has been ‘silenced’ so far, yet plays 35

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a central role in the development of the modern world, cannot be disregarded. Historical processes that bring about social transformation always leave room for the construction of partial narratives. That should not be a problematic consequence of the analytical task. But the question is, how is it possible to rescue what has been put aside when a societal phenomenon cannot be understood without a revision of the partial narratives that we have been used to accepting? I do believe that it is not possible to understand the dilemmas of the contemporary modern world without critically rethinking the societal processes that were discarded at the turning points, at the ‘edges’, of modern history.

Notes 1. The use of the word ‘Americas’, in the plural, in Humboldt’s writings appears to designate the northern and southern hemispheres of the continent. 2. One of the main ideas about the constitution of the modern world which forms a background to this paper is to see the constitution of this process as a ‘de-centred’ phenomenon (Mota, 2012a). In this way, it may be possible to avoid the analytical ideas of ‘inauthentic’ modernities or a ‘catching-up’ process. 3. Descartes studied logic in La Flèche (France) with the Jesuits who travelled to the Americas. For Dussel, indeed, it is not possible fully to understand the meaning of the idea of cogito, ergo sum without bearing this in mind. 4. The references that Montaigne had in mind were the French civil wars. 5. Montaigne based his ideas on a ‘tale’ that he heard from someone who had lived for a long time with the Tupinambás, an indigenous population in what later became Brazil. 6. In this chapter, I cannot develop an analysis of the School of Salamanca or the School of Coimbra, partly for reasons of space but also because the idea is not to offer an exhaustive interpretation of the significance of the New World for the philosophical discourse of the period after the discovery. I have deliberately decided to stay with authors whose concerns were not informed by what was ‘going’, or common currency, in the relation between the New and the Old Worlds. 7. Locke explored the books about travellers who had been to the North­– for example, Gabriel Sagard who lived for a while with the Huron in the Great Lakes region­– and to the South­– such as Garcilaso de la Vega’s Le Commentaire Royale Ou L’histoire Des Yncas De Peru (1633) and Jean de Léry’s Navigatio in Brasiliam (1590). The list with Locke’s travellers’ books is long and demonstrates his interest in narratives about almost everywhere in the world (see Talbot’s list on pp. 315–16; Talbot, 2010). 8. There is a disagreement about the interpretation offered by Marie Louise Pratt in her Imperial Eyes (Pratt, 2008). For her, the work of Alexander von Humboldt on South America­– a distinction that she made despite Humboldt’s insistence on describing the area he travelled to by the term ‘New Continent’­– was a clear attempt to portray an image of an area in which human beings played a secondary

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The American Divergence role in this scenario marked by an abundant tropical life in a natural zone. Pratt’s book is an extraordinary work; I very much agree with most of her analysis, especially with the general point that travel literature served as a way in which to make the imperial order meaningful to Europeans. But, when it comes to the discussion of the ‘reinvention of America’ through Humboldt’s work, she focuses on his less political writings. She doesn’t explore his Political Essay or Kosmos which it is necessary to do if one is to make the argument she wants to develop. 9. Taylor (1997) and Walls (2009) have different conceptions of the temporality of the modern world. Taylor works with a perspective that goes back to romanticism and the Enlightenment, where he locates the emergence of the modern self. Walls focuses on the main ruptures at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in talking about the emergence of modernity. 10. In his 1826 Political Essay on the Island of Cuba it is possible to find the clearest affirmation of this point in Humboldt’s writings. As he writes: ‘To avoid fastidious circumlocutions, I continue in this study to designate the countries inhabited by Spanish-Americans by the name of Spanish-America, despite the political changes that the colonies have undergone. I call the United States­– without adding North America­– the country of Anglo-Americans, although other United States have formed in South America. It is awkward to speak of peoples who play such an important role on the world scene, but who lack collective names. The word ‘American’ may no longer be applied exclusively to citizens of the United States of North America, and it would be desirable if this nomenclature for the independent nations of the New Continent could be fixed in a way that would be at once convenient, consistent, and precise’ (Humboldt, 2011: 209). 11. There are two main interpretations about the origin of the name ‘Latin America’. One emphasises its French origin and points to Michael Chevalier as one of the first to use this name to designate the countries of the American continent which have a Latin Romance language as official state language. The literature that emphasises the local appearance of the term goes back to the Colombian, José María Torres Caicedo, with his poem ‘Las Dos Americas’ (The Two Americas). According to this view, it became consolidated later, with Carlos Calvo’s two volumes on the ‘Latin-America States’ (1864). 12. In this book, he proclaimed public instruction­– or general education­– as the means to make societies embrace Enlightenment ideals. Rodríguez was focusing on America, but his proposal is a not-so-provincial one. He argues that the only way to build an enlightened society is by comparing different ‘realities’ or points of view and seeing how they are trying to solve their problems of societal integration (Mota, 2012b). He himself compared America to Europe in relation to this issue and said that the way out for America should be a creative one because it was clear that Europe had not solved the societal integration problem and could not be taken as an example. 13. Justo Arosema was concerned about how to guarantee that people would be protected against non-legitimate forms of government. He became widely recognised as an author who was focusing on how to develop societal integration without a demand for the pre-constitution of a supranational government. 14. It was the first organised revolutionary attempt in Spanish America aiming to establish a republican government based on the equality of its inhabitants without distinction of race or colour. Nevertheless, as with the Tupac Amaru

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity revolt (1780–82) in Bolivia, this revolt was brutally suppressed by the Spanish Crown in the space of no more than two years. 15. It is puzzling to read Walls (2009) on Humboldt. She, a US American, talks about America in Humboldt’s writings as if it were the United States. There is no passage in her book where it is possible to identify any sort of problematisation of the idea of America. The use of the expression ‘both Americas’ in her book is not exactly what Humboldt meant­– a continent geographically divided into two hemispheres, north and south. 16. For more about this point see Fuster and Rosich in this volume. 17. Nash’s (2007, 2010) analysis is based on the societal impact that the revolutions had in terms of the mobilisation of different social groups (such as indigenous groups and peasants). For him, the struggles for independence in other countries in America did not share the language of universal rights; from their very beginning they were marked by a plurality of world perspectives, each one with its own particular goals but sharing the same emancipatory spirit. 18. The liberal–republican matrix was present in the Constitutions of ‘Gran Colombia’ (1821), ‘Nueva Granada’ (1830 and 1832), Venezuela (1830), Peru (1823 and 1828), Argentina (1826), Chile (1828) and Uruguay (1830). Only in Bolivia and Peru’s constitution of 1826 the so-called ‘Boliviarian’ (Simón Bolívar’s political project) model was adopted but very shortly replaced by the liberal–republican one. 19. Nash (2007) shows how blacks, the poor and women were involved in the ‘American Revolution’. The author also shows that these groups did not become direct beneficiaries of this process for independence. For Nash, the explanation for this lies in the fact that they had insufficient political influence at the internal main front of this battle for freedom. 20. In the beginning, in what was then San Domingo, Toussaint did not pursue colonial emancipation. He saw the black, free San Domingo as part of the French Republic. After his deportation and death in France, his successor as the main leader of the revolution, Dessalines, pursued and achieved the colonial independence of Haiti in 1804. One of the signal gestures chosen to render this change more significant was the abolishment of the ‘colonial name’, San Domingo, and the reinstitution of the aboriginal one, Haiti (Wesley, 1917; James, 1980). 21. The first Haitian Constitution to proclaim independence from France is dated 1804. In this document, the abolition of slavery and the principle of equality for all people, irrespective of racial origin, goes hand in hand with the end of the colonial association with France. 22. The historical and comparative perspective is part of Lipset’s argument. Probably more important than that, however, is his personal view on the fact he is trying to explain. In relation to the debates around ‘American exceptionalism’, he says that: ‘ . . . however one comes to this debate, there can be little question that the hand of providence has been on a nation which finds a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt when it needs him. When I write the above sentence, I believe that I draw scholarly conclusions, although I will confess that I write also as a proud American.’ (Lipset, 1996: 14). 23. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville, who for Lipset is the first foreigner to highlight this qualitative distinctiveness of ‘America’, foresaw a possibility for the emergence of a ‘bipolar world,’ with US/America and Russia on either pole. For Tocqueville

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The American Divergence (1948: 434), however, the basis for this bipolarity would not be the emergence of individualist or collectivist forms of economic production and societal organisation; rather, it would come about because both countries were claiming a continent-wide territory and developing a strong industrial capacity.

References Armitage, David and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2010), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context c. 1760–1840, London: Palgrave. Arosema, Justo (1840), Apuntamientos para la Introducción a las Ciencias Morales Políticas por un Joven Americano, Nova York: Imprenta de Don Juan de la Granja. Arosema, Justo (1870), Estudios Constitucionales sobre los Gobiernos de América Latina, Havre: Imprenta A. Lemale Ainé. Bayly, C. A. (2004), The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford: Blackwell. Bolívar, Simón [1815] (2007), ‘Cartas de Jamaica, Rozo Acuña’, in Simón Bolívar: Obra Política y Constitucional, Madrid: Tecnos. Buck-Morss, Susan (2000), ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry, 26: 04, 821–65. Centeno, Miguel Angel (2002), Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Domingues, José Maurício (2008), Latin American and Contemporary Modernity: A Sociological Interpretation, NewYork/London: Routledge. Dunkel, Greg (2004), ‘Haiti’s Impact on the United States: what “voodoo economics” and high school textbooks reveal’, in P. Chin, G. Dunkel, S. Flounders, and K. Ives (eds), Haiti a Slave Revolution: 200 years after 1804, New York: International Action Center. Dussel, Enrique (2007), Política de la Liberación: Historia Mundial y Crítica, Madrid: Trotta Editorial. Hodgson, Godfrey (2009), The Myth of American Exceptionalism, New Haven: Yale University Press. Humboldt, Alexander von [1814–25] (1995), Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, London: Penguin Classics. Humboldt, Alexander von [1826] (2011) Political Essay on the Island of Cuba: A Critical Edition, eds V. M. Kutzinski and O. Ette, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. James, C. L. R. [1938] (1980), The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London: Allison & Busby. Kutzinski, V. M and O. Ette (2011), ‘Inventories and Inventions: Alexander von Humboldt’s Cuban landscape: an introduction to the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba’, in A. Von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba: A Critical Edition, eds V. M. Kutzinski and O. Ette, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Larraín Ibañez, Jorge (1996), Modernidad, Razon e Identidad en America Latina, Santiago do Chile: Editoral Andres Bello. Lebovics, Herman (1986), ‘The uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47: 4, 567–81. Lipset, Seymour Martin (1996), American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Mann, Michael (1993), The Sources of Social Power: The Rise of Class and Nation-State 1760–1914, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Mann, Michael [2004] (2006) ‘A crise do estado-nação latino-americano’, in J.  M. Domingues and María Maneiro (eds), América Latina Hoje: Conceitos e Interpretações, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Montaigne, Michel de [1580] (1993), Essays, London: Penguin Books. Mota, Aurea (2012a), Sobre Metamorfoses e Transformações: Una Perspectiva Sociológico-histórica a Respeito do Liberalismo Constitucional Atenuado Latinoamericano, PhD thesis, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Centro de Estudos Sociais e Políticos. Mota, Aurea (2012b), ‘Cosmopolitanism in Latin America: political practices, critiques, and imaginaries’, in G. Delanty (ed.), Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, London: Routledge. Nash, Gary B. (2007), The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America, London: Pimlico. Nash, Gary B. (2010), ‘Sparks from the Altar of ’76: international repercussions and reconsiderations of the American Revolution’, in D. Armitage and S.  Subrahmanyam (eds), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Palmer, Robert R. (1959), The Age of Democratic Revolutions, vol. 1: The Challenge, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pomer, León (1996), ‘Nuevo, viejo mundo: mundo de la esperanza’, in F. L. N. Azevedo and J. M. Monteiro (eds), Raízes da América Latina, Rio de Janeiro: Expressão e Cultura/São Paulo: EDUSP. Pratt, J. W. (1927), ‘The Origin of “Manifest Destiny”’, The American Historical Review, 32: 4, 795–8. Pratt, M. L. [1992] (2008), Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge. Rainsford, Marcus (1805), An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti: Comprehending a View of the Principal Transactions in the Revolution of Saint Domingo; with its Antient and Modern State, London: Albion Press. Ribeiro, Darcy [1969] (1971), The Americas and the Civilization, New York: E. P. Dutton & Company. Rodríguez, Simón [1828] (1840), Sociedades Americanas: Luces y Virtudes, HTML Facsimile of the Valparaiso Edition. Sahlins, Marshall (1985), Islands of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Talbot, Ann (2010), ‘The Great Ocean of Knowledge’: The Influence of Travel Literature on the Work of John Locke, Leiden: Brill. Taylor, Charles [1989] (1997), As Fontes do Self: A Construção da Identidade Moderna, São Paulo: Edições Loyola. Tocqueville, Alexis de [1835–1840] (1948), Democracy in America, vols 1 and 2, New York: Knopf. Véliz, Claudio (1984), La Tradición Centralista de América Latina, Barcelona: Ariel. Wagner, Peter (1994), A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, London: Routledge. Wagner, Peter (2001), Theorizing Modernity: Inescapability and Attainability in Social Theory, London: Sage Publications. Wagner, Peter (2012), Modernity: Understanding the Present, Cambridge: Polity. Walls, Laura D. (2009), The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander Von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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The American Divergence Weinberg, Albert K. [1963] (1968), Destino Manifesto: El Expansionismo Nacionalista en la Historia Norteamericana, Buenos Aires: Editora Paidós. Wesley, Charles H. (1917), ‘The Struggle for the Recognition of Haiti and Liberia as Independent Republics’, The Journal of Negro History, 2: 4, 369–83.

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2 The Limits of Recognition: History, Otherness and Autonomy Àngela Lorena Fuster Peiró and Gerard Rosich

I

An Ambiguous Picture

n 1940, in the United States, Salvador Dalí painted Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire. It was the first work in a series of paintings whose focus was the Americas. This painting is an example of double imagery representing, from one perspective, Jean-Antoine Houdon’s bust of the iconic Voltaire and, from the other, two traders (presumably Dutch), with the immobility of a Velázquez painting, outlined against a hole which seems to form some kind of entrance. The entire scene is contemplated from the left by a young, half-naked white slave (Gala) whose posture is similar to Rodin’s Thinker, looking at Voltaire/the two traders. What is common to the traders and Voltaire’s bust is that both are surrounded by figures of different slaves (some dressed and present­– some nude and fading), ruins and a coastal landscape. Notwithstanding Dalí’s own interpretation of the picture­– that ‘by her patient love Gala protected [him] from the ironic world crawling with slaves’, and from the scepticism of eighteenth-century philosophy (Dalí, 1948)­– his puzzling picture provides us with a means by which to introduce the main themes of this chapter, subject to the expediency of our interpretation. Both the dialectic gaze of Gala towards Voltaire (and thus the traders) and Voltaire’s gaze back (whose eyes are shaped by the heads of the two traders) can be read as a playful representation of the double imaginary of modernity and, more concretely, as an interpretation of the double imaginary of the modern Western ­philosophy of history. The painting can be seen as an archaeology of a modernity 42

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Figure 2.1  Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire by Salvador Dalí, 1940 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS, 2015.

that was fading in 1940. This bi-stable, ambiguous image allows us to reveal the double register of a discourse that can be interpreted as a dispositive of domination and/or justification of the hegemon but also, and at the same time, as the place for autonomy and/or resistance to the domination. The main objective of this chapter is to analyse the link between the modern constitutive ambiguity of the European philosophy of history and the experience and conceptualisation of the other in order to open a critical debate on the current theorising of otherness provided by theories of recognition. This chapter begins, accordingly, with the disentanglement of the forces present in the modern constitution of the discipline, where it is possible to observe the central tension of modernity itself, in direct relation to the discovery of a new form of the other; secondly, a speculative approach is adopted with regard to a perceived turning point for the imaginary of history, this being a decisive moment allowed by the conceptualisation of the duality master/slave; thirdly, the modern genealogy of the current theories of recognition is highlighted with the aim of discussing the bias that continues to frame the understanding of the dynamics between self/other. As we shall try to show, contemporary theories of recognition, 43

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inspired by the time-honoured Hegelian logic based on the master/ slave dialectic (though working under the double-imaginary understanding of modernity), uncritically assume some of the conditions of the Hegelian system that self-cancel and work against these same theories’ normative assumptions. The Western philosophy of history resolves the constitutive tension of modernity between autonomy and mastery with an understanding of the concept of universality that pretends towards totalisation. What is particularly dependent on the European experience of modernity is conceptualised either as the only possible experience of modernity or as an instance of a universal concept of modernity to which one needs to conform if one wants to be modern (Wagner, 2008). As heirs of this tradition, the authors of contemporary theories of recognition do not critically discuss the epistemic assumptions of this totalising understanding of universality, and therefore subsume the otherness of the other under previously assumed universal categories thought generally valid and all-embracing.

Being Modern in Time The classical description of the birth of modernity, a time concept in itself, is related to a change in the way ‘contemporaries’ place t­ hemselves in historical terms. The Latin term modernus, though coined in the fifth century ad to mean ‘recent’ and ‘present’, does not immediately suggest an historical use. Only at the moment the term is used in the expression ‘tempora moderna’, at the end of the twelfth century, is there a shift in its meaning: it refers to the time from which we have living memories, namely, no more than one century (Le Goff, 1991: 156; Hartog, 1995: 34). At this point, the term is mainly used to refer to the events human beings are acquainted with, and around which they organise their lives, and not to refer to the times in which they are living. As is commonly accepted, the Renaissance is the turning point, the moment when the meaning of the term modernus changes and acquires, primarily, an historical connotation. From that moment on, histories are on their way to becoming history. The specific understanding of this shift emerges as a gap in time that redefines and enlarges the concept of memory. Now, the ‘tempora moderna’ are understood in opposition to the ‘tempora antiqui’, and the gap is what will come to be identified as the Middle Ages. The Renaissance understands itself as a renewal of the ‘old time’ because it establishes a comparative link between the ‘moderns’­– those who 44

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are living in this newly defined present­– and the ancients,1 those who gave birth to the tradition. The aspiration for these early moderns is the ‘aemulatio’ or ‘imitatio’ of the ancients, and not a break with them (Baron, 1959: 15). The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes makes sense only when a new understanding of historical time emerges: one that makes it impossible ‘to return back to’ because historical time ‘goes forwards’ (Hartog, 1995: 251). It is important for our purposes to highlight two facts: 1. the selfunderstanding of these early moderns, in contrast to other self-understandings, is achieved through an historical comparison, not by an ‘essential’ one (for instance, Christians/Pagans or Greeks/Barbarians), nor by a ‘spatial’ one (Chinese/Europeans) but by a temporal one: we, moderni, who live in the present in comparison to those who lived in the past, the Greeks and the Romans; 2. any self-understanding implies the need to distinguish oneself from the other, from something external: the early moderns compared themselves to the other (the ancients) in terms of similarity, not of difference. Discussions related to the emergence of this first self-perception agree that the transformations taking place within Europe, mainly in Italy, from the twelfth century onwards are the key to its interpretation.2 The ‘discovery of America’ in 1492, however, would alter this picture.3 It is significant that, almost a century later, Montaigne could still say ‘ . . . Our world has just discovered another world . . . yet so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its A B C.’4 Many developments would have to occur before Europeans would be able to understand that this world was another and new for them. Only with the first mappa mundi created in 1500 by Juan de la Cosa, together with the third expedition of Amerigo Vespucci in 1502, was it evident that the continent found by Columbus had to be a new one: a mundus novus. The epistemic assumptions of the Europeans themselves pre-empted their recognition of the fact that the continent was not the one they had expected, and that the inhabitants had been thus far unknown to the Europeans. The frames of recognition and cognition, namely the intellectual resources available for their acknowledgement, were based on the Graeco-Roman tradition, Christian theology and ‘travel literature’ related to the Asian and Islamic worlds; and not one of them was able to provide useful tools for the interpretation of this new situation. The otherness of this other was not yet recognised as such. It could not be seen. It was either ignored or subsumed under the known category of southern Asian Indian. 45

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Not until the moment that the first settler colonisers arrived, and the continent actually became a ‘new’ one, could dissimilarity or difference no longer be negated. The inhabitants were other than those known before then. The discussions that took place up to the mid-sixteenth century were mainly related to the determination of the otherness of the other to justify the conquista though, simultaneously, this new relationship necessarily destabilised and transformed the self of the conquistadors. The intellectual resources and language used were based largely on Aristotle’s Politics, and the Corpus Christianorum, both of them the ancients of these early European moderns. Nevertheless, because this experience was radically novel, the theories emerging from it could no longer be considered as part of the traditional canon: they inaugurated a new interpretative intellectual horizon. From that moment on, a double shift in the conception of history was possible. The first consisted in the possibility of thinking that ‘differences in place may be identical to differences in time’ (Pagden, 1983: 2), that is, the American Man was in another period of time though being contemporaneous, and the second, that this event allowed the early moderns to understand themselves as being in another time­– the contemporaneous one as being in their own time, in comparison to the time of the ancients and of those living in the mundus novus (Hartog, 2005: 49). But to link these two shifts, that is, to consider that some non-Europeans were backward, further developments would have to take place and become crystallised within the European Enlightenment. The philosophy of (and for) the conquest, to use Silvio Zavala’s expression (Zavala, 1994), was not rooted explicitly in backwardness. The legitimacy of the right to empire had a twofold justificatory framework: firstly, the right to enslave, resulting from the determination of the Indians as barbarous; and secondly, the territorial right to dominion justified by the duty of the conquerors to convert the Indians to Christianity, since they had been determined as infidels, namely the evangelical mission.5 To justify an explicit denial of being coeval with the other, to use Johannes Fabian’s idea, it is necessary to bind an epistemological concern to a normative view.6

A Universal History It is beyond our scope to discuss comprehensively all the different philosophies of history which emerged with the different Enlightenment(s) and their subsequent evolution. Therefore, with a view to outlining 46

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a central trend, we will focus our account only on the origins of the discipline, with its inner conflicts, and on the climax of the modern philosophy of history reached by Hegel. Despite the range of Enlightenment philosophies of history (Montesquieu, Lessing, Herder, Kant) there is common agreement on the conception of rationality as a guiding force in history, and also as a criterion for belonging to a new ‘actuality’ and a new ‘we’. This emergence of a ‘we’, according to Foucault, is the consequence of understanding Aufklärung neither as a period, nor as a school of thought. As envisaged by Kant, Enlightenment is a philosophical ethos from which a new rationality emerges. This rationality is primarily equated with the double possibility of the critique of our present, that is, of what we are: ‘a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus [rationality is defined] as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ (Foucault, 1984: 47). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the attempt at conceptualising different experiences of openness in terms of the universalisation of time and space was the watershed in the field of theories of history. At the origin of the discipline, we find two esprits that are usually polarised in the analyses of the significant transformation that led to the opening of this new ‘discursive space’ (Delanty, 2006: 37), namely Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and Voltaire. Bossuet’s apologia, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), addressed to the dauphin of France­– and implicitly to his father, Louis XIV­– is conventionally defined as ‘the last theological history to follow the pattern of Augustine’. This is especially remarkable because the transition from pre-modern to modern history is described only in terms of emancipation from the principle of providentialist causality (Löwith, 1949: 104). From this perspective, Voltaire is seen as the pioneer in writing a secularised interpretation of history derived from the adoption of the principle of scientific causality, as opposed to Bossuet, who is one of the distinguished targets of Voltaire’s crusade to ‘écraser l’infâme’. It is also possible, however, to describe that transition from a nonuniversalising to a universalising understanding of history as the result of a decisive quest, conditioned by different kinds of events, such as the discovery of New World, scientific discoveries and new information about the world arriving in Europe through travellers, from merchants to monks, a quest towards a rearticulation of the universal through temporal concepts, in a context of a deep crisis of self-understanding. At this moment, a new history is needed to give meaning to this 47

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a­ pparent confusion, a history that must be universal, and the criteria, under which all particulars could be subsumed, appear as an empty space to be conquered by different interpretations, all struggling to be the hegemonic ones and, therefore, to institute the manner of seeing, of determining, the otherness of the other. Modern Western philosophy is the consequence of a bifacial crisis involving, on the one side, the validity of the principles that organise society and, on the other, the reliability of human knowledge. In the field of politics, the Hobbesian solution to the uncertainty that living with others carries when the sovereign, the state, has to be justified on rational grounds, results in contractualist theory. Its purpose is to legitimise the obedience of the subjects to the sovereign as their voluntary consent to be ruled. At the same time, the doubts cast on the human capacity to reveal reality are related to the new scientific discoveries that refute our everyday perceptions. The Cartesian solution to the problem of uncertainty is the costitutio cogitans of the subject which becomes the source of validity for every representation. Knowledge can be guaranteed by the deductive method of science through a series of causes. The ideal methodology for every systematic theoretical science should be the hypothetical model. It allows for giving an explanation of all the known facts in order to establish a universal science aspiring to objectivity. This methodology will also become the model through which meaning is given to historical events. History is a confused collection of myriad facts and occurrences that can easily be perceived as meaningless. Unlike ancient history, which was a catalogue of significant and extraordinary events whose meaning was revealed in the exemplarity of the particular, the new historical science ensures the meanings of the events by placing them within a long-term process. Hegemony in historical studies­– that is, which of the concepts of the universal gets to reign­– is seized by means of the concept of process. This, in turn, ­guarantees the possibility of grasping the meaning of events and positing them in a logical chain so as to avoid pure contingency and the meaninglessness of the particular. As Arendt observes, the institution of the philosophy of history corresponds to a symptomatic escape from politics into history, understood as the result of interpreting human action by way of the category of production, where the capacity of agency is shifted from human beings to hidden forces and self-propelling processes (1968: 41ff. and 83). It is the same escape that Koselleck interprets as the bourgeois attempt ‘to obscure this cover as cover’; 48

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according to him, this ‘was the historic function of the philosophy of history’, the abandonment of critique for the sake of participation in state power (1988: 185). In their writing of the first universal histories, both Bossuet and Voltaire represented an earlier chapter in modernity, coinciding with Vico’s transformation of history into scienza nuova. But the idea of process is central also to their reading of events: understood as progressive steps towards salvation for Bossuet, and towards moments of civilisation for Voltaire (progress with interruptions). Moreover, the only common thread running throughout the history of the discipline, perhaps, is the purpose of finding this universal principle of intelligibility that tends to include everything. This potentially totalising tendency will ultimately turn out to be a complete identification of reality with rationality: morality and politics finally reconciled. Seen in this light, something emerges that is possibly as compelling as the grand narrative of secularisation; Bossuet and Voltaire are working with the same aim, for the sake of universality. After all, the idea of Providence continues to be present in the philosophy of history, though somewhat hypocritically or ‘naughtily’ for a long time, as a guarantee of rationality, even in the Hegelian system. As Fabian suggests, universal has two connotations in this context: 1. generality, that is, applicability ‘to a large number of instances’; 2. totality, that is, ‘the whole world at all times’ (Fabian 1983: 3 ff.). In Bossuet’s Discours, what is taken for granted is Christian universality (its plan for salvation in history and the omnipresence of God), and therefore the rearticulation of the universal is realised, exclusively, on the side of generality by subsuming the diversity of sacred and profane events under the category of ‘epoch’. ‘Epoch’ is a methodological device employed to order confusion into a distinction of times, through the idea of an event that suspends time (Epokhé). Through this, and despite his purely Christian-centred perspective of history, he introduces the possibility of breaking with a presentation of facts which is both chaotic and/or canonical. Generality is not understood as the need to give account of, and to chronicle, all the occurrences, details and particulars but as being bound to the capacity of the historian to identify certain events that interrupt the continuum of time, thus instituting a new principle of validity. This centrality of the judgement of the historian will come to be a position shared with Voltaire who innovates by introducing his critical opinion and, moreover, by proposing his own historical account as a 49

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model with which to judge others. While the space of interpretation in Bossuet’s history is circumscribed by his faith, that is, by the idea of ‘God’s chosen people’ (that is, only the peoples implied in the history of Christian religion), Voltaire, in Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), works on the universalisation of space and time, not only against the horizon imposed by theological views of history but also by French and European provincialism. His disgust for the founding national histories, self-referential self-understanding and ancient history, urges him, in an exercise of reflexivity, to rewrite, in these short essays, the history of the human races. In addition, he questions the categorical apparatus used by historians up to that moment, along with the principle of intelligibility which shapes historical writing. Voltaire’s thoughts were fuelled by the image of China brought back by the Jesuits, by the wave of sinomania engulfing France at that time, very common among intellectuals such as Montesquieu, Malebranche and Bayle, and, in general, by the expansion of a powerful orientalist discourse which considered the Orient to be the site of the most ancient civilisations and religions, as well as the cradle of the arts (Clarke, 1997: 44–6). Nevertheless, his initial chapters, devoted to China, India and Persia, are more statements of purpose than rigorous historical accounts, a fact which is due to the lack of concrete historical knowledge. Voltaire’s aim seems to be to include the other, and to legitimate its inclusion by virtue of its antiquity and superiority, derived by founding religions, morals and politics upon the principles of natural reason. The identification of the grandeur of this civilisation as originating from the rationality of its foundations is the key to unveiling something that is valid for all times and all places; something different from Christian universality, and which can work as an alternative universal principle of intelligibility for history. This universal principle, however, seems to include only the other whose otherness can be recognised as sharing a recognisable rationality. As Dalí’s bi-stable image appears to suggest, the eyes of critique are also biased by historical frames of recognition, namely, by the ambiguity of the philosophe, who expounds the discourse of freedom while, at the same time, amassing one of the most sizeable fortunes in France and with no small contribution from the slave trade. Universality is the totalising result of a partiality, something quite easy to cover theoretically though more difficult to conceal in practice.

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The Hegelian Turn The stability of the philosophy of history as a new discipline seemed to be affirmed by the American and French revolutions, according to the interpretation that the ‘actors’ themselves made of these events. What happened was interpreted by Europeans as a standard for the entire world, though the historical background of these revolutions is not as exceptional as was initially thought.7 The most representative intellectual at this moment is Kant who states in a clear and unequivocal manner the Enlightenment maxim: the enlightened is the one who emerges ‘from his self-incurred immaturity’. The other is the one who has ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.’ [our emphasis, Kant (1791) 1991: 54] Drawing upon the work of Susan Buck-Morss (2009),8 we also intend to highlight the turning point that the slave revolution in Haiti signified in 1791, resulting in the Declaration of Independence and the formation of the Haitian state in January 1804. The Haitian revolution renders the Kantian idea no longer sustainable since it would compel the hegemon, the colonial powers, to acknowledge that those dominated on the grounds of backwardness can also be ‘enlightened without the guidance of another’ and therefore invalidate domination.9 This is precisely the point of departure for Hegel so that he can make explicit what was previously implicit in the philosophy of history of the eighteenth century: the process of history makes progress through conflict and its resolution as sublation (Aufhebung). When this hidden dialectic in particular, which was the secret figure of the hegemonic relationship between the self and the other, is factually superseded in Haiti, Hegel thematises it under the Herrschaft–Knechtschaft dialectic. His aim in so doing, however, is not to critique the existing reality of that moment but merely to describe it, and thus furnish a quasi-legitimation of the way in which history had occurred. Moreover, the philosopher of Jena constructs this dialectic as the ontogenetic dynamic of ­self-consciousness upon which full recognition is to be grounded. Hegel’s interpretation will have consequences for the discipline itself from the moment he identifies stages in time and place with concepts and conflicts, rather than with specific contents or determinations. The outcome seems to be a cul-de-sac which we cannot exit; the paradox emerges at the moment we fill the universal in history with the very 51

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form of universality, for example Reason, God, Nature, Man and so on, without any concrete particularity, for example whiteness, maleness, nationality, etc.10 If any singularity is privileged, it is because it embodies the very form of universality. Reason will occupy the position of the universal in history in Hegel’s philosophy.11 Within the encyclopedic work of Hegel, there are several spheres in which reason is embodied. For the purposes of this chapter, we intend to focus on how human beings grasp the universal, that is to say, reason. The dialectic of self-consciousness (Hegel, [1807] 1977: §166–230) is the process through which this grasp is realised (Taylor, 1974: 148). What is worth remarking is that this process is interpreted by Hegel through the ontologically constitutive conflict of Herrschaft–Knechtschaft. This dialectic consists in demonstrating that self-consciousness demands recognition by another self-consciousness in order to flee the utter emptiness of the pure identity relation I = I, or that of being an object or being with ordinary, that is, immediate, consciousness (Hegel, [1807] 1977: §103; Taylor, 1974: 128). In what follows, we should like to sketch out the double exclusion upon which this dialectic is founded, and to show that the two are European centred: one being established through an epistemic–­ economic exclusion and the other by way of a political exclusion, both depending on the manner in which we historically understand the Herrschaft–Knechtschaft dialectic. The English translation of the dialectic will afford us a clue in our illustration of this double exclusion; if it is translated as ‘master–slave’, the interpretation of the emancipation of a colonial dependency is favoured. If it is translated as ‘lordship– bondage’, however, preference is given to the interpretation of the emancipation from the Old Regime or, as it is classically understood in the Marxist tradition, the constitution of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft.12 Thus, as Buck-Morss suggests, the master–slave dialectic can be interpreted from the perspective of the slave colonies outside Europe. In our view, in line with the Kantian interpretation of immaturity, what at this period seemed to be the implicit condition of the slaves as lacking subjectivity, Hegel can now appreciate how ‘resolution and courage’ can break the chains of the imposed ‘guidance of another’; this runs contrary to Kant’s take which sees the emancipation of the enlightened as having its negative solely in ‘self-enslavement’, and not in the ‘guidance of another’. Kant works with the implicit assumption of the enlightened philosophy of history, something which Hegel cannot uphold after the slave revolutions. This is precisely why Hegel’s 52

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next step, despite the fact that he makes no historical reference, can be interpreted as the need to take into account the Haitian revolution and the struggle of the slaves, because he might consider it as representing a moment of full mutual recognition (though legal recognition by France of Haiti as an independent state is not to take place until 1838 when Haiti grants compensation to French slaveholders). It is also a significant moment for the understanding of freedom and full mutual recognition in general. In Hegel’s theory, full self-consciousness of the slave, that is to say, to be recognised as an embodiment of the universal as opposed to a particular individuality (Taylor, 1974: 153), depends on a twofold ontological condition: 1. the mediated (in)dependence of the slave from the master through the possibility of work, precisely because it is the slave and not the master who has mastery over things, as they are transformed by his own work; 2. the willingness to risk life in the arena of the struggle for full recognition, namely to use violence,13 is the other ontological condition for the emancipation of the slave in Hegel’s dialectic, a risk concerning which the master is not willing to reciprocate. This is related to the fact that self-consciousness is embodied in living beings; the universal is embodied in the particular. These two conditions are those that the Haitian revolution fulfils. Though it could seem that Hegel justifies the violent self-­emancipation of the slaves, things become more problematic when we consider his historical context and other parts of his work. In Hegel’s theory, enslavement is constitutive of the struggle for recognition. This struggle is ontogenetically the condition for freedom: the self and the other must be either master or slave. This conceptual device allows Hegel to dehistoricise the real conflict between masters and slaves. Historically, the slaves do not enter into the struggle for recognition voluntarily: only the masters do so. The enslaved are in another condition before they become involved in the struggle for recognition. They are only in the struggle when they become a commodity in the slave trade. It is at this moment that a third necessary actor appears on the stage in Hegel’s dialectical theatre, an actor who is never recognised as such: the ‘Negro’, to use the parlance of the time, in the context of slavery: But the Africans have not yet attained this recognition of the universal; their nature is as yet compressed within itself . . . The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness, and if we wish to understand him at all, we must put aside all our 53

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European attitudes . . . Slavery has awakened more humanity among the negroes. The negroes are enslaved by the Europeans and sold to America . . . Slavery is unjust in and for itself, for the essence of man is freedom; but he must first become mature before he can be free. Thus, it is more fitting and correct that slavery should be eliminated gradually than that it should be done away with all at once. (Our emphasis, Hegel, [1830] 1975: 173–90) The consequence is clear: the absolute other, the ‘Negro’, must be enslaved in order to become ripe for freedom. In Hegel’s terminology, the slave is the sublate of the ‘Negro’.14 The struggle for recognition has three and not two actors in the play. The master, the slave and the ‘negro’: the self and the other who are interrelated and are not foreign to each other (Taylor, 1974: 153; Hegel, [1807] 1977: 110), and the absolute other, who is the outsider in this relationship and is unable to possess any of the abstract properties for instituting the struggle for recognition. It is worth pointing out that we are in the 1820s and that the process of colonisation of almost all of Africa has not yet begun. Therefore, the Africans are also excluded because they are not yet under ‘colonial jurisdiction’.15 Only at that moment can the struggle for recognition take place. To put it briefly, the struggle for recognition is actually imposed by the colonial powers. Seen in this way, slavery is the ‘guidance of the other’ condition towards reaching understanding and making possible the conquest of independence and freedom. The struggle for recognition, considered as the starting point for freedom in history, precludes and silences any past which is not subsumable to it. In naturalising the absolute other, in making it foreign to the world instituted by the struggle for recognition, it is dispossessed of the possibility of having a history, and, consequently, it is condemned to be ‘peoples without history’, or better, ‘peoples without [their own] history’. (Hegel, [1830] 1975: 190) Not only did Hegel have the cleverness to adapt his philosophy to his own time but, additionally, he was able to neutralise the disintegrating power of the insurgent elements (categorising them as irrational or endowed only with immediate consciousness) to ensure the legitimacy of his understanding of rationality. Having the same function as the Negro figure, it is not simply a coincidence that Antigone represents in his work the feminine, defined as the immediate consciousness which goes against the political universality from the particular standpoint of the natural family and, in doing so, the heroine transforms the public 54

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into a private and contingent end. At that period, women also began to demand a role in public affairs, and Hegel deactivates, through this analogy, the effects of this potential ‘tremor’ or instability. He minoritises and naturalises women and states that the polis collapses owing to harmful feminine intrigues: ‘the everlasting irony of the Community’ due to the prevalence of the particular over the universality of the State (Hegel, [1807] 1977: §475). Dalí ‘seems’ to evoke Hegel when he refers to the slave world as an ironic world. In short, Haiti is a problem for contemporary historians because it is integrated into world history with the preclusion of its own past; for philosophers, the problem is that the struggle for recognition needs to make the other un-alien for ‘it’ to engage in the struggle. It is the very novelty of the Haitian slave revolution which was reabsorbed and negated in Hegel’s philosophy of history, with the latter breaking the logic of the enlightened philosophy of history and having, as one of its outcomes, the abolition of slavery in Revolutionary France. The struggle for recognition requires effecting an epistemic reduction of the otherness for it to be suitable for entry into this bond. This is precisely the logic that we aimed to propound at the beginning of this chapter through the discovery of the other, together with all the epistemic operations implied in making the other not foreign. In the words of Anthony Pagden, ‘Classifying men is not, after all, like classifying plants. For when regarding his own species, the observer not only has to decide what he is seeing, he also has to find some place for it in his own world.’ (Pagden, 1983: 12)

Recognition(s) At this point, we should like to pick up the original thread of our argument once again and briefly discuss the foundations of contemporary theories of recognition, by Neuman, Beauvoir, Kojève, Taylor, Honneth, Fraser and Butler, among others. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, otherness is one of the main bones of contention of the contemporary philosophy of history raised by feminism and postcolonial studies. The concept of recognition proposed by Hegel was in its prime in the second half of the twentieth century, and has succeeded in establishing a paradigm for understanding the relationship with the other in epistemology, ethics, politics and history. This phenomenon is not surprising when democracy is considered not to be the only normatively leading logic; there is also the modern Western imaginary 55

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of the progressive inclusion of the otherness of the other. Once the old universal of modernity has been uncovered as an extremely partisan and violent pseudo-universal, especially useful to the master, the only possibility for it to keep its critical potentiality is the rearticulation of a new one. Such a new universal would ideally be totally inclusive, as any exclusion can no longer be justified by reason of substantive determinations such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality and whatever new difference we add to the ‘symptomatic and embarrassing etcetera’ that Judith Butler, using the words of Henry Gates, observes as always accompanying the recognition of human diversity (Butler, 1997: 126). Almost all emancipatory projects are understood against the background of their struggle, and their history is described by means of the paradigm of recognition. To emerge into the light of the public sphere, to make one’s voice heard and seen in the political debate, to become a subject of rights, collectivities resort to the right to be recognised by the hegemon as belonging to the universal, not only as usual, de jure, but overall, de facto. As we have seen, the justification for this is that recognition, meaning full mutual recognition, is the resolution of the master–slave dialectic. We have, however, pointed to the problems of this assumed equality of the outcome, some of which are related mainly to epistemic problems, having serious consequences for the political and economic spheres. Let us illustrate this with two small observations on two particular works by two of the main contemporary representatives of the theory of recognition, both of whom have drawn their arguments from Hegel’s work: Charles Taylor (1994) and Axel Honneth (2008). Taylor is completely aware of the risk of homologating the differences and reproducing Eurocentric attitudes (1994: 42–3), for which purpose he establishes a clear distinction between the politics of equality and the politics of difference and their interrelated dialectics. Because of the manner by which he addresses the recognition of the excluded, however, through a specific understanding of the dialogical properties of the self-constitution of individuality and collectivity by means of language and communication with the other, he is obliged to make a subtle distinction, using G. H. Mead’s theory at the ‘heart’ of otherness. The dialogical space in which the ‘struggle for recognition’ takes place is constituted by the self and the ‘significant other’, (Taylor, 1994: 32–7) namely, with the specific other that constitutes me, and from which a regime of reciprocal mutual recognition is instituted. What makes ‘significant’ the other, however, with respect to the insig56

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nificant one, is in no place written.16 And this means opening the back door to introduce, once again, a preceding discrimination before the struggle for recognition takes place, and to exclude those who cannot be part of it, those with whom the self cannot communicate. As said above, in the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, both must be not foreign to each other. When we come to Honneth, however, the problem emerges from his theory of knowledge. He draws his argument from a critique of Lukács’s notion of reification as being too embedded in the Marxian interpretation of commodity fetishism, its related assumption of a true underlying reality, and its reductionist and holistic perspective. Nevertheless, through a reinterpretation based on Heidegger and Dewey, as critics of the epistemic assumptions of the cognitive neutrality derived from the subject–object relation, a recovery of Lukács’s concept of genuine praxis can be achieved. This implies adopting the perspective of the participant and accepting that recognition enjoys a genetic and categorical priority over the self and the world. The empirical basis for this approach is rooted in social psychology, and it seeks out ‘the cognitive preconditions that are contained in the way in which children acquire the ability to take over the perspective of another’ (Honneth, 2008: 41). Its main concern is to prove ‘that in ontogenesis, that is, in a chronologically understood process, recognition must precede cognition . . . a small child first of all identifies with her figures of attachment and must have emotionally recognised them before she can arrive at knowledge of objective reality by means of these other perspectives’ (our emphasis, Honneth, 2008: 46). With this, we have reached a new understanding; forgetfulness of recognition can now be termed ‘reification’, meaning ‘the process by which we lose the consciousness of the degree to which we owe our knowledge and cognition of other persons to an antecedent stance of empathetic engagement and recognition’. (Honneth, 2008: 56) Though Honneth’s understanding of reification could help us in the analysis of many facets of our lives, it carries two main problems derived from his having grounded his interpretation on the Hegelian mutual recognition dialectic and, overall, from the manner in which he understands knowledge and ontogenesis, namely chronology. According to our reading of Honneth, he precludes the possibility of seeing the subject–object relation epistemology as non-constitutive, that is, as conforming to one specific world but not to the only p­ ossible 57

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epistemic world. Because this is the case, and he wishes to hold that, nowadays, the understanding of objectivity is the same all over the world, he needs to resort to recognition theory coming from an ahistorical understanding of chronology because he assumes the birth of a child as being the empirical foundation and inception of chronological time. In so doing, he dehistoricises the way in which this epistemic world­– this paradigm, in Kuhn’s words­– could have been co-constituted from, according to his logic, an eventual mutual recognition; and thus, in our view, his approach would also make it impossible to ask if the ‘forgetfulness of recognition’ does not correspond, in fact, to ‘forgetfulness of historical exclusion’, as discussed above. Let us give an empirical example to show how his theory of reification reifies history. As Anthony Pagden shows very well in his account of the epistemic problems derived from the ‘discovery of the new world’,17 the cognition–recognition problem could not be disentangled. They both formed a synchronic problematic at the moment of understanding what that experience meant: Columbus saw sirens, reported that he did not observe monsters and so on, that is, he did not see what he expected to see. A change of ‘gaze’ would be the condition of possibility through which recognition and cognition might be made possible. Historically, however, and this is important to underline, we solely have at our disposal ‘the perspective of the European participant’,18 and only with some difficulty can it be said, as Fabian shows with the birth of anthropology, that both occupy the same position as participants. The ontogenetic priority of recognition over cognition is true only if we have previously epistemologically reduced the otherness of the other and transformed it into a ‘significant other’. The reification of the world of the other becomes a condition for the struggle for recognition. Both worlds may change in this struggle and, as a resolution, a ‘common world’ can emerge, though this struggle does not end in full reciprocity: the ‘slave’ has to negate his epistemic world to enter the ‘struggle’, and therefore the world of the ‘master’ continues to possess the epistemic prerogative. This previous homologation required for entry into the struggle precludes the possibility of seeing the historical and epistemic conditions for this ‘struggle’ to take place. It is in this sense that historicity is the limit of theories of recognition; they determine the otherness of the other in temporal terms as being in the same time as the self. This sameness, however, is constructed from specific historical experiences of one concrete self. To relate to this ‘significant other’, a subsuming must come about a priori: the historicity and the 58

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epistemic framework of the other have to be the same as the ones of the self.19 To conclude, our aim has not been to criticise universalism, as such, but to uncover the bias of the specific understanding of it produced by the Western philosophy of history that is still at work in contemporary theories of recognition. Universalism per se is an inescapable dimension of human life from the very moment all of us are de facto interconnected. The problem is how to give an adequate response de jure to this novel experience without assuming the logics of the master–slave dialectic.20 As exemplified by the experience of women, for example white women in relation to white men, black women in relation to white women, poor black women in relation to wealthy black women, the price to be paid for recognition is usually to have to speak and behave using a code acknowledged by the hegemon (normally that of the hegemon itself), and thus comply with the hegemonic requirements for recognition. To neuter the danger of consenting to act in accordance with these frames of recognition, some feminists suggest diverse performative strategies such as parody, irony and camp, which, in following the rules in a distorted way, allow women to be simultaneously inside and outside the frame, by making the rule explicit; one is, thus, able to destabilise it and to provide an opportunity for the excluded difference to self-manifest. It would not be necessary, however, to use antidotes against the logics of homologation if we did not reduce the whole relation with otherness to the logic of recognition. Recognition is an unavoidable, yet opaque moment in the experience with otherness, though it does not cover the totality of this relationship. The master–slave dialectic can offer a realistic view of the way things happen in the real world, though we should be suspicious when this interpretation is considered the only possible reality or understanding of reality. The fight for freedom does not necessarily end when we are recognised. Far from ending, it sometimes does not even begin with recognition. In fact, the hegemon seems to be waiting for us to ask for permission to be; when he authorises us to be, what is positively affirmed becomes our being, and thus we are rendered superfluous. It may be that we should imagine anew the true significance of our challenge, which is to embody what has always terrified philosophy: the unexpected that empowers us with the capacity to begin. This is what breaks down any kind of enforceable universalistic logic. Perhaps freedom is deeply related to appearing 59

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where nobody expects it. And for that to be possible, do we first of all become unrecognisable?

Notes 1. It is at that moment that the Greeks and the Romans are understood as a unity; that is, together, they are the ancients of the moderns. 2. Skinner (2002: Introduction). He also outlines the new normative framework of exclusions, especially of women, which was one consequence of this rebirth. For a radical criticism of the endogenous explanation of the birth of the Renaissance and the influence of the East on its formation, see Dussel (2007: 167–85) and Hobson (2004: Chapter 6). 3. The Spanish reconquista ended nine months before with the conquest of Granada together with the so-called ‘expulsion’ of Muslims and Jews. Now, the entire Iberian peninsula was ‘identical’, that is, had one Christian identity, and the mission was to do the same in the New World (Todorov, 1982: 69). See also Santos Herceg (2011: 2). 4. ‘ . . . not fifty years ago it knew neither letters, nor weights and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vines.’ (de Montaigne [1592] 1958: 693) 5. The 1550–51 Valladolid debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda on the right to conquest is based mainly on the first justification and its relation to the problem of violence. The second justification is also assumed, with nuances, by Las Casas. See Santos Herceg (2011: 3). 6. The work of Johannes Fabian (1983) is focused on the specific epistemological ‘distancing devices’ that anthropology has implemented in order to deny the coeval nature of its object of analysis, the other. Fabian is not really interested in the conceptual framework that made these devices possible. Thus, he centres his analysis on the naturalisation of time and on the two main strategies that preempted ‘coevalness’ in his discipline: cultural relativism and structuralism, or as he terms it, ‘cultural taxonomy.’ According to our interpretation, the relevant framework is the constitution of the philosophical understanding of history, which emerged at the end of the seventeenth century, and found its most sophisticated elaboration with G. W. F. Hegel. See also Guha (2002: 12). 7. C. A. Bayly (2004: Chapter 3) shows very well how these revolutions and the world situation were interconnected at that moment, and were shaped by a global fiscal and military crisis beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. 8. We agree with her argument, though we do not fully agree with her conclusions, nor with her reading of Hegel’s work. For a critical review of her book, see Stephanson (2010). For a similar but more nuanced analysis from a purely historical perspective on the importance of the Haitian revolution during the age of revolution, see Blackburn (2006). 9. Kant’s sentence also implies that immaturity can be not self-incurred, either because it is externally generated or because it is based on ‘lack of understanding’, for instance, in children. Such infantilisation or the determination as irrational will be a commonplace in the nineteenth century towards the justification of domination. 10. For the paradoxical nature of universality, see Scott (1996: 16) and Buck-Morss (2009: 23).

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The Limits of Recognition 11. For our critical purposes we use Charles Taylor’s writings on Hegel (1974). 12. As is recognised, before Marx, bürgerliche Gesellschaft means both civil and bourgeois society. Only after his work was it necessary to coin two new expressions to distinguish civil and bourgeois society. We cannot develop here the consequences of the Hegelian–Marxist legacy. The main problem with this, however, in relation to the problem of the universal in history, is that it assumes either a particular economic imaginary (capitalism or communism) or a particular state form as embodiment of the universal. The developmental process is the one sustaining this logic. At the same time, in making these developments dependent on the transition from the feudal system, it makes a Eurocentric epistemic claim about other situations in the world. See Chakrabarty (2000) for a critical discussion on this problem. The postcolonial and the Marxist interpretations are, to some extent, interdependent. There is a third important tradition of interpretation of this dialectic that reduces it to a psychological device. 13. We cannot develop this second condition here although it is as important as the mastery of the world through work condition. The recourse to violence against the coloniser was justified by Frantz Fanon in developing this Hegelian theme. 14. We are using the concept of ‘Negro’ as it is defined by Hegel in his work, not in its historical meaning. 15. See Gilroy (1993: Chapter 2) for a similar argument in relation to a critique of the bürgerliche society as formulated on the same originary exclusion. For an epistemic and historical examination of the European constitution of Africa as a continent existing permanently in a state of nature, see Appiah (1992: Chapter 1) and Mudimbe (1988). 16. The volume includes commentators on his paper, though nobody raises this issue explicitly. 17. One of the chapters in which he discusses this problem is called ‘The problem of recognition’, although he does not relate it to our topic. See also our previous quotation from Anthony Pagden, in the second section, above. The same problems can be identified in Todorov, Sánchez Ferlosio and Dussel, though their evaluations differ. 18. Only in 1959 was a compilation of ‘texts’ on how ‘the other participant’ participated in the ‘struggle for recognition’ published by Miguel León-Portilla (Santos Herceg: 167). 19. The understanding of time as being empty and homogeneous is the device ­connecting the epistemic framework to the historical perspective from which this process of subsuming is realised. Recognition that the self and the other are in the same time is not problematic per se; the problem is what is meant by sameness and how it is produced in historical terms. 20. Though theorised by Hegel in the early nineteenth century, this logic is not only a phenomenon of the nineteenth or twentieth century. For a contemporary example of its application, see Achille Mbembe’s press article ‘Sarko, Hegel et les nègres’ in Le Monde Diplomatique, 30 August 2007, reporting on how Hegel’s imaginary of Africa was present in the visit of the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, to francophone Africa.

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References Appiah, K. A. (1992), In My Father’s House, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arendt, H. (1977), Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York: Penguin Books. Baron, H. (1959), ‘The querelle of the ancients and the moderns as a problem for renaissance scholarship’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20: 1, 3–22. Bayly, C. A. (2004), The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Malden: Blackwell. Blackburn, Robin (2006), ‘Haiti, slavery, and the age of the democratic revolution’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 63: 4, 643–74. Bossuet, J. B. (1966), Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Buck-Morss, S. (2009), Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Butler, J. (2010), Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, London and New York: Verso. Chakrabarty, D. (2000), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Clarke. J. J. (1997), Oriental Enlightenment, New York: Routledge. Delanty, G. (2006), ‘The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory’, The British Journal of Sociology, 57: 1, 25–45. Dussel, E. D. (2007), Política de la Liberación, Madrid: Trotta. Fabian, J. (1983), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Gilroy, P. (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Guha, R. (2002), History at the Limit of World-History, New York: Columbia University Press. Hartog, F. (2008), Anciens, Modernes, Sauvages, Paris: Points. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F., H. B. Nisbet and D. Forbes (1975), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, J. M. (2004), The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A., J. Butler, R. Geuss, J. Lear and M. Jay (2008), Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1991), Kant: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, R. (1988), Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Le Goff, J., and H. F. Bauzá (1991), El Orden de la Memoria: El Tiempo como Imaginario, Barcelona: Paidós. Montaigne, M. de (1958), Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988), The Invention of Africa, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Pagden, A. (1982), The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Limits of Recognition Sánchez Ferlosio, Rafael (1994), Esas Yndias Equivocadas y Malditas: Comentarios a la Historia, Barcelona: Ediciones Destino. Santos Herceg, J. (2011), ‘Filosofía de (para) la conquista: eurocentrismo y colonialismo en la disputa por el nuevo mundo’, Atenea (Concepción), 503: 165–86. Scott, J. W. (1996), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Skinner, Q. (2002), Visions of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stephanson, A. (2010), ‘The Philosopher’s Island’, New Left Review, 61. Taylor, C. (1975), Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (1994), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Todorov, T. (1982), La Conquète de l’Amerique: La Question de l’ Autre, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Voltaire and R. Pomeau (1990), Essai sur les Moeurs et l’ Esprit des Nations et sur les Principaux Faits de l’ Histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, Paris: Bordas. Wagner, P. (2008), Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Zavala, S. A. and V. Rojo (2005), La Filosofía de la Conquista y Otros Textos, Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacuch.

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3 On Being in Time: Modern African Elites and the Historical Challenge to Claims for Alternative and Multiple Modernities Jacob Dlamini

T

o be modern, says C. A. Bayly (2004), is to be ‘up with the times’. It is, according to Peter Wagner (2012), ‘to be in one’s own time’. This chapter uses these two claims, drawn from the disciplines of history and sociology respectively, to speculate about how scholars might use the idea of temporality­– privileged by both Bayly and Wagner as being central to a subject’s experience of modernity­– to engage critically in debates about what some thinkers have called ‘multiple modernities’ and ‘alternative modernities’. Drawing on the colonial archive in South Africa, this chapter looks at how scholars might enrich ongoing debates about multiple and alternative modernities and, in the process, deepen our understanding of modernity. The notion of ‘multiple modernities’ is associated with Shmuel Eisenstadt, while Dilip Gaonkar pioneered the concept of ‘alternative modernities’. According to Eisenstadt (2000), the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ offers a view of the contemporary world that breaks with modernisation theories that were, for the better part of the twentieth century, dominant in the social sciences. Eisenstadt (2000: 2) says: ‘The idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world­– indeed to explain the history of modernity­– is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs.’ For his part, Gaonkar (1999: 1) says: ‘To think in terms of alternative modernities is to recognize the need to revise the distinction between societal modernisation and cultural modernity.’ Without getting into the merits and potential demerits of the distinctions between society and culture drawn by both Eisenstadt and Gaonkar, this chapter argues that there is great intellectual profit 64

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to be had from taking seriously Bayly’s and Wagner’s claims about temporality as a key dimension of the modern experience, as well as Eisenstadt’s and Gaonkar’s argument for complexity. This chapter draws on a specific historical case, involving a group of Christianised African elites in colonial South Africa from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, to show how scholars might go about finding archival support for the kinds of claims advanced by Bayly, Wagner, Eisenstadt and Gaonkar. By looking at these early African elites and their engagement with aspects of the colonial order, we can see the ways in which temporality was, indeed, a crucial dimension of what it meant to be modern. More importantly, these African elites offer ways of engaging critically with notions of ‘multiple modernities’ and ‘alternative modernities’ that are both historically sound and intellectually enriching. By examining the story of these elites, we see close up some of the stakes to which debates about ‘multiple modernities’ and ‘alternative modernities’ alert us. Being a speculative chapter, it does not engage in depth with Eisenstadt’s and Gaonkar’s arguments. But readers are reminded to keep in mind that the speculation pursued here takes place against the intellectual backdrop provided by both Eisenstadt and Gaonkar­– not to mention Bayly and Wagner. Ultimately, the essay argues that, while it is indeed correct and historically sound to think of modernity in its multiplicity and alternatives, scholars should not assume that this is an easy task.

