Civilization, Modernity, and Critique: Engaging Jóhann P. Árnason’s Macro-Social Theory (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought) [1 ed.] 1032217723, 9781032217727

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‘Jóhann Árnason is a leader in the historical sociology of civilizations, the theorization of multiple modernities, and indeed social theory generally. The interest and importance of his work has attracted engagement from a remarkable range of leading social scientists – as this book demonstrates. Authors bring new insights to Árnason’s own work and to many of the themes and historical questions with which he has engaged. Their chapters are significant on their own and invaluable as a guide to Árnason’s contributions and their continuing importance.’ – Craig Calhoun, William Kelly, Jr. Professor of Sociology, Princeton University, USA ‘This exciting volume builds from the work of Jóhann Árnason to offer a sophisticated and thoughtful extension, in its own right, of the debate about cultural values, including their significance for how societies, economies, and international orders develop.’ – Leigh K. Jenco, Professor of Political Theory, The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK ‘Finally, through this collection of excellent essays, one of the most erudite and multilingual historical sociologists and social theorists of our time receives the recognition he deserves. No contemporary attempt to understand modernity and its multiple civilizational variants can afford to ignore Jóhann Árnason’s lifework and the discussions about it.’ – Hans Joas, Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, USA ‘Truly engaging Jóhann Árnason’s writings, this volume is an impressive collective and interdisciplinary intellectual achievement. It is not only a tribute to Árnason’s outstanding contribution to comparative historical macrosociology and civilizational analysis, but also a stimulating invitation to reflect upon his lesser-known contribution to general sociological and cultural theory, and its strong anchor in an unusually broad and persistent engagement with history and philosophy. Emerging from the chapters by eminent scholars of diverse disciplinary and intellectual bent, and from Árnason’s own constructive replies, is the value of a staunchly processual, relational, contextualizing, historicizing and cultural hermeneutic approach, challenging any overly homogenizing, holistic or systemic mode of interpretations, even as it also no less staunchly cultivates conceptualizing and combining multiple levels and scales of analysis. Stretching from micro- to meso- and macro-, local to global, past to present and grappling with major matters of comparative analysis—such as the nature of action and institutions, dynamics of world-making and opening, civilizations and cultural worlds, regions,

religion, culture and cultural worlds, multiple and alternative modernities, politics and the political, world-making and world-opening, points of rupture, continuity and transformation, etc.—it is thus a volume that still conveys, as does Árnason’s opus itself, the hope of perhaps illuminating what might otherwise seem at times, and pressingly so in our own times, as just an intractable, vertiginous whirlpool of overwhelming cultural differences and historical developments.’ – Ilana Silber, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Civilization, Modernity, and Critique

Civilization, Modernity, and Critique provides the first comprehensive, cutting-edge engagement with the work of one of the most foundational figures in civilizational analysis: Jóhann P. Árnason. In order to do justice to Árnason’s seminal and wide-ranging contributions to sociology, social theory and history, it brings together distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical contexts. Through a critical, interdisciplinary dialogue, it offers an enrichment and expansion of the methodological, theoretical, and applicative scope of civilizational analysis, by addressing some of the most complex and pressing problems of contemporary global society. A unique and timely contribution to the ongoing task of advancing the project of a critical theory of society, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in historical sociology, critical theory and civilizational analysis. L̓ubomír Dunaj is University Assistant at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna and Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Jeremy C.A. Smith is in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community at Federation University. He is also a Managing Editor of the International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill). Kurt C.M. Mertel is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Sharjah.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

This series explores core issues in political philosophy and social theory. Addressing theoretical subjects of both historical and contemporary relevance, the series has broad appeal across the social sciences. Contributions include new studies of major thinkers, key debates and critical concepts. Connecting Practices Large Topics in Society and Social Theory Elizabeth Shove Marx, Engels and the Philosophy of Science David Bedford and Thomas Workman Bourdieu’s Philosophy and Sociology of Science A Critical Appraisal Kyung-Man Kim Nation and State in Max Weber Politics as Sociology Jack Barbalet The Political Durkheim Sociology, Socialism, Legacies Matt Dawson Utopia without Ideology Ambrogio Santambrogio Social Imaginary and the Metaphysical Discourse On the Fundamental Predicament of Contemporary Philosophy and Social Sciences Christoforos Bouzanis Cultural Capital and Creative Communication (Anti-)Modern and (Non-)Eurocentric Perspective Oana Ș erban

Civilization, Modernity, and Critique Engaging Jóhann P. Árnason’s Macro-Social Theory Edited by L̓ubomír Dunaj, Jeremy C.A. Smith and Kurt C.M. Mertel

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, L̓ubomír Dunaj, Jeremy C.A. Smith and Kurt C.M. Mertel; individual chapters, the contributors The right of L̓ubomír Dunaj, Jeremy C.A. Smith and Kurt C.M. Mertel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dunaj, L̓ubomír, editor. | Smith, Jeremy, 1966- editor. | Mertel, Kurt Cihan Murat, editor. Title: Civilization, modernity, and critique : engaging Johann P. Arnason's macro-social theory / [edited by] L̓ubomír Dunaj, Jeremy C.A Smith, Kurt C.M. Mertel. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought | Includes bibliographical references and index Identifiers: LCCN 2022057145 (print) | LCCN 2022057146 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032217727 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032229911 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003275046 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Árnason, Jóhann Páll, 1940- | Historical sociology. | Comparative civilization. | Civilization, Modern--Philosophy. | Sociology--Philosophy. | Sociologists--Germany. Classification: LCC HM479.A755 C58 2023 (print) | LCC HM479.A755 (ebook) | DDC 301.01--dc23/eng/20230130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057145 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057146 ISBN: 978-1-032-21772-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-22991-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27504-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of Contributors 1 Preface

x 1

AXEL HONNETH

2 Introduction

6

L̓UBOMÍR DUNAJ

PART I

Questions of Theory and Methodology

17

3 The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question: Reflections on Jóhann P. Árnason’s Thought 19 SUZI ADAMS

4 Long-term Developmental Processes as an Unintended Consequence of Human Action: Some Theoretical and Methodological Questions of Historical Sociology JIR ̌ Í ŠUBRT

40

5 World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities: A Pluralistic View of Global Sociological Theory 48 SAÏD AMIR ARJOMAND

viii Contents PART II

Re-Thinking the Concept of Modernity/ies through the Lens of Civilizational Analysis

61

  6 Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth: Normative Expectations and Subsequent Social Change

63

PETER WAGNER

  7 Politics and the Social Imaginary: The Problem of the State – and the Problem of Modernity

77

WOLFGANG KNÖBL

  8 Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis within Left-Heideggerianism

96

KURT C.M. MERTEL

PART III

Modernity in the Plural: Civilizational Analysis and the Axial Age Debate

115

  9 The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Claims of European Civilization 117 HANS SCHELKSHORN

10 Traditions of Transcendence: A Hermeneutic Appropriation of the Axial Age Discourse 133 HANS-HERBERT KÖGLER

11 A Secularity Sui Generis? On the Historical Development of Conceptual Distinctions and Institutional Differentiations in Japan

162

CHRISTOPH KLEINE AND MONIKA WOHLRAB-SAHR

PART IV

Making Theory Contextual Through Civilizational Analysis: Place, Politics, Situatedness

179

12 Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere: ReligioCivilizational Imaginaries Via East-West Entanglements

181

ARMANDO SALVATORE AND KIEKO OBUSE

Contents  ix

13 Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis: Reflections on Russia’s Trajectory

197

YULIA PROZOROVA

14 Regionality and Civilizations in the Americas: Considerations on Civilizational Analysis in the Context of American Modernities

214

JEREMY C.A. SMITH

PART V

Jóhann P. Árnason’s Replies

229

15 Replies to Criticisms and Suggestions

231

JÓHANN P. ÁRNASON

Index

258

Contributors

Dr. Suzi Adams is an Honorary Research Fellow in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, and a managing editor for the International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill). She has published widely in the social imaginaries field. Saïd Amir Arjomand is an Iranian-American scholar and Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Stony Brook University and former Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies. He received his PhD in 1980 from the University of Chicago. He is the founder and former President of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS) and founding Editor of the Journal of Persianate Studies. Jóhann P. Árnason, born 1940 in Iceland, studied philosophy, history and sociology in Prague and Frankfurt. He taught sociology in Heidelberg and Bielefeld from 1972 to 1975, and at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, from 1972 to 2003. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and at the University of Leipzig, and a research fellow of the Alexander v. Humboldt-Stiftung, the Swedish Institute of Advanced Studies, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (Essen), the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen and the Max-WeberKolleg in Erfurt. He is now emeritus professor of sociology at La Trobe University and from 2007 to 2014, he taught at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University in Prague. His research interests centre on social theory and historical sociology, with particular emphasis on the comparative analysis of civilizations. L̓ubomír Dunaj is University Assistant at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna and Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is associated editor of Pragmatism Today and member of the international editorial board of Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought. His areas of specialization are social and political philosophy and social theory. Axel Honneth is Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University; From 2001 to 2008 he was Director of the Institute for Social Research (2001–2008) and

Contributors  xi C4-Professor Emeritus of Social Philosophy, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Research Interest: Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics, Social Theory. His most recent book is: Der arbeitende Souverän. Eine normative Theorie der Arbeit (Walter-Benjamin-Lectures), Suhrkamp, 2023. Christoph Kleine is Professor for the History of Religion at Leipzig University, Germany, and co-director of the Centre for Advanced Studies on “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.” His main research areas are the religious history of Japan, East Asian Buddhism, and theoretical as well as empirical problems regarding the formation of secularity in Japan. His most recent book is Secularities in Japan. Edited with Ugo Dessì. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Wolfgang Knöbl was born in 1963; 2002–2015 Full Professor of Sociology, University of Göttingen; 2015–present director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Main research interests: Social Theory, Political Sociology, Sociology of Violence and Conflicts, Historical and Comparative Sociology, History of Sociology. Most Recent Book: Die Soziologie vor der Geschichte. Zur Kritik der Sozialtheorie (Berlin 2022: Suhrkamp). Hans-Herbert Kögler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville and regular guest professor at Alpen-Adria University, Klagenfurt, Austria. Major publications include The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault; Michel Foucault; the co-edited volumes Empathy and Agency. The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences and Enigma Agency; an anthology dedicated to his approach, Hans-Herbert Kögler´s Critical Hermeneutics, appeared in 2022. Kurt C.M. Mertel is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Sharjah. He is the co-editor of three books in critical social theory and his work appears in the European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Social Criticism and Grazer Philosophische Studien, among others. Kieko Obuse is a Visiting Researcher at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan and an Affiliate Member of the School of Religious Studies, McGill University. She is completing a monograph titled Buddhist-Muslim Engagement: Doctrinal Negotiations in Southeast Asia and Japan and has been a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2022). Yulia Prozorova is a Senior Research Fellow at Sociological Institute, FCTAS, Russian Academy of Sciences. She is affiliated with the Sector of the History of Russian Sociology and Centre for Civilizational Analysis and Global History. Her research interests include historical sociology and civilizational analysis, Russia's civilizational trajectory, Soviet modernity and post-Soviet transformations in Russia.

xii Contributors Armando Salvatore is the Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at McGill University. He authored The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2022). Hans Schelkshorn, head of the Department of Intercultural Philosophy of Religion at the University of Vienna; research fields: philosophy of religion, discourse ethics, political philosophy, Latin American philosophy, global discourse on modernity. Monographs: Diskurs und Befreiung. Studien zur philosophischen Ethik von Karl-Otto Apel und Enrique Dussel (1997), Entgrenzungen. Ein europäischer Beitrag zum philosophischen Diskurs der Moderne (2016). Jeremy C.A. Smith is in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community at Federation University. He is author of three research monographs, five co-edited books, and numerous journal articles. He is also a Managing Editor of the International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill). Jiří Šubrt works as an associate professor of sociology in Prague at Charles University. In 2009, he founded, and has since stood as guarantor of, the study program of Historical Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities. He is the author and editor of many books published in Czech and English. Peter Wagner is Research Professor of Social Sciences at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and at the University of Barcelona. Currently, he is also lead investigator in the research cluster “Modernity in Central Asia: Society, Identity, Environment” at the University of Central Asia. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr is Professor of Cultural Sociology at Leipzig University, Germany, and co-director of the Centre for Advanced Studies on “Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities.” Her main research areas in the field of Sociology of Religion are conversion to Islam, secularization in East Germany as well as comparative research of secularities. Her most recent book, Islam in Europa: Institutionalisierung und Konflikt (edited with Levent Tezcan), was published in 2022.

1 Preface Axel Honneth

Although Jóhann Árnason perhaps lacks the glamour of the internationally feted, celebrity sociologist, he has long been recognized within the academy as one of the most interesting, productive, and profound social theorists of the present day. Born in Iceland, in 1960 his studies brought him to Prague, which in the following years became the centre of the democratic awakening in Eastern Europe. His subsequent scholarly career led him via so many countries and continents that the idea of cosmopolitanism inevitably became the guiding thread of his sociological work. Whilst others made grand proclamations about the programmatic value of incorporating non-European cultures into the construction of social theory, Árnason practiced what they preached, in masterful style: prior to the explicit surge of general interest in varieties of modernity, he began to rethink the developmental processes of different civilizational spaces and found a way to theorize them within his own comparative framework. The result of these highly impressive, independently conducted feats of research – which required both considerable linguistic skill and the interpretation of swathes of largely unknown literature – is a body of work on the diversity of modernity that, in terms of historical precision, theoretical depth, and comparative breadth, has few competitors. Viewed as a whole, his books and articles on the Japanese path to modernization, on the outlier that was Russian development, on the significance of the Greek legacy in Europe, on the developmental dynamics of nation-states and, finally, on the specific structure of Western modernity, form the cornerstone of a comparative historical sociology whose quality and ambition is matched among contemporary scholars perhaps only by Shmuel Eisenstadt. To be sure, Árnason hit upon the premises of his theory of multiple modernities by way of a reappraisal and critique of the tradition of critical theory and Western Marxism, and at the beginning of his scholarly career, he produced three brilliant books on critical social theory. These owed much to a close cooperation with Jürgen Habermas, to whom he had reached out after the Soviet defeat of the “Prague Spring” in search of an intellectual mentor in the West; being stuck in Reykjavik when attempting to go back to Prague, because connections to Czechoslovakia at the times of the invasion were interrupted, he wrote to Habermas and asked to be accepted as a DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-1

2  Axel Honneth doctoral student, a request which the latter accepted without further hesitation. The critique of the Marxist paradigm of production that Habermas had developed in his early studies in social philosophy became the central theme of Árnason’s first phase of research (Habermas 1986). In the study that began life as his doctoral dissertation, Von Marcuse zu Marx (From Marcuse to Marx), he conceptualized a dialectical anthropology that built upon the thought that social labor is always embedded within the horizon of a cultural self-understanding, such that its significance and function will depend upon its particular interpretation at a given place and time (Árnason 1971). Árnason further developed these ideas in the Habilitation he wrote at Bielefeld University, Zwischen Natur und Gesellschaft (Between Nature and Society; Árnason 1976). In order to forestall the tendency to blithely apply contemporary social practices to alien and past cultures, he sought to work out the cultural dependencies of social action quite generally. The pinnacle of this trio of socio-philosophical studies, however, was undoubtedly the essay collection Praxis und Interpretation (Practice and Interpretation; Árnason 1988). In these essays, he lay the foundations of his thesis that the given initial conditions of specific cultural worldviews can be seen as establishing path-dependencies within particular societies, which essentially set the course followed by the subsequent development of their constitutive institutions and practices. Evidently, Árnason was gradually moving away from the premises of the Habermasian theory according to which social development depends primarily upon world-historical rationalizing processes of instrumental reason and moral interaction. To this transcultural view of history, he opposed an alternative conception: it is the specific world-interpretation of a given cultural and civilizational space that first decides what so much as counts as increasing rational knowledge – and thus what should be understood as “rationalization” in the first place. With this thesis, however, Árnason had laid the foundation for a wholly original and self-contained theory of society. The chief lesson of his early writings might be summarized in the maxim that if social action is always bound by the presuppositions of specific cultural worldviews, then the study of modernization has to take account of the multiplicity of its culturally rooted processes. Alongside it could be mentioned that this result might also have vast consequences for the study of the recognitional relations by which societies are constituted because it reveals that those world-interpretations foundational for civilizations also create the cultural frameworks for how people are expected to recognize it other.1 In the years that followed, it was primarily this insight which led Árnason increasingly to adopt the perspective of a comparative theory of civilization. It helped, of course, that force of circumstance had driven him to lead a truly cosmopolitan scholarly existence, spending long periods in Paris and Florence, before finally finding refuge, side by side with Ágnes Heller, at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Working from these various bases, he undertook a protracted research process, which combined a hermeneutic reconstruction of the sociological work of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Norbert

Preface  3 Elias, and Cornelius Castoriadis with comparative historical investigations of a variety of cultural spaces. The fruit of this period was a thesis that would shape his work from then on: The horizons within which civilizations attempt to overcome their specific geopolitical and socio-economic challenges are formed by their respective cultural worldviews, and it is the sheer variety of their contingent initial conditions which accounts for modernity’s characteristic plurality of specific forms of social integration. With this idea – which anticipated the now-standard notion of “multiple” modernities by two decades – Árnason had provided the basis for the studies of the concrete developmental processes of different types of modern social formations that would occupy him over the following decades. I will here mention only three of these path-breaking works which, deploying the techniques of cultural history, uncovered two variants of modernization: The books Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilization and Social Theory and Japanese Experience both examined the unique Japanese form of modernity, whilst The Future that Failed offered an equally significant treatment of the failure of the Soviet Russian path to modernization (Árnason 1993; Árnason 2002; Árnason 2016). Taken together, these monographs elaborated the highly complex and historically rich picture of the dynamics of modern society that Árnason retains to this day: In each specific realization of modernity, the foundational cultural stratum of a civilizational space continually manifests itself by predetermining the intellectual framework within which various actors can overcome or fail to overcome the contingent challenges of their socio-economic and geopolitical situation. So far as I can tell, the integrative and systematic sharpening of this thesis would allow it to be recognized for what, in my view, it undoubtedly is; namely, one of the most sociologically sophisticated, empirically comprehensive, and original theories of civilizational processes to have arisen since the great works of Norbert Elias, Benjamin Nelson and Shmuel Eisenstadt. Árnason’s research project for the coming years, therefore, is to undertake precisely this kind of theoretical elaboration of his previous studies. By integrating both philosophical and social-theoretical considerations, he plans to develop a kind of categorial framework for future comparative analyses of civilizations. In order to establish such a categorial framework, that he had for the first time tentatively outlined already in his book Civilizations in Dispute – a kind of interim result of his earlier studies –, he believes we need to address a deeply exciting and challengingly controversial complex of questions (Árnason 2003). He argues, for example, that we need a foundational theoretical clarification of whether cultures, in the sense of comprehensive, world-disclosive contexts of sense, should be thought of as essentially closed or as porous and continually extendible. Against this background, moreover, he intends to identify the concept or ethical idea that allows the multiple patterns of modernity to appear as variants of a single cultural system. The handful of allusions that Árnason makes here to Cornelius Castoriadis’s reflections on the central status of the notion of “autonomy” already point towards a highly fruitful engagement with the relation between relativism and

4  Axel Honneth universalism. A further step in this ambitious project will be a clarification of the relation between culture and power; here too, one cannot but be struck by the topicality of Árnason’s meditations, which centre on the thesis that cultural elaborations of meaning always possess the further function of lending power a normative legitimation. Two years ago, Árnason provided a systematic overview of the current state and organizing themes of his research in his essay collection The Labyrinth of Modernity (Árnason 2020). One need only begin to tie together the various loose ends of these essays to get an inkling of the scholarly significance and exceptional theoretical power of the project that thereby comes into view. In the contributions to this volume, renowned authors from different countries and with diverse orientations engage at the crossroads of philosophy, history, and sociology in discussing the enormous fruits of Árnason’s multilayered publications for what can be called “Civilizational Analysis”: A comparative study of the chances for human emancipation that the different cultures of modernity allow depending on the world-disclosing idea manifested in their institutional framework, cultural practices and problem-solving resources. For everyone interested in the future of “modernity”, this critical engagement with Árnason’s work in its many facets will be of highest importance. Axel Honneth, Frankfurt/Main in August 2022 (Translated by Alex Englander)

Note 1 Jóhann Árnason has mentioned this possibility himself in a conversation with Suzi Adams (Adams and Árnason 2016, 155). It will be interesting to see how the theoretical relation between a social study of recognitional relations and civilization analysis will be further explored in the future. A first attempt is to be found in: (Dunaj 2021).

References Adams, Suzi, and Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2016), “Sociology, Philosophy, History. A Dialogue”, Social Imaginaries, 2(1): 151–190. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (1971), Von Marcuse zu Marx. Prolegomena zu einer dialektischen Anthropologie. Neuwied und Berlin. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (1976), Zwischen Natur und Gesellschaft. Studien zu einer kritischen Theorie des Subjekts. Frankfurt/Köln. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (1988), Praxis und Interpretation. Sozialphilosophische Studien. Frankfurt/M. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (1993), The Future that Failed. Origins and Destinies of the Soviet Model. London. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2002), Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilization. Tokyo. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2003), Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden and Boston.

Preface  5 Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2016), Social Theory and Japanese Experience. The Dual Civilization. London. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2020), The Labyrinth of Modernity. London. Dunaj, L̓ubomír. (2021), “Critical Hermeneutics 2.0: A Necessary Update of the ‘New German Ideology’”, Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 5(2): 69–98. Habermas, Jürgen. (1986), Knowledge and Human Interests. Cambridge.

2 Introduction L�ubomír Dunaj

Jóhann P. Árnason’s work offers one of the most erudite historical comparative sociological approaches, one which has significantly enriched our understanding of world history. His theoretical perspective, inspired by the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology, fruitfully synthesizes social and political philosophy in a novel way. It has not only opened new, and, above all, nuanced horizons for understanding socio-historical phenomena, but has also yielded important insights concerning the long-standing debates around modernity, democracy, and capitalism. This is particularly important when analyzing the “history of mankind”, for Árnason’s scholarly efforts always probe for a historical-systemic framework that, rather than addressing empirical and normative issues separately, prefers to analyze their underlying interdependency.1 The most influential figures for the “early” Jóhann P. Árnason was the Czech philosopher Karel Kosík, whose phenomenologically informed account of Marxism played a decisive role in the early stages of his intellectual development. A subsequent influence of similar importance was the phenomenological and sociopolitical work of another notable Czech philosopher: Jan Patočka. Árnason’s work was further influenced by his critical engagement with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, particularly the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas (who was Árnason’s Doktorvater). In his later years, he was inspired by German scholars Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Hans Joas, and Hans Blumenberg, who left a lasting impact on the development of his theory. Equally broad and deep is Árnason’s study of French philosophers, sociologists, and historians, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lefort, and Marcel Gauchet. Yet not withstanding all these inspirational sources, one can justifiably claim that Cornelius Castoriadis’ “social imaginaries” or “imaginary significations”, which are to be understood as “ways of world-making”, play the most pivotal part in his approach. Inspired by Max Weber’s studies of cultures, by French civilizational discourses (Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss) as well as by other influential scholars such as Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Jaroslav Krejčí, and Benjamin Nelson,2 Jóhann P. Árnason develops a new perspective on civilizational analysis, which adroitly integrates the theoretical outlook of Cornelius DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-2

Introduction  7 Castoriadis. The concept of “civilizational analysis” is said to combine theoretical and historical approaches for the comparative investigation of civilizations. The focus is particularly on the constitutive patterns and long-term dynamics of civilizations – understood as macrocultural, macrosocial, and macrohistorical entities – but also on the question of their more or less active involvement in modern transformations (Árnason 2007). Hence, Árnason’s approach to civilizational analysis can be viewed as a unique synthesis of Castoriadis and Weber or a blending of philosophy and sociology, developed from his original re-interpretations of these canonical thinkers. And it is precisely this essential dialogue between philosophy and historical sociology that constitutes the focal point of the present volume. Árnason’s philosophically informed social theory provides a powerful framework for addressing a variety of challenges that have escalated as a result of globalization, a framework which, in turn, has rendered Eurocentric reductionism obsolete. Indeed, one of the greatest achievements of Árnason’s work is that he has managed to challenge and resist Eurocentric reductionism in all its forms, as documented by the incorporation of non-Western perspectives into his analyses (e.g., his “case studies” on Russia and Japan). Hence, Árnason succeeds where most have failed, namely, in developing a theoretical framework that is sensitive to socio-cultural particularity, without sacrificing philosophy’s essential orientation towards universal knowledge and truth. There is, however, a tendency of philosophers to overestimate the role of their discipline and, by the same token, their own role and importance for society. This is especially true for Central Europe, the birthplace of the author of this text and the region that Jóhann P. Árnason’s work and life have been so strongly associated with. In stating this, one should make sure to avoid the other extreme, i.e., underrating the influence or role of philosophy and culture per se. For instance, we can look to Horkheimer’s essay “The Social Function of Philosophy” (Horkheimer 2002) or speculate about Isaiah Berlin’s warning of the danger of “when ideas are neglected by those who ought to attend to them” (Berlin 2002, 167). Both texts are still highly relevant in many ways.3 And, naturally, there is an endless number of other excellent analyses of the use of philosophy for human society, which I will not go into detail here. The point is that in the field of academic philosophy, there is a tendency among those who pursue, or at least dabble with the discipline, to enclose themselves in theories and concepts, while forgetting about “time” and “space”; i.e., the historical contexts and worlds in which they are situated. This is what philosophers have been criticized for – perhaps since the inception of philosophy – and such a reproach may not be entirely unfounded. Without some distance from the “everyday”, without a certain disconnection from the “world as it is”, philosophers could hardly grasp human reality in theory. Fortunately, there are still some positive exceptions. Jóhann P. Árnason’s extensive philosophical and historical-sociological work does not allow us, especially if we move into the field of social and political philosophy, to forget our historicity and contextuality (cultural, social, economic, geographical, etc.); it consistently brings them to the foreground. It teaches us that finding

8  Lu̓ bomír Dunaj ultimate solutions, a universal normative order, or the way to live a good life is extremely difficult, if not impossible, and even undesirable, especially when articulated in a rigorously moralist fashion. For even if we follow the path of less demanding “soft” expectations, i.e., if we look for minimum rather than maximum versions of, for example, universalism in ethics, then even there, nuanced knowledge of history – not only of one’s “own” history, but also of the widest possible range of non-Western cultures and civilizations – is a condition sine qua non in order to reach, or at least to get closer to, an adequate “image of the world”. And when we consider Axel Honneth’s observation in the preface to this volume that the quality and significance of his work notwithstanding, Árnason lacks the glamor of the internationally feted, celebrity sociologist, and Peter Wagner’s remark elsewhere “that his [Árnason’s] work is less known than those of some of the other scholars mentioned above4 says something about the state of scholarly communication in our time” (Wagner 2021), perhaps we will be better able to see the reasons behind many problems of our contemporary world. Of course, the claim is not simply that Jóhann Árnason deserves a proper place among the most prominent social theorists of today, but, more importantly, that a large part of the (Western?) thought seems to have become largely insulated from history – along with a sense of context, time, space, and geopolitics – and has avoided deeper systematization of individual research findings in the human sciences. In this regard, the study of Árnason’s works can serve as an important corrective and an indispensable source of historical information and context. However, let us turn to my above statement. By claiming that many contemporary (political) philosophers are too constrained by their own “concepts and theories” this often means they are often not only ahistorical in their approach, but also adopt an overly strong normative stance.5 Nevertheless, there is another serious problem, which Árnason’s work may be particularly helpful in overcoming, viz. cultural reductionism or conventional stereotyping,6 often associated with a number of nationalities considered apparent or “real” enemies of the West such as China, Russia, or some Islamic countries7 through the process of othering, which often goes to extremes. To illustrate, let me draw on personal experiences from my student days, during which I not only met plenty of incredible scholars, but also some extreme cultural determinists among them. The memory of the first experience goes back to about twenty years ago, when I was studying in Prešov, in the easternmost part of Slovakia, a small country on the eastern edge of the European Union. At the university, there were a significant number of scholars of Czech ancestry, who considered themselves to be true, radical successors of the Enlightenment rationalist tradition. A significant portion of ethnically Slovak teachers, moreover, were strongly influenced by the “Czech point of view”, since many of them had studied in the Western part of the former Czechoslovakia. I remember that a couple of them tried to explain in some of their lectures why Slovakia and Slovaks in general were so backward (culturally, economically, politically…) compared to some of their geographical neighbors – especially Czechs,

Introduction  9 Germans, and Hungarians. The main argument was that this was because most Slovaks were Roman Catholics while most Czechs were atheists and Germans and Hungarians were Protestant. Hence, in their view, those who followed doctrines other than Catholicism were much more progressive, creative, or responsible. Naturally, Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethics” occupied a central place in their thought, although I am not sure now how thoroughly they had really studied it, especially the more recent interpretations of that text, which offer a much more nuanced picture.8 Yet, the message they aimed to get across was this: certain – very specific – philosophical and religious ideas are crucially important for the success or failure of a society. Their influence on me was very strong; indeed, it was not easy for a 20-yearold student to resist such an “offensive of cultural determinism”. Nevertheless, already at that time, looking through the prism of my personal experience, I had identified many problems with this interpretation as Eastern Slovakia is an extremely heterogeneous region – in both religious and ethnic terms. The area lies on the border between two great civilizations – Western and Orthodox.9 Anyone who has ever visited the local metropolis of Košice will probably find out that Košice boasts one of the easternmost Gothic cathedrals in Europe, with Greek-Catholic and Orthodox churches located further to the east, in an “inter-civilizational” belt that spans several hundred kilometers. As we travel farther east, to Ukraine, we may realize that Roman but especially Greek Catholic enclaves are encountered less and less frequently, until they disappear completely. Curiously enough, in the pre-World War II period, Prešov – the second most important city in the region – demonstrated multiculturalism and diversity as an integral part of their day-to-day existence (as a number of other cities in the region as well). Within a few hundred meters in the center of Prešov, one could find Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, and Evangelical churches, as well as a beautiful Jewish synagogue, with the city inhabited by Germans, Slovaks, Jews, Hungarians, Romani, Rusyns, and other nationalities. Had there been a mosque in the city, all major Western monotheistic religions would have been represented on the “Main Street”.10 Thus, the theme of intercultural and inter-civilizational contacts was, so to speak, “staring us in the face”. Today, we can say that globalization creates such intercultural and inter-civilizational encounters outside its geographical core, which, however, often do not result in a kind of “neutralized cosmopolitanism”, but rather lead to growing conflicts and identity crises. Despite the optimism of the 1990s, we are currently experiencing rather a return to the particular, to the awareness of cultural and civilizational belonging. Freeing oneself from specific identities has never been easy, after all; even the aforementioned ethnic and religious groups in Prešov lived side by side rather than together. But even this can be seen as a significant achievement in light of the current proliferation of wars, conflicts, acts of terrorism, or other atrocities, which indicate that peaceful coexistence between diverse cultures and civilizations seems to be increasingly at risk. I do not wish to further elaborate on the history or complexity of relations in that small part of the world, nor do I want to generalize this specific

10  Lu̓ bomír Dunaj episode, but rather to illustrate how someone obviously well-versed in philosophy, or rather in a certain way “doing” philosophy, could be utterly incapable of gaining an adequate understanding of her immediate environment because of a blind adherence to reified clichés. There is no room for showing in detail where and why they were wrong, and it would be rather hard to find a methodology for comparing and analyzing the evolution of individual societies. Let us just take an economic perspective, for our current purposes: it can be shown that, over the last thirty years following the collapse of socialist regimes, the most dynamic development was recorded in the most Catholic country in the region, viz. Poland, rather than in largely protestant Hungary or mostly atheist Czechia.11 And, after all, one could hardly claim that predominantly Catholic Slovakia is indeed “backward” – the overall economic situation in all those countries is more or less the same. What I would like to highlight here is the complexity of the task of explaining the nature of a relatively small society, let alone that of a “giant” like China, for instance, which I will use as the other example of personal experience. Indeed, the point here is not efface real differences between diverse ethnicities or religious groups, or, in terms of the focus of this book, differences between civilizations. Rather, it is that one should always be deeply suspicious of socio-cultural oversimplification, of which the aforementioned professors were guilty, and, therefore, be more careful and judicious when making evaluative claims. All societies, let alone civilizations, are hyper-complex entities and must be approached as such, a lesson to be drawn from Árnason’s work. In 2009, I started writing my doctoral thesis at the Comenius University in Bratislava, where I encountered a couple of influential scholars who strongly viewed China as a potential alternative to Western modernity and liberal democracy – the problematic and, in some respects, failed post-1989 transition, was one of the most important reasons for adopting such a position.12 Admittedly, there were other relevant reasons that brought me to study Chinese philosophy, which covered a wide range of issues – from ontological to ethical and environmental. Yet their knowledge and passion for the subject inspired me to change my research focus from purely Western theories of justice towards a more global perspective, as well as towards the possibilities of intercultural dialogue. As many would likely agree, China’s role and place in an increasingly globalized world is a relevant reason to learn more about the “software” that “runs” China and Chinese people. However, while the work of the above scholars of Chinese culture remain inspiring for my own research, their theoretical attempts to explain Chinese history from past to present through books such as Book of Changes (I Ching) or Dao De Jing, must at a certain point encounter unsolvable problems: most importantly, oversimplifications similar to those of the aforementioned Slovaks, as the questions of how to apply and especially how to decipher the real effectiveness of individual philosophical motives are also always historical and the way how we interpret them is often either contingent on some complex factors or arbitrary. Indeed, it would have taken me much longer to liberate myself from such totalizing interpretations of China – from the cultural-deterministic interpretation

Introduction  11 of China’s history as an enclosed, autochthonous story that remains unchanged irrespective of any external influences – if I had not had the opportunity to meet Jóhann Árnason13 and to familiarize myself with his work.14 But let us briefly conclude the problem of the impact of philosophy on society and culture. What I have attempted to show was that the blind following of certain philosophical methods or trends – a kind of tunnel vision of preconceived ideas – can often lead us astray. Indeed, there are many experts in philosophy who, while being ready to provide a detailed account of the ideas of Antisthenes, Jóhannes Duns Scotus, or Laozi, of modal logic, non-classical logical systems and a rule of inference, for example, often fail to see the contemporary relevance of their thought, unable to situate it in our current reality. Of course, I do not mean to disparage such important historical and methodological work, but rather to suggest that it serve as the starting point of philosophical inquiry, not the destination, especially if we wish to gain an insight and understanding of what is. A much broader perspective is thus necessary, and the hope is that this volume provides such a point of departure.

Sections and Chapters The book is divided into four thematic parts – Methodology, Modernity, the Axial Age, and Applied Civilizational Analysis – each containing three chapters. The first, entitled “Questions of Theory and Methodology”, begins with Suzi Adams’s chapter, in which she accepts Árnason’s invitation to elucidate the being of the political but diverges from him in suggesting that ‘politics’ is entangled with ‘the political’. She argues, moreover, that the being of instituting doing is always already involved and is not subordinate to history, to the political/politics, or to the imaginary: it is a question in its own right. Along the way, the essay expands on Castoriadis’s fleeting mention of ‘instituting doing’ in conjunction with a phenomenology of the world as a self-limiting horizon to human doing/action and appeals to Kosík’s articulation of praxis to hermeneutically reconstruct elementary levels of instituting doing as world formation and world opening. In the second chapter in this part Jiří Šubrt draws attention to phenomena which cannot be explained through microsociology, viz. phenomena that arise, are shaped, and change, as a result of certain cumulative effects, which –although originating in human behavior – have their own supra-individual nature and a specific logic that cannot be derived from the individual actions of individual human beings. In this sense, Šubrt claims that the processes dealt with by historical sociology are mainly (though not exclusively) the unintended consequences of human action. What is missing today in sociology (and especially in historical sociology), therefore, is a deeper effort to discover the hidden logic of the complex phenomena that set long-term historical processes in motion. In the closing chapter on methodology, Saïd Amir Arjomand explores the usefulness of the concept of ‘world regions’ as the connecting link between the interrelated ideas of multiple modernity and axial civilizations by focusing on the

12  Lu̓ bomír Dunaj Persianate world as a civilizational zone. By analyzing a few examples of contemporary traditionalizing modern trends in contemporary Iran, he shows that the interplay of the universal and the particular in the global context can be civilizational, and further, that this interplay is the key for unpacking multiple modernities as culturally-specific developments within each world region, or what Jóhann Árnason calls “cultural world” (Kulturwelt). The second section, “Re-thinking the Concept of Modernity/ies through the Lens of Civilizational Analysis”, begins with Peter Wagner’s reflections on the concept of modernity. According to Wagner, the term ‘modernity’ has widely been used to mark a social transformation that sets history on a track towards accomplishing normative achievements, a view that informs wide strands of (historico-)sociological research, often under the concept of modernization, or now neo-modernization. In light of Árnason’s critique of modernity as a normative project and defense of a non- or meta-normative concept of modernity as a social-historical field that discloses (conflicting) normative options, the purpose of Wagner’s chapter is to contribute to clarifying the place of normativity in socio-historical analysis, particularly in the analysis of modernity. Wolfgang Knöbl deals with Árnason’s understanding of two central terms of political sociology and social theory: the ‘state’ and ‘modernity’. While he mostly follows Árnason’s conceptualization of the modern state as a “historical configuration of the social imaginary”, he nevertheless argues that Árnason’s approach to theorizing the state and modernity might profit from a more thorough contextualization, given that state projects in different parts of the world have indeed taken very different shapes. The final chapter by Kurt C.M. Mertel examines the hitherto unexplored relationship between Árnason’s civilizational analysis and “LeftHeideggerianism”. He provides a brief account of what he calls the “political paradigm” of Left-Heideggerianism, which is based on the ‘political difference’ between politics and the political, which sets the stage for an alternative “social paradigm” that takes the ‘social difference’ between society and the social as a point of departure. By reconstructing some core features and commitments of the social paradigm, he clears the path for situating Árnason’s civilizational analysis within its framework, thus providing an opening for future research on the relationship between and potential role of civilizational analysis within Left-Heideggerianism and post-foundationalist social and political thought, broadly construed. The third part, “Modernity in the Plural: Civilizational Analysis and the Axial Age Debate”, starts with Hans Schelkshorn’s reflections on Árnason’s and Eisenstadt’s works on the theory of multiple modernities, as well as on Jürgen Habermas’ account of the Axial Age as a holistic historical background of post-metaphysical modernity. This provides the necessary context for Schelkshorn’s philosophical analysis of the different relations between the Axial Period and modernity, as sketched by Árnason, Eisenstadt, and Habermas, which he situates in relation to the pioneering work of Karl Jaspers. Hans-Herbert Kögler’s chapter is motivated by the following systematic question vis-à-vis the Axial Age discourse: can the value orientations of

Introduction  13 early world religions and philosophical systems be preserved and re-actualized even after they succumbed to a reification and distortion of their initial cognitive motivations in “metaphysical worldviews”? By historically and socially situating the cultural breakthrough of the Axial Age as described by Jaspers with insights drawn from Árnason and Assmann, the decline of these features into the dogmatic authoritarianism of fixed worldviews are empirically identified. More importantly for Kögler’s purposes, the essential role of ‘communities of interpretation’ in the Axial Age formation of worldviews discloses a possible path for an immanent overcoming of dogmatic reifications from within each tradition, recognizing the pluralism of all and the internal validity of each. Finally, his discussion of late Habermas points towards the possibility of a shared postmetaphysical consciousness that avoids a developmental grounding in one tradition by reconstructing inherent hermeneutic presuppositions operative within any one of the diverse cultural contexts. The section comes to a close with Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr’s chapter, which connects the Axial Age theory and the concept of Multiple Secularities by investigating the emergence of conceptual distinctions akin to the religious–secular divide and the related forms of institutional differentiation. In addition, they consider the configurations and forms of agency from which these developed and argue that such distinctions and differentiations emerged in various civilizations, becoming resources for distinctions between the religious and the non-religious, and for secular developments in the modern era. Through a study of pre-modern Japan, they thus they aim to historicize the concept of an original transcendence/immanence divide in civilizational analysis, thereby giving it a stronger empirical turn. The last part of the book, “Making Theory Contextual through Civilizational Analysis: Place, Politics, Situatedness”, begins with Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse’s chapter in which they explore the process of geocultural mapping that accompanied the Western making of the twin categories of religion and civilization and the way it produced imaginative cartographies of authenticity. They show how a revised religio-civilizational imagination affected a proponent of the centrality of the Islamosphere like Marshall Hodgson, while an altogether alternate approach developed in Japan in the post-Meiji era, which produced a counterhegemonic mapping of East, West, and the Islamosphere. The chapter focuses on how the work of the Japanese scholar Toshihiko Izutsu valorized a non-Western perspective largely converging with the Western-critical one offered by Hodgson. Izutsu’s trajectory brought to culmination a process of geocultural remapping through which the East/Orient of the West was overwritten and “re-Oriented” to a more organic idea of the East cemented by inter-Asian connectedness. This geocultural move, it is argued, put the Islamosphere straight at the center of the map, while relativizing the weight of rigid East–West dichotomizations and embracing the continuous fluctuations and mediations within East–West entanglements. Yulia Prozorova focuses on the relationship between religion and politics. According to her, their (trans-)formative and long-term complex societal effects constitute the core research problematic

14  Lu̓ bomír Dunaj of civilizational analysis, whose major theoretical underpinnings draw on the pioneering studies and legacy of the classical theorists. The essay briefly overviews the contemporary theoretical reflections on the religious-political interplay in the works of Shmuel Eisenstadt, who is generally credited with the revival of the problematic in the civilizational studies, and its further elaboration by Jóhann Árnason, who reconsiders the Eisenstadtian concept of ‘civilizational dimension’ and interprets the “religio-political nexus” as a societal meta-institution. Prozorova considers political theology as a dimension of the religio-political nexus engendering political meanings, imaginaries, and forms. This, in turn, informs her study of the religio-political nexus in Russia’s civilizational trajectory, which is associated with political theologies aggrandizing secular rulership, asymmetric state–church relationships, autocracy, and the institution of ‘monistic unity’ of religious and political powers suppressing pluralism and the diffusion of power. In the closing chapter of the volume, Jeremy Smith draws our attention to the way re-casting civilizational areas long regarded as unproblematic as ‘multi-civilizational’ and ‘multiregional’ is producing new thinking in civilizational analysis. At the same time, the turn to regions in the comparative social sciences is bringing world regions, regional formations, and (at times) sub-national regions into question. As a result, the literature urges us, Smith claims, to consider ‘region’ and ‘regionality’ as dynamic concepts. In addition to this theoretical contemplation, Smith considers two types of specific regional configurations in the Americas. He argues that both sub-national territories and larger cross-border zones circumscribe regionality. At the same time, sub-regions are a counterpoint and can even be counter-national. Through explorations of the Southwest of the US, the Caribbean and Central America as case studies, he shows that inter-civilizational engagement and encounters are central dynamics to the formation of regions and regional consciousness. The concludes with Jóhann Árnason’s replies, in which he explains and clarifies his views with regard to some basic problems, with a particular emphasis on five sets of questions. On the most basic conceptual level, the position of civilizational analysis with regards to ongoing debates on action, structure, and process in social theory is discussed. This approach is grounded in an ontology of the social-historical, drawing most extensively on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis. Moving on from that background, the question of the difference between politics and the political, central to political philosophy, is taken up and treated as a primarily non-normative issue, i.e., as a matter of locating the political sphere within the social-historical world. A third problematic concerns the understanding of modernity as a new type of civilization. That view is opposed to ideas of a normative modern project or cultural programme; the core orientations of modernity, centred on human autonomy and its paradoxes, must be theorized as meta-normative presuppositions, in the sense that they necessarily give rise to rival normative interpretations, but are not reducible to them. The conception of modernity as a new type of civilization leads to an emphasis on multiple versions, grounded in different combinations of economic, political, and cultural spheres and

Introduction  15 concretized through varying regional patterns; some comments on the distinctive Russian and Japanese trajectories are included. Finally, the question of the Axial Age is briefly discussed, and shortcuts from its innovations to modernity are rejected. Let me conclude by thanking both co-editors, Kurt C.M. Mertel and Jeremy C.A. Smith, who have done an exceptional job of editing as well as contributing high-quality chapters. Likewise, I would like to thank all the authors, not only for their outstanding research contributions, but also for their cooperativeness, which helped to create a collegial atmosphere around the entire project. We also owe a debt of gratitude to our editor at Routledge, Neil Jordan, for his enthusiastic support for the project from the outset and to the entire editorial staff for their outstanding work throughout. Last but not least, a big thanks is due to Jóhann Árnason, who followed the project from a distance and supported us throughout, especially for his thoughtful, meticulous, and charitable engagement with the chapters and his occasional expert advice and recommendations, which significantly enhanced the project as a whole.

Notes 1 According to one of his most important interlocutors, Peter Wagner: “Arnason keeps the ambition comprehensive, bringing together approaches and insights from philosophy, history, sociology and opening up to anthropology and political philosophy, rather than retreating to a focus on only one of these fields, as others have done” (Wagner 2021). 2 The list could be extended beyond the academic world given Árnason’s wide-ranging interests, interactions, and sources of inspiration (e.g., Elias Canetti). 3 In this context, it is worth recalling an eloquent passage from Berlin’s most famous text: “Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization. He spoke of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as the sword with which German deism had been decapitated, and described the works of Rousseau as the blood-stained weapon which, in the hands of Robespierre, had destroyed the old regime; and prophesied that the romantic faith of Fichte and Schelling would one day be turned, with terrible effect, by their fanatical German followers, against the liberal culture of the West. The facts have not wholly belied this prediction; but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not governments or congressional committees), can alone disarm them?” (Berlin 2002). 4 In his text Wagner mentions Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, Margaret Archer, Jeffrey Alexander, and Hans Joas. 5 To this issue see especially the chapters by Suzi Adams, Peter Wagner, and Wolfgang Knöbl in this book. 6 Árnason’s works may also be helpful in eliminating or at least minimizing other reductionisms, especially economic ones – whether in Marxist or neoliberal form. Regarding Marxism see, for instance, at various places in (Árnason 2003), regarding neoliberalism in (Árnason 2020). 7 Incidentally, something similar happens in non-Western cultures vis-à-vis Western countries or the USA, where discussions about individual nationalities are soon reduced to a few basic characteristics and often degenerate into clichés and prejudices. 8 Regarding Max Weber, see especially Árnason (1988, 2003).

16  Lu̓ bomír Dunaj 9 On the other hand, at that time, I was in touch with a couple of fellow students from the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, who was also of the Calvinist faith – but one could hardly pinpoint any fundamental differences in the lives of their families and those of Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, and eastern Orthodox Christians. Nor was their native village and towns any “different” from majority in economic or cultural terms. Thus, the seeds of skepticism over cultural reductionism were sown. 10 Nevertheless, to add just a small footnote – Muslims had been close to establishing a foothold in the region since the southern border of present-day Slovakia was a borderland with the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg Empire, to which Slovakia belonged at the time. 11 See for instance Ther (2016). 12 Cf. for instance Ghodsee and Orenstein (2021). 13 I first met Jóhann Árnason when, during his visit to Bratislava at the invitation of my supervisor Ladislav Hohoš in 2011, I had the honor to guide him around the capital of Slovakia. While this is not vital to my argument presented here, I have always been overwhelmed by Jóhann Árnason’s profoundness of knowledge of, and interest in, the Slovak past and present, which proves that in his work not only the “big players” count for theorizing an issue. It is easy to see from my texts how the interaction with Professor Árnason subsequently affected me, but I could not have imagined at the time that our acquaintance would develop into something as wonderful as this book project. The very first impression, which was then repeated during our further and further meetings, was that I met a person who, in the olden days, no one would have called anything other than ‘a sage’, whose erudition and moral standards are unparalleled. 14 Cf. especially Árnason (2003, 2020). See also the forthcoming book: Dunaj, L̓ubomír and Sigurðsson, Geir (eds.). (2024). Imaginary Worlds and Imperial Power: The Case of China (in preparation) with essential Jóhann Árnason’s study.

References Árnason, Jóhann P. (1988), Praxis und Interpretation. Sozialphilosophische Studien, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Árnason, Jóhann P. (2003), Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill. Árnason, Jóhann P. (2007), Civilizational Analysis: A Paradigm in the Making in World Civilizations, in Robert Holton (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, Oxford: Eolss Publishers. [http://www.eolss.net] Árnason, Jóhann P. (2020), The Labyrinth of Modernity. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Berlin, Isaiah. (2002), Liberty. Edited by Henry Hardy, New York: Oxford University Press. Ghodsee, Kristen and Orenstein, Mitchell. (2021), Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions. New York: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max. (2002). Critical Theory. Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connel and et al. New York: Continuum. Ther, Philipp. (2016), Europe Since 1989: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wagner, Peter. (2021), Jóhann Árnason’s unanswered question by Peter Wagner. In Thesis Eleven. https://thesiseleven.com/2021/04/26/article-johann-arnasons-unansweredquestion-by-peter-wagner/

Part I

Questions of Theory and Methodology

3 The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question Reflections on Jóhann P. Árnason’s Thought Suzi Adams

In a recent interview, Jóhann P. Arnason takes the opportunity to reflect on the central tasks of political philosophy. Instead of a focus on normative commitments, he advocates for an elucidation of the being of the political within the social-historical as a more basic undertaking because “the possibilities, ambitions and limits of normative discourse will depend on prior ontological assumptions” (Adams and Arnason 2022b: 330).1 It is noteworthy that Cornelius Castoriadis made his turn to ontology in not too dissimilar circumstances: he aimed to elucidate the mode of being that underpinned an autonomous society. For Castoriadis, the self-institution of society was always already a political institution; politics was a whole of society question, irreducible to a single domain (1987: 87). Drawing on Weber, Arnason instead emphasizes internal pluralism and articulates the political sphere as part of a multi-dimensional social world (eg 2023). Although Castoriadis is one of Arnason’s primary interlocutors along this path, there are critical differences, as we shall see. As a first step, Arnason proposes a rethinking of Castoriadis notion of the social-historical (the trans-subjective dimension of the human condition) and his distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique). In this essay, I take up Arnason’s invitation to consider the being of the political. I diverge from Arnason, however, in suggesting that politics is entangled with the political and, furthermore, that the being of instituting doing (Castoriadis 1987: 5) is always already involved. I contend that the question of instituting doing is subordinate neither to the political/politics nor to the social-historical; it must be considered on its own terms. The conception of instituting doing stems from Castoriadis (1987: 5). He used the term very occasionally; he more often utilized the couplet of instituting society and instituted society; and he also referred to the instituting imaginary. In broad terms, instituting society characterizes the always-becoming and radical historicity of society (as the social-historical) as perpetual self-alteration and self-creation, whilst instituted society emphasizes its enduring and more or less stable patterns. Instituting/instituted society, like the social-historical and social imaginary significations, form part of the trans-subjective domain of the human condition. The notion of instituting doing also refers to the always-becoming of society (in that sense it is part of instituting society).2 However, unlike the social-historical, it encompasses DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-4

20  Suzi Adams collective action as “thoughtful doing” (to use Castoriadis’s terminology), to explicitly and reflexively interrogate instituted society to effect socio-political change, as well as a trans-subjective aspect of ‘social movement’; these two levels can overlap.3 I will uncover further, more elementary levels of instituting doing in the course of this essay. Arnason himself has suggested a rethinking of the creativity of action as one of the tasks of articulating the being of the political, but it is worth noting that, over the course of his intellectual trajectory, the question of action/praxis has, at least since his hermeneutic turn in the 1980s, clearly been subsidiary to the problematic of history.4 He has focussed on fleshing out the trans-subjective, historical context to better understand the creativity of action – and social-historical creativity, more generally – instead of the problematic of action/praxis, itself. As he puts it, “contextuality is the other side of creativity, and action is a particularly instructive example of this connection” (Adams and Arnason 2022a: 143). This has been in part because he has rightly pursued a theory of society as a mode of being sui generis, irreducible to intersubjective accounts and intentionality (where theories of action have generally foundered).5 Arnason has suggested bringing Castoriadis and Joas’s respective accounts closer together as an inviting way forward (Adams and Arnason 2016, 2022a, 2022b; Arnason 2023).6 Mindful of the underdevelopment of the being of doing in Castoriadis’s thought, Arnason has also variously suggested Castoriadis’s notions of ‘teukhein’, ‘revolutionary action’ and ‘le faire/faire’ as pathways to a reconstruction of “doing”. Well, amen to that!, as Arnason himself might say. Consideration of the connection between doing and the world horizon is also a fundamental task. Due regard for the world horizon serves, amongst other things, to limit the scope and reach of human doing to avoid the pitfalls of hubris, and, relatedly, to facilitate a move beyond socio- and anthropo-centrism. Arnason’s phenomenological approach makes these aspects explicit (cf Adams 2019b). Although Arnason has traversed ‘roads beyond Marx’, there has been no ‘road beyond phenomenology’ in the same way; his ongoing encounter with the question of the world as an ‘horizon of horizons’ is a central thread across his entire intellectual trajectory (Adams and Arnason 2016: 151–152). Drawing attention to this aspect can illuminate his distinctive contribution to the field as well open new paths in the labyrinth. In this essay, I reconstruct a hermeneutical spiral to pursue intersecting and complementary avenues to reflect on the being of the political and of politics. The overarching focus is on different levels of instituting doing as world forming and world opening. As mentioned, Arnason suggests a rethinking of the social-historical as part of reconsidering the being of the political. To this end, I first retrieve a subterranean thread of elementary trans-subjective doing and its ties to the world that is implicit in Arnason’s thought, but, although I remain within the trans-subjective domain in this section, I shift the focus from the social-historical to the mode of being of social imaginary significations and the elementary doing of world formation. Second, as mentioned, I contend that, once politics appears, it is analytically distinct but

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  21 inseparable from the political. I subsequently, third, highlight the terrain of collective doing as world opening as la politique via consideration of praxis as a propaedeutic. Both Castoriadis and Arnason associate the questioning and problematization of instituted society with la politique. In the concluding two sections, drawing on Patočka’s understanding of problematicity and Arnason’s interpretation of Patočka’s “Negative Platonism”, I briefly consider the being of questioning as part of instituting doing at both world opening and world formation levels – as well as the positive responses to those questions as the metaphysical domain of societies – and, in a final hermeneutical arc, return to the question of the political.

From World Appropriation to World Articulation To begin, Arnason reflects on the mode of being of the social-historical as part of his rethinking of the political (Adams and Arnason 2022b). The social-historical comprises the trans-subjective dimension of anthropic being. It highlights the impersonal domain of the self-institution of society as the anonymous collective “that fills every given social formation but which also engulfs it” (Castoriadis 1987: 108). Arnason – like Durkheim and Castoriadis before him – articulates society as a trans-subjective mode of being sui generis that is reducible neither to intersubjectivity nor to intentionality. More than Durkheim and Castoriadis, however, Arnason moves beyond socio-centric accounts of the human condition and society by emphasizing the world as an ‘horizon of horizons’ as the trans-objective counterpart to the social-historical as a critique of anthropo-centrism and subjectivism. Arnason wants to bring more ‘history’ into the ‘social-historical, both in general and as part of his rethinking of the being of the political. When Castoriadis elucidated the mode of being of the social-historical in The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), he devoted most of his energy to demolishing conventional theories of society rather than theories of history. 7 Arnason’s approach in the political philosophy interview indicates an historical turn, not only in his articulation of the “specific features” of history, including “path dependence, contingency, concatenations of circumstances as well as invention and creative action” (2022b: 330), but also in historicizing the social-historical through concrete historical analyses, instead of the “onesided” emphasis on social creativity; that is, by making the social-historical more historical. As a corrective to Castoriadis in the IIS, he wants to show that “a properly understood civilizational perspective overlaps—to a significant extent – with the philosophy of history” (2011: 115). Arnason’s emphasis on history and historicizing has been an important long-term strategy to relativize and challenge general social theory and over-integrated concepts of society. Indeed, the emphasis on history as an antidote – or at least a relativization – to general social theory and philosophy as part of a critical reformulation of the concept of society is a Leitmotif of his approach. It is evident throughout his intellectual trajectory: from his early engagement with Kosík, where he wanted “more history, and more emphasis on different historical worlds” (Arnason

22  Suzi Adams 1966),8 to his recent critique of Eisenstadt’s typological notion of ‘axiality’ in favour of retaining “the historical conception of the Axial Age, in fact to make it more historical” (Adams and Arnason 2016: 157). The deepening analysis of history that Arnason puts forward “denote[s] spaces and horizons of the imaginary” (2022b: 330), and the social imaginary is inextricably linked to the social-historical (although distinct from it); they each comprise different aspects of the trans-subjective dimension. For Castoriadis, too, the social-historical presumes social imaginary significations and vice versa. He develops his elucidation of the being of the social-historical in the first instance as a critique of the metaphysics of determinacy; it is only when he comes to the mode of being of social imaginary significations that he began to elucidate a positive ontology (Castoriadis 1987; cf Adams 2011). But even more strikingly, Castoriadis placed the being of doing on an equal footing with the social-historical and social imaginary significations in the IIS. These aspects of the human condition formed a trinity; along with an elucidation of the being of the social-historical and social imaginary significations, Castoriadis also intended to elucidate the ‘being of doing’.9 This trinity was already present in the first part of the IIS: “History is impossible and inconceivable outside of the … radical imaginary as this is manifested indissolubly in both historical doing and in the constitution, before any explicit rationality, of a universe of significations” (1987: 146; emphasis in original). Castoriadis pinpoints the question of doing at the beginning of his entry point into the ontological labyrinth (that is, at the beginning of the second part of the IIS), along with the social-historical and the imaginary element, as the key problematics to be addressed in his elucidation (Castoriadis 1987: 168). The closing words of the IIS reinforce the importance of doing where he writes that: [t]he self-transformation of society concerns social doing – and so also politics, in the profound sense of the term – the doing of men and women in society, and nothing else. Of this, thoughtful doing, and political thinking—society’s thinking as making itself—is one essential component. (1987: 373; emphasis in original) Indeed, this notion of “doing” permeates the “Preface” as the final part of the IIS to be written (1987: 1–5). Castoriadis intended the elucidation of the being of doing to be central to his ontology; it was already central to his political project. It is unfortunate that he did not deliver on that promissory note. Instead, he became immersed in the problematic of the imaginary element and left his elucidation of doing to one side. Suggested as early as his doctoral thesis (1971: 254), the concept of appropriation (Aneignung) – especially as world appropriation – was the guiding thread by which Arnason critiqued Marx’s production paradigm (1988: 46). In the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx attempted to situate the “elementary structures of production” within a more general context of “relations between man and world” (Arnason 1991: 67), which brings the theory of the

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  23 “superstructure” into question.10 Marx uses the notion of world appropriation to show that there were different ways of grasping the world: practical, aesthetic, religious (and so on). This insight puts the base/superstructure model into question, as, instead of derivative to the superstructure, these different world orders (each with embedded “Praxisformen”) appear as “irreducible and totalizing world perspectives” (1988: 46). This opens onto the Weberian problematic of a plurality of world spheres, each with their own logic, that Arnason develops further in Praxis und Interpretation and beyond. Not only is each domain – each world appropriation – characterized by its own mode of doing as praxis, Aneignung itself – that is, the relations between humankind and world – was regarded as an “elementary form of action” (1988: 48). World-appropriation as a general structure is further understood as the transformation of the subject–object relation, meaning that subjectivity is based in a meaningful, multi-dimensional interaction with the world qua world (and not merely objects in the world) that is only ever able to be articulated from partial perspectives (1988: 46–47).11 There is unmistakable resemblance to Merleau-Ponty’s reflections in the “wild humus” (Castoriadis) of the working notes in The Visible and the Invisible: “The ‘world’ in this whole where each ‘part’, when one takes it for itself, suddenly opens unlimited dimensions – becomes a total part” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 218; emphasis in original).12 So we are already close to Merleau-Ponty, and it is perhaps not accidental that two ‘Weberian-Marxists’ – Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis – were significant for Arnason’s path from Marx to Weber. At the time of his cultural turn, Merleau-Ponty was Arnason’s most important phenomenological interlocutor. But the elucidation of ‘the relations between man and world’ that was a feature of Marx’s Aneignung changed emphasis with Arnason’s roads beyond Marx towards cultural hermeneutics and Weber. Arnason’s cultural turn in the 1980s saw a shift in emphasis in his response to the phenomenological problematic of the world. His basic orientation to philosophical anthropology remained phenomenological; i.e. ‘anthropo-cosmic’, to use Kosík’s language (1976: 139; cf. Castoriadis 1991: 149), which is to be understood as the relations between ‘man and world’; i.e. irreducible to anthropo-centric accounts. Arnason used this terminology in relation to Marx’s grappling with world-appropriation in the Grundrisse but it was a Weberian formulation from the Zwischenbetrachtung that was foundational to his articulation of culture as the “relation between man and world”. Arnason rendered this as “cultural applications of the world” as a rendering of Merleau-Ponty’s mise en forme du monde and Castoriadis’s notion of social imaginary significations to render this as “cultural articulations of the world”.13 Arnason thus gives his anthropology a distinctive turn in that human being is not only considered anthropo-cosmic but it is now anchored firmly to the trans-subjective/trans-objective dimension of the social-historical via – and as – cultural articulations of the world that move beyond socio-centric approaches to culture and society, on the one hand, and take the focus from anthropos as subject-self to social-historical, that is, takes the emphasis off the subjective nature of a focus on the human self as the basis

24  Suzi Adams of philosophical anthropology, on the other. These are important innovations. However, a consequence of this is that the being of doing – the elementary doing of the Aneignung der Welt (linked to more explicit forms of praxis; I return to this, below) of world formation – has been occluded. Nonetheless, it remains implicit to world formation and can be extracted and reflected on as a question in its own right. To see this more clearly, let us first take a short detour. The underlying connection of world formation to doing is made explicit in Karel Kosík’s thought, which was a key source for Arnason’s perspective in phenomenological Marxism. Kosík delineates different layers of praxis and the connection is made between praxis and onto-formation highlights the implicit and elementary ‘doing’ in the active and ongoing formation of human world and reality: In its essence and generality, praxis is the exposure of the mystery of man as an onto-formative being, as a being that forms the (socio-human) reality and therefore also grasps and interprets it (i.e. reality both human and extra-human. Reality in its totality). Man’s praxis is not practical activity as opposed to theorizing; it is the determination of human being as the process of forming reality. […] The onto-formative process of human praxis is the basis of the possibility of ontology of ontology, i.e. for understanding being. The process of forming a (socio-human) reality is a prerequisite for disclosing and comprehending reality in general. Praxis as the process of forming human reality is also a process of uncovering the universe and reality in their being. Praxis is not man’s being walled in the ideal of socialness and of social subjectivity, but his openness toward reality and being. (1976: 137, 139; emphases in original) For Kosík, the ‘onto-formative’ process – both distinct from and inextricably related to praxis – is the “basis for the possibility of ontology”. This brings us close to Merleau-Ponty’s mise en forme du monde: both philosophers emphasize the “creative doing” and its ontological implications in world formation of reality (which, as per Castoriadis, can only be lent meaning as and through social imaginary significations). Indeed, the term “onto-formative” in the original Czech emphasizes the onto-creative dimension of human praxis. Not dissimilar to the German verb gestalten, but with more of an aesthetic sense, it is fundamentally akin to the French mise en forme du monde, as put forward by Merleau-Ponty (and Kosík was familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work).14 “World articulation” as “world formation” is thus to be understood as both a type of elementary trans-subjective doing, as ontologically creative, and as linked to more overt forms of praxis as action (I return to the question of praxis below). World formation (as mise en forme du monde) incorporates creative doing, but this elementary doing emerges from the context of cultural horizons of meaning and power as the relations between man and world – and their changing historical variety. It is a level of elementary instituting doing inextricably connected to the world as an overarching horizon (cf.

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  25 Castoriadis 1987: 147–149).15 A submerged notion of elementary trans-subjective doing as world formation (which appears both as instituting doing and instituted society) is thus evident in Arnason’s thought.

‘Politics’ and ‘the Political’ Arnason links his reappraisal of the being of the political to a rethinking of Castoriadis’s distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique), and of the trans-subjective domain of the social-historical and social imaginaries (2022b: 335). For Castoriadis, politics (la politique) in the strong and explicit sense entails an overt collective understanding of the self-institution of society; a concomitant understanding of its citizens’ – as a socio-political collective – capacity to question and change its own laws and mores; and the task of collective self-limitation (e.g. 1991). As Arnason notes, it occurs only when there is “an active confrontation of institutional projects, hence an imagining of alternatives” (2022b: 331) and is “synonymous with autonomy” (Arnason 2023*: 26). Arnason now generally singles out the interrogation of instituted society to articulate autonomy (e.g. Arnason 2023*; Adams and Arnason 2022b; cf. Castoriadis 1991: 159).16 He further relativizes Castoriadis’s approach to autonomy from a number of perspectives. Of most relevance here is his rejection of the notion of a fully autonomous society where he convincingly argues that “projects of autonomy are never more than partial aspects of a more complex constellation, in some cases more radical and formative than in others, but never in full control” (Adams and Arnason 2016: 158). The political (le politique), in contrast, refers to the configuration, institutionalization. and distribution of political and infra-power that every society must make and the “rivalries and struggles that inevitably accompany it” (2022b: 331). In the interview on political philosophy, Arnason situates Castoriadis’s distinction within the broader Francophone debate on the political and rejects what he sees as Castoriadis’s reduction of the political “to an inferior version of politics, rather than an underlying and encompassing dimension, which is more commonly assumed, and which I think we need to thematize” (2022b: 331). In foregrounding “the political”, Arnason emphasizes the problematic of power in the sphere of politics but as always already involved in cultural interpretations. Recently, he has rethought Gauchet’s conception of the religio-political nexus to articulate a more “multi-form” approach in conjunction with civilizational analysis (e.g. 2022b: 333ff).17 This is in line with his Weberian understanding of the internal plurality of life spheres and his acceptance of Gauchet’s notion of modern democracy as a “mixed regime” (e.g. 2022b: 333; cf Arnason 2003). Yet, in modernity, at least, the political is always already entwined with politics. Autonomy, no matter how qualified, is central to the modern imaginary. As soon as interrogation of the established institution of society appears – no matter how partial, nor how oblique (as per Arnason’s relativization of autonomy) – then there is an opening onto politics (la politique); this means

26  Suzi Adams that “another relation, previously unknown, is created between the instituting and the instituted” (Castoriadis 1991: 160). To wit, the emergence of politics alters the very terrain of the political, and the instituted closure of society is opened. Once autonomy as la politique comes into play, it hinges onto the contestation of the already instituted, on the one hand, and the imagined alternatives for the future (mentioned by Arnason), on the other. The political and politics are thus mutually entangled. As discussed above, Arnason supports a deepening account of the creativity of action – albeit with an emphasis still on historical contexts. He regards the changing historical forms (of cultural articulations of the world) as the context for a comparative understanding – and theorizing – of action. Arnason is arguably less optimistic about the prospects of political action in the contemporary world (e.g. Adams and Arnason 2016, 2022b). He is very aware – and wary of – the unintended consequences of action as a constant precipice (and invitation to hubris). But this does not mean that he dismisses it altogether. As mentioned above, Arnason agrees with Gauchet’s notion of democracy as a “mixed regime”. From this perspective, democracy as a “mixed regime” consists of three organising principles: first, the rule of law anchored in human rights; second, a political community by and large linked to the nation-state; and third, “a distinctive vision of history, centered on the future as a domain of collective action” (2022b: 5). Although Arnason accepts the importance of collective action (and the concomitant orientation to a futural temporality), his view is that [t]here is always an interplay of small groups with concentrated power and social forces with more diffuse power; the idea that social forces can simply take over and put the elites out to pasture has always turned out to be an illusion, and there are certainly no reasons for reviving it now.18 Some of his interlocutors, however, are more optimistic about the prospects for democracy and place greater emphasis on the importance of collective action/social movements in its ongoing renewal. In a just published book, Calhoun, Gaonkar, and Taylor, for example, argue for the importance of social movements – not just political protest – in the regeneration of democracy. They contend: “While the micropolitics of specific grievances prepare the ground for consorted political action, it takes a movement to channel the people’s democratic energies towards constructive change. […] Movements are crucial in making what matters to ordinary people politically effective” (2022: 285–286). Mota and Wagner also argue for the centrality of collective action and movements in the ongoing process of democracy’s renewal, arguing that “democracies have always been positively transformed by reflexive collective action” (2021: 195). Whilst I agree with Arnason that it would be unlikely for social forces and movements to unseat elites, I am also more optimistic regarding collective action and democratic renewal. Regardless, it can be agreed that the future is the domain of collective action. In that light, how might the being of instituting doing be articulated?

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  27

World Opening Praxis Let us return to the problematic of the "being of doing" and look for elementary concepts that might help to re-thematize it. I first address Arnason’s reflections on praxis as an opening onto political doing as a specific form of instituting doing – as critical, transformative, and creative – as part of politics (la politique); second, I broach its connection to elementary forms of transsubjective doing. Each is considered in the context of the world horizon. Arnason’s interpretation of praxis emerges from phenomenological Marxism, and it thus takes into account not only the doing of praxis but also the world horizon. Arnason is presently less inclined to pursue a reconstruction of praxis, but it was for some time an explicit goal (1988: 46; 1991). Conceptions of praxis draw on both Marxian and Aristotelian antecedents (not least its economic reductionism with Marxian approaches). There are long-standing criticisms of praxis, but where some consider it to be an overburdened concept beyond renovation, others continue to regard it more positively. Whether or not praxis can be usefully reconstructed shall be left as an open question for now. Either way, praxis has been a key concept in Marxian thought (including phenomenological Marxism). Arnason remarks that praxis was attractive to critical Marxists in Eastern Europe because it “enabled a new emphasis on human autonomy and creativity and was in that sense congenial to the critique of the authoritarian regimes that claimed to be socialist”.19 The emphasis on creativity, autonomy, and socio-political transformation as central to praxis is relevant for current purposes. Additionally, Arnason’s approach to praxis gives the phenomenological problematic of the world its due that is often overlooked in contemporary accounts of (political and/or collective) action that then can tend toward subjectivism. As mentioned, the notion of praxis has been an enduring thematic in Arnason’s thought, even if it has been subordinated to the problematic and analysis of history. His most systematic use of praxis was in his first thesis on the ontological foundations of Marx’s humanism, written in Prague in the mid-1960s. Karel Kosík had just published Dialectics of the Concrete (1976 [1973]) which was a key source for Arnason – both at that time and over time. In the 1960s, Arnason understood praxis “very much along the lines of Kosík´s concept, but with the added twist that I placed a stronger emphasis on history”.20 It remained of importance into the 1980s, but in his most systematic articulation of his ‘roads beyond Marx’ and concomitant hermeneutic turn, in Praxis und Interpretation (1988), despite its prominence in the title, praxis is not to be understood as one of two key problematics but rather as a point of departure to consider other questions, such as culture as the imaginary dimension of meaning, and a new understanding of power (inspired by a reading of Norbert Elias). Arnason’s most recent discussion of praxis is found in the final section of the essay, entitled “Praxis and Action: Mainstream Theories and Marxian Correctives” (1991). Part of his overall objective was to develop the contextuality of action further, which distances it from the intentions and aims of

28  Suzi Adams actors. Stripping away the Marxian reductionism, Arnason still finds it useful to understand praxis as productive and transformative in the broadest sense, ranging from the creation of a distinctively human world to revolutionary changes in the forms of social life; in both cases, goal-directed activity is a crucial part of the processes in question, but not co-extensive with the whole. (1991: 77) Its reconstruction comprises part of an overall approach to the creativity of action that goes beyond rationalist, normative, and teleological approaches as an antidote to the ‘action frame of reference’. His reconstruction of the praxis problematic in that essay focuses on Kosík’s Dialectics of the Concrete (1976; Arnason 1991). He highlights four themes. First, praxis is understood as a creative activity especially because of the ontological novelty of the forms that human action brings into being. Second, humans are not only anthropological but also cosmological beings: “the cosmological dimension of the human condition, i.e., openness to the world, [is] distinctively human but subject to historical variations in form and content” (1991: 77). Third, Kosík conceptualizes the social dimension of praxis via Hegel and the struggle for recognition, suggesting, for Arnason, a “close link between conflict and communication” (1991: 77). The latter has found perhaps the least resonance in Arnason’s own work, although he has observed, in reference to Honneth, that civilizations should be understood as forms of recognition (Adams and Arnason 2016). Peter Wagner casts recognition as a precursor to autonomy – this aspect could be fruitfully developed further. Lastly, Arnason observes that the counterbalance to openness and creativity is that “it is conditioned by structures and in this context, its own creations can become part of an imposed framework” (1991: 78). Whilst the first two aspects arguably inform his approach, the latter holds more significance (1991: 78) and underscores his own distinctive contribution to his elaboration of the interconnected problematics of culture and power to which he returns in the political philosophy interview (2022b). These trans-subjective contexts are embedded in and as social-historical worlds; contexts are interpretative, and interpretations are various and conflictual.21 This takes the notion of action beyond intentions into what Arnason has called the ‘transintentional’, i.e. the notion that action can – and does – have unintended consequences (1991: 78). The world connection is important here. As we have seen, Kosík was Arnason’s main interlocutor for his phenomenological conception of praxis; however, they cast the respective connection between anthropos and the world differently. For Arnason, humanity is always already open to the world; here he takes both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding that we are always already au monde but also, as a critique of Castoriadis’s notion of the psychic monad closed upon itself and to the world, a more phenomenological reformulation of Gauchet’s argument that there is an “original

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  29 openness” of the psyche towards reality (e.g. Adams and Arnason 2022a: 135). There is also a clear sense in Kosík that we are always open to the world – this is what sets us apart ontologically from the animal and organic world.22 But Kosík goes further. For him, praxis itself is the activity that opens the world; it is an ongoing project. Humanity can comprehend the world “only on the basis of his openness that develops in praxis” (Kosík 1976: 140; cf p. 139). Despite Castoriadis’s articulation of the closure of the psychic monad, his earlier, more phenomenological reflections have a not dissimilar emphasis on the ongoing work of world opening: it is something to be achieved. In his homage to Merleau-Ponty, for example, Castoriadis concludes his reflections thus: “It is opening, then, in the sense of the work of opening, constantly renewed inauguration, performance of the primitive spirit, the spirit of praxis. Or, in other words: the subject is that which opens” (Castoriadis 1984b: 144). Both examples illustrate autonomous forms of instituting doing; that is, transformative, creative, and questioning. There seems to always already be an openness toward the world – that is, an orientation toward the world, in and of the world as part of our human condition as per Arnason (above); but the breaking open of the closure of the social world, in part, at least, results – at this level –from the instituting doing of autonomous collective action (and social movements). This perspective underscores the different layers and levels of openness and closure in-between humanity and the world horizon.

The Being of the Question Thus far, I have begun to elucidate two levels of instituting doing – as world formation and world opening – as part of a reflection on the being of the politics (intertwined with the political). The former highlighted the trans-subjective sphere (of the social-historical and imaginary significations), whilst the latter emphasized collective action (drawing on debates on praxis as a propaedeutic) that are further interwoven with the trans-subjective dimension (not only world formation but also social movements). In the remainder of the essay, I briefly sketch a potential path to deepen the elucidation of instituting doing and la politique by focussing on the “being of the question”. I map the being of questioning at an elementary, trans-subjective level of world formation, as well as at the more reflective level of world opening. To begin, let us remain at the level of instituting doing as the world opening of la politique. In brief, to open the world is to problematize and to question its horizons; this is the instituting doing as discussed above via the notion of praxis. Both Patočka and Castoriadis saw the emergence of the Greek polis as instaurating a close connection between politics and philosophy (as exemplifying world opening doing).23 Castoriadis framed this as the project of autonomy, whereas Patočka preferred to anchor it in a conception of freedom (Arnason 2007; Adams and Arnason 2016).24 Philosophy in this strong sense for Patočka meant the “explicit questioning in confrontation with the original disclosure of the world” (Patočka, cited by Arnason 2011: 222-223).25

30  Suzi Adams This also heralds the emergence of “problematicity”: the movement of history that takes a self-reflexive and self-interrogating turn linked to the rise of the Greek polis, and which Patočka discussed more comprehensively in Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy (1996). Socrates – “the great questioner” – symbolized philosophy in an era of problematicity. It becomes clear that the doing of questioning is central to the instituting doing of world opening as la politique. But there are also more elementary forms of doing; they form trans-subjective preconditions to questioning (as thoughtful doing and collective action). In sketching the contours of this terrain, I remain with Patočka’s thought but move to consider his unfinished reflections on “Negative Platonism” that were formulated in his middle period. One essay from the early 1950s was completed but was originally intended to introduce a much longer work (Patočka 1989; Arnason 2007); much of the rest is fragmentary.26 In brief, negative Platonism involves a “critique and recovery of metaphysics”; it links a distinctive philosophy of freedom with a critique of anthropocentrism that has implications for the phenomenology of the world horizon and comparative history, on the one hand (Arnason 2007, 2011, and, as I shall demonstrate, for the being of questioning, instituting doing, and the being of politics/the political, on the other. As most of the source material is in Czech, I draw on Arnason’s reconstruction of negative Platonism to hermeneutically develop my argument further (Arnason 2007, 2011). Arnason’s approach is particularly distinctive: he connects the project of negative Platonism directly to Patočka’s phenomenology of the world (instead of, for example, reading it through the lens of Heidegger’s ontological difference or Husserl’s epoché); and links it to a civilizational approach to comparative metaphysics – and beyond. Each aspect will be hermeneutically addressed in turn. For Patočka, the most important philosopher of problematicity was Socrates, whom he regards as the culmination of pre-Socratic thought. Socrates’s philosophical pursuit was “a knowledge of non-knowledge; i.e, as a question. Socrates is a great questioner” (Patočka cited in Arnason 2007: 11). For Patočka, Socrates’ emphasis on questioning was understood as a (pre-metaphysical) form of non-objectifying proto-knowledge. But Socrates’ questioning is also embedded in a wider horizon. The proto-knowledge of the question comprises a “comprehending distance from experience as a whole, translating into an ability to problematize all results of the quest for more reliable knowledge” (Arnason 2007: 11; emphases added). The distancing is a form of transcendence (in a broad sense) or what Patočka sometimes terms transcensus. The doing of transcensus – the proto-act of distancing – is a precondition of questioning and critique. It is an elementary “standing back and looking beyond”.27 Transcensus underlines a “basic human capacity” and elementary doing of human life in its trans-subjective domain; it is not an “attribute of human beings” (2007: 18). As Arnason observes “[t]he distance from given reality and the anticipation of other possibilities are inherent in human activity as such” (2007: 12); it is an experience of freedom.

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  31 In this vein, the Socratic mode of questioning appears as a “reflective exercise of freedom: there is no given foundation for a stable or comprehensive meaning of life” (2007: 17). Arnason links the ‘proto-act’ of transcensus (linked to the constitution of experience and the background context to questioning) to the phenomenology of the world: “[t]he opening to horizons beyond the given makes it possible to consider the given itself as an open-ended totality. In other words: the vision of the world as a whole sui generis […] presupposes the experience of freedom” (2007: 15–16).28 Although the world problematic was central to Patočka’s phenomenology, it was more muted in the negative Platonism writings. Arnason, however, sees a “fundamental affinity” between them. He observes that [t]he proto-knowledge – or, in more hermeneutical terms, pre-comprehension—of an open-ended totality of beings, invoked by Patočka as a misunderstood source and potential corrective to metaphysical thought, corresponds to the phenomenological theme of the world as an ‘horizon of horizons’, never given but always involved in the constitution of experience. (2007: 22) Thus, the world horizon appears as the precondition of transcendence, and anticipates transcendental approaches. Patočka’s anchors his notion of freedom – as the “experience that we are” – and its various dimensions in a distinctive philosophy of language as historical as a basic “dissatisfaction with the given and the sensual” (Patočka cited in Arnason 2007: 15); his insight was that the given and the sensual do not exhaust reality. Instead, the experience of freedom is an experience of transcendence. For “the experience of finite things is never, in itself, exhaustive enough to give rise to a totalizing perspective; it is the proto-act of transcending … [transcensus] that adds this dimension” (Arnason 2007: 16).

The Metaphysical Dimension: Questions and Answers If Socrates was the example of philosophical questioning in its pre-metaphysical mode par excellence, then Plato paradoxically also outlined a model for metaphysics when he tried “to extract positive answers from the very questions raised by Socrates. The open ended and incessantly self-correcting totalizing stance becomes a positive knowledge of the fundamental determinants of the world as a totality” (Arnason 2007: 11–12). Patočka’s next step is the recovery of metaphysics but in a negative sense. He identifies the “experience of freedom” as the origin of metaphysics (2007: 16–17). This leads into a reflection on the chorismos as a symbol the trans-subjective dimension of freedom (2007: 17–18). His rethinking of the Platonic idea holds that it is “neither an object nor a concept” (Patočka cited in Arnason 2007: 18) and it becomes in this sense “a symbol of freedom and a manifestation of

32  Suzi Adams chorismos” (Arnason 2007: 18). The Platonic idea now emphasizes “the deobjectifying power, the power of distance from any possible object” (Patočka cited in Arnason 2007: 19). It is now understood as a common source for the “creation of new forms based on but not reducible to given ones” and a “guide to permanent questioning” (2007: 20, 21). The recast Platonic idea becomes both a symbol of freedom, but also an “appeal of transcendence”. This is where the phenomenology of the world returns. As Patočka pursues a negative Platonism, transcendence does not invoke a transcendent reality; and given his critique of subjectivism and anthropocentrism, it will signal more than the human capacity to transcend the empirical world (Arnason 2011: 223ff). Arnason suggests that for Patočka “the experience of freedom … is also an experience of self-transcendence” (2011: 224); transcensus is “the act of transcending, the ability to transcend, the new dimensions opened up through transcending, rather than in the metaphysical style about a superior reality discovered through that act” (Adams and Arnason 2016: 174). For Arnason, the phenomenology of the world – as an overarching, unifying horizon – implicitly includes a hermeneutic aspect (phenomenology is hermeneutical, and vice versa), and, as such, an intrinsic “pluralizing turn”. Accordingly, he holds that the phenomenology of the world is “one-sided without the insight that [the theme of cultural articulations of the world] lends itself to multiple interpretations” (Arnason 2011: 226).29 This applies to the changing historical constellations of cultural articulations of the world – or to use the approach being developed here, of world formation – on the one hand, but also to intercultural interpretations of the world qua world, on the other. The doing of transcensus that moves understanding beyond the given and toward the world also “manifests itself in the fundamental historicity of a being capable of changing itself as well as its environment” not only in relation to the tripartite of human temporality (past, present, future), but, further, their historical variety “translates into different cultural choices and combinations” (Arnason 2011: 225). Patočka’s approach to negative Platonism accentuated a rethinking of the ancient Greek paths to metaphysics. He not only recognized the internal pluralism of its emergence (Democritus, Plato, Aristotle) but also, following Karl Jaspers, held open an explicit space for comparative analysis of metaphysical traditions also emerging in the Axial Age, more broadly (Patočka 1989: 181). Shmuel Eisenstadt’s more recent investigations into the Axial Age shifted the emphasis from an emphasis on philosophy of history to historical sociology. Arnason’s distinctive contribution to the renewed debate on the Axial Age and civilizational analysis has always been attentive to philosophical sources and trajectories, and his approach to Patočka’s negative Platonism is no exception. Taking up the opening to comparative history in negative Platonism, he considers the plurality of civilizational paths to metaphysics and their interplay with civilizational dynamics (Arnason 2011). Arnason focuses on metaphysics as “a civilizational phenomenon and on the new lights that negative Platonism – as a trans-metaphysical rather than post- or

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  33 anti-metaphysical mode of philosophical thought – throws on this theme” (2011: 217). His approach explores not only the “civilizational dimension of metaphysics” but also opens onto the “metaphysical dimension of civilization” (2011: 217). In the space remaining, I would like to briefly contour how the latter – the metaphysical dimension of civilization – might be incorporated into an approach to instituting doing, the being of questioning, and the political. First, Arnason’s distinction between ‘metaphysics’ and ‘the metaphysical’ echoes similar distinctions mentioned in this essay, especially the political and politics, but also philosophy and the philosophical, and history and the historical.30 Politics, philosophy, history, and metaphysics indicate a stronger, more explicit version than the political, the philosophical, the historical, and the metaphysical (they have been generally associated with historical breakthroughs in ancient Greece, although the recent debates on the Axial Age have relativized some of the stronger claims). However, unlike the other terms mentioned here, “metaphysics/the metaphysical” was not considered part of the project of autonomy for Castoriadis. On the contrary, he considered metaphysics – and Platonism, in particular – as the culprit of the inherited onto-logics of “being = being determined”, which his elucidation of the social-historical as radically self-creative was meant to destroy (Castoriadis 1987). As mentioned above, Arnason articulates ‘the political’ as an underlying, more encompassing dimension to politics (Adams and Arnason 2022b). We can expand upon this and consider not only the political but also, in this case, the metaphysical as an underlying and more encompassing transsubjective domain. What do I mean by metaphysical? If Socrates’ questioning was in a pre-metaphysical mode, then Plato’s shift to “extracting positive answers” points to the metaphysical dimension as a trans-subjective domain of social-historical life, and the sense in which the world is a transcendental precondition for new dimensions of the imaginary to appear. Arnason’s elucidation further emphasizes the way in which Patočka’s approach to negative Platonism understands myth, philosophy (as questioning), and metaphysics as entangled (2007; 2011). Cultural articulations of the world – as world formation – underpin these currents. In this vein, Arnason emphasizes Patočka’s suggestion that this is linked to the human imagination and world articulation – as “traces of the idea at work in our experience”– and its role in freedom (Arnason 2011: 225). The ideas have been reimagined as the shared source for the creation of new forms based on but irreducible to those already existing. This returns us to the imaginary dimension of cultural meaning embedded in the elementary doing of world formation. The imaginary dimension of meaning is, of course, central to the “anticipation of other possibilities”, mentioned above (2007: 12). Castoriadis elucidated the transcending move of social imaginary significations (Castoriadis 1987; Adams and Arnason 2022a), but that the world horizon is the “ultimate precondition for the transcending move inherent in imaginary significations” (Adams and Arnason 2022a: 139).

34  Suzi Adams Castoriadis argues that a basic aspect of world articulation as the transsubjective, instituting doing of world formation is to provide answers to fundamental questions: Every society up to now has attempted to give an answer to a few fundamental questions: Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? Where and in what are we? What do we want; what do we desire; what are we lacking? Society must define its ‘identity’, its articulation, the world, its relations to the world and to the objects it contains, its needs and its desires. Without the ‘answer’ to these ‘questions’, without these ‘definitions’, there can be no human world, no society, no culture […]. The role of imaginary significations is to provide an answer to these questions, an answer that, obviously, neither ‘reality’, nor ‘rationality’ can provide […]. Of course, when we speak of ‘questions’, ‘answers’, and ‘definitions’ we are speaking metaphorically. These are not questions and answers that are posed explicitly, and the definitions are not ones given in language. The questions are not even raised prior to the answers. Society constitutes itself by producing a de facto answer to these questions in its life, in its activity. It is in the doing of each collectivity that the answer to these questions appears as an embodied meaning; this social doing allows itself to be understood only as a reply to the questions that it implicitly poses itself.31 (1987: 146–147; emphases in original) He wants to show that at a very elementary level, social imaginary significations are embodied in and as the elementary doing of world articulation as world formation (this ‘doing’ can be both elementary and trans-subjective, as well as appear as a more reflexive level of collective action). Significantly, world articulation as world formation includes ‘questions’, ‘answers’, and ‘definitions’. Unlike his elucidations of social imaginary significations after his ontological turn, the world as an overarching, meta-horizon is clearly in play here, and the metaphysical dimension comes to the fore at an elementary level.32 For Castoriadis, the self-institution of social-historical worlds is not per se autonomous. This is because for him they are instituted in closure, they are heteronomous; that is, they do not generally recognize society itself as the source of its own mores, laws, customs (nomoi) but posit an extra-social source. But if world opening in the strong sense discussed above signals the activity of la politique, then Arnason’s understanding of the human condition as always already open to – and oriented toward – the world mitigates against the strong sense of closure and heteronomy in Castoriadis’s thought at the social-historical level. The social-historical posing of fundamental questions (and the responses) as part of its metaphysical domain is also an experience of freedom: as a self-creation of the social-historical, they are non-foundational; meaning is not given. If some worlds are instituted in greater closure than others, it nonetheless underlines the intercultural, intercivilizational, and comparative historical approach required to understand

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  35 the changing historical constellations of world formation, and which underlines the world qua world as an open-ended totality. Finally, in a concluding hermeneutical arc, negative Platonism – and the metaphysical domain it illuminates – connects to the religio-political nexus (Arnason 2014; Adams and Arnason 2022b), not only readily identifiably instances but also the totalitarian movements and regimes of the twentieth century as “mutant versions of religion” (2022b: 4; cf. Arnason 2007, 2011), which returns us to the terrain of “the political” as an underlying trans-subjective domain interwoven again with politics (as questioning).