‘We must insist, in all cases, on case-specific historicisation’­– Leon de Kock (1996: 126) In 1885, Elijah Makiwane, newly elected leader of the Native Educational Association, gave a presidential speech in which he addressed what he called a ‘delicate matter’.1 The matter concerned the question of whether Africans could ever be considered equal to Europeans. Makiwane was in many ways best placed to raise such a delicate matter. Born in 1850 in the British-controlled Cape Colony, Makiwane was a second-­ generation Christian and the second African in what later became South Africa to be ordained in the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He was also a product of two of the top mission schools in South Africa in the nineteenth century, namely Healdtown and Lovedale. These schools were key to the production of a Christianised, modern African elite between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. By the time he gave his 1885 address, Makiwane 65

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had served as a priest, a teacher, a telegraph operator and a newspaper editor. He was, in short, immersed in the modern world then fast developing in colonial South Africa, thanks largely to the often-violent encounter between Africa and Europe. Speaking during his address of Africans of his class, Makiwane said (quoted in de Kock 1996: 118): ‘In other words, it is asserted or assumed that the rising generation forgets that the natives are an inferior race. To remind them of this, a reference has on various occasions been made to great names and great deeds. Reference has been made to such names as Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and others, and to railways, wire fences, and other public and private works which show the skill and energy of the English people. Then it has been asked if the Kafir can produce anything to equal these names and these works. It has been represented that no one could expect anything else in as much as the English have had 2000 years of civilization (my emphasis) while the native is as yet a barbarian, or, at least, only semi-civilized.’ Makiwane (in de Kock 1996: 118) said many Africans acknowledged that the ‘English are a great nation, that [the] English Nation is a greater nation than the Kafir’. This was because, he argued, the ‘possession of Christianity and civilization for so long could indeed not fail to make a difference’. Makiwane, however, did not believe that British pre-eminence was due to manifest destiny. In other words, he did not think it would last. ‘One may doubt if their pre-eminent position will always or will be long preserved’ (in de Kock 1996: 118). But what about the Africans to whom Makiwane belonged? How could they make up the two-thousand-year gap which Makiwane seemingly took for granted? He said (in de Kock 1996: 119): ‘What requires to be noted however after all this is stated is this: if the English took 2000 years to reach their present stage are we to understand that it is impossible for any other people to come up to it within a shorter time? Is it to be expected that those nations or tribes who enjoy the advantages which are given by the Missionaries and the Queen’s government are to proceed at the same rate as the English, whose early advantages are not to be compared with our own? If a man takes 20 years to make a road are those who are to travel after it is made necessarily to take 20, or even 10 years? It may be absurd to expect that a nation can become civilized in the course 66

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of one generation; but is it reasonable to imply that 2000 years are necessary under all circumstances?’ (my emphasis) Therein lay the nub of Makiwane’s argument. He was more than happy to accept that the British were ahead of the Africans in terms of civilisation. But he was not prepared to accept the claims that it would take Africans at least two thousand years to achieve the progress, as he saw it, that the British had achieved. After all, was he, a second-­ generation Christian who had excelled in Western-style education, not proof that Africans could become ‘civilized’ and need not wait two thousand years to be considered modern? A keen follower of the Christian teachings in which he was raised, Makiwane believed that Africans could, indeed, attain equality with Europeans. Makiwane also challenged a key assumption of white supremacist thinking, namely the claim that all Europeans were, by definition, superior to all Africans or that there was, to borrow the words of Leon de Kock, ‘absolute superiority in a “scale” of civilization’ (de Kock 1996: 119). Said Makiwane (in de Kock 1996: 120): ‘But further what the natives or, if you like, the rising generation do dispute is the assumption that every European is necessarily above every native. Of the rising generation you will find very few who believe that every European who is in William Kama’s Location is necessarily above William Kama because he is a European . . . If those who refer natives to Milton and Bacon and other great names mean to suggest even remotely that every countryman of Milton and Bacon is to be considered as equal to and deserving of the same respect as these distinguished names, all I can say is that such persons are likely to require at least 2000 years of loud and constant preaching before they can get a convert among the Kafirs.’ Makiwane was making an argument for contingency. He essayed to make an argument that would be familiar to twenty-first-century students of world history, namely the idea that there is nothing necessarily racial about what we call civilisation. Even though his thinking was limited by his historical circumstances and he could speak only with the language and concepts available to him then, Makiwane knew enough to argue for a nuanced appreciation of history. He did not, as befitted a man of his background, question the status of Britain as the world’s leading empire and civilisation. He was careful to disaggregate 67

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that empire, however, and to argue that not every European member of said empire could claim to be civilised by virtue of his or her membership. But why did Makiwane make such an argument? As he said during his address: ‘What I am chiefly concerned about is a correct statement of what the natives really feel and say because I believe it has been mis-apprehended and mis-represented.’ (in de Kock 1996: 118) To understand why Makiwane raised such a ‘delicate matter’, one must understand who he was in conversation with. Makiwane was essentially responding to a Presbyterian missionary, named James Stewart, who was headmaster of Lovedale between 1870 and 1905. According to de Kock (1996: 70), Stewart’s tenure as principal of Lovedale saw a shift away from the assumed cultural superiority of Europeans that had characterised the principalship of William Govan, Stewart’s predecessor. Govan ‘wished to offer a full classical education with tuition in Greek and Latin, and whose aim was to “raise” African students to complete equality with Europeans’ (de Kock 1996: 70-1). Stewart’s tenure, on the other hand, saw a shift from the assumed cultural superiority of Europeans to an assumed racial superiority of Europeans over Africans (de Kock 1996: 71). Stewart, who was influenced by Darwinist ideas, did not want Africans trained in the classics. He preferred that Africans be offered ‘useful’ vocational training (de Kock 1996: 71). Stewart believed that there were certain stations in life beyond which Africans could not go. He also believed that Africans comprised a backward race. As he told the Lovedale Literary Society in a speech titled ‘The Experiment of Native Education’, it was possible that Africans could attain some level of civilisation but they had a long way to go still. He asked (quoted in de Kock 1996: 93): ‘What single thing have you done as a race which the world will preserve, that you sit down contentedly and say we are as good as our white neighbors? Who first utilised steam and perfected the steam engine? Was he born on the banks of the Kei (a river in the Cape Colony) or the Clyde (a river in Scotland)? Was his name James Watt or Umpunga Wamanzi?’ The name Umpunga Wamanzi (which literally means ‘the drinker of water’ in Xhosa) was meant to signify an African everyman, in much the same way that James Watt was supposed to stand for every European male. This then is what Makiwane was going against. 68

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Historicising Theory The object of this chapter is not simply to recount an obscure encounter between a European missionary and an African convert, interesting as that story may be. Rather, its aim is to broaden the conceptual terms in which we talk about the relationship between Africa and modernity. Drawing on Bayly’s (2004) and Wagner’s (2012) crucial placement of time at the centre of their definitions of modernity, this chapter wants to insist that we read Makiwane’s address as an argument about time, as a claim about being in time. To be sure, Makiwane was not an uncomplicated historical figure. He claimed to be articulating what the ‘natives really feel and say’, when he could not have done that, given that he represented only a relatively small class of mission-educated African elites. At the time Makiwane was going up against Stewart, the great majority of Africans in southern Africa were still subject to indigenous forms of rule and traditional leadership. Second, Makiwane took for granted assumptions about European superiority that many would challenge today. Chief among these assumptions is the idea that European civilisation could be measured in time and that it was precisely two thousand years old. To be fair to Makiwane, the idea of a European civilisation that was at least two thousand years old was not his invention. It was part of a Christian calendar that would have been an intrinsic element of his education at Healdtown and Lovedale. In fact, as we shall see from a few examples below, the idea that Europe was at least two thousand years ahead of Africa in terms of civilisation was pervasive, especially among graduates of mission schools. They took it for granted that there was a scale of civilisation and that some nations were ahead of others. As we can see from Makiwane’s address, however, the fact that this idea of a scale of civilisation was readily accepted by the likes of Makiwane did not mean that they understood it to be fixed and immutable. Also, as Makiwane makes clear in his address, just because it took Britain two thousand years to be where it was did not mean necessarily that it would, or should, take other nations the same amount of time. To paraphrase Makiwane, the road to civilisation was built only once. What this chapter argues is that Makiwane was making an argument about being in his own time, to paraphrase Wagner (2012). He was, in effect, making a claim that he was up with the times. In short, he was staking a claim to the modern world of which he was a part. He was making a case for inclusion in what we call modernity. By using a 69

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real historical case from a specific time in the past, this chapter seeks to show that it is alert to the dangers inherent to the promiscuous ways scholars tend to talk about modernity. As Lynn Thomas points out in an essay entitled ‘Modernity’s Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts’, the promiscuous use of modernity by scholars leaves the term to ‘encompass seemingly everything and nothing’ (Thomas, 2011: 727). Thomas wants a rigorous use of the term in order to address the following question: ‘how to counter the pernicious and persistent positioning of Africa as outside of the modern while simultaneously acknowledging the historical depth, complexity, and difference encompassed within its social domains’ (Thomas, 2011: 733). For Thomas (2011: 734), a useful way to answer the question means that historians of Africa must be attentive to how Africans use the term ‘modern’ in order ‘to make political claims and envision different futures’. In the case of Makiwane, the historian must pay particular attention to the ways in which he frames his argument about racial equality, and the complex ways in which he challenges notions of an immutable, divinely manifest European hegemony. Over and above paying greater attention to what Makiwane says, we also need to understand him in his context. What vision of modernity does he evoke? We should not assume that Makiwane’s idea of modernity is similar to our idea of modernity. Ideas change. As Thomas says, we need a more conceptually rigorous and historically grounded approach to the study of modernity. We need, in other words, to look at how terms such as ‘modern’ shift over time and the contexts in which they shift: Rather than historians engaging modernity as a static ideological formation or our own category of analysis, such an approach considers the modern as a ‘native’ category for claiming and denying political inclusion and imagining new­– often better ways of being. (Thomas, 2011: 734) Following Thomas, a more historical and grounded mode of analysis does not mean, however, that we can, to paraphrase her, ‘leap from rich but specific historical materials to the high abstraction of modernity or modernities’ (Thomas, 2011: 737). What it does mean is that we must, with each historical concept, take seriously what agents do with concepts. As Thomas (2011: 737) says, while there is no uniform definition of modernity, there are certain ‘core formations’ that help define the concept of modernity. These include, she says, a ‘future-oriented 70

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conception of time that figures the present as a radical rupture from the past’ (Thomas, 2011: 737). There is, ultimately, no ‘comprehensive or coherent definition of modernity’ (Thomas, 2011: 737). What there is, is a varied list of the core formations that define modernity. For Thomas (2011: 738) this is the challenge that faces students of modernity: Given most historians’ commitment to providing robust and often detailed accounts of past events and processes, such intermediate analytical concepts (such as ‘accelerating forms of transportation within urban landscapes, or the racial logics of bureaucratic systems’) would better highlight the depth and texture of our methodological labors than the more distant abstraction of modernity. By being more attentive to the specificity and richness of historical materials, such concepts would encourage rigorous cross-regional and crosschronological comparisons . . . By using colonial and postcolonial locations as the starting points for such histories, scholars can develop substantive insights for refining conceptions of modernity.

History in Detail In the case of colonial South Africa, the debate, such as it was, between Makiwane and Stewart, does not end with the two men. In fact, it becomes an ongoing saga that comes to define over time the precarious position within colonial society of the modern African elite. At its heart, the debate was about whether modern African elites could ever become full and acknowledged members of colonial society. The debate pitted various members of the colonial state against members of the African elite and concerned, at heart, questions about the shape of South African society. What kind of society was developing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and what was the role of the Africans, especially the elite, in that society? Members of the modern African elite did not want to rush their integration into colonial society but they wanted to know that the promise of equality­– used by the British Empire to justify its rule­– and a fair partnership were real. As Umteteli wa Bantu, a newspaper for the modern African elite founded in 1920, stated in an editorial dated 15 October 1921: ‘The educated and thinking tenth of the Native population will share our belief that the political evolution of the Native will be speedier if he hastens slowly’. This talented tenth did not mind waiting for gradual political evolution. But it wanted colonial authorities to show that they 71

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understood that African elites were in fact the real ‘native problem’ that needed solving. Members of the African elite sincerely believed that all the colonial authorities had to do was bring educated Africans into the colonial regime as partners and South Africa’s race problem would be solved. African elites were the only ones complaining, and that was because the colonial state had failed to live up to its promise to reward ‘civilized natives’ with privileges extended to even the most uneducated European. Reward these elites and they would stop complaining and agitating for change; that is what these elites believed. Umteteli wa Bantu wrote in an editorial dated 9 June 1923: ‘The problem will be solved by white understanding and by the conferment of privilege upon native men according to their individual merit.’ According to members of the African elite, African intellectuals were the ‘native problem’ only because colonial authorities refused to acknowledge social distinctions between educated Africans and the majority of Africans who were, said Umteteli wa Bantu in its 9 June 1923 editorial, ‘ignorant and uncaring, unconscious of repression or hardship and content to live and die as their fathers did’. This view was as old as the Christianised elite itself. The African elites saw themselves as a class apart but they still opposed the stereotypical view of rural Africans as a people in danger of being overwhelmed by Western civilisation. These ‘out-of-category’ Africans opposed the two-­dimensional characterisation of Africans as either hopelessly corrupted by modernity or idyllically traditional (the term is borrowed from James Ferguson, 2007). But they did not see Africans as being one undifferentiated group. In truth, members of the elite went to great lengths to distinguish themselves from the great mass of Africans, the majority of whom still lived, to borrow a phrase already quoted above, unspoiled by Western civilisation. Writing in the 19 September 1925 edition of Umteteli wa Bantu, H. Selby Msimang, a member of the elite, took J. B. Hertzog, South African prime minister and leader of the segregationist National Party, to task for saying the following: ‘I have seen two distinct classes [of Africans]­– the tribal native, with a strong sense of obedience to his chief and respect for the whites; and the intellectual we know so well­– the man of the big towns’. The African elites objected to Hertzog’s caricature of Africans because he denied them a stake in modern society. This disregard was considered an affront to the African elite. Umteteli wa Bantu editorialised in its 14 May 1921 edition: 72

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We are convinced that there is no psychological justification for the popular European belief in the inferiority of the Bantu race, and we are inclined to think that the general prejudice is founded on the tendency of the human mind to merge the individual in the class to which he belongs, and to ascribe to him all the characteristics of his class . . . That there should be Natives of a higher caste physically and mentally than the blanket native is inconceivable to the hide-bound European who revels in the superiority vested in him by 2000 years of progress. The elite drew a sharp distinction between the ‘worthy native’ and the ‘uncultured natives’ preferred by segregationists such as Hertzog. This social distinction is worth keeping in mind because it suggests that activities such as tourism, which only a few members of even the African elite had the means to pursue in the first four decades of the twentieth century, were one way in which the elite distinguished themselves from the rest of the African population. Members of the elite took for granted claims that, when it came to civilisation, Europeans had a two-thousand-year head start on them. But they believed that, given time, they too could become ‘civilized’. As Umteteli wa Bantu said in its inaugural editorial on 1 May 1920: ‘Let us [Africans] be content to climb the ladder of progress step by step, and not endanger our ascent by reaching for a higher rung until our feet have been firmly planted on the one below it.’ This did not mean, however, that Africans were to be treated like beasts of burden or, to paraphrase Thema, to be confined to a national park or zoo. As The Bantu World said, for example, in its objection to a Transvaal Publicity Conference proposal to preserve African life in the Kruger National Park: ‘In God’s scheme of things, no human is created for the benefit of another, but to make [his or her] contribution to the prosperity and progress of all. If black men and women are today servants, it is not by Divine ordination but by force of circumstances’ (‘Preservation of Native Life’, The Bantu World, 6 April 1935). While some colonial officials looked with disdain at social distinction within African communities, members of the elite took seriously the question of social distinction. They wanted recognition as mobile and dynamic elites and as a social category separate from that of Africans moving for labour purposes between their rural homesteads and the industrial places, and between European-owned farms that needed their labour, or Africans moving because of land hunger caused 73

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to a large extent by government-led land dispossession and expulsion. The modern African elite also understood that they were living in a different time, a time they needed to claim as equally their own. To steal the words of Thomas (2011: 737), they worked with a ‘future-oriented conception of time that figure[d] the present as a radical rupture from the past’. For members of the African elite, modernity meant abandoning old customs in favour of new ways, converting to Christianity in place of traditional African belief systems, acquiring Western-style education, and appropriating European clothing, mores and forms of conduct. Writing in the 18 January 1930 edition of the African newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu, R. V. Selope Thema, a member of the African elite, wrote: ‘The jungle has been cleared, and railway trains and motor cars travel over hill and dale, through forests and deserts, disturbing the lives of the most benighted of Africa’s children.’ Africans wanted meaningful parts in this modern drama, said Thema. He wrote: The African has sufficient sense to know that in this changed Africa his salvation lies in the assimilation of western civilization. He will refuse steadfastly to be herded like Africa’s animals into National Parks and Zoos for the benefit of the white race. Africa is his, and while he has no objection to alien races making Africa their home, he will not agree to be isolated in reserves for purposes of exploitation. Like any other member of the human race he is entitled to free movement and free intercourse with the outside world (‘Let the African Sing and Dance’, Umteteli wa Bantu, 18 January 1930). For people of Thema’s class, modernity meant the lofty: Western civilization and its ideologies; and the practical: enhanced forms of communication such as those provided by the railway, the motor car and the telephone. Modernity also meant the right to free movement, something that African elites and organisations such as the ANC made a key part of their campaigns throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Towards a Conclusion It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that history travels in a straight line, or that there is a clear and uninterrupted link between Makiwane, who died in 1928, and people such as Msimang and Thema, who were 74

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active in the first half of the twentieth century. But it would be right, I argue, to say that there was a consistency to these men’s struggle about modernity and about being in their own time. Makiwane and his successors might have lived and been active at different times in history but they each struggled to assert their being in time. This does not mean that they lived in unchanging times or that what Makiwane understood as accelerated development was similar to that which, say, Msimang and Thema understood by the idea. To use the cliché, times change. Put another way, time is constantly on the move. So are the subjects who make time; so are the historical agents whose rhythms both make, and are themselves made by, time. Instead of seeing Makiwane’s argument against Stewart’s chauvinism merely as a Christian plea for a deferred inclusion into the modern world, I suggest we read it rather as an act of affirmation, an assertion of being in time. Makiwane understood avant la lettre what it meant to be of this world. It meant to be up with the times; it meant to be in one’s own time. So what if other civilisations claimed to be two thousand years older than yours? That did not matter. What mattered was that the fruits of human progress could and should be shared equally. That way, humans would not waste time constantly reinventing the wheel.

Note 1. Details of Makiwane’s address and the political and conceptual context in which it was given are drawn from Leon de Kock (1996): 117–20.

References Bayly, C. A. (2004), The Birth of the Modern World, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Eisenstadt, S. N. (2000), ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus, 129: 1, 1–29. Ferguson, James (2007), ‘Formalities of poverty: Thinking about social assistance in neoliberal South Africa’, African Studies Review, 50: 2, 71–86. Gaonkar, D. P. (1999), ‘On alternative modernities’, Public Culture, 11: 1, 1–18. Kock, Leon de (1996), Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-century South Africa, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. The Bantu World (newspaper), 6 April 1935. Thema, Selope R. V. (1930), ‘Let the African Sing and Dance’, Umteteli wa Bantu, 18 January 1930. Thomas, M. Lynn (2011), ‘Modernity’s Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts’, American Historical Review, 727–40. Umteteli wa Bantu (newspaper), 1 May 1920. Umteteli wa Bantu (newspaper), 14 May 1921. Umteteli wa Bantu (newspaper), 15 October 1921.

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4 The Sublime Dignity of the Dictator:1 Republicanism and the Return of Dictatorship in Political Modernity Andreas Kalyvas

F

rom the sixteenth century on, since Niccolò Machiavelli’s momentous rediscovery, the Roman concept of dictatorship has come to occupy a central place in the modern political vocabulary, contributing substantially to the making of political modernity.2 Fiercely debated in the constitutional discussions ushered in by the revolutionary movements that spread from the mid-seventeenth century up to the nineteenth, it was reinvented in various political forms throughout the twentieth century and regularly enacted during the most critical periods of modern politics. The enduring presence of dictatorship is testified by its multiple historical trajectories, its nearly global geographical dispersion, its ideological pluralisation and broad political diffusion. The concept itself metastasised, reaching to the extremes of the new political divide between Left and Right,3 all the while becoming a formative influence on the constitutional state of emergency, as it was formulated in the newly founded liberal republics that came to replace monarchical rule.4 Hence, as political modernity resurrected the republican model and sought to renovate it to fit modern conditions, dictatorship was transmitted and transformed into a constitutive attribute of the modern experience of politics. The republican legacy of dictatorship was inexorably linked with the consolidation of the centralised state, its strategies of domination, and its spaces of exception. Moreover, it was complicit with the political forces associated with arbitrary autocratic power that led to the disastrous events of the last century (Duverger, 1961: 111–38). Roman dictatorship is a defining feature of the statist spirit of modern politics that daunts the public and individual liberty 77

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of citizens, often regarded as constitutive norms of the modern political imaginary. The chapter advances three claims. First, it establishes the historical and conceptual co-evolution of republicanism and dictatorship in modern political thought. There is a clear correlation between dictatorship and modern republicanism. This genealogical exercise in conceptual history demonstrates that republicanism and dictatorship are coeval. To put it more forcefully, dictatorship is constitutive of republicanism and provides its condition of possibility, in the sense that the latter rests on the former. Second, the question of dictatorship allows for a critical ­re-evaluation of modern republicanism as a whole. For instance, most republican thinkers acknowledged that the institution of the dictator consisted of regia potestas (Keyes, 1917: 298–304). Not only Livy and Cicero, among others,5 but also Machiavelli, openly admitted that, when confronted with grave perils, republics, because of the limitations and constraints of their mixed constitutions, ‘might have need of this regal power’(Machiavelli, 1996: Book I: 34, p.  75). But, if dictatorship is a condition which emerges from a republic in need of rescue, temporarily unleashing against its enemies the powers of a king, doesn’t this condition amount to a tacit admission of the necessity for a monarchy, at least in the abnormal circumstances of mortal danger? When it comes to the crux, in dark and dangerous times, aren’t we witnessing a frightened republic rushing under the skirts of mother monarchy? [Brandolini (1492/1494) 2009: 235] Finally, and this is my third claim, this monarchical presence in the republican model of the state of emergency might shed some light on the complex formation of the modern state and its coercive system of ruling. The modern rediscovery and revival of this Roman office is characterised by a political logic that regards preservation, survival and security as the paramount animating principles of politics. It is this dominant logic that I wish to scrutinise in order to question the selfprofessed normative commitments of political modernity and begin to expose its stato-centric nature and antidemocratic tendency.

The Disappearance of Dictatorship With the passing of the ancient world, the concept of dictatorship fell into desuetude. Hardly discussed in medieval political theory, it does not appear in its main themes and orientations. This indicates an unam78

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biguous conceptual discontinuity between ancient and medieval political thought on the question of the exception. The theologico-political discourses that followed the split and fall of the Roman Empire, the consolidation of Christianity, the development of a sophisticated and systematic metaphysics of universal natural law, the tension between the realms of the secular and the sacred, the question of the katechon, and the antagonism between pope and emperor (and later king and prince) would formulate the problem of the exception afresh, setting the stage for the advent of the doctrines of royal prerogatives and absolute sovereignty (Saint-Bonnet, 2001: 79–179; Lewis, 1954: 267–70). The Christian theological ‘turn’ in Western political thought posited the exception mostly as an effect of the chief conflict between the two realms over the ultimate source of political authority, thus moving away from the immanently political character of the republican emergency office and its worldly tasks. Even though jurists, theologians, grammarians and philosophers debated the exception in terms of magna and imminens necessitas, salus populi, princeps legibus solutus, and utilitas publica, reworking, updating, and transforming Roman legal categories (Post, 1964: 214–308), they shied away from the model of dictatorship and did not seek to find learning and guidance in its study. Under the influence of St Augustine’s fervent antirepublicanism, the extraordinary magistracy was confined to an irrevocable past, a relic of paganism and ancient ignorance, complicit with the seditious and unstable politics of idolatrous republics, morally depraved, motivated by ‘the ambition of domination’, and pervaded by pride and greed (St Augustine, 1984: Book IV: 12–22, pp. 196–218). Indeed, dictatorship became marginal, a minor presence throughout the development of medieval legal and political philosophy. If discussed at all, it was often tainted, misdescribed, and never invoked in relation to the medieval problem of emergency. As early as the fourth century ad, Eutropius’ Brevarium, commissioned by the Emperor Valens and intended for the education of the ruling elite in Roman military and political history, mistakenly ascribed the title of dictatorship to Augustus by claiming that, like Caesar, he ‘ruled with the title and rank of the dictatorship’ (Eutropius, 1993: Book I: 12, p.  5). Similarly, several centuries later, Ptolemy of Lucca would incorrectly assign to the Roman dictator a five-year appointment instead of the sixmonth limitation (Ptolemy of Lucca, 1997: Book IV: 26, p. 279). More scholarly ambitious studies on the Roman magistracies, such as John the Lydian’s in the sixth century, offered but a brief and dry description 79

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of dictatorship and treated it as a relatively minor office of lesser dignity (John the Lydian, 1983, Book I: pp. 36–8). In fact, with his compendium, the concept of dictatorship acquired a definite philological and antiquarian quality, devoid of political significance and institutional relevance, disassociated from the medieval formulations of emergency (Maas, 1992: 71–82). This utter disregard towards dictatorship was confirmed by John of Salisbury’s organic theory of the body politic which provides a striking illustration of the absence of the Roman emergency institution from medieval political philosophy (John of Salisbury, 1990: Book III: 10, p.  22; Kantorowicz, 1957: 207–34). Unlike other ancient offices and titles, the institution of the dictator is excluded from the monarchical constitution of the republican body (corpus rei publicae), the anthropomorphic depiction of a just commonwealth, and the right organisation of its public powers. John of Salisbury seems to have held dictatorship in low esteem, alluding to its ‘truly dreadful power’, because ‘for so long as all are led by a single pre-eminent will, they are deprived of their own free will, universally and individually’. (John of Salisbury 1990: Book III: 10, p. 23) One could further consider the paradigmatic treatment of the exception (accidens) in Thomas Aquinas which encapsulates how the medieval theory of emergency fully displaced the Roman model of dictatorship. Writing in the thirteenth century and while retaining elements of the classical republican tradition, Aquinas ignored the history and concept of dictatorship; it was conspicuously absent from his discussion on whether positive law may be violated in exceptional cases of ‘sudden peril calling for an immediate response’ (Aquinas: Vol. II, Part II: I–96.6, p. 1022). Aquinas advocated the ‘violation of the letter of the law in order to protect the common interest as the legislator intended’, which he derived from the ontological primacy of necessity over legality: ‘necessity is not subject to the law’, (ibid., Vol. II, Part II: I–95.6, p. 1021) he asserted, thus confirming the medieval principle of public law that ‘necessitas non habet legem’ (necessity knows no law) (Post, 1964: 317–18; Kantorowicz, 1951: 490). For this reason, he did not attempt to prescribe and codify the exception within the structure of legality but, instead, left it open to the total discretion of the ruler to judge and decide whether, when, and how a danger necessitates the suspension of the law (Aquinas: Vol. II, Part II: I–95.6, p. 1021). In ‘exceptional cases’, acting outside the realm of human law does not amount to a breach of natural law if the act is just, that is, if it derives from the 80

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general principles of reason, aimed at preserving human life and preventing its destruction, maintaining peace, and furthering public utility and the common good (Post, 1964: 318). ‘It often happens’, Aquinas asserted, ‘that the observance of a law may be useful to the community in most cases but very harmful in particular situations . . . Therefore if a case emerges in which the observance of the law would be harmful to the general good, it should not be observed’ (Aquinas: Vol. II, Part II: I–95.6, p. 1021). It behoves the prince to decide in a concrete situation whether there is an ‘imminent danger’ that cannot be dealt with within human law, ‘to dispense from the law’, and declare an exception.

The Recuperation: Neo-classical Republicanism and the Return of the Dictator The civic humanism of the Renaissance, for many a source of modernity, and the ensuing neo-Roman political revival ended once and for all the medieval neglect of dictatorship. It retrieved the republican emergency institution from near oblivion, turned it into a seminal object of constitutional study and political reflection, and enthusiastically reintroduced it as a viable model of emergency power for modern republics.6 Niccolò Machiavelli’s neoclassical republicanism stands out in this remarkable tale of rediscovery. With ‘the example of the ancients’, he sought to educate his contemporaries on how to order and preserve free republics (Machiavelli, 1996: Book I: Preface, p. 6). As it happened, his reflections on Roman dictatorship had a catalytic effect in the recovery, rehabilitation, and renewal of this emergency magistracy. Machiavelli is arguably the first modern political thinker of constitutional dictatorship (Pasquino: 14; Saint-Bonnet, 2001: 182–3, 189; Strauss 1995: 86). Evocatively, Machiavelli’s discussion of dictatorship in 1532, in his published commentaries on the ten first books of Livy’s History of Rome, opens with a vigorous defence against the charge of tyranny (Lefort, 1986: 509–10; Strauss, 1995: 115). The Florentine was eager to lift the curse of tyranny from dictatorship, to establish their irreconcilable differences, and thus to demonstrate that ‘the dictator was not a cloak for tyranny’ (Mansfield, 2001: 114). The main chapter on dictatorship (I: 34) refutes an unnamed ‘certain writer’ who ‘cites the fact that the first tyrant in that city commanded it under the dictatorial title; he says that if it had not been for this, Caesar would not have been able to put an honest face on his tyranny under any public title’ (Machiavelli, 81

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1996: Book I: 34:1, p. 73; Nippel, 2012: 36). It was ‘not well examined’, Machiavelli complains, and it was ‘believed against reason’ (Machiavelli 1996: Book I: 34: 1, pp. 73–4). What made Caesar a threat to the republic was not the office of the dictator but the widespread moral corruption that had already contaminated Roman political life. Caesar’s tyranny, Machiavelli concluded, would have arisen even if dictatorship had not existed (ibid., p. 74). Machiavelli’s repudiation of the critic of dictatorship was twofold. First, he emphasised ‘the limited authorities he [the dictator] had’, the legal and procedural forms that regulated his office, its instituted character, its prescribed length and task, and contrasted them to the arbitrary and absolute nature of tyranny (ibid. Book I: 34:2–3, pp. 74–5). Two key principles, separating the ordinary nature of dictatorship from the extra-legal nature of tyranny, encapsulated the substantial difference between the dictator and the tyrant: the form of authorisation and the time for which it is given (ibid., Book I: 35:1, p. 76). Thus, contrary to tyranny, he asserted, the Roman dictator brought the exception into the purview of the law and under the control of the city. With ­dictatorship, the exception became legalised and regulated by procedural norms, fully included within the juridical order (ibid., p. 76). Moreover, he enthusiastically recommended dictatorship to the moderns because it ‘always did good to the City’, and thus it is proper that they imitate the ancient Romans when they set forth to constitute their own republics (ibid., Book I: Preface, p. 5; Book I: 7:4, p. 23). Thus, a second line of defence against the critic of dictatorship amounted to a strategy of praise. Far from being a tyrant, he regarded the office of the dictator as one of the main causes of Rome’s greatness (grandezza). Machiavelli claimed that the dictatorial concentration of powers was both an effect and a cause of empire, that is, of greatness. The Roman emergency office was the unintended effect of empire to the degree that it was caused by wars and provoked by external violence (ibid., Book I: 33:1, p. 71; Book I: 34:4, p. 75). Following Livy, Machiavelli saw dictatorship as an ordini originated in the wars the republic waged against its outside enemies (Parel, 1992: 130). Fighting wars, Machiavelli observed, .  .  . made them think about new modes, through which they expanded their power in a briefer time. Among them was the creation of the dictator, a new order through which they not only overcame impeding dangers, but that was the cause of avoiding infinite evils that the 82

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republic would have incurred without that remedy. (Machiavelli, 1996: Book I: 33:5, p. 73) Respectively, dictatorship was also the cause of empire because it provided the republic with an exceptional military weapon of expansion. With it, the Romans were able to fight ‘with more force, more counsel, and more authority’; that is, to conquer more successfully, to expand (ibid., Book I: 34:3, p. 75). In the absence of the Roman dictator, Machiavelli asserted, the republic would have remained small, ‘weak’, simply because either its external enemies would have defeated it or, instead, it would have ruined itself in an attempt to extra-legally defeat them with means that its constitution did not provide for. (ibid., Book I: 6:4, p. 22; Book I: 34:2–4, pp. 74–5; Book I: 35:1, pp. 76–7) Contrary to the ancients, however, Machiavelli barely evoked the domestic use of dictatorship in relation to intrinsic accidenti, that is, seditions and internal discord (ibid., Book II: 2:1, p. 129; Book III: 41:1, p. 301).7 Notably, while on this subject, he did not address its connection to class conflict and social struggles, that is, to crises internal to the city. He did not treat the constitutional emergency office as a cause or result of tumults and dissensus. It is external preservation and augmentation, not internal politics, that produced and animated the republican remedy of dictatorship. Hence, dictatorship seems of no particular relevance to domestic affairs and the political struggle between the two social orders, as it is considered solely in relation to extrinsic accidenti, that is, foreign wars and imperial expansion. (Machiavelli, 1996: Book I: 4, p. 16) Machiavelli was therefore resolute in claiming that the republican emergency model did not endanger the (domestic) free way of life (vivere libero) (Machiavelli, 1998: Book IX, pp. 41–2). In his republican theory, the Roman state of emergency was a differentiated space, whereby concentration of power in the executive was increased to the point of becoming royal without, however, causing a ­corresponding decrease in the other constitutional powers as to reduce them to servitude. With dictatorship, the executive became stronger without the citizens becoming weaker. This was odd reasoning that tried to reconcile inequality of power and freedom, military rule with political participation, the exception and the norm. There was nothing, in sum, to fear from a republican dictator. But even for Livy’s standards this was an overstatement. The Roman historian time and again had alluded to the tension between 83

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­ ictatorship and liberty, stressing how the appointment of a dictator d caused ‘a great fear’ in the plebs, making them docile and subservient, and thus ‘more zealous in obeying orders’ (Livy, 1996–99: Book II: 18, pp. 276–7; Book III: 26–7, pp. 90–3). Livy further observed that this magistracy inspired a ‘great terror’ to the effect that ‘nor did either the tribunes of the plebs or the plebs themselves dare to lift their eyes or open their mouths against the power of the dictator’ (ibid., Book VI: 28:4, p. 295, Book VI: 16:3–5, p. 251). Thus, contrary to Machiavelli, one has to ask whether political contest, whereby ambitious citizens, ‘men in rivalry’, strive for power and glory, is still possible under dictatorial rule (Machiavelli, 1998: Book II: 2:3, p. 132). Is there space left for citizens to exercise their civic privileges and ‘to reason about either public defense or public offence’? (ibid., Book I: 16:2, p. 44) What kind of agonistic politics could possibly exist and how might tumults and discords be played out when a dictator is appointed who commands by fear and violence? How does terror create or promote the possibilities of political action for the many? Or, to put it bluntly, is the citizen in a dictatorial state of emergency ‘able to enjoy one’s things freely, without suspicion, not fearing for the honour of wives and that of children, . . . afraid for oneself?’ (ibid., Book I: 16:3, p. 45) The crucial question which Machiavelli evaded was whether a temporary king could ever coexist with political freedom and public contest.

The Monarchy of Dictatorship The close affinity between dictatorship and monarchical rule sparked an intense debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the political and constitutional nature of the republican emergency office. This forgotten querelle, stirred by Jean Bodin, involved Hugo Grotius, Robert Filmer, James Harrington, Algernon Sydney, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is enormously instructive. On the one hand, it convincingly illustrates that, with the development and diffusion of modern republicanism, the Roman institution of the dictator returned for good in political thought, provoking learned discussions and extensive scrutiny by some of the most influential jurists and philosophers of the time. On the other hand, this debate exemplifies how the dictator’s return inspired a heated dispute on the very character of the republican government. Jean Bodin seems to be the first to have set off this remarkable debate in his classic 1576 treatise, The Six Books of the Commonwealth. While 84

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discussing the relative weaknesses and merits of the three canonical regime types, Bodin drew attention to the striking similarities between dictatorship and monarchy and exposed the king’s presence lurking inside the complex republican mixed system of checks and balances. Whereas most ancient and modern republican thinkers were well aware of this presence, yet not particularly perturbed or puzzled by it, Bodin was the first of the moderns initially to have pulled the thread of dictatorship until it unravelled the entire institutional fabric of the republican constitution, laying bare its veiled monarchical core. Republic is a monarchy, in the last instance. Bodin’s reflection begins with the distinction between sovereignty and dictatorship. While the first is a supreme, perpetual and unlimited absolute power of command that does not recognise any higher authority but God, the second is a mere commission. The dictator is just a subordinate ‘trustee’, with delegated powers subject to time limitations and confined to particular tasks (Bodin, 1993: Book III: 8, pp. 113–15; Book III: 5, pp. 299–301; Book IV: 1, p. 329). Notwithstanding this fundamental difference, Bodin identified a crucial similarity between the two that corresponded to one of his four eminent attributes of sovereignty: the absolute power of command. Even if dictatorship was a commission lacking the perpetual, inalienable, and unlimited attributes of sovereignty, it still ‘had absolute powers’, in the sense of being indivisible as long as it was not subject to appeal, held the supreme right of life and death, and all the other offices were suspended or subordinated to its command. (ibid., Book III: 8, p. 113; Book III: 5, p. 296) With this systematic reinterpretation at his disposal, he suggested that the Roman dictator was a kind of ‘sovereign Monarch’, who was called in whenever the city was engaged in perilous wars against its external enemies or internally divided, with the citizens fighting among themselves (ibid., Book VI: 4, pp. 544–5). The republic’s mixed constitution, he asserted, ‘that has many lords, either for dividing or diversifying opinions, either for the diminution of the power conferred to the many, either for the difficulty to agree and resolve, either because the subjects do not know who to obey, either for giving away what must remain secret, or finally for all these reasons together’, found itself compelled to appeal to the sovereign power of the One. (ibid., Book VI: 4, pp. 546–7) By reinterpreting dictatorship as an expression of regal power, Bodin concluded that whenever citizens rush, frightened, for protection by a dictator, they fall back on a king and consequently they inadvertently 85

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admit the necessary superiority of monarchy over a republican constitution (ibid., Book VI: 4, p. 545). Even the Romans, who were famous for their abhorrence and hatred of all kings for the mistakes committed by a prince, had decided to make the dictator a ruler with absolute powers to help them overcome great perils. Republicanism is a proof of monarchy (ibid., Book VI: 4, p. 545). In his 1625 masterpiece on The Rights of War and Peace, Hugo Grotius further radicalised Bodin’s original interpretation through a reconsideration of the relationship between sovereignty and dictatorship. He went a step further, to maintain that the Roman dictator was not solely ‘a sort of temporary Monarchy’ but, predominantly, a ‘temporary Sovereign’ (Grotius: Vol. I, Book I, Chapter 3: 8, pp. 271, 283). For Grotius, the dictator enjoyed ‘real sovereignty for a Time’ and therefore his office was equal and similar to supreme royal power (ibid., Chapter 11: 11, p. 283). In the chapter on sovereignty, Grotius chastised Bodin for denying the Roman emergency magistracy authentic and full sovereign power and thus misunderstanding its true supreme nature. Grotius explained Bodin’s failure as a consequence of ignoring a crucial distinction between ‘the Thing itself’ and ‘the Manner of enjoying it’, that is, he missed the basic difference between content and form. While the first is constitutive of the essence of an entity, the second is accidental and inessential to its intrinsic qualities. The nature of a thing, he argued, is apprehended in the effects and not in the temporality of its operations (ibid., p. 282). In the case of dictatorship, its duration is irrelevant as to its nature because ‘the continuance of a Thing alters not the Nature of it’ (ibid., pp. 283–4). Here, Grotius alluded to a key distinction between acts unlimited in power and acts unlimited in time. These should not be treated as identical because the former acts remain unlimited in power even though they might be limited in time. Hence, an unlimited power can either be limited or unlimited in time without its nature being affected. Indeed, what actually matters is that both sovereignty and dictatorship are similar acts of command and tend to produce identical absolute effects; they are absolute commands (ibid., p. 282). As an example, he mentioned that the removal of a king does not retroactively annul his sovereignty for the period he reigned before his deposition (ibid., p. 282). If that were the case, he sharply concluded, only immortal beings would possess sovereign power. Grotius further argued that, for the limited period of its duration, dictatorship could resort to all the acts of sovereignty. Namely, the 86

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dictator possessed the same powers and had the same effects as a sovereign, that is, his ‘acts are not subject to another’s Power, so that they cannot be made void by any other human Will’, (ibid. Chapter 11:7, p.  259). While in office, the Roman dictator ruled and commanded ‘without consulting anyone, or being accountable for his conduct’, ‘[was] above the People, and [was] no more dependent on them, during the Time fixed, than a Prince established for Life’, ‘nothing he had done could be annulled by any other Power’, ‘there was no Appeal to the People’, his ‘Edict was held as sacred’, and ‘Neither was any Security but in a careful Obedience’ (ibid., Chapter 11:11, p. 282; Chapter 8, pp. 271–2). As a consequence, Grotius confidently asserted, by a ‘temporary Right’ dictatorship possessed for a time ‘as much Authority as the most absolute King’ (ibid., pp. 280, 283). Two decades later, by the time Filmer joined the debate on dictatorship, the stakes were considerably higher. His approach relied heavily on Bodin and Grotius’s work and certainly did not equal their ­originality. Nevertheless, his contribution was just as important. He inventively combined Bodin’s trenchant political critique of the republican government and Grotius’s thoroughly analytical reinterpretation of dictatorship in terms of sovereign power finally to bring them together. This synergy allowed him to take the concepts to their ultimate conclusions. Filmer fully endorsed Grotius’s redefinition of the Roman dictator as a ‘temporary king’ who exercised, for a limited time, absolute sovereignty by a ‘temporary right’, in order to sharpen and radicalise Bodin’s criticism of the inconsistencies and paradoxes of the republican mixed government as they were epitomised in the institution of dictatorship. (Filmer, 1991c: 26; Filmer, 1991a: 224, 229; Filmer, 1991b: 259) Filmer’s offensive consists of three interrelated arguments. First, he claimed that the Romans never truly emancipated themselves from monarchical power despite all the pride they took in the expulsion of the kings and, therefore, ‘their government was never truly popular’ (Filmer, 1991b: 262). The office of the dictator and its frequent use whenever confronted with great troubles demonstrated their failure to establish a headless government and testified to the impossibility of a free mixed republic. The Romans, he asserted, ‘who were drawn to swear they would suffer no king of Rome, found no security but in perjury and breaking their oath by admitting the kingly power in spite of their teeth, under a new name of a dictator’ (Filmer, 1991a: 229). With this allegation, Filmer aimed to subvert the ideological antimonarchical arsenal of republicanism by accusing it of inconsistency 87

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and insincerity; Rome remained under the sway of absolute monarchy all the while it gratified itself in believing otherwise and seeking to convince others as well. Secondly, Filmer explained Rome’s imperial glory and its muchadmired world expansion as a result of undeserved good fortune and as the effect of ‘an apparent kind of monarchy’ (Filmer, 1991b: 258). Rome’s military successes were due partly to dictatorial rule and partly to the authority of the two councils which, once combined, allowed the Romans to muster their royal absolute powers of command to achieve their imperial designs. Turning Machiavelli on his head, Filmer asserted the close affinity between dictatorship and empire and claimed that ‘Rome at one and the same time was broken and distracted into two shows of government­– the popular, which served only to raise seditions and discords within the walls, whilst the regal achieved conquests of foreign nations and kingdoms’ (Filmer, 1991b: 258–9). Third, Filmer also took issue with the fall of republican Rome. Along the many arguments he developed to make a case for its self-destructive nature, he alluded to the dictatorial armies, ‘for the arms she had prepared to conquer other nations were turned upon herself, and civil contentions at last settled the government into a monarchy’ (Filmer, 1991c: 26). When the dictatorial armies that helped the republic to build its empire turned inwards, towards the city, invading domestic politics to wage war against it, there was no force to stop the temporary kings from conquering Rome itself. The return of the dictator to the city brought the republican government to an end, as Rome ‘was ruined by her own hands’, that is, by her own institutions and ordini: ‘Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit’.8 Filmer concluded his polemic against dictatorship not without a sense of irony, stressing how it gave an ‘honorable testimony of monarchy’, ‘which is the royallest evidence for monarchy in the world’ (Filmer, 1991c: 26; Filmer, 1991b: 259). Thus, the declared enemy of kings became the best proof of their superiority.

Defending the Dictator This formidable offensive against dictatorship did not go unchallenged. Two leading Commonwealthmen, James Harrington and Algernon Sydney, rushed to the spirited defence of the Roman emergency magistracy. Their responses illustrate how closely intertwined were the fate of dictatorship and republicanism. Despite searing criticisms, modern 88

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republicans stood resolutely by the side of the Romans, going to great lengths to elaborate various ingenious responses that would shield the institution of dictatorship from the repeated accusations of monarchia. Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) and Sydney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698) are seemingly different in style, method and purpose. The former proposed a fictionalised model of a perfect republic while the latter was an erudite republican diatribe against Filmer and absolute monarchy. One of their most notable commonalities, however, is in their allegiance to dictatorship. The concept infused their writings. They theorised it afresh and modified it, introducing new lines of defence that fostered the conceptual development, dissemination, and broader reception of dictatorship during the following century. At first glance, Harrington took to heart the contention that the Roman emergency office harboured monarchical power and became a threat to popular government. He acknowledged ‘that the Dictator for his term [does] have Sovereign Power’, conceded that ‘the dictatorial power, being in a single person, so little differs from monarchy’, and agreed with the critics that, in fact, it ‘is so dangerous and subject to introduce monarchy’ (Harrington, 1700a: 528; Harrington, 1992b:13, 131). He even called it ‘an Imperfection which ruined that Commonwealth [Rome] and was not to be found in any other’ (Harrington, 1700c: 181). How could then one make sense of his determination to uphold the tradition of dictatorship in his ideal Oceanic republic? The answer consists of four reasons. Harrington’s support of dictatorship is informed by a sense of political realism. It is a lesser evil, a preferable measure to the greater evil of altogether lacking a dictatorial institution­– a risk worth taking. Precisely because of the nature of the mixed regime and its structural ‘inconveniences’, Harrington, like Machiavelli, saw dictatorship as an unavoidable ‘necessity’ (Harrington, 1992b: 132). The republic’s ‘natural slowness and openness, and the suddenness of the assaults that may be made upon her, as also the secrecy which in some cases may be of absolute necessity upon her affairs,’ made the dictator the ultimate ‘refuge’ without which it was ruined (ibid., p. 132). Furthermore, he was convinced that the sustained cultivation of morals in a republic would counterbalance the risks of monarchy in extreme situations. Civic virtue and dedication to the public good would ensure that the men appointed to the dictatorial office would ‘excel in virtue’ and ‘authority’ and thus eliminate the probabilities of 89

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abuse and corruption (ibid., p. 35). For Harrington, this ethical requirement transformed dictatorship from a potentially dangerous power into a ‘universal acknowledgment of virtue’ and made the republic ‘the principality of virtue’ (ibid., p. 35). In addition, Harrington asserted that the institution of dictatorship was, after all, simply an institution, that is, an epiphenomenon, a ‘superstructure’, erected upon and dependent on the true foundation of society: land property (Harrington, 1992b: 33; Harrington, 1992a: 270–3; Harrington, 1700b: 385–95). If ethics and virtue provided one kind of guarantee against the abuses of dictatorship, the right economic structure, what he famously called ‘agrarian balance’, provided another (Harrington, 1992b: 32; Harrington 1700b: 394). Finally, building on all of the aforementioned reasons, Harrington laid out a new model of dictatorship for his perfect republic of Oceana. It was not enough to have virtuous citizens fill the office, nor was it sufficient to maintain the exact agrarian balance so as to eliminate the risks of monarchy. The menace of arbitrary autocratic power demanded an additional line of defence: depersonalisation. Harrington boldly introduced the novel idea of a collegial, plural ‘Dictatorial Council’ lodged within the central executive branch of the mixed government. He named it, Dictator Oceana (Harrington, 1700b: 443; Harrington, 1992b: 130). Because ‘it is incident unto commonwealths upon emergencies requiring extraordinary speed or secrecy’, the senate declares an emergency and, . . . shall at any time make election of nine knights extraordinary to be added into the council of war, as a junta for the term of three months, the council of war, with the junta so added . . . having power to levy men and money, to make war and peace, as also to enact laws which shall be good for the space of a year (if they be not sooner repealed by the senate and the people) and for no longer time, except they be confirmed by the senate and the people. And the whole administration of the commonwealth for the term of the said three months shall be in the dictator, provided that the dictator shall have no power to do anything that tended not unto his proper end and institution, but all unto the preservation of the commonwealth as it is established and for the sudden restitution of the same unto the natural channel and common course of government. (Harrington, 1992b: 129, 130, 133, 166, 236; Harrington, 1700b: 441) 90

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With this extraordinary recommendation, Harrington proposed the preliminary elements for the first modern theory of emergency government, taking the idea of constitutional dictatorship to an altogether new level of theoretical and institutional sophistication. This idea is formative for subsequent eighteenth-century theories of dictatorship as a council and a committee, a collective body, anticipating the notion of a crisis cabinet. Yet, however ingenious his Dictator Oceana is, Harrington’s elaborate institutional remedy stands out in the history of the concept primarily for blending the executive with the legislative, and thus for significantly increasing the powers of his dictator(s) far beyond ­conventional republican understandings. The insertion of legislative powers into the rights of dictatorship enlarges rather than diminishes its sovereign authority, reinforcing its absolute character. The commands of the dictator are elevated into decrees and laws (Harrington, 1992b: 129–30). In addition, unlike the Roman senate, Harrington ­conferred to his own Oceanic senate the power both to declare an emergency and appoint the additional members of the dictatorial council. Furthermore, by constituting the dictatorial council out of the normal institution of the council of war with the addition of a junta of nine extra members, Harrington blurred the distinction between normal and exceptional rule. As a result, a small, less mixed and more powerful and unitary government with full administrative tasks was recreated within the normal constitutional mixed regime, since ‘this Dictatorial Council has more of it of a Commonwealth than has hitherto among us been practised or offered’ (Harrington, 1700b: 443; Harrington, 1992b: 167). Sydney, by contrast, did try to respond. In a republican recuperation of Bodin’s distinction between sovereignty and dictatorship, and against Filmer but also contrary to Grotius and Harrington­– all of whom had, in varied degrees, equated the two forms of authority­– Sydney articulated one of the most powerful rejoinders against the critics. As great as the power of the dictator undoubtedly is, it is not truly sovereign but a mere ‘commission’ which is created for the execution of the supreme power of the people and therefore ‘does not confer any determined right upon the person that [has] it’ (Sydney, 1996: Book II: 31, p. 311; Book II: 7, p. 114; Book II: 18, p. 183; Book III: 6, p. 349; Book III: 10, p. 376; Book III: 21, pp. 439–46; Book III: 31, pp. 503–4). Thus, the emergency office remained subordinated to ‘the judgment, right, and power of those who appoint [it]’, that is, the Roman sovereign people, 91

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‘who still retained in themselves the power of changing both the matter and the form of their government’ (ibid., Book III: 12, p. 386; Book III: 13, p. 391). Sidney then proceeded to claim against Filmer that, Though I do therefore grant that a power like to the dictatorian, limited in time, circumscribed by law, and kept perpetually under the supreme authority of the people, may by virtuous and well disciplined nations, upon some occasions, be prudently granted to a virtuous man, it can have no relation to our author’s monarch, whose power is in himself, subject to no law, perpetually exercised by himself, and for his own sake. (ibid., Book II: 13, p. 152) Sydney’s rejoinder strengthened the theory of constitutional dictatorship. The main thrust is on the constitutionality of the Roman emergency institution, always within the republican legal framework. He asserted that dictators could be recalled, deposed and punished if they violated their commission and acted against the public good and the interest of the republic, that is, against their instructions (ibid., Book II: 13, p. 151; Book II: 24, p. 222; Book II: 32, p. 311). They ‘are under some compact, and . . . there is a power of constraining them to perform the contents, or to punish them for their violation’ (ibid., Book II: 32, p. 311). Therefore, he concluded, the authority of Roman dictatorship was ‘legal and just’ and deserving praise for its service to free governments (ibid., Book III: 28, p. 478; Book II: 17, p. 175). For Sydney, however, to develop a moderate theory of constitutional dictatorship, certain crucial theoretical changes were necessarily introduced, transforming considerably the republican doctrine itself. His effort to respond to the critics by stressing the legal character of dictatorship developed into a far-reaching revision of republicanism. A key change is Sydney’s emphasis on the sovereignty of the people as the ultimate foundation of the republic, superior to all instituted magistracies, including the dictator, the consuls and the senate, all derived from, and subordinated to, the real popular sovereign (ibid., Book III: 6, p. 349). It is to defend the Roman office against the accusation of harbouring an absolute monarch that Sydney endorsed another absolute sovereign: the people. Thus, he fully displaced one form of absolute sovereignty for another. This shift towards the absolute sovereignty of the people came from his attempt to limit dictatorial power by somehow stepping outside the republican framework in a search for a 92

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political check. He appealed to earlier theories of the constituent power of the people and dual sovereignty (duplex majestas), doctrines external to the republican lineage of civic humanism, and associated often with the rival post-medieval juris natural tradition of corporations, founding contracts and natural rights (Kalyvas, 2005: 2013). This opening up of modern republicanism to external influences did not come without a price. By introducing in neo-Roman theory the idea of popular constituent sovereignty, while attempting to solve the paradoxes and inconsistencies of dictatorship, Sydney had to misrepresent considerably the historical and institutional attributes of the Roman dictator. Contrary to his assertion, the people of Rome were not involved in the declaration of an emergency, neither did they participate in the appointment of the dictator as he argued. To accommodate the idea of popular sovereignty as a superior informal check on dictatorship, Sydney had to disregard the fact that, for most of Roman history, the right of appeal did not apply to this emergency office (Sydney, 1996: Book II: 13, pp. 151–2). Sydney fell into a serious contradiction: though he argued against all extra-legal measures in a free republic, his references to an informal popular right to depose the dictator whenever the people deemed it necessary, operated precisely on the level of extra-constitutionality, which he had explicitly denounced. More importantly, it seems that he abandoned both the ancient doctrine of the mixed regime and the ideal of constitutional balance, discarding them in favour of an unequivocally absolutist and unitary theory of the supremacy of popular sovereignty. Thus, by responding to the critics of dictatorship, Sydney took a democratic turn; he unwittingly reinvented republicanism beyond recognition as he abandoned important core elements of its political identity, radically transforming its normative and justificatory foundations. This originality, with its ambiguities, survived the development of the republican doctrine in the following century, culminating in JeanJacques Rousseau’s aporetic political theory. His 1762 ambitious and radical rewriting of republicanism upholds the centrality of dictatorship, reaffirms its indispensable place in a free republic and strengthens its basis of justification. Unsurprisingly, its political significance is again predicated on the absolute priority of the exception over the norm, that is, order and security over liberty and equality.9 The rule of law is sacred, Rousseau famously preached, ‘except when the salvation of the fatherland is at stake’, because, as he reasoned, ‘the people’s foremost intention is that the State should not perish’ (Rousseau, 1997b: Book 93

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IV: 6, p. 138, my emphasis). Considerations of self-preservation trump the principles of equal autonomy and the rule of law because ‘there are extreme evils that render violent remedies necessary’ (Rousseau, 1997a: 219). Dictatorship is the ultimate and foremost legitimate violent remedy to any serious threat confronting the very existence of the republic (Rousseau, 1997b: Book IV: 6, pp. 138–9). Faced with great dangers, generically described as unpredictable events that disturb public order and might cause the ruin of the state, the republic has recourse to ‘a Dictator’, ‘a supreme chief’, ‘a man above the laws’, who suspends the sovereign authority of the people and their legislative power in the name of public safety (salut publique) (ibid., pp. 138–9). This dictatorial emergency institution is juridically regulated, constitutionally bounded and ascribed with very clear and specific objectives. Rousseau’s dictator evokes Bodin’s commissary. Consequently, Rousseau not only did not consider dictatorship to be dangerous for public freedom but admired Roman ingenuity for devising such a wise and useful institution. In fact, he argued, the collapse of the Roman republic could have been averted if the Romans had made more frequent use of dictatorship. He attributed the fall of the republic to the sparing recourse to this emergency office during the civil wars that shook the city, and he blamed the Romans for ‘this error’ that ‘caused them to commit great mistakes’ (ibid., p. 139). Absent the dictator, no republic can be maintained and preserved. Rousseau, however, never addressed the vexing issue of the authority that has the competence to declare an emergency and appoint a dictator. He did not specify which political instance of his model republic has the authority to declare the emergency and select a dictator. Since his updated republican theory dispensed with the senate and the consuls, there were only two institutions left to decide this question: either the legislative body, that is, the citizens’ general assembly (the sovereign) or, the executive as a collective representative body (the government). Rousseau, however, abstained from identifying the proper procedure and appropriate authority, probably because he remained undecided on the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of the state of emergency. Rousseau’s passing reference to the need for ‘extraordinary assemblies that may be required by unforeseen circumstances’ (ibid., Book III: 13, p. 111) is highly suggestive in this respect. Is the state of emergency one of these unexpected situations that fall within the jurisdiction of the extraordinary assemblies? Do the sovereign people extraordinarily decide when the state is in peril? But if the people decide in an 94

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extraordinary assembly to suspend their sovereign power in a concrete situation, this would imply that the general will does not ‘apply to all’ and has no general object, because the dictator is exempt from the law (above the law) and the emergency refers to a particular decision and not to a general juridical norm. Therefore, their decision does not correspond to the general will as ‘it loses its natural rectitude when it tends towards some individual and determinate object’ (ibid., Book II: 4, p. 62). For Rousseau, ‘any function that relates to an individual does not fall within the province of the legislative assembly’ and as the sovereign ‘cannot elect a king’, he concluded, neither can it elect a dictator (ibid., Book II: 6, p. 67).10 These questions and shifting positions indicate a profound tension between popular sovereignty and dictatorship in Rousseau’s theory of constitutional emergency that, in fact, bring to the surface, much like in Sydney’s case, the implausible resolution to the problem of dictatorial authorisation within a free regime. This impossibility reflects the uneasy and, in the end, untenable attempt to provide democratic legitimacy to the state of emergency. It also exposes the irreconcilable differences between the republican (the statocentric logic of dictatorship as ‘raison’ of the state) and the democratic (the egalitarian logic of popular sovereignty as autonomy) dimensions located at the very heart of Rousseau’s ambiguous political project.

After-effects Though the conceptual history of dictatorship was significantly transformed after this long querelle over its precise political nature, its intrinsic association with the republican theory of politics was neither severed nor put into question. On the contrary, it remained as strong as ever. The concept survived its critics, adapted and evolved in various forms, migrated to the North and South American colonies, to become again a controversial subject of heated constitutional and political debates in the age of republican revolutions. But an important, unique shift occurred in the early nineteenth century; as republicanism began to decline and wither away,11 dictatorship, for the first time in its long history, diversified and multiplied, took a new life of its own and found new hosts. This diffused and unprecedented influence across the political spectrum shaped the rise of political modernity. In fact, as modern politics came hand in hand with the republic, dictatorship emerged as 95

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a ­constitutive attribute. The republican legacy of dictatorship is historically associated with the modern victory of the centralised state, executive power and its security apparatus, rational legality and its spaces of exception. Roman dictatorship defines the statist spirit of modern politics that casts a permanent shadow over autonomy and the political and individual liberty of citizens. This concept is ultimately aporetic in how it destabilises key assumptions, commitments, and assertions of political modernity. As a ‘limit concept’ it interrogates and unsettles modern notions of freedom, individual rights, the rule of law, and political and civil equality. As dictatorship suspends these principles, they appear conditional and negotiable, secondary and subsidiary, even derivative. The political history of dictatorship paints a disquieting image of modern politics, less flattering and more disturbing; a politics that periodically has legal recourse to enhanced centralised executive powers and military means that override and suspend the citizens’ freedoms and protections in the name of security, unity and stability. Modern political theory, in its various currents, has been keen to stress the primacy of safety and order over liberty, that is, to subordinate normalcy to the extreme exigencies of fear and insecurity. Dictatorship evokes the spectres of disorder, violence and downfall as ever-present possibilities of the political. Its logic, its inescapable necessity, is predicated on, and justified by, a politics of fear that mobilises anxieties of survival and self-preservation when faced with political discord, intense conflict and radical contestation. Modern freedom, therefore, is conditional, depending on internal pacification, geared to coercion to silence dissension and impose stability and uniformity from above. The presence of dictatorship in modern theory and practice is the exception that challenges and unsettles the unconditional primacy of liberty that modernity claims to embody.

Notes 1. Nedham (1656: 4). 2. The Roman office of dictatorship was an exceptional case in the constitutional structure of the republican magistracies. Supreme power was concentrated in one person for a limited time in moments of crisis, either serious external wars (dictatura rei gerendae) or grave internal conflicts (dictatura seditionis sedandae). The dictator was the only magistrate whose power was not counterbalanced by a collegial structure. In contrast to regular magistracies, he was not elected by a popular assembly but appointed by a consul following a previous decision of the senate. The dictator was supposed to resign as soon as he had accomplished his

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The Sublime Dignity of the Dictator task and, in any case, after a maximum period of six months. The Roman tradition records that, with an appointment of a dictator, all the other public offices were temporarily suspended and the right of appeal (provocatio ad populum) of the people against heavy punishment could not be used against him. Overall, from the beginnings of the republic to its downfall, over a period of four centuries and a half, ninety-four dictators were appointed. See for examples: Polybius (2001, Book II: 18.8–9, p. 277); Livy (1996–99, Book II: 29.11–12, p. 313; Book III: 82.7–9, p. 213; Book III: 29.2–3, p. 99; Book III: 20.8, p. 73; Book IV: 13.11–12, pp. 302–3; Book V: 9.6, p. 33); Cicero (1994b, Book V: 1, pp. 245–6); Cicero (1994a, Book III: 3.9, p. 467); Strabo (1983, Book VI: 1.3, p. 11); The Acilian Law (123–122 bc); The Digest of Justinian (1985, Vol. I, Book I: 2, p. 5). 3. In the extreme Left, dictatorship was taken up from Jean-Paul Maras, LouisAntoine de Saint-Just, François-Noël Babeuf, Filippo Buanarroti, Auguste Blanqui, Louis Blanc, and Ferdinand Lassalle, and finally by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. In the extreme Right, it was Donoso Cortés, Charles Maurras, and Carl Schmitt’s appropriation of dictatorship that influenced the political doctrines of fascism and Nazism. 4. For constitutional dictatorship, see Watkins (1940: 324–79); Rossiter [(1940) 2004]; Rossiter (1949: 395–418); Friedrich (1950: 572–96); Levinson and Balkinm (2010: 1790–866). 5. See, for example: Cicero (1994b, Book I: 40.63; Book II: 32.56, pp. 95, 168–69); Cicero (2001, Book I: 1.3, pp. 22–3); Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1986, Book X: 24, pp. 246–7); Dio Cassius [1990, Book IV (Zonaras, 7:13), pp. 106–7]; Mommsen (1893: 191–7); Kalyvas (2007: 412–42). 6. Tellingly, on the question of the exception, modern political thought comes closer to ancient wisdom than to medieval knowledge, especially with regard to the lack of transcendent supports. 7. On the distinction of internal and external accidente and for the concept accidenti in Machiavelli, see McCormick (1993: 888–900). 8. ‘Rome fell by her own might’ (Filmer, 1991c: 26). 9. For the concept of ‘republican exceptionalism’, see Lazar (2009: 24–6, 32–6). 10. In his 1772 reflections on Poland, Rousseau shifted course and rejected dictatorship altogether, as he came to recognise its destructive nature (Rousseau, 1997a: 219). 11. For the gradual decline and extinction of modern republicanism in the nineteenth century, see Kalyvas and Katznelson (2008).

References Aquinas, Thomas, The Summa of Theology, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Westminster, MD: Christian Classics. Augustine, St (1984), City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, London: Penguin Books. Bodin, Jean (1993), Les Six Livres de la République, Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Brandolini, Aurelio Lippo [1492/1494] (2009), Republics and Kingdoms Compared, ed. and trans. James Hankins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cicero (1994a), The Laws, trans. C. W. Keyes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cicero (1994b), The Republic, trans. C. W. Keyes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Cicero (2001), Philippic, trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dio Cassius (1990), Roman History, trans. Earnest Carry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1986), Roman Antiquities, trans. Earnest Cary, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Duverger, Maurice (1961), De la dictature, Paris: René Julliard. Eutropius (1993), Brevarium, trans. H. W. Bird, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993. Filmer, Sir Robert (1991a), ‘Observations Concerning the Original Government’, in Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 224. Filmer, Sir Robert (1991b), ‘Observations upon Aristotles Politiques, Touching Forms of Government Together with Directions for Obedience to Governours in Dangerous and Doubtful Times’, in Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 259. Filmer, Sir Robert (1991c), ‘Patriarcha’, in Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 26. Friedrich, Carl J. (1950), Constitutional Government, New York: Ginn and Company. Grotius, Hugo, The Rights of War and Peace, trans. Richard Tuck, Liberty Fund. Harrington, James (1700a), ‘Seven Models of Commonwealth or Brief Directions Showing How a Fit and Perfect Model of Government May Be Made, Found, or Understood’, in James Harrington, The Oceana of James Harrington and his other Works, ed. Jon Tolland, London, p. 528. Harrington, James (1700b), ‘The Art of Lawgiving’, in James Harrington, The Oceana of James Harrington and his other Works, ed. Jon Tolland, London, p. 394. Harrington, James (1700c), ‘The Prerogative of Popular Government’, in James Harrington, The Oceana of James Harrington and his other Works, ed. Jon Tolland, London, p. 181. Harrington, James (1992a), ‘A System of Politics’, in James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Cambridge: Cambridge University, pp. 270–3. Harrington, James (1992b), ‘The Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana’, in James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Cambridge: Cambridge University, p. 13. John of Salisbury (1990), Policraticus, trans. Cary J. Nederman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. John the Lydian (1983), De Magistratibus Reipublicae Romanae, trans. Anastasius C. Bandy, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Kalyvas, Andreas (2005), ‘Popular Sovereignty, the Constituent Power, and Democracy’, Constellations, 12: 2, 223–44. Kalyvas, Andreas (2007), ‘Legalizing Tyranny: When the Greek Tyrant Met the Roman Dictator’, Political Theory, pp. 412–42. Kalyvas, Andreas (2013), ‘Constituent Power’, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, 3: 1.