Conclusion In this essay, I have reflected on the being of the political and politics. I did so especially in relation to instituting doing, as an elementary trans-subjective doing of world formation, on the one hand, and as collective action/social movement doing as world opening. The doing of questioning was shown to be integral to world opening. Patočka’s broad notion of transcendence is integral to Patočka’s notion of freedom but is also a precondition of questioning and critique (and of instituting doing, more broadly). Arnason’s link between the phenomenological problematic of the world and negative Platonism belongs to a weak transcendental approach to the human condition. The world is sinnfähig: it must be put into meaning. This is the cultural doing of world formation, which crucially and fundamentally involves elementary positing of questions – and their responses – at a basic, trans-subjective level of the metaphysical. As with the political (le politique) and politics (la politique), world formation and world opening are better understood as entwined. That is to say, when collective action and social movements happen, they not only presume and are entangled with the elementary, trans-subjective doing of world formation, they also alter the very relationship between instituting and instituted society. The elementary doing of world formation always includes transsubjective doing but may also include forms of collective action, whilst instituting doing as la politique includes collective action as intentional social doing and social movement that in turn overlaps into the dimension of trans-subjective doing (but at a less elementary level). Whilst analysis of changing cultural (and civilizational) and historical contexts is vital – and I concur with Arnason that action must be understood as contextual (this also includes symbolic as well as imaginary contexts, to follow Castoriadis’s distinction) – in my view, this is not the same as subordinating the question of action to historical contexts (and to the social-historical). The being of doing – especially instituting doing – needs to be considered in light of its own problematic qua mode of being and distinctive connection to the imaginary element, history, and the world. In any event, as we have seen, when we ask after the being of doing, the very landscape changes, “[t]hings are no longer simply juxtaposed: the nearest is the furthest, and the forks in the road, instead of succeeding one another, have become simultaneous, mutually intersecting” (Castoriadis 1984a: ix).

36  Suzi Adams

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Jóhann and the editors – Jeremy, L̓ubomír, and Kurt – for inviting me to contribute to this project. I had some extra challenges to navigate, and they have been generous in supporting me to complete the essay.

Notes 1 All references to (2022b) refer to Adams and Arnason (2022b); I also refer to it as “the political philosophy interview”. 2 Elsewhere I have suggested a trans-subjective (and trans-objective) aspect of social movement both in relation to Arnason, Castoriadis and Patočka’s respective thought (2016, 2019a, 2019b). 3 I provisionally utilize the term ‘collective action/doing’ in contrast to ‘social action’, as I take ‘social action’ to signify a focus on the more micro-contexts. 4 Since his hermeneutical turn – and roads beyond Marx – in the 1980s, Arnason has written intermittently on praxis/action. Soon after the publication of Praxis und Interpretation (1988), Arnason published an essay on sociological theories of action and praxis (1991) and then a review essay of Joas’s important book, The Creativity of Action (1996). Arnason concludes his discussion by noting that Joas could have also incorporated the Durkheimian notion of ‘creative emergence’: action is dissolved into the trans-subjective sphere (implicitly also as history) and is no longer a question in its own right. This was the last time he included a discussion of action in an essay – with the exception of his reflections on action in the three recent conversations that we pursued together (Adams and Arnason 2016, 2022a, 2022b) – until a very recent essay on critical theory (2023*). The critical theory essay was written at the same time as participating in the political philosophy interview (2022b), which is the departure point for the present essay. It is apparent that the interview questions on action inspired a further reflection that appears in the critical theory essay (where he focuses on the individual aspect of action and autonomy). There is some thematic overlap between the political philosophy interview and the critical theory essay (not only on action but also on, for example, the question of normative commitments); they are best read as companion pieces. 5 As Arnason points out (2023*), any theory of action must also include a theory of the self-subject. It must also be able to deal with collective and trans-subjective dimensions. The latter is the focus of the present essay, especially as ‘instituting doing’. 6 Any anthropology of action should not only include conceptions of ‘play’ and ‘art’, as Joas has suggested, but also the notion of Wuwei as a limit concept. Wuwei is understood as a form of “non-doing doing” or “effortless action”. Although its origins are disputed, it is historically important to both Taoist and Confucian currents of thought (for further discussion, see, e.g. Graham 2015). 7 Hereafter referred to as the IIS. 8 Personal email correspondence, 2 March, 2022. (All correspondence cited in this essay is done so with permission.) 9 First published in 1975, The Imaginary Institution of Society is a heterogeneous text comprising two parts. The first, originally published in 1964–65, announces Castoriadis’s farewell to Marx; the second part, written 1970–74, elucidates his turn to ontology. For further discussion, see Adams (2011). 10 Translations from Praxis und Interpretation are my own. 11 Arnason now generally avoids the term ‘structure’ (cf Adams and Arnason 2016).

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  37 12 This working note from Merleau-Ponty was also important for Arnason’s cultural hermeneutic-phenomenology. 13 There is a certain affinity between the Marxian and Weberian formulations that allow for phenomenological elaboration. 14 I thank Jóhann Arnason for explaining the nuances of the original Czech terminology and for his insights into Kosík’s familiarity with Merleau-Ponty’s work (personal email correspondence, 28 February, 2022). 15 Articulations of the world manifest variously as instituting and instituted. 16 Arnason’s emphasis on autonomy as “putting into question” overlaps substantially with a further distinction to be made in Castoriadis’s thought: philosophy (la philosophie) in the strong and explicit sense of “unlimited interrogation” associated with autonomy, and the philosophical (le philosophique) as a more general category. This distinction can also be relativized along similar lines to politics/the political. 17 For Arnason, questions of the common good are significant but occur at the level of comparative historical analysis. 18 Personal email correspondence, 27 April 2022. 19 Personal email correspondence, 5 April 2022. 20 Personal email correspondence, 9 March 2022. 21 Arnason’s turn to culture – and his concomitant shift to hermeneutics – gained momentum in the early 1980s before his reconsideration of power. The two problematics were unevenly developed in Praxis und Interpretation and beyond. This has impacted his roads beyond Marx and the reception of his work. 22 Following Castoriadis, but with a more explicit phenomenological twist, we could argue for a proto-openness to the world as part of the poly-regional ontology of modes of being for-itself, which includes animals and organic nature as living beings, as well as different levels of human modes of being (cf. Adams 2011). 23 For Patočka, there is also a strong and explicit version of historicity; there is a similar notion in Castoriadis’s thought – a distinction between l’histoire and l’historique – but it remains implicit. 24 Arnason has also aptly framed it as “a union of autonomous questioning and self-questioning autonomy”, which brings it closer to Castoriadis (2007: 24). 25 The Patočka quotations have been translated by Arnason directly from the original Czech version of the texts (Sebrané spisy, 1: Péče o duši, I [Collected Works, Vol. 1: Care of the Soul, Part I], Praha: Oikumene, 1996) and they can differ from the same essay that has been translated into English (Patočka 1989). For this reason, I have chosen to retain Arnason’s translations instead of citing the English language version. 26 As negative Platonism remained an unfinished and fragmentary project, significant efforts are necessitated to reconstruct it. Both because of space limitations and unfamiliarity with the Czech language, I cannot do so here. For comprehensive introductions to – and discussions of – Negative Platonism, see Arnason 2007; and the essays collected in Chvatík and Abrams (2011). My discussion will restrict itself to those aspects of negative Platonism that can most illuminate the being of the question. 27 “Standing back and looking beyond” is Benjamin Schwartz’s more cautious reworking of Eisenstadt’s understanding of transcendence connected to the Axial Age. Arnason suggests that Patočka’s notion of transcendence “roughly corresponds” to Schwartz’s notion. (Personal email correspondence, 13 July 2013 and 2nd May, 2022.) 28 Kosík suggests that human reality not given but made in formation/praxis- deepening and intertwining layers. 29 Arnason interprets Patočka’s phenomenology as undergoing a complex hermeneutical turn (Arnason 2007, 2011).

38  Suzi Adams 30 In this sense, philosophy is to be understood as questioning, and metaphysics as systematizing. 31 Although Arnason has not explicitly discussed this passage from the IIS, it clearly informs his approach to civilizations – and to Castoriadis as a civilizational analyst (see, for example, Arnason 2003). 32 With his later, ontological discussion of social imaginary significations in the final chapter of the IIS, the world as a phenomenological problematic has disappeared (see Adams 2011).

References Adams, Suzi (2011) Castoriadis’ Ontology: Being and Creation, New York: Fordham University Press. ——— (2016) “The Significance of the Ancient Greek Polis for Patočka and Castoriadis: Philosophy, Politics, History”, in Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, ed. F. Tava and D. Meacham, London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, pp. 217–236. ——— (2019a) “Clarifying Social Imaginaries: Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor in Discussion”, in Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions, ed. S. Adams and J. Smith, London: Rowman and Littlefield International, pp. 1–44. ——— (2019b) “Beyond a Socio-Centric Approach to Culture: Jóhann Arnason’s Macro-Phenomenology and Critique of Sociological Solipsism”, Thesis Eleven, 151: 96–116. Adams, Suzi and Arnason, Jóhann P. (2016) “Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue”, Social Imaginaries, 2(1): 151–190. ——— (2022a) “A Conversation on Social Imaginaries: Culture, Power, Action, World”, International Journal of Social Imaginaries, 1(1): 129–147. ——— (2022b) “A Further Conversation on Social Imaginaries: Political Philosophy, Normative Commitments, and the Creativity of Social Action”, International Journal of Social Imaginaries, 1(2): 328–353. Arnason, Jóhann P. (1966) Člověk a dějiny: Ontologické základy marxistického humanismu [Man and History: An Inquiry into the Ontological Foundations of Marxist Humanism], Prague: Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University. ——— (1971) Von Marcuse zu Marx, Neuwied und Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag. ——— (1988) Praxis und Interpretation: Sozialphilosophische Studien, Frankfurt/M: Surhkamp. ——— (1991) “Praxis and Action: Mainstream Theories and Marxian Correctives”, Thesis Eleven, 29: 63–81. ——— (1996) “Invention and Emergence: Reflections on Hans Joas’ Theory of Creative Action”, Thesis Eleven, 47: 101–113. ——— (2003) Civilizations in Dispute, Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill. ——— (2007) “The Idea of Negative Platonism: Jan Patočka’s Critique and Recovery of Metaphysics”, in Post-Phenomenology, ed. S. Adams, special issue of Thesis Eleven, No. 90, pp. 6–27. ——— (2011) “Negative Platonism: Between the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History”, in Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology: Centenary Papers, ed. I. Chvatík and E. Abrams, Dordrecht, London, New York: Springer, pp. 215–227.

The Being of the Political and Instituting Doing in Question  39 ——— (2014) “The Religio-Political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections”, in Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives, ed. J.P. Arnason and I.P. Karolewski, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 8–36. ——— (2023*) “Lessons from Castoriadis: Downsizing Critical Theory and Defusing the Concept of Society”, European Journal of Social Theory. https://doi. org/10.1177/13684310221117353 Calhoun, Craig, Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, and Taylor, Charles (2022) Degenerations of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1984a) “Preface”, in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——— (1984b) “The Sayable and the Unsayable: Homage to Merleau-Ponty”, in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——— (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: Polity. ——— (1991) “Power, Politics, Autonomy”, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graham, A.C. (2015) Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, Chicago, IL: Open Court. Kosík, Karel (1976 [1973]) Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World, ed. Robert S. Cohen, trans. Karel Kovanda with James Schmidt, Dordrecht, Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mota, Aurea and Wagner, Peter (2021) Collective Action and Political Transformations: The Entangled Experiences in Brazil, South Africa and Europe, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Patočka, Jan (1989) “Negative Platonism: Reflections Concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics – And Whether Philosophy Can Survive It”, in Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. And trans. E. Kohák, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 175–206. ——— (1996) Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. J. Dodd, trans. E. Kohák, Chicago, IL: Open Court.

4 Long-term Developmental Processes as an Unintended Consequence of Human Action Some Theoretical and Methodological Questions of Historical Sociology Jiří Šubrt This chapter deals with the issue of historical sociology. First, it is worth recalling that in the Czech Republic, in Prague, historical sociology is a study programme that was founded in cooperation with Jóhann P. Árnason in 2009 at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University. When designing this programme, it began from the concept of historical sociology as a specific sociological perspective, primarily oriented towards the observation of long-term developmental processes (Šubrt 2017; Šubrt, Kumsa and Ruzzeddu 2020). For Jóhann Árnason, at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, when we began to create the study program of historical sociology, the concepts of culture and civilization were among the key objects of interest. These were concepts associated with a particular tradition of thought in which classical sociological approaches played an important role for him, especially that of Max Weber, but also Émile Durkheim, and in this he later associated himself, not least as a close collaborator of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt (see Eisenstadt, Árnason and Wittrock 2005). At that time, Jóhann enriched the historical sociological perspective by analysis of the development of two concepts – culture and civilization – which figured in both singular and plural forms (Šubrt and Árnason 2010). It should be added that what led to our mutual acquaintance was a common interest in the work of Norbert Elias and our participation in the Norbert Elias Centenary Conference in 1997 in Amsterdam. It was in Elias (Elias 1994 [1939]) that we found certain approaches that guided us in our conception of historical sociology. A characteristic feature of Elias’s sociological thinking is a figurational approach and processuality (Árnason 1987). His research interest is focused on processes of continuous, long-term change. What is especially important to Elias is that these processes take place unintentionally and are unplanned. These are processes that nobody wanted or intended but which still exist and significantly affect our lives. Another feature of these processes is their persistence, that is, the stability of the direction that some processes have taken for many centuries. However, the fact that a particular process follows a certain direction, according to Elias (1977) does not mean that it must do so in the future. Therefore, we should talk not about the necessity of any development, but about possibilities and probabilities. Shifts of different kinds and intensity occur simultaneously, during which time changes in one direction can DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-5

Long-term Developmental Processes  41 create space for changes in the opposite direction (for example, the prevailing process of integration may be accompanied by partial disintegration, or, on the contrary, the dominant process of disintegration may lead to the new type of reintegration). Despite the fact that de-civilizing processes have manifested themselves many times in the history of mankind, according to Elias, the tendency carried by the civilization process has prevailed. However, there is no reason and no guarantee that this must be the case in the future. In opposition to historical sociology we may put a different type of sociological thought, which is today often promoted as a kind of mainstream. It is often referred to as “social constructivism” (Berger and Luckmann 1966), and is linked to the use of qualitative methodology. Many members of the sociological community who today favour this second conception of sociology exclusively share certain ideas (often as concealed assumptions), which should, at this point, be very briefly examined. One such widespread idea is the notion of individuals as bearers of individual plans, intentions, and goals (as if original) in their heads, which then – as they come into contact with other individuals – begin to gain ground and are put into practice. Another assumption is that social reality begins to form – as if from nowhere – when two individuals coincidentally come together, start a conversation, from which it seems, by the way, something is created that is higher than its sub-elements, which we call the social order. The third popular idea – which is compatible with the previous two – is that all, even the most complex social units, can be viewed and explained as if assembled and bound from individual microsituations, and these microsituations are usually seen as conversations. In the course of their operation, they take place in mutual negotiation, within which the construction of social reality takes place. Accordingly, speaking is considered the main human activity, and conversation is referred to as the main tool for maintaining social reality (Berger and Luckmann (1989 [1966]: 152 ff.). One of the problems of the perspective that we have just described as an alternative to the historical sociology is that it is anchored in the micro-level of social reality; thus, it lacks adequate theoretical and methodological tools to capture and explore topics and phenomena at the macro-social level of reality. We can show these topics and phenomena by going through a simple list of concepts most often encountered in historical sociology. These include: civilization, culture, religion, city, region, empire, state, world system, politics, production, social stratification, law, army, science, and globalization. These terms express holistic content for which in system-oriented sociology the notion of social systems serves us (see for example Wallerstein’s [1974], 1980, 1989, 2011) “world capitalist system”). It should be added at this point that sociology is very fond of forgetting that extra-individual social reality also includes various phenomena of a material nature, and associated technologies and procedures. These are sources of material and energy important for human reproduction, production tools; means of movement, destruction, and protection; instruments used to expand human thought capacities, memory, and communication; things preserving value and wealth; objects of a

42 Jiří Šubrt symbolic and aesthetic nature, but also waste products of human activities that can pose a threat to human life. Furthermore, Anthony Giddens points out that sociology mostly creates theoretical models that give the impression that societies are in a stable state, and ignores the reality that the character of contemporary societies is substantially the result of conflicts that societies have undergone in the last century (1985: 236–254). In contrast with sociology, which has a tendency to reduce all human action to communicative action, which means speech acts, we can argue that, from the point of view of historical sociology, we can distinguish at least eight distinct areas of action (Šubrt 2019), which include: (a) biological reproduction; (b) social reproduction; (c) work and exchange; (d) the exercise of power and management; (e) intellectual activity; (f) legal action; (g) efforts to surpass ourselves; and (h) games. In practically every area we can identify social processes that take place at the micro-, meso-, and macro-social levels. However, not all these areas are equally important and significant for individual social sciences. From the point of view of historical sociology oriented towards macro-social phenomena and long-term developmental dynamics, the three areas that Ernest Gellner (1988) denotes with the expressions Plough, Sword and Book, and which represent the work, struggle, and production of knowledge, are essential. Undoubtedly, we can agree with Gellner that these three types of activities are the basic structure-forming forces of human history. In the beginning, the life of human groups was much more closely and directly linked to natural conditions and determinants than it is today. The specific natural environment inhabited by people represented the first macroreality, significantly affecting people’s lives in the first archaic forms of human coexistence (bands, tribes). Interactions between people and the environment took in certain stable forms in the life of these groups, acquiring the character of supra-individual systemic processes which cannot be satisfactorily explained within the principles of methodological individualism. Human groups had to adapt to the conditions of a given environment, and, by settling in it, determined the way of life not only of themselves but also of generations of descendants. But they could also decide to leave for various reasons and try to live elsewhere. The environment significantly affected ways of life, living, and dressing, as well as other areas of material and spiritual culture. It offered a number of opportunities that people became acquainted with and learned to use, but also a number of dangers that they had to learn to face. One such danger was the attempt to control this environment by another human group. It was an environment in which people built up certain reserves of knowledge, which, in their development and passing on to future generations, served as a living textbook. Part of this cognition was the formation of certain mythical and religious ideas. The first processes of a systemic nature from the perspective of the social sciences, therefore, were processes associated with the interaction between human groups and the environment inhabited by them. These interactions gradually changed over the course of historical development, leading to increasing alteration in the original

Long-term Developmental Processes  43 environment as a result of human intervention, making life easier but also creating certain threats and risks for further survival. Work and production are topics usually associated with materialist doctrine, elaborated especially in Marxist discourse. Social sciences often tend to either completely ignore this issue or reduce its complexity using very general concepts (such as the society of hunters and gatherers, agrarian society, industrial society, post-industrial society, etc.). The relationship between changes in the technological and social field has relevance not only in the area of production, but also in the military and science, and also concerns ways of interpersonal communication. The beginnings of technological development are connected not only with the use of the first tools, but also with archaic forms of division of labor and mutual cooperation (the origins of which can undoubtedly be found in the animal world). Cooperation brings effects that go beyond the capabilities of individual actors. It is important in providing livelihoods (e.g. when hunting), but also in certain crisis situations caused by a natural disaster or attack by another human group. Cooperation can be voluntary in nature, but often individuals must be forced into it by authorities wielding the means of power. In addition to the technological aspect of manufacture, there is its social importance and, it can be said, the key issue of the production, distribution, and exchange of value ​​of manufactures. This is a problem on which an entire independent scientific discipline, economics, is focused, and which penetrates into sociological thinking mainly due to Marxist influence. In the economic area of society, a number of processes that are systemic in nature (in the sense of being sovereign) can be identified and examined. These are processes of a holistic nature, which take place on a macrosocial level and have a latent form (famously, according to Marx, these processes lead, for example, to the class division of society). Various types of power relations are encountered not only in politics and warfare, but also in other areas of society: in economics, production, religion, science, art, and even in ordinary interpersonal relationships. Conflicting relations lead to the formation of defensive and offensive coalitions, but often even to the creation of enemies (an enemy can only be formed by a certain group joining another group) and the repelling imagery that accompanies mutual animosity. War conflicts can vary in scope, in terms of both space and time. They are usually characterized by having an identifiable beginning, associated with a certain cause – and there is often a difference between declared (manifest) and actual (latent) cause – and a hard-to-predict outcome. The declaration of war usually pursues a goal and, in this sense, may resemble purposeful action. However, there is one fundamental difference: in individual purposeful rational action, the intention to be achieved serves the orientation of action during it. In war, it is much more complicated, because at the moment in which two parties enter a conflict (and more and more can enter), a large number of entities at different levels of social reality interact and gain movement that arises in an unclear form of process. We would seek an explanatory model for this process in vain in sociology; especially in the case of great wars, whose course resembles what is called

44 Jiří Šubrt deterministic chaos; it does not represent the complete absence of order, but an order with infinite and confusing complexity. Although in contemporary sociological literature the opinion can be found that all macro-social phenomena can be in principle explained as large entities composed of micro-social phenomena, this idea seems problematic because, with respect to the holistic perspective, social entities cannot be explained by the nature of micro-social units themselves (meaning human individuals, their actions and interactions). Phenomena at the macro-social level arise: (a) as a result of actions by human collectives (human groups or masses); (b) under the influence of certain individuals whose actions have a broad impact and can affect social reality on a large scale, such as religious leaders, prominent politicians, military leaders, industrial and business magnates, top artists, etc. and; (c) as a reaction of a systemic nature to movements and changes at this level (Šubrt 2020: 112–117). In specific cases, these three causes are interrelated. In pursuit of the question of where the specificity of phenomena on macro-social level lies, we have to focus primarily on case (c), in which these phenomena manifest themselves in response to the systemic nature of the movements and changes at this level. It is necessary to add that we should focus attention on one characteristic feature: latency – the latent nature of the processes taking place. We can say that these systemic phenomena occur on the basis of a specific accumulation of the effects of human action on the manifest plane, but especially on the latent plane. People may deliberately try to achieve certain cumulative effects in individual areas of action, pursuing some common goal or project (e.g. strike, charity collection, etc.), but we are particularly interested in cases which have a latent, unintentional nature. Therefore, we ask ourselves, what are the causes of the formation, origination, and functioning of system processes occurring in a latent way on the macro level of social reality? And we can preliminarily answer that they are caused by a specific cumulation of acts of human action and interactions. In latent phenomena, we often discover a certain internal logic, not intentionally implemented by anyone. This logic makes itself known through certain ordering principles and rules. The basic symptom which leads us to track latent expression is an unplanned and unwanted decrease or increase of any phenomenon or value. This value may relate to: (a) a natural phenomenon caused by natural forces (e.g. loss of water resources); (b) a natural phenomenon caused by previous human activity, either our own or of another human group (e.g. soil erosion); (c) a phenomenon of asocial or cultural nature caused by the previous activity of our own human group (e.g. an increase in the crime rate); or (d) a phenomenon of social or cultural nature through the activity of another human group (e.g. an increase in hostile attitudes (Šubrt 2020: 113)). If these phenomena appear as a new event, we speak of their emergence. The processes that seem to be started by such an emergency event can differ both in terms of the space in which they take place, as well as their duration (short-term, long-term) and speed. The course of changes over time can

Long-term Developmental Processes  45 have a linear or non-linear form, which can be recognized and expressed as a trend. Verbally, these trends can be characterized as an increase or decrease, strengthening or weakening, widening or narrowing, profit or loss. Periodic cyclicity may be a specific phenomenon. Different processes can be variously fast or slow, speed up or slow down, run into various obstacles, and also stop completely. Each such trend needs a certain energy and resources for its duration, which, in the case of systemic mechanisms of a social nature, are supplied by different types of human activities (work, struggle, production of knowledge). In some cases, the accumulation of these elements or quantities may take the form of a simple loading of individual effects of human action or interactions (in the processes taking place in the economic system, on the market, such loading is facilitated by converting everything to a common denominator, money). In other cases, these sub-effects must be subject to some assessment (a selection), whose task is to decide to what extent the new elements are compatible with the existing whole (e.g., as regards the scientific system) and whether it is possible that the elements will work in the same way as before, or whether they will require certain – smaller or larger, minor or radical – adjustments. Many processes take place spontaneously in society, but many require control and regulation by human actors such as leaders or experts. An increase or decrease in one or more quantities in a certain area may cause a change in the existing proportions, or disproportion between quantities that previously existed in some mutually stabilized relationship and have now been disrupted, which may stimulate further development (even in a new, unexpected direction); for example, another element begins to strengthen, and with it the nature of the whole system changes (as a result of the weakening of one economic sector, there may be an increase in another sector, and thus a structural change within the entire economic system). These changes in proportion can be associated not only with crisis phenomena, but also with effects of a substitutive nature (the exchange of something for something), or the implementation of new knowledge, technologies, and inventions. People are often faced with the impossibility of implementing the old ways of acting, so they are forced to look for certain new options (e.g., going to another territory), which can lead to a change in their quality of life (e.g., changing diets can lead to certain medical consequences — positive, and also negative). Therefore, in addition to changes of a quantitative nature, it is necessary to take into account qualitative changes. In sociology, these are often characterized by certain general expressions, whose task is to describe their specific content (modernization, pacification, democratization, secularization, liberalization, scientization, miltarization), but also the evaluation of their direction (progress, stagnation, retardation, regress). In some cases (as Hegel or Marx once said), an increase in quantity can lead to a qualitative change (for example, an increase in the number of believers can lead to the conversion of a persecuted sect into a respected church). However, human invention and ingenuity play a fundamental role in the emergence of qualitative changes in the modern age, especially with the development of science.

46 Jiří Šubrt All these types of phenomena can cause other subsequent phenomena and processes, which can again have manifest, but also latent levels (depletion of water resources can affect not only migration processes, but also changes in the organization and structure of society). In practice, we also find that many phenomena are much more complicated because a certain quantity can be affected by more forces at the same time (interactions caused by migration processes can have geographical, demographic, military, economic and cultural dimensions), but also because there can be various ways of their mutual chaining (e.g. the so-called domino effect or ripple effect) or interconnectedness. If two or more processes in their development condition each other, we can speak of interdependence (Elias, for example, considered the interdependent process of psychogenesis and sociogenesis). If the parallel processes support and strengthen each other, we can talk about synergy. Thus, social units usually do not hold together only due to one type of connection, communication, or exchange, but due to the multiple interconnections of their individual elements. However, even this may not always prevent such units from disintegration – for example, due to certain serious disproportions caused by a change in one key factor – or collapse. Examples of macro-structural phenomena that require a specific explanation are social rhythms and cycles. Even though their clarification is now also called for in sociology, these cyclical phenomena have so far been examined most thoroughly in economics (Schumpeter 1939). However, the effects of these phenomena often have a significant impact on the problems addressed by sociology, too. Let us mention now – for illustration – the cycles recognized in contemporary economics. They include: • Short-term cycles (so-called Kitchin cycles), which occur at time intervals of about three years. • Medium-term cycles (so-called Juglar cycles), which last for 7 to 11 years. • Long-term cycles (so-called Kondratiev waves), which last for 40 to 60 years. In contemporary literature we find some attempts to turn attention to time cycles in sociology too. One example is Andrew Abbott’s (2001) Time Matters. Where sociology in this respect usually differs from economics, is that sociologists, in exploring this rhythmicity, tend to be subject to some sort of illusion that this rhythmicity takes the nature of so-called social time – i.e. they tend to be subject to some sort of temporal mysticism, and at the same time ignore, or inadequately examine, the question of what factors in real social processes may represent the reasons for this rhythmic movement. In other words, in sociology – more often than in economics – we encounter a tendency to attribute to time those properties that are characteristics of the movement that takes place in time. In conclusion, it can be stated that although the history of sociology begins as early as the nineteenth century, and so it might seem that everything essential must have been said during its almost 200-year history, it now appears

Long-term Developmental Processes  47 that there are still many ‘white spaces’ on the map of the discipline. These include the analysis of long-term historical processes, which are latent and holistic in nature, and therefore cannot be reduced to approaches based on the analysis of simple actions of human individuals. In an effort to bring more understanding to these problems, historical sociology has an important place today, and it is a discipline whose development was led, among others, by Jóhann P. Árnason.

References Abbott, A. 2001. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Árnason, J. 1987. “Figurational Sociology as a Counter-Paradigm.” Theory, Culture and Society, 4(2–3): 429–456. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. 1989 [1966]. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books. Eisenstadt, S. N., Árnason, J. P., & Wittrock, B. (eds.) 2005. Axial Civilizations and World History. Leiden: Brill. Elias, N. 1977. “Zur Grundlegung einer Theorie sozialer Prozesse.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 6(2): 127–149. Elias, N. 1994 [1939]. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, E. 1988. Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History. London: Collins Harvill. Giddens, A. 1985. The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Schumpeter, J. A. 1939. Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. Vol. I–II. New York – London: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Šubrt, J. 2017. The Perspective of Historical Sociology: The Individual as Homo Sociologicus through Society and History. Bingley: Emerald. Šubrt, J. 2019. Individualism, Holism and the Central Dilemma of Sociological Theory. Bingley: Emerald. Šubrt, J. 2020. The Systemic Approach in Sociology and Niklas Luhmann: Expectations, Discussions, Doubts. Bingley: Emerald. Šubrt, J., & Árnason, J. P. (eds.) 2010. Kultury, civilizace, světový systém (Cultures, Civilizations, World System). Praha: Karolinum. Šubrt, J., Kumsa, A., & Ruzzeddu, M. 2020. Explaining Social Processes: Perspectives from Current Social Theory and Historical Sociology. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Wallerstein, I. (1974, 1980, 1989). The Modern World-system. Vol. I–III. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I. (2011). The Modern World-systém. Vol. IV. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

5 World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities A Pluralistic View of Global Sociological Theory* Saïd Amir Arjomand When I took over the editorship of International Sociology at the turn of the new millennium, I made a statement of the editorial policy to the effect that comparative sociology becomes imperative for the proper integration of fact and theory in a global context. In anticipation of the dilapidation of our center–periphery model in a pluralistic international sociological community with multiple, mutually oriented centers, let me propose a motto for the opening decade of the new century: “Know locally and in historical depth, speak currently and globally”! (Arjomand 2000: 6, 9) Over two decades have since gone by, but I don’t see any reason to change this. I would now just add as a point of clarification that the interplay of the universal and the particular in the global context, which is usually termed ‘glocal’, can be and often is civilizational. Let me explain. In freeing itself from the classical conception of Western modernity as the universal goal of undifferentiated traditional societies, an important branch of comparative and historical sociology has turned to the analysis of the dynamics of non-Western civilizations in order to study alternative patterns of cultural crystallization and transformative breakthroughs. This was what I had in mind when I organized a panel to discuss the idea of ‘axial civilization’ as the basic analytical tool for this alternative approach to comparative history and sociology at the World Congress of Sociology 2010 in Götenburg, Sweden. The key idea behind this alternative approach was to decenter the conception of modernity in two ways: by historicizing developmental patterns or paths in different civilizations, and by introducing variety into the concept of modernity and taking their diversity in unity to mean they belonged to a type or were members of the same “modernity” family, with a varying degree of family resemblance. Summarizing this variety as shown in various contributions to the symposium published in the ensuing volume *  Keynote lecture presented to the network on “Globalizing Sociological Theory: Qualitative Research and Theory Building from the South,” organized by Marian Burchardt, University of Leipzig and Johannes Becker, University of Göttingen, on 4/9/2021.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-6

World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities  49 (Arjomand 2014), I labelled this diverse modernity as “modernity lite.” Variegated modernity lite included multiple, colonial, connected, entangled, alternative (competitive), and subaltern (contestatory) modernities, and it was in turn contrasted to “modernity-heavy” in two forms, one the “Habermas-Enlightenment project of modernity,” the second deriving from Wolf Schäfer’s (2014) universal “techno-scientific civilization” The deeper, more fundamental question for us in comparative sociology was this: How can differences be understood through comparisons, and how should social theory relate to regional studies in order to do so? Understanding diversity is a far greater challenge for the social sciences than making generalizations in imitation of natural sciences, and it is the main challenge in global studies. I think some recent interdisciplinary studies in humanities which focus on diversity rather than commonalities and the allegedly universal are therefore crucially relevant to your venture in the social sciences as well. To the extent that the periphery was not ignored in metropolitan theory (Connell (2007), its experience was fitted into the straightjacket of allegedly universal processes such as modernization and development. These generalized what was taken as the dominant Western pattern into a universal teleology. We should, however, not make the opposite mistake of taking the patterns you find in the global South and make them it into a universal teleology to provincialized the West. If the comparative dimension of comparative sociology is taken seriously in this project of mutual provincialization, the clear implication is to rethink concepts in broader comparative perspective rather than reject and dismiss them as analytically worthless. I would join those French who say “Vive la différence!” but with the stress on the intelligibility of differences. Or at any rate did so when editing Worlds of Difference with Elisa Reis (2013), following one of the themes of the same 2010 WCS for which we both had served on the ISA Programs’ Committee. Let me put my cards on the table so that my theoretical stand is clear. What I call civilizational analysis covers multiple modernities and their background in the axial civilizations. Both of these components of civilizational analysis point to diversity in social dynamics. When axial civilizations modernize, to paraphrase Milton Singer (1972), both the reactive impulse to preserve their axial tradition and the innovative impulse to reform it are at work. To understand this process, we need to think not so much of instrumental and formal rationality, which would incidentally lead to the old German distinction between civilization (as techno-scientific and general) and culture (as particular) (Schäfer 2014), but rather of value-rationalization. I have argued that value-rationalization is a process of harmonization of heterogeneous principles of order – foreign (“Northern”) as well as indigenous (“Southern”)1 – that is driven by the judgment of meaningful consistency (by this I mean to link Kant’s concept of judgment with Weber’s Sinnzusammenhang). The challenge, I think, is to specify the complex combination of logic, poetic judgment – Kantian/Aristotelian poetic judgment – and historical contingency in this architechtonic process of construction of meaning. The one thing that is clear is that we have to discard Elias’s (1978) notion of the civilizing process

50  Saïd Amir Arjomand and to replace it by culturally specific developmental patterns in different civilizations. The meaningful or symbolic consistency at issue evolves gradually, and often imperceptibly, among cultural clusters and is produced by elective affinities, giving rise to civilizational rationalities; it is the consistency that we recognize as “civilizational style” (Arjomand 2004). By civilizational styles I mean to capture the variation we find in the “composite civilization of modernity,” if I am allowed to push the late S.N. Eisenstadt’s (2003) undercelebrated concept. In this way, I think we can avoid the “grand erasure” of the historical experience of the periphery by the globalization theory emanating from the global North that Raewyn Connell rightly finds unacceptable. I think various periphery-generated contributions to the role of religion and tradition in the evolution of different patterns of alternative modernities can be understood under this general rubric. I’ll come back to this. I have claimed a convergence in what I called the third generation of comparative sociologists, with reference to the historical experiences of India and South America (2014), between two groups with compatible theoretical orientations: those who study axial civilizations and multiple modernities, and a broader group who have mounted a new wave of challenges to metropolitan theory from the periphery. This latter group’s primary concern is with forming concepts on the basis of distinctive historical experiences of different world regions. This brings me to the key term in my title: the idea of a “world region” that I propose to use to unpack multiple modernities. In the above-mentioned projects of decentering modernity by the introduction of variety within it, historicizing developmental paths in different civilizations was highlighted as a major source of variety. Here I wish to introduce variations among the world regions as another important source of variety. The two sources of variety are closely related as world regions are civilizational zones and the loci of intra-civilizational dynamics as well as, and especially of, inter-civilizational encounters. A world region is a world of shared culture, a Kulturwelt, the term Max Weber chose over “civilization.” The analysis of world regions as civilizational zones was pioneered by Peter Katzenstein (2010). He demonstrates that the coherence of a world region as civilizational zone rests primarily upon cultural factors and only secondarily upon geopolitical factors, as Huntington obsessively argued (1996). The civilizational forms in different world regions need not be derived from religion (Smith 2010: 122). Long before Weber linked civilizations to world religions – that is, by the end of the eighteenth century – the growth of Orientalism had been responsible for a shift from unitary to pluralist conceptions of civilizations. The Sanskritbased civilization of the “Hindus” and the Persian-based civilization, which was extended to pre-Islamic Iran with nineteenth-century archaeological discoveries, challenged the idea that Europe was the world civilization. For the emerging discipline of Orientalism, language rather than religion became the basic and decisive marker (Rudolph 2010: 144). Language is, if anything, the most obvious basis for the formation of civilizational zone, a kulturwelt or cultural world.

World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities  51 As a tribute to Jóhann Árnason, who explained the significance of the concept of Kulturwelt (which he properly rendered as “cultural world”) in Max Weber’s comparative history of civilizations (Árnason 2003: 86–105), I would like to consider one of the most important historical cultural worlds. This is clearly the case with the civilizational zone I have devoted myself to studying. My own study of the formation of what I call Persianate Islam and its spread throughout the Persianate world (Arjomand 2017) brought out the critical significance of the Persian language, in interaction with Arabic, for the expression of Islam and the development of a Persianate variant of the Islamicate civilization. It also highlighted the autonomy of a civilizational zone as a unit of analysis by noting how Islam’s axial dynamics led to the dominance of a world religion in that zone. Following Marshall Hodgson’s (1974) lead in identifying the Persianate phase of the Islamicate civilization, I founded the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies in 1996 and have edited its organ, the Journal of Persianate Studies, since 2008. This journal is devoted to the study of further intra- and inter-civilizational dynamics in the Persianate world in an entirely empirical and often historical fashion without any paradigmatic presuppositions. The Persianate cosmopolis or world region requires explanation as it provides the framework for our subsequent analysis. The New Persian was first written in the Arabic script by the end of the ninth century. It was quickly transformed into the lingua franca of several monarchies and empires and became the complementary lingua franca of Islam during its expansion in the eastern Muslim land. It thus created a vast civilizational area which I will call the Persianate world. The developmental path for the growth, consolidation, and expansion of this Persianate world was set by the rise of local monarchies in the Iranian zone of the caliphal body politic, most notably the Samanids (892–999), who switched their official language from Arabic to Persian and at the same time created the first Persianate polity, to be replicated in Eastern Iran and Northern India by the Ghaznavids in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and in the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century. The culture of the Persianate zone of the Islamicate civilization was made distinctive by these two major components that in turn make their study distinctive: Persianate Islam and Persian kingship (Arjomand 2022: ch. 2). Already in the late tenth century, the Persianate civilizational zone was called Irān-shahr (the land of Iran). According to Abu Mansur Tusi, who wrote the earliest-known Epic of Kings in New Persian, Iranshahr “extends from the Oxus River to the Nile.” Abu Rayhān Biruni (d. 1050), went beyond geographical determinism and adds culture to delimit the Persianate world. Arnold Toynbee, using civilization instead of culture, defines the distinctiveness of the society and civilization in a world region from the Sea of Marmara to the Gulf of Bengal into the mid-sixteenth century, and had called it “Iranic.” Last but not least, Marshall Hodgson called the cultural tradition and ecumenical unity that grew on the basis of the Persian language, “Persianate,” and further contrasted the continued vitality of the ‘Persianate zone’ with the early flourishing of the ‘Arabic zone’ of the Islamicate civilization,

52  Saïd Amir Arjomand going so far as to divide the Arabic zone itself historically “into an earlier ‘caliphal’ and later ‘Persianate’ phase” (Hodgson 1974: 2, 293–294; Arjomand 2022: ch. 2). World regions, world cultures, and civilizational encounters are in fact intimately connected themes. Civilizational zones, or regions, constitute the historical geography – or geopolitical and geocultural setting—of civilizations, and it is incorrect to reduce them to a single world religion. Arguably, nowhere is the confluence of world religions in a civilizational zone more important than in India. This point is of great importance for the two world religions in particular – namely, Buddhism and Hinduism. In his book on these world religions, published in English as The Religion of India, Weber offers important, albeit somewhat incidental, remarks on their joint civilizational impact as “Asian religions” (Weber 1958: ch. 10). He mainly focused on the multiple reasons for the absence of an indigenous development toward modern capitalism in India. In this regard, he emphasized the causal significance of the caste system. Louis Dumont’s classic Durkheimian civilizational analysis Homo Hierarchicus (1966) likewise focused on castes. However, neither Weber nor Dumont identified an axial civilization corresponding to Hinduism as a world religion. To do so, and to speak of the Indian civilization, requires consideration of the Indian subcontinent as a world region and, consequently, an analysis of the contributions of Buddhism and Islam to its historical development as a civilizational zone. The Indologist Sheldon Pollock (1996) does assess the civilizational impact of Hinduism in reference to the emergence of the Sanskrit cosmopolis and its vernacular offshoots within the Weberian parameters, but the systematic civilizational impact of Buddhism in early India (Collins 1998: ch. 5), pioneered by Romila Thapar (1975, 2003: 164–173, 200–204, 270–279, 317–325), and of Persianate Islam for the later periods still remains to be undertaken. Richard Eaton’s (2019) identification of a Persianate cosmopolis, which overlaps the Sanskrit cosmopolis for a millennium, constitutes a firm first step. The conception of the cultural sphere as distinctive of civilizational coherence and unity proposed by Pollock and Eaton follows the above-mentioned Orientalist-inspired assumption that the basis of civilizational coherence defining a world region is language rather than religion. Eaton’s history of India thus sees the subcontinent as the arena of the prolonged and multi-faceted interaction not between Hinduism and Islam but between the older Sanskrit Cosmopolis, which was formed between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries and spun a host of vernacular languages and literatures sponsored by local Indian monarchies, and the Persianate world that emerged with the revival of Persian as a language written in the Arabic alphabet in the tenth century, which immediately generated an enormous literature. The Persianate cosmopolis extended to northern India at the beginning of the eleventh century with the military conquests of the Ghaznavids and, much more extensively, with the Ghurid conquests in its last decade that created the Delhi Sultanate of the thirteen and fourteenth centuries. The soft power of the Persian literature and the Persianate culture spread with these hard military conquests creating a

World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities  53 Persianate cosmopolis whose evolution continued to the end of the nineteenth century. Each cosmopolis was transregional in nature, comprising norms of religion, kingship and administration, architecture and courtly culture (adab), all expressed through grammar the respective language and its styles of composition. The bearers of the eastwardly spreading Persianate culture for the first centuries were Persian immigrants – chancery scribes, poets, and Sufi masters. It goes without saying that they trained next generations of Indian Sufi disciples, scribes and Persian-speaking (pārsi-guy) poets. Surprisingly, however, from the fifteenth century onward, Persianate culture in India also found another class of bearers: the Brahmins in royal administration. The two main components of Persianate Islamicate culture, namely kingship and a political ethic based on justice (Arjomand 2008) on the one hand, and Sufism on the other, grew hand in hand in the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century. The Sultanate had spread from Delhi to Bengal as early as the thirteenth century with Sultan Rukn al-Din Keykāvus (d. 1291–1300). The Persianate character of this Sultanate is evident already in the ancient royal surname, Keykāvus, assumed by its Sultan, and even more in the following century, when the congregational mosque completed in 1375, alongside a royal palace modeled on the Sasanian Kasrā Dome in Mesopotamia, was called the Ā dina mosque (using the Persian word for Friday in preference to the Islamic jumʿa for the day of congregation) (Eaton 2019: 79–80). The Sultanate was next established as the regime in Kashmir. As Eaton shows in striking detail in relation to Kashmir, one of the most noteworthy early bearers of the Persianate culture to Kashmir was the Sufi master Sayyed ʿAli Hamadāni (d. 1384), who came from Iran, reportedly with as many as seven hundred disciples. He was warmly received by Sultan Qotb al-Din (r. 1373– 1389) and gave him his own sacred hat to wear under the crown. Sultan Zain al-ʿĀ bedin (r. 1420–1470), who had commissioned the translation of Sanskrit classics into Persian, also made Persian the official language of the state. The Brahmins, who formed their administrative staff, not only began using it instead of vernacular Indian languages but became fully versed in it, setting the trend for Brahmin administrators of other Indian Muslim rulers (Eaton 2019: 91, 116–119).2 In the fifteenth century, the Persianate cosmopolis extended southward during the Bahman successor empire to the Delhi Sultanate to the Deccan to the South. The multifaceted interaction between the Sanskrit and the Persianate worlds thus produced the distinctive civilization of India as a world region. Eaton, here and elsewhere (Eaton and Wagoner 2014), demonstrates that this interaction could take place without military conquest, as it did in the Vijayanagara empire, whose rulers assumed the title of Sultan and whose architecture (not to mention military organization) bore the unmistakable imprint of the Persianate culture. The interpenetration of the two cultural worlds, however, was mutual. The Deccanese Persianate Sultanates were markedly Sanskritized, first in Bijapur and then in Golkonda (Eaton 2019: 193–194). Sanskritization of the Indo-Persianate polities culminated in the extensive Sanskritization program of Emperor Akbar and his successors in the Mughal Empire in the