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The Sublime Dignity of the Dictator Kalyvas, Andreas and Ira Katznelson (2008), Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1951), ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’, The American Historical Review, 56: 3, 490. Kantorowicz, Ernst, H. (1957), The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Keyes, Clinton Walker (1917), ‘The Constitutional Position of the Roman Dictatorship’, Studies in Philology, 14: 298–304. Lazar, Nomi Claire (2009), States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lefort (1986), Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel, Paris : Éditions Gallimard. Levinson, Sanford and Jack M. Balkin (2010), ‘Constitutional Dictatorship: its Dangers and its Design’, Minnesota Law Review, 94: 1790–866. Lewis, Ewart (1954), Medieval Political Ideas, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Livy (1996–99), History of Rome, trans. B. O. Foster, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maas, Michael (1992), John Lydus and the Roman Past: Antiquarianism and Politics in the Age of Justinian, London: Routledge. McCormick, John P. (1993), ‘Addressing the Political Exception: Machiavelli’s “Accidents” and the Mixed Regime’, American Political Science Review, 87: 4, 888900. Machiavelli (1996), Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Machiavelli (1998), The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mansfield, Harvey C. (2001), Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mommsen, Theodore (1893), Le Droit Public Romain, trans. Paul Frederic Girard, Paris: Thorin et fils. Nedham, Marchamont (1656), The Excellencie of a Free State, London. Nippel, Wilfried (2012), ‘Saving the Constitution: the European Discourse on Dictatorship’, Il Pensiero Politico, 33, p. 36. Parel, Anthony J. (1992), The Machiavellian Cosmos, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pasquino, Pasquale, ‘Machiavel: dictature et salus reipublicae’, in Brigitte Krulic (ed.), Raison(s) d’Etat(s) en Europe: Traditions, Usages et Recompositions, p. 14. Polybius (2001), Histories, trans. W. R. Paton, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Post, Gaines (1964), Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State 1100–1322, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ptolemy of Lucca (1997), De Regimine Principum, trans. James M. Blythe, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rossiter, Clinton (1949), ‘Constitutional Dictatorship in the Atomic Age’, The Review of Politics, 11: 4, 395–418. Rossiter, Clinton [1940] (2004), Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1997a), ‘Considerations of the Government of Poland and on its Projected Reformation’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 219. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1997b), ‘On the social contract’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 62. Saint-Bonnet, François (2001), ‘L’intelligence médiévale de la nécessité’, in L’État d’Exception, Paris: PUF, pp. 79–179. Strabo (1983), Geography, trans. H. L. Jones, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strauss, Leo (1995), Thoughts on Machiavelli, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sydney, Algernon (1996), Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. The Digest of Justinian (1985), trans. Alan Watson, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Watkins, Frederick M. (1940), ‘The Problem of Constitutional Dictatorship’, in C. J. Friedrich and Edward S. Mason (eds), Public Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 324–79.

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5 The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: Between Reform and Revolution Alice Soares Guimarães

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hrough the eighteenth century, the European sociopolitical order suffered crucial challenges. New world views arose from critical reflections about the social and political life in the context of the Enlightenment. In the political realm, a process of secularisation, with the questioning of the religious legitimacy of political power, and the decline of the ancien régime, with the delegitimisation and gradual abandonment of the principles and practices of absolutism, are regarded as the main transformations of the period [Hobsbawm, (1962) 1996; Habermas, (1996) 2002]. The Portuguese intellectual milieu at that period is generally identified as being radically different from that of the rest of Europe. The Enlightenment was supposedly absent from the Portuguese Empire as a result of the rejection of modern ideas by conservative world views and projects. In this chapter I argue in the opposite direction, claiming that there was a Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment which is ignored owing to an erroneous account of the Enlightenment as a homogeneous intellectual movement, inevitably associated with the ‘death’ of the ancien régime and the critique of religious authority and theological world views. Adopting a plural conception of Enlightenment, I show through the Portuguese case that this movement was far from uniform, and does not necessarily lead to a revolutionary critique of religion and absolutism. Even within itself, the Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment was plural and eclectic, supporting both critiques and defences of the absolute power of the king, endorsing simultaneously a secularisation process, the promotion of reason and Roman Catholicism, and fostering not only revolutionary projects but also conservative state reforms. 101

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The Plurality of Enlightenment Traditionally, the Enlightenment is portrayed as a homogeneous movement of ideas that emerged in Europe around the mid-seventeenth up to the end of the eighteenth century, putting forward a social, political and cultural project that was based on three central elements: reason, freedom, and individualism. Additionally, it is depicted as inherently revolutionary, having replaced the epistemological authority of God with the secular authority of reason. Thus, the Enlightenment enacted a major rupture in the foundations of knowledge, being the main force behind the process of secularisation and the emergence of modern rationalism. For some [Kant, (1784) 1990; Constant, (1816) 1988; Marx and Engels, (1848) 2000; Habermas, (1962) 1984] the Enlightenment made possible the realisation of freedom and emancipation in both the individual and the collective spheres, with the democratic and rational organisation of state and society and their interrelation. In the realm of politics, for instance, it is said that the Enlightenment was the main force behind the overthrow of the ancien régime, postulating that all external authority not justified by reason should be rejected. Therefore, the Enlightenment has been treated as a revolutionary movement, in conflict with traditional religious and political authorities [Cassirer, (1923) 1997; Hazard (1946) 1989; Gay (1966) 1995]. This image of a homogeneous and harmonious movement is challenged by another picture that portrays the plurality of forms that the Enlightenment took in different settings, highlighting the specific features it acquired according to differences between and within societies [Outram, 1995; Koselleck, (1959) 1999; Pocock, 1997; Schmidt, 2000]. Indeed, the Enlightenment was heterogeneous in space, time and themes, and presented evident contradictions in the writings of its major thinkers. Under the term Enlightenment is hidden a variety of ideas that can be observed in some crucial ‘vectors’ around which central understandings of the Enlightenment have been constructed, such as religion, politics and the ideals of freedom and equality. Regarding religion, a recurring theme was the defence of religious freedom and tolerance. Nevertheless, around this defence were congregated thinkers who held different opinions (Villalta, 1999: 84). In some places, as in France and England, antireligious understandings prevailed. But there were also Christian versions of the Enlightenment, including a Roman Catholic 102

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one, very influential in Portugal, Spain and Italy, which articulated some of the so-called enlightened ideas­– such as the defence of reason, freedom, and religious tolerance, and the critique of Aristotelianism­– with Catholicism.1 There was also diversity in what concerns the political life. Some versions of Enlightenment rejected the reason of state doctrine as a principle of rule, stipulating rights as the beginning and end of politics. They promoted the existence of natural law as prior to and above any human convention, defining freedom as an inalienable, universal, natural right, consisting of the right to private property, equality under the law, and participation in legislation. They also advanced the idea of an initial social contract between the individuals and the ruler by which the former abdicate some of their rights to constitute public authority. This abdication, however, was revocable in cases where the ruler did not fulfil his duties (Villalta, 1999: 91–2). In this line, Locke [(1690) 1988] rejected the absolute power of monarchies, deeming it incompatible with natural rights and civil society. He defended the necessity for different powers with distinct attributions and developed a powerful theory of resistance. Montesquieu [(1748) 2001] also advocated the principle of the separation of powers. Rousseau [(1762) 1978] considered freedom an inalienable right of man, conceiving the existence of a general will as the expression of popular sovereignty and the regulator of the moral and collective body at the basis of the republican constitution of the state. Nonetheless, most authors put limits to their criticism of absolutism. They sought to combine political authority, natural rights and civil freedom while they deemed state power necessary and absolutism as something to be tolerated as long as it was lawful (Falcon, 1982: 134). As Koselleck [(1959) 1999] correctly points out, the political ideas of the Enlightenment enabled not only the critique but also the justification of absolutism. Indeed, in some political communities, its ideas were used to enhance the authority and power of absolutist monarchies. The presence of a legal optimism within the Enlightenment generated a ‘belief in the unlimited power of the law to promote the welfare and happiness of men’. This optimism led, in some readings, to the conviction that an enlightened sovereign might ‘sweep the darkness away from his kingdom’ and deploy reason through laws and institutions. Therein lies one of the main pillars of enlightened absolutism (Falcon, 1982: 113). In what concerns the modern ideals of freedom, reason and 103

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equality, usually considered as values universally promoted by the Enlightenment, they found limits and conditionings in the writings of many thinkers. Most enlightened authors limited their defence of equality to the political and the juridical realms, excluding the social dimension of it. Some even denounce social equality as a source of political instability and, therefore, as something to be contended. Voltaire, for instance, judged the persistence of class inequality necessary to the conservation of society, while D’Alembert and Holbach considered that nature established a necessary and legitimate inequality between its members, it being unreasonable to equate the social classes (Villalta, 1999: 92).2 The debates about freedom and reason also defied the widespread idea of an unrestricted and resolute promotion of these elements by the Enlightenment. It is true that some thinkers defended political and intellectual freedom as universal rights.3 But there was also a lively debate about how much enlightenment of the citizenry was desirable, advisable and possible without destabilising the public authority and leading to political disorder (Schmidt, 1996: 2). Some authors, such as Kant and Mendelssohn, considered that a free and unrestricted discussion of religious, moral and political matters could undermine the conventional mores and beliefs on which society rested, and tried to balance the demands of enlightened reason with those of civil order by limiting the spheres and situations where reason should be applied.4 Others maintained that the ‘common man’ needed to live by dogmatic precepts in order to behave properly; not everyone could or should be ‘enlightened’, as many people were unable to be guided only by reason without threatening the sociopolitical order. For certain classes of man, prejudices, errors and dogmas could do more to promote the public good than reason and truth (Schmidt, 1996: 4–5). Freedom and reason, after all, should not be universally and unconditionally applied to all human beings, in all matters of social life. Furthermore, most enlightened authors did not question or even debate colonialism, in a strange silence for those who supposedly promoted the universal values and principles of equality, reason and freedom. When it comes to the colonial domains and subjects, these do not apply.5 Thus, as Israel (2006: 525) points out, despite a strong rhetoric in defence of ‘enlightenment’, ‘liberty’ and ‘reason’, in practice these elements were in many cases ‘set back, rather than advanced in eighteenth-century Europe and still more in the European colonial empires’. 104

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Finally, the outcomes of the Enlightenment were also varied. Usually associated with revolution, the enlightened ideas were also operationalised to legitimise reforms, some of which were very conservative. In some polities, as in Portugal, Russia, Prussia and Austria, legal optimism was complemented by a diagnosis of the necessity for better laws, apt to ensure the common good and the happiness of humankind. This provided the justification for reformist versions of the Enlightenment, based on placing hope in rational laws and in the enlightened sovereign. The existence of different perspectives and outcomes within the Enlightenment deconstructs its naive depiction as a homogeneous movement of ideas which advanced a clear, coherent revolutionary project. By contrast, what endows it with the qualities of an intellectual movement is not any kind of substantive content or a revolutionary drive, but an attitude: a critical reflexive posture in relation to knowledge, sociopolitical life, and to humanity as a whole. Therefore, what characterises the Enlightenment is the conviction that everything, in all fields of human experience, can be the object of critique and questioning. There is no external guarantee of authority. The only justification for any kind of order is based on rational inquiry about its validity. Thus, the Enlightenment is more of an attitude­– a critical and reflexive one­– than a closed system of thought [Kant, (1784) 1990].

The Portuguese Milieu The critical attitude that characterises the Enlightenment starts being adopted by the Portuguese intellectual elite in the first half of the eighteenth century, in the midst of a ‘crisis of consciousness’. For some authors, this crisis was the result of a perception of marginalisation of Portugal in relation to ‘European culture’ since the Renaissance, and of the backwardness of Portuguese society in comparison with other European ones [Cidade, 2005 (1929); Falcon, 1982; Dias, 1986]. Others situate its origins in the bitter understanding of the loss of status and decadence of Portugal in the world system, from a prestigious position as the vanguard in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to a marginal one in the following centuries (Calafate, 2001; Carvalho, 2008). In any case, this crisis was a reflection of the non-linear and uneven character of the development of modernity. Modernity is not a radically innovative order that emerged from radical ruptures and major discontinuities with previous forms of organisation of social life. The transformation of the world in the modern era is better understood as 105

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a complex process, with advance and backlash, changes and continuities, in relation to earlier sociopolitical orders. Also, the modernisation of societies does not embrace all the spheres of social life at once. Dissimilar levels of modernisation can be observed in the different aspects of a society at any given period. In this sense, Portugal showed different degrees of modernisation in the various areas of social life. Already at the end of the medieval age, a ‘precocious modernisation’ was in motion in the Portuguese kingdom, grounded in monarchical centralisation (Falcon, 1982: 149). Later, from the end of the fifteenth century and throughout most of the sixteenth, in what became known as the golden age of Portugal’s history, the country was, along with Spain, the main maritime power of the occidental world. Its mercantile and colonial enterprises were central to the development of global trade and modern capitalism. It also generated new knowledge which challenged the dominant scholastic tradition (Dias, 1986: 43). Thus, in the age of discovery, Portugal was at the head of a process which revealed a new world to the Europeans, a revelation ‘whose importance was felt at all levels of reality’ (Falcon, 1982: 149). In spite of Portugal’s ‘vanguardism’ and an early modernisation in the economic and political realms, the cultural and scientific paths that were opened up with the discoveries did not produce major changes in Portuguese thought. This was a result of political, ideological and epistemological obstacles, such as the loss of Portugal’s independence between 1580 and 1640, the censorship operated by the Tribunal of the Holy Office, the triumph of the ideology of the Counter-Reformation, and the dominance of the monastic scholastic tradition in Portuguese schools (Dias, 1986; Falcon, 1982). At the end of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus assumed control of education in Portugal and its colonies, imposing an Aristotelian–Thomistic orientation to it. Thus, Portugal remained loyal to the scholastic epistemology, not experiencing the renovation that occurred elsewhere, under the impact of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. The identification with the peripatetic scholastic kept Portuguese society within the ‘epistemological frontier’ bequeathed by the Middle Ages. The hegemony of a medieval kind of thought, refractory to humanism, rationalism and empiricism, together with the pedagogical control exercised by the Society of Jesus, represented a major obstacle to the proliferation of modern thought (Falcon, 1988: 77). The passing from transcendence to immanence did not occur. The repudiation of anything associated with another truth and not subor106

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dinate to the revealed truth persisted. Secularisation was postponed and modern rationalism rejected (Falcon, 1988: 77). Thus, there was a structural tension between the ‘possibilities opened up by a new age and actual practice’ (Dias, 1986), between the empirical tradition ‘built by the Portuguese at sea and in the conquest and preservation of the Empire’, and the educative tradition that ‘favored scholastic speculation and a bookish culture’ (Camargo, 2005: 578). During the reign of Dom João V (1707–50), there emerged a growing concern about the cultural isolation of the kingdom and a nostalgia for the golden age. The desire to overcome the stigma of decadence and regain a prestigious position within the international order stimulated a search for solutions to the Portuguese problems. The rationalism and the critical attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment were in motion, impelling some members of the intellectual elite to reflect on how to achieve the progress of the Portuguese state and society. Thus, despite the persistence of the aforementioned obstacles, the impact of the Enlightenment started to be felt in Portugal, albeit reluctantly and in a shy and restricted way. Dom João V attracted to Portugal foreign scholars of various origins, and sponsored local initiatives to develop and disseminate new knowledge (Camargo, 2005: 579–80). A process of renovation of Portuguese thought began, with the creation of experimental laboratories, the proliferation of journals, translations and publications of important works, and the emergence of literary and scientific academies. In these new spaces, the rationalist and experimental spirit were debated and defended, while current Portuguese culture was criticised. All this was part of an incipient reaction against instituted knowledge, the Inquisition and the scholastic spirit. Nonetheless, Jesuit control over education persisted and, more broadly, the cultural and intellectual attitude of Portuguese society was still steered by scholastic guidelines. Responding to this ambivalent situation, some men of letters, who became known as ‘foreignisers’, opted to emigrate, among them Luís António Verney, António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches and Dom Luis da Cunha. These men had a strong influence on Portuguese enlightened thought and reformism; in their works, they elaborated a strong critique of ecclesiastical power, pointing out the need to limit the scope of church influence and domination, and emphasised the urgent need to secularise the state and some areas of society, such as those involved in the generation of knowledge, defending the implementation of radical educational reform. 107

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Under Dom José’s rule (1750–77), a new phase of political modernity was inaugurated. A critical–reflexive posture and the debates it gave rise to were incorporated into the state apparatus, informing new policies and reforms. This enlightened reformism was broad in its scope and resulted in a crescent concentration of power and resources, with an expansion of the state apparatus and its control over the sociopolitical and economical dynamics of the kingdom, as well as over the lives of its subjects. Critical reflexivity and reason were put to work on behalf of the absolute power of the king, in a new political project for the Portuguese Empire that fits what is defined as enlightened absolutism. Enlightened absolutism redefines the field of state action. Obstacles to sovereignty must be removed, no sector of social life can remain outside the sphere of state sovereignty associated impersonally with the government. New governmental techniques favour the centralisation of the administrative structure, the creation of a loyal and competent bureaucracy, the division of governmental functions between subordinate agencies, and the attack on the independent and private jurisdictions of feudal origin (Falcon, 1982: 134). As I shall argue below, the Portuguese enlightened reforms of the eighteenth century were oriented towards these objectives. The Portuguese enlightened absolutism and reformism had their particularities and limitations which resulted from Portugal’s concrete conditions and historical determinations. Portuguese society was deeply marked by previous cultural legacies, particularly by corporate medieval theories of power, theological world views and scholastic epistemology (Villalta, 1999: 22; Hespanha, 1989). Against this background, the Portuguese enlightened rulers and thinkers opted for eclecticism, attempting to bring apparently irreconcilable elements into a coherent whole: ‘faith and science, the philosophical and religious tradition, rational and experimental innovation, theocentrism and anthropocentrism’ (Falcon, 1982: 430). Caution in the face of excessive innovation prevailed, leading to a process of modernisation without radically breaking with the previous forms of political and social organisation.

The Portuguese Enlightened Reformism The main ideas of the Portuguese Enlightenment were put into practice during the reign of Dom José I through the reforms of his chief minister, the Marquis of Pombal. Like other reforms undertaken by absolutist monarchies, Portuguese enlightened reformism marked a 108

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selective incorporation of the ideas of the eighteenth century, articulating the valorisation of reason and science with a defence of absolute monarchy, religion, and colonialism (Villalta, 1999: 22). Thus, while the Enlightenment constituted, on the one hand, a benchmark for reforms, on the other hand, some of its ideas were opposed, specifically those that supposedly threatened the absolutist prerogatives of the king, colonial rule, and Roman Catholicism. To understand this ambiguity, it is necessary to take into account the political project behind the Portuguese reforms and the broader historical context in which they were developed. From the second decade of the eighteenth century onwards, an economic and political crisis took place within the Portuguese Empire, with the decline of the infrastructural power of the state and a significant reduction in colonial profits. The result was government inertia, administrative inefficiency, and an increase in corruption inside the bureaucratic apparatus. Consequently, state power became the object of tough disputes between the classes connected to it (Falcon, 1982: 371–2). Against this background, Pombal’s main objectives were the reorganisation of the economy and the strengthening of the Portuguese state. To that end, he implemented an ambitious set of reforms, incorporating political, economic, and societal elements. In the political realm, the main goal was to increase state power by introducing modifications to the bureaucratic and legal systems, and operating major changes in the configuration of the blocs of power. In the economic sphere, the aim was to recover control of the national economy, with a strong emphasis on colonial trade, industrialisation and fiscal reform. And, at the societal level, he sought to promote secularisation and modernisation and supported the diffusion of doctrines that justified the unrestrained sovereignty of the king over his subjects and territories. The ancien régime had specific characteristics in Portugal, being heavily influenced by the medieval corporate tradition grounded in the organic representation of the sociopolitical body. The king was the ‘head’, having the role of maintaining the established order. But the notion of pact was central in these theories, implying the interdependence between the monarch and his vassals, and allowing every part of the sociopolitical body a certain amount of autonomy (Hespanha, 1989; Villalta, 1999). In opposition to this configuration, the political project of Pombal 109

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was based on the notion of the absolute and indisputable sovereignty of the monarch. He systematically pursued the centralisation of political decisions and the elimination of the relatively independent jurisdictions. The group that most benefited from this kind of autonomy was the upper stratum of the nobility. Moreover, during the reign of Dom João V, the aristocracy benefited financially and politically, mainly as a result of the influx of substantial revenues generated by gold mining in Brazil since the end of the seventeenth century. There was also a strengthening of the relationship between the aristocracy and the bureaucratic sector, with the former increasing its presence and power of decision inside the state apparatus. Thus, some of its members were explicitly hostile to the project of strengthening state power, as this would end their autonomy and reduce their political prestige. In response to their unveiled opposition, Pombal adopted highly repressive measures, resorting to extreme violence against those who ­supposedly challenged the state. On different occasions the state apparatus was used against the antiabsolutist fraction of nobility, but the Távora affair was of particular significance, as the government used this event to terrify, by physical and symbolic violence, its enemies at the apex of the social hierarchy (Falcon, 1982: 377). This episode was the culmination of a process starting with the attempt to murder Dom José I in September 1758. Between those arrested and accused for the crime was a group of prominent aristocrats who, despite the absence of a confession and any kind of evidence, were convicted for the crimes of ‘lèse-majesté, treason, and rebellion against the King and the State’ (Maxwell, 1995: 79). They were sentenced to death, some of them by public execution, in a display of extreme violence. Additionally, a 1759 decree reaffirmed the irreducible nature of the property of the crown. The concessions granted by the king to noble families, whether in income, property or titles, were susceptible to reversal and in need of periodic confirmation. During Dom José’s reign, the renewal of these concessions was slow, regularly postponed, with the titles and revenues of the houses that constituted the core of Portugal’s aristocratic elite suspended for many years (Monteiro, 2003: 39). Another powerful group opposed to Pombal’s objectives was the Roman Catholic Church. Eighteenth-century Portuguese society was characterised by the ecclesiastical control over it. The Church had in its hands the monopoly of education and regulated the production and dif110

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fusion of information through its dominant position in the Inquisition and the Tribunal of the Holy Office, the institution responsible for the censorship of publications. The Church was also the main agent of socialisation. Thus, the Catholic Church had a dominant role in the ideological realm, being the main exponent of, and the agent responsible for, the cultural and intellectual hegemony of the aristocracy. In other words, aristocratic supremacy, expressed in the prominence of its values and world views, has its reproduction and perpetuation assured by the ecclesiastical sector (Falcon, 1982: 422). Within this ecclesiastic hegemony, the Jesuits occupied a key position and, as mentioned above, they held a near monopoly of education. As a result, thinkers of the Portuguese Enlightenment blamed them for the cultural and educational decadence of the kingdom. The Society of Jesus was considered as the main upholder of a dead and sterile scholastic tradition, ill-suited to the Age of Reason, and an obstacle to the development of modern ideas (Maxwell, 1995: 12). There was also an understanding that only an education directed and maintained by secular power could contribute to the stability of the civil order and to the development of Portuguese society. During Pombal’s administration, this perspective became the official state view. In 1759, a royal decree suppressed the Jesuit schools and banned the Society of Jesus throughout the Portuguese Empire. These measures should be understood in the broader context of assertion of regal sovereignty. What was at stake was the political role of the Church and its hegemony in the ideological expressions of the state as a result of its dominance in forming mentalities. The objective was not merely the modernisation of the educational system but also the elimination of ecclesiastic hegemony in the political realm which threatened Pombal’s intentions of ensuring royal supremacy. Thus, the secularisation of education, with the establishment of public instruction controlled by the state, was strongly articulated with the ­enlightened absolutist political project. In 1769, the Law of Good Reason was promulgated which complemented the political and ideological subjection of the Church with its juridical subordination. The law established a rational precept for the validity of all laws, according to which only those laws should be accepted that do not conflict with the principles of human reason. It also declared the primacy of national law over Roman and canon law, the last two applied only in the cases not covered by the first. Hence, the reign of Dom José was a moment of rupture with 111

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e­ cclesiastical power and of secularisation of the political sphere which thus became more autonomous. Nonetheless, there was never a generalised fight against the Church or a deist movement in eighteenthcentury Portugal. The Church, kept subordinated to the state and operating within limits, was treated as necessary for the conservation of order. In 1768, the Royal Censorial Court was created, with the objective of secularising and centralising control of the works to be published or disseminated in the Portuguese Empire. This task, shared until then between the Tribunal of the Holy Office and governmental bodies, was transferred in its totality to the new institution. The state secular censorship, however, focused not only on books and ideas that challenged the sociopolitical order but also on those that threatened Catholicism. In this sense, the Royal Censorial Court decree of 1770 is illustrative in that it reflects the eclecticism of the Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment and its complex articulation of religion, science and politics.6 The decree implicitly affirmed a need to combine natural reason and revealed religion. It affirmed the absolute primacy of Christianity, conceiving it as the only religion that provides that men know ‘the influence of natural reason’ and subject ‘their weak lights to the higher truths of Divine Revelation’, thus leading to the enlightenment of humankind. Religious reason becomes enlightened. It is religion that guides individual and social conduct, subjecting people to natural reason, and restraining their passions. Thus, it would establish ‘the good [social] order’. Finally, the decree states that Christianity would found ‘the power of the political government’, instilling the authority of kings, and inculcating obedience and subjection in the vassals. Therefore, Christianity remains the foundation of political society. For these reasons, the Crown would fiercely combat ‘irreligion’. Books or authors which supposedly blasted the Catholic religion and supported deism and atheism were forbidden in the Portuguese Empire. Also banned were authors and books whose ideas challenged the colonial system, particularly those defending the free market against colonial ‘exclusivism’, and those affirming the natural and inalienable right of freedom for all people, therefore condemning slavery. In this second group we find authors who proposed changes in the relation between the metropolis and its possessions in America. The main targets of criticism were the excesses of royal power, the privileges of the king and nobility, commercial monopoly, slavery, and the fiscal oppression of the colonies. Additionally, some defended the 112

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right of insurgency of the vassals against their rulers, questioning the legitimacy of absolutist monarchy and of the colonial system as a whole (Villalta, 1999: 108–9). To defend the supremacy of the king and the Catholic religion, the Royal Censorial Court forbade many books and authors. The list was extensive, including all works of Raynal, D’Alembert, Buffon, Condorcet, Condillac, Diderot, Mably, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, among others. Also censored were Montaigne’s Essais, La princesse de Clèves of Mme de la Fayette, the Contes Moraux by Marmontel, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of the Nations, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, and different books by Pope, Swift, Sterne, Goethe, Robertson, Hume, Hobbes and Locke.7 It is worth noting that the prohibition made it harder to disseminate the works placed on the list but did not prevent it, with copies of all of the aforementioned authors and books circulating in Portugal and Brazil. In addition, special permits to possess prohibited books were granted to some individuals who were considered to be able to be ‘enlightened’ without corrupting their morals and, consequently, putting the sociopolitical order in danger. Thus, some people were seen as more suitable than others to adopt the critical attitude of the Enlightenment which should, therefore, be allowed only within this select group of people. At the same time, within limits and in mitigated versions, some of the new ideas developed in the context of the Enlightenment were propagated by the Crown which supported the scientific and pedagogical renewal of educational institutions and the foundation of literary and scientific academies. Seeking to change the educational and cultural Portuguese landscape, which privileged theology and the scholastic tradition, the government made a major reform of Coimbra University, emphasising natural sciences, philosophy, economics and other knowledge useful for commercial activities (Villalta, 2005: 19). In the political realm, the enlightened reforms dealt not only with ideological but also with practical matters, aiming to reorganise and strengthen the state bureaucracy. Pombal sought to rationalise the bureaucracy, following one of the most typical tendencies of the enlightened governments of the period; he tried to increase the revenues of the state through the reduction of the costs of the administrative apparatus, eliminating unnecessary expenses. This was pursued mainly through administrative reorganisation and a functional review, centred on replacing the traditional and random forms of payment 113

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by fixed scales of remuneration for officials, and on the adoption of detailed regimens laying out the rights and duties with regard to each function. Additionally, efforts were made to increase the subordination to royal power and eradicate indiscipline and corruption from the state administration through a closer surveillance of its officials (Falcon, 1982: 390–2). The administrative reorganisation reflected major changes in the relationship between the high nobility and the state. As mentioned earlier, the influence of corporate theories of power was still strong in Portugal, with independent and private jurisdictions persisting with some degree of autonomy from royal power. Administratively, the organic idealisation of the sociopolitical body was translated into the existence of different councils, usually led by the most prominent noble families, the last seen as parts of a body that worked with autonomy but in co-ordination with the head, that is, the king. With these reforms, political power and decision-making were centralised in newly created secretaries of state which deprived the councils of their powers and autonomy. In what involves the Portuguese colonies, Pombal’s main concern was the progressive loss of state presence and the diminishing of its infrastructural power in the periphery of the empire. He considered that the decline in the capacity for state action and control in the overseas possessions could pave the way for the development of local autonomist aspirations, as well as increased smuggling and illegal commercial exploitation of colonial goods, producing a significant reduction in tax revenue. As a result, Pombal determined to reorganise the colonial administration and strengthen the state apparatus overseas. Additionally, a fiscal reform was implemented to rationalise and increase tax revenues, primarily by combating tax evasion and by clearing the colonial bureaucratic channels that obstructed commercial circulation and tax collection (Falcon, 1982: 374).

The Eighteenth-century Brazilian Enlightened Revolts It is on the relationship between metropolis and colony that one of the main contradictions of the Enlightenment rests. The colonial situation is understood as one of necessary subordination and inferiority, as this was the ‘destiny’ of the colonies (Falcon, 1982: 367–8). Thus, the critical posture that is central to the Enlightenment does not apply when it comes to colonialism which was considered as an institution beyond questioning. 114

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The enlightened reforms generated reactions in Brazil and became part of a broader discussion about the relations between state and society, and between metropolis and colony. The claim, central to the Enlightenment, that all authority which is not justified by reason should be rejected challenged the idea of an indisputable and immutable colonial domain, stimulating the subjects to look at their reality critically (Villalta, 1999: 108). This critical enlightened reflection contributed to the emergence of revolts against Portuguese rule in Brazil. The most relevant instances of revolt in the eighteenth century were the Minas conspiracy (1788–89) and the Taylor revolt (1798). They should be understood both in relation to ideas and developments at the international level and to local realities and specificities. The enlightened reformism, the crisis of the colonial system, the economic crisis in the colonies, ideas developed by the Enlightenment, the local impact of metropolitan policies, and specific events such as the American and French revolutions, all contributed to these events, at least to some extent. The Minas conspiracy was a plot organised in the gold-mining province of Minas Gerais. It was, according to Maxwell (1973: viii), ‘the result of socio-economic divergence between Minas Gerais and Portugal, and of a classic confrontation between colonial and metropolitan interest groups’. Almost all its participants were members of the colonial elite: miners, farmers, priests, high-ranking military, lawyers and judges, who had ties with the colonial authorities and, in some cases, performed official functions in the colonial administration. Even though they were the most powerful and wealthy individuals of the province, they experienced, from the second half of the eighteenth century, an economic and political decline. The political reforms aimed at centralising the state apparatus and asserting the absolute power of the king weakened the power­– which had been considerable during the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth (Maxwell, 1973)­– exercised locally by these colonial elites. In addition, the continuous fall in gold production and the measures taken to ensure tax collection had a great impact on their economic situation. The enlightened fiscal reforms had changed the methods of taxation of Brazilian gold production, replacing the ‘fifth tax’­– which consisted in the payment of a fifth of total gold production to the king­– by the avença, an annual minimum contribution of gold which should be guaranteed by the municipal councils (Maxwell, 1973: 13). If the quota was not reached, the councils had to implement a derrama, charging 115

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a per capita local tax to make up the difference. In 1788, the governor of Minas Gerais received orders from Portugal to apply a derrama and investigate all individuals who had debts to the Crown. These measures represented an additional threat to the economic situation of the colonial elite whose members were the main debtors to the Crown and closely connected with mining activities. It is in this context that they planned an uprising aiming to secede from the Portuguese Empire and to install a constitutional republic in the province. In their project, a strong influence by some works of the Enlightenment and by the War of American Independence can be identified. Despite the censorship of works and authors considered ‘dangerous’ to the social and political order, many of the proscribed books were found in the private libraries of the participants of the conspiracy.8 Several of the books confiscated were about the War of American Independence, and various witnesses declared that those involved in the conspiracy ‘recurrently mentioned the revolutionary events in English America’ and ‘passionately debate it’, having a ‘natural complaisance in the success that the American rebels had’.9 Other witnesses claimed that the conspirators asserted that ‘Minas Gerais, with the implementation of the derrama, was in the same circumstances that led English America to revolt.’ Finally, many of those indicted for the conspiracy were writers themselves and, in their works, the influence of the aforementioned authors, ideas and events is clear, abounding as they do in criticism of tyranny, colonialism and specific aspects of Pombal’s enlightened reforms. In addition, they contain plenty of references to republicanism, and to the War of American Independence, as possible ways of solving the problems and fostering the progress of Minas Gerais.10 The basic justification for the conspiracy given by its members followed the ideology of enlightened government; the incapacity of rulers to accomplish necessary reforms, dictated by reason, justified the revolutionary option. The conspirators found in Raynal’s work a defence of the legitimacy of popular rebellion against a despotic power. In Histoire des Deux Indes the author criticises ‘colonial atrocities’, and ‘appeals to revolt and the affirmation of the principle of freedom and independence’. Raynal asserts the existence of three kinds of freedom: the natural freedom associated with man; the civil freedom of the citizen; and the political freedom of a people. Political freedom is defined by the author as ‘the state of a people who has not alienated its sovereignty and that 116

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makes its own laws, or is associated, in part, to its laws’. Departing from this definition, Raynal states that the inhabitants of the colonies, either slaves or freemen, were not really free, being subject to the captivity of ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism’. He also emphasises the absence of a social contract between the colonies and the metropolis. According to Raynal, ‘revolt’ is the name that the oppressor gives ‘to the legitimate exercise of an inalienable and natural right of the man who is oppressed’, and stated that if ‘the people are happy under the form of their government, they conserve it’. He also signalled the transient character of all governmental forms, stressing that ‘no form of government has the right to be immutable’, and that there is ‘no political authority created yesterday or a thousand years ago, which cannot be abrogated in ten years’ time or tomorrow’ (Raynal 1781: 75–6). Following Raynal’s ideas, the participants of the Minas conspiracy claimed that they had the legitimate right to rebel against colonial power because they were oppressed by an unreasonable sovereign, therefore, a tyrant. Hence, they were acting in the name of freedom, their slogan being ‘Libertas Quæ Sera Tamen’. Nonetheless, their defence of liberty had its limits: they did not touch on the theme of slavery, some of them being slave owners. Their conception of a rightful pursuit of freedom was restricted to white freemen. In addition, they did not broach the subject of social equality, suggesting that some inequality was necessary for social order. Thus, as with many enlightened thinkers, they did not go beyond political equality, thereby condemning social equality. Once again, as in the case of the Portuguese enlightened reformism, we are facing a selective and eclectic use of the Enlightenment, according to specific interests and context. Their ‘revolution’, in fact, was a conservative one. The freedom demanded in the economic and political realms did not apply to the social order which should be kept as it was. The members of this political and intellectual elite were reformists, believing that it was possible to live with the basic social structures of colonial society, provided that they were improved upon, and that the rulers were rational, enlightened sovereigns. Claiming that this was not the case with the Luso-Brazilian Empire, and that the king was a tyrant, they admitted the possibility of political change­– defending emancipation­– with socio-economic structural continuity­ – ­preserving the slave-owning order. The Taylor revolt, organised in Salvador in 1798, was more ‘popular’ than the Minas conspiracy. It was a movement organised by people marked by an inferior racial and social status: free blacks and mixed 117

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race people with urban occupations, such as craftsmen or soldiers, some white men who, with few exceptions, were also members of the lower classes, and a few slaves. The main target of the uprising was slavery and white dominance. It was triggered by the living conditions of the population of Salvador where the scarcity of food and famine led to several riots in 1797 and 1798. They sought to achieve free trade, independence, the end of racial discrimination in public offices and military bodies and, most important of all, the abolition of slavery (Mattoso, 1969; Tavares, 1959). The revolt was inspired by the ideas of French philosophers and the example of the French Revolution. The documents relating to the prosecution of the rebels show that they were found with notebooks containing transcriptions of texts by Rousseau and a handwritten translation of Volney, entitled Revolution of Past Centuries. Other texts mentioned in the prosecution documents are O Orador dos Estados Gerais de 1789, by Jean-Louis Carra, The Speech of Boissy d’Anglas (1795), Aviso de Petersburgo (1796), and Les Ruines ou Méditation sur les Révolutions des Empires by Volnay (Mattoso, 1969). Here, the slogan centred on the idea of equality. In the manifesto that urged the people to rebel, signed by the ‘anonymous republicans’, they claimed that the time had arrived when ‘we will all be brothers, the time when we will all be equal’.11 During the movement, other manifestos were circulated that reveal the aspiration to an egalitarian society in which racial differences would not represent barriers to holding office and to social mobility. The rebels also preached the benefits of a government of equality and of republicanism which, together, constituted, in their view, the only truly reasonable and ‘enlightened’ form of rule. The two conspiracies were very different in their criticism, motivations and objectives, and in the socio-economic status of their members. Nonetheless, they had in common a way of thought, characteristic of the Enlightenment; departing from a rational assessment of reality and a critical evaluation of the present, they reflexively developed a project for a better future, legitimated by the ‘enlightened’ and reasonable rejection of authority and of the status quo. Thus, the conspiracies in eighteenth-century Brazil show, once again, that the critical attitude which characterises the Enlightenment can lead to different social and political projects.

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Conclusion The conception of the Enlightenment as a homogeneous revolutionary intellectual movement, characterised by the defence of universal freedom and equality, and an antireligious and anti-absolutist spirit, led many authors to hold that the Luso-Brazilian Empire did not experience this movement until the first decades of the nineteenth century. My aim in this chapter has been to show that this perspective is wrong. Understanding the Enlightenment as a critical and reflexive attitude, as ‘the courage to use one’s own reason’ [Kant, (1784) 1990], I claim that this was clearly present in the eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian Empire. The ‘crisis of consciousness’ of the beginning of that century was a reflection of this, as were the reforms made under Dom José’s rule and subsequent Brazilian conspiracies. Some authors add an adjective when characterising the Portuguese Enlightenment, recognising the presence of the movement while highlighting its differences in relation to what is considered­– even if implicitly­– as the ‘original’ version of Enlightenment. The most usual qualifications are ‘mitigated’, ‘eclectic’ and ‘compromised’. These qualifications suggest a coexistence between the Enlightenment and previous traditions of thought. This coexistence is undeniable but it is not specific to the Portuguese case. In fact, the coexistence of different ways of thought is not an exception but the rule. All Enlightenments are, somehow, ‘eclectic’, with their substantive content varying, according to its articulations with different traditions of thought, specific to each context. In the Portuguese case, absolutism and Roman Catholicism were the main ingredients that were blended with it. But the association between Enlightenment and absolutism also occurred in other polities; Pombal’s reforms are closely associated with those of other great figures of enlightened absolutism, such as Catherine II in Russia, Frederick II in Prussia and Joseph II in Austria (Maxwell, 1995: 1). The articulation with religion can also be found in the writings of major enlightened thinkers in other countries, such as Italy, Spain and Prussia, of whom many were clergymen. Finally, I argue that the Enlightenment can lead both to reform and to revolution. Within the Luso-Brazilian Empire, religious men, absolutist rulers and political elites resorted to reason, objective knowledge, criticism and reflexivity to defend the ancien régime and Catholicism, that is, the very same elements that, in other countries, laid the 119

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f­oundations for the criticism of these institutions. In addition, I have shown how even within the Luso-Brazilian world, the Enlightenment was plural, inspiring both conservative/reformist and radical/revolutionary political projects. Hence, the Luso-Brazilian case shows that the Enlightenment is plural in its manifestations, being shaped by the concerns, needs and interests of particular times and spaces, that is, by specific historical places. Also, it demonstrates that the Enlightenment can be articulated with different traditions of thought and can lead to different outcomes. Consequently, as Outram (1995) points out, a generalising analysis of the Enlightenment is impossible. As Pocock (1997) suggests, we should eschew the definite article and speak of a variety of ‘enlightenments’ rather than ‘the Enlightenment’, accepting the ‘fact that it had a number of projects going, not all of which necessarily got along very well with each other’ (Schmidt, 2000: 737). As a result, case studies, as well as comparative works, are central to understanding the Enlightenment in its plurality, and the various roles it played in the trajectories of different modern societies. This chapter has attempted a contribution in this direction.

Notes 1. The main representatives of this strand were clergymen, such as the Spanish Benito Feijoo, the Portuguese Luis Antonio Verney, and the Italians Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Antonio Genovesi. 2. It is also worth noting, regarding this theme, that the Enlightenment shows plurality, with some authors, such as Morelly, Malby, Spencer and Ogilvie, making a radical defence of social equality as a necessary feature of a just society. 3. For example, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire and Holbach. Rousseau and Raynal go even further, defending the freedom of all subjects to rebel against a despotic sovereign (Villalta, 1999: 92). 4. Mendelssohn differentiated the civil enlightenment from the human enlightenment, while Kant developed a distinction between the public and private use of reason (Schmidt, 1996: 4–5). 5. There was, as with the other main ideas of the Enlightenment, a plurality of understanding, with some authors, such as Raynal and Kant, explicitly condemning colonialism on the basis of the equality of all human beings and the universal value of freedom. 6. Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo. Real Mesa Censória, Edital de 24 de setembro de 1770, caixa 1 (PT/TT/RMC/B-A/1). 7. Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo. Real Mesa Censória. Secretaria da Censura 1641/1848. Editais de proibição de livros 1768/1816 (PT/TT/ RMC/B-A/1). 8. AUTOS de devassa, de perguntas, de testemunhas, de confrontação e conciliação

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The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment e de inquirição relativos a Inconfidência Mineira. AHU_CU_011, Cx. 133, D. 10344–5. The documents relating to the trials of the conspirators contain inventories of books confiscated in the houses of some of them. Also, different witnesses declared that the conspirators owned or had mentioned books and authors which were forbidden. The review of these documents shows the presence of the following works: the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert; Observations sur le Gouvernement des États Unis de l’Amérique; Le Droit Public de l’Europe (1776) and De la Legislation ou Principes des Lois (1777) by Mably; Histoire des Deux Indes (1772) by Raynal; L’Esprit des lois by Montesquieu; The History of America (1777) by Robertson; O Verdadeiro Método de Estudar by Verney; the Teatro Crítico Universal of Feijoo; Baron de Bielfeld’s three-volume Institutions Politiques (1772); Wallace’s Dissertation Historique et Politique (1769); Young’s Arithmetique Politique; Aikin’s Letters from a Father to His Son on Various Topics; and different books­– without specification­– of Voltaire, Marmontel, B. de Saint-Pierre, Condillac, Lafitau and Rousseau. Also, a collection of the constitutive laws of the United States appeared as part of the case for the prosecution. 9. AHU_CU_011, Cx. 133, D. 10344-45. In the references of authors, the work of Abbé Raynal features prominently. Various witnesses claimed that that the conspirators read and mentioned with frequency the Histoire de l’Amérique anglaise. Some, they said, even knew passages off by heart. For most of the witnesses, the ‘subversive potential’ retained from Raynal’s work by the conspirators was that it explained ‘the mode of having an uprising, as involving the cutting of the Governor’s head and then making a speech to the people [which should be] repeated by an erudite person’. Thus, the insurrection should take place as a political action which would then be legitimised by a ‘speech to the people’ and ratified by a scholar. 10. See, for instance, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga`s Cartas Chilenas (1863); Canto Genetlíaco of Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1782); Vila Rica (1773) and Poesias Manuscritas (1779) of Cláudio Manoel da Costa. 11. Autos da Devassa da Conspiração dos Alfaiates. Salvador: Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia.

References Calafate, Pedro (2001), História do Pensamento Filosófico Português, vol. 3, Lisboa: Editorial Caminho. Camargo, Téa (2005), ‘Colecionismo, ciência e império’, in CEDOPE: Ata da VIª Jornada Sececentista, Curitiba: Aos Quatro Ventos, 576–87. Carvalho, Flávio Rey de (2008), Um Iluminismo Português? A Reforma da Universidade de Coimbra (1772), São Paulo: Annablume. Cassirer, Ernst [(1923) 1997], A filosofia do Iluminismo, Campinas: Editora Unicamp. Cidade, Hernani [(1929) 2005], Ensaio sobre a Crise Mental do Século XVIII, Lisboa: Editorial Presença. Constant, Benjamin [(1816) 1988], ‘The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns’, in The Political Writings of Benjamin Constant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 307–28. Dias, José Sebastião Silva (1986), ‘Cultura e obstáculo epistemológico do Renascimento ao Iluminismo’, in D. Contente and L. F. Barreto (eds), A Abertura do Mundo, Lisboa: Editorial Presença, pp. 41–52.

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Falcon, Francisco J. C. (1982), A Época Pombalina: Política Econômica e Monarquia Ilustrada, São Paulo: Ática. Falcon, Francisco J. C. (1988), ‘Luzes e revolução na colônia’, Estudos Avançados, 2: 2, 73–85. Gay, Peter [(1966) 1995], The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, New York: Norton. Habermas, Jürgen [(1962) 1984], Mudança Estrutural da Esfera Pública, Rio de Janeiro: Edições Tempo Brasileiro. Habermas, Jürgen [(1996) 2002], A Inclusão do Outro: Estudos de Teoria Política, São Paulo: Edições Loyola. Hazard, Paul [(1946) 1989], O Pensamento Europeu no Século XVIII, Lisboa: Editorial Presença. Hespanha, Antonio M. (1989), Vísperas del Leviatán: Instituciones y Poder Político (Portugal, siglo XVII), Madrid: Editorial Taurus. Hobsbawm, Eric [(1962) 1996], The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, New York: Vintage Books. Israel, Jonathan Irvine (2006), ‘Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 67: 3, 523–45. Kant, Immanuel [(1784) 1990], ‘Resposta à pergunta: o que é iluminismo’, in I. Kant, A Paz Perpétua e Outros Opúsculos, Lisboa: Edições 70. Koselleck, R. [(1959) 1999], Crítica e Crise: Uma Contribuição à Patogênese do Mundo Burguês, Rio de Janeiro: Eduerj; Contraponto. Locke, John [(1690) 1988], Two Treatises of Government, New York: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels [(1848) 2000], Manifesto Comunista. Mattoso, Katia de Queiros (1969), Presença Francesa no Movimento Democrático Baiano de 1798, Salvador: Editora Itapuã. Maxwell, Kenneth (1973), Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal 1750–1808, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maxwell, Kenneth (1995), Pombal: Paradox of Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Monteiro, Nuno (2003), ‘Pombal e a aristocracia’, Revista Camões, 15/16. Montesquieu, Charles de [(1748) 2001], The Spirit of Laws, Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books. Outram, Dorinda (1995), The Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1997), ‘Enthusiasm: the Antiself of Enlightenment’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60: 1/2, 7–28. Raynal, Abbé (1781), The Revolution of America, Lockyer Davis. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques [(1762) 1978], Do Contrato Social, São Paulo: Abril Cultural. Schmidt, James (ed.) (1996), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-century Answers and Twentieth-century Questions, Berkerley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schmidt, James (2000), ‘What Enlightenment Project?’, Political Theory, 28: 6, 734–57. Tavares, Luís Henrique Dias (1959), Introdução ao Estudo das Idéias do Movimento Revolucionário de 1798, Salvador: Livraria Progresso Editora. Villalta, Luiz Carlos (1999), Reformismo Ilustrado, Censura e Práticas de Leitura: Usos do Livro no Mundo Luso-Brasileiro, Tese de Doutorado em História (doctoral thesis in history), FFLCH-USP.

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6 Inconsistencies between Social-democratic Discourses and Neo-liberal Institutional Development in Chile and South Africa: a Comparative Analysis of the Post-authoritarian Periods1 Rommy Morales Olivares

I

n countries such as Chile in Latin America and South Africa on the African continent, drastic processes of democratisation occurred in the political sphere during the 1990s, accompanied by radical processes of economic liberalisation. These processes assumed a neoliberal character that generated a development pattern characterised by substantial market reforms and a reduction of state functions. After their authoritarian periods, apartheid in South Africa and the military dictatorship in Chile, the economic trajectory of both societies can be considered successful in economic terms when judged by its results, namely, a decrease in poverty and an increase of the gross domestic product (GDP) (Ffrench-Davis, 2003). Despite the favourable economic indicators, however, these countries have maintained high levels of inequality, South Africa currently being the most unequal country in the world (Palma, 2011; Habib, 2013). The adjustments and reforms, typical of the authoritarian periods, have generated serious social and economic crises in both societies. These crises, which have continued with the democratic transitions, have undermined the industrial base on one side and, on the other, led to greater capital concentration, determining the specialisation of resources and intensive working sectors (Palma, 2011; Habib, 2013). The aim of this chapter is to develop an understanding of the manner in which economic policies in post-authoritarian societies are influenced by policies formulated during previous authoritarian periods, as well as the mechanisms that lead to the continuity of an economic policy framework that allows the perpetuation of social inequality. There is an emphasis on processes and discourses, such as 125

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communicative norms, that have constituted a particular kind of capitalist development in post-authoritarian peripheral societies and their asynchrony or inconsistency with political practice. The discussion below proceeds as follows: first there is a brief introduction to both nations’ historical contexts; second, a socioeconomic analysis of Chile’s post-authoritarian period is developed; third, an analysis of South Africa’s post-authoritarian period, with both countries being discussed with a view to identifying mechanisms of continuity. In the fourth section, five such mechanisms of institutional continuity, which may serve as hypotheses to explain the neo-liberal trajectories, are highlighted. Finally, some conclusions are sketched. For this analysis I shall focus on the discursive level at which the economic and institutional development of both countries has been formulated. I have selected this field of analysis because, firstly, a comparison at the level of political economy is required in order not to lose sight of the boundary between the institutional evolution and the ­political context, where policy is not just an exogenous variable. Secondly, in Chile and South Africa, the implantation of neo-liberal policies following authoritarian periods has been planned from the state through the ‘structural reforms’ approach. These structural reforms are best described in terms of the economic materialism of Karl Polanyi (1944), for whom the market is created by the state and controlled by a bureaucracy. From Polanyi’s perspective, the separation between the market and the state would be an appearance that can just be discussed in an analytic sense but cannot be viewed as an ontological description. All economies are, in the final analysis, planned political economies (Hall, 1989).

The Historical Context Both cases considered have been examples of the neo-liberal reforms of the capitalist periphery and offer an additional complexity. While South Africa has demonstrated a softer neo-liberal trajectory than Chile, marked by a post-apartheid universalism in many of its stronger public policies, Chile has maintained a neo-liberal orthodoxy, masked by a post-military dictatorship discourse of social democracy. Similarly, the public sphere discourses that prevailed in the transition periods in both societies pointed out the possibility of an alternative development path, with a strong state component, but this discourse has been at odds with institutional practice. 126

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To understand economic policy-making, it is necessary to relate that which Peter Wagner, following Anthony Giddens, has called the practices of resource allocation, with the authoritative practices, or political practices. In such a view, an institutional system of resource allocation, or economic system, has been formed inductively from the crystallisation of practices and habits and the consequent configuration of rules (Wagner, 1994). The institutional arrangements are not the result of purely technical decisions (formal) but respond to normative options (substantive). Therefore, it is interesting to analyse the political ­component of the decisions that have informed the neo-liberal institutional developments. In the cases of Chile and South Africa, recent institutional development has configured a neo-liberal economy, implicitly with little state intervention, and this development has been accompanied by a social-democratic discourse that derives from social and developmental discourses circulating beyond the economic field. In both cases privatisation and state fragmentation are the most relevant institutional consequences of social policies according to metrics of economic growth. The developing countries appear more dependent upon direct external pressures than developed ones. The institutionalised patterns of state–society relations determined the way in which neo-liberal transitions were carried out, somewhat irrespective of the level of economic development (Fourcade and Babb, 2002). As Michel Foucault observed (1978), ‘neoliberalism should not be confused with the slogan “laissez-faire”, but on the contrary, should be regarded as a call to vigilance, to activism, to perpetual interventions.’ The injunction to act in the face of inadequate epistemic foundations is the very soul of the neo-liberal thought collective. Classical liberalism, by contrast, disavowed this precept. The neo-liberals reject ‘society’ as solution, and revive a version of authority in a new guise. This becomes transmuted into various arguments for the existence of a strong state as both producer and guarantor of a stable market society. The neo-liberal system and its institutional design are determined by decisions from capitalist institutions [such as the Washington consensus, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States Federal Reserve], with strong intervention from governments, local elites and technical experts (economists). This ‘utopian’ neo-liberal project was precisely what Polanyi feared. The state is not cancelled but is fragmented. The state persistently seeks institutional reorganisation, leading to a fragmented internal institutional system and new external constraints (Harvey, 2007). 127

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In both nations, neo-liberal continuities have occurred despite discourses of change voiced by the coalitions in power. While institutions can change, even when they are not consciously altered, continuity can occur despite changes, or precisely because of them. To understand the neo-liberal continuity in post-authoritarian periods we consider statements of political principles by the coalitions responsible for institutionalising change, reading these statements as an expectation of change against which to measure continuity, or the lack thereof, in practice.

Chile: the Trajectory from the Horizon of Happiness to Inconclusive Happiness Since 1960 Chile has experienced one of the more accelerated capitalist development periods in history (Madariaga, 2013; Meller, 1996; Ffrench-Davis, 2003; Garreton, 2012), particularly by the instatement of specific development policies leading to economic growth. In this period a process of deep mutations in the economic policies began which ended with the impulse towards transformations by the socialist government in the 1970s. After the right-wing military coup in 1973, structural reforms were carried out through which a new dimension was incorporated into the architecture of the economic system; financial local capital gave way, in institutional and normative terms, to a Chilean capitalism in ­co-ordination with transnational institutions. When democracy returned in 1989, the substrate of these reforms was maintained, however, because of the serious problems of an inflation uncontrolled by the Central Bank, in the context of a process of economic opening up. Also, there was the precarious and insufficient social expenditure to deal with the dictatorial social debt. New roles and reforms emerged from 1990 onwards. During the period of democratic transition, institutionalised economic operations in Chile have been reversed several times, particularly following the election of centre-left democratic governments, and the economic crises of 1998 and 2008. At these moments, several debates, investigations, scientific postures and normative approaches have proliferated concerning the form that the principles of the economy must acquire and the co-ordinating role of the state; the debate around what is called the ‘economic model of the Concertación’ (Muñoz, 2007: 22), which means the set of economic and social measures and policies implemented by the Concertación de Partidos por la 128

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Democracia (Coalition of Parties for Democracy) from the beginning of the political democratisation in 1990 until 2010, when a right-wing government came to power.2 Features of continuity appear at the end of the first Concertación government of Patricio Aylwin with the first critics of the ‘unaccomplished promises’ and the ‘abandoned programme’ but, eventually, criticism becomes more radical and leads to a questioning of the model itself. Midterm through Michelle Bachelet’s first government period, the questioning about the successes and failures of the ‘Chilean model’ made a strong reappearance, coming from distinct academic and political spheres. At the beginning of its government period, the Concertación faced the possibility of deciding between a radical change in economic strategy, reimplanting a necessary state interventionism into a weakened state, or accepting the institutional conditions that were imposed, limiting themselves to the adjustments that were considered essential for greater economic efficiency and greater social equality (Muñoz, 2007). They ultimately chose the latter option. At the end of the Concertación governments, with an economic model installed and widely legitimised by the local and transnational business elites, financial and political, the first question about ‘continuity or change’ of the economic model imposed during the dictatorship occurred. This question restored its validity in view of the transformations in civil society and the social movements of development of new progressive projects in Latin America (Venezuela, Ecuador) and in the world. The core of the debate about the concertacionist model in socio-economic matters focuses on its relationship with the inherited neo-liberal model, that is, whether what the Concertación did in this matter was an administration of the model, or more or less deep corrections, which leaves room for discussing its relative transformation or improvement of that model (Garretón, 2012). Within this debate, however, a consensus exists concerning the economic and social success of the Concertación governments as shown by an increased international status or role, the overcoming of poverty, and the improvement in quality of life for the entire population, a consensus more evident among the wider population. What varies is the appraisal of whether that was accomplished because of the inherited properties of the model, as maintained by those on the right, or in spite of it, that is, precisely because the Concertación abandoned it. For many critics, actual success is not that important; the very deficit in real progressive 129

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transformation is explained on the basis of inheriting the dictatorship’s model. For those who maintain that a distancing from the inherited model and its overcoming have occurred in a combination of policies, ‘with no theoretical justification’ (Ottone and Pizarro, 2003: 155), such policies are an expression of the progressivism, and an exceptional case in Latin America, not only in matters of growth but also in what is referred to as democratic development and equality. This view tends to be self-complacent in terms of socio-economic development. In terms of poverty reduction, emphasis is placed on the progress achieved over one decade, because, to quote the CASEN 2000 survey, in 1990, 38.6 per cent of the Chilean population were below the poverty line while, at the end of the decade, this percentage decreased to 20.6. Figures are even more remarkable in the reduction of extreme poverty which decreased from 12.9 per cent in 1990 to 5.7 per cent in 2000. That would be explained by economic growth, the growth of salaries and the distributive impact of social expenditure. From this point of view, these numbers are solely the result of a ‘good administration’ and not an expression of continuity, despite the fact that the Concertación did not revise the institutional design of Pinochet’s military regime. The jury is still out, however, on the question of the progress in economic development achieved by the Concertación governments; the high levels of socio-economic inequity, admitted even by the staunchest defenders of the Concertación model, would normally be unacceptable to a country in a ‘process of development’. Basically, in the 1990s, the Concertación government carried out a strategy of continuity, christening it ‘the reforms of reforms’ (Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, 2003). Its main goal was to decrease the vulnerability of the economy within an external environment of growing volatility. Its results were the aggressive expansion of the productive capacity and the significant reduction of poverty. Actually, between 1990 and 2000, the economic policies were led by the Concertación administration, starting in 1990. The successive governments of Patricio Aylwin (1990–94) and Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000) oversaw one of the longest periods of prosperity in the economic history of Chile. These measures sought macrosocial and macro-economic equilibriums, and also sought to apply a legitimate economic policy within the new democratic framework.3 Economic and political circles on the right of the political spectrum, both in business and in academia, expressed views that were identical 130

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with the critical approaches coming from the left of the Concertación; both sides would admit that there was a continuation of the neo-liberal model of the dictatorship, disagreeing only with respect to the evaluation of such continuity. More critical circles of the left, for example, around the Communist Party, have stated the thesis of ‘transmutation’; the policies followed since 1990 would be a kind of premeditated trick devised by those in power in order to maintain, after 1980, the continuity of what Tomas Moulian calls the constitutional phase of the dictatorship: ‘The current coalition has not created a project, rather administrates the institutional design of the military period with expertise, characterised by the neoliberal stamp”’ (Moulian 1997). Until the end of President Bachelet’s government, mainly during the period in which Gladys Marin presided over the Communist Party, this was the official position of the party and the nucleus of its opposition to the  Concertación governments. Its position was always radical and hard to reconcile with centrist politics; it was based on the arguments of organic intellectuals, as well as the economists and study centres bound or close to the party (Riesco, 2007; Fazio, 2007; Salazar, 2000). One of the central aspects of development achieved through this economic policy would be the high degree of economic concentration, generator of a dominant financial elite that has contributed to the curtailing of public policy objectives, prioritising the perfection of the financial system rather than the institutional operations of productive and social development. Additionally, the widely held idea that the Concertación governments represent the continuation or the simple administration of the structural transformations carried out during the dictatorship, is discussed and refuted by Meller (2005). The main differences between a ‘right’ model and the Concertación model lie in the principal components inherited from the neo-liberal model of the military regime, such as: firstly, the maximisation of economic growth, everything else being a by-product of that; therefore, the social and redistributive problems were solved by means of a ‘trickle-down effect’. Secondly, the role of the state was restricted to the implementation of care policies for the poor. On the one hand, the Concertación model does give importance to consensus-building around the policies to implement. At the same time, the Concertación model maintains a discursive concern for the redistributive effect of the policies and generates special programmes for the poor and socially excluded, as can be evinced by the fact of poverty reduction. On the other hand, even though the stability principles of the global 131

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macro-economy match those implemented by the military regime, they would also be prevalent in the world currently; in addition, there are important differences with respect to its application on the role of the state, particularly related to the matter of redistribution and the social policies in which the state performs an active role as the market complement and the reviewer of the latter’s failures. Having said this, in empirical terms of social protection, the reforms have not had an appreciable effect on inequality and its importance has been rather discursive; the thesis about the change of the role of the state would be nothing more than a reaffirmation of the continuity hypothesis, despite the constitutional change. Definitely, the Concertación governments have based their development of economic policies on, among other aspects: the prioritisation of economic stability; social policies aimed at the more vulnerable; frustrated proposals of modifying the inherited institutional framework; negotiation with the opposition in order to approve laws; predominance of the presidential figure over and above the political parties. Within this framework, there were no substantial differences between the governments headed by Christian Democrats and the presidents of the centre-left, nor was there an appeal to mobilisation or social movements. As concerns more specific policies, in Garretón’s (2012) assessment, one finds the same pattern: tax reform at the outset of Aylwin’s government, without there occurring a structural redistribution of income; state reform during the Frei government, without a new relationship between the state and society; health reform by Lagos’s government and social services reform during Bachelet’s term, with no change in the institutional system or power relationships within the market, as expressed in a highly concentrated and high-profit private sector, a weak public system without regulatory power, and a society with relatively little strength against the power of the private sector. The policies of social protection for the more vulnerable did signify a change but it is debatable whether or not they effected a significant alteration of the inherited institutional structure.

South Africa: Inequality Linked to the ‘Rainbow Nation’ Discourse In the case of South Africa, the political economic evolution after the end of apartheid reflects an intersection with the postcolonial British 132

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model, whereby widely excluded sections of society and high rates of poverty are manifested (Seekings, 2012). The post-apartheid policy has been based on the Reconstruction and Development Programme that served as an electoral platform in 1994, and that, according to Alan Hirsh, was a product of political ‘alliances’ of the centre-left.4 This plan was applied by the Ministry of the Treasury which was in charge of economic policy (as in the Chilean case). In practice, however, this programme did not have enough impact on redistribution, again as in the case of Chile. Semantically, the African National Congress (ANC) had an apparent commitment to social democracy in matters of state policy. The neo-liberal approach, however, takes priority in decisions on state economic policy. Even though it had good results, as, for example, in overcoming poverty, it maintained a tax policy that favoured the dominant classes and reduced state expenditure, as compared with European states, both factors theoretically affecting the economic development of South Africa (Hirsh, 2005). The left-centre coalition, the ANC, which has ruled since the end of apartheid, is characterised by the implementation of neo-liberal policies in practice while maintaining social-democratic principles in its discourse. The objective of reducing inequality has not been officially questioned inside the ANC, despite the fact that some members could have shown interest in doing so. As a lot of research has demonstrated, however, inequality increased significantly in the first period (1994–99) and the early second period (1999–2001) of ANC rule, and it has remained stable since then (Leibrandt et al., 2010 and Van der Berg, 2010: 12). In terms of poverty, the situation is different. While the two studies show that poverty increased in the second half of the 1990s, this has subsequently decreased, largely because of the massive expansion of social support (Seekings, 2012). The difference among the three governments in South Africa in the post-apartheid period, would be more a difference of degree rather than of kind. With respect to this, Habib contends (2013), reflexive critiques about economic policy in South Africa after apartheid reveal three distinct phases in its evolution. 1. The implementation of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy from 1996 to 2001, first implemented by Thabo Mbeki and Trevor Manuel. Taking effect mainly during Mandela’s presidency, there was also 2. the massive expansion of the social support system of subvention during Mbeki’s years as president (1999–2008), and 3. the subsequent period, 133

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under Jacob Zuma (from 2009 on). From our perspective, however, we could question this categorisation; economic policy has reflected an attempt by the dominant class to restructure the terms of the new trajectory of hegemonic growth, and apartheid, like the military dictatorship in Chile, has left a mixed economic legacy in South Africa. On the one side, it has created multiple levels of marginalisation and structural impoverishment through racial policies; not only was this morally censurable but it also placed limits on the economic growth sustainability of the country. For example, education, one of the most exclusionary legacies of apartheid, is, especially according to the South African political elite, one of the biggest ballasts of authoritarianism, compromising post-apartheid development (Van der Berg, 2002). In the same way, the systematic exploitation of blacks has disabled the emergence of a significant internal market, or a manufacturing sector. The historical development of South Africa has largely been based on the export of commodities, with almost non-existent industrial competitiveness, as in the Chilean case (Seekings, 2010). Two economic points of view competed for supremacy in transforming the racial slant that the South African economy inherited. The first, developed by the previous ruling alliance (the National Party and the business sector), was a traditional neo-liberal programme having as its aims the deregulation of the financial and labour markets, the privatisation of state enterprises, and the integration of South Africa into the global economy. This perspective has its roots in the economic agenda that, at the end of 1970, gathered the Afrikaner capital, the military and the ‘verligtes’ in the National Party around President P. W. Botha (Davies et al., 1985; Habib, 2013). This alliance was broken in the 1980s as the result of the lack of popular support, the state’s response to this, and the international isolation that was provoked. Afterwards, the successor to Botha, F. W. de Klerk, re-established the alliance at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, as it experimented with political liberalisation. After the ban on the African National Congress was lifted, the National Party presented its neo-liberal economic agenda for the restructuring of the South African economy: a normative model approach (Central Economy Advisory Services, 1993). This pointed towards an objective of a GDP growth of 4.5 per cent and an increase of 3 per cent in employment and, additionally, several supply-side reforms as well as the elimination of the political and social barriers that held up the market. It was said that these measures would allow the South African economy to reach its maximum growth potential. 134

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There was also the necessity for redistribution but this was expected to follow almost inevitably, provided economic growth was accelerated. In the language of the ANC during the 1990s, this was labelled ‘growth with redistribution’. The second economic vision was presented by the ANC and its allies. Enshrined in the ‘Freedom Charter’,5 and understood as ‘growth through redistribution’, the objective was essentially social-democratic and implied, in the words of Joe Slovo, ‘a mixture between the market and the plan, with priority assigned to the last’ (in Habib, 2012). The vision was by no means coherent. In fact, the leaders of the ANC sent a great number of contradictory messages. Nelson Mandela announced his support for nationalisation just after coming out of prison but, a little more than a year later, spoke against it in a meeting of enterprise executives in Britain (Klein, 2007: 268; Habib, 2013; The Financial Times, 8 February 1992, in Habib, 2012). In the same way, the economic documents released from the ANC in 1992 were far removed from the proposals suggesting the strict control over foreign investors that had been adopted in 1990 (official document, Discourses of the ANC, 1990a, 1992; Nattrass, 1994; Habib, 2013). Despite this contradiction, the ANC’s economic policy proposals before 1994 were clearly different from the ‘growth with redistribution’ model adopted later. The proposals of the ANC were perhaps most coherently articulated in the reports published by the Macro-economy Research Group (MERG) and the Strategic Industrial Project (SIP) which were the economic think tanks of the ANC at the time. MERG drew up a ten-year plan with two different phases: the first directed by public investment, and the second dominated by the private sector. It predicted initially the creation of 2.5 million jobs over the ten-year duration of the plan and an annual growth of 5 per cent during the second phase (MERG, 1993: 2). This rate of growth would be accomplished through the incremental increase in the role of the public sector and allowing for the fact that the state would intervene to regulate the market with the aim of ensuring the basic necessities of the citizen. Also the Federal Reserve Bank would be under political control for the purposes of monetary policy, thus supporting the state’s development objectives. The chapters on commercial policy, business and industry were written by the SIP. Attention was focused mainly on the manufacturing sector, and it was argued that the growth perspectives of South Africa would depend, in great measure, on the development of a competitive export sector. In this manner, on the eve of the first democratic elections in South 135

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Africa in 1994, two different economic visions came into existence. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), reflecting the vision and the major policies and aims proposed by MERG, served as an electoral manifesto of the ANC. It was expected that after winning the elections, the ANC would implement this economic development agenda. Jay Naidoo, then general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), was named by President Mandela as minister but with the responsibility of the RDP. Unlike the Chilean case, in South Africa the co-opting of dissenting parties took place inside the institutions or within the formal political sphere, mainly with the South African Communist Party and COSATU becoming part of the government alliance. As an example of the ANC liberalisation, in December 1995, Thabo Mbeki, then vice-president, forced the government to adopt a wide privatisation programme which included the sale of major parts of Telkom and South African Airways (Habib, 2013). This neo-liberal economic agenda was formalised in June 1996 when the council of ministers adopted the GEAR policy and approved the closing of the RDP office that had taken place three months before. The process followed the recommendations of a report released by the South Africa Foundation­– a corporate think tank (South Africa Foundation, 1996). The report recommended cutbacks in state expenditure in order to reduce South Africa’s budgetary deficit. A set of deregulation measures was presented, such as the liberalisation of the exchange rate, and new subsidies should aim at attracting foreign investment. Privatisation of state assets was also recommended (Treasury, 1996, in Habib, 2013). All this was carried out under the pretext of supporting the RDP but, in its fundamental normative structure, GEAR represented a change of direction and, further, a change in the ANC’s discourse of 1994. Some studies have cast doubts over the appropriateness of the label ‘neo-liberal’ for this move, arguing that it was accompanied by the ‘black economic empowerment’ and the adoption of the Labour Relations Act (LRA, Act 66 of 1995). As Vishnu Padayachee and Habib argued in 2000, however, these did not ‘deny the essentially neoliberal character of the economic programme. Overall, it can be seen as part of the contradictions that for some time accompanied the application of neoliberal economics, as also occurred in other places, even in Thatcher’s UK in 1980’ (Habib and Padayachee, 2000: 253) and in Chile during the ‘Concertación’ period. As set out, it would be a sustainability mechanism of continuity. 136

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The economic impact of GEAR was mixed.6 Inequality levels and poverty increased in the years immediately after the adoption of GEAR, though poverty levels have been reduced since then and, to a lesser extent, since 2000. As discussed elsewhere, the ANC’s abandonment of its initial programme is explained, paradoxically, by elements within the left, as well as inside the liberal right, and has to do with the new configuration of the state’s elites. As in the Chilean case, the opinions of national intellectuals diverge. Many critics on the left believe that the ANC ‘sold out’ as it deviated from the common sense of the left, though it is sometimes recognised that the equilibrium of power limited possibilities for the party (see, for example, Bond, 2000; COSATU, 2006). Those on the liberal right, such as the economist Iraj Abedian (2004), seem to believe that the ANC had at last seen sense with respect to economic development. In spite of criticisms, Thabo Mbeki, in the document ‘The State’s Social Transformation’, admitted that public debt, capital mobility and the limitations of a global environment would have to be taken into account by post-apartheid manoeuvres and strategy. Mbeki was not alone in expressing this point of view. Hein Marais also pointed out, citing Gramsci: ‘Change is produced inside the limits of the possible,’ and these limits were more restrictive than the rhetoric of the ‘workday’ transmitted (2011); a similar speech, considered infelicitous, about going ‘as far as possible’ was delivered by Chile’s Patricio Aylwin in 1990. It seems, however, that the limits were not so constrained in empirical terms but that such constraints were configured to ensure a comfortable continuity in terms of international costs for the new elites.

Post-authoritarian Continuity under the Rainbow Semantics: Mechanisms of Institutional Continuity7 The economic situation of Chile and South Africa is characterised by the presence of strong political coalitions left of centre, the ANC in South Africa and the Coalition of Parties for Democracy in Chile, whose elites mostly belong to the groups of actors who were ‘oppressed’ during the authoritarian period in both countries. Both coalitions govern in the new context of democracy with a high availability of resources enhancing economic potential, and also in a context of high dependency on foreign economies and the global capitalist growth of the 1990s. Historically, both countries have searched for mechanisms to move forward, towards a greater economic self-sufficiency, in Chile in the form of import substitution policies, inspired by theories of d ­ ependency 137

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(from the middle of the twentieth century), and several ways of development of the national market which, however, were limited by the dictatorship, with processes of radical privatisations and structural reforms starting in 1979. In South Africa these processes of self-sufficiency have been generated as a response to the isolation imposed by the sanctions against the apartheid regime but both societies have also reviewed such policies, opening up their markets to foreign countries. The comparison of Chile and South Africa here is based mainly on their similarities. This kind of comparison starts from the hypothesis that systematic similarities in underlying conditions, coexisting with notable differences, go a long way towards explaining the continuity of their neo-liberal regimes of development related to the asynchrony between discourse and institutional practice. The goal of this comparative exercise is to provide a set of hypotheses about the underlying or subjacent mechanisms of the observed trajectories of change. In both cases, we observe the following similarities: the establishment of a neo-liberal regime of development as the result of a critical conjuncture, to satisfy groups asking for an abrupt break with the past; the solidification of the most relevant institutions in economic matters, with the aim of limiting the interpretation and reform of this past; the institutionalisation of a political system of representation, with centreleft groups in a strategic position; the existence of groups on the left (unions) supporting the governments; the overriding of criticism and the exclusion of social movement demands. The change trajectories in Chile and South Africa reveal five main common mechanisms associated with the continuity of their socioeconomic development system: 1. The ‘seduction’ of potential opposition and the systematic blocking of more radical alternatives. 2. Elites and endogamy networks. 3. Factual institutionalisation of the policies as forms of self-binding. 4. The dark side of moral capital. 5. International strategic image. The Seduction of Potential Opposition and the Systematic Blocking of More Radical Alternatives In both societies, a notable limitation of the scope for democratic competition emerged early on during the post-authoritarian democracy as 138

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a combined consequence of the structure of electoral support after the end of oppression and the particular institutionalisation of the rules of democratic representation. The effect was in both societies a very weak presence of more radical critics of neo-liberal economic policymaking, even though such critics had had strong voices during times of resistance. The result was roughly the same in both cases, even though the mechanism looked different in detail. The Chilean case is especially clear because of the explicit acceptance during the transition to democracy of an ‘authoritarian enclave’ (Garretón, 1996) of rules and institutions that could not be altered without the consent of the political right. This institutional impediment to change was fortified by electoral structures that, for two decades, gave only slim majorities to the (‘centre-left’) alliance of all democratic parties, in the presence of a Pinochetist political right that always remained close to be voted into government (until it succeeded in 2010). Thus, the left minorities outside the government coalition (the Communist Party8 and other small parties) had extreme difficulties in making their voices heard and listened to. In the South African case, the political exclusion of radical positions was not as apparent, given that the Communist Party has always remained part of the ANC-led government alliance. Given, however, that the ANC alliance rapidly gained a hegemonic position in South African politics, getting close to a two-thirds majority of seats in parliament, with its transformation-oriented agenda, and remaining so until today, there was little space for an opposition left of the ANC. In turn, the Communist Party­– and the trade union federation COSATU­ – were seduced by the possibility of co-exercising power in the new South Africa, even though, in the course of this practice, the programme of the political left was increasingly abandoned, despite the fact that it had initially been shared within the ANC alliance; for example, in the form of the Freedom Charter. Elites and Endogamy Networks In both countries the end of the oppressive regimes meant that groups came to political power that either had always been excluded from it, such as the disenfranchised South Africans under apartheid, strongly represented in the ANC, or had been displaced, in some cases exiled, for almost two decades from any positions close to power, as during the Chilean military dictatorship. For these groups, the intentional 139

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creation of bases of support in society and the strengthening of partisan supporters through the provision of power resources to potential allies have been important mechanisms in the reproduction of power. Given, in particular, the distrust, or at least the lack of full trust, of the established business elites towards the new political elites, there was a special concern for the creation of government-friendly business groups in the ongoing dispute for social control in the economic field, the lack of which could have endangered the holding of political power.9 This strategy operated through the creation of networks of reciprocity with emergent, or parts of, previously established elites. The existence of such network ties, while enhancing business support for government, limited the power of progressive discourses of change and introduced particular interests in policy decisions (Mascareño, 2011). Complementing this logic, there are liberalisation measures whereby new business groups are created through implementation of some aspects of economic policy. State assets are alienated and handed over to private management for key sectors of economic development. In the Chilean case, for example, the financial liberalisation was essential to generate a support base for the neo-liberal experiment, not related to that part of the business sector which had been disobedient in the first stages of the experiment. At the same time, the privatisation of social security in the AFP system (Administradora de Fondo de Pensiones) offers a constant and growing flux of fresh resources to feed these new groups. Despite some reform of this system by the last government of Concertación, its structure remained intact. In the South African case, privatisation measures were pursued without controlling for the intromission of external capital and, basically, did not touch the structure of key sectors, such as mining. The core of the transformation was the creation of a black business elite, a change in the internal composition of the overall economic elite, again not least with a view to enhancing support for government policies within business, a policy also referred to as the ‘dark side’ of black economic empowerment. Factual Institutionalisation of the Policies as Forms of Self-binding We understand here institutionalisation as the crystallisation of the rules through a more strict codification (Wagner, 2009), whereby future changes and alternative interpretations, or internal rule change, become more difficult. Institutionalisation in this sense can be a conscious strategy of self-binding, and it has been pursued as such by the 140

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incoming democratic governments by creating sets of rules and more global normative regimes that are very difficult to change, either de jure when, for example, requiring constitutional change, or de facto, for example through the creation of a hegemonic strategic discourse that is difficult to deviate from. The latter was particularly important in the case of South Africa, with the early institutionalisation of the approach to altering the racially unequal structure of South African society, namely through the empowerment semantic and the positive discrimination policies current during the whole transition, an approach, the ‘success’ of which on its own terms, reduces the possibility for alternative approaches at subsequent turning points. In the Chilean case, democratic politics focused early on a constant search for improving the use of the existing institutions and agreements, rather than on their alteration. This can be seen, for example, in the improvement and better specification of the inflation objective and the mechanism for reaching it, the improvement of the rules for fiscal expenditure, a tacit compromise on a law for fiscal responsibility, and social protection. The Dark Side of Moral Capital A major underlying mechanism for this non-progressive immobility is the presence of unequally held moral capital in the post-oppression polity and the dark side of the mobilisation of such moral capital. Recent debates in political theory have often referred to the mobilising and uplifting potential of keeping the memory of past injustice alive in the present (Nedimovi´c, in this volume). When, however, the rememorisation becomes a form of discursive moral capital not binding to any political action, and when, in turn, criticism of the government becomes illegitimate because of the condition of the current governing elites as formerly oppressed and even persecuted groups in society, as in the case of some ANC members and the Concertación nowadays, the reference to the moral capital acquired due to resistance towards oppression in the past becomes constraining rather than enabling in the present. Habermas (1997) reminds us of the close relationship between the self-comprehension policy at present and historical consciousness, and of the importance of adopting a critical attitude to the past. To achieve the revitalisation of the past in the present, however, also requires the emergence of a discursive space in which the critic of post-liberation practices is not immediately denounced as failing 141

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to understand the conditions of liberation, or even disregarding the accomplishment of liberation overall. International Strategic Image The international strategic image can be described as the concessions made by the domestically dominant groups to foreign power groups, with the aim of preserving the institutions in a context in which the domestically subordinated groups increase their negotiating power. This mechanism is relevant for both countries. The case of adherence to the Washington consensus propounded by the de Klerk government in South Africa produced the economic policy determination to submit to the logic that there is only one way to manage the economy. In the Chilean case, the subsidies to the business sector go along with increases in social expenditure, in order to maintain institutional stabilisation. In Chile, the general trajectory of the normative framework seems to be an interesting story about how the incompatibility increases because of the incorporation of new interests and potentially controversial objectives into the existing institutional design, driving the development regime as a whole towards instability. Taking into consideration the relationship with foreign power groups, it is crucial to support the neo-liberal measures in order to satisfy the expectations of the external agents and to establish a good ‘business climate’ for investment. Though these policies may not necessarily produce greater economic liberalisation, as is shown in the South African case, they may act to strengthen the country’s external economic credibility, relevant for establishing loan conditions and reaching integration agreements (as in both the Chilean and South African cases with the International Monetary Fund).

Conclusions: the Dominance of an Ethic of Responsibility above One of Conviction Max Weber makes the distinction between the ethic of responsibility and the ethic of conviction (Weber, 1987). The first responds to the evaluation of an action’s consequences, confronts ways and goals, and measures the hypothetical effects. And the second responds more to moral beliefs and thus implies a greater intransigence of the search for what is right; in this case, the ‘right’ development of economic policy. From our point of view, under a project of refoundation and democ142

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ratisation of a state, the ethics of conviction turn out to be strongly represented by the discursive terms, while the ethics of responsibility are represented by the institutional terms. Under this distinction, the exposed mechanisms which explain the abandonment by the ANC and the Concertación of the vision of a cohesive development, present in its initial discourse, suggest that the combination of elements internal to the governing alliances, as discussed above, with the power equilibrium in the national and international ambit­– owing to the persistence of ownership in the hands of traditional elites­– was not favourable to the discourse and the viable intentions. In consequence, the national elites were conditioned to take the decisions that they took. In the South African and Chilean cases, Mbeki, Aylwin and Frei, and other national elites, faced two diametrically opposed interest groups that defended contrary political decisions. On the one hand, foreign investors and the national business community were pushing for the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies, including privatisations, deregulation, financial and commercial liberalisation, and the achievement of a low budget deficit. The main source of power of this interest group was investment. On the other hand, the wider citizenship and social movements, weakened by the violence of the preceding authoritarianism, asked for relief of poverty and provision of services as part of a broader transformation along the lines of a welfare state discourse. The influence exerted by this group was based on the vote. In the South African case, the citizens were, however, weakened by the structure of the existing political parties, and the fact that none of them posed a real threat to the ANC (Habib and Taylor, 2001). In the Chilean case, the explicit exclusion of the Communist Party, as (practically) the only organised model of left politics, prevented the successful fulfilment of such demands. In this context, the pressure exercised by foreign investors was perceived as immediate and, as a result, Mbeki chose to accept their demands, and Aylwin chose to continue on the path of the ‘possible’, the path of continuity. This led to the adoption of the GEAR in South Africa and the continuation of the Social Protection System in Chile. What were the conditions of likelihood for alternatives in the years immediately after 1994 in South Africa and 1990 in Chile? The opinions of the governing elites of the time in both countries are rather clear: while the adoption of a radical economic agenda was not possible, with the pursuit of a logic of responsibility seen as essential, a weak version 143

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of a social-democratic agenda would nevertheless have been possible; in fact, it was even expected by the business community and other interest groups, as it had been announced in the electoral discourse. Visualising possibilities, therefore, it seems that a social-democrat politics could have been generated if the mechanisms discussed had not existed. As a justification for the absence of such politics, the antidemocratic discourse that had emerged as a threat in South African society immediately after 1994 and in Chilean society after 1990 is often referred to; in the new international context of the 1990s, however, a threat to democratic institutions should have appeared as not very persuasive. Any challenge to the governing coalitions from the left could in principle have emerged from the union movement in the South African case (not in Chile because of its dismantling and weakness), as happened in most of Western Europe, or through the consolidation of the political principles of the Communist Party, a possible scenario in the Chilean context with the democratic history of the Communist Party (as occurred in Kerala, India). Such a possibility, however, was foreclosed by the mechanisms of seduction of opposition, of the factual institutionalisation of policies, and of moral limitations to an agenda of real change. A popular insurrection, in turn, was impossible in both societies, considering the experience of failure during the years before the transition in South Africa, and the one of overthrow of a leftist government in the Chilean case. The focus of this chapter has been on the continuity of economic development policy implemented by regimes of neo-liberal ‘success stories’ of the South. In an international context of pressure for liberalisation, neo-liberal institutions do not remain exempt from change, rather they are subject to constant modifications. These modifications, as evidenced in the analysis of political discourses, depend not only on the political context and the internal barriers to institutional change but also on the relations between the different institutions and how these relations are conceived by interested parties. In such a complex constellation, the supremacy of a discourse of change is possible, even at the apex of the institutional hierarchy, despite the continuity of economic policy-making and its institutions. Specifically, the asynchrony between discourse and institutions allows us to understand how the political elites have tried to alter and maintain the regimes of development. Historically different situations, as in the cases of Chile and South Africa, are influenced by mechanisms of continuity, 144

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and these mechanisms have managed to generate specific trajectories, where the institutions have changed semantically but only in order to keep the general socio-economic regime of the authoritarian period in place.

Notes 1. In addition to TRAMOD support, this chapter has received funding from the Becas Chile­– CONICYT Programme of the Chilean Government. I am grateful to the members of TRAMOD research group, especially to Peter Wagner and Sam Sadian, for very useful comments on an earlier draft. I am grateful to Rodrigo Betrian for the language comments and corrections. This work is based on the preliminary analysis of interviews in South Africa (February–March 2013) and in Chile (February 2012) with relevant actors in the democratic transition, from the academic, political and economic spheres. 2. All the presidents of Chile between 1990 and 2010 have come from the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia: Patricio Aylwin (1990–94); Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000); Ricardo Lagos (2000–06); Michel Bachelet (2006–10). 3. The average annual rate of growth was 7 per cent between 1989 and 1998, marking a clear break in the historical trend of GDP expansion. Aylwin’s main efforts during the early part of his administration were concentrated on stabilising the economy after the electoral boom in 1988–89, achieving a more robust, stable and sustainable GDP growth. Thus, it was necessary to increase the rate of investment and to focus on macro-economic management to achieve a sustainable equilibrium, thus reducing the vulnerability to external shocks. With that, urgent social demands would be satisfied, assuming that a greater part of the population would benefit from the process of economic modernisation (Ffrench-Davis, 2003). 4. All the presidents of South Africa since 1994 come from the African National Congress (ANC): Nelson Mandela (1994–99); Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008); Kgalema Motlanthe (2008–2009); Jacob Zuma (2009 incumbent). 5. African ‘common sense’. In 1955, the ANC sent volunteers to 50,000 townships (racially segregated urban slums, where the black and coloured population was confined during the era of Apartheid in South Africa) and rural locations, and collected the demands for freedom of people in the country. 6. The GEAR programme has strengthened South Africa’s finances, lowered interest rates and brought inflation under control. Annual growth between 1994 and 2003 averaged 2.8 per cent, compared to 0.6 per cent over the last eight years of apartheid (Horton, 2005: 91). Inflation decreased from an average of 15 per cent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to an annual rate of 5.2 per cent in 1999 (Van der Merwe, 2004; Habib, 2013). 7. The emblem of the transition to democracy, in both Chile and South Africa, was the ‘rainbow’. In the Chilean case, the rainbow represented ‘La alegria ya viene’ discourse (‘Happiness is coming’ promises), and in the South African case, the rainbow is used to describe the ‘Rainbow Nation’ (the pluralistic social asset of the post-apartheid nation). 8. The Communist Party did not participate in the Concertación governments (but it does now in the Nueva Mayoria of the second Bachelet presidency) in a context of controversy and criticism, which were a product of its active participation in the

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Student Movement since 2011, and unable to deal with the paradox of abandoning a radical leftist programme. 9. Certainly, the policies of poverty reduction and the introduction or extension of welfare benefits, as practised by both alliances, sustained and enhanced electoral support for the governments. The economic policies, however, also needed support from business.

References African National Congress (ANC) (1996), The State and Social Transformation, discussion document. African National Congress (ANC) (1997), Developing a Strategic Perspective on South African Foreign Policy, discussion document, Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Chipkin, I. (2007), Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy, and the Identity of ‘The People’, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) (1997), The Report of the September Commission on the Future of Unions, August 1997, (last accessed 29 February 2012). Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) (2004), Why Workers Should Vote ANC, (last accessed 29 February 2012). Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) (2006), COSATU Political Discussion Document: Possibilities for Fundamental Change, prepared for the Ninth National Congress, 18–21 September 2006. Ffrench-Davis, R. (1983), ‘Una evaluación del modelo económico’, Estudios Públicos 11, 7–39. Ffrench-Davis, R. (2003), Entre el Neoliberalismo y el Crecimiento con Equidad: Tres Décadas de Política Económica en Chile, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Fourcade-Gourincha, M. and S. L. Babb (2002), ‘The rebirth of the liberal creed: paths to neoliberalism in four countries’, American Journal of Sociology, 108: 3, 533–79. Foxley, A. (1983), Latin American Experiments in Neoconservative Economics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gárate, M. (2012), La Revolución Capitalista en Chile : Desde la Tradición del Liberalismo Decimonónico (1810–1970) a la Búsqueda de una Utopía Neoconservadora (1973– 2003), Santiago de Chile: Universidad Alberto Hurtado Ediciones. Garretón, M. A. (1996), ‘Economía y Mercado: aspectos socio-políticos’, Revista Medellín, 22: 85. Garretón, M. A. (2012), Neoliberalismo Corregido y Progresismo Limitado: Los Gobiernos de la Concertación en Chile, 1990–2011, Santiago de Chile: Editorial ARCIS-CLACSO-PROSPAL. Gelb, S. (ed) (1991), South Africa’s Economic Crisis, Cape Town: David Philip. Gelb, S. (2003), Inequality in South Africa: Nature, Causes and Responses, Johannesburg: The Edge Institute. Gevisser, M. (2007), Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Habermas, J. (1998), Facticidad y Validez, Trotta: Madrid.

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Discourses and Practices in Chile and South Africa Habib, A. (2013), South Africa’s Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Habib, A. and V. Padayachee (2000), ‘Economic Policy and Power Relations in South Africa’s Transition to Temocracy’, World Development, 28: 2, 245–63. Habib, A. and R. Taylor (2001), ‘Political Alliances and Parliamentary Opposition in South Africa’, Democratization, 8: 1, 207–26. Hall, P. (ed.) (1989), The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Harvey, D. (2007), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsh, A. (2005), Season of Hope: Economic Reform under Mandela and Mbeki, Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Leibrandt, M., I. Woolard, A. Finn and J. Argent, J. (2010), ‘Trends in South African Income Distribution and Poverty since the Fall of Apartheid’, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 101, Paris: OECD. Madariaga, A. (2013), ‘Mechanisms of Institutional Continuity in Neoliberal “Success Stories”: Developmental Regimes in Chile and Estonia’, MPIfG discussion paper, 13/10. Marais, H. (2011), South Africa: Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change, Cape Town: UCT Press. Mascareño, A. (2011), ‘Entre la diferenciación y los individuos. derechos fundamentales y las redes de la infamia’, Estudios Públicos, 124: 45–82. Meller, P. (1996), Un Siglo de Economía Política Chilena (1890-1990), Santiago de Chile: Andrés Bello. Moulian, T. (1997), Chile Actual: Anatomía de un Mito, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Muñoz, O. (2007), El Modelo Económico de la Concertación, 1990–2005 : ¿Reformas o cambio?, Santiago de Chile: Editorial Catalonia. Ottone, E. Y. and C. Pizarro (2003), Osadía de la Prudencia: Un Nuevo Sentido del Progreso, Santiago de Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Palma, G. (2011), ‘Why Has Productivity Growth Stagnated in Most Latin American Countries since the Neo-liberal Reforms?’, Cambridge Working Papers in Economics (CWPE), 1030. Polanyi, K. (1944), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Seekings, J. (2005), ‘The Colour of Desert: Race, Class and Distributive Justice in Postapartheid South Africa’, CSSR working paper, No. 126. Seekings, J. and N. Nattrass (2006), Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press. Van der Berg, S. (2010), ‘Current Poverty and Income Distribution in the Context of South African History’, University of Stellenbosch Working Papers, Stellenbosch: Bureau of Economic Research. Wagner, P. (1994), A Sociology of Modernity, London: Routledge. Wagner, P. (2008), Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Wagner, P. (2011), ‘The Democratic Crisis of Capitalism: Reflections on Political and Economic Modernity in Europe’, London School of Economics Europe in Question Discussion Paper Series, 44.

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Weber, M. (1987), Economía y Sociedad, vol. 2, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Williamson, J. (ed.) (1990), Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.

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7 HIV/AIDS Policies and Modernity in Brazil and South Africa: a Comparative Critical Analysis José Katito

T

Introduction

his chapter analyses in a comparative fashion HIV/AIDS policies in Brazil and South Africa over the thirty-year history of the epidemic, with special attention given to the period between the ­mid-1980s and the early 2000s. The emphasis is placed on the largely divergent responses of the two states to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The core argument is that, during this period, Brazil acted far more aggressively than South Africa against the HIV/AIDS epidemic by implementing comprehensive prevention, treatment and care policies (Gauri and Lieberman, 2006). Consequently, Brazil has managed to contain the spread of the virus across its population while, in South Africa, belated effective policies have considerably contributed to today’s severe HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV/AIDS is a pressing problem in many countries today and has gained space in social research worldwide. About 35 million of the world population are HIV-infected and two-thirds of these are found in African countries, the sub-Saharan area being the most affected. Brazil is considered a world model as regards integrated HIV/AIDS policies in terms of prevention, treatment and care which have maintained the prevalence rate stable at less than 1 per cent (UNAIDS, 2012a). Conversely, South Africa delayed tremendously in the adoption of effective measures against the epidemic and, as a result, has one of the world’s highest prevalence rates of HIV, at 17 per cent (UNAIDS, 2012b). Moreover, while in Brazil the epidemic is largely concentrated in the populations of commercial sex workers and men who have 149

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sex with men (MSM), in South Africa the rate of infection of women is higher than that of men. These divergences constitute the prime reason for comparing Brazil and South Africa. Importantly, at the time of the first HIV outbreak, the two countries had similar features in terms of general state capacity, Human Development Index and civil society involvement. But the history of HIV infection would be radically different in the two countries, largely because of divergences in the timing and quality of HIV/AIDS policies, where Brazil was far superior to South Africa until roughly a decade ago. For the time being, let us note that the factors explaining such divergence have to do with three elements: first, national unity or political community, in the sense of a high national understanding of HIV as a threat to, and a priority for, the entire nation, an essential requisite for a concerted work effort between state, local administrations, civil society and other stakeholders; second, reliance on biomedical science; and third, openness towards sexual discourses and diversity. Comparatively, Brazil’s stronger national identity and reliance on biomedicine are rooted in its less exclusive and conflictual recent history of race relations, compared to South Africa, which, despite all race-based inequalities, has led to a greater degree of miscegenation in the Brazilian population and a sense of political community. Conversely, in South Africa, colonialism and apartheid policies, strongly carried out with the support of racially exclusive biomedicine in an open and legal manner, would result in a profound fragmentation of the nation and the black population’s distrust of ‘Western’ biomedical science. Consequently, Brazil found it easier to forge further national compactness around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, while South Africa’s responses were characterised by negligence, denial, delay and fragmentation, the consequences of which will be evident even in the decades to come. Concerning modernity in the present discussion, the concept of modernity is used in two ways: as development which, in turn, is defined as improvement of the material and social conditions of nations and individuals; and second, as autonomy and sound levels of self-understanding (Wagner, 2008). In the present discussion, self-understanding is conceived of as the critical and normative stance of a nation or its government, that is, a fundamental part of a self-reflection exercise for the improvement of material and social conditions. The economy of this chapter does not allow an explicit discussion about modernity, hence development projects, autonomy and self-understanding. The reader is invited to read the chapter in 150

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the light of the spirit of the entire book. It is worth noting, however, that the distinction between the above two meanings is more analytical than factual because development projects necessarily include a degree of autonomy, at least theoretically, and self-understanding. But, with regard to Brazil’s and South Africa’s HIV/AIDS policies, it is important to explicate the concepts of autonomy and self-understanding because they have shaped HIV/AIDS state actions in both countries. Indeed, HIV/AIDS policies in Brazil and South Africa bring to the discussion of development a considerable number of key aspects that are constitutive of modernity discourses: general state capacity; democracy and social justice; the use of science, including biomedicine; gender, sexual and reproductive health; human rights; race relations, among others. These are aspects in which debates generally emphasise critique, autonomy and self-understanding. Also, when related to HIV/AIDS policies, these aspects are interconnected and imply the involvement of different social actors. This is true with regard to national HIV/AIDS interventions, and the state is, historically and normatively, bound to play a leading role, whereby conflicts­– stemming from the divergent interests of the various constituencies involved­– are ‘capitalised upon’, for the construction of cohesion around the epidemic. Brazil and South Africa constitute emblematic examples in this regard. Why Compare Brazil and South Africa? There are several reasons why one should compare Brazil’s and South Africa’s HIV/AIDS public policies. Let us just mention a few. Firstly, Brazil and South Africa are middle-income countries and, in both societies, socio-economic inequalities are pronounced and race is a critical factor of socio-economic status; secondly, both states have recently achieved democracy (in 1988 and 1994 respectively); thirdly, by the time of the outburst of HIV in the early 1980s, Brazil and South Africa had similar features in terms of general state capacity, civil society involvement, and Human Development Index­– the last having subsequently deteriorated in South Africa, largely because of AIDS-related mortality and morbidity, especially with regard to life expectancy, which fell from sixty-three years in 1992 to fifty-one in 2012; fourthly, in the initial years of HIV, Brazil and South Africa had a similar epidemiological profile in the sense that, in both countries, the first risk group was constituted by urban, white, middle-class male homosexuals; finally, in the South–South co-operation, Brazil is not only a significant other 151

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to South Africa’s fight against HIV/AIDS but also a key actor in South Africa, which gives Brazil the opportunity to strengthen and extend its economic, political, and cultural influence in Africa (Nauta, 2011). The comparison is also justified, however, by the fact that Brazil is considered a world model country, in terms of comprehensive HIV/ AIDS prevention, treatment and care, which has resulted in Brazil’s low prevalence rate of HIV infection, estimated at less than 1 per cent in a total population of approximately 190 million. Conversely, South Africa is one of the countries that delayed the most in the implementation of aggressive prevention and treatment policies. Indeed, South Africa has a generalised HIV epidemic estimated at about 17 per cent of its 45 million total population. In both countries, in certain age groups, HIV rates are higher than the respective national averages: thirty-five to thirty-nine in Brazil, and fifteen to twenty-four in South Africa. In these age groups, and to some extent in the total respective populations, the incidence rate is higher in men who have sex with men (MSM­ – defined through biological criteria, rather than sociological ones such as gender) in the case of Brazil while, in South Africa, female cases of infection are more numerous. This means that, in Brazil, most cases of contagion occur through male–male sexual intercourse while, in South Africa, HIV is predominantly transmitted through male–female sex. Interestingly, young women in South Africa comprise the most vulnerable subpopulation. This is largely a result of intergenerational sex (young women engaging in sex with older men) and sexual multipartnership which, to some extent, includes the ‘intimate economy’, namely women’s surviving strategies through ‘transactional sex’ or prostitution, interrelated not only with economic issues but also with symbolic ones, such as concepts of masculinity and femininity. More than South Africa, Brazil has had a special trajectory in terms of sex ratio (men–women). In fact, the sex ratio has changed radically over time, shifting from forty to one in 1983 to 1.7 to 1 in 2010. This dramatic change is due to the concomitant decrease in male cases and increase in female cases of infection. For this reason, Brazilian literature considers this phenomenon as the feminisation and ­heterosexualisation of HIV/AIDS. With regard to race, cumulatively, most cases of HIV infection are found in the white subgroup in the case of Brazil and in the black population in the case of South Africa. In any event, in both societies, low socio-economic status is a major factor of vulnerability to HIV today. Therefore, poverty­– both material and symbolic­– as well as the related 152

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abuse of alcohol and other drugs in some contexts constitutes major challenges in Brazil and South Africa with regard to HIV susceptibility. The implication is that Brazil and South Africa share some fundamental features of HIV today: pauperisation, heterosexualisation, and feminisation. Pauperisation and feminisation call attention to the need for investment in order to improve people’s economic conditions and gender equality. The sphere of the ‘international game’ is also important when comparing Brazil and South Africa. The two countries are signatories to the 2001 Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGASS) on HIV/AIDS through which member states commit themselves to intensifying efforts to eliminate HIV and AIDS within the Millennium Development Goals framework, now to be achieved by 2015. The commitment is reaffirmed every five years in an UNGASS High-level Meeting. Scaling up to the entire population is deemed to be the very proxy for universal access to prevention, treatment, care and support. Calling for greater political and financial investment in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, the 2011 Political Declaration has defined new targets to be achieved by 2015: to halve sexual and injecting-drug transmission of HIV; to eliminate mother-to-child transmission; and to halve tuberculosis (TB) deaths in people living with HIV. The increase of prevention initiatives and treatment programmes points to reducing AIDS-related maternal deaths and ensuring that no children are born with HIV (Zero HIV/AIDS Model). This also includes enhancing access to health services by vulnerable populations such as commercial sex workers (CSW), injecting drug users (IDU), and men who have sex with men (MSM). Eliminating gender-based inequities and abuse is another important aspect. It also emphasises the need to promote the state’s collaboration with stakeholders in prevention programmes, particularly with international and civil society organisations, as well as people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). It is worth noting that the UNGASS objectives resonate with those announced in Brazil’s and South Africa’s constitutions, promulgated in 1988 (Art. 196) and 1996 (Art. 27) respectively. Indeed, the two constitutions state that access to health is a right of all citizens and a duty of the state, guaranteed through social, economic and environmental policies that promote protection and recovery of health, on a universal and equal basis. Therefore, the basic principles of the Brazilian and South African health systems are universality, equity and integrality, in turn founded on a human rights basis. Both health systems are o ­ rganised 153

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in a decentralised manner, involving articulations between the three administrative levels (federation, states/provinces and municipalities/ regions–districts) and subject to social control for their effective implementation. The efforts announced by UNGASS have a long history in Brazil which is the reason why Brazil is considered by international organisations, particularly UNAIDS, to be a world leader in HIV/AIDS policies. Conversely, as noted above, until a decade ago, South Africa was witnessing government policies that were unproductive and caused neglect. South Africa has only recently improved its national HIV/ AIDS policies. But the results of this change seem encouraging. The time frame of implementation of the ‘2007–2011 South African National Strategic Plan of HIV/AIDS and STI’ shows substantial progress in the following fields: universal access to free antiretroviral therapy (ART), partly thanks to increased public health expenditure; national HIV counselling and testing campaigns which reached between 13 and 15 million people; access to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), early diagnosis, and prevention of HIV mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT), plus co-infection testing and treatment of TB, syphilis, and hepatitis. Additionally, male circumcision is being rolled out on a massive scale as an HIV prevention modality in South Africa because it is recognised as potentially reducing the risk of men contracting sexually transmitted infections (STI) by 60 to 70 per cent. All this progress has been achieved thanks to the new-found positive attitudes of the political leadership towards the epidemic in South Africa’s Health Ministry which also involved the inclusion of civil society and orthodox scientific communities in HIV/AIDS policies.

Brazil and South Africa’s HIV/AIDS Policies As noted above, there are several variables explaining the divergence between Brazil’s effective and South Africa’s ineffective responses to HIV/AIDS until roughly a decade ago. The chapter builds upon the argument made by Gauri and Lieberman, according to which, compared to South Africa, Brazil’s prompt and well-articulated HIV/AIDS policies were considerably facilitated by its higher levels of: racial and cultural miscegenation, plus de facto monolingualism, which strongly contribute to the existence of a higher level of national identity and unity, whereby­– unlike in South Africa­– the HIV biomedical paradigm was used appropriately rather than questioned; administrative 154

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decentralisation, which permitted autonomous development of AIDS intervention strategies at municipal and state level that later became a model for the national AIDS programme; and cultural openness with regard to sex discourses and sexual diversities, a ‘national value’ which was crucial in promoting progressive AIDS activities, including solidarity with people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and risk groups such as men who have sex with men (MSM), injecting drug users (IDU) or commercial sex workers (CSW). Human rights principles were also emphasised. In such a social climate, PLWHA, MSM, IDU and CSW groups acquired power and rights to work as agents of social change by carrying out prevention programmes, especially though peer education. These aspects combined are indicators of social cohesion, in terms of a high sense of nation state identity or political community. This is a fundamental resource that, more than others, helped in conceiving of HIV as a threat to the entire population rather than a problem exclusive to risk groups. Consequently, a few years into the epidemic, and following the development of multilevel and inter-organisational interventions, the concept of ‘risk group’ in Brazil notably gave its place to a more effective one, namely ‘social vulnerability’. This underlines that, first, when a person is infected, everyone is in danger and, second, vulnerability to risk behaviours is not only related to sexual inclinations, such as unprotected sex or promiscuity of specific groups, but depends on a complex set of social and economic factors, such as power relations and poverty, for which reason interventions have to be multilevel and inter-organisational. This reasoning was widespread internationally but literature shows that in South Africa, in the face by then, of a high prevalence of HIV, such a paradigm shift was occurring more on a theoretical than on a practical level. In other words, a lower degree of segregation (‘boundary formation’) and thus a higher degree of trust and collaboration at the sociocultural and political–administrative level played a crucial role in Brazil’s timely and more effective response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Compared to South Africa, especially during the early stage of HIV, Brazil’s lower degree of ‘boundary formation’­– thus, a higher sense of national unity or political community­– resulted in higher levels of trust and collaboration: trust in conventional HIV/ AIDS scientific communities; collaboration between local and federal administrative levels; and collaboration between the administration and civil society organisations (CSOs). Trust and fruitful collaboration between different constituencies played a crucial role in setting up far more timely and effective AIDS interventions in the case of Brazil. 155

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Conversely, South Africa’s HIV/AIDS measures were, until very recently, characterised by negligence and a tendency for denial because of the problematic history of race relations, given the decades of apartheid regime, the system of legalised racism, inequality, oppression and exploitation of the non-white majority by the white minority. The problematic history of race relations in South Africa, which has resulted in a low sense of national belonging, has largely contributed to the apartheid government’s neglect of HIV, which stemmed from its viewing of the epidemic as an exclusive plague of groups who generally did not deserve political attention: blacks, CSW, and gays, and has also contributed to post-apartheid president Thabo Mbeki’s ‘denial’ of the HIV–AIDS causal relation and the need to use antiretroviral therapies (ART). Connected to this, South Africa’s multilingualism and multiculturalism have also had an effect in limiting the delivery and reception of antiHIV messages. Furthermore, unlike what happened in Brazil, where the National AIDS Programme originated with local administrations and CSOs, politico-administrative power (in HIV/AIDS interventions) was, until very recently, very centralised, and this greatly limited the expansion of good experiences of AIDS activities carried out by local political and civil society entities such as those carried out in the Western Cape, the most advanced region in several respects.

Critical Factors in Brazil’s and South Africa’s Responses to HIV/AIDS The critical aspect explaining Brazil’s and South Africa’s differences of response to HIV/AIDS has to do with the timing and quality of the respective national policies in the first phase of the epidemic, namely the decade between the early 1980s and early 1990s, during which Brazil was far superior. Several factors have been explored to explain why Brazil and South Africa, two similar societies, responded so differently to HIV. Gauri and Lieberman (2006) examine and reject several hypotheses that might explain the largely divergent national HIV/AIDS public policies in Brazil and South Africa. Let us just mention a few, the ones that have generally been pointed out by key scholars such as Parker (1994, 1997) and Bastos (1994): 1. the nature and the timing of democratic transition (stronger and earlier in Brazil); 156

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2. the fact that the movements linked to the first risk group in Brazil, namely middle-class white, male gays, were already politically organised by the time of the HIV ‘outbreak’, in the wave of (re) democratisation of the state, and were thus able to influence political and financial groups in setting up robust AIDS policies; 3. the relatively stronger Brazilian civil society; 4. the international links and loans in which Brazil was superior to South Africa until the mid-1990s, when apartheid officially ended. The authors compellingly suggest that what most mattered to the divergence in the HIV/AIDS responses between Brazil and South Africa in the epidemic’s first decade was a series of societal and political factors underlying the formulation and implementation of public policies, or the absence thereof. In Gauri and Lieberman’s view, none of the abovementioned parameters is a strong variable in explaining the divergence between Brazil and South Africa’s early AIDS policies. One could agree that, to follow Gauri and Lieberman’s reasoning, the level of boundary formation in the Brazilian and South African societal and political systems constitutes the factor that has produced the strongest impact on the timing and quality of anti-HIV/AIDS interventions. These boundaries are grounded in three aspects. First, the history of race relations, which was and still is less problematic in Brazil, an aspect that helped Brazil (re)discover its sense of political community and so consider HIV as a threat to everyone­– this was critical to developing national AIDS policies, modelled on activities previously elaborated locally by states, municipalities and CSOs; second, Brazil’s higher degree of decentralisation of political and administrative power, which allowed Brazil’s local administrations to develop autonomously intervention strategies that would later be integrated into the national AIDS Plan; third, Brazil’s higher degree of openness towards sex discourses, and gender and sexual diversity, an essential aspect for implementing prevention policies and developing solidarity to PLWHA. The result has been a concomitantly bottom-up and top-down, or even better, ‘transversal’ nationwide struggle against the epidemic; fourth, Brazil’s early use of biomedicine, that is, ART (since the mid-1990s), which ­drastically helped in limiting HIV expansion. Thus, during the first stage of HIV/AIDS, and later on, such interventions were far more critical than the 1993 loans that Brazil received from UNAIDS and USAID, which are often mentioned as being key factors contributing to Brazilian success in handling HIV/AIDS. In 157

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fact, by 1993, Brazil already had a well-developed national AIDS programme. Conversely, South Africa has only recently started to make significant efforts in reversing the epidemic, after a considerable period of neglect and denialism. The History of Race Relations and the Sense of National Political Community Even after the first case of HIV was reported in South Africa in 1982, the spread of the virus was barely registered by the national health system, and the apartheid administration took very limited action to protect its citizens through prevention of contagion and treatment measures (Nattrass, 2007). Instead, even when the epidemic became generalised in the country, the apartheid government labelled it as a plague of population groups that generally did not deserve political attention, namely gays, the poor, prostitutes, blacks and IDU (Crewe, 2002: 448–51). The rise of HIV incidence throughout the non-white South African demographic coincided with the democratic transition in South Africa. During this period, at least officially, there was a growing recognition that black South Africans would need to be well accommodated in the new political settlement. Neither for Afrikaner rulers nor for the early ANC government was AIDS a national priority, however, in this climate of profound change. More importantly, during this period, even when there were attempts to handle the epidemic, political rhetoric and social discourses on HIV were rather stigmatising and highly racialised, taking the black population to be the only group in danger. Mbeki’s administration considered poverty to be the chief determinant of HIV contraction in the black population. This served, in part, to overcome the colonial stigmatising discourse of the black body as hypersexualised and black Africans as unable to constrain their sexual desire and promiscuity (Fassin, 2007). While poverty is certainly a key health determinant, Mbeki’s government used it in a simplistic way, together with historical ‘injustices’, including the aforementioned denigrating vision of black Africans. As a result of this decolonising attitude, at societal level, black people have spent more energy fighting against such a simplified and stereotyped vision than searching for the real factors underlying vulnerability to HIV, in order to operate social change. Furthermore, as Crewe suggests, the target of AIDS education was the individual, rather than the community, on the assumption that once individuals knew the disease causes and consequences 158

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they would behave in a ‘healthy’ manner, in their personal interest (knowledge-attitude-behaviour approach). In brief, the initial South African response to HIV/AIDS could be described as neglecting, coercive and stigmatising (Wouters et al., 2010: 74). There was no sense of emergency and collective fate; therefore, there were very few information strategies dealing with virus transmission and its consequences. In contrast to Brazil, since the outbreak of HIV, and until very recently, South Africa was very limited in developing fruitful debates and activities at the national level to expose and examine its values, including those related to sex and reproduction. HIV/AIDS Bureaucracies As suggested by Gauri and Lieberman (2004: 9), . . . neither Brazil’s nor South Africa’s trajectory of state capacity building has been entirely consistent or linear, but it is clear that in Brazil the state made a commitment to establish policy space for the AIDS response sooner, and that the bureaucracy was endowed with wider and stronger authority than in South Africa. Indeed, Brazil has been superior to South Africa in timing the institutionalisation of HIV national policies, including the universal access to ART, largely thanks to the inclusion of both orthodox scientific communities and civil society, as well as to the assignment of large amounts of money to the project. Brazil established an HIV/AIDS bureaucracy as early as 1985, creating a National AIDS Programme (NAP) within the Ministry of Health (Parker, 1994; Bastos, 1994). Furthermore, there would be substantial continuity in the NAP policies, even concerning its personnel, as well as its adherence to scientific expertise. In 1988, the AIDS interministerial National Commission was established. The commission reported to the Ministry of Health but included representatives from the ministries of Education, Labour, and Justice, the principal association of lawyers in Brazil, various universities, and four NGOs. This task force would develop a national policy to respond to HIV, targeting first of all the most-at-risk group (MARG) such as MSM, CSWs, IDUs, and the young but without regarding the epidemic as a problem exclusive to these groups. Information about HIV/AIDS was accompanied by concrete actions such as the universal availability of free condoms and clean needles for IDUs. Focusing on human rights 159

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and social justice approaches, by the early 1990s the tolerance of politicians, administrators and health professionals towards prostitutes and IDUs had increased significantly nationwide; there was, by now, an increase in the shared public and government consensus that prostitution should be addressed as a profession deserving rights, and drug use as a public health, rather than a criminal justice, problem (Berkman et al., 2005: 1169). To be sure, as mentioned earlier, the national AIDS programme in Brazil was shaped by local initiatives at the municipal and state level. In general, big cities in Brazil were at the forefront of the struggle against HIV, and their experience, mainly acquired via NGOs and evaluated by municipal and state administrations, became an integrated model for the National AIDS Programme. By contrast, in South Africa, when entities in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal attempted to develop more aggressive measures than the national government, they were warned by central authorities about the fact that important decisions had to be taken in accordance with state federal hierarchy (Gauri and Lieberman, 2006). In the early phase of HIV, the South African state also performed poorly in the use of academic research (Crewe, 2002). This is the opposite of the Brazilian experience, whereby several HIV research groups were created and supported by the government. This was the case with NEPAIDS (Núcleo de Estudos e Prevenção da AIDS), an academic body based at the University of São Paulo and led by psychologist Vera Paiva, and ABIA (Associação Brasileira Interdisciplinar de AIDS), an NGO (non-governmental organisation) based in Rio de Janeiro. Established in 1991, NEPAIDS would become the leading organisation carrying out nationwide AIDS education in schools. For its part, ABIA, initially led by sociologist Herbert de Sousa (Betinho), seropositive himself, was created in 1986 with the intent of mobilising politically organised groups of health professionals committed to sanitary reform, gays, women, churches, and other entities linked to the struggle for democracy. ABIA has since been, in all probability, the most active think tank and knowledge-production organisation, as well as the very trait d’union of all Brazilian (and international) HIV organisations: public health departments, academic institutions of collective health and movements of LGBT (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transvestites/ transsexuals). It is important to point out, however, that, well before national government actions, HIV NGOs, social movements (SMs) and local 160

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governments in Brazil reached out to extremely marginalised populations, providing them with AIDS knowledge, care and HIV treatment (Berkman et al., 2005: 1169); they were acting mainly on the basis of solidarity and human rights principles. Therefore, by the time of the establishment of the National AIDS Programme in 1985, solidarity with PLWHA had already been firmly established throughout the country and could be observed beyond care activities carried out by religious entities. This epitomises, compared to South Africa, the existence of a stronger sense of belonging to a Brazilian national entity or unity. Throughout the 1980s and during the early 1990s, Brazilian AIDS NGOs, SMs and academic bodies were financially supported mainly by international agencies such as UNAIDS (Pimenta et al., 2002: 48). With the advent of democracy in Brazil, in 1986, many actors from the Sanitarian Reform Movement, including those dealing with HIV/ AIDS, entered political–administrative institutions and played a key role in designing the ordinary Universal Health System [Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS)], one of the novelties of the 1988 Constitutional Law, whose principles are universality, equity and ‘integrality’ (inclusiveness). More recently, with the coming to power of Lula’s Workers Party, the shift of health experts from CSOs has been more pronounced. Concluding the argument about the influence of former civil society health militants in fostering public policies in the Brazilian democratic era, it seems reasonable to affirm that their international links also helped the Brazilian government negotiate the first in a series of three loans with the World Bank in 1993. This funding provided the NAP with substantial autonomy within the ministry, including the capacity to hire its own staff on a contractual basis with more flexibility than civil service rules generally allowed (Nunn, 2010). In the decade since 1993, about 480 staff and consultants were under contract with the NAP, and they were responsible for the formulation of AIDS policies, regarding prevention and treatment, on behalf of the government. By 1994, Brazil had already consolidated its AIDS national programme. On the contrary, in South Africa the first truly autonomous and authoritative national AIDS programme was set up as late as 1998, when an interministerial National HIV/AIDS and STD Directorate was established within the Ministry of Health. By 1998, the epidemic had already reached alarming proportions in South Africa. Yet, South Africa’s National Directorate was staffed with only eighteen full-time members and seven short-term consultants. All of the preceding policies had a relatively minor effect, as they were very limited with respect 161

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to the number of staff, funds, decentralisation, proper government infrastructures, and the use of biomedical and social sciences knowledge (Gevisser, 2009). In 2000, the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) was established (National Strategic Plan on HIV, STIs and TB 2012–16). Chaired by the deputy president, SANAC is the multisector co-ordinating and advisory institution for government HIV/AIDS policies, with representatives from all government departments and nineteen CSOs (2012 South African Global AIDS Response Progress Report). Three representatives of PLWH are also members of SANAC, coming from the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA), and Positive Conventions. Various nonstate actors and experts observe, however, that, until 2007, SANAC was poorly recognised as the authoritative source of decision-making on AIDS policy (for example, Schneider, 2002). As a result, until recently, there was in practice no obvious decision-making centre for addressing the epidemic in South Africa. Furthermore, ten years after the advent of democracy and four years after the creation of SANAC (2004), though the infection rate was six times higher than in Brazil, the South African national government employed only about a hundred people with direct responsibility for HIV/AIDS (far fewer than the Brazilian government). For these reasons, during that period there was a considerable divide between policy planning and implementation of government anti-HIV measures (Wouters et al., 2010). The only major initiative carried out at this time was the ‘Sarafina II Scandal’, the production of an AIDS education musical based on the film Sarafina and designed to tour the country. It was criticised and abandoned by civil society for providing confusing and ineffectual messages, despite the astronomical sum at the time, of 14 million rand allocated to it (Martin-Tuite, 2011: 12; Gauri and Lieberman, 2004: 15; Mackintosh, 2009). The Use of Biomedical Science In Brazil, the struggle against HIV/AIDS has embraced biomedical science from the outset, and the state has made efforts to produce ARV drugs locally (40 per cent by 2012) and condoms, besides importing a portion of them from abroad. Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a leading institution in public health, which was founded in 1900, has played a pivotal role in this direction. 162

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While Brazil’s history of the relationship between science and politics concerning HIV/AIDS is roughly linear, in South Africa the issue is much more complex. Thus, South Africa’s national response to HIV/ AIDS until less than a decade ago must be placed within the broader framework of the history of science and medicine in the country which, in part, served as a ground for the infamous ‘denialism’ of President Mbeki (Martin-Tuite, 2011: 9–15). The argument made by the prominent historian of colonial medicine, David Arnold (1993: 9), about the central role of modern medicine in colonising processes is clearly irrefutable. Despite regional differences, inequalities and domination on a racial, cultural or regional basis, when compared to South Africa the recent history of Brazil has witnessed a more profound hybridity of its population that has contributed to a stronger sense of national unity, together with a reasonably good articulation between central government and local ­administrations, and between politics and biomedicine. As a result, compared to South Africa, biomedicine has been more inclusive and less problematic during the country’s recent history. More so than in Brazil, in South Africa, under both colonialism and apartheid, biomedicine provided not only a sense of self-worth and pride to European colonisers and apartheid rulers but also justification for the segregation and domination of indigenous populations, thus producing a dominant set of racialised biomedical practices as well as an increasing separation between medical experts and ordinary people (Martin-Tuite, 2011: 9). Serving as a unifying force for white rule, a strong faith and investment in Western scientific practice granted further legitimacy to European scientists whose classification systems contributed strongly to the perceived differences between themselves and their ‘indigenous ruled’. The legacy of this history is still present in post-apartheid South Africa, where ‘the majority of scientific experts and medical practitioners remain upper-class, white professionals, in stark contrast to the small number of black and non-white scientists and doctors’. This becomes very clear through the lens of the AIDS epidemic (Martin-Tuite, 2011: 10). The inability to construct an effective response to HIV/AIDS and a shared vision of the epidemic did not enable scientists and political leaders in the apartheid era to challenge the authority of orthodox scientific knowledge (Martin-Tuite, 2011: 12); the conformity of apartheid politics had merely privileged Western scientific knowledge. With the emergence of the liberal democratic state by 1994, however, 163

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the ­post-apartheid context subsequently allowed for critical thinking around the biomedical paradigm, also thanks to the incursion of an international AIDS-related dissidence into the national dialogue. While Brazil consolidated its national HIV/AIDS policies by the early 1990s, further strengthened by international loans and expertise, during the same period South Africa saw a regression in HIV/AIDS policies; we shall return to this point later. The relationship between biomedicine and politics in the HIV/ AIDS field began to change radically as a result of the national controversy over Virodene, a locally produced drug that its Afrikaner producers, Olga and Zigi Visser, presented as ‘an alternative medicine with the potential to disprove once and for all Western stereotypes of black African capacity’ (Myburgh, 2009: 4, cited in Martin-Tuite, 2011: 12). Actions were taken by the Mandela government (1994–99), with Deputy President Thabo Mbeki at the forefront, with the aim of working around the existing drug regulatory framework in order to approve Virodene. Unfortunately, Virodene proved to be only a mixture of industrial solvents produced by two laboratory technicians with no toxicological experience. Embarrassment followed within the ANC government for its support of pseudoscience. Later, the rhetoric and actions of Thabo Mbeki’s administration (1999–2009) concerning HIV/AIDS would be indelibly marked by denialism. Supported by an international group of a handful of dissident scientists and by his loyal Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, President Mbeki established the Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel in 2000 not only to deny ‘scientifically’ the HIV–AIDS causal relationship and thus ART to PLWH (Nattrass, 2007) but also, more reasonably, to insist on the toxicity of ART. Dissident biologist Peter Duesberg was one of the key members of the advisory panel. Equally important was the fact that, in contrast to Brazil, where democracy was already consolidated, the recent democratic arrangement in South Africa posed a myriad priorities for the government and CSOs, HIV/AIDS being just one of them. By implication, when compared to Brazil, attention was more dispersed in South Africa. This validates the thesis about Brazil’s earlier democratisation as a key element in the country’s successful HIV/ AIDS policies, as some scholars have suggested (for example, Berkman et al., 2005). But, again, more complex inquiry suggests that this is not an important parameter in explaining Brazil’s successful and South Africa’s unsuccessful AIDS policies in the long run. Mbeki’s ‘denialism’ must be understood in a broader context. 164

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Throughout the ANC struggles, Mbeki served as a public intellectual, a fact that earned him important positions of power at the apex of the struggle against apartheid (Gevisser, 2009). He had acquired those capacities through his early involvement in ANC activities, his education, obtained in England and Russia, and his work for the ANC in exile as both a high-level operative and a speech writer. As deputy president in the Mandela administration, Mbeki presented himself as a triumphant and visionary leader for African renaissance. Mbeki understood his African renaissance as an attempt to achieve the complete emancipation of the continent from the social, cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and apartheid. ‘Pan-Africanism’ was a key element of the project and so AIDS was a global threat to the future of Africa that had to be confronted by a uniquely African solution (Posel, 2008). In line with his African renaissance vision, following personal communications, Mbeki joined AIDS dissidents in denying that HIV was the cause of AIDS and considering ART as more harmful than beneficial to PLWH (Mackintosh, 2009; Butler, 2005). Mbeki also argued that Western theories and histories of HIV, elaborated on the basis of largely homosexually transmitted patterns, were not applicable to the African context which involved largely heterosexually acquired cases of HIV. Using his position of political and social authority, Mbeki made several public statements to express his way of repoliticising AIDS science in the context of post-apartheid South Africa (Nattrass, 2007; Posel, 2008). So, the history of colonialism, apartheid and racist science laid the ground for Mbeki and other South African decision-makers’ doubts about the benevolence and coherence of the biomedical explanation for the spread of HIV/AIDS (Butler, 2005). In Mbeki’s view, the biomedical HIV/AIDS explanation seemed to resonate strongly with racist and colonial images of Africans. Locally, Mbeki’s questioning of Western scientific knowledge found support with various individuals and organisations sharing the same vision. According to Cullinan (2009), in 2005 prominent figures, such as South African lawyer, Anthony Brink, and Dr Matthias Rath, a German doctor and businessman, launched the Treatment Information Group, an advocacy coalition science-critical organisation which included the Traditional Healers Organisation (THO), the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO), and the National Association of People Living with AIDS (NAPWA). By that time, Dr Rath had even established his own ‘alternative medicine’ operations in the Khayelitsha township in Cape Town, apparently framing his critique of Western 165

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science within related community sentiments. Consequently, ART was universally introduced into the public health system only as late as 2001, largely thanks to a Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) legal victory over the state. ‘Denialism’ gave space to critical approaches from academic and SMs/NGOs which also denounced the ANC’s centralisation of political power. TAC was, and probably remains, the biggest and most successful organisation in HIV/AIDS advocacy and education, pushing the government to set up an effective HIV/AIDS policy. As Martin-Tuite notes (2011: 17) TAC’s mobilisation of different segments of society ‘signalled a gradual reframing of scientific authority to pockets of South Africa, whereby the public no longer views scientific knowledge as exclusively for elite, educated professionals but also for broader public understanding’; the massive civil-society response is another difference with Brazil that is worth commenting on. Despite the significant response of TAC and other CSOs to the HIV policy debacle, South Africa’s government approval or support of science-critical enterprises remained in place until very recently. In 2006, Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, appeared at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto with the infamous government anti-AIDS prescription: a recipe of vegetables and vegetable products, including garlic, beetroot, and olive oil (Posel, 2008; Cullinan, 2009). Even when Mbeki stopped making public comments on HIV/AIDS treatment after 2001, Tshabalala-Msimang continued with her rhetoric in a manner that openly discredited scientific authority. ‘Whose science?’ was her response to the United Nations’ critical comments of the ANC government’s lack of scientific support (Posel, 2008). Significant changes in the struggle against HIV/AIDS in South Africa began to emerge by early 2007 when the South African National AIDS Council was completely restructured, largely through civilsociety pressure. Concomitantly, TAC restructured itself, with former General Secretary, Zackie Achmat, leaving his position to Vuyiseka Dubula, a young seropositive lady, thus allowing the emergence of a new generation of TAC activists. By the fall of 2007, Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang disappeared from the public discussion and were largely recognised as having caused massive damage to the country: in terms of numbers, more than 320,000 AIDS-related deaths. By 2008, following a crisis in the ANC, both political figures were forced out of office altogether by the party, so they almost completely disappeared 166

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from public life, with Tshablala-Msimang dying in mid-December 2009, following a protracted illness (Martin-Tuite, 2011). In such an atmosphere of restructuring, indigenous medical practices and beliefs­ – historically marginalised by white domination, a problem that Mbeki tried to solve in a particular manner­– are portrayed as peripheral to science: ‘the consequence may be pushing indigenous populations even further to the edge of national politics’ (Martin-Tuite, 2011: 21); but it could, as well, be an opportunity for TAC to demonstrate its abilities to, for example, extend its social-mobilisation and treatment-access campaigns to the rural homelands of indigenous populations (Robins, 2008: 126). Conversely, ‘denialism’ concerning AIDS has never been recorded at any politico-institutional level in Brazil, and there has never been such a negative influence within the ruling party or at the level of society. Instead, by 2001, ART was a common medical practice in Brazil, expanding even further when Minister of Health, José Serra, in Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration, broke the pharmaceutical industry’s patents on ARV drugs on the basis of human rights and universal access to health. Eventually, during that period, South Africa’s TAC worked closely with Brazil’s Fiocruz and other international bodies to influence the Doha trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) agreement in November 2001 which recognised the right to free access for PLWH to ARV drugs, thus prioritising public health in opposition to pharmaceutical companies’ patents on life-saving drugs (Nauta, 2011). The South African state did carry out some necessary policies in the first phase of HIV/AIDS. For example, as regards prevention, South Africa led the way and was more aggressive with the safety of blood products since 1985, passing a law that prohibited commercialisation of such products and subordinated its control to health authorities, while Brazil did not do so until 1988, when the post-dictatorship constitution was promulgated (Gauri and Lieberman, 2004: 15). But, overall, South Africa did not carry out solid and sound policies that involved an engagement with society so as to produce significant social change leading to healthier behaviours. In general, the period between the late 1980s and the early 1990s witnessed not only the proliferation of health CSOs in Brazil but also their legal recognition and increased accountability. Conversely, in South Africa, instead of encouraging a constructive dialogue, the state’s centralisation of politico-administrative power marginalised the role 167

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of AIDS CSOs which worked in significant isolation from government actions (Crewe, 2002); this would be the case until very recently. The same applies to the role of the social sciences and humanities. Even when prevention activities were carried out throughout South Africa, they were not sufficiently informed by social or political theory and there was no real comprehension of the outcomes so as to elaborate future interventions accordingly (Uys and Alexander, 2002).