54  Saïd Amir Arjomand seventeenth century. Akbar gathered a number of Brahmin and Jain scholars in his court and ordered the Persian translation of 15 Sanskrit classics, including the Mahabharata, which was assimilated to the Persianate political ethic of advice to kings, emphasizing kingly virtues (Eaton 2019: 386–388). Likewise, the formation and global impact of Buddhism, especially of Mahayana Buddhism, involves more than one civilizational zone and therefore requires the study of more than one axial civilization. In other words, it requires an approach that locates religious and civilizational encounters in a world region. Probably the most important of the world regions involved here is the Inner Asian civilizational complex, a region increasingly recognized as important by comparative historians (Árnason 2003: 176). Similar to the Persianate world more generally and the Mediterranean region, Inner Asia as a world region (Kulturwelt) is especially significant for religio-civilizational pluralism and for encounters across three major world religions: Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Islam. Although now extinct, Manichaeism was the first world religion so defined by its founder (Rudolph 1991); for centuries, it competed with Buddhism and Islam in the East and Christianity in the West and its impact was transmitted through these world religions. I take ‘alternative modernities’ to be the equivalent of multiple modernities, and it seems to be that diversity is the distinctive feature of the two kindred conceptions of modernity. Now my central point is that understanding this diversity differentiating among the modernity patterns – or rather the specific mixture of traditions and modernities – we find in different world regions. To explain what I mean of the mixture of traditions and modernities I cannot do better than to quote Ashish Nandy, one of the champions of the Indian alternative modernity, who describes his work as belonging to “the tradition of reinterpretation of tradition to create new traditions” (Nandy 1983: xiii–xiv). Thus, creating new traditions on the basis of indigenous ones is alternative modernity. I can only give examples from the world region I know best, and from Iran within that world region. The dialectic of tradition and modernity became the dominant theme in the public sphere in post-revolution Iran in the 1990s after the subsidence of Islamic ideology of the revolution of 1979. It was driven by the so-called “religious intellectuals” in the 1990s, who elaborated a critical theoretical framework for understanding the dialectic of tradition and modernity under the heavy shadow of the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the Islamic Republic of Iran it had brought into existence. The focus of this critical perspective was not on the transition from tradition to modernity but on the continuous tension between modernity and tradition or rather the religious tradition. It was thus a search for an alternative modernity in post-revolutionary Iran is through the dialectic of tradition and modernity. The tradition–modernity debate accordingly produced a variant of multiple modernities – an as Islamic/Iranian alternative modernity. The close identification of tradition with Islam was due to the fact that the debaters were also participants in the Islamic revolution, who still believed in the myth of revolution as a step in the history of human progress and were

World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities  55 soon called reformists. The debate was against the traditionalist clerical elite of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and the debaters’ counterclaim was that reform as the updating of tradition to make it modern, and that it was fully consistent with the character and dynamics of Islam as a world religion. Modernization had earlier been contrasted to “backwardness” and to “decline”. In a series of books beginning in the late 1980s, Javad Tabataba’i had written on the irreversible decline of political thought in pre-modern Iran, arguing its epistemic incommensurateness with modernity. In the mid1990s, Mohammad Mojtahed-Shabestari, the reformist cleric who made the decisive epistemic break with the apologetic Islamic modernism of the earlier generation, also introduced the hermeneutic conception of tradition. In Hermeneutics, the Book and Tradition (1996),3 Mojtahed-Shabestari drew on the mastery of modern hermeneutics he had acquired in his years at the Islamic center in Hamburg in the 1970s before returning to Iran to be elected to the first Islamic Consultative Assembly (IRI parliament) in 1980, in order to delineate a critical theory for rethinking Islam in the contemporary world.4 He considered “the concept of tradition (sonnat) and its derivatives have primarily a religious-doctrinal sense for the Muslims” to be the source of “many difficulties and errors in the study of the problems of tradition, modernity and development in Islamic countries.” He argued, by contrast, that the confrontation between tradition and modernity is easier in Islam than in Christianity, where “tradition” is tied up with the idea of the church as the vehicle of sacred history. The confrontation of tradition and modernity in Islam can therefore be confined to the “anthropological viewpoint,” and need not assume the form of confrontation between religion and atheism. In other words, he was proposing a modern hermeneutics of the Islamic tradition in the contemporary world and within the limits of modern rationality as set by natural and historical sciences. According to ‘Abdol-Karim Sorush, the best-known Iranian reformist thinker, one was to take advantage of traditions (sonan) on the path to development. Traditions were, however, both shackles and supports. One should both take refuge with them and seek liberation from them. The ethics of science and the ethics of wealth were two sets of modern, constructive traditions we now need more than ever. President Sayyed Mohammad Khatami (1997– 2005) identified with the reform movement and took part in the tradition– modernity debate. In his book, A’i va andisha dar dām-e khodkāmagi (Constitution and Thought in the Trap of Arbitrariness/Absolutism), published in 1999), he acknowledged the tension between rationalism and legalism or “Shari`a-orientation” (shari’at-garā’i) with a view to helping the revivalists and reformists who were lost in the mayhem of “the struggle between tradition and modernity.” Furthermore, his investigation of non-juristic elements in Muslim historical heritage – namely its political theory – for guidance in the transition to modernity, is fully in line with the reformist search for modernity in dialectical relation to tradition, albeit a neglected aspect of it. In Jomhuriyyat. Afsunzodā’i az qodrat (2000), the reformist Sa‘id Hajjarian proposes the deconstruction of tradition as the first step toward its reconstruction. For him, the

56  Saïd Amir Arjomand new religious intellectual “has to prepare a four-phase journey: the first from tradition to modernity; the second is a journey within modernity, the third is the journey from modernity to tradition; and the final phase is the journey within modernity while staying faithful to one’s tradition” (Arjomand 2009). In short, the search for an alternative modernity in Iran could only be achieved through the dialectic of tradition and modernity. Likewise, a perceptive observer of the intellectual scene wrote in 1998 that “the future of Iran primarily depends on this movement of religious enlightenment (rawshanfekri), which is capable of bringing about a synthesis between tradition and traditional thought and the heritage of the modern world.” As the dissident cleric Hasan Yousofi Eshkevari put it in 2000, a critical assessment of both tradition and modernity were necessary in order to combine “the relevant and valid elements of both tradition and modernity” in “designing a kind of indigenous (Iranian-Islamic) modernity” (Arjomand 2001–2002 for all citations). But the reform movement was soundly defeated by the time Khatami was reelected President in 2001 and waned quickly. It was moribund by 2005 when the hardliner Mahmud Ahmadinejad succeeded Khatami as president. After disillusionment with Islam and the possibility of its reform under the IRI, the search for a non-Islamic Iranian alternative modernity, drawing on the Iranian historical tradition and Persian literature, took a decade or two to find its bearing. As early as the late 1980s, Javad Tabataba’i had sought to revive what he called “the political thought of ancient Iran” (fekr-e siya ̄si-ye irānshahri) but did not develop the project beyond alleging its rapid decline in the Islamic era. During the touring exhibition of the Cyrus Cylinder in Europe and the United States in 2012–13, it was widely hailed as the ancient Iranian charter of human rights in the Iranian social media, but the preoccupation of dissidents remained with the actual violations of human rights in the IRI rather than the launching of any intellectual debate. Nevertheless, the search for Iranian alternative modernity remains fully alive, if not (yet) elaborately articulated. Despite the despondency of the Covid-stricken world compounded by the current political despair and disillusion in Iran, where I have been living since my retirement in 2020, one of the leading religious intellectuals/reformists of the 1990s has just launched a ̄ new quarterly, Agāhi-ye Naw (New Consciousness) for which he asked me for a piece on the centennial of Max Weber’s death which I was happy to do. But it is a most desperate editorial of a new periodical I have ever seen on the disheartening political situation in Iran. I do not want to give the impression that the inter-/intra-civilizational processes mingling tradition and modernity cover everything of importance and have, in fact, argued for the primacy of two other factors. In fact, I would argue that the greatest source of multiple modernities is the enormous diversity in the experience of building the modern nation-states. The selective adaptation and considerable transformation of the nation-state model generalized in the international system by the United Nations was inevitable because of the wide range of divergence of indigenous historical experiences in the non-Western world regions from the Western premises of nationhood

World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities  57 and statehood (Arjomand 2014). I would also mention the varied takes on civil society, the public sphere, and citizenship in different world regions as a second important source of multiple modernities (Arjomand 2013). Nevertheless, let me continue with the theme of the interplay of modernity and tradition in an entirely different form the religious intellectuals’ debate, which could be said to begin a decade or more later and is fact just gathering momentum. I want to give as my last example the movement for the restoration of old dilapidated residences in the Iranian old cities, Kashan, Yazd, Isfahan, Shiraz, and in the old neighborhoods of central and southern Tehran where the renovation movement is driven by the young artists and intellectual taking advantage of the new traffic restrictions in central Tehran. Let me briefly enumerate basic points with the help of two examples: KASHAN:  one

of the oldest cities in central Iran about 250 kilometers south of Tehran and half-way between Tehran and Isfahan. According to the city’s leading architect restorer, some 150 old condemned or seriously derelict residences have already been fully restored and another hundred or more are in the process of renovation. These include a number of patrician residences which consisted of a complex of six or seven interlinked houses where prominent merchants and their families lived (and did business). Some has been restored as hotel-boutiques, others as private residences, including one restored by my wife where we currently live. Affluent women are conspicuous among the restorers. NARAQ:  another old city near Kashan that was virtually abandoned until recently but is now experiencing a restoration movement as well as return of some old inhabitants who had made it in Tehran and now build second homes in Naraq. The old bazaar is being restored. It is very small, perhaps with no more than a dozen or two stored reopened. Before entering the city from the east, there stands on the outskirts a monument to modernity that offers an ironic contrast to the charm of the old traditional city center: an empty university campus with functional brick dormitories and lecture halls. It is the abandoned campus of the Free Islamic University built with public money by Abdallāh Jāsbi, its founding chancellor (1982–2011), who was a native of the nearby village of Jasb, where another branch stands likewise abandoned. When my wife and I visited it around 11:00 in the morning, only two shops were open, both owned by women. One of the store owners explained that the rest of the bazar was also run mostly by women, but they were at that hour busy in their kitchen. The bazar would be fully opened on weekends where second homers come to buy local crafts and fabrics and the like as souvenirs. Globalization as “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson 1992: 8) certainly means the end of the insulation of the world regions of the periphery from centers of production of knowledge. The wedding of regional studies (by definition, studies of different world regions) and comparative social theory is clearly

58  Saïd Amir Arjomand called for by the increasingly global production of knowledge. They can be taken as theoretical expressions, by its intellectual vanguard, of the composite civilization of modernity in the new global republic of social theory, making it possible for the West and the rest to provincialize each other mutually, and to view their respective socio-historical experiences from a multifocal and more genuinely universal horizon. This is surely what Jóhann Árnason’s comparative history of civilizations has prepared us to do.

Notes 1 I am using these terms metaphorically in order to speak the language of the scholarly community, but as you can see, I myself divide the globe differently into world regions. In my division, Latin America is a sub-region of the Western civilizational zone. 2 The Persianate heritage was thus carried into the Mughal Empire and the British Raj and beyond them by latter-day Kashmiri Pandits, including Jawaharlal Nehru and the distinguished contemporary sociologist T.N. Madan. I treasure a dedicatory note in exquisite Persian calligraphy Madan wrote for me on the front page of his Modern Myths, Locked Minds on 1/1/1999. 3 The subject was broached in a lecture to the Philosophical Society of Tehran in 1993 (1372), if not earlier. 4 He also made a rigorous critique of the foundations of theocratic government in Islamic law.

References Arjomand, S.A. 2000. “International Sociology into the New Millennium: The Global Sociological Community and the Challenge to the Periphery,” International Sociology, 15(1): 5–10. [Russian translation in СОЦИС (Sociological Studies, the Review of the Russian Academy of Sciences), 10 (2000): 10–13.] ——— 2001–2002. “Modernita, tradizione e la riforma schi`ita nell’Iran contemporanea,” Sociologia del diritto, 28(2): 99–114. ——— 2004. “Rationalization, the Constitution of Meaning and Institutional Development,” in The Dialogical Turn. New Roles for Sociology in the PostDisciplinary Age, edited by C. Camic and H. Joas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 247–274. ——— 2008. “The Salience of Political Ethic in the Spreasd of Persianate Islam,” Journal of Persianate Studies, 1(1): 5–29. ——— 2009. After Khomeini. Iran under his Successors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— 2013. “Multiple Modernities and the Promise of Comparative Sociology,” in Worlds of Difference, edited by S. A. Arjomand and E. Reis. London: Sage, pp. 15–39. ——— 2014. “Introduction: The Challenge of Integrating Social Theory and Regional Studies” and “Three Generations of Comparative Sociologies,” in Social Theory and Area Studies in the Global Age, edited by S. A. Arjomand. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 1–20, 23–61. ——— 2017. “Persianate Islam and its Regional Spread,” in Religions, Nations and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities, edited by P. Michel, A. Possamai and B.S. Turner. London: Palgrave, pp. 67–84.

World Regions and the Unpacking of Multiple Modernities  59 ——— 2022. Apocalypse, Revolution and Reaction in the Persianate World. Leiden: Brill. Árnason, J. P. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Collins, R. 1998. Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Connell, R. 2007. Southern Theory. The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dumont, L. 1966. Homo hierarchicus: essai sur le système des castes. Paris: Gallimard. Eaton, R. M. 2019. India in the Persianate Age. 1000-1765. UK: Penguin Books. Eaton, R. M. and Wagoner, Phillip B. 2014. Power, Memory, Architecture. Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Modernity, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Elias, N. 1978. The Civilizing Process, translated by E. Jephcott. New York: Urizen Books. Hodgson, M. G. S. 1974. The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Huntington, S. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Katzenstein, P. J., ed. 2010. Civilizations in World Politics. Plural and Pluralistic Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Mojtahed-Shabestari, M. 1996 (1375). Hermeneutics, the Book and Tradition (Hermenutik, Ketāb o Sonnat). Tehran: Tarh-e Naw. Nandy, A. 1983. The Intimate Enemy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pollock, S. 1996. “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, AD 300–1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Identity,” in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, edited by J. E. M. Houben. Leiden: Brill, pp. 197–248. Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture. London and Newbury Park: Sage. Rudolph, K. 1991. “Mani und der Iran,” in Manichaia Selecta. Studies Presented to Professor Julien Ries on Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by A. van Tangerloo and S. Giversen. Louvain. Rudolph, S. H. 2010. “Four Variants of Indian Civilization,” in Civilizations in World Politics. Plural and Pluralistic Perspectives, edited by P. J. Katzenstein. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 137–156. Schäfer, W. 2014. “Reconfiguring Area Studies for the Global Age,” in Social Theory and Area Studies in the Global Age, edited by S.A. Arjomand. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 145–175. Singer, M. 1972. When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization. New York: Praeger. Smith, J. C. A. 2010. “The Many Americas. Civilization and Modernity in the Atlantic World.” European Journal of Social Theory, 13(1): 117–133. Thapar, R. 1975. “Ethics, Religion, and Social Protest in the First Millennium B.C. in Northern India.” Daedalus, 104(2): 119–132. ——— 2003. The Penguin History of Early India from the Origins to 1300. Delhi: Penguin Books India. Weber, M. 1958. The Religion of India, edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale. New York: The Free Press.

Part II

Re-Thinking the Concept of Modernity/ies through the Lens of Civilizational Analysis

6 Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth Normative Expectations and Subsequent Social Change Peter Wagner

The term modernity has been used widely to mark a social transformation that sets history on a track towards accomplishing normative achievements. Within social theory, this notion has often been associated with Jürgen Habermas, where it is most explicit, but it was also held by theorists as different as Talcott Parsons and, more implicitly, John Rawls and it informs wide strands of (historico-)sociological research, often under the concept of modernization, or now neo-modernization. In turn, Jóhann Árnason, as is well known, has criticized the notion that modernity is a normative project, “equated with core ideas of the Enlightenment”. In contrast, as he put it recently, he argues “that we need a non-normative concept of modernity as a social-historical field, within which normative options and alternatives can be articulated, but remain locked in conflict” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 333; see also Blokker and Delanty 2011; Árnason 2018). The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to clarifying the place of normativity in socio-historical analysis, in particular in the analysis of modernity.1

Modernity and Normativity Let us start with the common view that expectations of normative progress arose during the eighteenth century and were then more explicitly formulated than ever before, including assumptions about why and how such progress would come about and what it would entail, not least wealth and freedom (for recent accounts Wagner 2016; Charbonnier 2020). True, there have also been critiques of such promises of progress. A first such critique denounced these promises as ideology masking new forms of intra-European domination. A second major critique, much more recently, saw these expectations emerge in Europe in coincidence with the rise of European global domination and express suprematism in the form of imperialism and racism. The first critique is best known as Marxism or historical materialism, the second as post-colonialism or de-colonialism. Neither of them denies, though, that these normative expectations have been effective; they rather criticize, even denounce, those effects. While such criticism can be shared to some extent, this is not the main issue here. There have been other critiques, too, which DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-8

64  Peter Wagner worked by expressing doubt rather than by denouncing modernity. These are doubts both about the normative standing of the expectations and also about their effectiveness in history. As we shall see, Jóhann Árnason’s analysis of modernity is closer to the latter than to the former. In this light, the task of the following exploration is to see whether there is a way to understand how normative expectations relate to subsequent history, to the actions that human beings took after the expectations were raised and to the social structures that arose as the result of such actions. There are three main assumptions that have been held in this regard. First, it has been suggested that these expectations have had no significant normative effect. They are, for instance in Vilfredo Pareto’s prominent analysis, rationalizations of a newly rising elite justifying their ascent to power. Second, in direct contrast, subsequent history has been considered as the realization of these normative expectations. In some sense, this has been the dominant view in the West across the past two centuries, as referred to at the outset, though not at all times and in all places. There have been more philosophical and more historico-sociological versions of it as well as more or less nuanced ones. Even though the final failure of this view had been declared during the 1970s and 1980s, it turned out to be an interpretation “that won’t pass away” (Knöbl 2003). It has become a core part of the “Western” self-understanding. Third, it can be acknowledged that subsequent history is ambiguous and cannot be considered as realizing normative expectations, but that nevertheless the terms can be spelled out by which one can measure the degree to which expectations have been fulfilled. Within social theory, this has been Jürgen Habermas’ project in Theory of Communicative Action (1981), and, within political theory, that of John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), both of which are normative theories with universal claims elaborated against the background of an analysis, without fully spelling it out, of the post-Enlightenment socio-political constellation. Jóhann Árnason has rejected all these options – and that far this author is in agreement. Alternatively, as quoted at the outset, Árnason sees the normative expectations of modernity as creating a field of action – maybe in loose Bourdieuian terms? – within which normative claims are made and struggled about. This view has a number of implications that will subsequently be discussed to arrive at an assessment of the relation between modernity and normativity: First, Árnason needs to consider if and how what is often called the onset of modernity does mark a socio-political rupture – the rupture, namely, which brings the new “social-historical field” about. Second, this modernity is not itself normative but “non-” or “meta-normative”. The latter term seems preferable as Árnason does see autonomy as constitutively modern, in other words as a key component of this social-historical field, and as he himself states (Adams and Árnason 2016), the concept of autonomy unavoidably has normative connotations. Despite his grounding of modernity on this concept (Árnason 1989, 2020) and seeing it as framing normative struggles, though, third, Árnason seems to say that little more can be said conceptually about modernity because of the plurality and variety of interpretations of autonomy.

Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth  65 At this point, fourth, the step he appears to take is to pursue further exploration historically and to do so by reflecting on the general conditions of intentional human action in time. As significant as this step is, its somewhat existentialist approach implies further, fifth, that no historical logic can be detected, just tensions and open-ended normative struggles.

The Modern Rupture European social theory and philosophy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was constituted by the notion of a rupture, of a major social transformation, that brought modernity about (for a recent overview Wagner 2020a). This rupture was supposed to have taken place during the eighteenth century and was defined in a variety of ways, but broadly seen as based on Enlightenment thought and culminating at the end of that century in the industrial and market revolution as well as in the liberal and democratic revolution. Jóhann Árnason has been less obsessed than others with trying to precisely date the beginning of modernity, a debate in which conceptual choice tended to be imposed on a multifaceted history. Rather, he has insistently been pointing to “components” of modernity outside of the time-space of post-1800 Western modernity as well as to the “multiplication” of interpretations of modernity early on (Árnason 2020, chapter 4, here: 78). While this is well taken, the preceding chapter of The Labyrinth of Modernity, exploring the “political, economic, and cultural spheres” of modernity (Árnason 2020, 14), proceeds by reviewing the key lines of the above-mentioned social theory and philosophy of modernity in a succinct and highly erudite way. As such, though, it cannot avoid placing the emphasis on the past two centuries and focus on Europe, because this is what such theory and philosophy did. In other words, the impressive world-historical and comparative widening of the analysis of modernity, as Árnason provides it, attenuates the significance of the supposed rupture around 1800, but it does not at all eliminate it. This historical-comparative observation can be translated into conceptual terms. Árnason is willing to define – although “define” may be too strong a term here – modernity through the concept of autonomy. He sees “the imaginary signification of autonomy” as “the horizon of meaning most central to modernity as a civilization” (Árnason 2020, 10). In contrast to Cornelius Castoriadis, otherwise a main inspiration, though, Árnason insists that no sharp line can be drawn between “autonomous” and “heteronomous” societies: “there are only historical mixtures of the two, and it is not obvious how we are going to rank these mixtures. Traditional societies are not wholly heteronomous, and modern societies are not fully autonomous” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 334). While some understanding of autonomy can be found in all civilizations, modernity brings about “an unprecedented and many-sided opening of new dimensions for autonomous activity” (Árnason 2020, 11). Even though there are good reasons for detecting aspects and components of modernity in other times and spaces (see Wagner 2005, 2015 for some of my own reflections), to speak of an “opening” requires the further move to

66  Peter Wagner locate this event in space and time. And having said this, it is hard to deny that the decades around 1800 witnessed a particularly strong and explicit expression of – what one might want to call – the will to autonomy. Indeed, one way of reconciling the focus on autonomy with an open historical view is to witness in the decades around 1800 a “rupture in societal consciousness” (to use a phrase coined by Koselleck and Reichardt 1989) rather than a pronounced and sustained institutional rupture, even less a re-instituting of society based on the concept of autonomy. This distinction permits a recognition of the emergence of different orientations and parameters for human action, while avoiding the much stronger claim that “modern societies” have arisen in a radical break with all prior human history and have inaugurated a new socio-historical trajectory. Let us then move to a first interim conclusion: Jóhann Árnason works with a concept of modernity that is far-reaching in historical terms, since it is seen as a new civilization, and sharp in theoretical terms, since modernity is seen as centered on a notion of autonomy. In this reader’s view, this is highly laudable, in particular in contrast with most other uses of the term, which are either loose in empirical-historical terms or unconvincing in theoretical terms, if not both. Doing so, though, it seems one obliges oneself to explicate the significance of the rise of modernity in both world-historical and normative or, if one prefers, meta-normative terms. In the next step, the meaning of metanormativity will be explored before moving back to the historical record.

Non- or Meta-Normativity We should first address the difference, if any, between claiming that modernity is a “non-normative” or a “meta-normative” concept, as Árnason appears to have recently shifted from the latter to the former expression (compare the above quotation with Blokker and Delanty 2011, 124; and Árnason 2018, 3). The move may be motivated by the fact that, still, the term modernity is far too easily associated with some kind of achievement. To be modern appears preferable to be not. Once one underpins the concept of modernity with a researchable qualification, namely autonomy, there is a need to take distance from normative connotations. It is plausible, for instance, to see National Socialism as an extreme commitment to collective autonomy, namely the assertion of the German “race” and nation, and thus as an interpretation of modernity. However, one would not want to make positive normative claims in this regard. To refer to modernity as non-normative, therefore, would bring the historical sociology and social theory of modernity in line with the prevailing understanding of scholarly inquiry as aiming for “objectivity” – all the while bearing in mind that the way in which the “light of cultural problems” shines has an impact on what we can see, as Max Weber had underlined in his essay on objectivity. While gaining this distance is an important step to take, a further step is still necessary. The first step leads to agreeing with Jóhann Árnason (2020, 11) that the modern vision of autonomy “unfolds in multiple dimensions of

Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth  67 the human condition, acquires specific meanings in different institutional spheres, and […] reveals ambiguities and paradoxes”. Thus, indeed, there is no unequivocal normative commitment in modernity nor a steady direction into which societies shaped by the modern social imaginary move. However, to say, with Árnason, that modernity is a civilization, and that autonomy is its most important horizon of meaning, already implies that modernity as a “social-historical field” cannot be fully researched from a distance without considering its horizon of meaning. Rather, to use Árnason’s term, the horizon of meaning pertains to the cultural sphere, which is researchable as part of that social-historical field. In turn, we cannot be suggesting either that giving meaning to the world is an action devoid of normativity. If an orientation towards autonomy is multi-dimensional, sphere-specific, ambiguous and paradoxical, as it without doubt is, then it can well be called meta-normative, but not really non-normative. Árnason’s critical approach to normativity in the analysis of modernity seems mainly motivated by the concern about a misplaced reading of “modernity as a project”. But this is by now largely an imagined adversary. Scholars who think that there has been steady and sustainable progress over an extended period are today not only rare (there are some) but also tend to be empirically minded, collecting indicators, rather than offering a conceptual reasoning about a dynamic of normative achievement (Welzel 2013 may be seen as an interesting exception). It may be worthwhile, though, to spend a moment to reconsider the motivation for seeing modernity as a project. Given that this interpretation emerges from social and political philosophy rather than historical sociology, it does not really contain any serious claim to provide an adequate account of history. Rather it is an interpretation of history as if it had a normative direction, and the point of postulating such a direction is to identify deviations of the present socio-political constellation from those past possibilities that the interpreter sees as normatively superior. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 63) once said that Marx “does not so much provide us with a teleology of history as with a perspectival point from which to read the archives”, and mutatis mutandis this can also be said about Habermas (one could add Rawls, except that there is very little history in his writings, rather a seizure of the present as the endpoint of history). In this approach, the normative perspective is the one of the interpreter, not the one of the historical actors. While it is selectively taken from history, it imposes its perspective on a history that is much more manifold and ambiguous. In turn, one cannot agree more with Árnason when he states that “[e]lucidating the being of the political within the social-historical is a more basic task than any normative construction” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 330).

The Meta-Normativity Of Autonomy: Explicating Plurality and Variety To spell this task out more clearly, one needs to consider in more detail Árnason’s notion of meta-normativity (as we will keep saying, rather than non-normativity). The main reason that makes a straightforward normative

68  Peter Wagner approach impossible is pluralism of values, namely “the irreducibly different versions of autonomy” (Blokker and Delanty 2011, 124). But the question that follows from this assertion is whether this plurality and variety can only be retrieved historically or whether it is possible to conceptually pre-structure the “social-historical field” of modernity with a view to mapping locations of possible interpretations within that field. Without focusing on modernity, scholars have elaborated a number of such attempts, reaching from Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice to the line of socio-theoretical thinking about functional differentiation that leads from Talcott Parsons to Niklas Luhmann. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s (1991) conceptual outline of a plurality of “orders of worth” stands between these two lines of thought and avoids some of the pitfalls of either. Significantly, both authors separately tried to transfer this approach into historico-sociological and comparative social research respectively (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Lamont and Thévenot 2000). For current purposes, all these approaches have the weakness that they do not explicitly build on concepts of modernity and autonomy (but see Wagner 1999), but at least they demonstrate the possibility of a systematic approach to socio-political plurality (of which Árnason deplores that Weber identified the issue but did not develop it). And indeed, something more can be said about the plurality and variety of interpretations of autonomy. We can call this an attempt to map the interpretative field of autonomy in analogy to the “social-historical field” of modernity but with the specificity of elaborating a historico-conceptual rather than a socio-historical approach. Going back to Castoriadis, the commitment to autonomy and mastery can be seen as the imaginary signification of modernity. Adding mastery to autonomy is more a move of clarification than of alteration (see the discussion by Carleheden 2010). As “giving oneself one’s own law”, autonomy already entails a commitment to mastery and control: of oneself, of one’s relation to others, and of one’s relation to nature. Such unfolding of the imaginary signification enables the identification of key interpretative tensions that lead to plurality of interpretations. The most fundamental tension is between autonomy as freedom, on the one side, and mastery as control, on the other. It mirrors the distinction between instituting moments and institutional self-binding, as underlined by Castoriadis and taken up by Árnason (2022, to which we will come back below). Secondly, autonomy can be interpreted in more individual or in more collective terms; and mastery in more instrumental or in more hermeneutic terms.2 Thirdly, at any given moment it is possible to argue that the basic imaginary signification of modernity should be interpreted differently according to its area of application, in at least two different senses: whether it applies to oneself, others, or nature; or whether it applies to political, economic, or epistemic issues. As regards the former, it has often been assumed that human beings would engage with others through hermeneutic understanding but instrumentally with nature. Historically, however, it is obvious that human beings – including and perhaps in particular modern ones – have

Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth  69 treated other human beings instrumentally. And in our time the insight that nature cannot endlessly be treated instrumentally may finally become unavoidable. As regards the latter, it has proven useful to distinguish interpretations of autonomy and mastery with regard to the three problématiques that all human societies need to address: gaining knowledge, setting rules for the life in common, and satisfying material needs. Jóhann Árnason is not likely to disagree with any of the above (see for rather similar reflections Árnason 2020, 14–17; Árnason 2022). His rich historical-comparative sociology of modernity is meant to show up the variety of interpretations of autonomy. For him, though, it seems permitted to think, this variety is so large and the emergence of particular interpretations so contingent, not to say unpredictable, that modernity comes to constitute a “labyrinth” in which every new exploration potentially makes visible another, hitherto unknown path. In contrast, I am inclined to assume that an interpretative field can, in principle, be mapped and that even if the pathways appear labyrinthine, we are not at a complete loss in our attempt at deciphering them.

Normative Ambiguity: Autonomy in Time This raises the question about the reason why Árnason’s interpretative angle is different. When pressed about the concept – rather than the history – of modernity, he does not start out from the plurality of possible interpretations of autonomy, but – at least at times (see below)—from a specific and quite singular understanding of autonomy as the “involvement of human action in historical processes”. For him, the understanding of autonomy that is “characteristic of modernity as a civilization” aims at “[h]igher and self-reinforcing levels of human intervention in the world, in natural, social, and cultural contexts” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 342). From this angle, namely the one of the human being confronting the world as an object of intervention, a sequence of issues emerges that Árnason outlines with great clarity. First, there is the risk of hubris, namely the erroneous assumption that human beings can indeed control and master the world, even though they cannot. Or, in Árnason’s apt formulation, giving rise to imaginary over-extensions of the human ability to intervene in the world, as well as the capacity of humans to arrange their own affairs – myths of the complete domination of nature, of revolution, the invisible hand, a world without borders etc. (Adams and Árnason 2022, 334) This is due to, second, the problem of uncertainty, namely the lack of certain knowledge of the world, including a degree of unpredictability of the world. This entails that “social action will inevitably be confronted with alternatives and forced to make choices backed up by inconclusive arguments” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 343; on this question see also Wagner 2020b). Thus, third,

70  Peter Wagner human action, even when not hubristically overreaching, is likely to lead to unintended consequences or, as Árnason puts it, “intentions produce unexpected results and orientations acquire unforeseen meanings” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 343; see also p. 334). These are highly important reflections, but they suffer from two problems. As a general reflection on modernity, coming from the pen of Árnason, they are surprisingly one-sided. They tend to emphasize within modernity the aspect of intentional transformative action, and as such they move close to an understanding of “modernity as a project”, which Árnason otherwise strongly rejects. In my own earlier terms, they provide a “modernist” analysis, one that takes a particular angle on a much wider and more plural conceptual-historical field. Certainly, such an angle was taken by many thinkers and actors, in particular European (and North American) ones from the late eighteenth century onwards. But at all times this view was contested by critics of various persuasions and with variable emphasis.3 And the second problem with the angle is that it lends itself precisely to one form of critique of modernity that arose early on in reaction to the interventionist concept of human action and which has not been mentioned as such at the outset, namely the conservative one. Or, in other words, this critique indeed considers modernity as a project, but as one that is bound to fail. Hubris, uncertainty, and unintended consequences align rather neatly with the topics of what Albert Hirschman (1991) called the rhetoric of reaction: hubristic overreach jeopardizes any existing achievement; uncertainty points to the likely futility of any involvement of human action in historical processes; and unintended consequences demonstrate the possible perversity of such involvement. At this point, we appear to have arrived at an identification of Jóhann Árnason as a critic of tendentially hubristic modernism with – if not conservative, then at least – scepticist undertones. However, Árnason also says that “the imaginary signification of autonomy, inasmuch as it involves a new focus on human creativity, empowerment and self-determination, also opens up a space for interpretation and reflection”, which is a very different view of modernity. This apparent contradiction dissolves when one recognizes that Árnason here introduces conceptual layers of autonomy. The critical angle is taken on the “basic imaginary signification”, which needs to be distinguished from “reflective autonomy”. The former refers to autonomy as “characteristic of modernity as a civilization, […] inspired and transfigured by imaginary projections”, whereas the latter is “a new way of relating to social imaginary significations” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 342, all quotations).4 However, the distinction of layers does not seem entirely warranted, or at least unclear. What exactly is the conceptual difference between making choices on the basis of inconclusive arguments, inspired by imaginary projections, and the exercise of human creativity and interpretative capacity? At the face of it, there isn’t any. Both are taking place in the course of normative struggles in the social-historical field, and, in both cases, the choices depend on the situations human beings find themselves in.

Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth  71 An example may be useful here, as risky as any example is, from its very phrasing onwards: When human beings started to doubt that their ruler possessed divine legitimation and aimed at finding ways of ruling themselves, one can say that they made a move from heteronomy to autonomy. This was a moment of collective creativity (see, e.g., Sewell 2005, chapter 8, on the days of July 1789 that came to be called the French Revolution). In Castoriadis’s terms, one can see it as an instituting moment, as the moment in which a political order is to be based on the imaginary signification of (collective) autonomy. Among the many issues that arose in the aftermath of this event, the setting of the boundaries of the new kind of polity was a key question. There is no conclusive argument about how a modern, autonomous polity should set its boundaries. It requires a decision in a situation; furthermore, it cannot be autonomous because it also relies on the agreement or at least compliance of external actors. The answer that became predominant (though not exclusive) in Europe was to set boundaries according to commonality of language and culture. In such way, institutions of the “modern” polity were established, even under conditions of uncertainty whether a spatial boundary matched a linguistic boundary. Once consolidated, these boundaries became a constraint to action. The chosen criterion turned into an imposed one, a heteronomous one; and unintended consequences of major significance were to follow. This stylized presentation of a historical sequence is meant to show that autonomy as “characteristic of modernity as a civilization” and autonomy as “human creativity” do not exist on different conceptual planes. Rather, they represent the instituted and the instituting moments of autonomy (see Wagner 2005 for more detail). This is explicitly recognized in conceptual terms by Árnason (2022, 19–21) in another writing that unfolds the dilemmas of critical theory in characteristically brilliant form. However, the balanced conceptual arrangement gives way to the more sceptic perspective in the reading of history – sceptic in the double sense of accepting the opaqueness of history and of doubting the normative advances in instituting moments. The separation of the two moments then has the effect of letting the instituted moment appear as a “social-historical field” without normativity as such, whereas the point is to see how the historically observable “critical attitude with practical consequences” (Árnason 2022, 21) structures the struggles within this field and, possibly, shapes historical trajectories of modernity.

The Trajectory of Modernity Admittedly, this is not an easy task. Jóhann Árnason identified uncertainty, unintended consequences, and the tendency towards hubris as problems that arise from the modern self-understanding and that make it impossible to normatively embrace modernity as such. With these general assertions, as important as they are, Árnason renounces the attempt to connect specific situations of modernity to each other across time and space. In contrast, I have tried to argue that any existing interpretation of modernity – in the “social-historical

72  Peter Wagner field” – is created against the background of prior experiences, be it with instituting modernity or with prior interpretations of modernity and the problems those have created. That is why the notion of “successive modernities”, which I have borrowed from Árnason (Wagner 2010), is highly important, but it remains underexplored. The commitment to autonomy always encounters specific situations, but it does not encounter them always in the same way. It is impregnated with experiences, and furthermore human beings are – in principle – able to connect different situations to each other through conceptual labour (Wagner 2003). To make the options clearer, let us take a brief look at one of the more sophisticated attempts to revive the notion of the history of modernity as the realization of normative expectations. In recent writings, Axel Honneth (2013, 2017) has connected his social theory of struggles for recognition with an analysis of modern societies as based on the principle of autonomy, here understood as personal freedom. Thus, he unfolds a reading of history in which increasing individualization and inclusion mark a path of normative progress achieved in struggles for recognition that widen normative horizons, all the while accepting historical contingency, paradoxes in the process of realization of normative promises, and openness of the future for yet-unknown issues of recognition. This is not the place for a more general problematization of Honneth’s approach (for elements, see Árnason 2018, 2022; Karagiannis and Wagner 2008; Wagner 2016). For current purposes, it may suffice to underline one aspect: With his insistence on the single principle of autonomy as personal freedom, Honneth stays close to a view of modernity’s promises as, in principle, realizable, and despite the acknowledgement of arising paradoxes, he underestimates the ambivalences at the core of modernity. As a consequence, his actual reading of history – beyond being much less profound and nuanced than Árnason’s – tends to trace rather steady, even though not linear, lines of normative advances. Nevertheless, Honneth offers at least an attempt at connecting experiences of modernity across historical time. Or, in other words, he is interested in providing a conceptually driven account of the formation and transformation of social phenomena of large scale and long duration, arguably the core task of historical-comparative sociology. In my view, though, his rather normative concept of autonomy imposes itself on the reading of history. In turn, Árnason’s understandable rejection of such a normative positioning tends to disconnect historical experiences because it underestimates the rather steady force of normative reasonings held by the historical actors themselves. In the small remaining space, a few notes will be added to signal how experiences with modernity can be connected without even coming close to seeing modernity as a realizable project. As Árnason underlines, human beings make choices and decisions in the situations they find themselves in. Under conditions of modernity, they see themselves as autonomous, which is to say nothing else than that they can make choices and that the adequate solutions to the problems they need to address are not predetermined. This is, however, different from saying that

Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth  73 they do not face constraints in shaping or re-shaping their ways of living together. A strong view that any existing constraint can be overcome amounts to hubris. Even when not holding this view, human beings need to recognize that they may not have all the knowledge available that would be required to adequately address a problematic situation. They face uncertainty, and their actions may lead to unintended consequences. Following Árnason so far, one can see “modern” human beings as committed to “autonomous” problem-solving, while also recognizing that the solutions they adopt may create new kinds of problems, be it because of hubris or insufficient knowledge and foresight, and, furthermore, that the “autonomously” created problems may even be more difficult to address than the problems that were apparently solved (on democracy as problem displacement, see Wagner 2022). Thus, it is a matter of historical contingency whether the history of modernity marks normative advances or not, even if we locate the normativity in the actors and not in the socio-philosophical observer. But we should nevertheless keep the focus on the connection of experiences when reading the trajectory of modernity. New problems are insufficiently understood if one does not recognize that they were solutions to earlier problems. And the sequence of problems, far from being located on a learning curve, as thinkers like Jürgen Habermas may still assume, makes some modern “logics of history”, in William Sewell’s (2005) sense, visible, one that is shaped by creativity and contingency. Within this logic, the history of modernity has witnessed shifts of emphasis between individual and collective autonomy. These shifts are misunderstood if they are seen as normative advances towards greater individualization. If there is an insight from experiences, it lies in the need to recognize both plurality and the need for coordination, which is a relation of tension for which no universally superior solution can be found. The commitment to equality may also be seen as shaping the modern logic of history, but it, similarly, would be misunderstood as a trajectory of increasing inclusion. Rather, equality has mostly been – temporarily – realized within political boundaries, and this by increasing inequality across boundaries (see Árnason 2020, 11–13, to be discussed in detail elsewhere). If there is a normative horizon of equality under conditions of modernity, and I would suggest there is, it is a persistently receding horizon. Finally, modernity is often seen as having led to a historically unprecedented increase of human mastery. While there has always been some awareness of hubris, during the past half century the consequences of human hubris have come to endanger human life on this planet. And this insight at least seems to be growing. Current planetary modernity urgently needs to reconsider its expansive tendencies and explore the meaning of frontiers that should not be crossed. In an unusual optimistic note, Jóhann Árnason suggests one could envisage “a cleansing from hubris (the retreat from myths of revolution to a better understanding of democracy is an example)”, even though he recedes immediately again by saying that this “is – at best – a complex and long-term process, and it is bound to raise questions about the purposes of autonomy”

74  Peter Wagner (Adams and Árnason 2022, 334). The former is certainly true, as we can see every day now, but the latter may not be. As soon as we seriously raise questions about the purpose of autonomy, we are bound to recognize that autonomy as such has no purpose. Who raises a question of this kind moves in the realm of what Árnason calls “reflective autonomy”, and they will not be able to step out of it because they have lost the certainty that there are any answers that come from elsewhere. Autonomy is our condition; it is not our choice.

Notes 1 I am very grateful to Jóhann Árnason for making available articles and interviews that were yet unpublished at the time of writing. The following reflections are based on a close reading of Árnason’s recent statements. They build on my broader analysis of Árnason’s research programme (Wagner 2021) and should be seen as a contribution to an ongoing conversation. To add to this conversation, I have taken the liberty of providing a number of references to my own work that otherwise may be found excessive. My thanks go to Jóhann Árnason also for quick comments on a draft of this article, which permitted revision of some imprecise formulations. 2 I still remain unsatisfied with the terms to map the interpretations of mastery but have not been able to find better ones. 3 It may be remarked in passing that the historical widening of modernity that Árnason undertakes, as discussed above, sits uneasily with a radical, always potentially hubristic conceptualization of autonomy, which is much more historically confined as a social imaginary. 4 Lacking space for a detailed discussion, just a note on Árnason’s view of “reflective autonomy” as having “ipso facto a normative orientation” (Adams and Árnason 2022, 14). On the one hand, this statement appears in contradiction with the “meta-normative” approach, but it is justified through the conceptual layering (discussed above in the main text). On the other hand, while it rings persuasive to say about reflective autonomy as “explicit and unlimited interrogation” that “you cannot understand it without accepting it” (loc. cit.), the principle reasonably does not apply to all human situations, as thinkers as different as Hannah Arendt (1958) and Luc Boltanski (1990) have pointed out. We come briefly back to this issue at the end.

References Adams, Suzi, and Jóhann P. Árnason, Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue, Social Imaginaries, vol. 2, no. 1, May 2016, 151–190. Adams, Suzi, and Jóhann P. Árnason, A Further Conversation on Social Imaginaries: Political Philosophy, Normative Commitments, and the Creativity of Social Action, International Journal of Social Imaginaries, vol. 1, no. 2, 2022, 328–353. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. Árnason, Jóhann P., The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, vol. 27, no. 86, 1989, 323–337. Árnason, Jóhann P., Selbstaufhebungen der kritischen Theorie: Aufklärungsbilanzen, Fortschrittskonstruktionen, Relativierungen, unpublished paper, 2018. Árnason, Jóhann P., The Labyrinth of Modernity. Horizons, Pathways, and Mutations, London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020.

Ways Out of the Modern Labyrinth  75 Árnason, Jóhann P., Retreats and Revisions. Downsizing Critical Theory and Defusing the Concept of Society, unpublished manuscript, 2022. Blokker, Paul, and Gerard Delanty, An Interview with Jóhann P. Árnason: Critical Theory, Modernity, Civilizations and Democracy, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 14, no. 1, 2011, 119–132. Boltanski, Luc, L’Amour et la justice comme compétences, Paris: Métailié, 1990. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot, De la Justification, Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Carleheden, Mikael, The Imaginary Significations of Modernity: A Re-examination, Distinktion. Journal of Social Theory, vol. 11, no. 2, 2010, 51–70. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Charbonnier, Pierre, Abondance et liberté. Une histoire environnementale des idées politiques, Paris: La Découverte, 2020. Habermas, Jürgen, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1981. Hirschman, Albert O., The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1991. Honneth, Axel, Das Recht der Freiheit, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013. Honneth, Axel, Die Idee des Sozialismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Karagiannis, Nathalie, and Peter Wagner, Varieties of Agonism: Conflict, the Common Good and the Need for Synagonism, Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 39, no. 3, Fall 2008, 323–339. Knöbl, Wolfgang, Theories that Won’t Pass Away: The Never-ending Story of Modernization Theory, in Gerard Delanty and F. Isin Engin, eds., Handbook of Historical Sociology, London: Routledge, 2003. Koselleck, Reinhart and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewußtseins, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989. Lamont, Michéle, and Laurent Thévenot, eds., Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Sewell, William H. Jr., Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformations, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Wagner, Peter, After Justification. Repertoires of Evaluation and the Sociology of Modernity, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 2, no. 3, 1999, 341–357. Wagner, Peter, As Intellectual History Meets Historical Sociology. Historical Sociology after the Linguistic Turn, in Gerard Delanty and Isin Engin, eds., Handbook of Historical Sociology, London: Sage, 2003, 168–179. Wagner, Peter, Palomar’s Questions. The Axial Age Hypothesis, European Modernity and Historical Contingency, in Jóhann Árnason, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History, Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2005, 87–106. Wagner, Peter, Successive Modernities and the Idea of Progress, Distinktion. Scandinavian Journal for Social Theory, vol. 11, October 2010, 9–24. Wagner, Peter, Modernity and Critique: Elements of a World-sociology, in Breno Bringel and José Mauricio Domingues, eds., Global Modernity and Social Contestations, London: Sage (Sage Studies in International Sociology), 2015. Wagner, Peter, Progress: A Reconstruction, Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Wagner, Peter, Modernity, in Peter Kivisto, ed., Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020a.