Concluding Remarks This chapter has sought to explore the political factors that have strongly contributed to contemporary Brazil’s low and South Africa’s high HIV prevalence rate (less than 1 per cent versus 17 per cent). It has argued that, particularly throughout the period between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, Brazil acted in a much more timely and effective manner than South Africa against HIV/AIDS by implementing a comprehensive HIV/AIDS programme of prevention, treatment and care. This is because of a stronger sense of political community, administrative decentralisation and openness towards sexual discourses and diversity. Unlike what happened in South Africa, in Brazil the government recognised very early and emphatically that HIV was a threat to the entire nation. Rather than following a strictly top-down approach, Brazil’s HIV/AIDS programmes involved local administrations, civil society organisations and other constituencies. Also, this was done within a clear and authoritative national plan. On the contrary, South Africa’s government embarked on controversial policies that culminated in the denial of the HIV–AIDS causal link and the public ­provision of ART, the latter deemed more harmful than beneficial to pwlha. By questioning the benevolence and effectiveness of Western biomedical and social sciences relating to AIDS, President Mbeki, in particular, emphasised anti-imperialism and the African renaissance as part of post-apartheid South Africa’s path which, in his understanding, meant radical autonomy from Western countries and holistic decolonisation. It is important to remember that political actions discussed in the present chapter as determinants of HIV/AIDS comprise just one aspect of the problem. Indeed, the epidemic is tightly linked to the sociocultural, economic and political panoramas. Therefore, talking about HIV/AIDS in terms of causes, effects, prevention and treatment implies touching upon issues relating to power and inequalities (Naidoo and Misra, 2008; Hall and Lamont, 2009). Such dynamics occur not only 168

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in the public arena at the macro structural-institutional level, whether legislative, political or in the media, but also in the spheres of the common people’s intimate and everyday lives. This implies that, first, the theoretical reflections stemming from empirical studies, and meant to inform intervention strategies, require holistic approaches that take into account a number of factors explaining people’s vulnerability to HIV, and, second, that such interventions must be multilevel and interorganisational. In Brazil and South Africa most of the HIV contagion occurs via sexual intercourse, predominantly in male–male sex in the case of Brazil, and male–female sex in the case of South Africa. As regards the analysis of social determinants of HIV, unlike the old prevention formulas which emphasised ABC/KAB (abstain, be faithful, condomise/ knowledge, attitude, behaviours), more recent empirical studies in both societies show that the problems to be addressed do not concern exclusively or directly sexual desire and unprotected sex. This assumption is based on mistaken rational–individualistic thinking, according to which, once individuals are knowledgeable about the HIV risk, they will adopt healthy behaviours such as the use of condoms or even abstention from sex. Rather, studies in Brazil and South Africa focus on the multiple factors explaining why people knowingly behave in ways that endanger their health and life. In particular, emphasis is placed on economic power and its interaction with symbolic aspects, such as masculinities and femininities, status and trust. Thirty years of HIV epidemic have taught Brazil and South Africa that policies must take into account the complexity of HIV/AIDS, perceive it as a threat to everyone, and develop intervention strategies locally but within a broader project of development. To use an example, this is, indeed, the attitude reflected in the title of the Sixth South African AIDS Congress of June 2013: Building on Successes–Integrating Systems. As far as services needed by PLWHA go, ‘positive prevention’ is a concept in vogue today and refers to the comprehensive set of physical, psychological, social and legal assistance that PLWHA need in order for them to conduct a normal life. This means that seropositive individuals and couples should exercise their full human and citizen activities, including sexual and reproductive ones. It goes without saying that ‘positive prevention’ is far more developed in Brazil than in South Africa but the latter society has recently made efforts in HIV/ AIDS policies and counselling, on the basis of which such a complex set of assisting actions can be built within social development frameworks. 169

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The ‘Brazilian model’ of response to HIV/AIDS is today criticised locally by a coalition of health professionals, CSOs and social scientists. They argue that, now, rather than talk about a ‘model’, we should be talking, instead, about ‘Brazil’s good experience’, since, in recent years, political and financial investment has decreased, especially with regard to politicising HIV and supporting AIDS CSOs. Consequently, they argue, not only is the government’s HIV-related investment insufficient for historically at-risk groups (MSM, CSWs, IDUs) but it is also unable to provide for the new cases of contagion, in age groups which had, until recently, remained largely untouched by the epidemic: twelve to eighteen, fifty to sixty and the over sixties. CSOs also criticise the government for ‘co-opting’ their leaders into the centres of power which further impoverishes AIDS CSOs. The government responds to such criticism as follows: regarding the co-opting thesis, with the coming to power of Lula’s Workers’ Party, it is natural that leaders from CSOs enter politics and institutions; as regards financial support to AIDS NGOs/SMs, these organisations have not been able to adapt to the neo-liberal context, being dependent on: 1. government funding since international loans ceased in the late 1990s, and 2. AIDS funds, instead of elaborating multisector projects, as required by the government for the funding of non-government-led activities. The debate on the boundaries separating different forms of citizenship is, therefore, very much alive. It is right to point out, however, that whatever the case may be, in Brazil, as everywhere, the relationship between the government and CSOs, with respect to development projects, is less problematic when CSOs are not overly and overtly critical of the government. Be that as it may, in Brazil such controversies are generally more evident at the local level, where the current decentralisation of public health services has revealed important limitations. The call for a secular state in Brazil and the presence of progressive religious groups in South Africa are mentioned by researchers and health practitioners as major challenges in the struggle against HIV/ AIDS today. Indeed, the Brazilian government has recently appointed evangelical figures to key positions in health and human rights departments, dismissing historically progressive figures such as Dr Dirceu Greco. The new appointees occasionally go as far as banning HIV peer education activities for prostitutes and proposing ‘gay cure’. Medical male circumcision is notably used in South Africa as a prevention method, with corresponding repercussions on debates about traditional male circumcision and its connections to ethnicity, gender 170

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and sexuality. Brazilian society and authorities exclude male circumcision as an HIV prevention method on the grounds that such practice has not been shown to be an adequate prevention method and, in addition, does not fit in with Brazilian mainstream culture, and implies genital mutilation which is against human integrity. Race is a crucial issue in health matters. Owing to racial inequalities and apartheid, race has always been a central theme in South Africa’s public health debates. Indeed, one important debate in today’s South Africa concerning race focuses on whether to target (poor) black people­– the most vulnerable group­– or follow UNAIDS indications about ‘scaling up’ the whole population in order to achieve the zero HIV/AIDS model. Generally speaking, interviews with experts and practitioners recently conducted by this author reveal that, overall, black people are in favour of the zero model. This goes with the idea of deracialisation of society and, above all, destigmatisation. Conversely, white people advocate the ‘positive racialisation’ of HIV policies, thus targeting blacks, because racial groups live in ‘separate worlds’ that do not leave room for significant inter-racial sexual relations. As we have seen, Brazil’s history does not show this level of explicit debate on race. In recent years, however, this theme has increasingly been at the centre of attention. This debate on race and health in Brazil is linked to affirmative action policies and massive use of the race variable in health statistics to show race-based inequalities of access to health services. These debates can be observed within the Brazilian Sanitary Reform Movement. Being historically Marxist oriented, the Sanitary Reform Movement uses the concept of class as the key explanatory tool, with race hence being overshadowed. But, the movement’s new generation now challenges such understanding of the process of unequal access to health. The Sanitary Reform Movement is therefore undergoing a restructuring process, the effects of which are bound to resonate in the political sphere because, historically, members of the movement have found positions inside the centres of power. It would be interesting to study in comparative terms Brazil’s new national projects that take into account race and South Africa’s commitment to deracialisation. Finally, in attempting to better people’s economic conditions, it is also crucial to pay attention to the unintended effects of such measures. For example, ‘child grant’ in South Africa often incentivises men and women to procreate, even engaging in non-stable relations, which means that sex for procreation becomes an important driver of HIV (Naidoo and Misra, 2008). In this light, it would be interesting to 171

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explore the effects of Brazil’s ‘Bolsa Familia’, another recent Brazilian economic policy.

References Arnold, David (1993), Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century India, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bastos, Cristina, J. Galvão and R. G. Parker (1994), ‘A AIDS no Brasil: (1982–1992)’, Coleção História Social da AIDS, 2, Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará IMS. Berkman, Alan, J. Garcia, M. Muñoz-Laboy, V. Paiva and R. Parker (2005), ‘A Critical Analysis of the Brazilian Response to HIV/AIDS: Lessons Learned for Controlling and Mitigating the Epidemic in Developing Countries’, American Journal of Public Health, 95: 7, 1162–72. Butler, Anthony (2005), ‘South Africa’s HIV/AIDS Policy, 1994–2004: How Can it Be Explained?’, African Affairs, 104: 417, 591–614. Crewe, Mary (2002), ‘Commentary: Reflections on the South Africa HIV/AIDS Epidemic’, Society in Transition, 33: 3, 446–54. Cullinan, Kerry (2009), ‘Government’s Strange Bedfellows’, in K. Cullinan and A. Thom (eds), The Virus, Vitamins and Vegetables: The South African HIV/AIDS Mystery, Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Fassin, Didier (2007), When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Gauri, Varun and E. S. Lieberman (2004), ‘AIDS and the State: the Politics of Government Responses to the Epidemic in Brazil and South Africa’, (last accessed 19 April 2014). Gauri, Varun and E. S. Lieberman (2006), ‘Boundary Institutions and HIV/ AIDS Policy in Brazil and South Africa’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 41: 3, 47–73. Gevisser, Mark (2009), A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Peter and M. Lamont (2009), Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health, New York: Cambridge University Press. Mackintosh, Daniel (2009), ‘The Politicisation of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: Responses of the Treatment Action Campaign and South African Government, 1994–2004­– a Literature Review’, University of Cape Town/CSSR Working Paper, No. 244, (last accessed 21 April 2014). Martin-Tuite, Patrick (2011), ‘“Whose Science?” AIDS, History, and Public Knowledge in South Africa’, Intersect, 4: 1, 8–25. Myburgh, James (2009), ‘In the Beginning There Was Virodene’, in K. Cullinan and A. Thom (eds), The Virus, Vitamins and Vegetables: The South African HIV/AIDS Mystery, Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Naidoo, Kammila and K. Misra (2008), ‘Poverty and Intimacy on Sexual Exchange, Reproductive Dynamics and AIDS in South Africa’, South African Review of Sociology, 39: 1, 1–17. Nattrass, Nicoli (2007), Mortal Combat: AIDS Denialism and the Struggle for Antiretrovirals in South Africa, Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

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HIV/AIDS Policies in Brazil and South Africa Nauta, Wiebe (2011), ‘Mobilising Brazil as Significant Other in the Fight for HIV/ AIDS Treatment in South Africa: the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its Global Allies’, in T. Dietz, K. Havnevik, M. Kaag and T. Oestigaard (eds), African Engagements: Africa Negotiating an Emerging Multipolar World, Leiden: Brill, pp. 133–62. Nunn, Amy (2010), The Politics and History of AIDS Treatment in Brazil, New York: Springer-Verlag. Parker, Richard (1994), ‘Public Policy, Political Activism, and AIDS in Brazil’, in D.  A. Feldman (ed.), Global AIDS Policy, Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 28–46. Parker, Richard (ed.) (1997), Políticas, Instituições, AIDS: Enfrentando a Epidemia no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: ABIA. Pimenta, Maria C., C. A. F. Passarelli, I. Brito and R. Parker (2002), ‘As pesquisas sociais sobre sexualidade e AIDS no Brasil: entre a demografia e a cultura sexual (1980–2000)’, in R. Parker and V. Terto Jr (eds), Pesquisa em DST/AIDS: Determinantes Sócio-demográficos e Cenários Futuros, Rio de Janeiro: ABIA, pp. 47–56. Posel, Deborah (2008), ‘AIDS’, in N. Shepherd and S. Robins (eds), New South African Keywords, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 13–24. Robins, Steven L. (2008), From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movements, NGOs & Popular Politics after Apartheid, Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer. Schneider, Helen (2002), ‘On the Fault-line: the Politics of AIDS Policy in Contemporary South Africa’, African Studies, 61: 1, 145–67. UNAIDS (2012a), Progress Report on the Brazilian Response to HIV/AIDS. UNAIDS (2012b), South African Global AIDS Response Progress Report. Uys, Tina and P. Alexander (2002), ‘AIDS and Sociology: Current South African Research’, Society in Transition, 33: 3, 295–311. Wagner, Peter (2008), Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity, Malden, MA: Polity Press. Wouters, Edwin, H. C. J. van Rensburg and H. Meulemans (2010), ‘The National Strategic Plan of South Africa: What Are the Prospects of Success after the Repeated Failure of Previous AIDS policy?’, Health Policy and Planning, 25: 3, 171–85.

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8 Land and Restitution in Comparative Perspective: Analysing the Evidence of Right to Land for Black Rural Communities in Brazil and South Africa Joyce Gotlib

S

Introduction

ince the opening of the process of democratic reconstruction during the 1990s, historical reparation policies have been implemented in Brazil and South Africa to atone for injustices committed by both states against the black population during the previous centuries. In this chapter, we shall debate and compare the legitimised objects linked to the right to land of black rural communities, associated with the reparation policies in these two contexts.1 In the Brazilian case, legal recognition of landownership of areas occupied by reminiscences of quilombos (descendants of the slave population) is part of the affirmative action policies adopted by the federal government to combat racial discrimination since the proclamation of the constitution of 1988. These actions have received a great deal of criticism because conservative sectors of society still rely on the myth of racial democracy, aiming at reproducing and sustaining the white, slave-owning, racist and monocultural face of our ‘civilising’ process. In the South African context, the land restitution programme, aimed at the reparation of injustices committed during the apartheid, is criticised for not having met the goals of transferring 30 per cent of arable land into the hands of black farmers. In the newspapers, the word ‘failure’ is a constant in debates about the dilemma of land reform, aiming at attesting the inability both of the government and of the African National Congress in providing for the country’s agricultural development. 174

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Within the field of social theory, several authors have tried to think about historical restitution policies (Fay and James, 2008; Barkan, 2000; Verdery, 2004; De Greiff, 2006). Most of their efforts, however, did not address or, indeed, cross the south–north dichotomy, using the reconstruction of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust and North American indigenous peoples’ reparation as their comparative basis. Nevertheless, over the last few years, the issue of ancestral land rights has been widely debated among African and Latin American researchers. The recent studies on this theme have shown the singular ‘orders of worth’, borrowing terminology from Boltanski and Thévenot (1991, originally ‘orders of grandeur’), related to land, that emerge in countries whose historical trajectories differ from occidental contexts. The indigenous cosmology, recently studied by Brazilian anthropologists (Viveiros de Castro; Cunha), reveals that the land in these societies is, as are other objects, endowed with agency, mediating rituals and participates in their modes of existence. In the South African context, some anthropologists (James, 2008) have also shown the singular meanings of land and animals, demonstrating the failure of Western theoretical frames of reference in understanding these non-European contexts. Thus, this chapter tries to demonstrate that the state, in the contemporary Brazilian and South African contexts, legitimises ‘orders of grandeur’ of land that differ from its Western conception­– which understands it only as an economic good­– converting these grandeurs into state legibility. Secondly, we attempt to underline the different ways in which ancestral land rights are justified by the state in these research contexts, in which ancestors, saints and graves have agency as do human beings. This investigation will be carried out through an analysis in a comparative perspective of two sets of documents: two technical reports, belonging respectively to the two contexts under scrutiny, containing the synthesis of the evidence of restitution/reparation of the rights to the ancestral land to the Bhangazi group, claimants of a portion of land in the Isimangaliso Park, Hlabisa District, on the North of KwaZuluNatal, South Africa, and the quilombola community of Ivaporunduva, located in the Ribeira Valley, municipality of Eldorado, in the southeast of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The quilombola community of Ivaporunduva was one of the first to receive its land title but they are still fighting for basic rights. In approximate numbers, out of the five thousand communities in Brazil claiming their rights, only 170 have received land titles (source: 175

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Comissão pro Índio; CONAQ). In the Ribeira Valley, recognised as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999, the Jacupiranga Mosaic Act of 2008 redefined the borders of environmental protection parks and quilombola lands. This law was received with severe criticism because of the lack of popular participation and the restrictions to land cultivation. By the end of 2011, the quilombola circuit programme was launched. It is an ethno-touristic project based on the communities, with routes for six of the communities in the region. Furthermore, a partnership with the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Instituto SocioAmbiental has developed a project of growing organic bananas which faces distribution difficulties because of lack of access to main state roads. The South African restitution programme bears similarities to the challenges faced by the quilombo populations in Brazil. The number of concluded land cases is very small and, in most cases, the claimants were not granted any rights of property or use of the lands their claims bore upon. In the settlement between the Bhangazi, the park’s authority and the Land Commission, each family received 30,000 rands as financial compensation and a piece of land (where the leader Lokotwayo was buried), destined for the construction of a hotel and a museum (Walker, 2008). In the year 1999, the great park of St Lucia was also declared a Natural World Heritage Site, because of the uniqueness of the wetlands of the region, together with its flora and fauna. The conservation unit was expanded and renamed as Isimangaliso­ – which means ‘The Miracle’. In the same year, the national government approved a law on the administration of World Heritage. This ­legislation, based on the Australian model, has altered the administration and the relationship with the beneficiaries and the communities around the park, launching an era of comanagement under the false premise of participation which modified, to an extent, the initial agreement, increasing the rights of the Bhangazi over the profits resulting from tourism in the park.

Gaining Rights During Democracy ‘Construction’ During the three centuries of the Portuguese colonial system in Brazil, the main labour force came from the enslavement of Africans. Even after the enactment of the Golden Law, abolishing slavery in Brazil in 1888, the black population remained excluded from civil, social and political rights. After that, the first federal constitu176

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tion of the republican period, passed in 1891, remained based on the Land Laws of 1850, reinforcing racial inequality and racism, leaving aside the rights regarding landownership by the descendants of slaves. The first legislation to promote black people’s rights was the federal constitution of 1988. It conferred juridical status to the land rights of the quilombola populations:2 Art. 68. To the descendants of quilombos residing on their lands, are recognized their permanent property rights, and the emission of the title deeds is a duty of the State. Besides their property rights, the law also recognised other kinds of rights, linked to the abolishment of racism and the respect of the Afrodescendants’ modes of existence, as we can see below: Art. 216. Constitute Brazilian cultural heritage: the goods of material and immaterial nature, taken individually or as a group, bearing reference to identity, to action and to the memory of different groups forming Brazilian society, including: I­– forms of expression; II­– modes of creating, making and living; III­– scientific, artistic and technological creations; IV­– works, objects, documents, buildings and other spaces destined for culturalartistic manifestations; V­– urban compounds and sites of historical, landscape, artistic, archaeological, palaeontological, ecological and scientific value. There is a lot of controversy surrounding this piece of legislation. A group of anthropologists believes that the conversion of a mode of being into a national heritage (and identity) could represent a conservative project about traditional populations. On the other hand, many scholars adopt the perspective that: The notion of ‘traditional’ cannot be reduced to history, not in the least to fundamental ties which support affective units, and incorporate the collective identities redefined situationally in a continuous mobilisation . . . The political-organizational criteria stand out, combined with a ‘politics of identitiy’, which social agents set in motion to confront their antagonists and the state apparatus. (Almeida 2004: 3) 177

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In the constitution text cited above, the expression ‘modes of creating, making and living’ valorises the unique use and occupation of land in present times, which contributes to the legitimacy of a mode of existence as proof of a population’s right over the occupied territory. Therefore, the intertwining of the land thematic with the black issue, in the Brazilian context, allows us to see the multiple orders of grandeur associated with the object ‘land’­– land to perform rituals; land as a mediator with ancestors­– allowing us to understand more broadly this research context and its problematic. In South Africa, the racial segregation regime occupied a large part of the construction process of its modern societal structure. This regime was based upon three discriminatory acts: the Glen Gray Act, of 1894, prohibiting communal forms of land use (Ntsebeza, 2005); the Native Lands Act of 1913, preventing native population (named ‘Bantu’ by the state) of owning, by means of purchase or rent, lands outside the reservations; and the Land Act of 1936, reinforcing the previous act and setting limits to the reservations’ zones and their respective ethnic groups, which would be ruled by Bantu authorities elected by the state.3 The consequences of this legislation, as we know, were disastrous. Millions of black people were dispossessed of their goods, their cattle and their land, contributing to the impoverishment and marginalisation of the black population in South Africa.4 The first democratic presidential election took place in 1994, following three years of negotiations with the National Party, and saw the victory of the African National Congress (ANC), represented by Nelson Mandela. During the first year of his presidential term, Mandela published the Restitution of Lands Act of 1994, with the aim of immediately initiating the reparation of injustices committed by forced evictions. The Restitution Act made provisions as follows: To provide for the restitution of rights in land, in respect of which persons or communities were dispossessed under or for the purpose of furthering the objects of any racially based discriminatory law; to establish a Commission on Restitution of Land Rights and a Land Claims Court; and to provide for matters connected therewith. Any person or the representative of any community who is of the opinion that he or she or the community which he or she represents is entitled to claim restitution of a right in land as contemplated in section 121 of the Constitution, may lodge such claim, which shall include a description of the land in question and the nature of the 178

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right being claimed, on the form prescribed for this purpose by the Chief Land Claims Commissioner under section 16.5 If one were to analyse the text of this legislation, the expressions ‘dispossessions’ and ‘any racially based discriminatory law’ emphasise that the right in land, in the South African context, relates to the experience of forced removal formalised by the racialist acts decreed from 1913 until 1993.6 The proclamation of the Act and its reproduction as part of the National Constitution of 1996 demonstrate the importance that the restoration of land had for the ANC at that period, being part of their political agenda since the beginning of forced removals. In addition, the provision for a Land Claims Commission also represents the centrality of the land restitution issue during the construction of democracy, being part of the state reconciliation plan instituted by the ANC.

Inside the Evidence on Ivaporunduva Inside our quilombo, we have historical landmarks: a chapel and a cemetery built by the slaves. There are important people coveting our lands­– mainly the businessman Antônio Ermírio de Moraes. Then, our greatest concern today is the titling of our lands. (Benedito Alves da Silva, Black community of Ivaporunduva, Eldorado/SP)7 Ivaporunduva’s quilombola community is located at the margins of the Ribeira do Iguape river, in the Ribeira Vale region, in the southeast of the state of São Paulo. Almost all the remaining Atlantic forest belongs to the area, hence its definition as a World Heritage Site. Ivaporunduva’s quilombolas have inhabited their land at least since the mid-eighteenth century, when their chapel, Nossa Senhora dos Rosários dos Homens Pretos (Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men) was built. The leaders of Ivaporunduva filed a Public Civil Action to the Federal Public Prosecutor on 22 August 1994, against the union, demanding the titling of their lands as a quilombo community. After a long wait, in the autumn of 1997, the Ivaporunduva community was visited by a technical team co-ordinated by anthropologist Deborah Stucchi, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, with the aim of producing a specialist report, as requested by the court. 179

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The aim was to conduct an anthropological investigation, by means of interviews with the residents, gathering narratives about their singular relationship with the land, their cultivation practices, as well as the identification of ancestral landmarks. Concomitant to the work of the Public Prosecutor, the provincial government published an Act, determining the elaboration of a Technical Scientific Report (TSR) by specialists, a step by the bureaucracy to legitimise the plea as ‘quilombo community’. The Ivaporunduva TSR was published in 1998 amid a tangle of disputes between land regularisation and environmental preservation.8 The TSR passage that we shall analyse below is a synthesis of these pieces of evidence, contained in pages 18 and 19 of the document: 1. Written sources (Krug and Schmidt) and the inhabitants’ oral tradition itself show that the community originated from a group of slaves that were compulsorily sent there, transferred as captive work-force destined to gold mining; 2. The existing chapel, listed by CONDEPHAAT (Council of Historical, Archaeological, Artistic, and Recreational Heritage), dates, according to written records, from 1791, and all indications are that it was built by the captives themselves, displaying evidence of a rather ancient occupation of the area, and a community heritage; 3. The slaves’ descendants rooted there never left the tract of land where they established themselves, making continuous and collective use of it, through various generations, towards the acquisition of their means of subsistence; 4. These slaves’ descendants produced an authentic community, i.e. an autonomous and self-sufficient group of family unities thanks to kinship, compadrio,9 and neighbouring bonds; 5. This group sees itself, and is also seen by others, as a distinctive group, carrier of their own identity based on ethnic, cultural, and historical elements; 6. The lands are regarded as property of the community, of the Saint, even though they are used by the family groups within the scope of their necessities. This configures a rather peculiar pattern of land heritage appropriation, the so-called ‘communal appropriation’. 7. The reports concerning the group’s constitution reveal a myth of origin, which links the beginning of the community as such to the arrival of Joanna Maria to that locality. 180

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First of all, the anthropologist in charge exhibits the group-founding experience of Ivaporunduva, named by anthropologists as a myth of origin, as main proof of the group’s slave ancestry. The myth refers to Ivaporunduva’s first ancestor: Bernardo Furquim, direct descendant of the slaves of the Portuguese owner Dona Joanna. The staff recreated the narrative told by the inhabitants through the chapel’s reference books, wills and marriage records, aiming at the exaltation of the myth, transforming it into evidence of the land rights they demand. Secondly, it was necessary to prove the antiquity of Ivaporunduva’s inhabitants.10 The Lady of the Rosary of Black Men chapel, listed as an historical heritage site by the government in 1972, represented compelling material evidence of the antiquity of that locality, reinforced by the tombs and ruins of other buildings. The continuous usage of the land was legitimated by the techniques of traditional growing such as the coivara,11 which functions also as proof of the ethnicity of the claimant group. In this case, the articles of the national constitution, which grant the land rights as a guarantee for the reproduction of the ways of life, allowed for that type of land management, interpreted as competence to legitimise their claimed quilombola ‘identity’. As for the fourth point, it was essential to demonstrate Ivaporunduva’s ‘autonomy’ and ‘identity’. As we consider this, we notice that the kinship and compadrio relationships convert Ivaporunduva into a collective subject. Besides this, the sociability and the mutual obligation networks between the inhabitants of this and other communities, engendered during the processes of social struggle and resistance that are part of this group trajectory, are transformed into an important proof of the group’s autonomy. Thereby, the ‘digging’, or investigation, is conducted both within the lived space and with the written documents: searching for traces of a collective existence in time. And it is precisely at the intersection between the ancestral marks (material and immaterial) and documental research, that further evidence is produced: the territoriality, which is dealt by items 5 and 6 of the TSR. In the Ivaporunduva case, the identity was built through the link between the inhabitants and the saint (Nossa Senhora do Rosário); everyone shares the idea that the saint owned the land and that their existence (past and present) was linked to the divine. Thus, all these proofs relating to the right to a particular area of land transform the meaning of ‘land’, insofar as other forms of being and of using land 181

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are understood as competences for being a beneficiary of this historical reparation policy. Finally, the concept of territory and communal appropriation was outlined. The collective appropriation of the territorial heritage has been translated as territoriality, a concept developed by social anthropologists who work with this theme. The expectation is that such a group should be recognised as the bearer of an identity attached to a singular land, under the gaze of the magistrates who are going to judge the case. We can infer thus far that the proofs of the Ivaporunduva community’s quilombola condition or status are associated with different orders of grandeur: land to work on; land to conduct rituals on; and land to reproduce the traditional knowledge. In other words, the construction of evidence demonstrates orders of grandeur in dispute, which also include the right to private property and the recognition of land as an object with agency. Next, we shall see how Cherryl Walker’s team, in association with other actors, produced the evidence for the Bhangazi case.

Getting Back the ‘Land of Dreams’12 The eastern shores of Lake St Lucia, a portion of land claimed by the Mbuyazi clan, are located at the north-east of the province of KwaZuluNatal, in the Isimangaliso Wetland Park. The Mbuyazi refer to their land as Nkokhweni, and claim they have lived in the region for more than six generations. Phineas Mbuyazi, the clan’s representative, filed a request for land restitution with the Regional Commission of KwaZulu-Natal on 24 September 1995, representing the Bhangazis. His involvement with the cause began in the mid-1980s, during P. W. Botha’s government, when his father’s brother, Lokotwayo, a notorious ‘sangoma’ (traditional healer), came to him in a dream, to tell Phineas to fight for the return of the Mbuyazi to Mkokhweni, the land of his ancestors: When Lokotwayo came to me through the dream, I called the people of Bhangazi together. Then I explained to them about this representation. They gave me their support. Thereafter I pursued the matter [. . . ] There were times when I would get fed up and want to stop, but Lokotwayo would come to me and say, ‘Who said you could stop?’ (Walker 2008: interview with Phineas Mbuyazi) 182

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On 29 September 1995, five days after Phineas filed his plea, the clan Mkwanazi, representing tribal authority Mpukonyoni, who had traditional jurisdiction over the area, filed a plea claiming the tribe’s collective rights to the same land: the south-west of Lake St Lucia. In March 1996, Cherryl Walker, head of the Land Restitution Commission of KwaZulu-Natal, accepted both registered requests, uniting them under a single proceeding named Bhangazi, the name of the lake where the Mbuyazi performed their rituals. To outline briefly the case trajectory, in 1956, Nkokhweni area was declared a Blackspot13 by the apartheid government, causing instability and conflict in the lives of the families living in the region. In that year, the Bhangazi received the first eviction notice, delivered by Natal Park Boards, the entity that managed the former state park of Eastern Shores. The land would be used for planting pine trees. This event marked the beginning of the group’s resistance, led by Lokotwayo Mbuyazi, who fought to stay permanently in the land of their ancestors. The resistance continued for eighteen years, until Lokotwayo’s death in 1974, the year in which the last families were evicted. In 1989, Richards Bay Minerals won the rights for titanium exploration in the dunes encircling the Eastern Shores, in the same year when the creation of the Great St Lucia Park was decreed. Owing to the pressure of environmentalist movements and entities, the company was forced to conduct an environmental impact study before beginning mining operations. The issuing of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) had an unexpected effect: it exposed the history of the eviction of the Bhangazi, erased by the pine plantation, including their demands found during the investigations conducted by the specialists hired for the drafting of the document. This evidence was used by Phineas as proof of their restitution rights and transformed into competences by the Land Commission, as required by the state bureaucracy. In 1996, the commission sent a report including the case evidence to the court, in order for it to proceed with trial of the Bhangazi as requested. The document contained seven arguments in favour of the acceptance of the case by the Land Claims Court: 3.1 By 19 June 1913, ownership of the Eastern Shores of the St Lucia wetland area, including Bhangazi, was vested in the State, in terms of the Zululand Annexation Act, 37 of 1879, and the establishment of the Zululand reserves by means of Deed of Grant No. 7638/1909. 183

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3.2 According to research, the inhabitants of this remote area were descendants of the Mbuyazi clan, arguably forming a separate grouping but brought under the authority of the Mpukonyoni tribal authority from the 1870s. In 1909, with the demarcation of the Zululand Reserves, Tribal Authority control over the area was terminated. 3.3 In the first half of the 20th century, the land was occupied and used by an unknown number of Zulu-speaking families, who remained there undisturbed for many years. During the 1951 Census their total number was put at 2075 people. 3.4 The inhabitants were not formally the owners of the land, however they enjoyed use and occupation rights to the land which, although rendered precarious by racial laws such as the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, persisted for many years. 3.5 After 1956, when the Cape Vidal and Eastern Shores Forest Reserves were proclaimed, the inhabitants were told that only those who worked for the Department of Forestry could remain on the land. Those who moved could obtain land only by pledging allegiance to the neighbouring tribal authorities such as Mpukonyoni (under Inkosi Mkhwanaze). 3.6 In the ensuing years, the land use and occupation rights of those inhabitants who did not move became increasingly precarious, until, in 1974, the last remaining people were finally removed from the land. 3.7 Due to an absence of documentary evidence, it is not clear from the records what law was used in the forced removal of these last inhabitants. It was possibly the Forest Act of 1941, perhaps in conjunction with Chapter IV of the 1936 Land Act. The possibility also exists that the removal was informal and/or illegal. (Preliminary report­– Rural Land Committee) The first item refers to the judicial situation of the claimed land. Through research in the official gazettes and previous legislation, the specialists attested that the piece of land claimed by the Bhangazi belonged to the state, a requirement of the Restitution Act.14 In items 2, 3 and 4, the history of the group occupation is described, aiming to prove the association of the Mbuyazi clan ancestry with the land claimed. Supported by historical research, Walker states that the clan occupied the region since remote times. In other words, the aim is to prove that the existence of the Mbuyazi at the Eastern Shores dates 184

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from before the colonisation process. Therefore, the Bhangazi right to the land would precede state rights.15 Walker also relied upon the narratives of Phineas Mbuyazi, representative of this clan, to reconstruct this trajectory. In the claim form, the leader identified six clan leaders who ruled the Mbuyazi clan during the two hundred years they would have been living in the surroundings of Bhangazi lake: Sokana Mbuyazi (1812–1821); Makhungu Mbuyazi (1821–1829); Dobo Mbuyazi (1829–1840); Hlawukane Mbuyazi (1840–1910); Siyakatha Mbuyazi (1910–1913); Lokotwayo Mbuyazi (1913–1971). (claim form cited by Walker 2008) The team of consultants compared the oral history presented by the claimants and historical and archaeological references about the lineages and clans that live in the St Lucia Park region over the last two centuries, based on Graham Dominy’s research, included in the EIA. Its purpose was to legitimate the narrative presented by the Mbuyazi clan, who were stated in this form to be politically autonomous, in contrast to the narrative presented by clan Mkwanazi, who said the Mbuyazi were chiefs subordinate to the Mpokonyoni tribe. Therefore, we note that owing to the dispute between the claimants, the team aimed to gather proof in accordance with the requirements of the Restitution Act and with reference to the political autonomy of the Mbuyazi clan. Items 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 refer to the history of the removal. Proof of forced eviction is essential to ensure the land right because it forms the basis of the Restitution Act. According to the form filled in by Phineas: Trucks were used to remove the people . . . The people were moved step by step until my father died in 1971 . . . About 56 families were left behind at KwaNodlembe who were the last to move in 1973. (claim form, Mbuyazi clan) Item 3.7 refers to the evidence that legitimises the event of the eviction as an involuntary act, thus being an injustice worthy of reparation. It aimed at attesting that the Mbuyazi and Mkwanazi were evicted through a racist or discriminatory act. Finally, I should like to emphasise the absence of any reference to the forms of land use during the time of land occupation. In contrast to the Ivaporunduva report, in which the uses of the land are employed 185

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as a competence, in the South African context it is necessary to prove that the claimants were invested with ownership rights prior to their eviction instead of proving some technical performance in the land. And such competences were proved by means of the marks of Mbuyazi former entitlements, such as ancestral graves and cattle byres. From the appendix to the Bhangazi court proceedings, it is clear that Walker had made use of the sentimental relationship between Phineas’s clan and Lake Bhangazi to support the need for restitution, as can be seen in other land claims as well. In the records of her conversations with Phineas, described in Walker’s book, Land Marked (2008), Walker points out that the land, as well as the hippos of the Bhangazi lake, were communicators between living and dead members of the clan. The lake was the site where the clan members, Lokotwayo included, sustained a relationship with their ancestors. The hippopotamus was the messenger between the two worlds, and Cape Vidal Beach was the site of their rites of passage. It was in the lake that Phineas sought comfort, talking to his deceased ancestors buried at the site. In this case, remembrance signals symbolise a re-engagement with the claimed land, demonstrating the acceptance, by state authorities, of ethnological elements as evidence of their land restitution rights. This acceptance also relates to the desirable use of the park by the white environmentalist movement. NGOs as well as state environmental bodies defended the project of keeping the lake as an untouchable place. The Bhangazi case for restitution was included in the government project of rural development through tourism, called the Lubombo Corridor, including safaris and natural reservations from KwaZulu-Natal to Mozambique. The secret agreements between government agencies had already ruled out the resettlement of the claimed area as a viable alternative to reparation, in accordance with the conservationist project of converting the area into a World Heritage Site. Thus, we can say that, in relation to the Bhangazi case, what was at stake was the restitution of history rather than the restitution of land. From the correlation between the examination of South African legislation and the analysis developed above, one can argue that the proof which ensures public recognition of the candidates’ right to land restitution belongs to competencies of different orders of grandeur: land as a mediator with the ancestors; land as a way of remembering the history of apartheid; and land as an economic good. Now, we shall proceed to a comparison between the two cases studied, aimed at 186

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stressing the articulations between the objects ‘land’ and ‘reparation’ in each research context.

Land and Restitution­– Considerations in a Comparative Perspective Reviewing the two case studies, we could say that the Bhangazi and Ivaporunduva reports show us the different ways in which restitution policies have been understood in Brazil and South Africa. In the former country, what is being restituted is three hundred years of injustice during the slave-owning era, through the right to stay on the land of their ancestors. According to Paulo, a local leader from Ivaporunduva, ‘the State has an historical debt with us’. It is a debt brought up to date through racial segregation and exclusion which persist in Brazilian society. In South Africa, restitution is related to the experience of being forcibly removed during apartheid; it is a restitution of history rather than a restitution of land (James, 2009). The South African constitution clearly states that the ancestral land restitution right applies to those removed between the years 1913 and 1993, according to the governing law of that time. In other words, the right to land restitution was linked to the injustice caused by eviction, and not to the injustices committed during the whole racist regime. Nonetheless, almost all black citizens had experiences of forced evictions among their families, which make them eligible and likely to receive restitution. With regard to similarities, the analysis demonstrates that, in both contexts, the long-term claimants’ occupancy, ancestrality, territoriality and suffered social injustice are employed to maximise the ­subjects’ claims to land rights. In the Brazilian context, the foundational experience (Godoi, 1998) of the group justified one of the key arguments for its linkage with slavery, while territoriality would ensure its ethnic nature. In the South African case, ethnic discourse is seen by human rights activists as conservative, as are the guidelines followed by the government since the promulgation of the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) in 2004 which prioritised the distribution of land to communities.16 Confronting the meanings of land contained in Brazilian and South African pieces of legislation, it is correct to affirm that both cases carry notions of ownership that differ from a Western understanding of these concepts. As Mafeje stresses: 187

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According to European jurisprudence, these two concepts (ownership and property) refer to some delineated portions of the physical solum and confer jurisdiction as well as exclusive control on the holder. In contrast, in sub-Saharan Africa the holder could be any of several things; the territorial authority (dominium eminens), the clan, the lineage, the household or production unit, but never the individual. Hence, a distinction is made between repository and use rights. As is quite evident in this instance, the holders are vertically organized groups with corporate rights and not the community as a whole. (2003: 10) Mafeje’s criticism supports the empirical findings of the research we aim to outline here: they demonstrate that, both in Brazil and in South Africa, the connections between land and people cannot be explained solely by the orders of grandeur of culture and labour. To make this point clearer, we may proceed to compare the evidence garnered and ‘mobilised’ by each report. Regarding the construction of ancestrality, we can assert that the two technical reports mobilise common objects in order to create the connection between past and present; both teams of experts enlist genealogies, ruins and graves to guarantee that link. In the Brazilian case, however, the link between the quilombolas and the land they lived on was proved by three other elements: the traditional cultivation methods employed in agriculture; the relationship between the residents and the religious entity of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men (Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Pretos) which, according to documents in the registry office, was the owner of the land; and the common use of land by the community. Concerning the evidence of injustice committed by the state, in the Ivaporunduva report it was crucial to construct relevance by means of the reconstruction of the foundational moment of the community, based upon its myth of origin. According to the Bhangazi report, the experience emphasised is the moment of eviction, based on testimony (Das, 2008) of the eviction and on its forceful character. Therefore, it was necessary to emphasise the victims’ stance because restitution is attributed to the violence of forced eviction linked to racial discrimination. Going back to the meaning of the object ‘land’, we could assert that, in both cases, there is reference to beings, the saint and the hippos respectively, that act and interact with living human beings, dem188

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onstrating that these documents are mobilising orders of grandeur in common: land as a mediator with ancestors; land to make rituals; land as a re-engagement with the past; and land as an economic good. Beyond that, it is very important to stress that, in these contexts, the state recognises these novel orders of grandeur and legitimates those as competences for acquiring land rights. Rosa (2012) and Borges (2011) have been trying to demonstrate, based on their research on the struggle experience of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), the various meanings of ‘land’ in South Africa. Analysing processes rarely examined in the social sciences, such as people’s struggle to bury their dead, they challenge the modern concepts used to explain the link between people and land, demonstrating their failure. In the view of the people we know [in South Africa], the land does not seem to be merely flat, three-dimensional or circular. The land is what is known from land, and, because of this, it happens to be a precious good. And it is this definition that both anthropologists and any others need to learn. (Borges, 2011: 243) When the justifications for ensuring the claim are ‘overstepped’, by relating them to a saint or to a hippopotamus, the usual analytical explanations reduce them to claims of culture or tradition. Following the same perspective as Rosa and Borges, we aim to avoid such foreclosure here. What we aim to highlight is that, in Brazil and in contemporary South Africa, hippopotamuses, graves, the bush, ancestors and saints act upon the world, magnifying the meaning of land. As we have seen in the examination of the specialist reports, such objects are accepted as part of the claimants’ narrative featured in the reports. While in the Brazilian case, however, such justifications are legitimised through the discourse of ethnicity and ‘identity’, in the South African example, the claim to ancestral land is free from this frame of reference, presenting itself as a universal right of those expropriated by apartheid. Performing rites for the ancestors, and the very nature of this bond, are devoid of any ethnic connotation, under the allegation that such link would mean to recall the old ghost well known to South Africans: racial categories and the Bantustans.

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Notes 1. This chapter is the result of one year’s work experience in the TRAMOD Research Project, from September 2011 to August 2012, and was also shaped by my participation in the Working Group of Ethnology and Rural Studies during the thirtysixth Annual ANPOCS Meeting, in Águas de Lindóia­– SP, Brazil, in October 2012. Translated by Daniela Araújo. 2. In the contemporary Brazilian context, the land titling policy for rural black communities was supported mainly by two pieces of legislation: by Article 68 of the transitory disposition of the federal constitution of 1988 and by Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization, of which Brazil is one of the signatories. Among several groups that participated in the juridical recognition of quilombolas’ land rights, the militants of the black movement, engaged in the struggle for racial equality and social inclusion of the black population, during the years of military dictatorship in the country, stand out (Carril, 2005; Arruti, 2006; Leite, 2000; Chagas, 2005). 3. Forced migration of natives to reservations, farms and cities was an ongoing process, which intensified in the 1960s when there was available funding for the forced eviction of large populations. For more details see SPP, 1985. 4. Besides the struggle by political parties, such as the ANC, opposing apartheid, several NGOs were formed during the resistance to the racist regime. These collective actors were essential for the publicising of the forced removals being committed by the state, because the parties were banished and their members exiled or under constant surveillance by the apartheid police. 5. The commission was responsible for the investigation and, in accordance with the Act, specialists could be hired to assist in the research and in the search for evidence concerning each claim. The case minutes resulting from the cases presented to the Court of Land signal that the place occupied by the social anthropologist is very controversial: in some cases, their participation was crucial to the plea; in others, it resulted in the loss of rights by the claimants. 6. Two years later, the publication of the National Constitution of 1996 shows the problematic overlap between property and land rights. In spite of the controversy, the assumption of land was inserted in the property clause, as can be seen below: 25. Property. (7) A person or community dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to restitution of that property or to equitable redress. According to the constitution, the paragraph concerning the right to land restitution to the population who suffered from racial discrimination is defined by Article 25, under the item ‘Property’; this fact demonstrates the supremacy of property rights over other rights, the ones referring to indigenous and autochthonous peoples among them. (James, 2007:16) 7. Since the mid-1960s, Ivaporunduva has been facing a fierce struggle against private and government development projects that aim to build hydroelectric plants to supply power to the mining companies in the Vale. The proposal to

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Land and Restitution in Comparative Perspective build the dams was headed by Antônio Ermírio de Morais, one of the richest businessmen in the country, and president of the Votorantim Group which retains national monopoly of the production of cellulose, zinc, aluminum, etc. In 1991, small farmers of the region were collectively organised against Votorantim Group’s enterprises, creating the moab (Movimento dos Ameaçados por Barragens­– Movement of those Threatened by Dams), in order to denounce the situation of injustice to which they were submitted. 8. It is important to state that four years after its publication and the construction of the community’s descriptive material, and following the writing of the report, the 10.850 Law was approved: it altered the boundaries of the park that form the Serra do Mar/Sea Range (Jacupiranga and Intervales), withdrawing from the park the land occupied by the quilombo community). Militants who worked at the Instituto São Paulo de Estudos Superiores (itesp) participated in this struggle, whose protagonists were Maria Ignes Maricondi, São Paulo Public Prosecution Service members, the quilombola population of the Vale, the EEACONE (Black Communities of Ribeira Valley Articulation Team), the MOAB (Movement of People threatened by Dams), ISA (Environmental Social Institute) activists, and the state environmental secretariat officers. Nonetheless, the implementation of the 9.985 Law, which established the Conservation Unities National System (snuc/cuns) altered, once again, the boundaries between park and quilombola lands in the Vale region. 9. Compadrio refers to the relationship between the godparents of a child and the child’s parents. 10. Both the Krug and Schmidt references were discovered by Queiroz (1983), the first contemporary anthropologist to write about Ivaporunduva. Between 1973 and 1980, he conducted research in the area, producing various pieces of evidence used by Stucchi. His master’s dissertation, under Professor Joao Baptista Borges Pereira’s supervision, was published in 1983. 11. The coivara is a ‘slash and burn’ system that has as its main characteristic the temporary occupation of a given area for growing of small crops. A clearing in the woods is opened up and subsistence crops are grown for one or two years. After this period, the location is abandoned and the forest regenerates itself. 12. This subtitle is a reference to Walker’s chapter ‘Land of Dreams’. 13. ‘A “Blackspot” was an area of land in which blacks lived in freehold in what the National Government regarded as white South Africa. The Blackspots were bought legally by blacks, either as individuals or as groups, before apartheid legislation made it illegal to do so, and many had been bought as far back as before the Union Government of South Africa in 1910. They were not the same as the black reserves, where 13% of the land had been officially set aside for 70% of the population, and where land was distributed by the chief.’ Definition available at: http://paton.ukzn.ac.za/Collections/blackspotsandforcedremovals.aspx 14. As featured in Article 3 of the Restitution Act: ‘Subject to the provisions of this Act, a person shall be entitled to claim title in land if such claimant or his, her or its antecedents­– (a) was prevented from obtaining or retaining title to the claimed land because of a law which would have been inconsistent with the prohibition of racial discrimination contained in section 8(2) of the Constitution had that subsection been in operation at the relevant time; and (b) proves that the registered owner of the land holds title as a result of a transaction between

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity such registered owner or his, her or its antecedents and the claimant or his, her or its antecedents, in terms of which such registered owner or his, her or its antecedents held the land on behalf of the claimant or his, her or its antecedents.’ 15. In this report, Walker does not employ the concept of immemorial time but it appears in several cases of restitution in the South African context to ensure rights for the black communities evicted during the apartheid. 16. ‘Restitution establishes the ground for a distinct kind of citizenship, by constituting people as members of communities or groups, often in response to these groups’ own insistence that they be seen in this way. The state may thus reinforce the idea of a community as native, indigenous, or autochthonous’ (Fay and James, 2008: 43).

References Almeida, A. W. B. de (2004), ‘Terras tradicionalmente ocupadas: processos de territorialização e movimentos sociais’, Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais, 6: 1, 9–32. Andrade, T. (1997), Quilombos em São Paulo: Tradições, Direitos e Lutas. São Paulo: IMESP. Arruti, J. M. (2006), Mocambo: Antropologia E História No Processo De Formação Quilombola, Bauru: Edusc. Barkan, E. (2000), The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices, New York. Boltanski, L. and L. Thevenot (1991), De la Justification: Les Économies de la Grandeur, Paris: Gallimard. Borges, A. (2011), ‘Sem sombra para descansar: etnografia de funerais na África do Sul contemporânea’, Anuário Antropológico, 2010/I. Cardoso, F. H. and E. Faletto (1979), Dependency and Development in Latin America, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Carril, L. de F. B. (2006), ‘Quilombo, território e geografia’, Revista Agrária, n. 3. Chagas, M. de F. (2005), Reconhecimento de Direitos Face ao (Des) Dobramentos da História: Um Estudo Antropológico sobre Territórios de Quilombos, doctoral thesis, post-graduate programme, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (1996), Preliminary Report: Eastern Shores of Lake St Lucia. Bhangazi Land Claim. Constitutional Assembly (1995), Documentation on Land Rights, Republic of South Africa: Constitutional Assembly. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (1993), Environmental Impact Assessment: Eastern Shores of Lake St Lucia, vols 1, 2, 3 and 4. Pretoria: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Environmental Services. Das, V. (2006), Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkeley and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press. Decreto nº 4.887 (2003), 20 November 2003, . De Greiff, P. (2006), The Handbook of Reparations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. EEACONE, Relatório sobre o Processo de Reconhecimento das Comunidades Remanescentes de Quilombos do Vale do Ribeira, no date.

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Land and Restitution in Comparative Perspective Everingham, M. and C. Jannecke (2006), ‘Land Restitution and Democratic Citizenship in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 32: 3. Fay, D. and D. James (eds) (2008), The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: Restoring What Was Ours. London: Routledge. Giacomini, R. L. B. (2010), Conflito Identidade e Territorialização: Estado e Comunidade Remanescentes de Quilombos do Vale do Ribeira­– SP, doctoral thesis, post-graduate programme in human geography, University of São Paulo. Godoi, E. P. De (1998), ‘O sistema de lugar: território, história e memória no sertão’, in Niemeyer and Godoi (orgs), Além dos Territórios: Para um Diálogo entre a Etnologia Indígena, os Estudos Rurais e os Estudos Urbanos, Mercado Letras. Gotlib, J. (2010), Getting Land Back to the People: A Interdependência entre Governo e Ongs na Produção de Beneficiários por Terra da Província de KwaZulu-Natal, África do Sul, master’s dissertation, post-graduate programme in sociology and law, Fluminense Federal University. James, D. (2007), Gaining Ground? ‘Rights’ and ‘Property’ in South African Land Reform, London: Routledge-Cavendish. James, D. (2009), ‘Burial Sites, Informal Rights and Lost Kingdoms: Contesting Land Claims in Mpumalanga, South Africa’, The Journal of the International African Institute, 79: 2, 228–51. Jornal da Unicamp, . Kepe, T. (2004), ‘Land Restitution and Biodiversity Conservation in South Africa: the Case of Mkambati, Eastern Cape Province’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 38: 3, 688–704. Leite, I. B. (2003), ‘Quilombos: questões conceituais e normativas’, Núcleo de Estudos Agrários e Desenvolvimento Rural, 1, pp. 1–5. Leite, I. B. (2005), ‘Os laudos periciais: um novo cenário na prática antropológica’, in I. B. Leite (org.), Laudos Periciais Antropológicos em Debate, Florianópolis: ABA/ NUER, pp. 15–28. Little, P. E. (2002), ‘Territórios sociais e povos tradicionais no Brasil: por uma antropologia da territorialidade’, Série Antropologia, n. 322, Department of Anthropology, UnB. Brasília. Mafeje, A. (2003), The Agrarian Question, Access to Land, and Peasant Responses in Sub-Saharan Africa, Civil Society and Social Movements Program Paper, Number 6. Mamdani, M. (1996), Citizen and Subject, Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Publishers; Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip Publishers (Pty) Ltd; London: James Currey Ltd. Monteiro, P. (2010), Desafiando o Direito de Propriedade: O Embate entre Diferentes Concepções de Direito Agrária Sul-africana, graduate monograph (social sciences), UFF, Niterói. Mostert, H. (2008), ‘Change through Jurisprudence: The Role of the Courts in Broadening the Scope of Restitution’, in Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: perspectives on land claims in South Africa, ed. Cheryl Walker et al., Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Ntsebeza, L. (2005) Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of Land in South Africa, Leiden: Brill. Oliveira, F. M. B. d’ (2009), Mobilizando Oportunidades: Estado, Ação Coletiva e o

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Recente Movimento Social Quilombola, doctoral thesis, post-graduate programme in political science, University of São Paulo. Pacheco, T. (2009), Desigualdade, Injustiça Ambiental e Racismo: Uma Luta que Transcende a Cor, Superintendência de Recursos Hidricos (org.), Justiça pelas águas: enfrentamento ao Racismo Ambiental, Salvador: Superintendência de Recursos Hidricos, pp. 11–23. Paton University, . Queiroz, R. da S. (1983), Os Caipiras Negros do Vale do Ribeira: Um Estudo de Antropologia Econômica, São Paulo: Editora EDUSP. Rosa, M. (2011), A Terra e suas Associações. Sobre as Políticas e Demandas por Terra na Africa do Sul Contemporânea (preliminary version), paper presented at the 35th Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais (ANPOCS) Annual Meeting. Rosa, M. (2012), ‘Reforma agrária e land reform: movimentos sociais e o sentido de ser um sem-terra no Brasil e na África do Sul’, Caderno CRH, Salvador, 25: 64, 99–114. Schmitt, A., M. Turrati and M. Pereira de Carvalho (2002), A Atualização do Conceito de Quilombo: Identidade e Território nas Definições Teóricas. Ambiente & Sociedade. Secretaria da Justiça e Defesa da Cidadania do Estado de São Paulo (1998), Relatório Técnico Científico sobre os Remanescentes da Comunidade de Quilombo de Ivaporunduva (Technical Scientific Report on the Quilombo Community Remnant Population of Ivaporunduva), Municipality of Eldorado­– SP. Snyder, R. and J. Mahoney (1999), ‘The Missing Variable: Institutions and the Study of Regime Change’, Comparative Politics, 32: 1, 103–22. Stucchi, D. (2005), Percursos em Dupla Jornada:O Papel da Perícia Antropológica e dos Antropólogos nas Políticas de Reconhecimento de Direito, doctoral thesis, Philosophy and Human Sciences Institute­– State University of Campinas (IFCH­ – Unicamp). Toneto, B. (1994), ‘Contra a corrente da exploração’, Revista Sem Fronteiras, 225, 19–21. Verdery, K. (2004), ‘The Obligations of Ownership: Restoring Rights to Land in Postsocialist Transylvania’, in K.Verdery and C. Humphrey (eds), Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy, Oxford: Berg. Walker, C. (2008), Land Marked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa, Johannesburg: Ohio University Press. Weinberg, M. (1996), Back to the Land, Gauteng: Porcupine Press. Wikipedia, . Wikipedia, .

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9 An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource Svjetlana Nedimović

A

past1 within the framework of transitional justice is reckoned with and assigned definite significance through the processes of truth seeking, prosecution, acknowledgment of suffering and ultimate redemption through reparations and targeted institutional reforms. This perception of the past and past reckoning reflects an understanding of society that overlooks the open-ended and deeply conflictual historicity of societal existence, captured in Castoriadis’s notion of the social–historical. The failure to recognise continuous engaging with the past as the gist of societal existence is related to the dominant conceptualisation of modern society. A society is modern insofar as it is ­radically detached from its past, because the prevalent conceptualisation of modern temporality is progressivist, as are also transitional justice narratives. The reconceptualisation of society as social–historical allows for a much broader understanding of past reckoning as engaging with the past beyond the framework of transitional justice, its processes and mechanisms. Certain changes in the field of past reckoning are heralded by the recent shift of focus and approach to transitional justice, suggesting ‘weariness of [conventional] institutions’ and moving away from the dominant understanding of transitional justice as ‘limited and linear’ movement (McEvoy and McGregor, 2008: 6). The motion is twodimensional­– towards civil society activities on the one hand,2 and on the other, to the processes in everyday life of communities which experienced mass violence and possibly continue to experience tensions and divisions.3 Transformative motions, however, retain continuities with the 197

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c­ onventional approaches that focused on the roles of crime tribunals and official truth commissions, where the past is treated as a burden to be overcome. As will be argued here, such understanding of the past is informed by the modern future-oriented conception of time. In that context, past reckoning is successful only insofar as it delivers society of its traumatic past. By contrast, I shall argue, on the basis of Castoriadis’s theory of the social–historical, that engaging with the past is an inescapable dimension of societal existence and its self-creative process. Such past is not necessarily a burden but can become a political resource in the (re)construction of political community. The resourcefulness of the past, however, is vitally dependent upon standing or permanent political institutions and normative frameworks, though this has been overlooked by previous analyses that focus on the importance of the ad hoc instruments of transitional justice and civil society. As the final section will demonstrate, drawing on the Historikerstreit papers and Dubiel’s study of parliamentary debates in West Germany, the unsettled past becomes a valuable political resource as long as it remains unsettled and, as such, a vital part and live matter of everyday political processes through the interconnected workings of collective political responsibility and political imagination.