76  Peter Wagner Wagner, Peter, Knowing How to Act Well in Time, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, vol. 17, 2020b, 507–513. Wagner, Peter, Jóhann Árnason’s Unanswered Question: To What end Does One Combine Historical-comparative Sociology with Social and Political Philosophy? Thesis Eleven. Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, published online first, 2021. Wagner, Peter, Neuartige Probleme und die Widerständigkeit der Realität. Über das Ausbleiben angemessener politischer Entscheidungen, in Karl-Rudolf Korte, Gert Scobel, and Taylan Yildiz, eds., Heuristiken des politischen Entscheidens, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2022, 203–226. Welzel, Christian, Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

7 Politics and the Social Imaginary The Problem of the State – and the Problem of Modernity Wolfgang Knöbl

At the beginning of his last major book, Jóhann Árnason pointed out that it is impossible for him (and certainly for anybody else as well) to offer “a general or comprehensive theory of modernity”. That has to do with the fact that there simply is “no [normative] project of modernity, no clearly defined core structure, and no basic principles that would explain and enable changes of institutional patterns [of modernity]”. That, however, doesn’t prevent him from theorizing modernity. On the contrary: Árnason is convinced that the concept of modernity refers “to a historical configuration of the social imaginary”, to “a core complex of orientations and dimensions” that are “open to divergent interpretations” (Árnason 2020: 1). As I see it, this is a cautious and, at the same time, reasonable and plausible socio-cultural approach towards modernity, one that allows him much better than most theorists to understand and explain the rather different and oftentimes contingent institutional outcomes of a peculiar socio-cultural problematic. This cautious approach towards modernity gave him (in a similar way as the other great theorists of “multiple modernities”, the late Shmuel N. Eisenstadt) the tools to highlight – among others – the Stalinist project (Árnason 1993), but also the contours of the Nordic (Scandinavian) civilization (Árnason and Wittrock 2015) or the features of Japanese history (Árnason 1997, 2002). I called Árnason’s approach a “socio-cultural one” for a particular reason. The starting point of his theorizing about modernity is indeed a deep awareness of the new cultural traits to be found in modern societies. But Árnason is not and never was a cultural theorist who shies away from analyzing institutions. On the contrary, he always tried to closely link his insights into the cultural horizons of modernity with his sensitivity towards the importance of specific historical institutions, which makes his approach a socio-cultural one, i.e. an approach which avoids the pitfalls and one-sidedness of most culturalist ways of reasoning. No wonder, therefore, that he goes along with Max Weber’s classic insight according to which the modern world is characterized by a few clearly demarcated world orders. Árnason believes that – at this point – Weber was on the right (sociological) track (though, according to him, there is some doubt whether the names and numbers of world orders given by Weber are really appropriate and sufficient) and therefore doesn’t pay any further attention to this question. Instead, he simply (and understandably) points out that DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-9

78  Wolfgang Knöbl for his present purposes it might be acceptable to stick to the (usual) “tripartite division of economic, political, and cultural spheres” (Árnason 2020: 14) because this is currently – and since the time of Weber – the best way to clarify how the cultural problematic of modernity was and still is spelled out institutionally in different societies. Thus, for analytical reasons Árnason accepts Weber’s specific theory of differentiation and – building upon that – gives us a concise sketch of the possible wide spectrum of economic, political, and cultural changes within modernity in chapter 3 of the aforementioned book, a chapter aptly entitled “Life Orders and Articulations”. In the following I will further explore Árnason’s suggestions and try to support some of his remarks on politics. As Árnason rightly claims: In the political sphere, there is no unifying force or formative centre comparable to capitalism in economic life (…). Bureaucracy and democracy are aspects of modern statehood, and the plurality of states implies geopolitics, including empire building and warfare. It is therefore an obvious choice to begin with the problematic of the modern state. (Árnason 2020: 29) And the modern state will indeed be my topic in the main part of this chapter. Looking into the state as a “historical configuration of the social imaginary” and into some aspects of the institutional articulations of the state in different regions of the world I would like to push Árnason’s sociological insights (admittedly only one specific aspect of his oeuvre) into an even more historicist direction (“historicist” in the sense of Ranke and Droysen, not in the sense of Karl Popper!). Dealing with “the” state in a meaningful way is – as will be shown – a remarkably difficult and tricky task, particularly if one tries to take a long-term and/or comparative perspective. Therefore, talk of “the state within modernity” is also rather dangerous although these dangers oftentimes simply cannot be avoided. But, in any case, the historically existing varieties of meanings of “the state” should make one cautious towards any over-generalized arguments or claims concerning “the political sphere of modernity”: If the meanings of the state are rather controversial, the ones of “bureaucracy” or “democracy” – that’s my guess – most likely have been contested as well which makes it even more difficult to get a proper understanding of “political modernity”. Yet – according to my mind – there is no way out of a thorough contextualization and historicization of political phenomena when we want to come to grips with modernity in general and political modernity and the state in particular. And – this will be the last part of my c­hapter  – theorizing modernity will also mean to historicize the concept of “modernity” itself, i.e. to understand why the concept of modernity was a rather late invention, one that was not established within the social sciences before the late 1960s. Why was that the case, why so late? Only if we do have a plausible answer to this question, we also have the chance to really understand Árnason’s claim that modernity basically is a “historical configuration of the social imaginary”. *

Politics and the Social Imaginary  79 In 2012 French sociologist Luc Boltanski tried to theorize the changing imaginaries of the modern state by looking into mostly French and British popular murder mysteries and spy novels written by prominent authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle or George Simenon. As he claimed in his Énigmes et Complots, it was no accident that the murder mystery was invented and created in the more or less democratic states of France and Great Britain since its original plot needed specific background assumptions in order to function properly. These were assumptions, however, that changed a lot over time and gave various generations of crime writers very different opportunities to stage their plots. The story of detective Sherlock Holmes, for example, was based on the idea that although the bureaucratic structures of Britain were relatively stable and reliable, not everything was under control so that suspicion as a kind of public mood or feeling ruled the day. That’s where the crime – and the private detective – comes in: Sherlock Holmes is a character who can only be imagined because of a tension between the state and capitalism insofar as capitalist society produces criminal events that could not even be controlled by the institutions of the modern nation-state of the late 19th and early twentieth century. The same is also true for Maigret, the hero of George Simenon’s novels, although the aforementioned background assumptions look rather different. Simenon stages his stories some decades later and in a different country, in France, or – to be more specific – in Paris. The story of Maigret only works because there is a rather chaotic civil society that at least appears to have acquired some shaky unity by the measures of a bureaucratic state. As Boltanski makes clear, however, the state as painted by Simenon is not a Weberian goal-directed and reliable machine any longer; on the contrary, it is one that is largely shaped and influenced by the particularistic interests of societal elites and notables which means that although a state administration exists, it is not only a helpless entity in which somewhat cynical, yet at the same time scrupulous, actors such as Maigret are doing their daily work, but also one in which paternalistic relations are at least as important as bureaucratic ones (Boltanski 2012: 124). What Boltanski indeed does in the book just mentioned is – via the detour of an analysis of crime novels – to paint a picture of the state as a social imaginary, at least if one refers to Árnason’s and Castoriadis’ understanding of this term, but also to Charles Taylor’s definition according to which social imaginaries – in contrast to theories – are shared by many people and refer to a “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (Taylor 2004: 23). Analyzing popular novels is certainly one interesting and possibly fruitful tool to get into the topic of social imaginaries; but, of course, there is always the critical question lurking in the background of whether the pictures painted by popular authors are true representations of societal discourse or whether they only invent a rather idiosyncratic metaphor which then somehow resonates in a wider public – and the emphasis here is on somehow.

80  Wolfgang Knöbl I prefer to leave this problem of defining social imaginaries to more competent authors and will instead – in the next section of this chapter – present some insights from the field of conceptual historiography on the “state” before I will then dig into its more recent institutional history. As should become clear, talking about the state as a social imaginary is a particularly difficult task since both its conceptual and its institutional history is rather different in different national contexts, and a look into colonial and post-colonial contexts makes the whole picture even fuzzier. * If one relies on those authors who have written on the “state” and on “state-sovereignty” in the famous Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the standard work of German conceptual and semantic historiography,1 a pretty clear picture emerges. “State” in our modern political meaning of the word came into being in Renaissance Italy (Conze 2004: 10) before it entered the French, the English, and then the German language. The history of the concept is particularly interesting in Germany – for two particular reasons: First, there seems to be a kind of a consensus that the German debate was somewhat exceptional insofar as in nineteenth-century Germany more than anywhere else “the state” became the social imaginary centered in the realm of politics. Second, due to the worldwide influence of the German social sciences, which lasted from the second half of the nineteenth century until at least the 1930s, the rather peculiar German debate in somewhat odd ways also shaped discussions in other nations: Although quite a few non-Germanic scholars tried to find a state-entity in “their” particular countries, they often searched in vain since the term was not considered important at all; in non-Germanic countries neither political elites nor ordinary citizens necessarily referred to the “state” while doing or describing politics. As it turned out, the German belief in the state, i.e. the German social and political imaginary, was a rather idiosyncratic thing indeed (Grimm 1987: 70ff.)! The term “state” entered the German language in the fifteenth century, two centuries earlier than the term “sovereignty” (Koselleck 2004a: 2; Münkler 1987: 171). Although the idea of the state – as already emphasized – was created in Italy, it was the French term of the state which became incorporated into the German language (Koselleck 2004a: 1). However, before the nineteenth century it was not clear yet which meaning the term would eventually take on: When German authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries talked about the state, they had in mind a political community, but also a situation of a political community, and – last but not least – there was no feeling that one should make a distinction between the state (as a royal administration) on the one side and civil society on the other (Conze 2004: 18). It was obviously the case that the odd constitution in Germany, the existence of a pretty fragile “Reich” under which roof many sovereign and quasi-sovereign kingdoms, cities, clerical institutions etc. lived, made it hard to think in terms of Machiavelli’s or Bodin’s “raison d’état” or “sovereignty”.

Politics and the Social Imaginary  81 Thus, the German term of the “state” at the beginning had many meanings! It was only in the nineteenth century that a clear and exclusively political understanding of the state emerged as we know it today, both in everyday language and in the social sciences. But, and this is important, this codification of the term “state” did not happen everywhere, since in Great Britain, but also in France – and, one should add, in the United States – there have been alternative social imaginaries that competed with the “state” such as “empire”, “republic”, “nation” etc. (Koselleck 2004a: 2). So, we have the somewhat curious result that although the Germans were comparatively slow in getting used to a political understanding of the term “state”, German social scientists began to codify – and even to sacralize – the term in a stricter and more systematic way than anybody else. As the late Reinhart Koselleck, the doyen of German conceptual history, had pointed out, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the “state” in Germany became a kind of entity which – in continuity to French thought of the late Enlightenment – was considered to be a quasi-actor, an autonomous being whose identity was secure and not dependent on other social spheres. Especially in Germany the metaphor of the state as an organism was believed to be appropriate, a conceptual move that particularly fitted the German situation because this metaphor allowed to defuse the tension between the idea of the sovereignty of the people (a democratic concept that since the US-American and French Revolutions gained more and more influence) on the one side and the idea of the sovereignty of the state on the other (Koselleck 2004b: 29; Stolleis 1990: 272). And this state-organism was put into a kind of eschatological context insofar as it was believed that the state has been created in order to bring about progress and reform in society. In the first third of the nineteenth century it was Jóhann Gottlieb Fichte, in particular, who proposed this future-directed picture of the state, and it was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who clearly linked the state tighter than anybody else in Germany to the concept of real power (Koselleck 2004b: 33–37). From here two intellectual moves became possible in the decades to follow. As Koselleck argues, one could either sharpen the dichotomy between civil society and the state as suggested by historians such as Leopold von Ranke who sacralized the state and regarded the “Beamtenschaft” (civil service) as a kind of carrier of reason, or one could – that was a different, but somehow related move – try to close the gap between state and society and regard the state as nothing more than a kind of embodiment of societal developments, something undertaken by the left Post-Hegelians such as Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx (Koselleck 2004b: 40ff.). The further development of the German debate should not concern us here, however, and so I would like to end this short excursion into the German debate with one last observation made by Koselleck which immediately refers to other national contexts. Koselleck claims that the sacralization of the state concept and the idea of a public law was very much a project of the German protestant “Bildungsbürgertum” (the educational bourgeoisie) (Koselleck 2004b: 44), an observation which is important for two reasons: First, most of the classics

82  Wolfgang Knöbl of the social sciences still relevant for the debate on the state today have also been protestants (from Max Weber to Otto Hintze)! And, secondly and most banal, the protestant educational bourgeoisie was a peculiar German phenomenon (see Bollenbeck 1996) which gives us some reason to assume that in the nineteenth century not only in non-protestant regions of the world, but also in protestant countries such as the US and Great Britain the debate on the state was and had to be rather different. * This leads to the state debate in non-Germanic countries. In the past ten years conceptual history in Spain and in Latin America (including Brazil) has taken a big step forward. The authors writing in the Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano made it quite clear that in Spain the “state” had only a weak position in political discourse in the period between 1770 and 1875 when concepts such as “gobierno”, “república” or “nación” dominated the scene. This is explained by the fact that Spain – in this period – has had rather weak political structures insofar as many governments quickly succeeded each other not the least because most of them were threatened and turned over by numerous rebellions. It was only since the 1850s that the concept of the “state” slowly acquired a new meaning in the sense that it was interpreted as a social body, a “poder director, capaz de actuar por sí mismo” (Iriarte 2014: 133). The situation was similar and different at the same time in post-colonial Latin-America. After and during the revolutions of the first third of the nineteenth century it didn’t make much sense to talk about the “state”, since the entities that emerged after the breakdown of Spanish rule in the Americas were built upon the ruins of the former Spanish empire: Local sovereign entities thus called themselves “provincias” or “provinicias unidas” (like in Venezuela, in Nueva Granada or at the Río de la Plata): “Cuando la multiplicación de los estados soberanos coincide con el antiguo reino o virreinato, la expresión de est antigua totalidad, así como la designación del titular de la soberanía del conjunto, tiende a significarse mediante la palabra nación, o a veces la expresión 'cuerpo de nación'” (Lempérière 2014: 31). During and even after independence, when talk of sovereign states had to get started simply because of the involvement of Latin American governments in the international diplomatic system, the idea of a homogenous and autonomous state (the one suggested by German social scientists at that time) was difficult to grasp because these states were usually not more than a union of different corporate actors. Although, for example, the revolutionaries in Buenos Aires around the years 1819 and 1820 began to reason about the “state”, this concept was anything but hegemonic. No wonder, therefore, that it was not the state that was declared sovereign, but the “provincias unidas” (Cansanello 2014: 41). According to Annick Lempérière, in Chile and Argentina where the state-concept was adopted comparatively quickly, that adoption had less to do with the real process of bureaucratic consolidation and more with

Politics and the Social Imaginary  83 the fact that the political and intellectual elites there were heavily influenced by European and particularly French thought which allowed them to use statist concepts (Lempérière 2014: 33ff.). Thus, Latin America was not the region particularly suited to ‘states talk’; if there was a social imaginary of the state at all, it was an imaginary imported from Europe and one which had to compete with other political imaginaries at least as convincing and powerful. But the same is true with respect to a country further north – the United States. In this context, too, the concept of the state had a difficult start – and not only because the English or British heritage mattered so much. As has been argued by various authors, the political developments in England and the United Kingdom were indeed different to the developments in continental Europe. The settlement of 1688 and the term of a “King in Parliament” made it quite clear that in England there was no absolute ruler any longer but only a rather constrained one who had to reckon with the parliament which was conceptualized “as the principal location for the articulation and aggregation of territorial interests. It was no longer just an assembly of the estates of the realm” (Dyson 1980: 39). Since sovereignty was placed in parliament, the dichotomy between state and civil society so typical for France (and later for Germany) was not considered appropriate, which also meant that the state-concept never played a decisive role in British politics (see, however, Meadowcroft 1995). These British roots certainly had also been important in the US-American context, to be sure. But it would be too culturalist a move to argue that the Americans simply took over the British avoidance of the state-concept. Something different took place in this part of Northern America: One must not forget that although the revolutionaries of the 13 colonies fought against an empire in order to get independence, this newly created polity never really hesitated to understand itself as an empire (even if later onwards this aspect of early US history was somewhat bashfully pushed into the background). It was Thomas Jefferson who spoke of an “empire of liberty” as “an expanding union of republics held together by ties of interest and affection” (Onuf 2000: 2; Wood 2009). The common interest was territorial expansion which should be achieved by the people themselves organized in small republics. Jefferson’s conception of republican empire, an idealized vision of the old regime purged of corruption, thus provided the framework for his inspiring vision of a new national identity. An empire without a metropolis would be sustained by the patriotism of a free and united people.2 (Onuf 2000: 55) No wonder, again, that the concept of a state in the US context didn’t get much support: It was the “republic”, the “nation”, and the “empire” that were the most important social imaginaries with a political content that really mattered in the US – and which very much shaped the debate within the US-American social sciences for a long time until some scholars began to shoulder the task of “Bringing the State Back In” in the middle of the 1980s.

84  Wolfgang Knöbl To come to an end of the debate here: Talk about the “state” as a “social imaginary” has to reckon with a huge variety of historical and geographical contexts. As should have become clear, at least up until the late nineteenth century and with the exception of the situation in Germany and – perhaps – in France, the state-concept was not particularly influential. That, of course, changed later onwards as a semantic analysis could and would show. This is not the place for such an undertaking here; however, I would like to focus instead on the institutional reality of the state – and this will be the topic of the next section. What should be clear from the beginning of the following discussion, however, is the fact that there was and is no parallel development between the development of the state as a concept and social imaginary on the one side and its institutional implementation on the other, that – as Árnason always correctly claimed – there were indeed many institutional pathways to articulate the (political) imaginary of modernity. * When one looks into the institutional history of the modern state, then it is rather surprising to see that this history might actually be not as old as one usually assumes – or, to put it differently, that many institutions we usually attribute to the modern state were rather late ‘achievements’.3 Take the example of France: As Eugen Weber (1976) had convincingly demonstrated in his famous Peasants into Frenchmen,4 France as a highly centralized country (and one with a long history) was actually culturally enormously heterogeneous until the end of the nineteenth century; even at that time the process of state-building, if one wants to use that term, was still in its infancy. Around 1870 half of the Frenchmen and -women regarded French as a foreign language (Weber 1976: 70), which was not changed very much by the intellectually hotly debated defeat in the war against Germany in 1870/71 (Weber 1976: 103). The modernizing effect of the Great Revolution of 1789 on French society (and of the wars of the nineteenth century) were therefore not really as big as is often claimed. It was certainly not before the second half of the nineteenth century and oftentimes not even before 1914 that thoroughgoing political modernization processes and successful processes of national integration could be detected (Weber 1976: 477) – something which is mirrored by France’s rather late educational reforms at the beginning of the Third Republic.5 The situation is little different when one looks into the field of political economy. It is interesting that a kind of systematic economic policy in nineteenth-century France was not even tried. And although World War I brought about an enormous mobilization of resources and thus could have laid the tracks for a new kind of policy-making, this was still not the case. After 1918 the measures and institutions used and established during the Great War were soon abandoned – with the exception of those in the realm of social policy, of course, since veterans, orphans, and widows had to be taken care of. Industrial structures, however, didn’t change very much and so the

Politics and the Social Imaginary  85 attitudes of bureaucrats and politicians towards industry and industrial policy remained the same (Rosanvallon 2000: 160). As Pierre Rosanvallon claims, the statist policy choices during the First World War were not the origins of the regulating state; they were not the roots of “planification” which in the late 1940s and 1950s became so famous. Indeed, and not very different to the US and the New Deal there, it needed the world economic crisis of the late 1920 and 30s and – of course – the Second World War in order to create a policy that really tried to link the state to economic processes. Thus, again, it was not some kind of an evolutionary logic that led to the development of the regulating state in Europe, but external shocks and events. It could have been different as well! The conclusion would be: Where such shocks and events just didn’t happen or where they were perceived differently, a statist economic policy simply was not put on the agenda of policy-makers, with the result that a powerful imaginary of a transformative state had no real chance to come into being. The picture does not change even if one looks into the military. After the wars of the absolutist period and the ensuing coercion-extraction cycle – an argument originally developed by Charles Tilly – European nations consolidated their civil and military apparatus. But was that really the case? To be sure, it is obvious that European states in the nineteenth century were far more powerful than most similar institutions in other regions of the world at that time (cf. Vries 2015)! And yet, doubts remain whether there was a clear developmental line between the European state of the nineteenth century and the one after 1914 or even later. This is so because the resources these European states could draw on, were rather limited for most of the nineteenth century – and this is true not only for material but also for human resources. Let’s start with manpower first: It is quite revealing that even one of the (supposedly) great achievements of the French Revolution – universal male conscription – was more or less a sham during long parts of the nineteenth century because no more than 10% of the pool of possible French recruits had actually been drafted around 1850 (Weber 1976: 292; see also Geva 2013). The situation in other parts of Europe at that time was not much different before the 1870s, and it took even longer until the bourgeois elements of society were really able to push aristocratic elites within the military aside.6 Thus, the rather hesitant willingness or ability of European states to use manpower for the purposes of war is another indicator for my thesis of the rather slow and late emergence of an institutionally strong state in Europe. If the duty to serve in the military was one of the foremost obligations for a modern citizen, the duty to pay taxes (in order to pay for the military) was certainly another one (Scheve and Stasavage 2016). One final example: European states before the end of the nineteenth century do not look very impressive compared to more recent periods. To be sure, there had been regimes being able to draw on direct (regressive) taxes, most notably Great Britain since the 1840s. But the majority of European states had not been so successful. John M. Hobson expressed it thus:

86  Wolfgang Knöbl Where state capacity was highest – in Britain – the state was able to avoid resorting to regressive indirect taxes, and hence tariffs, and instead chose to increase progressive income taxation. As a result, the state was able to avoid returning to protectionism, and maintained free trade instead. Where state capacity was low or moderate – especially in Germany and Russia – the state [of the nineteenth century; W.K.] resorted to increasing regressive indirect taxes and hence tariffs, thereby shifting back to protectionism.7 (Hobson 1997: 15) Thus, tax-policy and protectionism had a lot to do with power relationships in a society and here some European great powers – even Germany – had for a variety of reasons enormous political difficulties in mobilizing resources in the most efficient way. If one wants to summarize my examples of developments of different political fields in France (and some other European countries) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one could say that the state as a powerful institutional entity did not come into being before the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. It was war and war mobilization and then the impact of the so-called Great Depression which not only fostered the belief that states are really able to shape society but also created the conceptual and institutional tools for all those who would try to do so. * What about the world outside of Europe? Did they do things differently there? There is no clear answer to that question. What seems to be apparent, however, is the fact that there was a complex interplay between – to use a somewhat contested phrase – centres and peripheries: Institutional inventions were sometimes made in the periphery and then transferred back to the centre. But even more often the periphery itself developed its own institutional paths which looked rather strange from the perspective of the centre. With respect to the first case, one must not forget that quite a few institutions which are held to be the creation of the centre had, in fact, peripheral origins. This, for example, is even true with respect to one of the most important institutions of the modern state – the police. It is often heard that ‘the first modern police institution in Europe was the London Metropolitan Police founded in 1829.’ This is not quite correct, however, since such a new and comparatively centralized institution was first created by the British government in Ireland as a kind of a colonial experiment. The police in London was a result of imperial policy rather than a genuine invention of some politicians or bureaucrats in a context of city-politics (Palmer 1988). – With respect to the second case it is remarkable to see how political institutions were radically transformed when used at the fringes of the Empire, and this  is  even true for British North America in the nineteenth century, i.e., for  Canada. In the late 1830s it was Governor Lord Sydenham’s aim to strengthen the executive branch of government in Canada – not really in harmony with the trend in British politics at that time. The building of canals,

Politics and the Social Imaginary  87 administrative reforms and a systematic immigration policy to Canada on the basis of free land should develop this British colony. Sydenham believed that the state has to play a quasi-natural role in the colonies – in rather stark contrast to its role on the British Isles (Radforth 1992: 81). Thus, to stress it again, the state and its role were considered rather differently in different contexts. Sydenham’s policy measures and ideas, very much inspired by Benthamian utilitarianism, were certainly not unknown further south in the Americas. In the early 1820s, immediately after the revolution in Spanish America, politicians in Buenos Aires such as Bernardino Rivadavia, nowadays often and pretty falsely remembered as the first president of the Argentine nation, tried in a similar vain to establish a utilitarian republic which, if successful, would have created centralized institutions resembling those which only much later onwards came into being in Western Europe (Gallo 2006). But Rivadavia failed, indeed the whole project failed, as the emerging civil war between Los Federales and Los Unitarios showed, in which – at the end – the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas and thus the victory of the Federales emerged which, at least on the surface, rejected the kind of centralized policy measures of the Unitarios. As a consequence, Buenos Aires and the United Provinces became a more or less unified state not before the 1860/70s and early 1880s when the city of Buenos Aires and – above all – its harbour were federalized so that the rest of the country could live on the enormous financial resources that were collected there via tariffs. The slow process of state-building was – with respect to other parts of Latin America – no exception, however. The institutional role of the state in these countries remained rather limited for quite a long time. Attempts of systematically collecting resources via taxes (not so different to trends in Europe at that time) were missing since it was much easier to establish tariffs. And although at least some political actors tried to push industrialization by a protectionist policy of high tariffs in order to allow the development of an industrial base at home (Chiaramonte 1982), that also failed. Resistance from the side of the great estancieros was too strong to overcome, so that free trade ruled the day in Argentina, which also meant that in the nineteenth century industrialization never took off. In fact, it was only with the Import Substitution Policy of the 1920 and 30s, when such measures were at least on the agenda of influential political figures until  – in the times of Juan Perón’s first presidency in the middle of the 1940s – it then indeed became a political priority. Here is not the place to push my historical reflections further into the direction of our present time. I think it is sufficient to say that when one talks about the state as a social imaginary of modernity one has to reckon with – to use Mauricio Domingues’ (2009) term – “modernizing moves”, with periods when the “state” as a concept and an institution – in some parts of the world, but not in others! – was pushed more and more into the centre of policy-making. That, however, happened rather late and the moves which took place with respect to timing differed a lot between different countries. But this talk of “modernizing moves” – now with a peculiar emphasis on the state – doesn’t

88  Wolfgang Knöbl tell us very much about the specific features of these moves, the particular features of the political structures that were intended to be built. And since nowadays there is still a lot of talk about neoliberalism and similar terms, it might be worthwhile – and here I will also conclude my historical reflections on the institutional history of the state – to look once more (and for a last time) at a case often neglected, the case of the early US-American republic because here one can see a “state” which, at least for European eyes, looked and looks rather strange and weak but one which in fact was enormously powerful and might teach us lessons for analysing countries that don’t fit the European institutional model. As recent historiography8 on the US state has shown, nation-building need not to be based on a centralized state and a strong bureaucracy, but could also be achieved by the responsiveness of a small administration to the needs and demands of its most powerful citizens (Edling 2009: 465). In this context US historian Brian Balogh coined the term “Government out of Sight” (Balogh 2009) by arguing that the power of the early US-American state in Washington was indeed great whenever it could cooperate with the states and with particular groups of capital owners. This can be seen when one looks at the quick infrastructural penetration of the country via canals, railroads, newspapers, postal services etc. Contemporaries spoke of “internal improvement”; indeed this was a remarkable achievement at least from the viewpoint of the powerful. And the mechanism at work for all these developments can best be detected by looking at the distribution of newspapers: The “Post Office Act” of 1792 handed over to American Congress the task of designating postal roads and building postal offices, without however going into detail. The result of this law was that an enormous number of immigrants coming into the country in order to settle further West put pressure on politics by writing petitions demanding roads and postal services so that they could communicate with the eastern parts of the country or even with Europe.9 Congress normally reacted rather quickly and designated postal roads and offices without much consideration of economic rationality. The whole process was driven by politics and political pressure mostly from the bottom up.10 The result was a network of postal offices denser than anywhere else in the world. So, if it is the case that, as is sometimes stated in the literature on developing countries (Portes and Smith 2008), a functioning postal system is a good indicator of a functioning state, then the early American republic already had a very reliable and powerful state. A state, however, that neither looked nor worked like the one in western Europe. In sum, the story of the early US-American state is another example of how different the state could look like both as a social imaginary and as an institutional reality. One should keep in mind that the modernizing moves undertaken might shape political structures very differently and that only a comparative and historical perspective on the state will allow meaningful statements about the possible futures of this social imaginary and its articulations. *

Politics and the Social Imaginary  89 Where do we stand after this brief comparative sketch of the history of the state-concept and the state as an institutional reality? It needs to be emphasized that the social imaginary of the state was not only differently articulated in different societal and historical contexts; it must also be stressed that the imaginary of the state is not a kind of cultural entity or a cultural kernel which was and is to be destined to unfold with a certain kind of logic. On the contrary, imaginaries about the political order change and travel, they were and are translated, used and modified so that the political imaginary of modernity – as Jóhann Árnason always emphasized – is a kind of shifting phenomenon. The state was and is an important part of this political imaginary; it is not the whole, and it has and had very different meanings in different regional contexts. And – to be sure: it is a comparatively new element within the social imaginary of modernity. This brings me to my last point, a more general one than the one discussed so far, and a point which – according to my opinion – has been neglected by theorists of modernity and even by Jóhann Árnason. If it is true – and important – that the state-concepts emerged rather late within modernity, that “the state” was interpreted rather differently in different contexts, what do theorists of modernity do with the overarching concept of “modernity” itself, which also emerged rather late. What does Árnason do with the fact that the concept of modernity only became influential in a particular period, that it simply didn’t exist for a long time, that it wasn’t used very much before the late 1960s? Isn’t there some need to historicize and contextualize the talk of modernity itself ? And if he and others would do so, what does that mean for our thinking about “modernity”? Looking into the German context (for the following see Knöbl 2022a) one might be surprised to learn that the term “Moderne” (“modernity”) had been coined in German not before the last quarter of the nineteenth century! In 1886, it was the literary critic Eugen Wolff (1986) who introduced it to the German-speaking intellectual public in an essay entitled “Die Moderne. Zur ‘Revolution’ und ‘Reform’ der Litteratur”. What is important here is the fact that Wolff defined the term (as is evident from the subtitle of his essay) in an art-historical context; he didn’t use it in order to describe or analyze an epoch in its entirety. One might be even more surprised if one realizes that – in contrast to many claims made by sociologists – the sociological classics did not use the term “modernity”; that they did not take up that art-historical term, but indeed almost avoided it. The sociological discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in countries such as France, Germany, Britain, Italy, and the United States is replete with analytical terms further specified by the use of the adjective ‘modern’: German social scientists such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber talked about ‘modern bureaucracies’, analyzed the ‘modern state’ and ‘modern capitalism’; their French colleagues, such as Gabriel de Tarde, Emile Durkheim or Marcel Mauss, talked about ‘société moderne’, ‘religions modernes’ or ‘le monde moderne’; US-Americans

90  Wolfgang Knöbl like Robert Park and George Herbert Mead talked about ‘modern life’ or ‘modern communication’. The term “modernity” (“modernité”; “Moderne”), in contrast, they almost never used, at least not in order to define an era.11 The only exception seems to have been Georg Simmel, who explicitly referred to the concept of “modernity”. As a closer look at his work shows, however, it is simply not true that Simmel must be considered as the foremost sociologist of modernity, as quite a few historians of the discipline sociology and particularly cultural sociologists claim. Simmel did use the term, but he referred to it almost exclusively in small essays that deal with art and literature, not in his major and more systematic works. The first clearly visible efforts12 to coin the term “modernity” within a social science context in order to designate a whole epoch are to be detected within post-1945 French sociology, initially in the work of the Marxist sociologist and cultural philosopher Henri Lefebvre (Introduction á la modernité, 1962) and then – probably more influentially – in the oeuvre of Raymond Aron (1969) (Les Désillusions du progrès. Essai sur la dialectique de la modernité from the mid-1960s). In Germany, in the mid-1960s, the concept of modernity was first taken up by those who, out of an interest in a diagnosis of our time, tried to sketch Germany’s historical development and – from a left or liberal point of view – to measure Germany’s “special path” (“Sonderweg”) against the background of the history of Western nation-states, for example when Jürgen Habermas (1987) spoke of a “delayed modernity”13 in 1965 or Ralf Dahrendorf analyzed the “long path [of this country] to modernity” in his famous Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland in the same year (Dahrendorf 1968: 77ff.). But even at that time, talk of “modernity” was still rather rare within sociology and political science. The breakthrough for the term “modernity” (“Moderne” etc.) thus didn’t happen before the late 1960s as a quick look at Google’s N-Gram-Viewer also demonstrates. * The conclusion, then, is that sociology did not establish itself as a science of modernity, but that the concept of modernity appeared comparatively late in the discipline’s history. In other words, sociologists have long resisted using the term at all. Even if the term occasionally popped up: as an important contemporary diagnostic term and as one that stood for certain theoretical assumptions and theses, it did not have a strong impact before the late 1960s and 1970s. But is all this important, is it relevant? Is it really such a big difference whether one speaks of the “modern” world, the “modern” time etc. – or of “modernity”? After all – so the possible objection against my own argument – the adjective “modern” has existed for a long time; it can be traced back at least to the seventeenth century to the famous “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes”. Is it really necessary to be so cautious with respect to the concept of modernity as I am. Is it really a problem to speak of the beginning of modernity sometime in the fifteenth/sixteenth or seventeenth century even if

Politics and the Social Imaginary  91 that term did not exist at these periods? The answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No’! ‘No’, because temporal cesuras within history (and thus eras or epochs) are not simply there but are created by hindsight; they are always constructed by the historian or the social scientist. If this is so, then the non-existence of the term in the period under consideration is not a hindrance for using the term modernity. ‘Yes’, because neglecting the temporal (or cultural) origins of the term modernity tends to forget that nounifications of adjectives (the making of a noun out of an adjective, the creation of the noun ‘modernity’ out of the adjective ‘modern’) inevitably lead to shifts in meaning, which is why it does not seem unreasonable to ask why the classics of sociology talked a lot about modern phenomena, but hardly ever about modernity. Why, in other words, did they not use a term that had been available in the field of art criticism in quite a few European languages since the mid-1880s at the latest? And why did that take off only happen in the late 1960s and 1970s? We are still in need of some clarification concerning the historical context when the concept of modernity was coined, and against whom or what it was directed? Which intellectual or political gains could be reaped by coining the term in the last third of the twentieth century? Which normative and theoretical assumptions went hand in hand with the use of this term? Which intellectual trajectories and path dependencies (necessarily?) result once such a concept is established? Here one could think of ideas of the supposed superiority of the Western world as well as of questionable premises in theories of social differentiation and social change (see Knöbl 2022b)! Thus my claim would be: Talking about modernity as a “historical configuration of the social imaginary” must take the “historical” seriously, more seriously than in the past, and who else could be a better historical interpreter than Jóhann Árnason in order to clarify the roots of the widespread use of modernity – and its consequences!

Notes 1 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (ed. by Otto Brunner/Werner Conze/Reinhart Koselleck). Stuttgart 1972–1997. In the following I will use the corrected “Studienausgabe” reprinted in 2004. 2 “Commercial expansion into the hinterland was the necessary precondition for the proliferation of Jefferson's freeholding farmers; similarly, Jefferson’s apotheosis of the yeomanry (…) constituted his tribute, cast in the most self-consciously archaic, neoclassical, republican terms, to the dynamic, decentered, and progressive political economy of the postmercantilist age” (Onuf 2000: 71). 3 Here I draw on formulations used in Knöbl (2013: 65). 4 For criticism of Eugene Weber see Cabo and Molina (2009). 5 Cf. for numbers with respect to public education Leonhard (2006: 145). 6 For Germany see Frevert 2001; for a comparative perspective see Frevert 1997. 7 Cf. also Osterhammel (2008: 881f.) and Ullmann (2005). 8 For a more detailed account see Knöbl 2016. 9 “Of all the changes that Congress set in motion with the Post Office Act of 1792, by far the most radical was its assumption of the power to designate the routes over which the government would carry the mail. Prior to 1792, this power had

92  Wolfgang Knöbl rested with the executive; after 1792, Congress decreed that it and it alone would determine how the postal system would expand. Though this decision was seemingly a minor administrative matter, in fact it had major implications for the pattern of everyday life, since it virtually guaranteed that the postal network would expand rapidly into the trans-Appalachian West well in advance of commercial demand” (John 1995: 44/45). 10 “The importance of the post roads cannot be understated. In 1810, one could travel thousands of miles to every major city and town from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi River, from Dayton, Ohio, to Nashville, Tennessee, and visit hundreds of smaller towns on and out of the way without ever stepping off a post road. By 1815, 2,158 miles of post roads connected 85 post offices in Kentucky and 2,778 miles of road linked 134 post offices in Ohio. To the west, longer roads reached isolated settlement. Approximately 609 miles of post roads extended to only sixteen post offices in Indiana Territory, and 388 miles did so for a mere nine postal centres in Illinois Territory” (Bergmann 2012: 154); see also Wood 2009: 479ff. and Howe 2007: 213 ff.). 11 Gangolf Hübinger (2016: 110) correctly claims that Max Weber has indeed avoided the term “modernity”. 12 Even in the “Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung”, the famous in-house journal of the Frankfurt Institute für Social Research, which was published between 1932 and 1941, there was hardly ever a reference to “modernity”. 13 Habermas, however, has used the term already before 1965 in his critique of approaches closely linked to a particular philosophy of history, see his essays on Reinhart Koselleck and Karl Löwith. Within the discipline of philosophy, the term “Moderne” or “modernity” has been accepted somewhat earlier than in the social sciences and related disciplines, as texts by Hannah Arendt published in the late 1950s clearly show (cf. Arendt 2012: 41).

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Politics and the Social Imaginary  93 Cabo, Miguel and Molina, Fernando (2009), “The Long and Winding Road to Nationalization: Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen in Modern European history (1976–2006)”, European History Quartely 39: 264–286. Cansanello, Oreste Carlos (2014), “Argentina/Río de la Plata”, in Javier Fernández Sebastián (eds.) Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano. Conceptos politicos fundamentals, 1770–1870 [Iberoconceptos – II]. Tomo 3: Estado. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, pp. 37–51. Chiaramonte, José Carlos (1982), Nacionalismo y Liberalismo. Económicos en Argentina. 1860–1880. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar. Conze, Werner (2004), “Staat”, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Band 6: St- Vert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 4–25. Dahrendorf, Ralf (1968 [1965]), Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland. München: Piper. Domingues, José Mauricio (2009), “Modernity and Modernizing Moves: Latin America in Comparative Perspective”, Theory, Culture, & Society 26 (7–8): 208–227. Dyson, Kenneth H. F. (1980), The State Tradition in Western Europe. The Study of an Idea and Institution. New York: Oxford University Press. Edling, Max M. (2009), “Review of Brian Balogh’s ‘A Government out of Sight’”, Journal of Policy History 21: 462–468. Frevert, Ute (ed.) (1997), Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Frevert, Ute (2001), Die kasernierte Nation. Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland. München: C.H. Beck. Gallo, Klaus (2006), The Struggle for an Enlightened Republic: Buenos Aires and Rivadavia. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas. Geva, Dorit (2013), Conscription, Family, and the Modern State: A Comparative Study of France and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grimm, Dieter (1987), Recht und Staat der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen (1987), “Verzögerte Moderne” (1965), in Philosophisch-politische Profile. Erweiterte Ausgabe. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 453–467. Hobson, John M. (1997), The Wealth of States. A Comparative Sociology of International Economic and Political Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howe, Daniel Walker (2007), What Hath God Wrought. The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hübinger, Gangolf (2016), “Max Weber und die ‘universalgeschichtlichen Probleme’ der Moderne”, in Hübinger (ed.) Engagierte Beobachter der Moderne. Von Max Weber bis Ralf Dahrendorf. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 108–129. Iriarte, Iniaki (2014), “Espaǹa”, in Javier Fernández Sebastián (ed.) Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano. Conceptos politicos fundamentals, 17701870 [Iberoconceptos – II]. Tomo 3: Estado. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, pp. 125–145. John, Richard (1995), Spreading the News. The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge, MA; London: Cambridge University Press. Knöbl, Wolfgang (2013), “State Building in Western Europe and the Americas in the long nineteenth century. Some preliminary considerations”, in Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro (eds.) State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain. Republics of the Possible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56–75.

94  Wolfgang Knöbl Knöbl, Wolfgang (2016), “Der neue Staat und die Revolution oder Schwierigkeiten bei der Analyse der Entstehung der frühen US-amerikanischen Republik”, in Ewald Frie and Ute Planert (eds.) Revolution, Krieg und die Geburt von Staat und Nation. Staatsbildung in Europa und den Amerikas 1770–1930. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 21–46. Knöbl, Wolfgang (2022a), “Moderne”, in Brigitta Schmidt-Lauber and Manuel Liebig (eds.) Begriffe der Gegenwart. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Glossar. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, pp. 205–214. Knöbl, Wolfgang (2022b), Die Soziologie vor der Geschichte. Zur Kritik der Sozialtheorie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004a), “Staat und Souveränität”, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Band 6: St- Vert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 1–4. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004b), “‘Staat im Zeitalter’ revolutionärer Bewegung”, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Band 6: St- Vert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 25–64. Lefebvre, Henri (1962), Introduction à la modernité. Préludes. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Lempérière, Annick (2014), “El Estado en los Espacios Ibéricos: Orden Natural o Máquina Performativa”, in Javier Fernández Sebastián (ed.) Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano. Conceptos politicos fundamentals, 1770–1870 [Iberoconceptos – II]. Tomo 3: Estado. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, pp. 15–35. Leonhard, Jörn (2006), “The Rise of the Modern Leviathan: State Functions and State Features”, in Stefan Berger (ed.) A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789–1914. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 137–148. Meadowcroft, James (1995), “State, Statelessness ‘and the British Political Tradition’”, Contemporary Politics 1 (2): 37–56. Münkler, Herfried (1987), Im Namen des Staates. Die Begründung der Staatsraison in der Frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag. Onuf, Peter S. (2000), Jefferson’s Empire. The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Osterhammel, Jürgen (2008), Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: C.H. Beck. Palmer, Stanley H. (1988), Police and Protest in England and Ireland 1780–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Portes, Alejandro and Smith, Lori D. (2008), “Institutions and Development in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis”, Studies in Comparative International Development 43: 101–128. Radforth, Ian (1992), “Sydenham and Utilitarian Reform,” in Allan Greer and Ian Radforth (eds.) Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid Nineteenth-Century Canada. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, pp. 64–102. Rosanvallon, Pierre (2000), Der Staat in Frankreich. Von 1789 bis heute. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Scheve, Kenneth and David Stasavage (2016), Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe. New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press. Stolleis, Michael (1990), Staat und Staatsräson in der frühen Neuzeit. Studien zur Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Ullmann, Hans-Peter (2005), Der deutsche Steuerstaat. Geschichte der öffentlichen Finanzen. München: C.H. Beck.

Politics and the Social Imaginary  95 Taylor, Charles (2004), Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Vries, Peer, (2015), State, Economy, and the Great Divergence. Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s. London: Bloomsbury. Weber, Eugen (1976), Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolff, Eugen (1986), “Die Moderne. Zur‚ Revolution und Reform der Litteratur”, Deutsche academische Zeitschrift (Organ der, Deutschen academischen Vereinigung‘), 3/33. Wood, Gordon S. (2009), Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789– 1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8 Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis within Left-Heideggerianism Kurt C.M. Mertel

Introduction1 In a recent interview with Suzi Adams, Jóhann P. Árnason notes that “A turn to social ontology would seem to promise a more plausible solution” to the problems of contemporary political philosophy and that “elucidating the being of the political within the social-historical is a more basic task than any normative construction; the possibilities, ambitions and limits of normative discourse will depend on prior ontological assumptions” (Árnason 2022: 2). The two-part interview, in addition to a forthcoming piece on the legacy of the Frankfurt School, encompasses topics such as the political difference, the phenomenology of praxis and world, creative agency and world-disclosure, Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus’ realism, humans as language animals, as well as the importance of Cornelius Castoriadis, Karel Kosík, and Jan Patočka for social and political philosophy (Adams and Árnason 2022a, 2022b, Árnason 2022; Adams 2023). What is particularly striking from the discussion as a whole is that not a single reference is made to the work of Martin Heidegger, despite his sizeable contributions to the topics above, not to mention influence on the aforementioned philosophers.2 As a result, bringing Árnason’s hermeneutically informed, phenomenological-Marxist approach to social theory into dialogue with the recent reception of Heidegger within critical theory and post-foundationalist or “Left-Heideggerian” thought, would seem both a necessary and fruitful endeavor. Indeed, the influence and relevance of Heidegger’s thought for critical theory, broadly construed, remains palpable in recent work within both post-structuralist3 and Frankfurt School traditions.4 While the label ‘LeftHeideggerianism’ embraces a broad constellation of theorists (Janicaud 2001; Marchart 2007), it is possible to claim that those belonging to the predominant strand – what I call the “political paradigm” of Left-Heideggerianism – share a commitment to political ontology as first philosophy. The cornerstone of this approach is its reformulation of Heidegger’s ontological difference into the political difference between politics (ontic) and the political (ontological). This, in turn, implies the derivative status of the socio-cultural as always already static, habitualized, and reified; emancipation requires its latent political, contingent, and ultimately groundless character to be periodically activated either through an exceptional “Event” [Ereignis] or the exercise of DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-10

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  97 political agency. Otherwise put, what is often referred to as the ‘instituting moment’ of politics reveals the essential groundless and antagonistic (political) nature of the instituted social order. This absence of an autonomous account of the social is thus described by Oliver Marchart as an “an ontology of the social conceived as political”, which, in turn, is tantamount to the subordination or sidelining of the civilizational (Marchart 2018: 238). Heidegger’s thought has arguably played a more peripheral role in the Frankfurt School than in post-structuralism. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify shared exegetical and systematic commitments that constitute the rudiments of what I have called the “social paradigm” of Left-Heideggerianism (Mertel et al., 2021). The most basic commitment is to situate the political within a broader social-ontological framework: all being-political is construed a mode of being-social (being-with), but not all being-with is mode of being-political. In my previous work (Mertel et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2020, 2021), I have taken one step further to uphold the constitutive status of the social difference between society (ontic) and the social (ontological). Since Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Heideggerian Marxism’, resources have been drawn almost exclusively5 from the early Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein in the service of a critique of social pathologies such as reification6 and alienation7. Subsequent generations of the Frankfurt School have largely followed this avoidance of the late-Heidegger, while maintaining a resolutely critical stance towards his early work.8 In this context, although he has not been considered as belonging to the constellation of ‘Left-Heideggerian’ theorists, Jóhann P. Árnason’s social theory, influenced by hermeneutics, phenomenological Marxism and post-Marxism, is unique in incorporating elements from both paradigms: the political difference is situated within the social-historical field, concepts he adapts from Cornelius Castoriadis (Árnason 2022). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that a commitment to the priority of social over political ontology does not necessarily entail a commitment to social difference. Hence, while Árnason clearly holds that the political difference should be understood from the horizon of the social-historical, it is unclear whether he would take the additional step to endorse the social difference, even though as will be shown, it is compatible with his approach. In light of the above, it is possible to claim that, in the current landscape of Left-Heideggerianism, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology remains absent in the political paradigm, whereas the social paradigm remains largely insulated from the resources of the late-Heidegger. Without the resources of the existential analytic of Dasein, the political paradigm runs the risk of being too “asubjective” and normatively empty to successfully account for the firstpersonal dimension of social pathologies (e.g. the self-alienation and reification experienced in emotional labor).9 The social paradigm, in contrast, remains incomplete and overly abstract without the further historicization of Being undertaken in the late-Heidegger, particularly through the History of Being [Seinsgeschichte]. The task, therefore, is to integrate both perspectives in a way that preserves the post-foundationalist core of the political paradigm, which rightly exposes the radical contingency underlying all

98  Kurt C.M. Mertel socio-political formations, while, at the same time, avoiding an overly-nihilistic emptying of ontology of content that might enable it to successfully diagnose and criticize social pathologies. In this chapter, I take up this task by sketching an alternative within the social paradigm10 that successfully syntheses the perspectives of both the early and the late Heidegger. The most important upshot of this integration for our purposes is to open the methodological and conceptual space for accommodating Árnason’s civilizational analysis within the social paradigm. Indeed, in spite of having only recently began a close engagement with Árnason’s work, our respective approaches arrive at similar commitments, albeit from different theoretical starting points. While Árnason may object to the label ‘Left-Heideggerian’, what is important here is not the label or intellectual provenance of these ideas and concepts per se, but rather the shared systematic commitments between both approaches. Hence, another important the consequence is to show why a return to Heidegger might be fruitful for civilizational analysts. In the first section of the chapter, I provide a brief account of the core features of the political paradigm, noting, along the way, key similarities and differences with the Castoriadian variety espoused by Árnason and Suzi Adams. This sets the stage for a social-ontological alternative in the second section, where I spell out the core features and commitments of fundamental ontology as a post-foundationalist social ontology, which clears the path for situating Árnason’s civilizational analysis within its framework and the current landscape of post-foundationalist thought, more broadly, in the third section. This is accomplished primarily by showing how the History or Histories of Being [Seinsgeschichte] can play the role of an ‘empty placeholder’ for civilizational analysis by introducing a crucial zeitdiagnostische dimension to fundamental ontology not only for the purposes of social criticism, but also for enabling a comparative analysis of different social imaginaries and their corresponding modes of being-in-the-world. The historical concretization of fundamental ontology is necessary for two reasons. First, its emancipatory aim – the de-reification and disalienation of the always particular Dasein – cannot be realized without an adequate understanding of the past and current socio-cultural constellations in which agents appropriate themselves, others, and the world. Second, an ahistorical ontology runs the risk of homogenizing the specificity and plurality of understandings of Being across geographical and temporal boundaries. One of the most important and characteristic hermeneutical gestures of Árnason’s work is its pluralizing and complexifying our understanding of ‘modernity’ and ‘civilization’; not only are there multiple civilizational paths to modernity, but they are always already internally contested and heterogeneous, and permeable to outside cultural, economic, and political influences. To be sure, such similarities between the approach to social ontology outlined here and that of Árnason should not, to a certain extent, appear surprising given the formative influence of phenomenology and hermeneutics – including Phenomenological Marxism – on his thought. Nevertheless, the

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  99 equally prominent role played by Cornelius Castoriadis helps to complicate the relationship between Árnason and post-foundationalism, especially since Marchart considers Castoriadis as a representative of the political paradigm (Marchart 2007: 108). This, in turn, raises the question of whether social imaginaries or civilizational patterns can be understood as always already political in the sense of antagonism or whether they can be understood as social sui generis and, therefore, as enabling political agency. At the same time, Árnason’s meticulous, nuanced comparative analyses of various social imaginaries might appear almost too “positivistic” for Marchart, a charge he has previously leveled against Foucault’s genealogy (Marchart 2018: 99–100).11 As a result, the basic upshot of the chapter will be to serve as a point of departure for future research on the relationship between and potential role of Civilizational Analysis within Left-Heideggerianism and post-foundationalist thought broadly construed, while lending further support to Árnason’s claim that “the phenomenological-hermeneutical framework [is] the most adequate perspective for Civilizational Analysis” and that Heidegger’s thought “stands emphatically for the idea of engaging seriously the question of diverse ways of being-in-the-world” (Árnason 2013: 357).

The Political Paradigm of Left-Heideggerianism The hallmark of the political paradigm is its reformulation of the ontological difference between the ontic and the ontological (beings and Being) in terms of the political difference between the politics (la politique) and the political (le politique). The political is defined in terms of an event or radical antagonism (conflict, struggle, etc.) that provides the quasi-transcendental ground of politics: the ontic level of established political practices, institutions and subsystems (ibid.: 5). The unbridgeable ‘abyss’ [Ab-grund] separating the political from politics hence attests to the impossibility of society as an ultimate metaphysical ground:12 on the one hand, no particular ontic politics can be derived from the political; on the other, no politics can bring about a total and permanent closure of society. As such, there will always be a plurality of ultimately unsuccessful attempts at grounding it because of the underlying conflictual character of the political underlying all social formations. This reversal of the priority of the social in favor of the political is motivated by different versions of what Marchart refers to as the ‘colonization’ or ‘sublimation’ of politics by the social, e.g. by being reified into one subsystem among others governed by immutable social laws, by being caught in the ‘iron cage’ of modern society characterized by bureaucratization, juridification, etc., or by being reduced to superstructure (ibid.: 44–48). Árnason would likely agree with this claim,13 but might question whether this must lead to the ‘politicization’ of the social. It is thus possible to claim that the political as antagonism is a response and solution to the false reification of society by foundationalist social theories, which not only conceal its conditions of possibility and, therefore, its own groundlessness, but also suppress the free and contingent nature of political agency in the process.

100  Kurt C.M. Mertel By contrast, Cornelius Castoriadis understands politics in terms of “an overt collective understanding of the self-institution of society; a concomitant of its citizens’ – as a social-political collective – capacity to question and change its own laws and mores; the task of self- limitation”, whereas the political refers to “the configuration, institutionalization and distribution of political and infra-power that every society must make” and the inevitable conflicts and struggles that accompany it (Adams 2023: 8). Nevertheless, on Adams and Árnason’s reading, Castoriadis’ political difference does not play the kind of foundational role it does in Marchart because it is embedded within a broader social ontology, viz. the social-historical field, which provides the context for politics and the political. Hence, Castoriadis cannot be straightforwardly situated within the camp of the political paradigm, as Marchart does (Marchart 2017). From the perspective of Marchart’s political ontology, however, Castoriadis’ construal of the political – identifying it with the given factical configuration of political power and governance in a society – would appear too ontic to serve as the ontological ground of politics. It is more akin to Marchart’s own concept of (sedimented) society, whose latent antagonistic character is continually re-activated through (ontic) political agency. As a result, it fails to capture the underlying antagonistic and, therefore, dynamic and abyssal character of the political. Árnason’s own critique of Castoriadis’s political difference echoes Marchart’s: it is guilty of reducing the political to “an inferior version of politics, rather than an underlying and encompassing dimension, which is more commonly assumed, and which I think we need to thematize” (Árnason 2022: 331). The problem, however, is that the solution offered by the political paradigm takes for granted the reified and ultimately ontic conceptions of the social or of society from their rivals – positivism, systems theory, classical Marxism, etc. – without enquiring into the Being of the social as such. This is manifest in the way it theorizes the relationship between the social and the political: the political is described by Marchart, following Ernesto Laclau, as the ‘moment of the institution/reactivation of society’, while politics refers to concrete attempts at questioning and grounding society through political agency. The social is correspondingly associated with ‘sedimented’ practices that can be ‘reactivated’ through political action; the social represents what is fixed, rigid, closed, static, etc., whereas the political acquires opposite characteristics such as freedom, contingency, dynamism and openness. The derivative character of the social is further underlined by its status as an ontic concept alongside politics, policy, polity and police (Marchart, 2007: 6). From the above, it follows that there is no sui generis account of the social within the political paradigm: both its ontological and its ontic meanings are to be derived from the political difference. For this reason, Marchart admits that he ‘prefer[s] speaking about political ontology rather than social ontology’ (Marchart, 2007: 168). Seen from this vantage point, the history of social theory becomes a series of failed attempts of theorizing society as a self-enclosed, foundational object or totality, an enterprise whose impossibility

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  101 is disclosed by the aforementioned conflictual moment of the political. While Árnason would explain these failures differently – e.g. by appealing to the transcendent and creative role of imagination in the formation of social imaginaries and of the essential open character of the social-historical field – and might not go as far as Marchart et al. do in the direction of political ontology, he nevertheless holds that the overly-totalizing concept of society as traditionally employed in Marxism and systems-theory, must be “defused” (Árnason 2022). Hence, Árnason equally stresses the importance of theorizing the Being of the political, albeit from within the broader perspective provided by the social-historical field, which is always already implicated with power and conflict (Árnason 2022, Adams 2023: 8). To the extent that society exists only as an impossible object, an impossibility rooted in the political as antagonism, Marchart claims that ‘there is no such thing as society’. The social is thus correspondingly understood as concrete spheres or sites of antagonism, awakened from their ‘slumber’ through political agency. The social as such, however, has no dynamics or movement of its own; it is always already reified, inert, static. Otherwise put, the terms ‘social’ and ‘society’ are simply different names for designating a kind of ‘Seinsvergessenheit’. The end result, however, remains the same: the subordination of the social to the political, which, in turn, amounts to the subordination of the civilizational. Consequently, it might be conjectured that the affinities between Árnason and the political paradigm end precisely at this point. Interestingly enough, Adams’ own Castoriadis-inspired political ontology seems to operate on the same assumption about the social as always already fixed and closed, especially since it appears to be equated with the ‘instituted moment’ of society: As soon as interrogation of the established institution of society appears – no matter how partial, nor how oblique […] – then there is an opening onto politics (la politique) […] To wit, the emergence of politics alters the very terrain of the political, and the instituted closure of society is opened. Once autonomy as la politique comes into play, it hinges onto the contestation of the already instituted, on the one hand, and the imagined alternatives for the future (mentioned by Árnason), on the other (Adams 2023: 8; italics added). Elsewhere, social movements (qua la politique) are described as having the ability to “break open the closure of the social world” and, therefore, as a “world opening” activity. (Adams 2023: 12–13) In sum, without thinking the Being of the social from out of the social, which involves theorizing the social difference between society and the social, the reification of the social as such becomes unavoidable. Indeed, from the perspective of the political paradigm, it is not always clear what the exact referent of ‘society’ is in a given context: sometimes it stands for a (failed) attempt to serve as an ontological concept, while in others it is an ontic phenomenon

102  Kurt C.M. Mertel that is constructed through political agency. Hence, it might be claimed that the problem Marchart and Árnason rightly identify with the history of social theory – the reification of society as a closed system – is not due to the subordination of the political into a subsystem among others per se (Marchart), but rather its inability to adequately think the Being of society due to their underlying (reifying) metaphysical assumptions. Indeed, as sociologists Kenneth Aspers and Sebastian Kohl have argued (2013), the history of social theory is the history of thinking the social from an entirely individualist, subject–object ontology, a problem an appeal to the hermeneutical phenomenology of Being and Time can help to solve.

The Social Paradigm of Left-Heideggerianism Let us begin our reconstruction of fundamental ontology as social ontology by taking the definition of the hermeneutics of facticity as a basic point of departure, viz. as an emancipatory project that aims at the disalienation of the always specific Dasein: It is the task of hermeneutics to enable the specific Dasein to gain access to its own character of being as Dasein, to proclaim it and to trace back the self the self-alienation that is plaguing Dasein. In hermeneutics what is developed for Dasein is a possibility of its becoming and being for itself in the manner of an understanding of itself […] The theme of hermeneutical inquiry is the always particular Dasein, more specifically questioned as to its character of being with a view to developing a radical awareness of its own self.14 (HOF: 11–12) To clear the path for the disalienation of Dasein, a corresponding de-reification of Being is required by reformulating the traditional question “What is Being?” into a question of its meaning for an ethical, rather than an epistemic subject.15 In other words, the reifying logic of the “what?” question must be replaced with a hermeneutical “who?” question. In maintaining an orientation towards the metaphysical question of “the all,” a core commitment of the emancipatory project of fundamental ontology is that an adequate diagnosis and critique of alienation and reification is possible only from a holistic standpoint, i.e. one that has the totality of human existence in view. As such, it is not surprising that the early Marcuse maintained fundamental ontology must be prior to Marxist-Hegelian social ontology, since it provides a broader and therefore more adequate perspective from which to diagnose social pathologies (Marcuse 2005: 39, 44–45). This is a line of thought that has since been ignored by both political and social paradigms, but one that will be pursued in what follows. When we consider the well-known claim that what distinguishes Dasein from all other beings is that Being is an issue for it, what is referred to is existence as a whole – the totality of beings or of what is – addressing it as

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  103 something that matters and toward which it must respond in one way or another. It cannot be emphasized enough that ‘Dasein’ designates a multifaceted ontological structure that not only encompasses self, other, and world, but is always already present simultaneously in all an agent’s doings. It ­follows that the freedom of Dasein must be correspondingly social in character: To be free is to understand oneself from out of one’s own capacity-to-be; but ‘oneself’ and ‘one’s own’ are not understood individually or egoistically, but metaphysically. They are understood in the basic possibilities of transcending Dasein in the capacity-to-be-with with others, in the capacity-to-be by extant things, in the factic-existentiell capacity-to-be in each case toward oneself. (MFL: 214) Authentic Being-with is correspondingly described as a “freedom with-oneanother” that encompasses the totality of beings. The question of the “All” can thus be reformulated as a question of “What does it mean to ‘be’ in such a way that connects us with all other beings?” It is precisely at this point that we confront the question of civilization(s), modernity, and the possibility of finding commonality amidst plurality. The basic challenge posed by the question of the meaning of Being can thus be formulated as follows: How is it possible for everything to simultaneously matter to us and for us to articulate meaningfully all that matters all at once? While the circular, performative, historical, and linguistic character of all understanding and interpretation makes this an impossible task – ruling out the possibility of an all-encompassing metaphysical system – it does not thereby diminish the necessity and fruitfulness of ontological inquiry. This is why language is defined by its constitutive world-disclosing function: the primary unit of meaning is not to be construed as a discrete object (empiricist-instrumental), nor a proposition (descriptivism), but rather as a text, story, poem, narrative, etc. i.e. a world or social imaginary qua totality of existential possibilities. To be sure, the fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence implied in the question of Being were already captured in the Umweltanalyse of Being and Time, viz. the analysis of tool manipulation. When the hammer breaks, the background network of taken-for-granted beliefs and skills are disclosed along with the thing-like (present-at-hand) character of the hammer. What is most important for our purposes, however, is the way it reveals our essential entanglement in a network of interdependence or pattern of meaning: not only does the proper functioning of the hammer require the presence of other equipment, but the equipmental context as such ultimately refer back to other agents (e.g. craftsmen, producers, etc.) and to a broader, symbolically structured society in which such practices serve a specific function and acquire a shared meaning. The crucial implication of the Umweltanalyse is that agents are always already embedded in a network of

104  Kurt C.M. Mertel social relations that are neither always already reified and alienated, nor political as such. The question of the political is thus enabled by the fact that Being as a whole always already addresses and matters to our possibilities of being as the ontological precondition for ethical agency as such – being-political is, therefore, a distinctive mode of being-social, not the other way around. From this perspective, the ground of being-political is care and even solidarity, not antagonism; conflict, power struggle(s), strife, protest, etc. are distinct modes of mattering, but cannot exhaust care as such. Hence, the social paradigm is in agreement with Árnason that, “it is surely a high priority task to clarify the distinction between politics and the political”, but that this enterprise must be situated within “a turn to social ontology” as sui generis (Árnason 2022: 330-31). Indeed, when further asked about the difference between political and social imaginaries in light of his understanding of the political difference, Árnason’s stance remains unchanged: We should think of political imaginaries as components or domains of social imaginaries, and their specific features can be analyzed with that in mind […] We can start with the specific place of the political within the broader social context […] A secondary approach would focus on the imaginary dimension of relations between political and other orders of social life. (Árnason 2022: 335) Disclosing “holes” in the social order, moreover, does not require political agency per se precisely because it is always already sieve-like: it provides an open, dynamically unfolding horizon of meaning that privileges some and filters out other phenomena and, therefore, can only feign exhaustibility. Every disclosure, whether subjective, intersubjective, or trans-subjective, is always simultaneously a concealing and, therefore, partial and incomplete. As a result, no ontology can justifiably lay claim to providing an exhaustive grasp of society. Nevertheless, a constitutive feature of Das Man, as elaborated in Division 1 of Being and Time, is precisely its pretensions to providing a comprehensive normative order: it is the ideological “mask” it adorns to conceal the underlying contingency and nullity [Nichtigkeit] of its foundations and, therefore, the limits of sovereign power and the associated scope for creative, subversive agency. Indeed, Dasein’s Being as a whole is permeated by a “not”, by nullity and, therefore, the lack of a metaphysical ground. As such, this “mask” gets unraveled through the account of death, anxiety, historicity, and authenticity developed in Division 2, which discloses the ultimate lack and impossibility of absolute metaphysical foundations of society. From this perspective, the reified account of the social/society provided by the political paradigm can, ironically, be better understood as an accurate description of the false, ideological self-understanding of Man. Taking the post-metaphysical, linguistic turn’s de-transcendentalization of the subject and of as a point of departure, if all understanding is linguistic,

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  105 interpretive, and situated, then reason can never be “pure” since there is no correspondingly pure, universal language; no formalization of language could possibly capture all possible meaningful utterances or contexts and, therefore, Being. The ‘factical’ in the hermeneutics of facticity refers to the irreducible singularity, plurality, and underivability of everyday life from any ontological framework or worldview. Thus, the fulfillment of fundamental ontology demands a “turning-back” [Rückkehr] to facticity, i.e. to culture in its diversity of language-games and the essential performativity or contextuality of meaning implied therein. In relation to Árnason’s approach, this implies that there is no escape from the demand to do justice to historical and socio-cultural difference and nuance, even if this involves the risk of descending into “nominalism” and getting lost in the details.16 In light of the above, fundamental ontology must therefore be conceived as a radically open-ended and fallible project. Its abandonment of any claim to completeness and systematicity is reflected in Heidegger’s re-­construal of the function of its existential-ontological concepts in terms of ‘formal indication’. Formally indicating concepts are neither universal categories that supply a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for subsuming objects, nor are they simply empty labels attached to them through “baptismal acts”. Rather, they indicate or orient us towards certain phenomena or contexts without exhaustively determining them a priori; they can be described as having no “special content” or “not binding” from an ontic perspective (BT: 361). The ontological structure of Dasein, therefore, does not designate a “what” or content in advance, but rather a “how”, thereby leaving space open for the new, the unanticipated, the creative. Formal indicators must thus be ‘thin’ enough to allow space for factical, situated appropriation, but not so much so as to provide no guidance or criteria; they must allow space for mutual exchange and illumination between the ontic and the ontological, which is deftly exemplified in Árnason’s approach to social theory. In short, formal indication reflects the decidedly post-foundationalist rejection of the traditional aspirations of philosophy as metaphysics to provide a system that can provide an exhaustive grasp of Being as a whole: Exactly this appearance of the formally indicating consideration, which feigns finality and universal applicability, makes a fool of philosophy when the latter believes to find itself and its task, which is as such meagre and therefore so hard to detect and establish, in abstract systematic conceptualization. (PIE: 65; emphasis added) The defining incompleteness of fundamental ontology as a dynamic, openended (“feign[ing] finality”), emancipatory enterprise implies, moreover, that it must be “filled in” through appropriation by regional ontologies and, therefore, be interdisciplinary in character: “When understood historically, the relationship between ontic interpretation and ontology is always a correlative

106  Kurt C.M. Mertel relationship insofar as new existentialia are discovered from ontic experience” (ZS: 207). This dynamic, historical unfolding of the ontological difference is captured in late Heidegger’s now-famous move from ‘Sein’ to ‘Seyn’. In this context, it should be stressed that the post-foundationalist, “abysslike” character of the social does not domesticate the political within a self-contained subsystem – a legitimate concern that Marchart has with the sociological tradition. This is because it implies a necessary “gap” between fundamental and regional ontology: the move from the former to the latter can only be accomplished via a “leap”, rather than through a logical derivation or the necessary effect of a prior, foundational cause. In other words, it opens the space for thinking the political in a way that is amenable to a variety of interpretations, but this does not mean that all interpretations must be equally valid or compelling. In short, the above sketch makes it possible to construe fundamental ontology as a post-foundationalist social-ecological ontology of interdependence. From this perspective, civilizational analysis no longer looks like an extraneous add on, but rather an integral part of the fulfillment of fundamental ontology’s necessary return to factical for the sake of the factical. That is to say, an agent’s ontic, pre-ontological self-understanding is both the methodological point of departure and the ultimate destination. Consequently, no interpretation of Being can be legitimately imposed on Dasein from without; a non-reifying engagement with the other requires a nuanced understanding and reconstruction of their hermeneutic situation. This necessarily involves learning the language of the other, since to possess a language is to possess a world, i.e. access to the symbolic spaces of other cultures and cultural spheres, which enable and shape our individual and collective self-understanding. The ultimate validity of ontological concepts, therefore, depends upon their appropriability under concrete socio-historical circumstances, which Marcuse glossed as the ‘truth of appropriation’ (Marcuse 2005: 35). This, in turn, is where the History or Histories of Being can play a role within the social paradigm, namely to disclose the limitations and possibilities for authentic self-appropriation inherent in our epochal understanding of social reality, thereby contributing to a “science of the possibilities of authentic being” (Marcuse 2005: 14).

Conclusion: Situating Civilizational Analysis with the Social Paradigm The hermeneutic-ontological mode of disclosive critique outlined above thus shares with Árnason a basic commitment to the articulation of the socialhistorical contexts of action in which Dasein always already finds itself. In other words, it aims it revealing the ‘meta’ or ‘non-normative’ field that underlies and makes human agency possible.17 This is why I have argued (Mertel et al. 2016) that Heidegger’s tripartite distinction between authentic, inauthentic, and undifferentiated modes of being-in the-world is the cornerstone of fundamental ontology qua social ontology: existential-ontological categories

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  107 are to be understood, first and foremost, as formally indicating and modally neutral (undifferentiated), which enabling authenticity and inauthenticity but not ontically committing agents to one or another a priori. It follows that, at the factical level, all societies are more or less authenticity-promoting: there can be no strict distinction between “autonomous” and “heteronomous” societies, as is found in Castoriadis, a feature of his thought criticized by Árnason: An autonomous society, becoming conscious of itself, by the same token posits itself as superior to heteronomous ones. But there are three sets of problems with this dichotomy. In the first place, we cannot draw a clear dividing line between an autonomous and a heteronomous condition; there are only historical mixtures of the two, and it is not obvious how we are going to rank these mixtures. (Árnason 2022: 334) Indeed, understanding the social as an always already open field of meaning or mattering rules out such dichotomies. This does not mean, however, that reasoned distinctions between more or less autonomy or authenticity-promoting societies are not possible, as Árnason has rightly maintained: I have […] argued that we need a non-normative concept of modernity as a social-historical field, within which normative options and alternatives can be articulated, but remain locked in conflict; in that sense, I accept the position formulated in various ways from Max Weber to Alasdair MacIntyre: that modern attempts to develop a strong and unified normative framework have failed. This does not mean that we cannot have good grounds for preferring some modern alternatives to others. A reasoned defence of democracy is possible, but not on any transcendental or quasi-transcendental grounds, nor in a way that would allow us to overcome its internal tensions. (Árnason 2022: 333) In light of the above, fundamental ontology thus construed rejects a robust a priorism that reifies the social or politicizes it in advance, a problem Árnason has repeatedly stressed in relation orthodox Marxism and, to a lesser extent, the Frankfurt School (Árnason 2023). For this reason, fundamental ontology qua emancipatory project must appeal to the “social difference”18 between society and the social – the latter corresponding to the ontological dimension [das Man] and the former to its ontic instantiations – even though it was not employed by Heidegger himself.19 It is worth emphasizing that the ontological structure of Dasein as a whole is social: it cannot be identified with or derived from any of the existentiale. Nevertheless, the social “begins” with das Man in the sense that it represents a methodological point of departure for the analysis of social relations and formations within concrete

108  Kurt C.M. Mertel societies precisely because it co-enables and permeates them thoroughly; das Man and Mitsein are mutually irreducible, equiprimordial, but we cannot adequately understand the possibilities for authentic Mitsein afforded by any given society without understanding the way the social order is discursively, symbolically, and normatively structured, which, in turn, requires an analysis of sovereign power. It follows that questions such as, “Who is the ‘One’ [das Man] and associated ‘One-self’ [Man–selbst] at transnational, national, and local levels – how is it instantiated in various social, cultural, and political contexts, and how does it influence our individual and collective possibilities for an authentic appropriation of self, other, and world?”, among others, are of crucial importance. This is precisely why, as argued above, that the social paradigm must be informed by and shaped through a critical engagement with the social sciences and humanities, including civilizational analysis. This, in turn, amounts to the claim that an adequate grasp the full scope of the possibilities for authentic agency, requires an understanding of the epoch in which one lives, particularly of the predominant understanding of Being because our ontological assumptions are neither formed in a historical vacuum nor are they neutral: they have practical consequences on our concrete modes of being-in-the-world (e.g., reifying or alienating effects). The History or Histories of Being can thus be introduced into the picture to provide the kind of epochal understanding of Being – which is always appropriated by concrete agents in concrete socio-historical contexts – required for the fulfilment of the emancipatory promise of fundamental ontology. It is necessary to underline that a commitment to the necessity of disclosing of the epochal understanding of Being that both enables and constrains human agency does not entail fatalism about our individual and collective situation. As such, the traditional criticism laid against the Seinsgeschichte, viz. that it justifies complete passivity and quietism in the face of our contemporary predicament is misguided.20 The Seinsgeschichte does not foreclose the possibility of free agency because what is at stake is always a mode of comportment, viz. the appropriate response to the predominant way in which existence is understood and reveals itself in the current age of technology.21 To properly perform its role within the social paradigm, the Seinsgeschichte must have the status of an empty placeholder or formal indicator so that it is not unduly constrained by or forced to inherit whatever problems might remain from Heidegger’s own construal of it. No one, including Heidegger himself, can claim a monopoly on the project of fundamental ontology; the general validity of the Seingeschichte’s function within an emancipatory enterprise thus remains intact. If we consider, moreover, that Marcuse’s eventual abandonment of Heideggerian Marxism was motivated, in part, by the alleged ahistorical and overly formal/empty character of fundamental ontology, the introduction of a reformulated Seinsgeschichte into the picture provides the social paradigm with enhanced conceptual tools hitherto ignored by most Left-Heideggerians, while opening methodological and conceptual space for accommodating civilizational analysis (Marcuse 2005: 168).

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  109 To conclude, in light of the fact that disalienation and de-reification are always targeted to the “specific Dasein” in its concrete socio-historical circumstances, it appears impossible to provide an adequate analysis and assessment of the current possibilities for human emancipation without addressing the seinsgeschichtlich or zeitdiagnostische level, i.e. technology as the predominant way of understanding reality. An adequate Zeitdiagnose, however, cannot be construed along the lines of the political paradigm, i.e., by reifying the socio-cultural in advance. Rather, we must be open to learning from other cultures or civilizations, which requires an openness to what in ontic experience might have emancipatory potential, and in what sense. As such, our sketch of the social paradigm ultimately leads to agreement with Árnason on the principal tasks of political philosophy, viz. disclosing the “place and weight of the political sphere in the context of a multi-dimensional being-inthe world” and “elucidating the being of the political within the social-historical is a more basic task than any normative construction; the possibilities, ambitions and limits of normative discourse will depend on their ontological assumptions” (Árnason 2022: 1–2). More importantly, it represents an important step towards the vindication Marcuse’s original insight, viz. to ground the social sciences in fundamental ontology and, therefore, to provide the kind of ‘social’ ground for the social sciences, called for by Aspers and Kohl (2013): The ontological historicity of Dasein must … assume decisive significance for the methodology of the “social sciences.” Social arrangements, economic orders, and political formations together constitute the happening of Dasein and must be viewed from the perspective of this existence [Existenz]. If they are investigated from the outset as “things,” with an eye toward their structure, their relationships, and the laws of their development, the observations (most likely undertaken with the model of the natural sciences as their mistaken ideal) that result will be such that the meaning of these constructs cannot even appear. (Marcuse 2005: 39; italics added)22

Notes 1 This chapter builds upon and extends the line of thought pursued in Mertel et al. 2019, 2021. 2 This is not to deny that there might be good reasons for this, as Árnason has alluded elsewhere that he believes significant advances in phenomenology have been made post-Heidegger. Rather, the point is that the lively engagement with and fruitful appropriation of Heidegger’s thought within the contemporary landscape of contemporary post-foundationalist, Left-Heideggerian thought combined with the hermeneutical-phenomenological background of Árnason’s social theory, make for a fertile ground for a constructive dialogue. 3 The most prominent examples being, among others, Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Oliver Marchart (2007, 2018), Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala (2011).

110  Kurt C.M. Mertel 4 Qualified appeals to certain Heideggerian concepts and ideas can be found in Axel Honneth’s (2008) critique of reification, Rahel Jaeggi’s (2016) critique of alienation, Hartmut Rosa’s sociology of time and acceleration theory, as well as Hans-Herbert Kögler’s (1999) critical hermeneutics, Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology (2002, 2010, 2017) and Nikolas Kompridis’ (2006) disclosive mode of critique. 5 An exception to this is Feenberg, for whom the late-Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is an important resource. Nevertheless, he views the work of the early and the late periods as largely incompatible. In this regard, he follows Marcuse, who thought the late-Heidegger’s philosophy represented a complete break from the early emancipatory project of the hermeneutics of facticity and confirmed its ultimate inadequacy as a paradigm for social criticism (Marcuse 2005). 6 Axel Honneth (2008) draws upon Heidegger’s notion of care for his quasi-transcendental critique of reification 7 Rahel Jaeggi (2016) makes use of some basic insights from Being and Time in her broadly neo-Hegelian critique of alienation. 8 In this context, the criticisms of Marcuse, Adorno, Habermas, and Kögler, among others, are well-known. Nevertheless, the predominant, over-simplifying narrative of a one-sided, critical reception is being challenged by recent scholarship (Immanen, 2020) that reveals not only a more symmetrical and fruitful dialogue between fundamental ontology and Frankfurt School critical theory, but also a stronger influence of the former on the latter than is usually acknowledged. 9 I have argued this is greater detail in Mertel, 2017. For an application of fundamental ontology as a critique of self-alienation and reification in the service economy, see Mertel et al., 2016. 10 In my previous work (Mertel et al., 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2019, 2020, 2021) I have called the approach the “appropriative view” of social ontology because of the foundational role played by the notion of appropriation (of self, other and world). The current sketch of the social paradigm presupposes and builds upon the previous account of appropriation, but does address it explicitly. 11 The relationship between Árnason’s civilizational analysis and the genealogy and critique of power is further complicated by his preference of Norbert Elias’s relational theory of power, which he takes to be a precursor of Foucault’s. 12 Following Laclau and Marchart appeals to Heidegger, Being has an abyss-like character: the ground ‘grounds’ only as an abyss. 13 Indeed, in a recent paper (2023), Árnason argues that the kind of totalizing conceptions of society employed in the Frankfurt School from its inception to the present must be “defused”, which in turn, amounts to a “downsizing” of critical theory. Marchart’s (2013) reconstruction of the sociological tradition as a series of failed attempts of objectifying society – society as an ‘impossible object’ – is generally congenial to such a project. 14 I adopt the translation from Grondin (1994) in the first and third sentences and that of van Buren (1999) in the second. From now on, I will employ the following abbreviations for Heidegger’s texts (all references are to their respective English translations, unless otherwise noted): Being and Time (BT). Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (MFL). The Hermeneutics of Facticity (HF). The Zollikon Seminars (ZS). Letter on Humanism (LOH). Logic: The Question of Truth (LQT). Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression (PIE). 15 I thus follow Heidegger’s original definition of fundamental ontology as a fundamental ethics [ursprüngliche Ethik] that discloses the elementary pre-conditions of any morality or ethics. 16 Marchart, for example, argues that Foucault’s focus on the micrological leads to a kind of nominalism or social objectivism that falsely ‘onticises’ the ontological: “[Foucault] is hindered both by his blanket rejection of the negativistic tradition of Hegel and Marx and by his own nominalism, sometimes bordering on social

Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  111 objectivism, which prevents him from differentiating between an ontic and an ontological dimension of the social” (Marchart 2018: 99–100). On my view, however, it is precisely Foucault’s “blanket rejection” of any Marxist-Hegelian premises that makes his genealogy such a compelling approach to critical theory in its own right. The social paradigm sketched here does not rely on any MarxistHegelian assumptions, which in my view, makes possible an integration of Foucauldian genealogy as applied hermeneutical ontology and, therefore, crucial to the fulfillment of the original emancipatory aim of fundamental ontology. Of course, this line of thought cannot be pursued further here and it is an open question as to whether Marchart would read civilizational analysis in the same way, i.e. as suffering from the same problems as Foucauldian genealogy. 17 Engaging the debate between Wagner (2023) and Árnason on the difference between a meta and non-normative social ontology is beyond the scope of this present paper. 18 I develop this concept in more detail in Mertel et al. 2016, 2017a, 2020, and 2021. 19 Having said that, he clearly acknowledged, for example, that the ontological structure of das Man manifests itself in different ways in different socio-historical circumstances: “das Man [has] various possibilities of becoming concrete as something characteristic of Dasein [seiner daseinsmassigen Konkretion]. The extent to which its dominion becomes compelling and explicit may change in the course of history” (BT: 167). 20 Feenberg (2010) has offered such a criticism, to which I have responded in Mertel et al., 2020. Marchart also accuses the late-Heidegger of a “vacuous passivism” and account of agency as “passive activity”, which must be replaced with a “active passivity” or activism (Marchart 2018: 159, 196). While a response to this line of criticism is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that Heidegger’s radical re-thinking of subjecitivity as Dasein is premised precisely upon a rejection of the passivity-activity dichotomy inherited from German Idealism and its concomitant causal theory of agency (I have argued that this rejection motivates a turn to ‘appropriation’ as the ‘Ur-phenomenon’ of Dasein in Mertel et al., 2016). As a result, from a Marxist-Hegelian perspective, Gelassenheit, Besinnung, etc. cannot appear as anything but passive, ineffectual, apolitical, impotent, etc. and, therefore, misses the point entirely. And the same goes for non-Western, non-Eurocentric modes of agency such as Wu-wei, which is another reason why the social paradigm remains a more compelling approach to social ontology. 21 For a more detailed account of the role of the Seinsgeschichte in the social paradigm, see Mertel 2018, 2020, & 2021. 22 The priority of fundamental ontology is also captured in Marcuse’s often-made claim that phenomena must be grasped from the “totality of human Dasein” (Marcuse 2005: 123, 129–130, 142).

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Situating Jóhann P. Árnason’s Civilizational Analysis  113 ———. “Two Ways of Being a Left-Heideggerian: The Crossroads Between Political and Social Ontology.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 4(9) (2017a): 966–984. ———. “Self-Appropriation vs. Self-Constitution: Social Philosophical Reflections on the Self-Relation.” Human Affairs: Postdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences Quarterly, 27(4) (2017b): 416–432. ———. “Situando la Seinsgeschichte en el proyecto del heideggerianismo de Izquierda.” Proceedings of the 14th Meeting of the Peruvian Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, (2019): 1–10. ———. “Heidegger, Technology and Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(2) (2020): 467–486. ———. “Towards a Social Paradigm of Left-Heideggerianism.” In Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman (eds.) Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique. New York: Lexington Books, 2021, pp. 171–193. Vattimo, Gianni and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx and Back. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Wagner, Peter. “Ways out of the Modern Labyrinth: Normative Expectations and Subsequent Social Change.” In L̓ubomír Dunaj Jeremy, C.A. Smith and Kurt C.M. Mertel (eds.) Civilization, Modernity, and Critique:Engaging Jóhann P. Árnason’s Macro-Social Theory. London: Routledge, 2023.

Part III

Modernity in the Plural: Civilizational Analysis and the Axial Age Debate

9 The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Claims of European Civilization Hans Schelkshorn Introduction Immediately after World War II Karl Jaspers published a comprehensive philosophy of history, The Origin and Goal of History (1953), with its centerpiece the theory of the Axial Age. Jaspers’ historical thinking found little resonance in postwar philosophy, however, and it took until the 1980s before the theory of the Axial Age was absorbed and developed further, most revealingly not in philosophy but in the disciplines of the social sciences, history, and religious and cultural studies (Eisenstadt 1986a; Árnason, Eisenstadt, Wittrock 2004; Bellah, Joas 2012). Eisenstadt and Árnason translated the theory of the Axial Age into macrosociology and elaborated a sociological theory of civilization (Árnason 2003; Eisenstadt 2003). In philosophy, the Axial Age was then first taken up by the early conceptual approaches of ‘intercultural philosophy’ emerging at the end of the 1980s in the Germanspeaking world (Mall, Hülsmann 1989), but also by Frankfurt discourse theory (Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas). In this context, Heiner Roetz presented a vast study on the ethics of the Chinese Axial Age (Roetz 1993). The theory of the Axial Age is not merely a thesis based on the empirical observation of a historical epoch but concurrently part of a theory of modernity (Schelkshorn 2017; Assmann 2018). With the classical theories of progress and the sociological theories of modernization increasingly suspected of Eurocentric bias in the late twentieth century, Jaspers’ theory of the Axial Age offered an important new perspective that appreciatively recognizes cultural diversity in global modernity. The following considerations therefore delineate, first and foremost, the relationships between the Axial Age and modernity. Such an analysis means, however, bypassing the controversial question if the Axial Age is in fact historically verifiable at all or nothing but a myth (Assmann 2012). Despite all the necessary corrections and adjustments, Jaspers’ concept of the Axial Age remains a heuristically productive approach for a philosophical interpretation of human history. As I wish to show in the following, the theory of the Axial Age is not correspondent to a specific interpretation of modernity. On the contrary: after a general explication on the “discourse about modernity” in the first section, the chapter offers a comparison between Jaspers, Eisenstadt/Árnason, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-12

118  Hans Schelkshorn Habermas, which will show that the Axial Age serves as a historical background for completely distinct interpretations of modernity. For all his criticism of Hegel, Jaspers preserves key themes of his philosophy of history, and thus, in the debate on the Axial Age, the question of the universal claims of European modernity recurs on a new level. From this perspective I will then, in a third section, draw connections between Árnason’s theory of multiple modernities, Habermas’ post-metaphysical defense of European Enlightenment, and my own theory of modernity as a process of manifold de-limitations.

A Preliminary Clarification: the “Discourse about Modernity” Ever since the Enlightenment, the terms “modern age” and later “modernity” have been identified as marking a radical break with tradition while fueling a variety of ideas, above all progress, modern science and technology, market economics, and democracy. This dual conception of modernity engenders serious problems, however. Firstly, the distinction between traditional and modern societies categorically blends out possible processes of enlightenment in earlier epochs of humanity, both within and outside of Europe. Secondly, identifying modernity with normative principles such as democracy and human rights implicates that antidemocratic philosophies like Comte’s positivism, and political movements such as fascism and totalitarianism, are not integral to the modern epoch, which is obviously counterintuitive. To avoid the questionable exclusions resulting from a normative conception of modernity, I would first like to follow Hans Blumenberg’s thesis of an epochal consciousness of a modern – i.e. a new – age that originated out of the erosion of Christian theology of history. With the new knowledge gained through geology, in Europe the horizon of the past suddenly extended back several million years; simultaneously, stripped of its salvational telos, the future was now open, the horizon of its trajectory indeterminate. This epochal consciousness of the modern age, more precisely the consciousness of living in a global world with a radically open future, generated a need to reflect on the position of the respective present in history: “The modern age was the first and only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in doing so, simultaneously created the other epochs” (Blumenberg 1983: 116). The epochal consciousness of the modern age inheres a reflective spiral, for now one question is constantly prevalent: what constitutes the new of this new age, or what makes the modern age modern? For Foucault, Kant’s What is Enlightenment? initiated a recalibration, the question as to our contemporary existence and condition now the focal point of philosophy. The traditional questions addressed by philosophy – “What is the world? What is man? What is knowledge? What is truth” and so on – are suddenly joined by a fully new problem demanding an answer: “What are we in our actuality?” (Foucault 1988: 145). Asking about the respective present age, the contemporary condition, can be described as a “discourse about modernity.” “Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Husserl, Heidegger, the Frankfurterschule” – in other words, almost all the important philosophical thinkers since the

The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities  119 eighteenth century – “have tried to answer this question” (Foucault 1988: 145). Any historical reflection as to what is constitutive about the present is unavoidably reliant on empirical data, and hence, from the outset, the discourse about modernity was never the exclusive domain of philosophy. Other disciplines and sciences were also involved, in the eighteenth century history and national economics, and since the nineteenth century sociology, which continues to set the tone. From a philosophical perspective, the discourse about modernity is “impure,” a transdisciplinary discourse. In the eighteenth century, French and English intellectuals proclaimed their own age as the age of Enlightenment. In effect, this means that “Enlightenment” is only one possible interpretation of the modern age; many others are also possible. Because the idea of “Enlightenment” is inseparably tied to normative principles, historians cannot describe the epoch of the Enlightenment without making value judgements. Jonathan Israel has thus distinguished between the radical enlightenment reverberating out of Spinoza’s profound critique of religion from the more moderate enlightenment espoused in Germany, which was more circumspect in its considerations on religion (Israel 2001, 2019). To proclaim one’s own time as the age of the Enlightenment is, however, charged with a remarkable dash of polemic, a hostile aloofness encapsulating Eurocentric arrogance, a trait recently underscored by historians (Pečar, Tricoire, 2015). This means in sum that, on the one hand, philosophical discourses about modernity inevitably refer to and draw on the vast pool of empirical data of historical developments; on the other, however, when attempting to determine the central features of modernity, disciplines in the social sciences and cultural studies are forced to employ normative categories and principles, which are, in turn, the constructs of specific philosophies. Although presenting Origin and Goal of History as a philosophy of history, Jaspers negated the deterministic evolutionism inherent to classical philosophy of history. No longer possessing secure knowledge as to the origin or goal of history, the crux of a philosophy of history has to reside in understanding our present: “The source of understanding is our own present, the here and now, our sole reality” (Jaspers 1953: 10). The adequate horizon for this understanding is, however, that of a universal history. The “whole history of mankind” is required “to furnish us with standards by which to measure the meaning of what is happening at the present time” (Jaspers 1953; xiii). In short: Jaspers’ philosophy of history is a contribution to the discourse about modernity in the Foucaultian sense.