Modern Uneasiness with Past Societies which experience intense and widely spread violence, often over a longer time period, are referred to as traumatised, and the processes of truth seeking and past reckoning are perceived as inescapable parts of their healing. In the medical jargon of transitional justice, these societies are depicted as sick, and they need to be restored to a healthy condition.4 A healthy society is one which is relieved from the burden of its past, which means that relations between groups that were previously locked in conflict are no longer burdened by the past, as suggested by a definition of reconciliation (Hayner, 2001: 189). Arguably, therefore, transitional justice seems to be built upon the Enlightenment vision of history as an irreversible, progressive movement that leaves no room for concern with the traumatic past (Teitel, 2000: 69). Political practitioners show the same tendency to discard concern with the past, allowing for, at best, its instrumental value. Thus, already from the late 1940s onwards, the German political elites, especially the conservative wing, insisted that Germany had learnt its lessons from the past. Their public addresses often took rhetorical leaps into the 198

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future. They focused on what was to be done and made it clear that the interval between past and future could not be but a rupture (Dubiel, 2002: 36–7). The focus on the future does not necessarily entail forgetting and silencing, as seen in Spain during the Franco regime. It does, however, rely on ‘overcoming the past’ which drove the majority of Spanish political actors to vote in favour of the Law on Amnesty (Aguilar, 2007: 6) especially when it is believed that dealing with the past would resuscitate the old tensions. This kind of pragmatic turn is often encountered in so-called negotiated transitions, hence the example of South Africa marks a watershed insofar as the trade-off did not compromise the quest for truth. Even the past acknowledged or honoured is often closed off within a special place in the public sphere, out of touch with the flow of social life. But nowhere is the inclination towards the closure and containment of the past as evident as in the much used phrase of ‘movement forward’; ‘transitional narratives are generally progressive and romantic’ (Teitel, 2000: 111). For example, seventeen years after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and without the official truth narrative, speeches by European Union officials to the government and public of Bosnia and Herzegovina frequently refer to the need to move forward and look toward the future.5 This understandably resembles the spirit of Helmut Kohl’s visit to Israel in 1984 when the burden of the past was acknowledged but the emphasis was placed on turning to the future (Dubiel, 2002: 171–3). There is more to this than the pragmatism of ‘gag rules’ dictated either by the extraordinary circumstances of transition or the political wisdom of democracy that seeks to prevent conflict by avoiding controversial issues (Holmes, 1995: 202). Underlying the (redemptive) turn to the future is one of the principal characteristics of conventionally understood modernity, that is, ‘a future-oriented conception of time that figures the present as a radical rupture from the past’. (Thomas, 2011: 726) As Koselleck points out, modernity is characterised by the wide and widening gap between ‘spaces of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectations’ so that no ‘expectation [can] be satisfactorily deduced from previous experience’. (Koselleck, 2004: 268) The proper preoccupation of a healed (modern) society is therefore its future: ‘Since everything that passes is eliminated for ever, the moderns indeed sense time as an irreversible arrow, as capitalisation, as progress.’ (Latour, 1993: 69)6 199

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The new legitimates itself. It counterposes itself to tradition as not only radically different but as superior (Habermas, 1997: 39–40). This faith in the healing and liberating power of the new underpins the discourse of reconciliation. Thus, in his discussion of agonistic reconciliation, which comes closest to capturing its open-endedness and incompleteness, A. Schaap suggests, much in the Arendtian vein, that reconciliation cannot be sought in what was, only in the new to be created. Once a moral and political order generated mass violence, the society that emerges into the post-violence time should not seek restoration but construction anew beyond the possibility of return, as there is nothing to return to (Schaap, 2001: 762). The principal precondition of such agonistic conceptualisation of reconciliation is not past reckoning, understood here as ‘the settling of accounts’, but ‘a radical break with the social order that underpinned the violence of the past’. (Schaap, 2006: 272) While Schaap’s proposal is appealing, especially as it illuminates the tragic impossibility of reconciliation (Norval, 2000) which is cautiously but firmly asserted and reasserted as the final objective of all past reckoning efforts, it is problematic in one fundamental way.7 It ignores the weight of the past order for any new order. Constitutions, for example, which are the foundational acts of the new order in the Arendtian understanding, as discussed in On Revolution, are not enacted in a temporal void: ‘Constitutions are enacted in ongoing societies (whether newly politically sovereign or otherwise) with pre-existing laws and legal systems, political organisations, cultural and linguistic and religious divisions, and norms and mores’ (Levy, 2009:192). Contrary to the specifically modern secular faith in constitutions as new beginnings, forged through the eighteenth-century revolutions, societies with a tragic past teach us that the past inevitably appears as an external constraint upon a society reconstituting itself, preventing a radical break with the previous condition.8 It is precisely through constitution making in the intervals of transition that we come to understand the ties of constitutions to both past and future, in contrast to contractarian paradigms: Constitutionalism in periods of radical political change reflects transitionality in its processes . . . [C]onstitutions associated with political change generally succeed preexisting constitutional regimes and are thus not simply created anew . . . [T]he content of principles of constitutional justice relates back to past injustice. From a transi200

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tional perspective, what is considered constitutionally just is contextual and contingent, relating to the attempt to transform legacies of past injustice. (Teitel, 2000: 196) In that sense, the past is deeply meaningful for beginning anew. A radical break may be less of a moment of rupture and more of an onerous and painful series of breaks, as revealed in Dubiel’s study (2002) of parliamentary debates in West Germany which, dealing with individual laws and acts, required repeated visiting and revisiting of the past. What is lost in this view of the past is that, apart from being a constraint, it can nurture the potential for overall societal transformation if, rather than transcended, it is continuously engaged with. To grasp its hidden potentials, however, our underlying notion of society itself ought to be appropriated from progressivist thought.

Reworking the Notion of Society The theory of society proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis could challenge the notion of a ‘healthy’ society as one that is future oriented. Castoriadis foregrounds the indefiniteness of society which is always both instituted and instituting: ‘There is the social as instituted, but this always presupposes the social as instituting’ (Castoriadis, 1998: 72). Society institutes itself through the closure of meaning (Castoriadis, 1994: 152)­– it answers away its formative questions and closes itself to questioning. The contingent and transitory form of society is thus forgotten as the latter aspires to assert its stable and immovable forms. But in doing so, it constantly recreates itself: ‘Society is creation, and creation of itself: self-creation’ (Castoriadis, 1994: 149). Society, however, is not simply a dynamic being­– it is not a being at all, or is more of a non-being (Castoriadis, 1998: 72). The non-being is the creative power which is not an attribute of society but society itself, and the creative process which is not an action of society but is society. The process of indefinite recreation is the excess of society which spills over into its system of institutions, norms, meanings, symbols, customs­ – eventually to explode it. The excess of the instituted is the instituting­ – the self-alteration of society which is not the activity of society but what society is, it is the ‘is’ of society: ‘The perpetual self-alteration of society is its very being’ (ibid.: 235). The self-alteration of society thus understood does not produce history, it is history (ibid.: 117). 201

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If society is about self-alteration and self-alteration is history, it follows that history cannot be understood as a society’s history­– it is the society, just as self-alteration is not a process conducted by a being that is the society but is the being of society: ‘As instituting, as well as instituted, society is intrinsically history­– namely, self-alteration’ (ibid.: 235), where self-alteration brings about the radically new. For this reason Castoriadis rejects the epistemic and ontological claim that society and history can be experienced and grasped separately­– the meaningful engagement with the two must, in fact, be engagement with the social–historical (ibid.: 106). The banal interpretation that society cannot be understood without understanding its history, where history is reduced to the past, is simplistic and plain wrong. Transformation, which is both the ontic and the ontological of society, is what history is: It is not that every society is necessarily ‘in’ time or that a history necessarily ‘affects’ every society. The social is this very thing­– ­self-alteration, and it is nothing if it is not this. The social makes itself and can make itself only as history; . . . The historical is this very thing­– the self-alteration of this specific mode of ‘coexistence’ that is the social as such; outside of this, it is nothing. (ibid.: 136–7) The historical in the social–historical is not a succession of neutral temporal units but the emergence of the radically new. History appears through the emergence of the radical other which, however, does not emerge out of nothing: ‘There are always, even if in pieces, past and tradition’ (Castoriadis, 1994: 150). Castoriadis places the past among the external constraints of the radical imagination of society, but not in a rigid sense. Rather than being an objectified and detached repository of past experiences and its solidified meanings which conditions the exercise of creative powers, the past is received through recreation, thus becoming itself part of the creation process, the instituting of society, where new meaning emerges through the encounter, the confrontation, even, between the received and the immediately experienced: ‘This re-creation is, of course, always done according to the imaginary significations of the present­– but, of course also, what is “re-interpreted” is a given, not an indeterminate material’ (Castoriadis, 1994: 151). Understanding society as self-alteration and the creation of the new, leads to a reworking of the idea of a ‘healthy’ as opposed to a ‘sick’ 202

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society, where healthy societies are defined as the ones that have overcome their past and are projected towards the future. If relating to the past is inextricable from a society’s creative processes, that is, inextricable from a society’s very existence in the present and projection into the future, the distinction based on the temporal orientation of society becomes problematic, even if not entirely useless, for understanding how societies work.

Settling the Unsettled Past­– an Attempt at Arguably, the character and modes of relating to the past in those societies which receive their past as a repository of shared closed meanings of their world and self-understandings are different from those of the societies whose past remains unsettled and unsettling. The settled past is not necessarily free from controversies, and closed issues do not equal the issues resolved­– the reworking and recreating continue. But the unsettled, disjointed past is more than controversial­– it is embattled. Its fragments confront one another and clash, and society’s projects, rather than engaging with the past as an asset of collective imagination or a resource, become entangled in and with the past. An embattled past impresses itself upon the radical imagination of the social–historical­– does this also mean that it ultimately obstructs the institution of society and the emergence of the new? For societies with an unsettled past, past reckoning may be a necessary step towards stabilising the meanings of the past, mapping the acceptable and instructive in society’s history. While ethical damage is inevitable, failure to deal with the past is also politically costly in the long run.9 Past reckoning is, therefore, one of the major themes in the fields of transitional justice, conflict resolution and peace building. Yet, even though the instruments have been enumerated and elaborated on, and the processes refined, past reckoning does not seem to end, and reconciliation, as the aspired outcome, remains an ideal rather than a realistic objective. One successful example that is repeatedly cited is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa but such interpretation of the process and its outcome are contested, and new concerns and ambiguities over these continue to emerge.10 What past reckoning is to include11 and when it concludes remain obscure. The concept itself appears as irreparably elusive. Thus, the interdisciplinary field of post-conflict studies rightly seems more 203

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c­ omfortable with the overarching concept of transitional justice as its definition, at least in its broadest and crudest form, enjoys wider consensus among scholars and practitioners. Transitional justice is the way a society previously subjected to mass violations of human rights is supposed to deal with its past in order to (re)establish just order, where the definitions of just order arise from the norms and standards set by a number of documents adopted at the level of the United Nations since the end of World War II.12 It includes establishing truth and addressing criminal acts, though not always in the form of judicial processing, acknowledging victims and seeking to repair or remedy their condition, and reforming institutions to prevent any future reoccurrence (see, for example: www.ictj.org/about/ transitional-justice). These elements are considered crucial for dealing with the past in a way that will enable society to rebuild itself without violating the rights of the harmed. Debates on transitional justice cover various aspects but criticism and praise mostly stem directly or indirectly from their efficiency in contributing to lasting peace and reconciliation. Judicial approaches have thus been criticised as useless in situations where the potential spoilers remain strong in the political arena and institutions of the rule of law require (re)building, in which case conditional amnesties may contribute more to the stabilisation of societies (Snyder and Vinjamuri, 2003). Fletcher and Weinstein’s study (2002) also suggests that the administration of justice through international mechanisms falls short of ensuring societal peace.13 Another pathway which transitional justice offers leads away from the more conventional forms of retributive justice towards justice as restoring society and order. Truth or truth-and-reconciliation commissions are the most renowned mechanism of restorative justice, which can also contain strong elements of, or lead to, retributive motions.14 Their primary task is establishing ‘a coherent, official verified chronology of events and roles played by the key actors in those events that would transform knowledge on the war . . . into official recognition verified by the relevant state bodies’ (Subotić, 2010). Survivors, however, often perceive them as meagre substitutes for the work of courts, providing exit routes for the perpetrators and sacrificing justice to reconciliation (Suljagić, 2006). On the other hand, truth commissions have also been widely praised as forums for the public recognition of the survivors and their suffering, because the spotlight is on the victims, as opposed to the courts where their accounts have 204

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primarily instrumental value in the legal proceedings against the perpetrators. The commissions can also influence wider societal reforms that help transform the conditions that led to violence (Hayner, 2001: 11). The contribution to wider institutional reforms may include the reconstruction of the judiciary which is often the insurmountable obstacle to national administration of justice. In that sense, while commissions do not have powers equal to those of the courts, they bring to life a wider notion of justice which incorporates responsibility towards victims, a just order of community and, ultimately, towards justice itself (Arendt, 1963: 261). The commissions are also seen as complementing the work of courts in truth seeking: ‘Being focused on individuals, crime suspects, courts analyse and evaluate war events in that light, failing to meet much wider requirements of the right to truth’ (Hodžić 2006). As Agamben points out, ‘[a] non-juridical element of truth exists such that the quaestio facti can never be reduced to the quaestio iuris’ (2002: 17). Looking into individual accounts, but also processes and structures behind the events, the commissions can offer insight into historical contexts. Even though contextualised understanding is a primary task of the commissions much more than that of the courts, the criticism of courts is not entirely justified. The proceedings include detailed and extensive investigations and rigorous verification of evidence which can also cast light on historical developments prior to, and during, the instances or periods of violence.15 The facts established by courts can feed into the writing of history even though they do not generate comprehensive historical accounts (Prelec, 2007). The truth established in the process is more often than not a ‘workable truth’­– it is not dictated by pragmatism in the face of precarious political circumstances but is instrumental for societal transformation or what is considered to be the desirable transformation of society at a given point in time (Teitel, 2002: 92) which is, however, a moment of transition. Just as transitional justice is partial and contextualised (ibid.: 6), so may well be the truth. As modalities of inter alia truth seeking, courts and truth commissions can lead towards past reckoning. The rationale is that the truth on events, causes, actors and processes must be established so that it can be acknowledged and accepted, and the society in question can be reconstituted to reflect this acknowledgment and acceptance.16 This inventory of steps is as close as we can come to a definition of past reckoning, extrapolating from the much diversified praxis in this field. Past 205

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reckoning should ultimately liberate society by settling the past so that it no longer threatens the creative capacities of society and society itself. The past to be settled also eludes definition. It cannot be reduced to an historical period, a concluded period in societal existence. As is the case with society, the past evades essentialisation. It stretches into the present and future as a web of inconclusive and constantly changing understandings and recreations of society itself by itself. It cannot be reduced to events themselves, as they can never be grasped by themselves, without the implication of the present: ‘Truth is singular, but it is a continuous process of inquiry, because it builds on a present that is moving ground. History keeps running away from us’ (Buck-Morss, 2009: 150). Nor can it be contained in establishing and acknowledging the truth on past events, because the truth or truths is or are also entangled with the present. Ultimately, it is both in the experience of events and in the reading of them, where this reading involves facts, values and meanings­– transmitted or formed or created anew through the process itself. The past must be understood in its interpretive and creative, as much as its explanatory and normative, dimensions. Continuing in the vein of Castoriadis’s ideas, relating to the societal past is nothing else but the relating of society to itself.

Unsettling the Settled Past Acknowledging the openness of the past foregrounds the political dimension of the quest for truth and justice which is in conflict with the absolute character of the demands for truth­– and justice (Barahona de Brito, 1997: 4–5). In that sense, complete truth and justice can never be attained, and not only in divided or post-conflict societies but also more generally. Politics being a sphere of indefinite and imperfect solutions (Honig, 1993: 3), past reckoning never resolves itself into a settled past, which can be a problem­– or not: ‘[T]he impetus to fix the past, to be “post-histoire” is a futile attempt to stop the state’s historical accounting; to exhaust its politics and its potential for progress’ (Teitel, 2000: 113). The never-settled past is more often than not seen as a tragic burden. It may be silenced, even to the point of denial, at least for a certain time, as has happened previously in Argentina, Chile, Bali and elsewhere; or, even when acknowledged, it may become reified­– placed beyond any debate and then strategically instrumentalised by reactionary political forces or simply by forces seeking to conserve their status. 206

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How a troubled past or the past in general can nevertheless be of ‘use for life’ in a society was famously discussed by Nietzsche but his categories of relating to history − monumental, antiquarian and critical − do not help the move here attempted, away from a progressivist, pragmatic instrumentalisation of the past, towards a relating to it that would entail neither injustice nor closure of transformative possibilities. Firstly, the categorisation omits important modalities of engaging with past, especially those related to silences.17 Secondly, Nietzsche’s notion of the past borders on essentialisation. Change is not a potentiality of the past itself but of its instrumentalisation by the present and future. The past is nothing but a means. Hence follows, thirdly and most importantly, that Nietzsche’s proposal marginalises responsibility towards the past itself and therefore justice as a concern in relating to it. Nietzsche leaves theoretically undeveloped the possibility that responsibility towards the past does not entail the paralysis of society. I. M. Young’s social connection model of responsibility, which she develops with regard to historic injustices, is more useful as a ‘forwardlooking’ model of responsibility (2011: 173). Young’s discussion departs from the dominant liability model even though, in the cases of more recent violations of human rights, liability remains an inescapable moment of actualising justice. The value of Young’s model lies in its political dimension; the departure does not imply transcending the past and present which may signify an injustice in itself or the perpetuation of past injustices. The model rests on the political responsibility of ‘those who participate in the production and reproduction of structural processes with unjust consequences’ to take transformative collective actions (ibid.: 184). In that sense, this model, when applied to the circumstances of societies that have suffered mass or collective wrongdoings, may include both retributive and restorative actions but also a reimagining of society by engaging with its past as recounted and debated through what Maier terms contrapuntal narratives (in Torpey, 2003: 301). Along these lines, a surprising insight into the problematic of dealing with a past which will not settle arises from a controversial debate among the West German public in the mid-1980s when it might have seemed that Germany was close to settling its accounts. The debate can be crudely sketched out as a series of responses to the statements made during the 1987 electoral campaign by some German conservatives who declared that Germany ought to step out of the shadow of its past 207

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(Knowlton and Cates, 1994: 274). A number of German historians, such as Nolte and Hildebrand, were accused by the philosopher, J. Habermas, but also by some other historians and public intellectuals, of supporting this political strategy through historical revisionism. By contrast, the historians accused of revisionism saw their own work either as standard scholarly research to understand different dimensions of that period of history (Hillgruber) or as a step towards normalising the relationship to the past to allow the past to pass, as the past normally does (Nolte) (Knowlton and Cates, 1994: 18). The camp of the critics argued that the worth of such a past was precisely in its not passing, its resilience to the settling of accounts.18 The past unsettled, and unsettling, could thus become a source of what T. Mommsen called ‘political pedagogy’ (ibid.: 139, 141) and, in West Germany, it was fundamental for the building of a new democracy (ibid.: 139). Moreover, the political culture of post-war Germany is not just shaped by this experience and the negative reference that the past provides; the critical, reflective and never normalised relationship with the past forms its very axis (ibid.: 129). The debate that produced these insights, however, takes place rather late in the history of democratic Germany. It is often argued that open and critical reckoning with the past in Germany begins only in the late 1960s. Over those first twenty years of democracy, however, and afterwards, there was a reluctant, yet incessant and merciless, discussion of the German past which significantly contributed to shaping the politics and self-understanding of German democracy by keeping the past unsettled. Helmut Dubiel analyses this discussion, which unfolded over several decades within the (West) German parliament, in his ‘Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte’. Dubiel’s study takes up Jaspers’s idea that, after Hitler, building democracy in Germany may well happen in close relationship with the public reflection on German guilt, and proves it on the basis of six decades of parliamentary discussions (Dubiel, 2002: 9). The political reconstitution of German society came as a consequence of the condition by which West Germany, being a legal successor to the Third Reich, could not escape discussing its traumatic past. The discussions in the Bundestag kept Germany’s past alive, debated and unsettled through the decades of relative public silence and reluctance to reflect on the past beyond conventional rhetorical formulas, and prevented the politicians’ pragmatic turn to the future (Dubiel, 2002: 66). Paradoxical as it may seem, Dubiel’s enquiry points to a bridge between 208

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the unsettled and unsettling past on the one hand, and the possibility of a new beginning, on the other. The normative and political frameworks necessitated engaging with the past. In turn, this past helped transform them. Complementary to contemporary discussions of transitional justice and its instruments, which tend to focus on the special, ad hoc mechanisms described above, both Dubiel’s study and the tense debate between German historians point to the importance of a wider understanding of the practice of resourceful engaging with the past. Just as engaging with the past cannot be limited to the specially designed mechanisms and processes, it cannot end with the active remedying of specific past injustices either. While necessary and helpful, reparations and institutional reforms, such as the ones outlined by A. Boraine in his holistic interpretation of transitional justice, are insufficient, insofar as they are targeted at specific damages to be awarded and against specific enabling structures (Adler, 2004: 49–50). In this respect, W. Sadurski’s conclusion on the role of institutions in the democratisation process in Eastern Europe applies here as well. Institutions matter precisely because ‘they are not neutral; they do not merely channel and organise pre-political forms of collective life. Rather, they crucially affect, influence, and change the way politics develop[s]’ (in Zielonka, 2001: 455). Constitutions also matter. It must, however, be noted, in the light of Dubiel’s study, that, although the design of institutions and the contents of constitutions are important, praxis − what happens within institutions and how constitutions are received, interpreted and enacted − is at least of equal weight in determining society’s relationship with the past. Engaging with the past means more than taking responsibility through acknowledging the truth of specific events which, at some point, a society places within a certain period bracketed ‘off time’. Engaging, with the aim of unleashing the transformative capacities of society, entails a constant examining of present political praxis, as well as political visions viewed under the microscopic lens of the past and its present significance, much along the lines of the famous speech by German President Weizsäcker on 8 May 1985. There, Weizsäcker insists that critical and reflexive historical memory becomes a measure of present-day politics at the level of principles but also of everyday policy making and implementation, well beyond responding to the harms of immediate crimes and dealing with the actors and structures involved. Weizsäcker cites the examples in the Third Reich of the mass 209

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killings of people with mental illnesses, or the plight of emigrants persecuted by the Nazi state but denied entry by other states, and instructs that the memory of these crimes­– instead, presumably, of neo-liberal or realpolitik concerns − should guide everyday politics in the new Germany (Dubiel, 2002: 182), because new democratic Germany owes its existence to the horrors of the past. This demand should not be read as an instrumentalisation of the past in a teleological narrative of democratic societies evolving from an illiberal, authoritarian state or the rule of terror. It is about the impossibility of overcoming the past and the fact that in this very impossibility lies the transformative potential of a society. Nor does this represent a continuation of the liberal project of a neutral state by other means. Quite the contrary: Dubiel’s study highlights the importance of an involved state, even if troubled. Weizsäcker’s speech, with important insights coming from Dubiel’s interpretation, suggests that resourceful engagement with the past comes through the combination of historical and political responsibility with political imagination. As a political act, and especially by a political actor himself not free from historical debts, the speech offers an example of what it means practically to live, as a society, with responsibility towards the past while generating new collective, political imaginaries. Weizsäcker’s words could be seen as nothing more than a fine sample of political wisdom that only partly translated into practice, judging, at least, by the example of Germany’s relations with Namibia.19 Communal justice practices, however, in Peruvian mountain villages that were themselves caught up in the spiral of violence, as victims and perpetrators at the same time, demonstrate that societies can reinvent themselves without attempting to discard responsibility for the past. An anthropological study by K. Theidon (2006) reveals their rather unconventional approach, and certainly one that would not be vetted by the international justice institutions. The approach combines the two aspects of resourceful engaging with the past, responsibility and imagination, in a culturally specific way. The villages practise tribunal hearings to establish to what extent former guerrilla members can be trusted in their desire to leave military life and settle down. If the arrepentido (the repentant) is trustworthy, he/she − possibly upon physical punishment exacted − and his/her family are accepted into the village. The repentants are considered ‘new people’ which they could not have become through personal, individual metamorphosis but only by means of the transformation of social relations which 210

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involves their inclusion into the scheme of communal labour. The community benefits because an extra pair of hands is always needed but this also helps the arrepentidos reinvent themselves as social beings, as opposed to outcast loners. In the relationship of reciprocity and joint effort, sociability is recovered. Though Theidon does not elaborate on this, the necessity of recovery holds for both sides. The introductory observations on the villagers’ relationship towards violence that they themselves committed suggest their uneasy attitude towards these acts, even though they describe their violence as instrumental. There is clear acknowledgment of the devastation, also moral, which was suffered and inflicted, and of the repair that is essential. (Theidon, 2006: 435–6) Such communal practices, however, establish a clear moral hierarchy, as the villagers assume the judging role. The transformation of communities is not miraculous. Memory does not fade away, especially as the ‘new people’ are often allotted land in the vicinity of the shallow graves where the dead guerrilla fighters were buried, reminding them ‘that they had escaped [a] similar fate’ (Theidon, 2006: 452). The issues of the past are buried in the ‘in-between’, not dead, but the practices of communal justice indicate that this does not necessarily mean sliding back into violence or dwelling on and in the past. While the example described may strike reconciliation enthusiasts as cruel, it can be read differently − as a way for a traumatised community to negotiate its renewal through the labyrinth of historical injustices, claims for justice, demands for order restoration and concerns of everyday life in harsh natural and political circumstances, without a priori privileging any of these components. In that sense, engaging with the past remains an inalienable part of the overall political process of imagining and constructing a new/old polity and the political community that the polity is to host. It implies a constant conversation with past actions, while bearing the unrelenting responsibility for their dire consequences even when the immediate actors and victims are long gone. No refuge can be sought in the ‘blessing of a late birth’, of which Chancellor Kohl repeatedly spoke once, for political responsibility arising from the events of the past does not diminish or weaken with time (Knowlton and Cates, 1994: 26).

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In Conclusion: Beyond Settlements The cases discussed here challenge the idea of an irreversibly progressing transition, perhaps even of progress as such, on the basis of any settlement of accounts. The implications extend much further and wider than the field of transitional justice. Within that field, they call for a much keener interest in the role of existing institutions in order to understand better how an horrific past can become a political resource without ceasing to be horrific. More widely, however, they suggest that the possibility of outliving one’s history does not exist for societies, as some of the recent reckonings in Europe would have it, for example the debate over the role played by Switzerland in World War II (Elster, 2006: 310–11). The Historikerstreit teaches nothing if not that settlement of the past cannot and must not be perceived as definite.20 Nor can the settlement automatically result in the metamorphosis of society. Perhaps in the end, there is no metamorphosis at all, only continuous entwining of the ‘accounts settled’, or wishfully proclaimed settled, with never-ending reflection upon those. An unsettled past is that which cannot be reckoned away; indeed, it will not pass away and will not allow society to consider it closed (Knowlton and Cates, 1994: 18); but it is not necessarily a burden either, as long as the space of engaging with the past through political responsibility and political imagination is wider than the space which ad hoc transitional justice mechanisms define and demarcate. The space of engaging with the past must coincide with the space of the political; tragedy coincides with democracy, to paraphrase Dubiel’s conclusion (2002: 231). Recalling the words of the Japanese philosopher, K. Mishima, Dubiel lets us conclude that democracy is perhaps democratic only insofar as it is not allowed to forget its tragic grounding. Society is thus healed when, and only when, it recognises the impossibility of healing, accepting its own existence without a normalised, neutralised relationship with its past, which remains a resource for societal emancipation from past injustices for as long as it, the past, exists as unsettled, in discontinuity and tension.

Notes 1. I deliberately chose the indefinite article to start this chapter to highlight my understanding of a past or pasts as multiple and contingent. I use the more usual definite article in the rest of the chapter. 2. See, for example, a recent undp (United Nations Development Programme) report on the prospects for truth telling in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which

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An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource advocates formation of a ‘state-wide truth-seeking forum’ along the lines of truth commissions but with a much looser structure and more like an overarching framework within which diverse, localised and contextualised grass-roots initiatives could be acted out. (Simpson et al., 2013: 162) 3. The special issue of International Journal of Transitional Justice of November 2012 was dedicated to everyday aspects of transitional justice. 4. See, for example, Borrain and Levy’s book The Healing of a Nation? (1995). 5. Thus Stefano Sannino, the Director-General of Enlargement at the European Commission speaks of the need for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to move forward on its European integration path. Available at (last accessed 30 January 2013. Similar statements could be heard from European Commission President J. M. Barroso [available at < www.bh-news.com/en/vijest/3339/barroso_bih_needs_a_spirit_of_compromise_and_shared_vision.html> (last accessed 30 January 2013)] and EU High Representative C. Ashton (available at < www.delbih.ec.europa.eu/documents/ delegacijaEU_2012011214320630eng.pdf> (last accessed 30 January 2013)]. 6. A more refined view is found in P. Wagner’s discussion of modernity, where being modern is defined as ‘being in one’s own time’, even though the way ‘one’s own time’ was constructed in the prevalent discourse of the last century, effectively allowed only the First World societies to be considered modern (Wagner, 2012: VII). 7. Another problem with this proposal concerns its roots in Arendt’s understanding of new beginning in politics as a capacity of human plurality. While plurality does not assume community in the ‘thick’ sense, beginning anew comes from acting in concert which cannot be assumed for societies with relatively recent experience of internal strife and mass violence. 8. In the theory and practice of constitutional design for the so-called divided societies, the past as constraint is recognisable in its extreme in the so-called accommodationist models. These models seek to stabilise societies by building a new order that will accommodate anxieties and tensions of the past, balancing but not transcending them (Choudrhy, 2008: 26–8). The accomodationist model may be denounced as a self-fulfilling prophecy of political realism where it effectively reinforces the roots of the problem by cementing the contingent circumstances and momentary political antagonisms (Fischer and Petrović-Ziemer, 2013: 150). 9. ‘The consequences of the failure to reckon with the past in Bosnia and Herzegovina are even more detrimental. Two ethnic entities­– Republika Sprska and Federation BiH­– continue to fuel intolerance to each other and nationalisms, by denying the true essence of grave and mass violations of human rights committed during the war in BiH.’ (Subotić 2010) 10. Strong arguments have been made with regard to the absent gender(ed) perspective (Stanley, 2001), or failures to address socio-economic injustices. For a detailed critique, see Mamdani, 2002. 11. For example, past reckoning may demand that Latour’s spiral image replace the modern arrow image so that proximity of past moments no longer depends on their actual distance from the present but on the present itself. (Latour, 1993: 75) 12. Such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (1992), Basic Principles and Guidelines on

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity the Right to a Remedy and Reparation (2005), the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006), the Human Rights Council resolution on the right to the truth (2012); see more at 13. However peculiar it may seem, the transitional justice discourse has demonstrated excessive optimism in terms of the courts’ contribution to the reconstruction of communities. Some argue that the international tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have ‘significantly contributed to peace building in postwar societies’, especially in BiH, where the work of the International Criminal Tribuna for the former Yugoslavia (icty) has been seen as having ‘dramatically changed the civic landscape and permitted the ascendancy of more moderate political forces backing multiethnic existence and nonviolent democratic process’’ (Akhavan, 2001: 9). More recent accounts of BiH politics, however, render this diagnosis problematic (Lippman, 2010). Some empirical insights also suggest that there has been little impact, either positive or negative, of icty actions on relations among ethnic groups (Meernik, 2005). Lately, however, the tribunal for former Yugoslavia has become the centre of a controversy, bordering on scandal, over the acquittals of wartime commanding officers from Serbia and Croatia. Strong claims have been made that the tribunal has yielded to ‘pressure from “the military establishments” in certain dominant countries, such as the US and Israel, which do not want to see precedents established that could be used to convict their citizens in the future’. See: (last accessed 25 June 2013). While the discussion proper on this issue is yet to unravel, there are strong indications that the work of courts cannot be considered in a political void. 14. The cited commission in South Africa, for example, could and did refuse some amnesties on the basis that the violence inflicted by far exceeded the scope of political means or means employed for political purposes (Tropey, 2003: 299). 15. Thus, for example, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the suit of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Serbia heavily relied on the proceedings and documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. The final decision by the ICJ in 2007 offers an informed insight into the wider context of specific political and miltary actions, even if the ruling is controversial and possibly even problematic in its most important conclusions. 16. Truth seeking and past reckoning form two points of the triangle, the third being reconciliation. Reconciliation can be conceptualised minimalistically, as rebuilding of peaceful relations among previously confronted, often violently so, groups or sections within a society or polity, where these relations are no longer to be burdened by the past. (Hayner, 2001: 189). The main body of the literature comprises, however, works with a more substantive understanding, implying also a harmonisation of conflicting facts or stories, with the aim of agreeing upon one version of history. (Ibid.: 189) Reconciliation can be seen as predicated upon truth, established and widely accepted. In fact, relationship between truth seeking, past reckoning and reconciliation can be posed in causal terms, and they can be seen as three successive steps. But there could also be a normative hierarchy. The character of this relationship, however, often depends on the contextspecific understandings.

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An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource 17. For interesting discussions of silences − v. silencing inter alia − see L. Dwyer’s work on Bali (in Hinton, 2009) and Veena Das’s writings (2007). 18. On the whole, it could be argued that the two sets of conflicting assertions in this debate were based on arguments that would have actually been appropriate for the opposite side. Hence, while Habermas’s demand to close off the space of reinterpreting the past cannot be reconciled with the idea of a continuous resourceful engaging with this past, some observations by other commentators who supported him are instructive, insofar as they draw attention to the ethical and political value of a past that cannot be reckoned away. The problem does not lurk in scholarly revisions of previous findings in the light of new evidence nor in reinterpretations in a changing context. The problem would be an attempt to alleviate the weight of the past through elaborate explanations − acknowledging does not absolve from the responsibility of carrying the weight nor does it diminish the weight. Understanding does not eliminate the necessity of continuing to relate to the past in all its horror. This, however, does not mean that historical research ought to be terminated and that the present does not inspire novel readings, as suggested by the quotation from S. Buck-Morss above. 19. The genocide of the Herero and Nama people remains little known to the present day and has never received either public attention or national concern of the same scope and intensity as the destruction of Jews and other mass killings on European soil. This neglect has been reflected in the way German governments treated this issue and related requests by Namibia, leaving room also for a wider debate on the effects of this neglect upon the self-understanding of Germany prior to the Third Reich and nowadays. See the BBC documentary from 2005, Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich. 20. This is particularly evident when one notes that not a single contributor to the Historikerstreit, from either camp, makes a single reference to the aforementioned genocide in Namibia, though that could have cast more light on the 1930s and 1940s and would have helped deal with the question of analogies between Nazism and Bolshevism with much greater historical precision.

References Adler, Nanci (ed.) (2004), Genocide and Accountability: Three Public Lectures by Simone Weil, Geoffrey Nice and Alex Boraine, Amsterdam: Vossiuspers. Agamben, Giorgio (2002), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, New York: Zone Books. Aguilar, Paloma (2007), ‘Transitional Justice in the Spanish, Argentinian and Chilean Case’, Building a Future on Peace and Justice (International Conference), Nuremberg, 25–27 June, (last accessed 30 January 2013). Akhavan, Payam (2001), ‘Beyond Impunity: Can International Criminal Justice Prevent Future Atrocities?’, The American Journal of International Law, 95:1, 7–31. Arendt, Hannah [1963] (1994), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York and London: Penguin Books. Barahona De Brito, Alexandra (1997), Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Boraine, Alex and Jacob Levy (1995), The Healing of a Nation?, Cape Town: Justice in Transition. Buck-Morss, Susan (2009), Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1994), ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’, in G. Robinson and J. Rundell (eds), Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 136–54. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1998), The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Choudhry, Sujit (2008), Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation?, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Das, Veena (2007), Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkely and Los Angeles, CA: California University Press. Dubiel, Helmut (2002), Niko nije Oslobođen Istorije: Nacionalsocijalistička Vlast u Debatama Bundestaga / Niemand ist Frei von der Geschichte: Die Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages, transl. A. Bajazetov-Vučen, Beograd: Samizdat B92. Elster, Jon (ed.) (2006), Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, Martina and Ljubinka Petrović-Ziemer (eds) (2013), Dealing with the Past in the Western Balkans: Initiatives for Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia, Berlin: Berghof Foundation. Fletcher, L. E. and H. Weinstein (2002), ‘Violence and Social Repair: Rethinking the Contribution of Justice to Reconciliation’, Human Rights Quarterly, 24: 573–639. Habermas, Jürgen (1997), ‘Modernity: an Unfinished Project’, in M. Passerin d’Entrèves and S. Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 38–58. Hayner, B. Priscilla (2001), Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions, New York and London: Routledge. Hinton, A. L. and K. L. O’Neill (eds) (2009), Genocide: Truth, Justice, Representation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hodžić, Edin (2006), ‘Komisija za istinu i pomirenje (II): Forum protiv mitova’ (Truth and Reconciliation Commission (II): A Forum to Counter Myths), Puls demokratije, (last accessed 30 January 2013). Holmes, Stephen (1995), Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Honig, Bonnie (1993), Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Knowlton, J. and T. Cates (trans.) (1994), Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, New Jersey: Humanity Books. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia University Press. Latour, Bruno (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Levy, T. Jacob (2009), ‘Not so novus an ordo: Constitutions without Social Contract’, Political Theory, 37: 2, 191–217.

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An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource Lippman, P. (2010), ‘Bosnia’s Politics of Paralysis’, Open Democracy, (last accessed 30 January 2013). McEvoy, Kieran and Lorna McGregor (eds) (2008), Transitional Justice from Below: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change, Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing. Mamdani, Mahmood (2002), ‘Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa’, Diacritics, 32: 3–4, 33–59. Meernik, James (2005), ‘Justice and Peace? How the International Criminal Tribunal Affects Societal Peace in Bosnia’, Journal of Peace Research, 42: 3, 271–89. Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich, television film, directed by David Olusoga, UK: BBC Bristol, 2005. Norval, Aletta J. (1998), ‘Memory, Identity and the (Im)possibility of Reconciliaion: the Work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa’, Constellations, 5: 2, 250–65. Prelec, Marko (2007), ‘Suočavanja s prošlošću (III): Šta možemo očekivati od suda’ (Past Reckoning (III): What Should We Expect from Court), Puls demokratije, (last accessed 30 January 2013). Schaap, Andrew (2001), ‘Guilty Subject and Political Responsibility: Arendt, Jaspers and the Resonance of the “German Question” in Politics of Reconciliation’, Political Studies, 49: 749–66. Schaap, Andrew (2006), ‘Agonism in Divided Societies’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 32: 2, 255–77. Simpson, Graeme et al. (2013), Looking Back, Looking Forward: Promoting Dialogue through Truth-Seeking in Bosnia and Herzegovina, UNDP. Snyder, Jack and L. Vinjamuri (2003), Trials and Errors: Principle and Pragmatism in Strategies of International Justice, (last accessed 30 January 2013). Stanley, Elizabeth (2001), ‘Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 39: 3, 525–46. Subotić, Jelena (2010), ‘The RECOM Initiative: the Promise and Peril of Regional Truth-seeking in the Balkans’, Puls demokratije, (last accessed 30 January 2013). Suljagić, Emir (2006), ‘Komisija za istinu i pomirenje (II): pomirenje kao krvavi cinizam’ (Truth and Reconciliation Commission (II): Reconciliation as Bloodstained Cynicism), Puls demokratije, (last accessed 30 January 2013). Teitel, Ruti (2000), Transitional Justice, New York: Oxford University Press. Theidon, Kimberley (2006), ‘The Micropolitics of Reconciliation in Postwar Peru’, The Journal of Conflict Transition, 50: 3, 433–57. Thomas, M. Lynne (2011), ‘Modernity’s Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts’, The American Historical Review, 116: 3, 715–26. Torpey, John (2003), Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices, Lanham, MD and Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield. ‘Transitional Justice and the Everyday’ (2012), International Journal of Transitional Justice, Special Issue, 6: 3.

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Wagner, Peter (2012), Modernity: Understanding the Present, Cambridge: Polity Press. Young, Iris M. (2011), Responsibility for Justice, New York: Oxford University Press. Zielonka, Jan (ed.) (2001), Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe: Institutional Engineering, Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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10 Injustice at Both Ends: Pre- and Post-apartheid Literary Approaches to Injustice, Sentiment and Humanism in the Work of C. Louis Leipoldt, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the Film Invictus Riaan Oppelt

T

he term ‘injustice’ is ubiquitous with South Africa’s pre-1994 past, casting its overt influence over almost every aspect of modernity and lived experience of most black South Africans during the twentieth century. No history of the country could, in any way, avoid clear reference to the spectre of apartheid that conjoins the legacy of a segregated past with the contemporary, twenty-first-century efforts at forging a national identity based on the adjective ‘New’. The tension as well as constant interplay and peopled dialogue between the ‘Old’ South Africa before 1994 and the ‘New’ South Africa post-1994 permeate current thinking around remedial and reconstructive approaches to settling the country as a key player in the global South. Evidence of ever-snowballing, robust debates around similarities and differences between the past and present of South Africa can be sourced in almost all facets of deliberative and urgent conversations that form part of daily rhetorical routine. In essence, there are few conceivable ways of separating these present-day concerns from the larger history of South Africa, in which racial inequality and its ensuing calamities reach back to the 1600s. The term ‘injustice’ is connected to all these. For the purposes of this chapter, I concentrate on literary and cultural articulations of senses of injustice in spheres of South African experience. I hope to avoid some of the more obvious questions concerning the state of the nation and how it was shaped, looking instead at two divergent instances of what led to that very shaping. Ambitiously, the gambit is to posit as two poles, on the one hand, the circumstances of Union-era South Africa in the 1910s and, on the 219

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other, the ways of anti-aggression prevalent in, but not always ascribed to, forms of South African literary thinking in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The point is not to compare two disparate South Africas almost a century apart, nor to search for similarities, but, rather, to look at the different dealings with injustice as it occurred in South Africa’s sociopolitical history. At the one end, the 1910s, the argument I pursue is crudely an exposition of a sense of injustice held on to by actors, in the process of forcing outright injustice on to others. At the other end, I look at the expression of a kind of humanism in the face of situations that are decidedly anti-human, in their abject violation of some of the basic tenets of human rights. In both cases, I look at South African fiction, as well as the medium of film in the latter case, and the circumstances they are both entangled in. The emphasis here will be on perceived injustice motivating patent injustice and the consequent, oppositional negotiation of the unconcealed prejudice contained in a philosophical mode of humanism that differs from a Western definition of the term. The work of the Afrikaans poet, journalist, novelist and medical practitioner C. Louis Leipoldt will be analysed for his depiction of perceived injustice on the part of early twentieth-century Afrikaners in South Africa, while the book A Human Being Died That Night, by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and the film Invictus will be discussed for their contributions to the concept of African humanism.

C. Louis Leipoldt: Contested Nationalism, the Growth of Afrikaans and the Blueprints of Apartheid-era South Africa In South Africa, Afrikaner modernity in the early twentieth century presented a cultural battleground against English influence that, ironically, took shape after the Union of South Africa had been formed in 1910. In the wake of the South African War (formerly known as the Second Anglo-Boer War) of 1899–1902 and hostilities between republican Boers (later identified as Afrikaners) and the British colonial government, the Union was supposedly a concerted effort at conciliation between former enemies. To Afrikaners still smarting from the South African War and its crippling impact on the socio-economic and moral independence of the Boer republics, nationalism was a way to continue the ‘fight’ against the injustice of the South African War’s legacy, and the formation of the National Party (NP) by the mid-1910s was the clearest expression of dissent at the South African Party (SAP, established at the time of union in 1910) and the Union of South Africa. 220

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Much of this dissent was both based on, and spoke to, a nationalist feeling of injustice on the part of Afrikaners joining the NP­– injustice at losing the war, and at ‘conciliation’ with the old enemy. Sentiment came to count for plenty in the NP lobbying machine, and a very strong sentiment came with the memory of the South African War. While the end of the South African War ushered in a period of building towards the unification of the republics and the colonies in the country (Merrington, 2003: 41), the outbreak of World War I also saw events that would in time contribute to undermining this concept of unity, when a rebellion occurred in German South West Africa: scores of Afrikaner soldiers refused to take up arms alongside the British they were supposed to support (Giliomee, 2003: 382–3) and this split between Boer soldiers who were unwilling to fight and those who fought with the British would develop into nationwide polarisation between the white groups in South Africa throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Further tension between the ruling South African Party (SAP) and the larger white Afrikaner imagination of, and vision for, the country arose with the Rand Mining Strike in 1922. Addressing economic strife in South Africa, mine owners lifted the colour bar to employ more black workers who were cheaper than white workers and therefore a suitable replacement; this event, coupled with the country’s perilous economic climate in the post-World War I years, resulted in strikes at coal and gold mines as well as at engineering plants. With the majority of the disenfranchised white mineworkers representative of the Afrikaner community that had begun to distance itself from the SAP and was drawn to the National Party (NP), the leader of the latter, J. B. M. Hertzog, saw an opportunity to try to win the white working-class vote − even though the Labour Party effectively had the guarantee of this vote at the time − and referred to the example of Bolshevism in Russia to inspire the idea of anti-capitalist resistance and the right to self-governance among the workers (Giliomee, 2003: 331–2). While the NP did not overtly influence the mining strike of 1922, it did find an opportunity to appeal to the strikers and lent its support to them, along with the Labour Party. With the strike came a familiar rhetoric­– that of struggle, of mobilising the struggle for independence: The republican strikers presented the conflict in atavistic terms as a re-enactment of the frontier struggle between white and black. Speakers told a huge outdoor meeting that they had to be 221

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‘­unanimous’ in standing by the victory of the Voortrekkers over [the Zulu leader] Dingaan in 1838 . . . (Giliomee, 2003: 333) Once again, the nation-building concern with ‘struggle’ emerged in Afrikaner rhetoric,1 and through comparing capitalist mine owners to the Zulu leader Dingaan,2 the strikers also drew attention to other struggles for independence that shaped Afrikaner nationalism and modernity; if the capitalist mine owners were akin to Dingaan, then the black peril and its ‘otherness’ may also be ‘transferred’ to the antiBritish sentiments that founded the Boer republics and motivated the Boer cause in the South African War. In other words, by perpetuating the metaphor, the strikers were once again ‘trekking’, and this propensity to re-enacting history would emerge on an unprecedented scale by 1938, with the Festival of the Ox-Wagon. Though Giliomee (2003: 334) points out that the Rand Mining Strike was not wholly carried out by republican-minded Afrikaners (there was also a communist presence), a link between nationalism and racism was underlined by the strikers’ banner declaring: ‘Workers of the World Unite, and fight for a White South Africa’ (2003: 334). Again, the sentiment was clear: the Afrikaners were ‘fighting’, against non-white South Africans, and non-Afrikaners. It is this period of strong national feeling that informs C. L. Leipoldt’s novel, The Mask, written in 1932 but unpublished until 2001, fifty-four years after his death. An advocate of equal human rights for all, and opposed to nationalism,3 Leipoldt wrote the novel as the final part of a trilogy detailing his thinking around South African modernity and cultural development. A journalist during the South African War and the first major Afrikaans poet after the formation of the Union, Leipoldt was a member of the SAP and continued his journalism, based, in the 1920s, first in Pretoria and then in Cape Town. The Mask, set in an unnamed rural town (recognisable as Leipoldt’s home town, Clanwilliam), tells the story of a young Afrikaner woman, Santa, who has earned her medical degrees while away in London and is returned to her home town to establish a practice. She idolises her father, the wealthy, mayoral and fiercely nationalist Elias, while dismissing her mother, the sickly and quiet Maria, as being a typical descendant of the former Cape Afrikaner families that were loyal to the colonial government and the Crown during the nineteenth century. She also clashes regularly with another descendant of those families, Mabuis, an expatriate visiting from Argentina. A man of mixed descent, Mabuis 222

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regularly challenges Santa’s stubborn pro-nationalist views and disagrees with her views on sentiment. Along with another character, the Irish-born Buren, Mabuis argues against nationalist sentiment, suggesting that perceived injustice at the memory of the South African War was creating a larger injustice at the expense of non-Afrikaner South Africans. Santa’s idolisation of her father ends when she discovers that he has fathered an illegitimate child with the head servant of their household, the coloured woman Aya Minah. Her views about her own identity as a staunch Afrikaner subsequently change, and the novel ends with her doubting the prosperity of South Africa’s future if racial segregation and nationalism based on sentiment and antagonism are to serve as indicators of that future in the twentieth century. In newspaper pieces written in the late 1920s, Leipoldt comments on the way the sentiment of Afrikaner nationalism­– largely hinging on the memory of the South African War­– was affecting South African culture as well as the still-developing Afrikaans literature. In The Mask, Leipoldt elaborates on this concern in scenes featuring the animated debates of the young, impressionable and stubborn Santa and the older characters Mabuis and Buren. In both his journalism and in The Mask, Leipoldt is concerned that the Afrikaans language is in danger of future stigmatisation through its being employed by the National Party as a mechanism for cultural mobilisation based on opposition to English. In accordance with the sense of loss and injustice felt by Afrikaners at the outcome of the South African War, there were similar feelings about the fact that Dutch, instead of the newer Afrikaans, was still in place as an official language alongside English by the 1910s. With Afrikaans showing signs of coming into its own as a literary language by 1914, nationalists could argue that Afrikaans was to be used by Afrikaners for all purposes; and this would enhance the chances of the language developing its own literature independent of any European influence, something that would empower Afrikaners to claim the language as their own, as Gustav Preller − who was largely responsible for ensuring the history of the Voortrekkers would be regarded as the founding story of Afrikanerdom − put it, the device for transporting Afrikaners into modernity (Giliomee, 2003: 367). Afrikaans print media followed, by the mid-1910s, the founding of the National Party. The National Party, through citing its own history as one associated with mobility and struggle − The Great Trek and the South African War − could appeal to the imagination of its followers; like the ­trekkers 223

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almost a century before them, they could convince themselves as forever following a biblical narrative of being the ‘Chosen People’. With the support of the Dutch Reformed Church and the ability to manipulate the story of the South African War, presenting it as a battle for independence that must be continued, the National Party could speak of a self-righteous identity out to right the wrongs of the past and assert itself as independent and proud: The Afrikaners’ source of power was allegiance to South Africa as their only fatherland. Hertzog called the Afrikaners ‘pioneers’ of South Africa. With ancestry in Dutch, French and German, the Afrikaner was never heard to proclaim his faith in either. (Giliomee, 2003: 350) Using his position as a literary critic, Leipoldt launched his cosmopolitan argument against nationalist ‘sectionalism’ with his most ardent campaigning yet, by focusing the argument on literature. He criticised popular sentiment time and again as being a destructive force in the education of young people. Some of the books offered at school level were, to Leipoldt, purely sentimental choices (1990: 32), saccharine examples of Afrikaans literature aimed at a readership with a limited imaginative scope. His protest was that the quality of books was now affected by the Nationalist drive to get the nation to read Afrikaans: popular sentiment was superseding literary value. The term sentiment here extends to Leipoldt’s warning that Nationalists were themselves gaining power through appeals to sentiment, usually by holding the South African War as the trump card that inspired emotion when it was appealed to, as the event that forever changed Afrikaner culture. Whether the politicians were urging their followers never to forget the South African War or whether it became the subject matter of many books, the danger of establishing culture on sentiment, to Leipoldt’s mind, was always close by. The debate went further in The Mask when Santa is chided by cosmopolitan Mabuis for holding too strongly to sentiment in her pro-Nationalist arguments directed at those she considers as being SAP: ‘You wish to make us speak in the future entirely in the mother tongue, but in your efforts to be heroic you lose sight of the fact that in daily life it is not sentiment that counts, but something else.’ 224

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‘Sentiment does count, Mr Mabuis,’ interrupted Santa vigorously, ‘especially with us. If you knew more about your country, you would agree with me that it is sentiment­– pure sentiment and nothing else­ – that has brought about the present state of affairs. It is because the old Party, your Party­– for I suppose you are SAP, for only an SAP would talk like that­– made no allowance for sentiment, because it thought, like you, that something else counts, that it was swept away and will remain in darkness until it alters its opinion and lives up to its principles.’ ‘My dear young lady, you take altogether too much for granted. I am not SAP. I belong to no party, for I am expatriated. Were I living here, I rather think I should count myself a Nationalist, for there is today no difference between the principles of the old SAP and modern nationalism . . . ’ ‘Yes, there is. This difference of sentiment.’ ‘Instead of writing . . . purely literary books, you are producing propaganda literature, and you are using your schools, your universities, and your cultural centres for the dissemination of propaganda, not culture.’ (Leipoldt 2001: 557–9) Locked in another heated discussion later in the novel with the Irish– South African Dr Buren, the issue of sentiment re-emerges in Santa’s complaints: ‘ . . . If anybody has a grievance, it is the Afrikaans-speaking citizen. He sees his language constantly slighted, his ideals trod underfoot, his aspirations thwarted . . . It is high time we asserted ourselves, unless we wish to be swamped by English culture.’ ‘That is because you persist in thinking that English and Afrikaans cultures are necessarily antagonistic . . . Your South African nationalism is purely sectional for you refuse to credit us, who do not speak Afrikaans, with an equally strong sentiment. Yet it exists, and it existed long before you made language and culture the test of a true national South African sentiment . . . You must realize yourself that there would be very little of this ill-feeling if we could only get away from persons and platitudes and concentrate upon the big things.’ ‘They are big things to me,’ asserted Santa, stoutly. ‘Sentiment is a big thing, Doctor. Since I came back I have repeatedly witnessed what you call conciliation­– what your old Party harped on in and out of season­– is expected from us, not the other side. It’s we who 225

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have to give everything, and when, once in a while we take things, we are accused of stirring up race hatred.’ (Leipoldt, 2001: 577–8) Anticipating the fervour with which Afrikaner nationalism would yet be applied, Buren later reflects on the moment of the South African War as an injustice to all affected by it, regardless of political beliefs: ‘You know too little about that chapter, Santa, and perhaps it’s just as well. But you do a frightful lot of harm­– your Party­– when you harp on it and try to make political capital out of that bitterness. Those of us who went through it look back upon it with unutterable regret. Those of you who weren’t in it, and who now try to draw vicariously upon it, have no idea what it meant . . . Now we are in a welter of words, without sincerity and without, usually, much sense, and that to my mind is infinitely worse . . . ’ (Leipoldt, 2001: 577) Buren comments on how vicariously Santa’s Afrikaner generation draws upon the South African War to fuel anger and intolerance, a war her generation was not part of. By 2010 South Africa (a century after the Union’s establishment), with the event of the soccer World Cup supposedly being a unifying event bringing South Africans together to host visitors from around the world, young political leaders such as Julius Malema were regularly making news headlines for their aggressive, sectionalist views justified on the basis of the fight against apartheid, a fight that, for all their passion and heroic, populist appeals, they were not part of. In Leipoldt’s treatment of a similar attitude among Afrikaners between 1910 and 1930, he positions Santa to experience a rude awakening: she realises that the nationalism she believed in as heroically reshaping history after injustice, was, in fact, engineering the cultural dispute around an uneven modernity in South Africa. In the next section of this chapter, I shall look at a form of thinking evident in a South African literary (and also a filmic) text that focuses on moving away from the rhetoric of injustice even as it stares the spectre of ­injustice in the face.

African Humanism In this part of the chapter, I argue that humanism becomes a central tenet in discussions (here, I focus on literary discussions but the application may be found elsewhere) about justice and injustice in contem226

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porary South Africa. Post-1994, an emphasis on building bridges and conciliation characterised the Mandela presidency and the unfolding of amnesty hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission during the Mandela administration, whereas much of Thabo Mbeki’s first term in office was directed towards the notion of African renaissance. Against still-present vestiges of the injustice of apartheid in most facets of South African society, narratives of tolerance and conciliation seem hopeful and inconclusive on an urgent socio-economic level, possibly even as apparently distant as they were to early twentiethcentury Afrikaners smarting from the impact of their loss in the South African War. Against the obvious challenging realities a youthfully democratic country faces, calls for forgiveness by selected politicians and thinkers can seem decidedly unreal and out of touch. Couched in terms of humanism and its central doctrine that argues that all individuals ‘possess a value and dignity in themselves, as human beings’ (Gaylard, 2004: 265), ideas of reconciliation and of forgiving injustice, while its legacy is still to be seen in much of the country’s social and physical scenery, seem ambitious. The term ‘humanism’ is then also open to dispute (Gaylard, 2004: 265), undesirably associated with restrictive Enlightenment assumptions of European/Western thoughts on humanity being universally applicable, this coming from a Europe that discusses humanity while at the same time practising inhumanity, as Fanon warns in The Wretched of the Earth. The inclination towards relegating human beings to individual concerns can be found in the designation of ‘Man’ to stand in for ‘human beings’. In the selected South African narratives I explore here, humanism is a core device in dealing with notions of injustice and justice. The death of Es’kia Mphalehle in 2008 ushered in many tributes to the great writer who famously described himself as an African humanist. The legacy of Mphalehle’s work between the 1940s and 2000s reveals an enormous output of fiction and critical prose that both constructs and contributes to ideas of what African humanism could be defined as. While I do not offer an exploration of Mphalehle’s work here, I shall focus on some of the crucial tenets behind African humanism and how they are resurgent in more contemporary forms of literature in South Africa. The idea of an African humanist as opposed to a humanist is intriguing. A central idea of humanism is the ability to relate to one another through the mutual and tacitly understood facets of tolerance, empathy and agency. Yet, a problem with this idea is that it opens itself too easily 227

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to widespread framing; it becomes culturally specific­– meaning that one culture’s accepted ideas of humanity and humanism may not fit into another’s, yet core ideas of humanism seem to imply a universal acceptance, and a universal application. Western ideas of humanism too easily negate the fact that these ideas are not that readily applicable or compatible with views outside of Western thinking, and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a crucial early text criticising the European colonist’s ironic aspiration to spread notions of humanism to his colonised masses. Too often, the Western application of humanism functions around the undermining of those meant to receive its generosity­– it is an act that possibly makes the Western humanist feel good but leaves everyone else feeling less so.4 In that, the difference between Western humanism and African humanism throughout the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century is as much a discussion about modernity as it is about pontificating on its geographical unevenness and distribution. Essentially, the most immediate difference between a Western humanist and an African humanist involves the role of community. Citing the works of Fanon, Mphahlele, Achebe and Kwame Gyeke, Gaylard examines the way recent African writers have dealt with the term ‘humanism’, and how they have come to apply definitions to it that both support the idea of a separate African humanism and, at the same time, question it. The Western humanist acts as an individual, acting from the self for the self (or for the Western self, the individual) while the African humanist acts for a community, a larger group of people, an African community but, by extension, a universal community of humanity. In a lecture given in November 2004, Archbishop Desmond Tutu fixates: ‘We say each one of us matters and we need each other in the spirit of ubuntu, that we can be human only in relationship, that a person is a person only through other persons.’ Postcolonial initiatives, concepts and terms like African renaissance and African peer review speak to communal efforts on the part of African countries to yield African development and consolidation of the African continent after vast and protracted instances of Western occupation. The African humanist, as exemplified by a figure like Nelson Mandela, seeks to reconcile his community with the needs of a changing modern world, while encouraging this community to retain traditional African principles, or as Mphahlele argues, ‘ . . . the African begins with the community and then determines what the individual’s place should be in relation to the community . . . ’ (Mphahlele, 2002: 228

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147). This kind of Africanism is ‘social, not socialist, in that the character of the person changes in relation with others’ (Chapman, 1995: 53). If Western humanism’s focus is on civil rights and the personal space of the individual, African humanism implies that the individual is inextricably bound to a larger natural and cosmic order (Bell, 2002: 40). This is an oversimplification but, unquestionably, the role of community, of African communities, is a feature in a significant number of African narratives and critiques, more often than not from the postcolonial point of view. I shall apply these notions of humanism and community to various works dealing with South African subject matter, and I shall explore how certain books and films speak to some of the workings of these concepts. South Africa’s post-apartheid nation is the common backdrop to all the primary material mentioned here. Like the postcolonial narrative, the more diminished but still fundamental (to African study) post-apartheid narrative also ‘interrogates’ humanism, or the Southern African appropriations ubuntu (unity) and batho pele (people first). The term ‘community’ is itself becoming increasingly more difficult to define in the South African context; on one level, ideas of separate ethnic groups still prevail in mass thinking­– the ‘communal’ idea of a united South Africa is not yet fully present in the daily life of the lay South African. There are still the general race classifications of black, white and coloured, and too much identification, within those ethnic groups, with these classifications for an idea of a South African community, in its wholeness, to prevail. The cultural melting pot in South Africa boils more so than it would in other countries, taking in ingredients such as eleven official languages, a polyglot national anthem and various traditional African practices and understandings, and then the inevitable clashes between them. After the first decade of the twenty-first century, the injustices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still show strong traces of their legacies in South Africa. In spite of much media attention in South Africa,5 however, sensationalising purported race hatred still extant between, especially, white and black South Africans on the topics of hate speech and moral vengeance, the humanism of a figure like Nelson Mandela remains, as a lasting impression of South Africa’s peaceful transition to a democratic state after the turbulent 1980s. Mandela’s famed Nobel Peace Prize, shared with F. W. de Klerk at a time civil war was largely expected (Johnson, 1994), offered a moment that captured the manner in which Mandela’s ANC oversaw a move from a time 229

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of injustice to a time of justice for all. The civitas and emphasis on respectability that English, Scottish and German missionaries had tried to effect for non-white South Africans during the nineteenth century (before social Darwinism and eugenics brought about racial classification and vilification, developing later in that century, in both Europe and her colonies) was now being linked to a more exciting paradigm, a time when South Africa was finally with the world, and at the beginning of its period as a major player in what would now be called the global South. In the new democracy, the injustice had to give way to restoration.

A Human Being Died that Night In terms of addressing the inequality of the past, the restoration of South Africa had a sensational media debut in the amnesty hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the years immediately following the 1994 victory. In the TRC, in televised hearings, the Mandela-era’s route to justice became a world event: those who had infringed upon the human rights of others during apartheid had to be transparent and ask for forgiveness for their actions in order to be granted amnesty. It was not similar to the Nuremberg trials as these were not war criminals but those on trial at the TRC had to come face to face with the relatives of their victims. In literature, the response was almost immediate, with the famous multimedia theatrical offering, Ubu and the Truth Commission, first appearing in 1997. Following on from the TRC years, however, and the notion of an interaction between formerly wronged persons and agents of apartheid-era human rights violations, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night (2003) emerged as a serious remeditation on the power of forgiveness for the sake of wholeness, in a broader, more communal sense than could be found in familiar ideas of (Western) humanism. In this book, Gobodo-Madikizela writes about her experiences interviewing the notorious apartheid-era commander of death squads, Eugene de Kock. At the time of the interviews, de Kock was serving a 212-year sentence for crimes against humanity and Gobodo-Madikizela’s interviews and reasons for writing her book were aimed at the complex task of interrogating, confronting and ultimately, interacting with de Kock’s changing sense of humanity. Following the Mandela and TRC narrative of reconciliation, A Human Being Died That Night, it is argued here, contributes to a large, complex 230

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idea of African humanism and/or ubuntu, in its exposition of what passed between the psychologist, Gobodo-Madikizela, and the former state agent of race murders. The forgiveness encouraged by Mandela during his presidential term (‘forgive but do not forget’) becomes the intrigued notion of Gobodo-Madikizela’s study of de Kock and of her own changing attitudes towards him: Stories of forgiveness from victims of human rights abuses . . . are significant not only because they mark some of the most memorable moments and moral achievements in the life of the TRC hearings, but also, even more important, because they translate the forgiveness model from high-minded homily to actual practice, from what is conceivable in principle to what has worked. They lay a path, an already trodden path, making it possible to know that it is within the grasp of ordinary people to forgive evil and to end generational cycles of violence. The question is no longer whether victims can forgive ‘evildoers’ but whether we­– our symbols, language, and politics, our legal, media, and academic institutions­– are creating the conditions that encourage alternatives to revenge. We have come to rely too narrowly on retribution as the only legitimate form of justice . . . ’ (2003: 118) Nowhere in her book does Gobodo-Madikizela actively attempt at imagining de Kock as anything but what he is: a former statesanctioned killer. She also does not naively imagine him as an instantly reformed member of a hopeful human community but does note the changing nature of his sense of humanity, and she does observe the different aspects of him. What is at the core of her book is a determination to understand him better, in exchanges that test both her levels of tolerance and his changing approach to humanity­– what she simplifies as ‘dialogue’. The very communal association of ‘dialogue’ marks her interviews with de Kock as constructive interaction for her study on the limitations of forgiveness and the vexing demand of going ‘deeper’ than mere forgiveness. Any kind of human community would be hardpressed to function without dialogue of some sort or in some form, and the Gobodo-Madikizela–de Kock dialogue vindicates the psychologist’s theory that ‘ . . . dialogue does create avenues for broadening our models of justice’ (2003: 143). In an early review in 2003, Anthony Collins endorses the book for its central challenge which is essentially how human beings deal with 231

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those who are guilty of inhumane behaviour, ‘how to restrain, punish or rehabilitate them in ways that protect the rest of the community’ (Collins, 2003: 273). Collins further describes the book as ‘powerfully engaging at an emotional level, but without becoming sentimental’ (2003: 273). Gobodo-Madikizela’s emphasis on dialogue, essentially that which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was active in, marks an approach to some of the above-mentioned tenets of African humanism. It presents a complex grappling with injustice rather than an abject retaliation. The book presaged the later aggressive, reactionary rhetoric of the Julius Malema-era ANC Youth League (the years 2007 to 2011, in particular, are noteworthy for Malema’s regular media presence and his implied suggestions of retribution for apartheid injustice) where dialogue and interaction between antagonists in the drama of South Africa were not features.

Invictus The importance of ‘dialogue’ also marks a well-documented event in the Mandela story: his championing of the 1995 Rugby World Cup hosted by South Africa, a sensational media event at the time. Invictus, based on the book Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation by John Carlin, is a dramatic account of actual events, detailing Nelson Mandela’s efforts during his inaugural year in office as South Africa’s first democratically elected president, in uniting the different race communities of South Africa, in particular black and white communities. In reality, Mandela famously arrived at the final game of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, a match between South Africa and New Zealand, wearing a Springbok (the official emblem of the South African national rugby team) rugby jersey and cap, with the Springbok captain’s number ‘6’ on the back of his jersey. The image of Mandela dressed in the Springbok colours, long opposed by many nonwhites and anti-segregationists in South Africa who saw the Springboks as a symbol of apartheid-era oppression, is iconic, and Carlin’s book retells the story of how Mandela used strategy to unite his country around the Springboks in a bid to promote racial solidarity. The film’s main characters are Mandela and the captain of the South African national rugby team, Francois Pienaar. The men meet only a few times in the film but the narrative examines how their lives and leadership roles are affected by the Rugby World Cup tournament in 1995. The film employs a motif of showing physical distance between 232

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black and white people, from the film’s opening shots of black children playing soccer on a field on one side of a road while white children play rugby on the other side, to the marked contrast between white and black supporters at opposite sides of a sports stadium, during an international rugby match early on in the film. The idea of distance, of separation and Mandela’s goal of overcoming it is manifested in the scene where Mandela meets Francois Pienaar for the first time; Pienaar enters Mandela’s presidential office and slowly walks to the desk to greet Mandela but Mandela gets up and walks towards Pienaar, meeting him halfway, and greeting him. Black and white have literally engaged warmly for the first time in the film, and Mandela’s African humanism becomes clearer: he is striving for his community which is the entire population of different races in South Africa, not only his own clan. The film regularly shows Mandela’s black bodyguards confused by his decisions to conciliate with whites, especially whites who served the apartheid government against Mandela, and, while later moments of ‘harmony’ between black and white characters in the film (such as a touch rugby match on Mandela’s lawn between the white and black members of his bodyguard) appear saccharine, they also deftly show the purpose of Mandela’s leadership vision: integration and assimilation, even if this is to be achieved through sport. Mandela is shown to be physically fit, routinely taking an early morning jog or walk, and immediately this links him to the physical world of rugby players, at one point in the film driven by their coach to be the fittest team in the World Cup tournament, even if they could not be regarded as the best. Later in the film, in his efforts as president as well as in balancing his ambitions with the Springboks and negotiating difficult situations in his personal life, Mandela is overcome by exhaustion and collapses, indicating again the mutual affinities between him and the rugby team who would have to battle past pain and exhaustion to earn the World Cup. Mandela’s challenges in his goal to unite South Africa are seen as being as arduous as the Springboks’ bid to reach the World Cup final. In reinforcing the message of race conciliation, many of the film’s scenes operate almost exclusively to that purpose, and make their overall contribution well and powerfully illustrate the vital storyline, and that is, in equal measure, the story of Mandela the strategist and Mandela the humanist. Both Invictus and Carlin’s book, Playing The Enemy, refer back to an 233

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even more important text: Mandela’s 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. The former president quite readily reveals the workings of his strategies in this world-renowned life story, from the way he laboured to understand the white mentality that imprisoned him and delayed democracy in his country, to how he negotiated a peaceful transition to democracy after his 1990 release from prison. Discussing the autobiography in his 1995 article Mandela, Africanism and Modernity, Michael Chapman makes an argument for Mandela’s life story to be given the critical recognition and attention usually reserved for literary texts, believing that the way Mandela tells his story offers a narrative that takes in a working study of Africanism as well as showing tropes commonly found in social critique literary fiction based on irresistible social contexts, like the ‘Jim comes to Jo’burg’ trope detailing the journey of African men from rural areas and their first encounters with the industrial modernity of the cities. Mandela’s story is undeniably real, more real than most literary texts but ironically regarded of lesser merit by those Chapman identifies as critics who favour the Western model of autobiography, moulded by literary convention, in which the ‘hero’ is clearly a sinner, while Mandela is almost embarrassingly free from the standard flaws and character taints (Chapman, 1995: 50). Both Long Walk to Freedom and Playing the Enemy paint the same picture of Mandela: the freedom fighter who martyred himself to the cause of fighting inhumanity (a word Mandela uses repeatedly in his autobiography) and who gave a masterclass in political strategy by appealing to a sense of community rather than a sense of gain. He was as vigilant in calming black anger as he was in assuaging white fear, and a key scene in the film shows Mandela doing both at the same time when he interrupts a national sports council meeting to plead with his government officials to retain rather than discard the Springbok emblem; as his stunned white bodyguards look on, Mandela effectively convinces a room full of passionate black people to resist fighting an historical symbol of injustice with antagonism and hate. In Chapman’s words, Mandela’s story is a ‘human story’ (Chapman, 1995: 50), and his (autobiographical) style ‘embodies the priority of the moral idea’. Chapman also recognises what Carlin does, in that the Mandela story ‘refuses separation of the private and public figure’ (Chapman, 1995: 49) and that this is necessarily so, as Mandela’s personal motivations are at all times shown to be deeply intertwined with his political ideals. Invictus does offer some insight into Mandela the man, with its focus 234

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on his personal life at a time when he was separated from his estranged wife Winnie; there is one moment when his closest bodyguard even defends the fact that ‘he is just a man with a man’s problems’. Similarly, the film closely follows Carlin’s book in showing Mandela’s private routines, such as making his own bed at all times and unfailingly stepping out for his early morning walk, or asking his bodyguards about the welfare of their families. The African humanist Mandela is the dominant portrayal in most narratives about the man­– his personal life is unselfish and intensely moral, a point even his critics seldom dispute.6 Chapman’s article makes the distinction that in Mandela’s moral universe, ‘the concept of society is not the socialist one of a collection of individuals, but the communal one of unity at the centre of people’s beings’ (Chapman, 1995: 53) and goes on to quote Mandela from one particularly sensitive moment in Long Walk to Freedom, regarding the absence of family, the core unit of community, during a time of solitary confinement in prison: ‘Nothing is more dehumanising than the absence of human companionship’ (Mandela, 1994: 321). Lacking both his blood family and the ‘family’ community of his fellow prisoners, Mandela’s words describe his solitary confinement, his pining not for individual freedom but for community. The Mandela of Invictus is certainly a towering individual figure, and, as often as the film shows him surrounded by employees in awe of him, it also shows him alone, sitting quietly and meditatively­– yet even this Mandela, the loner, has a communal impact when, during a tour of Robben Island, Francois Pienaar imagines Mandela confined in his tiny cell, and later imagines him working in the island’s clay quarry, staring back with purpose at Pienaar. In another important moment, Mandela is seen alone in his office, writing down the words of ‘Invictus’, a poem from which he drew inspiration during his time in prison. It is this poem that he later gives to Pienaar in the film, to inspire him to lead the Springboks to victory. His personal moments are being filled with his communal efforts; Mandela the private person is, indeed, in this view, inseparable from Mandela the public figure. Chapman also notes that Long Walk to Freedom and 1994–95 South Africa raise interesting questions about the concepts of Africa and the West: Africa, despite its material disadvantages has been granted a kind of moral advantage. Whether it can utilise Africanism as modern 235

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leverage remains to be seen, but with Mandela as exemplum, Africa and the West require to be set, not in contrast, but in comparison. Antithesis is sufficiently bold to anticipate synthesis. (1995: 53)

Post-Mandela The death of Nelson Mandela in December 2013 became a world event, as tributes and remembrances from world leaders poured into South Africa on an unprecedented scale. In excess of ninety heads of state or members of high offices in their respective countries attended a memorial service for Mandela in the week following his death. Most of the speeches heard by those dignitaries paying their respects included the same theme of Mandela’s humanity, his victories for human rights and his role in the fight against social injustice that finds echoes in numerous other countries to the present day. This event marked, perhaps, the official start of an epoch that had long been anticipated by writers and thinkers as the post-Mandela period. It remains to be seen what the theoretical configuration of such a period supposedly looks like; is it pre-emptive, foreboding, overly speculative, or merely fodder for contemplative pieces ad nauseam? At the point of this writing, such signs, if they are to be signs at all, remain unclear. The image of Mandela’s humanism remains the dominant spectre, rising above its own political context (the increasingly troubled modern narrative of the postMandela ANC, for example) and retaining, as far as can be seen, its emphasis on the communal effort against mass injustice.

Notes 1. Although the point should not be pressed strenuously, one may note the affinities South Africa, in this period, has to post-World War I Germany. By the time of World War II, a contingent of nationalist Afrikaners openly supported Nazi Germany. 2. Dingaan had, in 1838, been behind a slaughter of Voortrekker leaders and their families in KwaZulu-Natal. 3. Elsewhere, I write extensively about Leipoldt’s life and literary career. 4. Here, it may be worth remembering Ivan Illich, who claimed that ‘[t]he compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may and actually will choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts’ (Illich, 1976: 20). 5. Elsewhere I write about attitudes towards race discerned from twenty-first-century Internet behavioural trends. 6. The Making of the Myth of Mandela, a recent dissertation by a South African

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References Bell, R. H. (2002), Understanding African Philosophy, New York: Routledge. Carlin, J. (2008), Invictus/Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation. London: Penguin. Chapman, M. (1995), ‘Mandela, Africanism and Modernity: a Consideration of Long Walk to Freedom’, Current Writing, 7: 2, 49–54. Coetzee, J. M. (1988), White Writing, Johannesburg: Radix. Collins, A. (2003), ‘Review of A Human Being Died That Night ’, South African Journal of Psychology, 33: 4, 271–3. Fanon, F. (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gaylard, R. (2004), ‘Welcome to the World of our Humanity: (African) Humanism, Ubuntu and Black South African Writing’, Journal of Literary Studies 20: 3/4, 265–82. Giliomee, H. (2003), The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Graham, L. (2010), State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gyeke, K. (1997), Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience, New York: Oxford University Press. Invictus, film, directed by Clint Eastwood (screenplay by Anthony Peckham, based on the book Playing The Enemy by John Carlin. Lead performances by Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon). USA: Warner Bros, 2009. Kannemeyer, J. C. (1996), Langenhoven: ’n Lewe, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Leipoldt, C. L. (2001), The Valley: A Trilogy, eds T. S. Emslie, P. L. Murray and J. A. J. Russell, Cape Town: Stormberg. Mandela, N. (1994), Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Johannesburg: Macdonald Purnell. Merrington, P. (2003), ‘C. Louis Leipoldt’s “Valley Trilogy” and Contested South African Nationalisms in the Early Twentieth Century’, Current Writing 15: 3, 32–48. Mpe, P. (2001), Welcome to our Hillbrow, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Omer-Cooper, J. D. (1994), History of Southern Africa, Cape Town: David Philip. Plaatje, S. (1982), Native Life in South Africa, Johannesburg: Raven Press. Ridge, S. (1984), ‘Chosen People or Heirs of Paradise: Trekkers, Settlers, and some Implications of Myth’, in Race and Literature, South Africa: Owen Burgers. Tutu, D. (2004), Look to the Rock from which You Were Hewn, lecture delivered to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, November 2004.

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11 The Student Movement in Chile 2011–12: Rearming the Critique of Capitalism Beatriz Silva Pinochet

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ince 2011, a permanent student mobilisation has been taking place in Chile. After the election of Sebastián Piñera as president in 2010, the eruption of the student movement surprised political authorities and even public opinion in different parts of the world,1 as it introduced a shadow of doubt on the real success of the economic model adopted by Chile during the military period (1973–90). Today, for the first time since the return of democracy in 1990 and in the context of the recent presidential elections that returned Michelle Bachelet to office, critiques and proposals to reform the economic and political framework established during the dictatorship have become widespread. In the meantime, the centre-left Concertación coalition that ruled the country after the dictatorship (from 1990 to 2010) has been strongly interpellated because of its role in what has been seen as a continuation and even a strengthening of the neo-liberal framework established since 1979, when the so-called ‘seven modernisations’ of the state began. On its behalf, the right-wing parties, which defend what has been ‘constructed’ to date, have been obligated to ‘justify’ [Boltanski and Thevenot, (1991) 2006] in a clearer way the alleged benefits and accomplishments of the current ‘spirit of capitalism’ [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007]. A normally drowsy society has suddenly seen itself awakened, beginning to voice protest across different fronts. In Luc Boltanski’s terms, the ‘temporary dismantling of critique’ that followed the change in the ‘mechanisms of accumulation’ [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 29] in Chilean society has come to an end. In this way, accompanied by, and perhaps partly legitimised by, the student movement, other 238

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movements2 have emerged from sectors that are neither youth nor ‘traditional movements’,3 but that can also be understood as criticising the predominance of economic criteria and the prevailing inequality in living conditions. In this sense, the discourses first raised by the students have made possible the reconstruction of a narrative about injustice, inequality, common good, and political and economic performance as issues that cannot be satisfactorily addressed by the current traditional policy and politics. The public sphere has been revived and, suddenly, debate and divergence have been demonstrated as possible after a long period of overrated consensus.4 For its part, the student movement has transformed itself into a leading stakeholder which is continuously contesting official discourses.5 In this sense, it seems that the student movement has managed to transform the social imaginary [and ‘the ranking of status’: Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 22] imposed by the dictatorship, trying to convert the premises that have given coherence to the present political and economic practices and opening a gate to laying out important institutional transformations. In this chapter, I shall attempt to present the critique [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 29] invoked by the Chilean student movement, that challenges the premises of the current spirit of capitalism, that is, the mechanisms of accumulation and its specific justifications in terms of common good [Boltanski and Thevenot, (1991) 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007], a critique that might be preceding a renewed understanding of the social, political and economic relations and institutions. To reach that objective, this chapter will first try to understand how the critique invoked by the student movement articulates itself. As a second step, it will attempt to analyse how the discourse of neo-liberal capitalism emerged in Chile, and which structures or reality tests [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 19] were built based on that discourse. Thirdly, we shall review some of the failures that these structures have shown in general terms and in the education system in particular, as the education system is deeply engaged in market dynamics and is also the site where the student critique starts. Finally, we shall deal with the interpretation of the critique voiced by the student movement, also considering the different nuances contained in it. The analysis will take as a reference the work of Luc Boltanski and Peter Wagner about modernity, capitalism, mobilisation, critique, and structural transformations. The results are based on research about the student movement in Chile that analyses 239

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both contextual information and interviews with student organisation representatives.

The Student Movement in Chile in 2011: the ‘Failures’ that Led to the Articulation of the Critique As already mentioned, in May 2011, thousands of students in Chile began to protest. The mobilisation first originated in the private sector where the students who had gained access to private universities through the credit with fiscal guaranty system (approved by law in 2005) started to finish their studies and realised the difficulty in paying back the loans and the significant amounts they owed. They considered that their individual freedom and security were being constrained by the size of their student debt which led to reduced chances of aiming for better living conditions. The credit was also seen as an unfair policy, one that affected equality, in that it harmed precisely the families that did not have enough money to pay university fees. As one of the interviewed students said: This debt that in the end is a lifetime debt, ties you to not being able to borrow money in order to buy a home, being unable to apply to get a loan to go abroad to study for a Master’s degree, it ties you down completely. That alleged promise of social mobility is a lie. (spokeswoman in 2011 and president in 2012 of the Universidad Central de Chile Students’ Federation) The same year another ‘source of indignation’ was opened: the Metropolitan Technological University (UTEM in Spanish), property of the state, was exposed on national television as having many financial and administrative problems. The Minister of Education at the time, Joaquín Lavín, was interviewed, expressing a harsh opinion about UTEM and saying that he would do what he could so that this university would not receive a good evaluation by the National Accreditation Commission. The comments of the minister caused the anger of the UTEM’s students who thought that, in this way, the minister was legitimising a deeper privatisation of the education system. The students took to the streets to protest and appeal against what they considered to be the abandonment of UTEM by the state and hence a financial crisis that could easily explain the difficulties that this institution was suffering. 240

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In the meantime, another university was also being shaken by student protests. The (private) Central University of Chile (UCEN in Spanish), founded in 1982 after Pinochet’s government approved a series of executive law orders that created the ‘Law of the Universities’, was soon to be partially sold to an important financial group that would transform the university, according to the students, into an entity with a more entrepreneurial character (2012, interview with the president of the Student Federation). The entering of a financial group into the private university system, by itself made explicit the fact that these institutions were good businesses to invest in and that they could generate huge economic returns.6 The lucrative business set up by some of these institutions7­– that by law are required to be non-profit­– exposed a situation that was widely known but which, at that moment, was being reconsidered by the students as detrimental to their personal conditions of life. The students had to pay high fees for their education while huge sums of money were being paid by the universities to companies that belonged to the same owners. Thus, questions began to be raised in relation to why revenue from utilities was not reinvested in student benefits and whether educational institutions had ‘the right’ to profit. Egoism, opportunism and common good were invoked. In this way a discourse was articulated and raised that included: a rejection of the commodification of educational services, including student credits, pointing to the relevance of the state as a regulator and as a supplier of public services; a consideration of education as a ‘social right’ related to equality; an examination of how it can be financed; and, finally, a reaction to what actually­– and illegally­– was a lucrative business and to the role played by profit. This discourse brought together the claims of the ‘traditional’ student movement, that is, the one that has been related to the ‘traditional’ public educational system and the one that was now emerging in private universities and other institutions.8 The whole educational system and the economic premises that had governed it also started being questioned, paving the way to a discourse that combined claims for structural changes with more specific demands. As will be seen below, this would merge with other assessments, frequently quoted from the ‘Penguin Revolution’9 onwards, that evidenced the failures of ‘reality tests’ [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 25] regarding the achievement of equal and fair conditions for all students when entering the educational system. Segregation, 241

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profit and selectivity were also issues that began to be discussed. By ­understanding how the educational system in Chile was built and which are the broader elements that have been criticised by the students, we shall also comprehend what were the premises that guided the profound transformation of Chilean society led by the dictatorship, premises that were also taken into consideration in reorganising the educational system from 1980 onwards.

The Structural Transformation of Chilean Society: the Foundational Discourse of the Dictatorship The economic and political model that has been severely criticised by the student movement was imposed in Chile under the dictatorship (1973–90). The premises that guided the transformation towards these new ‘mechanisms of capitalist accumulation’ [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 30] could be revived, according to the main ideologist of the institutional structure that would protect the legacy of the dictatorship, Jaime Guzmán, as: ‘an institutional structure in the service of freedom and progress that should strengthen a free economy, without which political democracy could be reduced to an empty formula, lacking true content or at least any libertarian content’ (Guzmán 1991, own translation). The premises that this statement underlines were at the basis of the understanding of every new institution as promoting economic rationality in actors and of politics as a strictly individual space where collectivities and majorities should not subdue the freedom of individuals and minorities. Those basic premises also supported the new discourse that was constructed to legitimise and explain what were the benefits of the transformation. At the same time, this discourse intended to respond to other questions, such as, the role of politics and democracy in Chilean society, what were the mechanisms for reaching a fair society and the common good, and, in that sense also, how to deal with inequality and injustice in access to resources. In that sense, and following Boltanski’s analysis on capitalism and justification [Boltanski and Thevenot, (1991) 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007], the political discourse of the dictatorship had to convince people of the individual advantages (security and autonomy) and the common good that participating in capitalist processes brought with it [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 8] while, at the same time, it had to confront the critiques, that is, the ‘sources of indignation’ [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 37] 242

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that historically have been levelled against capitalism, namely the artistic and the social critique. These critiques conceive of capitalism as a source of disenchantment and oppression and of poverty, inequalities, opportunism and egoism [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 37]. Finally, following Wagner (1994), the discourse of the dictatorship, as is the case with any modern discourse that wants to achieve legitimacy, also had to account for the legitimacy of its source of political power. Thus, one of the main themes in political modernity, that is, collective autonomy or how society defines its own rules for a life in common (Wagner, 2010), also had to be explained by this discourse in a coherent way. Thus, coherent and reasonable explanations and formulas (‘justifications’ and ‘reality tests’, in Boltanski and Chiapello’s terms, 2007) had to be constructed to convince people both of the benefits that this new form of Chilean capitalism would bring and of the legitimacy of the political system that supported it. In this way, ‘justifications’ had to confront, but also convince, the so-called artistic, social and political critiques whereby: the first invokes the ‘sources of indignation’ that have to do with individual autonomy and security of human beings affected by the process of commodification, standardisation and oppression; the second deals with equality of conditions or, at least, with the equality of opportunities that could support (and legitimise) the discourse of merit, and also with the common good affected by the predominance of egoism and opportunism in social relations [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 37]; and the third has to do with modernity and the increasing notion of collective autonomy that this process has brought with it involving, in particular, the capacity of a collectivity to decide over its ‘rules of living in common’ (Wagner, 2010: 83) and politics as a sphere of debate. The political discourse that tried to legitimise the profound transformation effected by the Chilean dictatorship dealt with these issues while also attacking the features, though not the main goals, of the developmental state and the model of industrialisation by import substitution (the second spirit of capitalism, in Boltanski and Chiapello’s terms) that was implemented by Chile through most of the twentieth century, as well as the economic and political restructuring that attempted to expand political and economic participation and social integration by means of universalistic policy.

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The Premises of the New ‘Mechanisms of Capitalist Accumulation’ The structural transformation that took place in Chile during the dictatorship was guided by premises that situated the responsibility for development with the market and with individual action, arguing that both could overcome the problems posed by injustice, inequality and scarcity of resources. In this new model, the injustices of inequality were to be resolved on the basis of individual merit and with the opening up of new opportunities for mobility within the market, which would base social ascent on individual effort and not on a ‘spurious equalisation’ (Büchi, 1995)10 attempted through state policies. This transformation was part of the so-called ‘seven modernisations’, through which the military regime gave structure to the new ‘model of development’. According to its ideologue, the Minister of Labour and Social Security of Augusto Pinochet, José Piñera (brother of the past president), the reform was directed towards strengthening the freedom of choice of individuals (Piñera, 1979). As pointed out by Piñera in 1979, in reference to the overall structural transformation: They represent a crucial stage of this true silent revolution taking place in Chile. The seven modernisations seek to introduce ranges for personal freedom unknown by Chileans, contribute to the necessary equalisation of opportunities, stimulate economic development, value the voice of the experts in highly technical decisions adopted by governments, all of this in order to transform Chile into a modern country where reason prevails over prejudice and dogmatism, and where individual freedom is the general rule and state intervention the exception. (Piñera, 1979, own translation) For its part, and following once more the above mentioned ‘justifications’ that have to convince about the benefits and respond to critics of capitalism, the common good, as a goal that had to be achieved by this discourse, was to be accomplished through the co-ordination of individual actions within the market (the invisible hand model). Economic inequality and poverty would be dealt with through the ‘trickle-down’ of benefits that the processes of entrepreneurs’ saving, accumulation, investing and job creation would bring with it. At the same time, this promise of ‘trickle-down’ paved the way to legitimising the respect 244

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for private property (and economic returns) as the basic factor for a healthy economic performance that could open the door to this specific type of (in)equality. The role of the state in this context would be the efficient allocation (targeting) of resources in public policy directed towards those groups who were unable to buy goods and services in the market. In this way, formally equal access to rights was to be ensured. In the new model, issues of short- and long-term individual security, as well as individual autonomy, were supposed to be resolved according to personal responsibility and individual choice within a market that offers multiple possibilities of responding to everyone’s necessities and desires. Politics and collective autonomy, finally, had no role to play beyond the mere administration of possibilities that do not interfere with the functioning of the market. Both ‘democratic processes’11 and explanations about the meaning of democracy in a ‘free society’ were likewise invoked responding to the necessity to legitimate the source of power. After the end of the dictatorship, and during the twenty years of government by the Concertación coalition that followed, the new institutions and their premises, that is, the ‘reality test’ [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007: 25] that guided them, remained loyal to the model’s most basics dynamics and justifications. Despite the fact that the second coalition had strongly criticised the model imposed under the dictatorship, and, though some policies were implemented to improve the situation of the poorest, the main features of the economic and political model established under the dictatorship were preserved.12

The New Structure of the Education System and its Failures The education system in Chile was one of many sectors changed during the period of structural transformation. The reform of the educational system in particular was driven by assumptions that aimed to achieve greater efficiency in state administration (decentralisation and targeting of resources), opening the gate to freedom of enterprise (commodification of educational services, competence and efficiency) and promoting freedom of choice for those seeking educational projects different from those offered by the state. In that sense, as was seen in the previous section, widening of opportunities, development and individual freedom within the market could be interpreted as the threads leading to a solution of the problems of equality (of o ­ pportunities), 245

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common good, resource scarcity (poverty), freedom (choice) and what was conceived as the inefficient intervention of the state in the affairs of individuals (oppression). The first of the assumptions above led, since 1980, to the policy of municipalisation of elementary and secondary schools (also contested by the student movement, facing great repression at the time) which meant transferring the dependence of public schools from the central state to municipalities13 on the basis of the Organic Law of Education. The Law of the Universities, for its part, was also directed towards the regionalisation of public institutions, especially the University of Chile; this separation was effected with the additional goal of dismantling the university student movement in its nationwide aspect (Mönckeberg, 2005). A second measure was the opening up of new markets and the widening of the educational offer, which provided the opportunity of creating private elementary and secondary schools partially subsidised by the state, that is, financed by public and private contributions, but in private ownership,14 and, in addition, private universities and institutes for technical education. The targeting of resources, meanwhile, would be based, in the elementary and secondary subsidised and public education systems, on a voucher system or ‘subsidy on demand’, whereby the state pays an amount per student to the receiving institution according to the student’s daily school attendance. This voucher system was also invoked­ – and still is, to this day, by the government­– as a logic that would improve educational performance (achieving quality and efficiency within instrumental and economic rationality) by pushing the students to select the better institutions, and to those institutions that were losing students­– and their respective vouchers­– ‘to start to improve’ (in the words of the first Minister of Education in the past government, Joaquín Lavín).15 In the higher education system, on the other hand, focalisation was achieved through allocation of resources based on excellence criteria (Indirect Fiscal Contribution Fund in the case of private universities) or by direct fiscal contribution and projects submitted by the institutions in the case of public universities which, additionally, were obliged to self-finance to a high degree via tuition fees and other activities. Quality in this context was also to be achieved by market dynamics. During the Concertación period, these dynamics were maintained. Despite important policies related to the primary and secondary educa246

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tion systems, concerning, among other things, infrastructure, extension of the study day and learning processes, and the approval of a new law,16 the main architecture of the education system was preserved. The same can be said for the system of higher education. Nonetheless, the education system has been manifesting several problems, for example, in achievements and quality and, in broader terms, integration and equality. In that sense, the premises that served as the basis for the implementation of the education system have revealed important problems in terms of actually reaching their goals, as invoked by the ‘justifications’ but have also raised a fundamental critique about the way and the degree to which certain types of values and premises­– or in Boltanski’s terms, the ranking of status of this spirit of capitalism [Boltanski and Thevenot, (1991) 2006]­– decide how society is to be organised. The academic discussion has been a part of this debate, taking into account the role of the educational system as an integration space, where students from different backgrounds can converge, and also where all the students can make use of one another’s different levels of knowledge (García-Huidobro, 2008). For its part, and in terms of equality and efficiency, the system has also proved to be ‘leaky’. The tests which are taken yearly by all schools to measure the results of educational processes have systematically shown that the poorer students perform worse than the richer ones. The test for entry into higher education has also exhibited the same dynamics. In the meantime, in contrast with the premise that conceives of public administration as being inefficient, evidence shows that schools in the public sector actually perform better than the subsidised ones (when results are controlled for student family income) (Torche y Mizala, 2010, quoted in Simonsen, 2012). Furthermore, it has become clear with time that competition between schools not only does not improve the quality of education but has, in turn, resulted in an enormous segregation of students in terms of income, political and religious views and status.17 As the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Report for Education in Chile has stated: ‘the education system [in Chile] is consciously structured around [social] classes’ (OECD Report for Education, 2004: 275, own translation). This report also stresses that ‘the Chilean education system is influenced by an ideology that gives unjustified importance to market mechanisms for improving teaching and learning’ (OECD Report for Education 2004: 290, own translation). 247

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For its part, the right to select students that the primary and secondary schools have, shows misleading results in terms of quality because the schools can prevent the entry of those students with greater difficulties. Thus, in some cases, good performance is more related to the type of student admitted than to the quality and capacity of the institution for improving the teaching and learning processes. This has cast serious doubts on the role played by merit, effort and private sector efficiency so proudly defended by the enforcers of the structural transformation. Regarding the technical and professional higher education systems, there is not much regulation, because the state has no legal jurisdiction or specific responsibilities over the performance of these private institutions. While a process of auditing and accreditation of institutions and teaching programmes has been applied to this system since 2000 (and in 2006 partially handed over to private agencies), this process has been increasingly questioned owing to the high amounts that the institutions must pay to be audited. At the same time, despite the non-profit rule that regulates the higher education system, since 2011 at least twelve universities are under investigation in relation to what could be illegal transfers between universities and other entities. This has opened a debate about what could be an unnecessary increase in university fees,18 that affects particularly those students who have lines of credit with high interest rates, such as the credit with fiscal guarantee approved in 2005 during the third Concertación’s government.19 This series of factors has revealed a failure of reality tests, that is, an instance where the institutional formulas to solve social problems prove their incapacity to achieve the goals for which they were created. This test failure has paved the way for a critique grounded on facts, opening the gate for the extension, deepening and improved argumentation of the student movement discourse. The students have voiced criticism against education as a lucrative business and against market ‘laws’ that were supposed to improve the quality of the education system. They have also invoked a more active role of the state and a clearer definition of the national education project and its meaning in terms of integration and equality. It is in this way that the premises of the model of accumulation that were introduced into the education system have been criticised by the student movement, moving from the critique of the education system towards a broader critique of the whole economic and political model. In this way, the critique against capitalism and political modernity has managed to rearm itself [Boltanski and Chiapello, (1999) 2007] after a long period of disarticulation. In 248

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the following section, the kind of critique raised by the students will be examined and understood in terms of the aforementioned social, artistic and political critique.

Egoism, Opportunism, Inequality and the Common Good: the Social Critique From one moment to the next, topics regarding social injustice, debt levels and the scam began to repeat themselves in dinner conversations in public spaces, in the media, in social networks etc. (president of the Catholic University Student Federation 2011 and spokesperson for CONFECH (The Confederation of Chilean Students) 2011, in Atria 2012) In terms of the social critique, the claims of the student movement are based on verification of the fact that that the reality test built during the dictatorship and the Concertación governments for solving ‘the problem of expanding opportunities’ (or how the structure of inequality is legitimised) and the unequal distribution of resources have not only failed but have profoundly affected the welfare and security, in the short and long terms, for those making use of the ‘new avenues’ for access to services. The so-called ‘opening of market opportunities’ to expand the services offered has been conceived of as a deceit that constrains the future of the poorest students and that gives greater returns to banks and universities;20 but the student movement has also questioned the legitimacy of property and wealth accumulation, upheld by the discourse of ‘trickling down’ of growth and ‘employment creation’, complaining that they do not resolve the enormous differences in income and welfare access that Chilean society shows today. The distribution of the tax burden and how the state uses the money it collects have also come into question: There have been detonating conflicts due to an awful distribution of wealth, wage inequality in our country, the misuse of natural resources, misuse of energy, the awful institutional representativeness that is made to ​​ further strengthen the inequality in Chile and continue to benefit national and international economic groups that become rich from our raw materials. (president of the Concepción University Student Federation 2011–12) 249

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The student movement has not only been demanding a greater public contribution to the education system as a whole, it is also demanding a reconceptualisation of what the public is, or how the common good is understood, giving back to education its emancipatory and social meaning, as well as the re-embedding of the economy in social relations. The increasing broadening of the notion of rights that modernity has brought with it, and in that sense, the idea of social rights that purport to ‘decommodify’ and to equalise some important areas of life are recaptured as threads in the arguments of the students: You have to make an unusual effort in order to live a life that you are supposed to live by right. One should not have to pay for health, public health, for education and for basic goods for the life of any human being in a society . . . then there’s a state responsibility that should be invoked. (defender of students at the Diego Portales University 2011)

Commodification, Oppression and Standardisation: the Artistic Critique It is not the same to be the subject of a good education, critical, humanist, with a sense of humanity, compared to one that transforms subjects to objects, subject to the market, a number. (president of the Student Federation of the Bernardo O’Higgins University 2011) Regarding the so-called artistic critique, we can observe that the student movement rejects the authoritarian practices prevailing in the school and in the political and economic systems but it also rejects the constraints imposed upon education by the market and the state in a broader perspective: Everything is determined, all the paths that one could follow. Education focuses on the labour market, and the fact that it is mandatory, twelve years, is a conditioning. At school what they teach you most is to respect a uniform, that is, to be ‘owned’ by the monitor and the teacher and to obey, to be still, to be muted. The worker is the best worker when he is still, the best worker is the one that respects the uniform, the one that remains sitting, it’s almost 250

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like training. (student protester in the 2011 occupation of the former Pedagogical University) In that sense, some of the participants of the student movement reject the notion of teaching as merely training for the needs of the market and its focus on instruction, that is, the dismissal of participatory relations in teaching–learning processes, especially with respect to the primary and secondary education systems; but there is also a reaction against the whole system perceived as being unfair. This kind of critique is raised against a structure that is observed as constraining the emancipatory possibilities of those who lack power, and the capacities of human beings in a broader sense: ‘The economic system is so well set up that it subordinates everything else, even humans and the human character which public institutions should have’ (spokeswoman for 2011 of the Seventh Girls’ High School of Providencia).

The Lack of Collective Autonomy and Politics: the Political Critique When the government criticised us last year and said we were ideological, yes, clearly we are ideological and we are a political movement and what is wrong with that? Aren’t you? Are you exempt from this? Are you the government, but you are not in politics? (president of the Mapuche Student Federation 2011–12) As part of a political critique, we can observe that there is a claim for a ‘deepening’ of the democratic system and for an increase of collective autonomy, where the political institutions respond better to the needs and will of citizens, but also where there is more space for debate and politics, and people are more engaged in decisions over their own lives. In that sense, the movement also envisions an economy not focused on the position of Chile in the global market but one that centres on Chile and its needs and where majorities can define its political projects. The political system seen as a complex of technical decisions is rejected and also interpellated, as it prevents transformation and incorporation of newer ideas owing to the specific election system imposed by the dictatorship: People can go and vote; myself, now I can vote, but it’s so hard to get into the political system, in order [for it] to be truly representative of 251

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what people want, which ultimately becomes stagnant. And current politicians, regarding the ‘binominal’ system we have, repeat themselves on an on. (student academic adviser 2011–12, Alberto Hurtado University) Notwithstanding the criticism cited above, parts of the student movement also make an attempt to move away from traditional spaces of power and argue in favour of building organisations that would develop their own political practice and would not simply be collaborators of the public policy of the state. Assembly methods, revocable leaderships, and proposals that deal with territorial and participatory decisions can be related to this. Such organisations invoke a strong anti-statist, anti-market, and anti-hierarchical vision that is also coherent with the artistic critique.

Closing Words As we have tried to understand in this article, the Chilean student movement has managed to question the most basic assumptions and dynamics of the neo-liberal system first installed in Chile (Harvey, 2007) but subsequently held up as an example of good economic performance and development strategy in different parts of the world. In terms of the critique voiced by the students, it is interesting to observe how the issues that have been part of a permanent and historical critique against capitalism and political modernity are also present in the discourse of the student movement. In that sense, it is also interesting to comprehend how the discourse built by the dictatorship was also coherent in responding to ‘modern values’, preventing in a very practical, but also discursive, way the capability of contestation. This discourse of market society and restrictive democracy permeated Chilean society for a long time, while it also convinced people of the necessity and the good reasons for living under that order. Nevertheless, at present, we can see that the justifications put forward by the dictatorship­– and accepted in a very broad way by the post-dictatorship governments­– so as to impose and preserve its order have not been shown to be coherent with how people live and face their own lives and projects from an individual perspective. In this way, the student movement has managed to reinterpret individuals’ lives in a structural account which solves the individual problem of not being able to reach the standards that this kind of economic 252

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model has imposed while, at the same time, it constructs a narrative of Chilean society from a more collective perspective that deals with inequality, injustice, lack of integration, individual constraints, lack of the common good and the difficulties faced by different collectivities in order to decide how to live. In that sense, the student movement has managed, at least, to reshape Chilean social imaginaries, without it being possible, at the moment, to acknowledge which other transformations this process will bring about. In that direction, the student movement, and other movements that came with it, pose all kinds of questions as one tries to comprehend how structural transformations are set up and what are the ‘logics’, using Sewell’s notion (Sewell, 2005), that impel the various movements in Chile and all over the world to react in a similar fashion, foretelling a moment of historical change.21 The reappearance of mass social movements that criticise the system rather than merely seeking to vindicate a few loosely defined values, speaks of a rearticulating among certain stakeholders who historically have placed themselves in a position of structural or individual breach, pushing towards an expansion of individual and collective autonomy, towards greater equality, be it political, material, or of opportunities and justice, in favour of the common good and, in some cases, aiming to replace capitalism as a productive system. As already mentioned above, this opens a breach in the hegemonic discourse that has based its premises on technical tests which are therefore very difficult to refute. We observe the reappearance of rage, demand and indignation; mobilisation in pursuit of a political opening up and economic control; in the end, what in Polanyian terms [for Karl Polanyi (1886–1964)] could be interpreted as a defence of society against the commodification and dislocation produced by market extension. Communities are based on social relationships, and when one detaches [oneself] from other people’s needs, one loses humanity. The fact of forgetting that other people don’t have the means, that the system has screwed them, generates the lack of participation we see now, people don’t make themselves heard. If people say ‘This is what I have and, little as it is, it is mine, or it is a lot, then they might take it away from me,’ no social participation can emerge from that. (student protester in the 2011 occupation of the former Pedagogic University) 253

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Notes 1. The most well-known leader of the student movement, Camila Vallejo, was elected person of the year by a poll among readers of The Guardian in 2011. 2. Important mobilisations have been taking place in different parts of the country in reaction to: ecological problems (against the Castilla thermoelectric plant in 2011); the increase in gas prices in the southern region of Aysen (2012); sanitation problems in the town of Freirina (2012–13); and the problems of access to water as related to its use by the mining industry (2012–13). 3. These new movements present a type of demand that could be related to the demands of the movements that characterised ‘organised capitalism’ (Wagner, 1994) or, in Boltanski’s term, the second spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007), though they also add new features. The demands of the new movements are also structural and, in that way, cannot be linked only to a specific age group (as a generational issue) or to the so-called ‘new social movements’. 4. The post-dictatorship period, also known as the transition period, as well as the end of the Cold War, provoked a closure of the public sphere, whereby there was not much dialogue between elected politicians and the people, and where ‘the people’ had not much to say, in the end, about policy performance. Then, the whole political system was understood as something to be left to ‘technicians’/technocrats and not to be negotiated outside the formal system. Terms such as governability, populism and statism were commonly invoked by Chilean politicians. 5. At present (June 2013) at least fifty secondary schools are occupied by their students in Santiago, Chile’s capital city, complicating the upcoming primary elections, as some of these buildings are polling stations. The government has invoked a duty to evict the occupiers. The students, for their part, have been very clear in stating that the electoral service should find other locations for the voting process. In: http://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2013/06/26/toma-2/ 6. Currently, a special commission within parliament is investigating more than twelve private universities for not respecting the law that designates them as nonprofit institutions. 7. To ‘mount’ this business, the owners of the universities have used complicated methods for evading the law, such as buying the buildings where the university premises would be located and then letting them to the universities in question. In that way, it is not the university itself which is not reinvesting its revenues; it is the owners who are controlling the amounts that have to be paid to ‘outside’ parties. 8. The rise of this movement occurred in parallel with the emergence of new student organisations, namely those that appeared in private institutions and in secondary schools, and with a new type of student that, at least from 2006 onwards, following the so-called Penguin Revolution, was more politically prepared and radicalised and that conceived of politics as something in which the students could and should intervene. 9. The Penguin Revolution was an important secondary school student movement that took place in 2006 during the first year of Michelle Bachelet’s government. It was also a movement that surprised the country, showing a very politically

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The Student Movement in Chile 2011–12 prepared youth that raised structural claims focused mainly on the inequality of the education system, the role of the state as a supervisor of education, and the importance of strengthening democratic dynamics. This movement ended with a proposal for a law that was extensively discussed in Congress but finally, though approved, maintained the same dynamics that govern the education system to date (Silva, 2009). 10. Büchi was Minister of the Treasury during Pinochet’s government and a main stakeholder in the transformations. 11. Two plebiscites/referendums were convened by Pinochet’s government. The first (a very suspect process) was to approve the new constitution, and the second to decide over the continuation of Pinochet’s government. 12. Though different reforms have been applied to the Chilean Constitution which attempt to ‘liberate’ it from the constrictions left by the dictatorship, the main bases of the political and economic architecture that restrained the entry of other groups into the political arena, such as the ‘binominal’ election system and the laws of ‘qualified quorum’, have remained. 13. To the present day, many of these institutions are still lacking the financial and technical resources to fulfil their assigned function. This fact has created great differences in municipal education between rich and poor townships. 14. The first is not allowed to have ‘lucrative ends’, while this is permitted for the other two. 15. The minister Joaquín Lavín is an economist who studied at the University of Chicago and has written a book entitled The Silent Revolution (Lavín, 1987) in reference to what he considered to be the main commercial benefits of the economic transformations led by Pinochet’s regime. 16. The General Educational Law, which deals only with the primary and secondary education system, was approved in 2009, following a long discussion initiated by the student movement in 2006. Despite the discussion, the law maintained the same logic and dynamics that characterised the education system imposed by the dictatorship and has been perceived by the student movement as a defeat. 17. This fact is strengthened by the loss of relevance of the public elementary and secondary systems, and the emphasis that the different ‘micro-projects’ of subsided schools have assumed. In the case of the higher education system, there are also important ‘ideological’ differences between universities. See: http://diario.latercera.com/2010/10/03/01/contenido/pais/31-40386-9-chile-es-el-pais-que-revelaque-la-competencia-pura-no-mejora-la-educacion.shtml 18. A study by the World Bank, comparing the relationship between debt and income in ten countries, has shown that students could owe up to 180 per cent of their income at the point of entrance to the labour market (Fazio, 2012: 43). Additionally, the OECD has identified the Chilean higher education system as one of the most expensive in the world while public expenditure at this educational level is one of the lowest (Ruiz, 2010: 157), making families responsible­ – either through their income or through loans­– for covering most of the costs (Fazio, 2012: 61). 19. This credit­– where the state acted as guarantor­– had a 5.3 per cent interest rate, while the corfo (Production Development Corporation) credit has an 8 per cent interest rate. 20. The disrepute of the economic model also results from several situations that

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References Atria, Fernando (2012), La Mala Educación: Ideas que Inspiran el Movimiento Estudiantil en Chile, Santiago de Chile: Editorial Catalonia. Biblioteca Nacional del Congreso de Chile (2006), ‘El sistema electoral binominal y las elecciones parlamentarias 1989-2005’, Serie Estudios Públicos N° 1, Santiago de Chile. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello (2005), El Nuevo Espíritu del Capitalismo, Madrid: Ediciones Akal. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello [1999 (2007)], The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso. Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thevenot [1991 (2006)], On Justification: Economies of Worth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Büchi, Hernán (1993), La Transformación Económica en Chile: Del Estatismo a la Libertad Económica, Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Norma. Carreras, Francisco (2004), La Estrategia Despolitizadora de la Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI), Tesis para optar al título de Sociólogo (thesis submitted for the degree of sociology), Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile. Castro, Sergio de (1992), El Ladrillo: Bases de Política Económica del Gobierno Militar Chileno, Santiago de Chile: Centro de Estudios Públicos. Cavallo, Ascanio (1998), La Historia Oculta de la Transición, Santiago de Chile: Editorial Grijalbo. Elacqua, Gregory (2011), ‘Breve historia de las reformas educacionales en Chile (1813 al presente): cobertura, condiciones, calidad y equidad’, Instituto de Políticas Públicas, Universidad Diego Portales, Fazio, Hugo (1996), El Programa Olvidado, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Fazio, Hugo (2011), Un país gobernado por sus dueños, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones/CENDA. Fazio, Hugo (2012), Indignación: Causales Socioeconómicas, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones/CENDA. FECH (2011), Financiamiento en Educación Superior Estudiantil y Universitaria: Universidad de Chile, Chile y el Mundo, Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile (FECH), Santiago de Chile. Gárate, Manuel (2012), La Revolución Capitalista en Chile: 1973–2002, Santiago de Chile: Ril Editores.

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The Student Movement in Chile 2011–12 García-Huidobro, Juan Eduardo (2008), ‘La Ley General de Educación: acuerdos y silencios’, Revista Mensaje. Garretón, Manuel Antonio (1993), ‘La dimensión política de los procesos de transformación en Chile’, Serie Estudios Políticos N° 29, Documento de Trabajo. Guzmán, Jaime (1991), ‘El miedo y otros escritos: el pensamiento de Jaime Guzmán’, Serie Estudios Públicos N° 42, Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), Santiago de Chile. Harvey, David (2007), Breve Historia del Neoliberalismo, Barcelona: Editorial Akal. Jackson, Giorgio (2012), ‘Entrevista’, Revista Puntos de Vista, Marzo-Abril, Centro de Estudios Sociales y de Opinión Pública. Lavín, Joaquín (1987), Chile, La Revolución Silenciosa, Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag. Mayol, Alberto (2012), El Derrumbe del Modelo, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Mönckeberg, María Olivia (2005), La Privatización de las Universidades: Una Historia de Dinero, Poder e Influencias, Santiago de Chile: Ediciones La Copa Rota. Oppliger, Marcel (2012), El Malestar de Chile ¿Teoría o Diagnóstico?, Santiago de Chile: Ril Editores. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2004), Education Report. Otano, Rafael (2006), Nueva Crónica de la Transición, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Piñera, José (1979), ‘La entrevista de la Refundación’, . PNUD (1998), Informe de Desarrollo Humano: Las Paradojas de la Modernización, Santiago de Chile: PNUD. PNUD (2002), Informe de Desarrollo Humano: Nosotros los Chilenos, Santiago de Chile: PNUD. Polanyi, Karl [1944 (1989)], La Gran Transformación: Los Orígenes Políticos y Económicos de Nuestro Tiempo, Madrid: Ediciones de la Piqueta. Portales, Felipe (1999), Chile: Una Democracia Tutelada, Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. Ruiz, Carlos (2010), De la República al Mercado: Ideas Educacionales y Política en Chile, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Sewell, William (2005), Logics of History, Social Theory and Social Transformation, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Silva, Beatriz (2009), ‘La Revolución Pingüina y el cambio cultural en Chile’, Latinoamerican Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), . Simonsen, Elizabeth (2012), Mala Educación: Historia de la Revolución Escolar, Santiago de Chile: Random House Mondadori. Wagner, Peter (1994), A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, London: Routledge. Wagner, Peter (2008), Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Wagner, Peter (2010), ‘Successive Modernities and the Idea of Progress: a First Attempt’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 11: 2, 9–24. Wagner, Peter (2012), Modernity: Understanding the Present, London: Polity Press.

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12 Indignation and Claims for Economic Sovereignty in Europe and the Americas: Renewing the Project of Control over Production David Casassas, Sérgio Franco, Bru Laín, Edgar Manjarín, Rommy Morales Olivares, Samuel Sadian and Beatriz Silva Pinochet

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Introduction

hat does an actor (or set of actors) do when, after protracted negotiation, she/he agrees to an imperfect compromise that nevertheless guarantees some important benefits, and after a certain period of time the opposing party decides to revise the deal by imposing terms that are clearly worse than those of the compromise they had settled upon? Does the former actor (or set of actors) fight to defend and recover the terms of the original compromise? Does she/he, instead, feel she/he may legitimately reset the terms of the negotiations to pursue what she/he had originally renounced? In this chapter we shall present contemporary social movements such as the indignados, the ‘occupy’ movement and popular protests in some Latin American countries as (sets of) actors that, albeit in different ways, appear to be pointing towards the second option. In effect, given the evidence that all the ‘social deals’ of the second half of the twentieth century­– or the expectations they gave rise to­– have been and are being undermined by the neo-liberal turn of capitalism, these movements are taking shape as forms of action that aim not only at defending some achievements of ‘reformed capitalism’ but also at exploring the possibility of forms of social and economic organisation that go beyond purely capitalist logics, as they try to recover one of the central goals of contemporary emancipatory traditions, namely control over production and distribution.1 To do so, in the first part we shall analyse what the post-World War II ‘social deal’ meant and what actors, historical trajectories and soci258

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etal self-understandings contributed to its appearance. Then we shall show some of the various institutional concretisations of the deal, and we shall explain why, both in Europe and North America and in Latin America, the guarantee of (very dissimilar) degrees of socio-economic security went hand in hand with a decrease of collective economic sovereignty. In the third part we assess the effects of the neo-liberal turn in terms of a decrease of the working populations’ socio-economic security, and suggest that this dismantling of the former ‘social deal’ helps disseminate the seeds of current forms of rebellion­– with the city being the main focal point of our analysis. The final section showcases some of the ways in which the aforementioned social movements are demanding both public policy schemes and self-management-based economic arrangements aiming at fostering collective sovereignty within the economic field by recovering the goal of popular control over (re)production. Class conflicts and the shaping of all those institutions that administer them constitute a core feature of modernity. In effect, a large part of the institutionality of modern states is closely linked to social imaginaries that emerge from, and define, the various forms of class struggle­– and agreement­– prevailing at certain periods. This chapter aims at assessing some particular configurations and evolutions of such imaginaries and their institutional embodiments.

A Social Deal for the Reform of Capitalism? Achievements and Renunciations in Popular Economic Sovereignty in the Aftermath of World War II In its essence, the so-called post-World War II consensus or social deal was the outcome of a class-struggle truce within the Fordist organisation of production: in effect, the deal would not have been possible without the previous development of a strong labour movement in Europe and North America that had achieved major goals such as universal suffrage. The post-World War II consensus emerged as a growth model based on a stabilised rise of productivity combining profitability and mass consumption, and embedding the capital–labour relationship in an institutional framework headed by the state. The use of the label ‘Fordist deal’ as a way to designate this consensus is not haphazard: the origins of the consensus can be directly linked to the ‘Treaty of Detroit’ (Zunz, Schoppa and Hiwatari, 2004), a crucial contract between the United Auto Workers (UAW) association and 259

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the three great Detroit car makers (Ford, General Motors and Chrysler) which crystallised after several encounters and agreements, and thanks to several strikes and high levels of unionisation. Daniel Bell used the term noting that the agreement ‘unmistakably accepts the existing distribution of income between wages and profits as “normal”, if not as “fair” . . . It is the first major union contract that explicitly accepts objective economic facts­– cost of living and productivity­– as determining wages’ (Jacobs, 2004: 140). This labour–management agreement implied the recognition of collective bargaining structures by corporations, allowing meetings, union elections and a certain degree of freedom of speech (putting an end to Ford’s inclinations towards anti-unionism), accepting wage adjustments according to inflation, and introducing pension, holiday and health benefits. These moves had to be accompanied by a decrease of strikes and labour demands, and, as this kind of ‘constitutionalisation’ of corporations (Domènech, 2005) spread­– mainly through the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations­– it brought with it widespread calls for working populations to renounce the labour movements’ aspiration to question the authority of capitalists in the workplace and to democratically control the means of production by achieving a high degree of freedom in the workplace (Davis, 1986). These changes pushed the state into becoming a guardian and a guarantor of working populations’ security and welfare which helped shape the social state that was emerging with the Keynesian macroeconomic policies of the New Deal. These policies came hand in hand with well-known laws such as: the Glass–Steagall Act, against what Roosevelt used to call the ‘banksters’, which required the separation of commercial banking from investment banking; the National Recovery Act which legalised collective bargaining; and the strengthening of the Anti-Trust Division in the Department of Justice which multiplied by five the number of lawyers, swelling its ranks (Leuchtenburg, 2006: 8). Also, the consolidation of this deal between the industrial workforce and industrial capital meant the decisive exclusion of rentiers from the income share, which was part of Keynes’s plans for the making of the Bretton Woods international monetary system that had to be put in place in 1944.2 This was of no small importance, for the presence of uncontrolled financial oligarchies had become a well-known problem following the 1929 crash. In Europe, the perceived threat of the USSR, which was often seen 260

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as an alternative social model, along with the presence of strong antifascist popular movements, motivated and helped spread the United States’s Marshall Plans for European economic recovery which led to the extension of the Fordist social deal across the continent. In effect, European post-war constitutions safeguarded several social rights but, at the same time, put an end to the debates about economic democracy and ‘labour-parliamentarianism’ in the workplace. The great shift in labour’s strategy in the majority of capitalist countries reflected a new imaginary that privileged collective autonomy in the economic and political spheres and in which industrial growth and sustained improvement of labour and living conditions in general were priorities. The abandonment of the debate on the control over production and the revolutionary opposition to wage-earning labour did not mean a total negation of socialist views,3 but it did imply the end of the centrality of workplace democracy within the core debates on economic organisation. The final result of this process was a degradation of popular economic sovereignty which took shape as limited forms of representation within the institutions of welfare-state capitalism. The post-World War II consensus can be understood as a shared basic programme taking the centrality of labour and the statutory regulation of capitalism as its core elements (Standing, 2002). This programme involved the (somewhat) universal provision of goods under the principles of social security and formal equality. The setting of these welfare institutions had to reconcile a constitutionalised independence of private property from legislative power with public ownership of certain strategic assets. At the same time, the programme included a plan of development with full employment as an unquestionable premise. Both as a normative goal and as an analytical problem, the full employment ‘mantra’ contained several tensions that neither industrial capitalists nor labour organisations explicitly considered. First, it laid the foundations for a model of growth that disregarded the possible lack of resources and external costs in relation to the environment in the long term. Second, it set aside reproductive work as an unwaged activity, concealing many aspects of exploitation­– particularly women’s­– under the veil of household prosperity. And last but not least, the main conception of full employment as a postulate could not be maintained, and therefore was never fully fostered, owing to its ultimate consequences for the dynamics of class struggle: in a full employment situation, capitalists would lose a very significant part of their bargaining power because of the absence of unemployed workers 261

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willing to work at lower wages. It was the anticipation and fear of this scenario that led capitalists to shift their strategies by using their political power to undermine full employment and, by doing so, to erode the foundations of the social agreement (Kalecki, 1943). To sum up, a new societal understanding of what the capital–labour relationship had to be was born after World War II. It was a consensus aimed at: guaranteeing an unprecedented economic security for most people living in these countries; a relative increase of popular sovereignty over economic life emanating from antispeculative controls over great accumulations of economic power; and, at the same time, a massive loss of popular economic sovereignty, as labour movements had openly to renounce their central goal of collectively controlling production. But how did this social consensus find institutional expression? In other words, what kind of institutional devices enabled the stipulations of this agreement to be realised?

Institutional Concretisations Europe and North America: the Many Outcomes of a Multifaceted Welfarist Project What we have been calling the post-war settlement within Europe, the United States and other societies of the global North was embodied in a number of prominent social practices with what might be called authoritative, allocative and communicative dimensions that together constituted a re-embedding of members of these societies into a regulated social order (Wagner, 1994). Below, we briefly consider the institutional forms into which authoritative practices solidified, for a time, following World War II, in order to fill in the background for our discussion of sovereignty and contemporary demands for a new social order. Authoritative practices include the emergence of mass parties focused on electoral politics and the social support policies aimed at reducing material uncertainties that came to be known as the ‘welfare state’ (Wagner, 1994). We can understand the welfare state, along with mass-party politics, as the two institutions most directly responsible for (at least partially) averting the permanent uncoupling of democracy and capitalism as prognosticated by such thinkers as Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville (Offe, 1984). The redistribution practised by welfare 262

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regimes deserves special attention because, through the institutionalised mechanism of social rights, the imagined interdependence, trust and solidarity of modern communities connect with the quotidian experiences of individuals (Bauman, 2009). Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) work on welfare regimes remains seminal, in part because it has helped discredit the notion of functionalist convergence of modern societies (Room, 2000). What are now commonly referred to as ‘welfare states’ are best understood as regimes that grant social citizenship through inviolable social rights to such things as minimum income, housing subsidies, education and health care, which enjoy the same status as property rights (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Fabre, 1998). Distancing himself from analyses of welfare regimes that focus only on welfare expenditures, which suggests relative convergence or divergence along a single axis, Esping-Andersen argues that we might conceptualise such regimes as belonging to ‘liberal’, ‘corporatist’ or ‘social democratic’ ideal types in accordance with the quality of social rights they guarantee through their disposition of the relationship between individuals (or families), the market and the state in the provision of welfare. This division into ideal types also considers the effects of such regimes on social stratification and on the relative commodification of individuals vis-à-vis the market (EspingAndersen, 1990; Ebbinghaus and Manow, 2001). Considering the welfare state’s effect on commodification is of special importance because contemporary opposition to what we have been describing as the post-war deal has revived the concern with the commodification of life. In this connection, Esping-Andersen (1990) reasons that, if we understand capitalism as a system in which workers are compelled to sell their labour power to ensure their survival, then, to the extent that welfare state social policies in capitalist societies effectively free workers from market dependence4 and deliver welfare services as a matter of rights, social relations become proportionately decommodified. This decommodification is extremely modest in liberal regimes (of which the US, Canada and Australia are the least ambiguous examples), where strict means or income tests, meagre benefits and social stigmatisation of recipients incline most of the population to rely upon private-sector welfare (Esping-Andersen 1990). In corporatist regimes (such as Austria, Germany, France and Italy), state-provided welfare entitlements are generous but the state is grudging with benefits if families can provide these independently, leading to only moderate decommodification (Esping-Andersen 1990). 263

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The Scandinavian countries (Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden) are the best exemplars of the social democratic model insofar as they secure social rights that guarantee high-standard, universal welfare through one blanket insurance system. Though the benefits this model secures are proportional to customary income levels, the model has strongly decommodifying consequences that cut across income divisions (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Bambra, 2010). While Esping-Andersen helps to remind us of the differences between northern welfare states, it is also meaningful to consider what they have in common. Discussing the legacy of the post-World War II welfare state, Offe (1984: 193–4) argues that the welfare state can be understood as a ‘politically instituted class compromise’, informed by Keynesian economic theory. As discussed above, the labour conflicts that had flared up throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were pacified by integrating workers into the political process and increasing their welfare (Offe, 1984; Halperin, 2004). In return, those representing workers relinquished their claims for fuller control of production and, in this negative sense, helped to diminish popular sovereignty. This compromise was premised on various forms of labour security that all northern welfare state regimes institutionalised after 1945: labour market security (attempts to ensure full employment),5 employment security (ensuring that practices such as hiring and firing were tightly regulated), job security (protecting the conditions which allowed workers to progress along a preferred occupational path), work security (protecting well-being by ensuring healthy working conditions and reasonable working hours), skill reproduction security, income security, and representation security (ensuring collective representation through trade unions and employer associations integrated into the state) (Standing, 2002). Through these measures, the post-World War II social consensus became an institutional reality in Europe and­– though in different ways­– in the United States, Canada and Australia. Let us focus now on how such a consensus was being interpreted in Latin America. Latin America: Expectations, Obstacles, and Attainments of Welfare In Latin America, the deal established in Europe was not achieved (Filgueira, 2009: 75). Nonetheless, several countries implemented changes aiming at building a ‘modern’ economy based, as in Europe, on broadening social protection. In that sense, we can interpret this 264

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broadening of social protection as the achievement of a certain degree of decommodification of some aspects of labour power. The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) was one of the main actors responsible for introducing an academic understanding of how to achieve development by taking an inward-looking perspective­– the so called import substitution industrialisation (ISI) model. In general terms, the ISI model was based on the attempt to strengthen domestic markets and to enhance industry and the production of manufactured goods by protecting these industries through tariff policies. The ISI model can also be associated with the attempt to establish an intervening and entrepreneurial state­– also called ‘developmentalist’­– which played a more active role in shaping the economic life of entire societies (Franco, 1996: 3). This type of state established a protective relationship with the employee in order to guide the delivery of services to the middle and organised working classes. This model was followed most closely by Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, and partly by Mexico and Colombia (Bulmer-Thomas, 2003: 268). As can be seen, the ISI model­– as well as the Alliance for Progress which was established in 1961 by the United States­– were policies that were intended to achieve some very specific patterns of development. They were also a product of, and a response to, Latin America’s special ‘correlation of forces’ which would create huge expectations of change and some fears as well, especially after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 which reinforced the concerns of the United States (Bulmer-Thomas, 2003: 308). But Latin America witnessed democratic ruptures and the existence of great obstacles to the development of efficient and inclusive types of capitalism not relying solely on precarious employment. Throughout the region, the imaginary possibility of enhancing collective autonomy by achieving a capital–labour deal based on employment and social security for those social groups participating in labour markets nonetheless prevailed­– a deal which, as in Europe and the United States, implied that working populations would renounce popular economic sovereignty in the workplace. With the exception of some countries over certain periods, this objective was not achieved in practice, a fact that greatly exacerbated social conflict. In some countries, the agrarian elites were able to maintain control of their interests and contain the social upheavals attending the 265

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a­doption of inward-looking, state-run industrialisation strategies as well as the expansion of public services (mainly in Central America, where United States interests also predominated). By contrast, in economies with a larger organised labour movement focused on the mining sector, the middle classes achieved alliances pushing towards greater inclusion and greater benefits and rights protection. Some of these countries (Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela) saw strong mobilisation and pressure for more radical changes, while others saw the establishment of electoral systems operating under the logic of political patronage. Thus, in countries such as Uruguay and Argentina, elites managed to establish an alliance with the middle and lower classes which limited class mobilisation but also achieved certain social and economic reforms and protection systems. In this way, there were important attempts in the region to reach more politically and economically inclusive and egalitarian systems which were seen as a real threat by the elites and built up important transformative expectations outside elite circles. These expectations were undermined, however, by several conservative coups d’état during the 1960s and the 1970s. Today, the current ‘map’ of inclusive social protection policies in Latin America is still very uneven. As a result of all these historical processes, and in spite of the fact that it is very difficult to create typologies in Latin America which would replicate those generally used in Europe and North America, one can identify some general trends in social protection systems in the region. According to Lo Vuolo (2016), . . . the region’s social protection systems could be classified into three groups. A first group of countries, including Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica had a social protection system of ‘stratified universalism’ characterised by universal or quasiuniversal coverage in the pension and retirement schemes, primary education and basic healthcare . . . In a second group of countries including Brazil and Mexico (together with Venezuela, Panama and, to a lesser degree, Colombia), a ‘dual regime’ can be identified insofar as a large proportion of the population (especially of the urban part) is covered by social services and income maintenance schemes . . . while the other important part remains excluded from the public protection system. Finally, a third group comprising such countries as El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Ecuador, and to a lesser degree, Guatemala, can be denominated ‘exclusionary’, since 266

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only a small privileged part of the population has access to social protection. In all cases, . . . informal labour relations . . . limit the coverage for large proportions of the population, which remain outside the reach of social insurance systems. In this context, social insurance suffers from severe limitations in the attempt to offer universal coverage, while it replicates labour market inequalities (and income distribution inequalities more generally).