Constellations between the Axial Age and Modernity – Jaspers, Eisenstadt, Árnason, and Habermas Jaspers introduced his philosophy of history with an unsparing diagnosis of his present age. Germany’s surrender sealed not only the defeat of the Nazi regime but marked the very end of Europe’s global hegemony. From now on, Europe will be forced to integrate into a polycentric world society. Jaspers

120  Hans Schelkshorn proceeded to then deconstruct Hegel’s philosophy of history: by identifying Europe’s onetime superior civilization as founded on ancient Greece, the sole authentic birthplace of philosophy, and Christianity, Jaspers adopted Hegel’s thesis of the transition from myth to logos, but at the same time refuted the claim that philosophy is a monopoly of Greek antiquity. The theory of the Axial Age radically broadens the perspective: along with ancient Greece, philosophy originated in the Near East, India, and China. It is now untenable to claim Christianity to be the intellectual foundation for a global world order (Jaspers 1953: 1). Given this background, it is clear that Eisenstadt, Árnason, and Habermas have all absorbed the theory of the Axial Age, while however going on to elaborate their own interpretations of modernity, parting ways with Jaspers. For Jaspers, there is a clear and unambiguous answer to the question “What is the modernity of the modern age?”: “The sole specifically new and radically different element, that bears no resemblance to anything that has come out of Asia is entirely autonomous, and foreign even to the Greeks, is modern European science and technology” (Jaspers 1953: 81). With modern science and technology spreading globally, Jaspers compares modernity to the prehistoric or Promethean Age, when humankind developed the elementary techniques of survival and social life (fire, tools, language etc.) (Jaspers 1953: 28–43). However, modern science and technology have radically transformed all societies across the globe, and in such a uniform way that a global civilization has arisen in which cultural differences are systematically levelled out or even eliminated totally. Jaspers is thus by no means a theorist of multiple modernities. Quite the contrary: the dominance of modern science and technology promotes not only a homogeneous world civilization but also a nihilism that grips not just the Western world, but devalues various canonical sources of spiritual and moral life, the teachings of the great figures of the Axial Age like Socrates, the prophets of ancient Israel, Buddha, Zarathustra, Confucius, or Lao-tzu. It is against this background that Jaspers kindles hope for the dawning of a second Axial Age, with new spiritual figures and religious reformers finding a way out of modern nihilism. Going against the grain of secularization theories, for Jaspers it is not inevitable that modern Enlightenment leads to atheism. The vision of a spiritual and moral renewal of humanity has to take the reflection processes initiated by the axial and modern ages seriously, for they have opened up a space of limitless communication. Faced with the challenge of nihilism, religious traditions only have a future if they are reinterpreted philosophically. And so, Jaspers paves the way for a second and global Axial Age by reinterpreting the thought of Buddha, Confucius, Plato, Nagarjuna, and other religious and metaphysical thinkers. Moreover: the global communicative community, produced by modern technology, creates a space enabling the political ideals of the European Enlightenment to be realized, in particular the ideas of human rights, democracy, and international law. In this way Jaspers retains the universalist claims of European modernity despite his critique of the Eurocentrism and evolutionism of Hegel’s philosophy of history.

The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities  121 Eisenstadt and Árnason draw on Jaspers’ Axial Age in formulating their civilization theory of modernity. Despite all the criticism of the sociological theories of modernization, the main components of the standard theory of modernity are not simply negated but relativized, above all those of institutional differentiation, modern science and technology, the nation-state, and capitalism. And joining the defenders of the Enlightenment, Eisenstadt and Árnason definitely assert the idea of autonomy as the core element of European modernity: “New horizons of autonomy include the projection of growing knowledge into power of nature, visions of alternative social orders and efforts to translate them into practice, as well as conceptions of self-interpreting and self-determining subjectivity” (Árnason 2020: 11). What Eisenstadt and Árnason question is, rather, the idea of a linear and global spread of European modernity. Encountering strong civilizations with cultural and political patterns long in place since the axial period, the expansion of European modernity has by no means established a single uniform global civilization, as modernization theories presuppose. Indeed, the contrary is true: central elements of European modernity have been modified, transformed, or even rejected by non-European axial civilizations. This means that, in contrast to Jaspers, Eisenstadt and Árnason use the theory of axial civilizations differently: rather than taking it as the intercultural background for a critique of scientific-technical civilization, they lay it as the foundation for their vision of multiple modernities. Eisenstadt and Árnason strictly distinguish the theory of multiple modernities from those of Spengler and Huntington, who have described global politics in terms of the coexistence or clash of closed civilizations. Following the spread and creative adaptations of European modernity since the fifteenth century, any notion of pure non-European cultures is anachronistic: “Civilizational frameworks, more or less selectively reconstructed and pragmatically readjusted, can serve to legitimize modernizing projects and mobilize social support for them, without translating into sustainable variants of modernity” (Árnason 2003: 43). Árnason is thus careful to correct latent holistic tendencies, even in Eisenstadt’s civilizational approach to modernity. A third view advocating a relationship between the Axial Age and modernity is that put forward by Jürgen Habermas, who has been referring to Jasper’s philosophy of history since the 1970s (Mendieta 2018: 11f.). In his recently published magnum opus, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte (2019), Habermas describes the Axial Age in terms of setting a holistic background for post-metaphysical modernity. For Habermas, the Axial Age was dominated by religious and metaphysical worldviews, and the social orders founded were thus informed by ideas of transcendence (logos, god, dharma, Dao, etc.). Hence, the various breakthroughs to reflection characteristic of the Axial Age still remained locked in dogmatism. It was the epochal achievement of modern Enlightenment to overcome the dogmatic holism of religious and metaphysical worldviews. Since this watershed, the differentiation of value spheres and subsystems is now driven by procedural types of rationality and no longer metaphysical and religious ideas. In short: post-metaphysical thinking and universal criticism are the fundamental intellectual features of modernity.

122  Hans Schelkshorn One major consequence is that modernity has no other alternative but to draw its norms from its own principles, and not return to the exemplary models of the Axial Age as Jaspers had proposed. This does not imply, however, that religious and metaphysical worldviews are blankly discarded in Habermasian modernity. On the contrary: confronted with the dangerous aberrations of modernity, the religious traditions of the Axial Age need to be translated into post-metaphysical thinking. A philosophy of religion has no legitimate place, however, in this post-metaphysical modernity, a point Habermas emphasizes in critical reference to Jaspers (Habermas 2019: I, 100–109). This brief look at Jaspers, Eisenstadt/Árnason, and Habermas shows how differently relationships between the Axial Age and modernity may be described. This is, however, not a diversification from a shared historical fundament. All of these descriptions stem from different interpretations of the Axial Age itself. Although integrating religious movements like the prophets of Israel, Jaspers by no means reduces the Axial Age to a set of religious and metaphysical worldviews, as Habermas assumes. In fact, Jaspers clearly notes that the Axial Age witnessed the emergence of “the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities, down to skepticism, to materialism, and sophism and nihilism” (Jaspers 1953: 2). For Jaspers, the Axial Age marked an epochal breakthrough to reflection, and this reflective capacity saw mythical traditions pulled into the maelstrom of criticism. Moreover, this axial breakthrough led to a second-order reflection, where crucially the very possibilities and limits of knowledge were explored and determined: “Consciousness became more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object” (Jaspers 1953: 2). This means that the ideas of transcendence articulated in religious movements and metaphysical philosophies represent only one dimension of the widespread “disputes of the schools,” a defining characteristic of the Axial Age: “The most contradictory possibilities were essayed. Discussion and the formation of parties, division of spiritual realm into the opposite […] created unrest and movement to the very brink of spiritual chaos” (Jaspers 1953: 2). Spiritual chaos was not the only consequence of these “disputes of the schools”; social and political anarchy ensued, a void out of which new empires emerged: At the end, the collapse took place. From about 200 B.C. onwards great political and spiritual unifications and dogmatic configurations held the field. The Axial Period ended with the formation of great States, which forcibly realized this unity (the unified Chinese Empire of Tsin ShiHwang-Ti, the Maurya dynasty in India, the Roman Empire). (Jaspers 1953: 194) These new empires rigorously suppressed the “disputes of the schools” and the consequences were grave: “The free struggle of the spirits seems to stand still. The result was a loss of consciousness” (Jaspers 1953: 194). Deprived of any possibility of political participation, people were condemned to lead a

The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities  123 life of “mere obedience and subjection”; indeed, “all were slaves” (Jaspers 1953: 195). Unable to return to the mythologies of the pre-axial archaic kingdoms, these new monarchies justified their imperial claims to power on the religious and metaphysical ideas of the Axial Age: “The imperial idea was realized in forms founded on religion” (Jaspers 1953: 194). The distinction between the Axial Age and the post-axial empires casts a sharp light on the present, an aspect Jaspers emphasizes. Although there can be no return to the Axial Age, a conviction Jaspers shares with Habermas, the current state of modernity reveals at least a “historical analogy with the end of the Axial Period” (Jaspers 1953: 194). In its search for a global order, humankind is confronted with an alternative of extreme polarities: to either re-actualize the idea of rational self-consciousness founded in the Axial Age and secure it in a global order based on human rights, democracy, and the law of nations; or to establish an authoritarian or even totalitarian world state, akin to the empires of the post-Axial Age. This is where it is possible to highlight more precisely the differences between Jaspers’ theory of the Axial Age and its “translations” into macrosociology by Eisenstadt and Habermas. Eisenstadt also identifies a growth of reflectivity in the axial period, initiated initially by small groups of intellectuals (Eisenstadt 1982: 298). This is not the decisive innovation of the axial period, however; this lies rather in “the radical distinction between ultimate and derivative reality (or between transcendental and mundane dimensions, to use a more controversial formulation)” (Eisenstadt 2012: 278). This transcendental is not Kantian, but a religious or metaphysical principle of reality cast in terms of a whole, for instance the logos, Tao, or an otherworldly god. Thus, the resultant tension between the transcendental and mundane order, desacralizing the archaic institution of the god-king, was where the fundament for new political projects and doctrines of individual salvation had to be found. In a rough overview, Eisenstadt distinguishes between purely this-worldly and purely otherworldly ideas of the transcendental, which stand in different relationships to the mundane order. In China and ancient Greece, respectively, a worldly concept of the transcendental dominates; in Hinduism and Buddhism, however, the idea of otherworldly salvation developed. And, in turn, the monotheistic religions combine this worldly and otherworldly visions of the transcendental order (Eisenstadt 1986b: 16). Jürgen Habermas takes up Eisenstadt’s ontological distinction between the transcendental and mundane, transforming it into the theory of religious-metaphysical worldviews (Habermas 2019: 307–480). Thus, the new empires since 200 BC no longer mark the end of the Axial Age, but initiate the widespread institutionalization of its religious and metaphysical worldviews. In summary, Eisenstadt and Habermas both dissolve Jasper’s differentiation between the Axial Age and the period of the post-axial empires. Despite this remarkable consensus, Eisenstadt and Habermas determine the relationship between the Axial Age and modernity in different ways however.

124  Hans Schelkshorn For Eisenstadt, in contrast to the Axial Age, the proprium of modernity can be described as a growth of reflectivity that prompts not only varying interpretations but also radical questionings of transcendental visions as such. Although modern reflectivity extends the horizons of autonomy in a qualitative dimension (Eisenstadt 2000a: 3f.), it still preserves a certain continuity. Eisenstadt emphasizes two aspects in response to the question of the novelty of the modern age. Firstly, man and nature are no longer interpreted in the light of transcendental principles but as autonomous realities whose inner order can be completely explored. The naturalization of the cosmos and humans marks the turning point between premodern and modern ontologies (Eisenstadt 2000b: 24). Secondly, the transcendental ideas serve not only as normative measures for social and political life, but as Leitideen for political revolutions and ideological struggles. Never before in human history can we observe a belief that political action can bridge the gap between the transcendental order and the world (Eisenstadt 2000b: 15). Thus, protest movements aim to realize transcendental visions, in terms of the biblical metaphor, “the Kingdom of God” on earth (Eisenstadt 2000b: 34). In effect, Eisenstadt generalizes Löwith’s deconstructive interpretation of modern philosophies of history as secularizations of the Christian salvation history (Löwith 1949). Since the intensified reflectivity multiplies the interpretations of the modern idea of autonomy, Eisenstadt’s historical macrosociology inevitably changes into philosophical reflections in the strict sense. More concretely, Eisenstadt refers to Toulmin’s theory of a twofold origin of the modern subject founded by Erasmus and Descartes. Moreover, he develops a complex typology of the antinomies, tensions, and contradictions within the modern ideas of autonomy, reason, freedom, creativity, etc. (Eisenstadt 2000b: 24–35). Due to its global spread and influence on other regions of the world, the political and ideological struggles characteristic of European modernity have provoked countless modifications, transformations, and reinterpretations, in both institutional and intellectual spheres. Moreover, the transcendental ideas of other axial civilizations also become the ferment for new forms of political protest and self-assertion. Thus, Eisenstadt’s concept of multiple modernities contains sociological descriptions of institutional patterns from non-European societies as well as intellectual debates in the global discourse of modernity, which are resident more in the field of intercultural philosophy. In contrast to Eisenstadt, Habermas first emphasizes the discontinuity between the axial period and modernity. The religious-metaphysical worldviews of the Axial Age serve as a holistic background for the structural differentiation of modern societies. Defending the project of Enlightenment, Habermas describes the economic and political systems, in conjunction with value spheres (of science, morality, aesthetics), as the institutionalization of special types of rationality, which were still confounded in the religious and metaphysical worldviews of the Axial Age. The modern naturalization of man and nature is explained with the theory of postmetaphysical thinking, wherein axial ideas of transcendence are replaced by

The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities  125 procedural forms of rationality. Even moral and political norms must be justified by the procedural norms reconstructed in discourse ethics. Moreover, Habermas de-constructs all religious and metaphysical ideas of transcendence, disclosing them as projections of the holistic horizons of the lifeworld in which human subjects are situated (Habermas 2019: I, 471– 480). The modern rationalization of the lifeworld thus promotes a rupture and is not merely a growth of the reflexive potentialities of the Axial Age. Deconstructing the projective mechanism within religious and metaphysical thinking, European Enlightenment has irreversibly overcome the Axial Age of worldviews. Nevertheless, the Axial Age and modernity are connected by some subterranean links, which Habermas has described in detail in his recent work Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte (2019). Here I shall limit considerations to just two aspects. Firstly, the emergence of post-metaphysical thinking was actually prepared by developments in Christian theology, where faith and knowledge had already been differentiated. Secondly, the post-metaphysical thought of modernity has inherited numerous themes and motifs from religious and metaphysical worldviews. For this reason, even the basic concepts of modern morality can only be understood against the backdrop of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a point Habermas frankly concedes (Habermas 1994: 16). This means: while on the one hand, modernity marks the end the Axial Age, on the other, it cannot understand itself without retrospective reflection on its own relationship to the Axial Age.

De-constructing the Universal Claims of European Modernity: Sociological Civilization Theory and Cross-cultural Philosophy From the referential background of Jaspers’ theory of the Axial Age, both the sociological theory of civilization as well as intercultural philosophies de-construct the universality of European modernity. The concept of “universality” has, however, two varying meanings: the empirically describable globality and the universal validity claims, which though can only be discussed philosophically (Árnason 2020: 198). The civilizational theory deals primarily with the phenomenon of the globalization of modernity and its consequences. Crafting the concept of “multiple modernities,” Eisenstadt and Árnason have proposed a middle path between the extremes of modernization theories and Huntington’s clash of civilizations. In light of the civilizational approach to modernity, Eisenstadt and Árnason have emphasized the cultural and sociopolitical preconditions for the rise of European modernity. Unlike China and the Byzantine empire, Latin Christianity was shaped by a number of centers of political power, and these centers generated the freedom for religious and republican protest movements to flourish. Urbanization led to an expansion of trade, and in turn this went hand in hand with political movements of expansion. The founding of universities initiated a scientific revolution (Eisenstadt 2000b: 20–45).

126  Hans Schelkshorn Modernity is, however, by no means just another civilization comparable to those in the Axial Age. In Árnason’s major and important formulation, modernity is a civilizational formation sui generis, both more and less than a civilization in the more conventional sense: the modern constellation is marked by civilizational traits which distinguish it from its historical background and constitute an effective challenge to all preexisting civilizational identities, but it is also in some degree adaptable to civilizational contexts which differ more or less radically from its original source. To synthesize both aspects is obviously no simple task. (Árnason 2003: 42) Árnason also rejects Eisenstadt’s thesis that modernity has spread globally from Europe, obviously struck by its simplicity. Rather, “we can think of the transition to modernity as a matter of multiple trajectories, taking off in different settings but ultimately converging in a global configuration” (Árnason 2020: 88; cf. Eisenstadt 2000b: 45). And hence, global politics also cannot be reduced to a clash of civilizations. Numerous elements of modernity, like capitalism, state formation, democracy, the nation, can be found in premodern societies […] It is the combination of these elements, in conjunction with a massive and multidimensional but ambiguous enhancing of human autonomy, and the new meaning thus given to each component, that defines the modern watershed. (Árnason 2020: 92) Although significant cultural and societal breakthroughs have taken place in non-European civilizations, it seems undeniable “that the European combination vastly surpassed other cases in regard to transformative implications” (Árnason 2020: 92). Despite this unique combination, non-European civilizations have not simply adopted but, in this process of adoption, genuinely modified and transformed the cultural, political, and economic patters of European modernity. Although this image of modernity “has no normative implications” (Árnason 2020: 92), Árnason is fully aware that the dictum “ambiguous enhancing of human autonomy” touches on the delicate question of a normative concept of modernity. In general, normative questions can be hardly neglected; but given the global dominance of European modernity, they are indeed prevalent. One of the main questions from the normative complex is whether the modern ideas of autonomy can be justified as a universal claim, and, if so, exactly which ideas of autonomy could be accepted as the founding principle of modernity, even when suppressed by historical movements. Further to this brace, we have to clarify the ambivalences inherent to the modern idea of autonomy.

The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities  127 At this juncture, it seems necessary to return to Habermas and his explicit defense of the universal claims of European modernity. Transcending the dogmatic limits of axial worldviews, post-metaphysical thinking establishes a normative framework for global communication between all cultures. Indeed, through its inclusion of atheistic and agnostic voices in public discourse, post-metaphysical thinking marks out a space, broader and deeper, conducive to and fostering plurality. Despite this, Habermas’ justification of a post-metaphysical idea of autonomy opens itself to a series of objections. Foremost is how in his reconstruction of post-metaphysical thinking, approached through the prism of occidental debates on “faith and knowledge,” Habermas seems to undermine the universalistic claims of his own theory of modernity. Aware of this, Habermas offers a remarkable forward-looking relativization: in the postcolonial age of global multiculturalism, even the claims of post-metaphysical thinking will need to be defended in a future intercultural dialogue, one that moreover will transcend the limits of his intellectual competence (Habermas 2019; I, 111). Habermas thus presents a monologue thought experiment to hypothetically test the relevance of post-metaphysical thinking in identifying and establishing a global moral and political order (Habermas 2019: I, 110–135). The rationale is clear: Habermas is presenting his concept of post-metaphysical thinking as a European contribution for resolving the thorny question as to which cognitive presuppositions need to be accepted to conduct successful intercultural dialogues concerned with problems of a global order. Given that non-European philosophies have been reflecting on Europe since the late eighteenth century, the monologue experiment staged by Habermas inscribes a limit on the theory of a post-metaphysical modernity, one that is all the more remarkable when we consider the work of Karl-Otto Apel, the cofounder, as it were, of discourse ethics, who engaged in an intensive and long-lasting dialogue with Latin American liberation philosophy from 1990 to 1997 (Schelkshorn 1997). Nonetheless, Habermas’ demand for intercultural dialogues reveals a certain deficit plaguing civilization theory as well. To take one example: Eisenstadt’s unorthodox view of Japan’s road to modernity was criticized for neglecting Japanese analysis (Lee Yu-ting 2011). On the level of sociological – and not merely epistemic – reflection, Habermas interprets global modernity as a forum and indeed even as battlefield where multiple modernities, each referring to and drawing on different axial civilizations, come into conflict. At this point Habermas carefully modifies Árnason’s civilization theory, which distinguishes between two dimensions of modernity, one that is distinct or decoupled from all premodern axial civilizations, including those in Europe, and another that can be linked to premodern civilizations. Habermas’s theory of global modernity, however, embraces three levels: global system mechanisms, especially capitalism and the bureaucratic state; the identity discourses of the axial civilizations; and a post-metaphysical normative setting that enables the political ideals of the European Enlightenment to be applied to global modernity (Habermas 2019: I, 118 120).

128  Hans Schelkshorn Without denying its heuristic relevance, Habermas’ theoretical architectonic begs the question if these three levels of global modernity can be strictly separated. Árnason at any rate seems to undermine the dichotomy between system imperatives and cultural patterns: a civilizational approach assumes that cultural premises are relevant to the autonomization of economic and political processes; the operative cultural definitions have to do with visions of mastery over nature as well as with new horizons of institutional differentiation, and they call for broader and more complex interpretations than those involved in traditional accounts of the spirit of capitalism or ideas behind the modern state. (Árnason 2003: 42f) The focus on the “cultural premises” of modern subsystems in general, i.e. not only those informing capitalism, opens up a potentially significant perspective for a different philosophical discourse of – and about – modernity. And it is precisely here that I can position my own studies on early modernity within the macro-sociological debates. When approached from a philosophical perspective, the codes of modern value spheres or subsystems are not the result of an anonymous process of functional differentiation but arise out of and accompany epochal cultural changes. A comprehensive consideration of the philosophies of the Renaissance and the early modern age lays the groundwork to precisely reconstruct the cultural breakthroughs paving the way for the genesis of modern value spheres and subsystems. What is moreover salient here is that the philosophes formulated between 1400 and 1700 not only detected the logic intrinsic to the market system or the power relations between territorial states, but also elevated the status of their respective Leitideen by subjecting them to continuous – and thus reflective – debate. This means that the Leitideen of the modern subsystems are neither unchangeable codes (Luhmann) nor mere objectifications of certain types of rationality (Habermas). Moreover, modern science and technology, the idea of human rights, and a dynamic market economy, all of which were still celebrated in the eighteenth century as progressive achievements of the Enlightenment possessing universal validity, came under fire in the twentieth century, both in and outside Europe. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the impetus of Bacon’s new science is a totalitarian will to power that degrades nature to being nothing other than a material of technological manipulation: “Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters” (Horkheimer, Adorno 2002: 2). For their part, postcolonial philosophies have offered a different critical focus, revealing the racism of Enlightenment philosophy. The dispute about the universal claims of European modernity can only be resolved through a dual perspective: the sociohistorical context and its formative influence in the genesis of modern value spheres and subsystems need to be taken into consideration, while the

The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities  129 connections to the enlightenment processes of the Axial Age must be clearly detailed, for these processes produced an incipient differentiation of rationality into various types. To be able to appropriately describe the proprium, and along with it the extreme ambivalences inherent to the modern ideas of enlightenment and autonomy, I have proposed the concept of “de-limitations/Entgrenzungen” (Schelkshorn 2009, 2019). The first point to make is that the Leitideen of modern societal systems were theoretically formulated in the context of two epochal de-limitations from the antique-medieval worldview. Even before Copernicus, Nicolas de Cusa forgoes the idea of a limited cosmos, replacing it with that of an infinite universe (Schelkshorn 2009: 95–125). Further, the transoceanic expansion launched by the Iberian sea powers transcended the limits of the oikumene. Both of these de-limitations evoked profound changes in all fields of cultural and societal life in Latin Christianity, paving the way for the rise of European modernity. To illustrate this allow me here to briefly note the contributions of Francisco de Vitoria, Francis Bacon, and John Locke. The School of Salamanca was the first intellectual movement in Europe that reflected the new global constellation after the conquest of America (Schelkshorn 2009: 205–298). The colonial debates in the sixteenth century referred both to the Aristotelean theory of the natural slavery of barbarian peoples and to the Stoic and Christian idea of the unity of humankind. Ancient political thought, however, was either focused on the polis or tacitly accepted the Roman Empire. Thus, the ancient cosmopolitanism never developed a political philosophy corresponding to its ethical universalism. Against this background, the spectacular innovations of the moral and political thinking of the School of Salamanca become discernible. Inspired by the colonial de-limitation of the oikumene, Vitoria developed the first philosophical foundation of a law of nations, an epochal rational breakthrough in European philosophy. Moreover, extending the horizon of moral responsibility to the whole of humankind, Vitoria formulated the first theoretical expression of what is called “humanitarian intervention” in current debates. Nonetheless, due to his unwavering faith in the superiority of Christian religion, Vitoria actually distorted this spectacular vision of a global order for all peoples beyond the logic of imperialism. Thus, Vitoria’s law of nations is a striking example of the ambivalences and complexities of modern processes of enlightenment. Vitoria’s global cosmopolitanism entails enormous gains in rationality, for instance the recognition of the rights of all, and initiates cultural projects unknown to ancient philosophies, like the vision of a communicative world society based on an extreme extension of moral responsibility. On the other hand though, it also furnishes new justifications of imperial power. A similar constellation is observable in Bacon’s foundation of modern science, profoundly inspired by Renaissance philosophy and the transoceanic expansion of the European powers (Schelkshorn 2009: 411–470). On the one hand, Bacon systematically integrates the experimental method into natural

130  Hans Schelkshorn philosophy. Combining systematically technical innovations and theoretical reflections, Bacon opened new ways to a progressive rational exploration of nature combined with permanent improvements of technologies. In this spirit, Bacon understands himself as a new Columbus, inspiring scientists to embark on the endless process of discovering new things. Adopting the idea of an infinite universe, Bacon’s vision of a new science exudes an overwhelming fascination with the unlimited diversity and richness of nature, which, however, as potentials, are to be unleashed and harnessed by new technologies. Baconian science is thus entwined with an extreme or even irrational vision, namely that of effecting all that is possible. The problem inherent to Baconian science is not so much the obsession with a forceful, if not violent manipulation of nature as Horkheimer and Adorno criticized, but in this vision of the unlimited production of new things. The idea to unleash the hidden forces of nature is riddled with ambivalence: it entails both the use of solar energy, which Bacon himself had indeed proposed, and the invention of the atomic bomb, a danger to the existence of humankind. Based on Baconian science, John Locke analyzed the intrinsic logic of the market system (Schelkshorn 2009: 529–543). Locke thus laid an important fundament for a rational theory of economics, which was adopted and modified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. On the other hand, even more so than Bacon, Locke devalues nature to a mere material substrate for human manipulation in his famous labor theory of property. Moreover, restricting its application to the English settlers in North America, the labor theory of property epitomizes colonial ideology. Not least, parallel to Bacon’s idea of an unlimited richness of nature, Locke accordingly creates the modern myth of unlimited economic growth, the irrationality of which has become the focus of debates on sustainability in the twentieth century. To sum up: considering the philosophical foundations of modern value spheres and subsystems in Renaissance and early modern philosophy enables us to approach the delicate question of the universal claims of European modernity on a new level, avoiding the ossified juxtaposition between the naïve affirmation of “the” Enlightenment and its antimodernist pendant, the bald rejection of its “achievements.” Further, modern breakthroughs in rationality cannot be adequately described as growths in reflectivity or the overcoming of religious and metaphysical worldviews. As the philosophies of Vitoria, Bacon or Locke exemplarily reveal, modern innovations, above all global cosmopolitanism, modern science and technology, and not at least the productive revolution of capitalism, are amalgamations, combining rational breakthroughs, power syndromes, and specific cultural patterns. In conclusion, I would like to respectfully acknowledge a source of inspiration here: just as Árnason’s impressive work is of inestimable value for both sociological debates and cross-cultural philosophy, I hope that the detailed analysis of the ambivalences discernible in European modernity can contribute to a global and transdisciplinary discourse about and of modernity.

The Axial Age and Multiple Modernities  131

References Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Árnason, Jóhann P. (2003), Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Árnason, Jóhann P. (2020), The Labyrinth of Modernity. Horizons, Pathways, and Mutations. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Árnason, Jóhann P., Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock (eds.) (2004), Axial Civilizations and World History. Leiden: Brill. Assmann, Jan (2012), “Cultural Memory and the Myth of the Axial Age,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and its Consequences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 366–407. Assmann, Jan (2018), Achsenzeit. Eine Archäologie der Moderne. München: Beck. Bellah, Robert N. and Hans Joas (eds.) (2012), The Axial Age and its Consequences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Blumenberg, Hans (1983), The Legitimacy of Modern Age. Cambridge: MIT Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (1982), “The Axial Age: the Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” European Journal of Sociology, 23(2), pp. 294–314. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (ed.) (1986a), Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany: State University of New York Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (1986b), “The Axial Age Breakthroughs–Their Characteristics and Origins,” in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 1–25. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (2000a), “Multiple modernities,” Daedalus, 129(1), pp. 1–29. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (2000b), Die Vielfalt der Moderne. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (2003), Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Leiden: Brill. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (2012), “The Axial Conundrum between Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes of Their Institutionalizations. Constructive and Destructive Possibilities”, Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 277–293. Foucault, Michel (1988), “The Political Technology of the Individuals,” in Michel Foucault, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 145–162. Habermas, Jürgen (1994), Postmetaphysical Thinking. Philosophical Essays. Translated by William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2019), Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, 2 vol. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Israel, Jonathan (2001), Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Israel, Jonathan (2019), Enlightenment that Failed. Ideas, Revolution and Democratic Defeat, 1748–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaspers, Karl (1953), The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lee, Yu-ting (2011), “Japan’s Tradition and Modernity in Eisenstadt’s Sociological Formulation,” Journal of East Asian Cultural Interaction Studies, 4, pp. 145–158.

132  Hans Schelkshorn Löwith, Karl (1949), Meaning in History, The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mall, Ram Adhar and Heinz Hülsmann (1989), Die drei Geburtsorte der Philosophie. China, Indien, Europa. Bonn: Bouvier. Mendieta, Eduardo (2018), “The Axial Age, Social Evolution, and Postsecular Consciousness,” Critical Research on Religion, 6(3), pp. 289–308. Pečar, Andreas and Damien Tricoire (2015), Falsche Freunde. War Aufklärung wirklich die Geburt der Moderne? Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Roetz, Heiner (1993), Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age. A Reconstruction under the Aspect of the Breakthrough Towards Postconventional Thinking. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schelkshorn, Hans (1997), Diskurs und Befreiung. Studien zur philosophischen Ethik von Karl-Otto Apel und Enrique Dussel. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schelkshorn, Hans (2009), Entgrenzungen. Ein europäischer Beitrag zum philosophischen Diskurs über die Moderne. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Schelkshorn, Hans (2017), “Die Moderne als zweite Achsenzeit. Zu einer globalen Geschichtsphilosophie mit und gegen Jaspers,” Polylog. Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren, 38, pp. 81–102. Schelkshorn, Hans (2019), “Modernity as a Process of De-Limitations,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, J-RaT 4.2: Crisis of Representation, 5, pp. 413–446.

10 Traditions of transcendence A hermeneutic appropriation of the Axial Age discourse Hans-Herbert Kögler

Can the value-orientations of the Axial Age discourse be preserved as cognitive universals after the demise of their emergence in metaphysical worldviews? This essay aims at an affirmative answer by building on hermeneutic insights. First, I’ll take up Jaspers’ rediscovery and show, by reinterpreting Árnason’s historicizing typology, how the Axial Age is best understood as entailing a radically new world-orientation which gets fleshed out in culturally and historically diverse traditions. Following Jan Assmann allows us to reconstruct how the Axial Age breakthrough is intrinsically tied to writing-based authoritative ‘cultures of interpretation.’ So, instead of the undialectical opposition between reflexive thought and dogmatic traditions that we find in Jaspers, we can now grasp interpretive practices as the crucial missing link between fixed authority and critical reflection. A meta-critique of Gadamer’s hermeneutics allows us to reconstruct the crucial features of the Axial turn identified by Jaspers as interpretation-immanent presuppositions of understanding. And a critical appraisal of Habermas’ recent genealogy of the discourse of faith and knowledge serves as a case study of a self-reflective, tradition-based appropriation of cognitive universals via one’s own historical background. The core thesis is that the crucial Axial Age value-orientations can indeed be saved as normatively guiding cognitive universals, as Jaspers envisioned, but only if we replace Jaspers’ own existentialist appropriation with a critical-hermeneutic framework that does justice to the diversity of traditions within the realm of critical reflexivity.

Jaspers’ challenge and Árnason’s reinterpretation: On preserving the Axial Age breakthrough To radically question, challenge, and reject tradition, to objectify the world as a whole, and thereby to position oneself vis-à-vis the historical, social, and cosmic world as such – thus could be captured, in one first approximation, the core breakthrough of what Karl Jaspers famously called the ‘Axial Age.’ Jaspers sees its radical revolution of consciousness happening around 800–200 BC as a decisive turning point that remains culturally and conceptually formative up to our present and modernity: DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-13

134  Hans-Herbert Kögler What is new about this age… is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and the lucidity of transcendence. (Jaspers 1953, 2) To be sure, there can be no doubt, as Árnason’s well-known observation brought home, that this description strongly reflects Jaspers’ own existential outlook (Árnason 2005). Such a criticism is certainly apt in light of Jaspers’ own demand that we overcome a speculative Hegelian construction of history and reconstruct the ‘empirical roots’ of the emergence of this radically new type of reflexivity and self-understanding. And yet, such a need to empirically ground such change in collectively shared cognitive structures should not, I argue, lead to a dismissal of the shared normative features that are suggestively hinted toward in Jaspers’ proposal – despite them demanding, as I will set out to show, a radical hermeneutic reconceptualization. To begin with, we should not lose sight of the context in which Jaspers himself rediscovers the Axial cultures, as he suggests the return to their origin in order to renew the ‘spiritualization of humankind’ right after World War II and Hitler’s terror-regime. The “experience of the terror of the world and one’s own powerlessness” describes Jaspers’ own situation and one’s situatedness in objective power relations needs to be reflectively included in any viable account of historical self-understanding. Second, Jasper’s plea to overcome a Eurocentric fixation on ‘our’ cultural achievements, the Hegelian Zentralperspektive of history (Aida Assmann), confronts us with the task to ‘pluralize’ the emergence of reason and morality. The ‘roots of reflexivity’ need now to be more emphatically historically located, and as such demand the recognition of the diverse and culturally distinct sources of shared cognitive capacities. Finally, while for Jaspers these cultural contexts are widely divergent in convictions and dogmas, common to all of them is “man’s reaching out beyond himself by growing aware of himself within the whole of being and the fact that he can treat them only as an individual on his own” (Jaspers 1953, 4, my emphasis). Referencing the singular paths of exceptional figures like Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Moses, Jesus – who are, to be sure, influential and ‘constructed’ within traditions as their original founders – should thus not be interpreted as a misguided existentialist adaptation, but rather points to the inevitable individuo-existential source of genuine critical reflection. The reference to an existentially irreducible self as the site within which cognitive processes appear is here recognized and historically emerging for the first time. Accordingly, the vulnerable self who confronts terror and power, the diverse traditions of the culturally situated self, and the self as an existentially irreducible dimension of thought all need to be recognized as enduring dimensions of human self-understanding. Jaspers credits these cognitive orientations as legacies of the Axial turn. Any viable appropriation of the Axial Age discourse

Traditions of transcendence  135 would need to do justice to this normative-existential background. Moreover, it would need to be shown how a mediation or reconciliation of the plural roots of collective intentionality and their shared and universal structures is possible: to what extent can these diverse historical contexts of our socio-cognitive breakthroughs, by all their irreducible diversity, be taking to unleash a shared cognitive potential of humanity as such? Or is it per se illegitimate to explore and reconstruct the shared features of cognitive achievements? Is such an enterprise per se doomed to reduce the historical and cultural specificity of its background cultures to a monolithic or worse, ethnocentric root? My proposal suggests answers by arguing that the cognitive presuppositions of appropriating cultural traditions themselves entail the desired and required normative orientations. Jaspers himself considers the historical Axial Age in terms of its cultural institutionalization a failure: The highest potentialities of thought and practical expression realized in individuals did not become common property, because the majority of men were unable to follow in their footsteps… When the age lost its creativeness, a process of dogmatic fixation and levelling-down took place in all three cultural realms.1 (Jaspers 1953, 5) Jaspers grounds this failure in the creation of dogmatic and authoritative traditions, as the reflexive, creative, and critical impulses fall victim to ‘the re-establishment of enduring conditions.’ Yet I detect in Jaspers a certain undialectical opposition between the transcending, terror-critical, and individuo-existential thought on the one hand, and a dogmatic adherence and integration into established cultural traditions and institutions on the other. Instead, I will try to show that the crucial features of the Axial breakthroughs that Jaspers has in mind can be reconstructed as entailed in a rightly conceived process of cultural appropriation of the respective traditions. To be sure, the establishment of authoritative traditions does not per se prevent dogmatism, authoritarianism, and uncritical adaptation (Vattimo and Rorty 2007; Kögler 2017). But as a reconstruction of hermeneutic premises of understanding can show, the required value-orientations are implied in the interpretive appropriative process. Furthermore, this entails that the diverse cultural and historical conditions – without thereby losing their distinctiveness and uniqueness as cultural traditions – share certain cognitively significant features: “In this age were born the fundamental categories within which we still think, and the beginnings of world religions, by which humans still live, were created. The step towards universality was taken in every sense” (Jaspers 1953, 2). Yet only a hermeneutic reconciliation between the established and institutionalized perspectives (which as authoritative traditions canonize truth and self-understanding) and the universal features of reflexive human cognition (which as hermeneutic potentials always transcend and challenge existing patterns of social practices and interpretation) can preserve the truth value of this strong normative statement by Jaspers.

136  Hans-Herbert Kögler If we approach the Axial Age discourse from the perspective of what remains enduring and what needs to be reconceptualized, it is thus helpful to relate to the reflexivity vis-à-vis tradition, to the new enabled world relations, and to the ethical attitudes that are thereby made possible. Practically all analysists of the Axial turn agree with the unique rejection of a hitherto uncritically received tradition. The narrative involvedness in the mythical construction of the world is now replaced by an attitude that objectifies the world as such. This ‘disembedding’ of one’s own thought from the immersedness in the seamless mythical narratives leads to an awareness of ‘history’ (Assmann 2013). History becomes possible because the disentanglement of the world as such opens up the distinct realm of human agency as subject to closer inspection: it becomes, so to speak, visible for the first time. Importantly, this historical awareness is very different from our contemporary ‘historical consciousness,’ the benchmark of which is the self-(re-)embedding of one’s existence within the stream of historical events. In contrast, in the Axial Age narrative, the mythical worldview is overcome in terms of an ascendence to an understanding of the world as a distinctly objectified totality (however internally defined). The step from a narrative-mythological order to a theoretic one proceeds, exemplified in Plato’s cave (Bellah 2011, 324 ff., Bellah 2013, 453 f.), from darkness to light, from a world of shadows and appearances to a world of eternal truth and being. In this new self-understanding, Jóhann Árnason has identified five different world-orientations (Árnason 2013). His instructive hermeneutico-phenomenological scheme, committed to enable a culturally specific and historically grounded comparison between ‘different paths’ withing the Axial order, lends itself to a twofold reinterpretation: first, the world as such is articulated, i.e., its being is thematized as a distinct realm of existence, understandable now as the world in its totality. It is thus capable of being analyzed in its truth, which consequently enables and even demands taken up an attitude toward it. Such a reflexive or distanced world-articulation is made possible by the rejection of tradition as a distorted, un-theoretic, immersed and diluted ‘view,’ which opens up ‘the world’ as a distinct object of reflection, and thus places the subject, in Plessner’s terms, in an excentric position vis-àvis Being. The next four world-articulations then express particular attitudes and interpretations vis-à-vis the world as it now becomes thematizable. Accordingly, the world may get recentered, overcoming a cosmo-centric view in light of a theo-centric or even human-centric view; similarly, the creation of the polis recenters the political field (as explored in Castoriadis’ reading of the birth of democracy). Or the world gets negated, as exemplified by Indian asceticism where the world is “envisioned as a place to escape from” (Árnason 2013, 358). In yet another option, the world gets expanded in both a temporal and/or a spatial sense, when an ideal ‘past as another country’ is invoked as a template for a better future (as in Confucianism); one may even interpret the universal aspiration of this view as an open-ended expansion of the world and those who belong to it. Finally, the world gets humanized, such that human agency plays an expanded role. Crucial in all these versions of

Traditions of transcendence  137 world-interpretation is that the basic breakthrough toward the thematization of the world as such allows for a creative symbolic imaginary in which different interpretive attitudes vis-à-vis the world become possible. This in turn creates an increased awareness of the human dimension, the space for an ethos in which different attitudes vis-à-vis the world are articulated and actualized. We can thus distinguish the disembedding from tradition as an essential first step, enabling the articulation of the world as such by allowing for specific world-relations. We may now further inquire into the shared cognitive presuppositions and enabling conditions that are reflected in these dimensions. By distinguishing radically between an illusionary past, tradition, or phenomenal world, contrasted by the projection of a true or ideal world, the second-order reflexivity vis-à-vis one’s initial hermeneutico-phenomenological existence is redefined in a decisive – and by no means necessary – way. Indeed, the capacity to thematize one’s existence is taken up as an objectifying project in which the second-order thought—i.e., the thought becoming conscious of itself as the hitherto traditionally bound thought—redefines or re-substantializes the ‘realm of reasons.’ The tradition-critical or reflexive space that opened up is, so to speak, immediately filled with a new substantive account of ‘being’ or ‘truth.’ The radical questioning that Jaspers envisioned as the heart of the Axial impulse, and that engages one’s own social, cultural and historical existence, become re-oriented toward (and thus controlled by) a new center, a ground or dogma from which to truly understand one’s world-engagement. Second-order thought, the self-reflexivity which enables the Axial turn, is thus indeed subjected to a new ‘dogmatic fixation’ (Jaspers 1953).2 The Axial quality of these new world-orientations may thus perhaps best be captured by first detecting the emergence of their shared feature as second-order thought, i.e., the critical and ‘transcending’ thematization of the previous symbolic and social practices, which become ‘history’ or ‘tradition’ (Überlieferung). This is accompanied by the redefinition of this newly opened reflexive realm as a ‘second world,’ discovered by an overcoming or moving away from the merely worldly, mundane, profane realm of existence. Benjamin’s Schwartz’s characterization of the “age of transcendence” and especially Eisenstadt’s idea of “transcendental vision” refer to this aspect. And by substantially redefining this realm as a real world apart – indeed, as the real world – the transcendent dimension now becomes ontologically different, gets determined in terms of content. It gets ‘filled’ with substantive notions of being, ideas, the divine, nirvana, Dao, the glorious past, etc. Its function is to be both juxtaposed to, and superior to, everyday existence.3 Jaspers’ critique of the new dogmatism targets this subsequent metaphysicization of the newly discovered realm of reflexive thematization. Roughly, the critique amounts to a Stillstellen of the questioning attitude, of the fixation of the new core dogmas; it is oriented both toward a fixation of content and toward the instrumental use that worldly or institutional powers are able to make of these new ‘ideologies’ (Rorty/Vattimo 2007). While the discovery of a transcendent realm opened up a reflexive space beyond existing political powers, its metaphysico-dogmatic reification makes them again useful for providing

138  Hans-Herbert Kögler legitimizing ‘authoritative’ sources of rulership. And while the detachment of the ‘divine sphere’ from mundane life allows potentially for an all-inclusive religion, the new crystallization of text-based authoritative traditions again restricts access to this realm to those who submit to the right scripturally revealed or defined authorities. Yet if we take a closer look at how precisely those new dogmatic traditions get established via their scripture-based practices and dogmas, we’ll be able to see that the symbolic practices by means of which these traditions were established already entail the solution as to how the normative cognitive core of the Axial turn can be preserved and reactivated. My central thesis here is that the hermeneutic fact of the interpretive construction of the diverse traditions that follow from the Axial Age allows for an immanent reconstruction of precisely those questioning and challenging qualities that Jaspers saw in decline after its initial push. In order to make good on this claim, we turn to Jan Assmann’s reconstruction of the central function of practices of recording and interpretation vis-à-vis the Axial Age civilizations. A close look at how discursive dogmas get established – or, rather, how dogmas get established discursively – will put us in a position to reconstruct the inherent roots of a critical reflexivity that can be unleashed from within the traditions, thus need not be opposed to or external to these, as Jaspers’ existentialism assumed.