The Neo-liberal Turn and the Rupture of the Post-World War II Social Deal: a Counter-reform of Capitalism? Europe and North America: the Dismantling of Welfare Regimes as a Loss and as a Threat As has been discussed, during the thirty ‘golden years’ of capitalism, an agreement between labour and capital played a central role in most of the European and North American economies. While the labour force renounced control over production, capitalists and employers accepted having to guarantee, and finance, relevant degrees of socioeconomic security for all. In this context, unions and trade associations were recognised by governments as legitimate actors and channelled the running of most democratic market societies. A certain coupling of capitalism and democracy­– the latter understood here in the minimal sense of the presence of multiparty elections­– was therefore achieved, even if it was at the price of decreasing collective self-determination within the economic realm. Nevertheless, since the mid-1970s the link between capitalism and democracy was profoundly altered. In effect, the institutional framework that emerged from agreements between labour and capital suffered radical changes which transformed the political meaning of these institutions and undermined their social legitimacy. During the last four decades, we have witnessed a process of what Karl Polanyi (1944) would have called the disembedding of markets from societal deliberation and control: clearly, economic activity has been detached from collective political sovereignty and public control. Rather than as a purely ‘disembedding’ process, though, this shift can be understood 267

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as a move from ‘national publicly regulated’ capitalism to ‘global corporations-led re-regulated’ capitalism. It is a shift that has been shaped by the neo-liberal and conservative agenda, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the predominance of the financial sector within contemporary economies.6 The spread of new institutional arrangements was facilitated, among other factors, by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the decreased influence of traditional social democratic parties and labour unions (two of the most relevant actors during the post-World War II period), the electoral victory of Margaret Thatcher in Britain (1979) and of Ronald Reagan in the United States (1981), and the end of the gold standard which was unilaterally declared by the United States in 1971. All these transformations led to the withdrawal of Keynesian economic and fiscal policies and opened the doors to the financialisation of national economies and their (re)globalisation. In addition to that, in 1999 President Bill Clinton abrogated the aforementioned Glass-Steagall Act. This move facilitated the preponderance of the financial sector, fostering its global turn, and this has implied a loss of national control over the movement of capital and, therefore, of collective economic sovereignty. This new scenario, a true alternative to the ‘social deal’ we have analysed in the first two parts of this chapter, was programmatically consolidated in the Washington Consensus (1989) which had radical effects in Latin America, and, in the case of Europe, in the Maastricht Treaty (1993). On the one hand, the Washington Consensus consisted of a set of economic measures to be implemented mainly in ‘developing countries’ by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in order to shape a macroeconomic agenda aimed at maximising financial and international trade openness and at increasing overseas operations, which reflects a greater offshore outsourcing of trade activities (OECD, 2011). On the other hand, the Maastricht Treaty aimed at fostering European integration, not only in political terms but mainly in terms of a common economic policy based on limits to governmental deficit and public debt7 and the reduction of public expenditure in social policies. Thus, these new trends in macroeconomic policies entailed a dramatic alteration of the post-World War II institutional setting while also implying what might be described as a shift in prevailing understandings of how to resolve the internal tensions of modernity. Instead of seeking to bolster the mechanisms promoting autonomous collective self-determination, which had previously led to economic 268

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reforms implemented by an interventionist state and legitimised by the provision of collective security, institutional reforms were now implemented which sought legitimacy by appeal to the promotion of exclusively market-based individual autonomy and that led in practice to worse living conditions for the majority of the population and to a strong decrease in socio-economic security (Harvey, 2007; Standing, 2002). It can be argued that these transformations were not the result of a purely political reconfiguration of class conflict and interaction but of a technical fiscal crisis of the welfare state. According to the last interpretation, the welfare state’s constant redistribution and reallocation of resources would have collapsed because of inherent difficulties in sustaining the large fiscal income that is needed to finance it, this being the result of the relative decrease of the working- (and fiscally contributing-)age population and of fiscal competition with emerging countries in which companies did not have to pay high taxes. Though these tensions did and do exist, we believe that between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, capitalism experienced elite-driven political transformations eroding the basis of the former social consensus and the social imaginary it assumed (Bello, 2009; Halperin, 2013; Harvey, 2007; Varoufakis, 2011). This shift expressed an alteration of the selfunderstanding of democratic market societies, which led to a true ‘democratic crisis of capitalism’ (Wagner, 2011). The living conditions of ‘the 99%’8 have deteriorated in accordance with a number of common experiences: decreased labour participation in the generation of national income and a decline in the total expenditure on social protection and government subsidies during the last thirty years; weakened labour market legislation; an acceleration of the process of privatisation of the public sector; an increasing disequilibrium between wages and productivity; and an increase in private debt through the extension of household and all kinds of consumptionrelated indebtedness. Though there are substantial internal differences within the large group affected by these developments, the general tendency is for all its members to experience a decrease of ‘social income’, measured as the aggregate of wages and other monetary earnings, company-related non-monetary benefits, and state, community and private benefits. It is within this context that social scientists and activists have begun to speak of an emerging ‘precariat’, that is, ‘a multitude of people living bits-and-pieces lives, having short-term or casual jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment or labour force w ­ ithdrawal, 269

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with insecure incomes, few assured enterprise or state benefits, and a lack of occupational careers’ (Standing, 2011a). In effect, precariousness has extended, as a consequence of both a decrease in cash and in-kind benefits and falling wages. This is a situation increasingly shared by all working populations: one can belong to the ‘precariat’ either because one lives in an effectively precarious situation­– with no job or with awful working conditions and scarce public assistance­– or because one lives under the permanent threat of falling into that trap. Both social realities are paradigmatic of the current counter-reform of capitalism: universal socio-economic security is no longer a reality or a realistic aspiration for the many. We can observe that political representation mechanisms are facing a true legitimisation crisis, while labour and capital are again divided regarding which policies should be implemented to achieve social integration. In this new context, new, sometimes contradictory, social movements which highlight the unsustainability of the current scenario and aim at the Polanyian ‘self-defence of society’ are emerging. One way of interpreting the demands of the new social movements we consider in this chapter is that what might be called a ‘social consensus’ about the desired institutional disposition of modernity is breaking down and, against this background, these movements are, in effect, appealing for a new consensus in which the running of the economic realm does not fundamentally negate popular sovereignty. Modernity­ – and, in particular, the relationship between the political and economic realms­– is thus being shaped by new forms of the long-standing Polanyian ‘double movement’. Latin America: Paradoxes and (Lost?) Opportunities In this section we shall explore how the loss of these achievements and aspirations is being experienced in Latin America. As is well known, post-military dictatorships in South American countries started to talk about neo-liberalism as an economic project around 1990 (Williamson, 1990). With the exception of the Chilean case, where it was implemented with the structural reforms of 1979, that is, long before the Washington Consensus, the regional turn to neo-liberalism as a systematic project began in Latin America with Mexico, in 1989. This tendency soon spread to the entire region and was taken up by democratically elected governments. The Washington Consensus can be considered the instrumen270

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tal foundation of the neo-liberal model. In institutional terms, its first formulation includes the following elements: budgetary discipline; changes in the allocative priorities of public expenditure; public reform aimed at creating a wide tax base with moderate marginal rates; financial liberalisation, especially of interest rates; the search for, and maintenance of, competitive exchange rates; commercial liberalisation; opening to the entry of direct foreign investment; and privatisation, deregulation, and guarantees of property rights for the few. Subsequently, the so-called ‘second wave’ reforms brought about the privatisation of social security systems­– health, education, and so on­– and the appearance of targeted public policies. One of the major consequences of this set of neo-liberal institutional changes is the fact that it blocks opportunities for individuals and groups to generate a new socio-economic and developmental model for the long term in the region (Garretón, 2012). In economic terms, these reforms imply that financial capital exercises more influence over society than public institutions­– that is, a form of disembedding of economics from political and societal deliberation, to put it again in Polanyian terms. In social terms, these reforms establish a new socioeconomic model where the market is understood as the best mechanism for allocating goods and services and also for regulating an entire society. Privatisation and state fragmentation are among the more relevant institutional consequences: social policies become subject to indicators of economic growth and resource-allocation processes are increasingly driven by market logic (Ocampo, 2005). The success accomplished in macroeconomic terms, which has to do with foreign investment and the opening of Latin American countries to global markets, did not translate into a growth in GDP or productivity. Empirical data contradict the widespread idea that market liberalisation in the region is a necessary and sufficient condition for economic growth. It is true that the reduction of both inflation and fiscal deficit contributed positively to the projection of an ‘image of confidence’ in Latin American countries’ macroeconomic behaviour. According to the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) data, however, the average growth rate between 1990 and 2003 was 2.6 per cent per year, that is, less than half the growth rate during the period of state-coordinated industrialisation between 1950 and 1980, when growth reached an average of 5.5 per cent per year (Ocampo, 2005). The neo-liberal development of the region meant giving priority to 271

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growth instead of overcoming poverty and income inequality­– during the 1990s, most Latin American countries suffered a deterioration in the distribution of incomes, as measured by the Gini coefficient. In effect, despite the wave of democratisation in the region, social policies have been weak and incapable of dealing with the effects of structural reforms. As Lo Vuolo (2016) explains, . . . the universalistic elements of social policies were confronted with the argument that they did not serve the best interest of the poor. The alleged ‘over-protection’ that certain categories enjoyed within the social security system helped legitimise policies that pushed down benefits and smoothened the way for selectivity, despite the social insurance legacy. Thus, social policymakers were advised to set aside such universalistic aims and strengthen instead the relationship between benefits and contributions, preferably through private insurance. The poorest groups, selected by social management experts, would receive direct subsidies by means of social assistance programs. As a result, countries in the region started to rely more heavily on market solutions for welfare, and on selectivity as the criterion for policy orientation. As Garretón (1997) suggests, there was a certain affinity between neo-liberalism and certain formal aspects of the democratic regimes in the region. But neo-liberalism tends to erode effective democracy, for it weakens and fragments the state, stratifies social relationships, subordinates the social and the political spheres to the economic system, weakens social movements and strengthens ‘the powers that be’ in the market (Garretón, 2012). At the end of the 1990s, discourses and policies of the traditional left were weakened, giving life to ‘progressivism’. This process occurred because of the fall of ‘real socialisms’ but also because of the opportunity offered by the evident failure of neo-liberal adjustment policies. In this context, a strong social and political debate about the possibilities of merging the deepening of democracies with capitalist market development originated in the global North and spread to a number of Latin American countries. All this gave rise to centre and centre-left ‘renewed’ political options; in the Chilean case, for instance, the process originated within a sector of the centre-left Concertación coalition.9 As debates about ‘progressivism’ have spread, so too has controversy 272

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about the term’s meaning. On the one hand, we are referring here to a political project that aims at offering a left-wing reaction against the negative legacy of the neo-liberal economic model after two decades of structural reforms. On the other hand, given its conciliatory approach to market mechanisms, it is a project that can also be related to what Anthony Giddens has called the ‘Third Way’ (Giddens, 1998). What seems obvious is that, during the last fifteen years, the classic demands of the left suffered a displacement to the centre and the right. According to Giddens (1998), this ideological framework involves a radical reform in the state and government to increase efficiency, transparency and sensitivity to a consumer society. The state assumes the role of a facilitator only, and disregards autonomy-fostering perspectives or a substantive questioning of neo-liberalism. In this sense, progressivism is a poor attempt at re-embedding the economy, to use Polanyi’s terms once more. In ideological terms, progressivism tries to renew European social democracy. Paradoxically, it tries to do so in a context­– Latin America­– that lacks the foundations of the European welfare state or social model. Therefore, it is an empty attempt, unsubstantiated by empirical or even ideological support. In sum, these new centre-left progressive options do not propose overcoming capitalism as a socio-economic model but they suggest a moderate reform of it, leaving intact many typically neo-liberal macroeconomic recommendations and practices (Perkoff, 2005). All in all, in spite of some positive effects of these reformist projects, the precariousness that neo-liberalism entails both in the global North and in the South remains one of the main features of Latin American economies which maintain their dependency on external actors and have proven to be incapable of creating the necessary conditions for decreasing poverty and extreme inequalities. The ‘multitude of people living bits-and-pieces lives’ we referred to when analysing the effects of the neo-liberal turn in Europe and North America (Standing, 2011a) is unquestionably also to be found in Latin America. Both in Europe and North America and in Latin America, this situation can only lead to (multiple forms of) contestation. In the next section, we shall analyse how the neo-liberal project manifests itself in the urban context, and in what sense one can say that the break-up of the post-1945 social deal­– whatever its institutional materialisation had been or had aimed at being­– sometimes carries with it the seeds of transformative, post-capitalist popular rebellion. In effect, what one can observe in Latin America today is that the social imaginary which 273

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privileged collective self-determination and aimed at reproducing social security schemes along the lines of European post-World War II ones, has been destroyed. Instead, new ways of administering social conflict are searched for within an historical context marked by deep economic crisis (Argentina), changes in political regimes (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia), long-lasting armed conflicts (Colombia, Mexico) and new social movements, even if modest in numbers, aiming at overcoming past solutions and forging new autonomy-enhancing paths (some of the most striking examples being, arguably, Chile, Mexico and Brazil). The Urban Dimension of the Neo-liberal Turn: Destruction, Resistance, Rebellion The crisis of welfare regimes and the break-up of the popular consensus underpinning them have recently opened waves of demonstrations on both sides of the Atlantic. Just to mention some of them: the Indignados in Spain and the occupation of several plazas around the country such as Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona and Plaza del Sol in Madrid; demonstrations, strikes and important political eruptions in Syntagma Square in Athens; the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, which has spread its protests to other United States cities; and several popular protests in the streets of Chile, Mexico, and Brazil. It is interesting to note that, in the general context of neo-liberal politics, all these demonstrations and movements have taken place in important urban zones, presenting strategies of occupation of public space that can be directly related to claims to recover ‘the commons’, that is, common pools of resources empowering the vast majority to pursue autonomous life plans and social and economic arrangements. Thus, despite the specific demands of each one of these movements, there are two features common to them all. First, all these 2011 to 2013 movements have an urban character.10 And second, their struggles aim not only at stopping the neo-liberal dismantling of welfare policies but also at recovering common resources, and the bargaining power deriving from their enjoyment, that capitalist dispossession has historically eroded. To understand all these recent ‘urban rebellions’, we need to focus directly on the consequences for urban life of the dismantling of welfare regimes and the strengthening of neo-liberal capitalism. Thus, a first point to note is that, over the last decades, the usual prescrip274

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tions of neo-liberalism have been applied to urban affairs, with cities being presented as true ‘growth machines’. In effect, neo-liberalism acted in the city by propagating the rather dubious assumption that economic growth could be achieved through the deregulation of planning and construction processes, the opening of the land market, market speculation in urban real estate and the built environment (especially housing), and so on. All these tendencies have been gaining ground, very often in connection with strong financial deregulation. Privatisation of public services and commodification of public space and goods have also been prescribed and, in several cases, faithfully implemented. The consequences of all these neo-liberal measures are experienced in a very immediate and visible fashion in the urban space, where ordinary people live their daily lives, and they have meant the degradation of the quality of urban life for the vast majority of the population in very different contexts around the world. As Harvey (2012: 53, 57, 129, 133) points out, rental appropriations and savage dispossession dynamics­– the so-called ‘secondary forms of exploitation’­– are piled upon the working classes in their living places by merchants, capitalists, financiers, credit-mongers, bankers and landlords. These several forms of exploitation, Harvey remarks, are and have always been vital to the overall dynamics of capital accumulation and to the perpetuation of class power, and ‘lie at the heart of many of the discontents that attach to the qualities of daily life for the mass of the population’ (Harvey, 2012: 129). But what is worth noting here is that Harvey also shows how class struggle against reforms that can be broadly characterised as neo-liberal is directly related to degrading qualities of urban life, through foreclosures, the persistence of predatory practices in urban housing markets, reductions in services, and above all the lack of viable employment opportunities in urban labour markets almost everywhere . . . The crisis now is as much an urban crisis as it ever was. (Harvey, 2012: 53) In the light of all this, we can easily understand why it is precisely in the urban sphere that some of the movements against neo-liberal capitalism have been emerging and developing in recent times. Therefore, movements such as the Indignados and ‘Occupy’ should be understood as transversal movements of people, in a myriad of urban contexts and under several forms of exploitation, rebelling for better conditions of life­– and sometimes even for a common life under non-capitalist 275

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c­onditions. In other words, these movements are fighting for what Lefebvre (1968) once called the ‘right to the city’. For instance, nowadays there are thousands of families in Spain suffering a systematic and predatory form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ related to housing mortgages acquired during the building and urbanisation boom­– and bubble. The struggle against this kind of exploitation is led by a social movement defending people from house eviction and carrying out several actions to guarantee the ‘right to housing’ as part of the ‘right to the city’.11 There are many other examples but the fact is that it is mainly in the urban space that most of these rebel movements have been rising against neo-liberal capitalism (and, in a number of cases, against capitalism itself). Moreover, the current struggle for the (re)construction of the commons does not have to do only with decommodifying labour power in production processes but also with restoring the public space for autonomous everyday life in the neighbourhood and in the city. In other words, current dynamics of class exploitation, and their consequent contradictions and crises, are not only confined to the workplace but are also present in the living place. It is also arguable that, while sometimes the fight for the recovery of common resources is directly related to claims for the defence of public services and space, on other occasions this fight clearly aims at, somehow, overcoming welfare-state capitalism itself. Throughout the history of capitalism, urbanisation processes and the provision of public spaces and public goods, such as health care, education, housing, sanitation, water, energy, paving of streets, transportation and so on, have been crucial for capitalist development and accumulation processes (Lefebvre, 1991, 2003; Harvey, 2012). It is well known that all these services and infrastructure investments helped to offset accumulation crises and were strongly present in traditional welfare states (Lefebvre, 1976, 1991, 2003; Harvey, 2012). Therefore, ‘while these public spaces and public goods contribute mightily to the qualities of the commons, it takes political action on the part of citizens and the people to appropriate them or to make them so’ (Harvey, 2012: 73). It is exactly in this sense that indignation and occupying have to be seen, on the one hand, as a defence of welfare devices; and, on the other hand, as an attempt to overcome welfare-state capitalism itself­– albeit through various procedures and to different degrees. In effect, these movements aspire to reappropriating public goods and spaces with the aim of going further and achieving some form of collective control over the produc276

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tion and the social uses of surpluses. As Harvey (2012: 22–3) observes, these days the signs of revolt are everywhere, and struggles for the ‘right to the city’ could lead to true ‘urban revolutions’.

Back to the Start: New Horizons for Social Change Legitimised In this section, we shall analyse the extent to which the rupture of the post-World War II consensus­– and more precisely, the fact that such a rupture is mainly the result of a unilateral trend pushed by neo-liberal economic oligarchies during the last thirty-five years­– has been perceived as a source of legitimacy for the popular fight for what such a consensus had forced working populations to renounce, that is, control over production. We hope the scrutiny of some slogans and discursive strategies from social movements will help throw light upon this question. These new social movements do not necessarily represent homogeneous social classes but they question a social organisation which is subject to the dictates of uncontrollable powers that be. These social movements can be observed in various parts of the world and are to be seen as incipient signs of the return to an era of open social and political conflict that has been partially revived by the dismantling of social protection. If the discussion above has been compelling, then it suggests that there is a widely felt need within societies of both the global North and South for new expressions of collective self-determination within the economic sphere, and many of the social movements currently emerging in these societies, despite their otherwise divergent origins and demands, share the common purpose of offering procedures for practically embodying this self-determination. As Wagner (2011: 22–3) argues, . . . a situation in which collective autonomy [within the economic realm] becomes extremely weak does not appear to be sustainable over the medium and long run. [This] unsustainability of the lack, or weakness, of comprehensive regulatory mechanisms has persistently been argued by critics, from at least Karl Polanyi onwards, but is now highly visible. Movements for the ‘self-defence of society’ (Polanyi) have begun, reaching globally from the World Social Forum to Nobel Prize winners in economics, and the fact that their institutional impact has been minimal until now does not invalidate their significance given the overall constellation. 277

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Getting ‘Indignant’ and ‘Occupying’ in Order to Recover Economic Sovereignty As discussed in the first part of this chapter, the post-World War II social consensus successfully tried to legitimise a social order based, on the one hand, on the working populations’ renunciation of control over production or, in other words, their renunciation of industrial democracy and economic sovereignty; and, on the other hand, on the guarantee of employment and high degrees of socio-economic security for all.12 In this context, states which were generously fed by progressive fiscal systems taxing the most powerful actors played a crucial role. In the next two parts of the chapter we have shown how these institutional settings took shape or were envisaged, and to what extent neoliberalism has meant the destruction or interruption of the institutional action taken for these goals, formerly agreed upon, to materialise. To put it succinctly, the rupture of the consensus, together with the evolution of global capitalist markets, implies, both in Europe and North America and in Latin America, that: 1. the promise of full employment as the guarantee of economic inclusion for all now appears as a true chimera; 2. regulation pertaining to the sphere of labour is vanishing; 3. social security nets and service provision linked to (more or less developed) welfare regimes are being dismantled; and 4. regulation and control over the economic activity of the most powerful actors, namely big investors, is also dramatically decreasing, a fact which has permitted a deep process of financialisation of an increasingly speculative capitalism, where rentierism proliferates at ease (Harvey, 2007; Bello, 2009; Varoufakis, 2011).13 What to do when a deal is broken? Simply put, a deal includes an achievement and a renunciation. If the deal is broken, doors are opened for a reassessment of the renunciation and, possibly, for a fearless recuperation of old goals and objectives that were originally cast aside. This is what Juventud Sin Futuro (‘Youth With No Future’), a relevant actor at the birth of the Spanish Indignados movement, seems to suggest when it argues that people nowadays find themselves ‘sin casa, sin curro, sin pension: sin miedo’ (‘without a home, without a job, without a pension: with no fear’). In effect, when a deal is (unilaterally) broken, the doors are open for the wronged side to revise the terms and conditions of the deal in question and, if necessary, to try to reconfigure the (social and economic) arrangements that shape life in common. In this context, the Indignados and ‘Occupy’ movements are to be 278

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seen as a defence of certain institutional devices pertaining to those welfare regimes which are now under attack­– for instance, when sociopolitical platforms oppose the closure of public centres for medical assistance­– and, in some cases, as an attempt to overcome welfare-state capitalism itself, for it is surmised that welfare-state capitalism signified an intentional limitation of collective sovereignty within the economic sphere (Rawls, 2001; Domènech, 2005). Whatever the case, what we are witnessing is a reaction against (and a critique of) the loss of popular sovereignty engendered by contemporary capitalism all around the globe, along with the claim that pathways need to be found not only to counteract the democracy-limiting nature of this neo-liberal capitalism but also to erect new (re)productive arrangements overcoming the capitalist ways of organising economic life themselves; hence the emphasis these movements place on the need for various forms of self-­management and mutual support networks in the creation of wide pools of common resources (Mattei, 2011) and for fully democratised public policy schemes unconditionally empowering the weak to operate with effective individual and collective freedom within the economic field (Krätke, 2003; Standing, 2011b). Marco Revelli (2010) made this crystal clear, when he quoted the graffiti he found on a wall at the Politecnico di Torino: ‘Ci avete tolto troppo, adesso rivogliamo tutto’ (‘You’ve taken too much from us, now we want it all’).14 This plain-spoken claim is a relevant example of the kind of fearlessly anticapitalist political action some sectors of the new indignados social movements are nowadays initiating, as is the vivid claim the Chilean student movement continuously makes: ‘the economy [should be] at the service of humans, not humans at the service of the economy’. Is the (Fight for the) Control Over Production Now Possible? Another way to tackle this question is, as we have already suggested, by recovering Polanyi’s idea of the ‘double movement’ (Polanyi, 1944). Capitalism has meant and continues to mean dispossession for the great majority. In effect, its development is closely linked to vast processes of private appropriation of external resources that literally leave the bulk of the population with no common goods and resources to resort to in order to satisfy basic needs and negotiate decent working and living conditions, which helped and helps create and discipline the labour force (Meiksins Wood, 2002). Neo-liberalism constitutes a contemporary chapter in this long-standing story, as it has found 279

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Figure 12.1  Students’ protest and occupation of Universidad de Chile’s main building, 2011. (Source: photograph by Beatriz Silva Pinochet.)

new forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003: 158), by removing or eroding all those protective institutions that constituted post-World War II reformed capitalism. Against this backdrop, working populations have historically tried, and are still trying now, to find ways to counteract this dispossessing dynamic of capitalism, this being the ‘double movement’ mentioned by Polanyi. If ‘indignation’ arises, if space and institutions are ‘occupied’, it is because these new social movements receive the baton passed on by the Diggers in seventeenth-century England and by the sans-culottes in eighteenthcentury France, and by ‘Black Jacobins’ in late eighteenth-century Haiti (James, 1938), and aim at reinterpreting the commons by reappropriating common resources of all kinds and for all. This can be seen when one examines the five ‘reasons’ given by the Spanish Indignados movement to ‘take the street’ between 12 May and 15 May 2012, that is, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the start of the revolt. These five reasons or ‘axes’ were: the fight for public and quality healthcare and education; the fight for a fully inclusive housing stock offering a decent home to all; the fight for a universal and unconditional basic income guaranteeing everyone’s material existence; the fight against neo-liberal labour reforms deepening precariousness and 280

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subservience in labour markets; and a fierce opposition to bail outs for financial institutions. In the same vein, the International Occupy Assembly’s 2012 ‘Global May Manifesto’ endorses ‘a system where labour is appreciated by its social utility, not its financial or commercial profit’. Therefore, the manifesto includes the following demands: Free and universal access to health, education from primary school through higher education and housing for all human beings. We reject outright the privatisation of public services management, and the use of these essential services for private profit; . . . free childcare for everyone; Retirement/pension so we may have dignity at all ages. Mandatory universal sick leave and holiday pay; work or, alternatively, universal basic income guarantee; . . . corporations [that are] held accountable for their actions. For example, corporate subsidies and tax cuts should be done away with if a company outsources jobs to decrease salaries [and] violates the environment or the rights of workers; . . . the right to enjoy culture, participate in creative and enriching leisure at the service of the progress of humankind. Therefore, we demand the progressive reduction of working hours, without reducing income; Food sovereignty through sustainable farming [as a way to promote] food security for the benefit of all. () In Latin America, social movements that appear with particular demands end up pleading for­– and sometimes putting into practice­– more autonomous forms of managing work and lives. In Chile, the 2011 to 2012 student revolt ‘simply’ opposed the rise in fees and the increasing commodification of higher education. In Mexico, the #YoSoy132 movement was born ‘just’ as a campaign for the democratisation of mass media. In Brazil, the Movimento Passe Livre emerged in June 2013 ‘only’ as a reaction against the rise of transport fares. Yet all these movements, though in different ways, coexist with­– and sometimes inspire­– broader demands for full democratisation of social relations 281

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in many other spheres of society. In Chile, the student protests have led to claims for the decommodification of resources and activities within and beyond the educational system (Silva, 2012). In Mexico, the initial critique of ruling mass media has evolved towards more demanding appeals, such as those gathered into the ‘Six-point programme for change’: democratisation and transformation of mass media; change in the educational, scientific and technological model; change in the neo-liberal economic model; change in the national security model; political transformation and connection with social movements; and change in the public health model.15 In Brazil, one can already observe meetings of the Movimento Passe Livre with groups that plead for antineo-liberal measures and for an alternative model of society (Carneiro, 2013), to the extent that the former has started to focus on health, education, social services, security, and public infrastructure, and to fight for a democratic deepening of society and for a real distribution of income that goes beyond targeted policies (Maringoni, 2013). As was, and still is, argued in Spanish cities, packages of measures and political strategies of this sort can constitute true ‘citizens’ rescue plans’, including state-provided (im)material resources and promoting myriad forms of self-management; and, in the end, endowing individuals and groups with relevant bargaining power when it comes to defining and deploying (re)productive life plans that are not imposed by market exigencies but that respect their real wishes and needs.16 And what happens when individuals and groups count on relevant sets of (im)material resources guaranteeing everyone’s social existence as a right? When this is the case­– and it must be clearly stated that all forms of conditionality that were linked to welfare regimes undermined this goal, both in Europe and in Latin America (Standing, 2002; Lo Vuolo, 2016)­– when individuals and groups have found ways to stop dispossession and to imagine and institute new pools of common resources, then it so happens that doors are opened for the possibility of decommodifying labour power in order to constitute productive units of a co-operative nature. Alternatively, they can opt for staying in labour markets but counting on higher degrees of bargaining power, thus increasing their capacity to co-determine the ways in which ­productive resources are allocated and economic life is shaped.17 Interestingly, these new settings could open up the doors to contemporary forms of control over production, which might mean that collective ownership of the means of production would be brought back on to the societal agenda. For occupying can be interpreted as reappro282

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priating common resources; and reappropriating common resources can be interpreted as having the capacity for collectively controlling the various ways in which we as individuals and as entire societies produce all kinds of material and immaterial goods and exchange or allocate them. To sum up, a myriad of contemporary ways of building those ‘republican system[s] for the association of free and equal producers’ that Marx suggested (Domènech, 2004) could therefore be explored. In summary, the neo-liberal turn aimed, both in Europe and the United States and in Latin America, at dismantling social protection schemes. And these changes are now quite far advanced. The Polanyian ‘double movement’ is still in operation, however, and is likely to remain so to the extent that neo-liberal reforms have acted as the ‘activation engine’ of economic sovereignty-enhancing political radicalisation, predisposing actors in both the global North and South not only to agitate for non-neoliberal socio-economic arrangements but also for non-capitalist ones. Of course, the story has just begun. But the spread of social movements fighting to create ways of re-embedding the economy into politics and societal discussion is something that cannot be disregarded or undervalued.

Notes 1. We use the term ‘production’ in a broad sense that includes the provision of both material and immaterial goods and services and the division of labour that this involves. We are grateful to the members of the tramod research group­– ­including Rubén Lo Vuolo who visited it and devoted very valuable time to this piece of work­– for very useful comments on an earlier draft. 2. It is not by chance that Keynes coined a very powerful expression in Chapter 24 of his ‘General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ (1936): the need for a true ‘euthanasia of rentiers’. In effect, rentiers not only perform high-risk speculative practices but they also have the capacity to introduce entry barriers to markets, to prevent economic participation. 3. In effect, the divide in the socialist traditions deepened and widened as many groups on the radical left kept insisting that freedom was not possible under (even reformed) capitalist institutions and social relations. 4. He contends that welfare regimes do this by providing services without reliance upon market mechanisms and by allowing citizens freely to opt out of work when necessary, without thereby compromising their employability, income level or general welfare (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 23–4). 5. But consider the precautions taken by capitalists with regard to this objective that Kalecki noted and that have been discussed in the first part. 6. While we adopt a Polanyian frame of reference here, we acknowledge that doing so is attended by a number of problems. It is, for instance, possible to contest the historical accuracy and comprehensiveness of Polanyi’s work (Halperin, 2004).

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity There are also conceptual difficulties in adopting a Polanyian framework today. For instance, Nancy Fraser (2013) has argued that a great many twenty-first-­ century social struggles cannot be cogently situated on either side of Polanyi’s double movement. While agreeing with Fraser’s general observations, we contend that there is a minimal, but seemingly expanding, coherency in the movements we discuss. Thus, despite the undeniably discrepant claims of those involved in these movements, and the fact that we have seen the mobilisation of centre- and far-right groups in recent times, too, we nonetheless contend that, at a sufficient level of generality, such movements can usefully be analysed in broadly Polanyian terms and have developed in response to shared historical circumstances. 7. As is well known, the Maastricht Treaty does not allow a state deficit above 3 per cent and a public debt above 60 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). 8. ‘We are the 99%’ has been one of the most widely used slogans by the ‘Occupy’ and the Indignados movements. Of course, it does not imply any statistical truth but it shows a real tendency towards social polarisation and allows us to link our analysis to popular reactions to the current economic context. 9. Other experiences that can be mentioned here are centre-left governments such as Lula da Silva’s in Brazil, Tabaré Vázquez’s and Pepe Mújica’s in Uruguay, and Néstor Kirchner’s and Cristina Fernández Kirchner’s in Argentina. The policies implemented by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador cannot be associated with these trends but with the (more or less successful) attempt to enhance popular sovereignty­– also within the economic sphere­– within the framework of the (re)construction of regional integration processes of an anti-imperialist nature. 10. Of course, we do not mean by that, that current ‘indignation’ against neo-liberal capitalism is taking place only in the urban world. Important rebel experiences which are deeply rooted in long-standing peasant movements have also been deploying in many countries, both in Latin America (Bolivia and Chile are two striking cases) and in the global North­– food sovereignty movements in many European and North American societies might best exemplify these non-urban struggles. 11. This Spanish social movement is the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH)­– the ‘Platform of People Affected by Mortgage’­– which started its activities in February 2009. See Colau and Alemany (2012). 12. Of course, such order was not free from criticism. In effect, far left and autonomous left groups, which developed most conspicuously in many countries of central and southern Europe such as Germany, France, and Italy, assumed responsibility for reminding their societies that these levels of socio-economic security had been achieved at a very high price: the renunciation of economic democracy; and that the ultimate goal was still outstanding (Katsiaficas, 2006). Interestingly, some groups taking part in the Indignados movement are taking up again, in new forms and with new political goals, the kind of critique of welfarestate capitalism that these far- and autonomous-left movements upheld three or four decades ago: ‘no es la crisis, es el capitalismo’ [‘(the problem) is not the crisis, but capitalism itself’], they claim in Spain. 13. One can even say that the emergence of the precariat’s living conditions, which we have discussed in the third part of the chapter, does not constitute an unintended damage caused by new social configurations but a true programme for

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Economic Sovereignty in Europe and the Americas ‘the many’ that was consciously designed by ‘the few’ (Harvey, 2007; Standing, 2011b). 14. Of course, what such an ‘all’ means is something that can be the object of different interpretations and therefore vary across societies. 15. See the ‘Discourse of the #YoSoy132 movement on the occasion of the peaceful take of Televisa Chapultepec headquarters’, La Jornada, 28 July 2012. 16. We are not saying that all policies providing resources by traditional welfare regimes were not ways to ‘reconstruct the commons’, at least partially. Actually, it should be said that, as seen in the second part, these policies were sometimes presented as ways to limit capitalist dispossession and to decommodify decisive resources and activities. It must be immediately added, however, that such a project was intentionally partial, as it was part of an institutional setting aimed at preventing working populations from gaining control over production and pursuing truly autonomous economic arrangements­– as has also been seen, the post-World War II consensus, which led to the appearance of welfare regimes of various kinds, was a reform of capitalism, not a rupture of, or break with, it. The Indignados and ‘Occupy’ movements are very well aware of the relevance of this distinction. 17. Of course, we do not mean to say that all forms of commodification, under all possible social formations, lead to freedom-limiting social relations. Nancy Fraser (2012) has argued convincingly that this is not the case. What we are saying is that the decision about whether or not to commodify one’s labour power is something that cannot be externally imposed on individuals or groups but must exclusively correspond to the wishes of these individuals and groups.

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Notes on the Contributors

All contributors are, or have been, associated with the European Research Council-funded Advanced Grant project ‘Trajectories of Modernity: Comparing Non-European and European varieties’ (TRAMOD, project no. 249438). Their contributions to this volume emerge from research pursued within this project. David Casassas is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Barcelona. He holds a PhD in sociology from the same university, with a thesis on the republican roots of Adam Smith and classical political economy. He has conducted postdoctoral research on social and political theory and social policy at the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium), the Centre for the Study of Social Justice (University of Oxford) and the Group in Analytical Sociology and Institutional Design (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). His book on Adam Smith’s commercial republicanism appeared with Montesinos, Barcelona, in 2010. Jacob Dlamini is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University for the 2014–15 academic year. His research interests include the intellectual history of pre-colonial Africa, the social and political history of modern Africa, comparative histories of violence and political collaboration, and the environmental history of Africa. Jacob is a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; the University of Sussex, Brighton; and holds a PhD in history from Yale University, New Haven; and is a Research Associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at Wits University, Johannesburg. 288

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Sérgio Franco graduated from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte in 2004 as a Bachelor in Social Sciences, and in 2007 with a Master in Political Science with a thesis on political theory that examined political and economic dilemmas involved in the process of instauration of participatory city planning in the Brazilian metropolis of Belo Horizonte. He also holds a Master in Sociology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona with a dissertation on the relationships between work, migration and health conditions in contemporary Spain. Currently he is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the Universitat de Barcelona with a research project that aims to study the spatial dimension of modernity through a historical-comparative analysis of the modern urban-spatial configurations in Brazil and South Africa. Àngela Lorena Fuster holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Barcelona and is a postdoctoral researcher in the epistemological research area of TRAMOD. Her doctoral research focused on the concept of political imagination and Hannah Arendt’s thought. Her main research interest is the relation between self-understanding and world-making from an interdisciplinary and gendered perspective, ranging from political theory to philosophy of history and art. Her most recent publication is ‘More than vulnerable: Rethinking Community’ in J. Sabadell-Nieto and M. Segarra, eds, Differences in Common. Gender, Vulnerability and Community, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2014. Joyce Gotlib graduated as a Bachelor in Social Sciences at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Nitirói, Rio de Janeiro, in 2007 with a thesis on the dilemma of agrarian reform in South Africa. In 2010, she graduated as Master of Law and Social Sciences at the same university with a thesis on the implementation of land reform in South Africa. She is currently a doctoral researcher in social sciences at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, researching the political projects and actions of individuals occupying positions in the state apparatus that perform restitution policies to rural black communities in the south. Alice Soares Guimarães is National Research Foundation (NRF) Postdoc fellow at the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She holds a PhD in sociology (IESP-UERJ, 2010) and an MA in International Politics (IRIPUC, 2004). In 2008–11 she was an associate researcher at the Postgrado 289

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Multidisciplinario en Ciencias del Desarrollo (CIDES-UMSA, La Paz). Her publications include A Bolívia no espelho do futuro (co-organised with José Maurício Domingues, Áurea Mota and Fabrício Pereira da Silva, 2009), and articles in books and scholarly journals, dealing with different aspects of state–society relations in contemporary Bolivia. Her current research analyses the trajectory of political modernity in Brazil, emphasising the different political projects and interpretations of state, society and their relationships that emerged from the mid-eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. Her affiliation with TRAMOD was partly funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal of Superior Level (CAPES, Brazil). Andreas Kalyvas teaches political theory at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Weber, Schmitt, Arendt (2008) and the co-author of Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (2008). Currently, he is completing a book typescript entitled, Legalizing Tyranny: Republicanism, Dictatorship, and the Enemy Within. José Katito holds a bachelor degree in social sciences from the University of Pisa and a Master of Sociology and Social Research Methods from the University of Trento. His is currently doing a PhD on the social sciences’ roles in Brazil and South Africa’s HIV/AIDS prevention activities. The analysis is articulated on two levels: 1. knowledge production on the social aspects of the epidemic; and 2. the social sciences’ involvement in HIV/AIDS prevention programmes, either carried out by government or civil society. It is hypothesised that such knowledge production and engagement have interesting epistemological implications for the social sciences. Bru Laín holds a degree in sociology from the Universitat de Barcelona and an MA in political science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is currently doing his PhD in sociology in the economic research area of TRAMOD researcher. He is working in different fields, such as political economy, political philosophy, and history. His research interests are social and political theory, political economy, theories of justice, basic income, and the economic and philosophic implications of the commons. He is currently working on the link between democracy and property that was characteristic of republican thought during the French Revolution and the pre-constitutional stage of the United States of America. 290

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Edgar Manjarín is a doctoral researcher in sociology. He completed his master’s degree in sociological research at the University of Barcelona. His doctoral dissertation focuses on freedom and democracy within the economic problematic of modernity. His research involves a conceptual review of the political economy literature and its normative implications, and secondly an empirical research focusing on the collective/individual sources of motivation and institutional settings in productive activity. On this basis he intends to develop an analytical framework to describe the material conditions, social mechanisms and explanatory foundations of collective bargaining and incentives within the emergence or reproduction of forms of co-operative action for the satisfaction of needs, with regard to the normative concepts of freedom, democracy and autonomy. Aurea Mota is an interdisciplinarily oriented sociologist whose main research interests lie in social theory and comparative historical sociology. She studied sociology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte (BA in 2004, MA in 2010), and her PhD is from the Institute for the Study of Society and Politics (IESP, formerly IUPERJ) in Rio de Janeiro (2012). She is a member of the Political Philosophy Group of the Latin American Research Council (CLACSO) and an associate researcher of the ‘Participatory Democracy Project’ (PRODEP) at UFMG. Aurea was a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Sociology, Sussex University (2010). She was the recipient of two awards from the Latin American Social Science Research Council (CLACSO) in 2006 and in 2010. Her publications are about Latin America, social participation in contemporary Brazil, and social theory. Svjetlana Nedimović works as a freelance editor and writing mentor in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She did her PhD on Hannah Arendt and political imagination at the European University Institute Florence (2007). She is engaged in civic grassroots activism, political education through praxis and social justice movement. Her research interests include the role of imagination in political acting, historical injustice and social justice. Rommy Morales Olivares is a doctoral researcher in TRAMOD. She is enrolled in the European PhD in socioeconomic and statistical studies­– PhD in sociology at the Universitat de Barcelona. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in sociology from Alberto Hurtado University, 291

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Santiago de Chile, and a Master’s degree in sociological research from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and she studied for a Master in applied economics, Alberto Hurtado University­– Georgetown University. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, and she currently is a scholar at the Becas Chile-Conicyt Programme. Riaan Oppelt is currently a lecturer in English and cultural studies at Stellenbosch University. His research interests include the study of modernity in South Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and looking at literary-modernist responses to it. He is among the first cohort of Mandela Rhodes Scholars. Beatriz Silva Pinochet is a sociologist from the Universidad de Chile. Her work has mainly focused on understanding how the structural changes that took place in Chile with the introduction of neo-liberal reforms from 1978 to the present have transformed the role of the state, the class structure and the self-understanding of Chilean society. In 2007 she was awarded a scholarship from the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) to conduct research focusing on the 2006 Chilean student movement (named the ‘penguin revolution’). In 2011 she studied for a Master’s degree in sociological research at the University of Barcelona, with the assistance of a Chilean government scholarship. Within TRAMOD, and also with the assistance of a Chilean government scholarship, her doctoral research aims to understand periods of movilisation and structural change in Chilean history, trying to comprehend how Chilean society develops a specific trajectory of modernity. Gerard Rosich is currently a doctoral researcher within TRAMOD. His work is on the modern foundations of politics, focusing on the concept of autonomy from its birth in classical Greece to the present, and evaluating its conceptual adequacy in terms of understanding the current global transformations. His research interests include ancient Greek political foundations, modern theories of autonomy and cosmopolitan studies. Samuel Sadian holds an MA in political and international studies from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, for a dissertation focused on Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s contributions towards an ontologically informed critique of procedural versions of liberalism. His doctoral research within TRAMOD explores the extent to which an emerging consumer order in post-democratic South Africa may be 292

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located within prevailing patterns of social and economic inclusion and exclusion, as well as novel forms of political legitimation and contestation. He also aims to explore the historical antecedents of this consumer order in the pre-democratic period. His research will further consider the extent to which South Africa has developed a meaningful politics of consumption in response to these broad trends, and what a nuanced normative-philosophical interpretation of them might recommend for the understanding and possible further development of such a politics. Peter Wagner is ICREA research professor at the University of Barcelona and principal investigator of TRAMOD. His recent publications include Modernity: Understanding the Present (2012) and Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (2008) as well as the coedited volumes The Greek Polis and Democracy: A Politico-cultural Transformation and its Interpretations (with Johann Arnason and Kurt Raaflaub, 2013) and Varieties of World-making: Beyond Globalization (with Nathalie Karagiannis, 2007).

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Index

Abedian, Iraj, 137 Adams, John, 31 Achmat, Zackie, 166 AFP system (Administradora de Fondo de Pensiones), 140 Africa, 1–2, 6, 10–11, 21, 54, 66, 68–74, 149 continent, 125, 228 elites, 8, 65, 69, 71–4 Sub-Saharan, 149, 188 Africanism, 234–5 African National Congress (ANC), 3, 11–12, 133–4, 174, 178 African renaissance, 165, 168, 227–8 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 104 Alliance for Progress, 265 America, 1–2, 6–7, 10–11, 21–2, 24–9, 31–4, 54, 112, 125 Central, 266 English, 116 Latin, 8, 11, 14, 26–7, 29, 34–5, 129–30, 258, 264–6, 268, 270–1, 273, 278, 281–3 North, 7, 11, 15, 95, 175, 259, 266–7, 273, 278 South, 7, 15, 95, 259, 270 Spanish, 26–7 American constitution, 27 American exceptionalism, 22, 26, 32–3 American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 260 American revolution, 6, 22, 28–30, 34–5 ancien régime, 101–2, 109, 119 anthropologists, 175, 177, 181–2, 189 apartheid, 125–6, 132–4, 137–9, 150, 156, 158,

163–5, 171, 174, 183, 186–7, 189, 219–20, 226–7, 229–30, 232–3 Aquinas, Thomas, 80–1 Arendt, Hannah, 48, 200 Argentina, 206, 222, 265–6, 274 Aristotelianism, 103 Arnold, David, 163 Arosema, Justo (Lawyer from Panama), 26 artistic critique, 250, 252 Asia, 10, 16, 45 ABIA (Associação Brasileira Interdisciplinar de AIDS), 160 Atlantic, 24, 179, 274 northern, 6–7 republican tradition, 6 sociopolitical constellation, 6, 9 world region, 1, 16 Austria, 105, 263 Aylwin, Patricio, 129–30, 132, 137, 143 Bachelet, Michelle, 129, 131–2, 238 Bantu, 73, 178, 189 Bastos, Cristina, 156 Bayle, Pierre, 50 Bayly, C. A., 35, 64–5, 69 Bell, Daniel, 260 biomedical science, 150, 162 Bodin, Jean, 84–7, 91, 94 Bolívar, Simón, 27, 31 Bolivia, 29, 266, 274 Bolsa Familia (Brazil), 172 Boltanski, Luc, 175, 238–9 242, 247 Boraine, Alex, 209 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 199 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 47, 49–50

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Index Botha, P. W., 134, 182 Buck-Morss, Susan and Haitian revolution, 30, 51 and Hegel dialectic, 52 Butler, Judith, 56 Bhangazi, 175–6, 182–7 Black Jacobins, 280 black rural communities, 174 Brazil, 6, 9, 11–13, 25, 101, 110–15, 117–20, 149–72, 174–8, 187–9, 265–6, 274, 281–2 history, 154–63 Bretton Woods (international monetary system), 260 Brink, Anthony, 165

communities, African, 73, 228–9 Concepción university student federation, 249 Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Coalition of Parties for Democracy), 12, 128–32, 136, 141, 143, 238, 245–6, 249, 272 Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH), 249 Cosa, Juan de la, 45 counter-reform of capitalism, 270 Cuba, 25, 31, 265 Cuban revolution, 265 Cullinan, Kerry, 165 Cunha, Dom Luis da, 107

Cape Town, 222 capitalism, 10, 11, 15, 34, 106, 128, 238–9, 242–4, 248, 252–3, 258, 261–2, 265, 267, 268–70, 273–4, 276, 278–9 Carlin, John, 232–5 Castoriadis, Cornelius and instituting moment, 5, 201 and autonomy, 4 and social–historical, 197–8, 202 Catherine II, Russia, 119 catholic university student federation (Chile), 249 central bank (Chile), 128 Central University of Chile (UCEN), 241 Chapman, Michael, 234–5 child grant (South Africa), 171 Chile, 11–12, 14, 34, 125–30, 133–4, 136–44, 206, 238–40, 242–7, 249, 251–3, 265, 266, 270, 272, 274, 281–2 christian democrats, 132 christianity, 8, 46, 66, 74, 79, 112 christians, 45, 50, 69, 79 civil society organisations (CSOs), 155 Clinton, Bill, 268 Colombia, 25, 265–6, 274 colonialism, 104, 109, 114, 116, 150, 163, 165 colonization, 8, 22, 54, 185 collective autonomy, 6, 9–10, 29, 243, 245, 251, 253, 261, 265, 277 collective self-determination, 10, 13, 15, 267–8 Collins, Anthony, 231–2 commercial sex workers (CSW), 153, 155 communal appropriation, 180, 182 communal land rights act (CLARA), 187 Communist Party (Chile), 131, 139, 143–4

Dalí, Salvador, 42, 50, 55 decolonization, 158, 168 declaration of independence, 6, 10, 28–9, 34, 51 democracy, 33, 55, 137, 151, 160, 164, 208, 212, 242, 272, 278–9 Descartes, René and modern thought, 4, 23 and Spanish Jesuits, 23 dictatorship, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 77–96, 125–6, 129–31, 134, 138–9, 167, 238–9, 242–5, 249, 251–2, 270 Dingaan, 222 Dom João V, 107, 110 Dom José I, 108, 110 Dubiel, Helmut, 208 Duesberg, Peter, 164 Dussel, Enrique, 16, 23 economic elites, 10, 15, 140 economic policy, 12, 125, 127, 130–1, 133–5, 140, 142, 144, 151–3, 172, 268 economic sovereignty, 259, 261–2, 265, 268, 278, 283 Ecuador, 25, 129, 266, 274 Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 64–5 Enlightenment, 2–3, 5, 9, 15, 25, 30, 33, 46–7, 51, 101–5, 107–9, 111–20, 198, 227 environmental impact ssessment (EIA), 183 Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, 263–4 Europeans, 23, 45, 46, 51, 54, 65, 67–8, 73, 106 Fabian, Johannes, 46, 49, 58 Fanon, Frantz, 227–8 Filmer, Sir Robert, 84, 87–9, 92

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Finland, 13, 264 Fletcher, L. E., 204 Foucault, Michel, 47, 127 France, 55, 102 and independent Haiti, 53, 280 Frederick II, 119 Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Eduardo, 130, 132, 143 French Revolution, 6, 51, 115, 118, 290 Furquim, Bernardo, 181 Gaonkar, Dilip, 64–5 Garretón, M. A., 132, 272 Gauri, Varun, 154, 156–7, 159 Gaylard, R., 228 Giddens, Anthony, 127, 273 Giliomee, H., 222 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, 220, 230–2 Govan, William, 68 Gramsci, Antonio, 137 Great Britain, 28, 67, 69, 135, 268 Greece, 13 gross domestic product (GDP), 125 Grotius, Hugo, 84, 86–7, 91 Guzmán, Jaime, 242 Habermas, Jürgen, 141, 208 Habib, A., 133, 136 Haiti, 30–1, 51, 53, 55 Haitian Revolution, 3, 30–1, 51, 53 Harrington, James, 84, 88–91 Hartz, Louis, 16 Harvey, David, 275, 277 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich and concept of recognition, 55–6 and dialectic, 44, 49, 51–3, 57 and process of history, 51–3, 55 Heidegger, Martin, 57 Henrique Cardoso, Fernando, 167 Hirsh, Alan, 133 Historikerstreit, 198, 212 HIV/AIDS, 12, 149–59, 161–71 Hobbes, Thomas, 48 Hodgson, Godfrey, 32 Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry d’, 104 Honneth, Axel, 7, 16, 55 Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 42 humanism, 106, 220, 227–9 African, 14, 220, 226–8, 231–3 civic, 81, 93 Western, 228–30 Humboldt, Alexander von, 28 and colonisation, 22 and cultural space, 25–7

import substitution industrialisation (ISI), 265 indigenous, 8, 10, 69, 163, 167, 175 indignados, 258, 274–5, 278 indignation, 240, 242–3, 253, 276, 280 individual autonomy, 6, 243, 245, 269 industrial revolution, 1, 35 injecting drug users (IDU), 153, 155 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 127, 142, 268 Invictus, 220, 232–5 Ireland, 13 Islamic worlds, 45 Israel, Jonathan Irvine, 104 Italy, 45, 103, 119, 263 Ivaporunduva, 175, 179–82, 185, 187–8 Jefferson, Thomas, 28, 34 Jesuits, 23, 50, 111 John the Lydian, 79 John of Salisbury, 80 Joseph II, 119 Juventud Sin Futuro (‘Youth With No Future’), 278 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 47, 51, 104 Keynesian theory, 264, 268 Klerk, F. W., 134, 142, 229 Kock, Leon de, 67–8 Koselleck, Reinhart, 48, 103, 199 Kuhn, Thomas, 58 KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), 175, 182–3, 186 La Coruña, 25 Lagos, Ricardo, 132 land restitution, 13, 174, 179, 182–3, 186–7 landless people’s movement (LPM), 189 Lavín, Joaquín, 240 Lefebvre, Henri, 276 Liberalization, economic, 125, 142 Liberia, 30 Lieberman, E. S., 154, 156–7, 159 Livy, 78, 81–4 Locke, John and absolute power, 103 and state of nature, 7, 23–4 Lokotwayo, 182–3, 185–6 Louis Leipoldt, C., 220, 222–4, 226 Lo Vuolo, Rubén, 266, 272 Lukács, Georg, 57 Lula, 161, 170

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Index Maastricht Treaty, 268 Mabuis, 222–5 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 77, 81 Makiwane, Elijah, 65–71, 74–5 Malebranche, Nicolas, 50 Malema, Julius, 226, 232 Mandela, Nelson, 133, 135–6, 164–5, 178, 227–36 Mann, Michael, 34 mappa mundi, 45 Marin, Gladys, 131 Marshall Plan, 261 Martin-Tuite, Patrick, 166 Marx, Karl, 238 Maxwell, Kenneth, 115 Mbeki, Thabo, 133, 136–7, 143, 156, 158, 163–8, 227 Mbuyazi, 182–6 Mead, G. H., 56 Meller, P., 131 men contracting sexually transmitted infections (STI), 154 men who have sex with men (MSM), 153, 155 Mendelssohn, Moses, 104 Metropolitan Technological University (UTEM), 240 Mexico, 25, 265–6, 270, 274, 282 middle-class revolution, 30 Minas Gerais, 115–16, 118 Mishima, K., 212 modernity alternative, 64–5 America, 33 autonomy, 4, 15 early, 106 failings, 70 genealogy, 43 history, 2, 6–7, 13, 33, 36, 47, 64 institutions, 2, 6, 35 multiple, 16, 64–5 philosophy, 23, 47 political, 6, 8–9, 77–8, 95–6, 108, 243, 248, 252 promises, 2 societal, 64, 106 theories, 64 world, 22, 29–33, 35–6, 66, 69, 75, 228 Mommsen, T., 208 Montaigne, Michel de, 23, 45 Montesquieu, Charles, 50, 103, 113 Moulian, Tomas, 131

Movimento passe livre, 281–2 Mphalehle, Es’kia, 227 Naidoo, Jay, 136 National Accreditation Commission, 240 National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA), 162 nationalism Afrikaner, 222–3, 226 American, 32 National Party, 72, 134, 178, 220–1, 223–4 neoliberal, 125–28, 131, 133–4, 136, 138, 140, 143–4, 170, 210, 238–9, 252, 258–9, 267–8, 270–5, 277–80, 282–3 reform, 126, 280, 283 neo-liberalism, 14, 270 New World, 21–8, 31, 47, 58, 101, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 207 non-governmental organization (NGO), 159–61, 166, 170, 186 Núcleo de Estudos e Prevenção da AIDS, 160 occupy movement, 258, 274 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), 247 Old World, 21, 23–4, 26, 28, 31 Ortiz, Fernando, 25 Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), 162 otherness, 43–6, 48, 50, 55–6, 58–9, 222 overcoming the past, 199, 210 Padayachee, Vishnu, 136 Pagden, Anthony, 55, 58 Paiva, Vera, 160 Palmer, Robert, 29, 34 Panama, 31–2 paradigmatisation of history, 7, 21–2, 30, 33 Parker, R. G., 156 Penguin revolution, 241 Peru, 25, 266 Pienaar, François, 232–3, 235 Piñera, José, 238, 244 Piñera, Sebastian, 238 Pinochet, Augusto, 11, 130, 139, 241, 244 Pocock, J. G. A. and enlightenment, 120 and political modernity, 6–7 Polanyi, Karl, 126–7, 253, 267, 270–1, 273, 277, 279–80, 283 Portugal, 35, 103, 105, 106, 112, 115

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African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity Portuguese colonies, 114, 176 post-authoritarian moment, 12, 125–6, 128, 137–8 post-colonial situation, 5, 8, 55, 71, 132, 228–9 Pratt, J. W., 32 precariat, 269–70 Preller, Gustav, 223 Prussia, 105, 119 Ptolemy of Lucca, 79 quilombos, 174, 177 Rainsford, Marcus, 31 Rath, Matthias, 165 rationality, 14, 47, 49–50, 54, 242, 246 Reagan, Ronald, 268 recognition, 5, 7, 30, 45, 50–4, 56–9, 73, 93, 158, 182, 186, 204 collective, 260 legal, 167, 174 struggle, 53–8 theories, 7, 43, 44, 55–9 Reconstruction and Development programme (RDP), 133, 136 reformism, 107, 115, 117 Renaissance, 44, 81, 105–6, 227–8 republicanism, 6, 8, 78–9, 81, 84, 86–8, 92–3, 95, 116, 118 revolutionary, 3, 101–2, 105, 116, 261 movements, 77, 102, 119 Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, 10 Ribeiro Sanches, António Nunes, 107 right to land, 13, 174, 186–7 Rodríguez, Simón, 26 Rome dictatorship, 88, 93 republicanism, 8, 81, 88 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 260 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 84, 93–5, 103, 113, 118 rugby world cup, 232 Russia, 105, 165, 221 Sadurski, W., 209 Sahlins, Marshall, 30 Salamanca–Valladolid debates, 7 sanitarian reform movement, 161 Santo Domingo revolution, 22, 29–30 Sarafina II Scandal, 162 Schaap, Andrew, 200

self-understanding, 10–14, 16, 45, 47, 50, 150–1, 203, 208, 259, 269 Serra, José, 167 settling the past, 206 Sewell, William, 253 Seymour Lipset, Martin, 32 slave revolution, 52, 55 social-democracy, 135, 144 discourse, 127, 133 social–historical, 197–8, 202–3 social imaginary, 22, 239, 269, 273 Sócrates, 4 Sousa, Herbert de, 160 South Africa, 10–14, 64–6, 71–2, 125–7, 132–44, 149–71, 174–6, 178–9, 186–9, 199, 203, 219–21, 223–30, 232–3, 235–6 South African communist party, 136 South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), 162 Spain, 25, 31, 35, 103, 106, 119, 199, 274, 276 spirit of capitalism, 238–9, 243, 247 state of São Paulo, 175, 179 Stewart, James, 68–9, 71, 75 Stucchi, Deborah, 179 student movement, 238–42, 246, 248–53, 279 Sydney, Algernon, 84, 88–9, 91–3, 95 Taylor, Charles, 56 Taylor revolt, 115, 117 Thatcher, Margaret, 136 Theidon, K., 210–11 Thévenot, Laurent, 175 Thomas, Lynn, 70, 74 transitional justice, 14, 197–8, 203–5, 209, 212 transition to democracy, 139, 199, 230, 238 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), 162 Tshabalala-Msimang, Manto, 155, 164 tuberculosis (TB), 153 Umpunga Wamanzi, 68 Umteteli wa Bantu, newspaper, 71–5 United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), 265, 271 United Nations General Assembly (UNGASS), 153 United States of America, 10, 26–7, 42 independence, 29–30, 34 modern identity, 33, 56

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Index University of Chile, 246 urban revolution, 267 Véliz, Claudio, 35 Venezuela, 25–7, 129, 266, 274, 284 Verney, Luís António, 107 Vespucci, Amerigo, 45 Vico, Giambattista, 49 virodene, 164 Voltaire, 47, 49–50 and class inequality, 104 and Dalí painting, 42 Voortrekkers, 223 Wagner, Peter and modernity, 64–5, 69, 239 and political power, 243 Walker, Cherryl, 182–3

Walls, Laura, 25–6, 28 Washington consensus, 127, 142, 268, 270 Weber, Max, 142 Weinstein, H., 204 welfare states, 263–4, 276 Wesley, Charles, 30–2 Western World, 21–2 Workers’ Party, 161, 170 World War I, 10, 221 World War II, 7, 204, 212, 258, 262, 264, 268, 277–8, 280 YoSoy132 movement, 281 Zavala, Silvio, 46 Zuma, Jacob, 134

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