The symbolic source of the Axial turn: Assmann and Gadamer Drawing on Assmann allows us to substantiate the thesis of shared cognitive features derived from the Axial Age by showing how this radical turn in human thought is based on the hermeneutic conditions of writing and interpretation (Assmann 2013; Mendieta 2018). The dependency of higher-order thought on symbolic media captures both universal features of cognition as much as it explains its context-dependency in diverse languages and traditions. The core background assumption posits the need of language for thought, i.e., language conceived as the essential medium in which higher-order beliefs alone are possible (as classically argued by de Saussure and Peirce). Assmann proceeds to a historical and cultural analysis of the specific role of linguistic practices like writing and interpreting, designating the invention of writing itself as an enabling condition for Axial thought, “­taking axiality to not be a consequence but an implication of writing, an option opened up by literacy of a certain quality, whose acceptance, exploration, and elaboration, however, depends on historical and cultural circumstances” (Assmann 2013, 379). The fixation of cultural content in writing, so Assmann observes, provides the necessary if not sufficient condition for the reflexive distanciation that defines the Axial turn in human thought. The elegant mediation of a universal potential articulated in the concrete practices provided by writing explains how hitherto orally transmitted cultural meanings and narratives may lead to the objectification and preservation of contents: “Writing as a technology… restructures thought” (Assmann 2013, 378). Based on the evolutionary potential of language which thereby gets formalized and objectified, writing emerges as a technology of creation and preservation.

Traditions of transcendence  139 Importantly, this writing process of content fixation comes into fruition only through collective practices of interpretation. Assmann distinguishes two types here: the use of writing in practices or ‘cultures’ of recording (when writing is used for instrumental and bureaucratic purposes), and the use of writing in so-called ‘cultures of interpretation’ (Assmann 2013, 378 ff., Mendieta 2018, 297–299).4 Interpretive cultures mark the decisive step towards the Axial transformation, since now writing becomes the source for a widely shared cultural self-understanding. Interpretive cultures relate to previously transmitted written texts and documents by means of a secondary reflexive thematization. Different roles and positions within these hermeneutic cultures now become possible, as the ‘author’ is created, specifically produced texts come into being, and specific contributions to a ‘field of cultural goods’ (Bourdieu) come to define cultural creation. Decisive for our context is that Assmann realizes that a new type of cultural literacy emerges. Here the creation and appropriation of semantic substance is pursued such that it comes to penetrate the core of a culture and thus produces a shared identity – a collective reservoir of authoritative thought – for its subjects: ‘Cultural memory’ is that form of collective memory that enables a society to transmit its central patterns of orientation in time, space, and divine and human worlds to future generations and by doing so to continue its identity over the sequence of generations… It provides that kind of knowledge that enables an individual to belong, and since human beings need to belong, they serve their drive to belong by acquiring the relevant knowledge. (Assmann 2013, 384) The hermeneutic appropriation of writing as the core medium of cultural memory – and thus of the construction of a unique tradition per se – is then undertaken in a process of secondary canonization. The previously orally transmitted myths are available as objectified themes and contents and can thus be reflexively distanciated and overcome. (Oral) cultural memory becomes ‘objectified’ in terms of (!) authoritative texts, thereby being able to be related to at a distance, even in solitary consumption, seen as another ‘space’ or ‘world’ from which it may now be time to depart.5 Undertaken by – or better attributed to – are these original innovations via a new type of ‘thinker,’ the famously innovative and radically transgressive new individuals, like Buddha, Confucius, or Moses, that we already referred to above. The crucial wirkungsgeschichtliche fact remains that their (allegedly ‘individual’) accomplishments of distanciation and detachment need now be symbolically objectified so that all can share in the truth: however radically subjective and distanciating their initial acts have been, their insights now have to become common knowledge. The transformation of transgressive individuals into the ‘founders’ of new formative traditions sets in. Tradition is thus ultimately defined by the construction, selection, and fixation of exemplary texts, which as “cultural texts” become the encompassing

140  Hans-Herbert Kögler semantic humus for the culture at large in its self-understanding. The crucial term of ‘secondary canonization’ designates this selective and dogma-forming process in which the multiplicity of voices and interpretations is channeled, domesticated, and tamed into the continuing and enduring ground of a cultural tradition. The distinction between a ‘canon’ – to which privileged texts belong, and which as such defines the official and pervasive self-understanding of a culture – and an ‘archive’ – to which all others are banned to be taken out of active circulation – rounds off Assmann’s conception of a linguistically enabled cultural memory. Traditions are thus actively established by means of collective interpretive practices and authoritatively enthroned via eminent texts as the dominant discourse that defines the substance and borders of the symbolic orders of knowledge. Three implications of this symbolically enabled articulation and fixation of transcendence are especially relevant in our context. First, the fact that the establishment of a ‘path’ to transcendence is elaborated and enabled through the canonization of sacred eminent texts ties the access to truth to particular texts and traditions. Insofar as they are taken to provide access to truth, they establish themselves as the sole authorities, as the authoritative pathways through which the truth has been revealed. In this way the universalizing tendency is immediately tied back to a specific and privileged medium in which it is articulated. “There seems to exist a strong alliance among revelation, transcendence, and secondary canonization. The codification of revelation leads to an expatriation of the holy from the worldly immanence into transcendence and into scripture” (Assmann 2013, 394, my emphasis). Previous and alternative religions and worldviews get devalued and must appear as inferior compared to the revealed and transcendent access: All this is denounced as idolatry by the new scripture-based world religions. Scripture requires a total reorientation of religious attention that was formerly directed toward the forms of divine immanence and is directed toward scripture and exegesis. Secondary canonization means an exodus both of the holy and of religious attention from the cosmos into scripture. To the extramundane God corresponds the textual character of revelation. (Assmann 2013, 394) The ascendance from the mere immersedness into the narrative flow of mythical events (Bellah 2011) is paid with the price of an exclusivist definition of access. The Axial turn thus entails the constitution of a new, a symbolic home (which as such become ‘portable religions’ independent from particular cultural settings): the religious house of being is now established through canonical texts. Being that can be understood as truth is now available through the language of scripture. This canonical fixation of truth puts, second, a certain strain on the fact of pluralism as it is now emerging against the backdrop of a privileged and absolute truth. Even though the monotheistic turn allows the overcoming of

Traditions of transcendence  141 intra-worldly entanglements, and the opening of a universalist perspective including all subjects as potential believers, the secondary canonization channels this openness back into particular texts and traditions. All of them are somewhat competing for the right path. Although in previous (Egyptian) practices of canonization, authoritative and exemplary texts were also selected, this new secondary canonization now operates by a different standard: “the criterion of absolute and universal truth… draws a distinction that sets one’s own culture and religion off against all other religions (including one’s past)” (Assmann 2013). The process of creating one’s cultural identity by means of distinguishing one’s own exemplary past via the selection of eminent texts is now hyperbolically overblown to morph into the superior truth-standard. This standard gets identified with one’s own worldview against which all others appear as “paganism, idolatry, heresy, and error” (Assmann 2013, 390). Such a truth-identification is specifically pronounced in the Abrahamic religions; their codification of revelation, by applying the principle of sacred fixation, is most extreme with regard to the standard of an exclusivist truth (Assmann 1997). Yet despite the different constructions of ‘classicity’ in Greek and Latin cultures or in Eastern, Indian, or Chinese contexts, the underlying unity and identity of a tradition is always established via normative and institutionalized practices of interpretation: Textual continuity is only achieved when institutions of learning and exegesis are established that keep the Ancient texts constantly present and transparent… Common to all corpora of secondary canonization is the existence of a full-fledged culture of exegesis and the strict distinction between text and commentary. (Assmann 2013, 394, 395) This leads, third, to the problem of how the ‘exemplary and transparent’ status of eminent texts, which for Assmann was to pervade the (constructed!) ‘essence’ of a culture, is to be disseminated. How can a text establish itself as a convincing candidate for cultural identity and self-understanding? Assmann himself grants that “sacred texts are not necessarily cultural texts [in the sense of culturally widely disseminated texts, HHK], since they may be known only to specialists and withheld from public circulation” (Assmann 2013, 391). This limited access to radical practices of interpretation and self-reflexivity, as exemplified by the tradition-founding leaders, may be a further indicator of the failure of the Axial Age, because existential self-reflection remained restricted to ‘the chosen few’ and never truly reached the multitude in a wider public. More importantly, however, the dogmatization and standardization of interpretive practices via eminent texts went hand in hand with the emergence of major empires. The hardening of the Axial breakthroughs into increasingly dogmatic and authoritarian ‘world religions’ lent themselves to provide ideological support for worldly powers. This ideological function could be fulfilled effectively precisely because the alleged true origin of its transcendent truth was now beyond visible and material means—and thus

142  Hans-Herbert Kögler could also not be called into question by them. The selective and dogmatic interpretation of sacred texts in the hands of a special class of priests, for instance, provided the transcendent source of legitimacy of worldly powers that could thus not be questioned by the people. This selective transformation of the initially universalist transcendent turn – which defined the origin of the Axial impulse – contributed to a destruction of its initial raison d’être. Accordingly, a selective elitism with access to privileged texts codifying the access to transcendence went hand in hand with an authoritarian exercise of power. It thus in the end disempowered the subjects for whom the Axial turn had constituted a first promise for a widely shared and participatory practice of human cognition, i.e., reflexive self-understanding. If the secondary canonization thus highlights the dangers of the dogmatic fixation, the question poses itself how the universalizing, transcending, and humanizing aspects of the Axial turn may be preserved or reactivated, assuming that they can be identified, in however rudimentary a form, as nascent ‘roots of modernity.’ The challenge that we identified at the outset is how they may be unleashed and realized in a manner that transcends the one-sided canonization of its origins in the respective Axial cultures. The challenge consists in drawing on this heritage, on the diverse legacy of a pull away from power, immanence, dependency, and to establish the Axial breakthrough of a truly reflexive attitude that relates to a realm of non-empirical and ‘transcendent’ values that is not subjected to mere self-interest and power-based advantage. How can the critical rejection of a power-infused tradition, the insight into one’s own reflexivity vis-à-vis such a background, and the irreducible situatedness of one’s own existence be reconstructed as an enduring and constitutive legacy of our cognitive practices and identity? How can the orientation toward a transcendent realm that allowed for such a critical distanciation from one’s merely habitual past be maintained such that it does not lead to a new authoritarian submission beneath an even more absolute and unchallengeable truth? How can the promise of an all-inclusive public be based on these cognitive practices without either denying one’s own local and cultural roots or to hypostatize those roots into new ‘particular universals’ at the expense of excluding and denigrating cultural and historical differences? The promise of the Axial Age as entailing a universalist conception of self-understanding and morality would need to be mediated with and embedded in an account of the dangerous practices of canonization which produced the existing world religions. Only if we include this ‘dark side’ of the Axial Age may we hope for a redemptive appropriation of its full potential (Kögler 2017; 2020b). Assmann’s reconstruction of the inherent dogmatic fixation of traditions reveals its symbolically mediated and practical character. It is the invention of writing, coupled with practices of interpretation grounded in eminent texts, that articulates and crystallizes their cultural authority. Yet if we now take a closer look at how such the appropriation of ‘authoritative texts’ is constituted, we shall be able to detect features of the Axial Age discourse as inherent potentials and presuppositions of this process. This is neither to say that the reflexive features I will present are openly adhered to; nor is it the claim

Traditions of transcendence  143 that they are fully known by the practitioners of understanding. It is not even the case that these are inevitably realized values, as their somewhat latent nature points to potentials and unconscious assumptions that underly the practice, if rationally reconstructed, but that may nevertheless be contradicted or distorted by the actual methods and acts pursued. Yet a philosophical analysis of what is entailed in the cultural appropriation of symbolic phenomena like texts can show that any interpretive act is irreducibly related to its own historical and cultural background which it is nevertheless able to transcend and reflexively challenge in the interpretive process. The meta-reflexivity of this process furthermore reveals that an irreducible self-relation, the diversity of cultural backgrounds and traditions, as well as the empirical conditions of social power and domination are constitutively involved. Making these assumptions explicit allows us to understand hermeneutic interpretation as expressing Axial Age value-orientations. Recall that our specific challenge consists in mediating or reconciling the universal features of cognition with the local or contextual embeddedness of the cognizing (or interpreting) subjects in their respective background cultures. The decisive starting point can be marked with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s designation of a historically situated pre-understanding as an inevitable condition of interpretation.6 When trying to understand the text, what we aim for is understanding its meaning. But meaning is what it says about something, ‘die Sache selbst.’ All understanding is linguistically mediated (defined), and yet aims at the subject matter, the thing itself. This means, first, that the interpretive access to the meaning of a text can only work against the background of my own understanding of what’s at stake. I necessarily project my pre-understanding onto the subject matter, and this projection is due to my embeddedness in and familiarity with the subject matter. This conception of pre-understanding thus displaces any abstractly or transcendently conceived subjectivity, as the interpreting self is now fully situated and dependent on a background understanding that always transcends its own conscious control. “Everything that makes possible and limits Dasein’s projection ineluctably precedes it.” (Gadamer 1989, 264). Yet the disclosure of meaning is nonetheless only possible if I orient myself toward the meaning, i.e., what the text is about. Gadamer here invokes the influential idea that interpretation is structured like a conversation, that indeed the text is approached with the aim to have it speak to me, “I let myself ‘be addressed by tradition.’” (Gadamer 1989, 382, also 361).7 Thus the inevitable and reflexive orientation towards the subject matter of the text both binds me to my culturally inherited background and yet deepens and expands my understanding of it. The decisive turn away from a pessimistic dismissal of the prospects of the Axial turn values, which both Assmann and Jaspers express in different ways, consists in a dialogic conception of truth, which in turn is built on a dialogic recognition of the agent as a subject expressing truth and validity perspectives. The hermeneutic grounding, however, does not employ a formalized speech act theory to distinguish different types of validity claims (Habermas 1983). What is at stake here is rather that the projective assumptions that

144  Hans-Herbert Kögler define our understanding of the world, ourselves and others are situated in a complexly structured cultural situation that entails the reflexive potentials to critically distance oneself from inherited traditions and to reestablish justified grounds on the basis of which one endorses beliefs and value-orientations. What is crucial is that the linguistic mediation of our self-understanding always entails the difference between a belief held as such, and a belief as itself objectified and reflected upon as a belief about something. This distinct or propositional differentiation – i.e., understanding something reflectively as an intentional understanding of something – allows for a reconstruction of the factors that influence the initial starting point or background of one’s beliefs. The reflexive attitude opened up here allows for a meta-reflexivity, in which I am consciously not only oriented toward the content of my beliefs or desires, but I now become capable of thematizing how this content itself is ‘disclosed’ or ‘structured’ by certain background conditions. Gadamer himself focuses in this context on the overwhelming significance of language: “Being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 1989, 474). This sentence expresses that to understand Being at all, i.e., being as Being that is disclosed in the process of an intentional understanding, language as a medium in which the disclosure happens and can then be meta-reflected upon, is necessary. I, in turn, have drawn on the subsequent cultural and philosophical discussions to suggest that the actual background structure of the interpreter’s intentional understanding is co-defined by three additional layers (Kögler 1999; Kögler 2019). To begin with, while each interpreting self is linguistically situated in a culturally shared and historically shaped background context, the interpretive act is nonetheless always, to some extent, the accomplishment of the situated self. Gadamer meta-interprets the process of interpretation in my view too much under the guidance of the late Heidegger, according to which ‘language speaks,’ and the subject is nothing but ‘a flickering in the circuits of the hermeneutic event.’ Yet both the reflective appropriation of the event as such, and also the conscious pursuit of its dynamics and result lead back to an existentially situated individual for which the meaning emerges (Kögler 1999, 77–81). Gadamer’s own pathbreaking reintroduction of application as a core constituent within interpretation is geared toward a practical goal: to reinvigorate the devalued authority of cultural traditions. In this context falls his rehabilitation of prejudgment and tradition as enabling, and not just distorting, factors of understanding. While thus a far cry from a blind or authoritarian conservatism, Gadamer’s aim to overcome and deconstruct the detached and objectified ‘historicist attitude’ is then to re-connect our current (displaced and orientation-lacking) self-understanding to (our) meaning-infusing tradition(s). This focus, however, leads to two further problems regarding the Axial Age legacy as inherent in the process of interpretation. On the one hand, Gadamer concentrates his view on the substantial re-actualization of the truth inherent in our tradition. Interpretation is conceived as a ‘fusion of horizons’ whereas our horizon presents our taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions. Gadamer thus suggests that a truly successful interpretation is

Traditions of transcendence  145 one in which both horizons fuse in such a way that a new true substantive and shared truth is established. While this may work for appropriating one’s own cultural or religious tradition, as it reestablishes the orienting and grounding function of that tradition, it cannot work, not in the same way at least, for a hermeneutic understanding across Axial cultures and religions. Here, the reflexive reconstruction of the basic ontological, ethical, and religious premises so as to better comprehend the other’s particular horizon would be the legitimate goal, since these traditions do not converge on one shared substantive tradition.8 On the other hand, the ethical goal of a reaffirmed orienting practical reason leads to an undertheorizing of empirical factors that preshape a subject’s self-understanding. Yet getting this power- and domination-defined dimension of the background right and ‘into the picture’ is crucial since the hermeneutic process develops its truth through reflexive appropriation, and thus may be distorted by such empirical factors that linger undetected, as it were, in the background.9 What do these critical-hermeneutic amendments to the truth-oriented hermeneutic dialogue, which Gadamer articulated so paradigmatically, amount to for a reappropriation of Axial Age value-orientations? How are the irreducible existential-individual situatedness, the distinct cultural background, and the empirical power-defined influences affecting what we take to be interpretive truth and truthful self-understanding? The answer lies, in my view, in a reflexive mediation of our unavoidable intentional orientation toward the world, ourselves, and others – which expresses truth-bound ontological claims about that world, how to approach others, and what it means to exist – with such truth-bound conceptions and assumptions as themselves emergent from situated, practical, existential contexts.10 Only if we adhere to a pre-hermeneutic, metaphysical concept of truth, i.e., truth conceived as a timeless and absolute representation of the ‘state of affairs’ or ‘reality,’ do these background conditions present impediments for a truthful understanding. Contrary to such a metaphysical view, I suggest that we instead see the individual situatedness of subjects, their cultural horizons and backgrounds, and even their embeddedness in relations of power and domination, as epistemic sources of insight. Depending on the respective value-orientation, the existential situatedness and the cultural horizons of thought will predominantly either lead to self-projections of one’s own authentic life or contribute to an expansion and further articulation of a shared social self-understanding. Being-situated-within-power, however, has a more ambiguous or dialectical function, as its epistemic value consists less in a productive and direct contribution to our self-understanding, and more in the necessary testimonial factor in learning and cognitively appreciating how power practices may undercut truth and social recognition. The inhibiting and yet socially productive function of power may be analyzed both with regard to our selfunderstanding of situated subjects (as in normatively-oppressive conceptions of self-identity), and with regard to constructing social imaginaries that define whole cultural horizons in a power-impregnated manner (as in colonialism or group-based domination ideologies).

146  Hans-Herbert Kögler If we reinterpret the background factors that enter the hermeneutic process via the structural articulation of the unavoidable pre-understanding as being constitutive of essential dimensions of critical self-understanding, we are – in a very formal approximation – able to capture crucial features of the Axial Age discourse as entailed in critical interpretation. The irreducible individual site of understanding, the holistic cultural and historical embeddedness, and power-defined practices and institutions are influential background factors that must be taken into account when we aim toward truth in interpretation. What remains to be shown, to be sure, is how exactly the individual-existential, cultural-traditional, and power-defined layers of selfunderstanding relate to and intersect within one’s cognitive practices. To advance this discussion, I would like to turn to one recent and remarkable example of concretely attempting a critical reappropriation of the legacy of the Axial Age: Habermas’ genealogy of faith and reason.

Habermas’ postmetaphysical appropriation of the Axial Age Habermas’s conception of postmetaphysical knowledge guides his reappropriation of the Axial cognitive breakthroughs (Habermas 1993, 2017). In order to capture its important results as well as to develop a hermeneutic meta-critique, its central features need to be present. Most fundamentally, postmetaphysical thinking is reflexively situated thought, aware of its contingent, historical, cultural-social origin. Yet since it is reflexive knowledge, it is both aware of its inevitable situatedness and at the same time beyond it. Since it is linguistically mediated knowledge, it contains a propositional or intentional structure, i.e., it relates to phenomena as such-and-such. Habermas famously appropriates the linguistic turn in late Wittgenstein and speech act theory in order to launch a non-foundational defense of universal rationality that is taken to be built into our everyday language use. Important consequences follow from this linguistic transformation. First, the intentional or referential disclosure of facts, norms, or subjective states operates, as it were, via the medium of linguistic conceptions and assumptions in light of which something can only be designated and defined. But this means, as Searle and others have forcefully shown, that any explicit and conscious reference is only possible against the backdrop of a host of implicit holistic assumptions and practices (Habermas 1983, Searle 1985). From this follows Habermas’ unique version of fallibilism, namely that any theoretically or philosophically made claim about reality can never assume to be the final word, to be irreversible or irrefutable. The implicit background assumptions tie the conscious and explicit endeavor to a never fully exhaustible contextual disclosure, and thus build into any explicit claim, however well-grounded or justified, the seed of revisability and reinterpretability. Yet importantly, for Habermas this inevitable context-dependency does not lead to the currently widespread contextualism and relativism vis-à-vis historical and cultural contexts. This is so because language use is intersubjectively oriented toward ‘something’ with regard to which claims to adequacy

Traditions of transcendence  147 and truth are inevitably raised. The background condition combined with the assumption of validity claims provides Habermas with the core tenets of his postmetaphysical conception of knowledge, which then allows him to interpret the inherent rationality of language use in tandem with a social differentiation theory which articulates the achievements of modernity (Habermas 1987). In this conception, ‘truth’ – understood as the adequate grasp or representation of some phenomenon – becomes differentiated into exactly three broad categories of disclosure. If our taken-for-granted language use becomes problematic or challenged, as Habermas emphasizes, we can criticize the assumed validity claims (the stand-ins for truth) in precisely three directions: we may question whether a statement’s presumptions are true (cohere with the facts), are right (cohere with presumed valid norms), or are authentic (cohere with someone’s truthful intentions). These different validity assumptions are intermingled in the lifeworld, but they can be separately articulated via distinct validity claims for which differentiated validity spheres may be established: Voila modernity and its rationalization patterns. Science, morality, and art emerge as cultural realms in which one of these claims is specifically attended to. According to Habermas, following a somewhat re-universalized Weber, such communication-inherent validity orientations can thus guide a philosophical and non-relativistic reconstruction of how, within modern societies, the rationality potential inherent in language gets unleashed in terms of really existing social value-spheres. Habermas’ provides us with an influential and well-articulated version of the dialogic or hermeneutic conception of truth. In his model, truth or its equivalents are conceived as an emergent justified consensus of what can be taken to be established on good grounds or warrants and with good reasons vis-à-vis certain phenomena in diverse domains of the world.11 What is crucial in this de-centered and differentiated conception of truth-bound conceptions of ‘reality,’ however, is that any ‘established view’ is put forward under certain constraints: it is always justified strictly with regard to one’s particular domain; claims are put forth under the assumption of revisability: reliability is thus tied to revisability. It thus entails a reflexive awareness that one’s own truth or validity claims are limited to these specific domains and make sense within them, but not necessarily beyond: the constraints of moral reason do not apply to art, nor does science determine art’s limits; science is universally valid for empirical or factual truths but cannot construct normative reasons or values; art, in turn, lacks any binding force as such and is limited to the subjective expansion of our imagination. To be sure, the different domains do expand in their specific ways to the whole of society, as scientific truth, moral universality, and subjective authenticity are ‘valid’ as irreducible dimensions of a rationally evolved social life. But they do not impose their own standards of truth or rational acceptability exclusively on the whole culture as such. To do that would constitute scientism, moralism, or aestheticism. To balance the universality of each domain’s claim and to, so to speak, adjudicate rightly their contribution to the overall understanding of a differentiated and decentered society, is the

148  Hans-Herbert Kögler challenge for a postmetaphysical society and public sphere. Habermas’ focus in his most articulated theoretical contributions consists in showing how the respective validity claims inhere in communication and how their socialtheoretical articulation can provide us with a new normative standard as to how to reconstruct the defensible rationality inherent in processes of modernization (Habermas 1983/1987). It is against the background of this postmetaphysical conception of validity that the cognitive contributions of the Axial turn are viewed. The Axial Age is thus neither merely a historical period, nor does its cognitive value and meaning consist in having once and for all accomplished a set of cognitive breakthroughs that we now only need to reactualize. It rather represents the historical emergence of a set of cognitive possibilities that nevertheless, in the form in which they were symbolically realized and institutionally established, failed to fully unleash the reflexive insights that Habermas preserves for the postmetaphysical age. Habermas’ critique of the classic (historical) Axial Age thus reads like a distorted mirror image to the qualities that our reconstruction of his postmetaphysical view unearthed. While our inescapable situatedness forces us to raise validity claims inevitably against a background of holistic assumptions and practices, which remain intrinsically embedded in the lifeworld, the Axial Age articulated their truth conception in terms of a ‘worldview.’ The lifeworld is the holistic, practical, never fully objectifiable horizon of one’s intentional claims.12 A worldview is a totalizing holistic representation of the foundational, metaphysical, or transcendent truths. A worldview determines in an explicit and authoritative fashion how the domains of subjective authenticity, normative orders, and factual truths have to be understood. Axial Age worldviews encompass existential hope via salvation or meditative transformation, normative obligation via a revealed order of commands, natural laws, or divine providence, and a pre-determined rational order of all nature and being. From our advanced postmetaphysical viewpoint, we can now see on what kind of symbolic operation the Axial worldviews rely on: Life-worldly categories are projected into the realm of ‘the world as such’ – which became as such thematizable in the Axial Age – thus transferring into this transcendent realm of ‘essential truths’ that which is experientially disclosed within social and communicative practices. Habermas thus conceives the advances by mono- or cosmo-theism and metaphysics as a ‘halfway-measure,’ falling short of a full radicalization of the potential of linguistic world-disclosure and intersubjective communication. In Axial worldviews, the world gets objectified as a whole, while it is in turn defined in terms of categories taken from human interaction (the lifeworld). The actual lifeworld of human interaction, however, gets denigrated to a derivative phenomenon: Philosophers and theologians claim, based on a viewpoint that transcends the Weltgeschehen in total, to represent a “theoretical” view of the world. This step towards objectification reduces the everyday world to a mere phenomenon, to a mirror image of the one true world. (Habermas 2019 I, 471)

Traditions of transcendence  149 Habermas’ aim, in contrast, is to put the Axial Age worldviews from their metaphysical heads back on their lifeworldly feet.13 To be sure, Habermas’ critical distanciation of the Axial Age doctrines is undertaken in the spirit that its cognitive breakthroughs represented normative potentials that subsequent developments unleashed. Habermas distinguishes strictly between a developmental logic – which reconstructs the normative components – and a developmental dynamics – which would explain these trends empirically. “Another History of Philosophy” (Habermas 2019) follows mostly an ideal-typical reconstruction how the discourse of faith and philosophy transformed philosophical thought such that these potentials were preserved, as much as they needed to be transformed. While a fully adequate account of this work is beyond the scope of this essay, I can highlight three essential dimensions by focusing on the value of our individual existence (1), the development of a universal moral perspective (2), and the detached analysis of an empirical-scientific world-relation (3). These dimensions dovetail with the three cognitive breakthroughs that we have so far been able to determine, and they help to advance further our hermeneutic aim to reinvigorate these dimensions as necessary entailments of a situated appropriation of tradition.14 As Habermas sees Axial Age worldviews as projecting the lifeworldly entanglements of factual, normative, and existential dimensions into an atemporal, abstract, and self-sufficient ideal truth, the objectified transcendent reality is not a value-neutral sphere: “The theoretical world-interpretation is intertwined, due to its strong evaluatively rich basic concepts, with norms of the practical conduct of life” (Habermas 2019, 474). Because here norms and experiences feed from the same sense of an encompassing truth, they express a claim to infallibility (Unfehlbarkeitsanspruch): “the dogmatic mode of thought (die dogmatische Denkform)… reaches back into the performative certainties of the lifeworld itself ” (Habermas 2019, 474). The challenge thus consists in disentangling the Axial Age breakthroughs from their embeddedness in dogmatic styles of thought toward a performative mode of recognition that unleashes their universal potential without their problematic metaphysical grounding. 1 Habermas approaches the development of a new existential self-understanding that is centered around an irreducible self-relation through the religious and metaphysical viewpoints on salvation or liberation, perfection or maturation and the immunization against suffering, pain, and danger… the religious and metaphysical doctrines are here defined by a unique ethos, often embodied in an idealistically conceived path of life and suffering of a foundational figure, which as such is universally binding. (Habermas 2019 I, 476) The subsequent developments point toward the liberation of these dogmatically prescribed pathways, of which “the subjective disclosure from

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the perspective of a soul struggling for her salvation is the most important innovation” (Habermas 2019 II, 194). Habermas traces as essential steps the authentic religious soul-searching of St. Augustine as well as Luther’s radicalization of the self-sufficient dialogue of the faithful with God, which unsurprisingly leads to a discussion of Kierkegaard as a m ­ odern-day crypto-existentialist representative of the Christian legacy of the irreducibly valuable individual. The critical yet also preserving demarcation to the original Axial Age legacy consists in three ‘post-conventional corrections.’ First, the universal claim toward particular pathways of an exemplary life, of what could count as a good life, is pluralized and made contingent. Second, the Axial Age world religions “basically addressed all human subjects, [while the good life and salvation] could only be reached via the [specifically defined] ethos and the membership in the respective religious community” (Habermas I, 477). In a post-conventional perspective, this restriction is overcome toward one’s quasi-automatic and universal membership within humanity as such. And third, while in Axial Age doctrines the final word as to how to conduct oneself ‘ethically’ is preserved for a religious or metaphysical elite, now the task how to interpret one’s own good life is handed over to each and every subject herself. Habermas’ portrayal of the blossomed seeds of the Axial recognition of selfhood thus proceeds by tracing the relation of self to God, detecting a continuous secularization of this dialogic encounter until an existentially irreducible, yet still intersubjectively accountable subject is reached. The pluralization, universalization, and autonomous radicalization of the question of one’s existential identity is the result of a long trajectory of problematizing the limits and fault lines of the previous dogmatic viewpoints. Its new boundaries, after abolishing the metaphysical and religious authoritarianism of transcendently justified doctrines and elites, are now set only by moral and empirical constraints. The universal moral recognition of Others is the second major inheritance from the Axial Age. But, as with the existential self-determination, the moral self-determination of the human species as such was only incompletely and ‘half-heartedly’ realized in the Axial Age. From the centered universalism of the traditions rooted in the Axial Age, it is a long way toward the discursive operations of an intercultural communication about the basic standards of political justice, which could define a cosmopolitan order for the emerging world society. (Habermas 2019 I, 478) The redogmatization of the Axial breakthroughs that Jaspers detected – and which we reconstructed with Assmann as emerging via the canonization of scripture-based dogmas and doctrines – ties the universalizing potentials right back toward a pre-defined and standardized mode of respect and belonging. This mode of traditional rootedness reintroduces a certain particularism that is expressed in the diversity of substantive

Traditions of transcendence  151 philosophical and continuously influential, powerful religious traditions. In the context of a global society which represents this diversity of multiple modernities, the major question thus arises how to decenter these tradition-imprisoned universalisms so as to allow for fully universal ‘standards of political justice which could define a cosmopolitan order for the emerging world society.’ It is here where Habermas makes a set of rich and yet potentially problematic proposals, which a fully hermeneutic reconstruction of the cognitive features of the Axial Age may be able to circumvent. In a somewhat parallel discussion, Habermas argues for a ‘postsecular public sphere’ in which religious viewpoints are fully respected as such (i.e., acknowledging what he calls their irrevocable pre-discursive core of revelation), and where religion is not diminished as an anachronistic leftover from a pre-rational age. Importantly, Habermas prescribes for such a reintroduction of religious viewpoints several minimal standards of cognitive acceptability, including moral universalism.15 In “Another History of Philosophy,” while he discusses and compares diverse Axial Age perspectives, his sole focus ultimately becomes the internal Western dialogue between monotheistic faith traditions and metaphysical philosophical discourses. Finally, for Habermas, only the Kantian and post-Kantian formalizations of the moral seeds contained in all world religions and traditions point toward a truly normative ground for a universal morality. We already saw how a linguistically transformed and situated self-understanding entails formal reference points within communicative practices as a fruitful continuation of the initial ‘half-hearted’ universalist impulses of the Axial Age. What really would remain to be shown, of course, is how such a ­formal-pragmatic reconstruction can establish itself as the organic and intuitive articulation of all Axial Age cultures and traditions. Yet Habermas own reconstruction follows a set of delimiting pathways which in a first step excludes all other than the Western traditions from his genealogy, followed by a choice of Kant over Hume, to finally arrive at – mediated by post-hermeneutic Young-Hegelians who are preferred over Hegel’s vision – at his own postmetaphysical stance, including discourse ethics (Kögler 2020c). Besides the obvious foundational limits of such an increasingly narrowed genealogy, Habermas’ aim to tie the formalized analysis of speech act types (as inhering different types of validity claims like truth, rightness, authenticity) to a theory of modern institutions (such as science, morality, and existential autonomy) marries his conception to a very specific type of modernity. The alternative hermeneutic option that we opened through our path from Assmann to Gadamer, instead, situates itself internally in each tradition as the shared premises of an in each case unavoidably interpretative and culturally situated practice. The interpretation-immanent reference to an existentially situated interpreter who may recognize other subjects as equally situated, reflexive, and capable of shared cognitive orientations and acts, which includes the thematization and objectification of a shared ‘objective’ or ‘natural’

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environment, could thus be approached from within each respective tradition, instead of being proposed as a universal framework derived from the learning process of just one of them. The third essential legacy of the Axial Age entails the seeds for an objectification of the ‘natural world’ as such. In Axial Age worldviews, empirical knowledge is not yet differentiated as an autonomous realm of knowledge or research.16 The construction of the world as pure nature is reserved for later ages. The demarcation of a purely natural world, so Habermas, entailed furthermore the separation of a realm of practical reason from contemplative theory (or natural science), as well as, in its most reflexive form, a fallibilistic self-understanding. The [post-axial] cognitive development points, firstly, towards a decentered concept of the world as the totality of physically describable states and events, secondly, towards a separation between theoretical and practical reason, and finally, towards a fallibilistic, but non-skeptical understanding of theoretical knowledge. (Habermas, 2017, 13) The Enlightenment developed a scientific version of ‘the view from nowhere,’ and in this manner somewhat inherits the concept of the ‘world as a whole’ from metaphysics and religion, albeit now limited to the sphere of natural events and strictly relative to empirically observable phenomena.17 This natural holism, however, now entails the seeds to a new metaphysical abuse, as when the ‘view from nowhere’ and its narrow naturalistic projection of reality, is expanded toward an all-encompassing worldview itself: “The fiction of a standpoint that transcends the world in toto is what scientism and metaphysics have in common” (Habermas 2019 I, 473) Scientism is the unjustified over-generalization of the world of facts and states of affairs defined in physicalist terms toward the world as a whole. While science legitimately discloses reality under the perspective of empirical evidence and lawlike generalizability, scientism expands the ontological premises of this world-projection onto the whole sphere of existence, thus necessarily leading to a reductionistic view vis-à-vis the now differentiated practical reason as well as the irreducibly emphatic individual self-relation.

Indeed, Habermas’ project to engage the mutual relationship between faith and knowledge is perhaps most deeply motivated by the aim to unearth a specific mode of socially and historically situated knowledge – practical knowledge and reason – that can neither be reduced to nor identified with theoretically observable or natural events. This new historico-social realm emerged reflectively after Kant, inspired by a newly developing historical and hermeneutic consciousness, and ultimately classically, albeit for Habermas problematically, grasped in Hegel’s concept of ‘objective spirit.’ As an early predecessor of the concept of collective intentionality, the historically and culturally irreducible realm of symbolically mediated and actively articulated practices and

Traditions of transcendence  153 institutions, constitutes a new threshold for preserving the true legacy of the Axial Age. Habermas’ core thesis is that only the appropriation of the dialogic motives combined with a strict duty ethics based on divine commands – which genealogically emerged from the Judeo-Christian background – enables the separate and non-reductive articulation of the sphere of practical reason. This sphere would otherwise – i.e, if Western thought remained solely emergent from its Greek metaphysical source – forever remained closed off. Thus only the secularization of the dialogically and normatively constituted religious experience enables the cognitive appreciation of an intersubjective and normative domain of experience and meaning in its unique logic and being.18 The historical genealogy of the faith/knowledge discourse which traces its irreducible roots in Judeo-Christian sources is thus meant to replenish and reinvigorate our scientistically diminished sense of reality and truth so as to allow for a richer self-appropriation of our cognitive abilities as human beings.

Towards a hermeneutic re-embedding of the Axial Age breakthroughs Now recall that Jaspers’ intent was to overcome a Eurocentric or Hegelian conception of history and culture so as to enable a truly non-ethnocentric and universal realization of the human potential.19 Jaspers, just like Habermas, is critical of the Hegelian conception of an objectively unfolding world spirit which ultimately arrives in a Westernized conception of truth, reason, and subjectivity. What was needed, especially obvious after the terror of the German fascist regime, was a rejuvenation of ‘world spirit’ that would escape any cultural chauvinism, claims to superiority, or the denigration of other ‘inferior’ cultures or practices. Note also that the reflexive decentering of one’s own cultural and historical tradition constitutes for Habermas an essential condition for a postsecular public sphere.20 Yet the reflexive awareness of the contingency, particularity, and situatedness of one’s background, which in turn provides the cognitive resources for one’s explicit validity claims, can only with difficulty be traced back to the Axial Age, since here the tradition was precisely rejected in terms of a transcendent, ideal and atemporal truth. What is now required, it seems, is a second meta-reflexive repositioning of one’s tradition as one among many, while similarly preserving the cognitive advances that were made vis-à-vis (1) the recognition of an irreducible self-relation in human existence, (2) the universal respect we owe to each other as human beings, and (3) the lawlike regularity and prediction of an empirical construction of the world as nature. What is needed is a new Axial Age breakthrough in which the diversity of traditions and cultural backgrounds can be mediated with the universal cognitive attitudes that the human species is capable of. Yet how are these cognitive orientations to be mediated with the diversity of cultural backgrounds and traditions? Habermas himself faces the challenge to show how his own genealogy can provide a sufficiently broad, formal, or basic viewpoint. One may question whether a genealogy undertaken within one particular context can per se be qualified to provide the resources for all possible cultural backgrounds. Habermas does not claim this, but hints

154  Hans-Herbert Kögler toward the need of a truly cosmopolitan dialogue within which the diverse traditional and cultural backgrounds would aim to reach an overlapping consensus (Habermas 2019, I, 125f.). Yet while couched as a history or ‘genealogy,’ Habermas’ claims often seem stronger, pointing toward the discovery and articulation of the truly dialogic and normative potential through the specifically Western discourse on faith and knowledge. Yet getting entangled in a discourse as to how to apply models derived from one culture to that of another seems little fruitful, besides being prone to produce defensive and hostile attitudes. In a similar vein, the deep connection that Habermas seeks between his formal pragmatics and the theory of cultural evolution ties his project to a – however much denied – quasi-Hegelian developmental account of how certain higher or more advanced types of validity and selfunderstanding emerged throughout human history. The question here would be whether the normative accomplishments of the Axial Age may be preserved without any recourse to such a developmental model which necessarily puts certain historical formations above others, based on a normative ranking of whole cultures or lifeforms.21 Finally, Habermas’ retrieval of the religious sources of practical reason may even run short of convincing power within its own Western formation. As the major aim is to delimit an out-ofbounds application of the scientific worldview, the value of practical reason may be only problematically established via a recourse to religion. After all, it is a mode of thought that science – and scientism – thinks it has forcefully refuted. Taking refuge in religious worldviews, or rather in a genealogy based on retrieving translations of their semantic potentials in order to challenge the scientific outlook, may do little to convince those who are prone to diminish religion as a backward ideology, convinced that it derives from mythico-metaphysical worldviews that science has long overcome and shown to be delusional regarding empirical truth. To be sure, the challenges faced by a Western-rooted genealogy of faith and reason which argues for a universally valid conception of practical reason in light of diverse background cultures and traditions, while being tied to a particular developmental logic and building on the challenged foundations of religious discourse, may not be insurmountable. After all, Habermas may be just right in all his claims. But if we take seriously that all intentional cognition is thoroughly embedded in holistic cultural background contexts, and if the linguistic mediation of such contexts is what first establishes the condition of possibility for the reflexive discourse about the mediation of the specific traditions with universal cognitive accomplishments, we may look for a less culturally specific grounding. As the previous discussion suggests, we may be able to circumvent the Habermasian problems via a critique of the hermeneutic conditions of the appropriation of cultural content as such. As we were able to reconstruct by drawing on Assmann’s analysis of the original establishment of canonical traditions, the Axial Age breakthroughs led indeed, as Jaspers feared, to a certain canonization of dogmas and doctrines. Yet by employing recent immanent criticisms of the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy, we were also able to see that the interpretation of texts –and, in

Traditions of transcendence  155 general, the interpretive retrieval of meaning though cultural artefacts of diverse types—displays certain cognitive orientations without which these practices – and thus the Axial Age discourse – would simply not be possible. However diverse their cultural content may be, however distinct the substance of their beliefs, i.e., the specific definitions of selfhood, truths, and ethical commitments – all cultural appropriation, even and especially the institutionalized one, is mediated by textual and symbolic sources within which a specific kind of human reflexivity is able to emerge and actualize itself. Canonical texts get handed down in dialogic disclosures in which situated subjects – however they relate to selfhood as a specific type of being – cannot but relate to the text as the meaningful and thus rational expression of another. The projection of another subject that expresses itself via a shared communicative medium is thus built into the processual mediation of accessing the content, and thus of rearticulating any tradition as such. This process entails that the understanding is about something, is orientated toward ‘truth’ as the most adequate articulation of ‘die Sache selbst.’ The reflexive awareness of this process, which is brought about in our current context and which may lead to a new pluralized understanding of diverse cultures and ontological domains, would understand specific reference points, such as the relation to one’s irreducibly individualized self, toward others as expressing themselves rationally and thus universally, and toward an ‘objective truth’ about which the engaged dialogue partners may come to an agreement (as high consensus in natural science shows), as emergent orientations stemming from within diverse holistic cultural contexts. The cognitive value-orientations are thus taken to be implicit in the very process of acquiring any tradition, and they remain constitutive in the constant cultural renewal that traditions undergo – and must undergo – if they are to remain alive. A hermeneutic framework as an immanent reconstruction of cognitive presuppositions of interpretation leads to important changes vis-à-vis the formal-pragmatic grounding as conceived by Habermasians. Surely, formal pragmatics proceeds immanently too, reconstructing the internal entailments of speech acts via validity claims. But in doing so the analysis focuses mainly on the intersubjective relations via claims and commitments. It is, so to speak, forward-intentionally oriented, conceiving the lifeworld as the mere background reservoir for more or less explicit warrants and justifications. This background is further analyzed in terms of a theory of modernity that sees an increasing value-oriented differentiation of autonomous action-spheres. What remains in the background and unthematized in this theory are the subject’s cognitive capabilities to orient herself toward the claims. The hermeneutic approach, in contrast, reappropriates the insight of the mutual dependency of cognitive and linguistic orientations by suggesting that the three speech dimensions that Karl Bühler designated as the expressive (subjective), the representational (objective), and the appeal (intersubjective) function, are structurally related to cognitive capacities which are required to actualize the linguistic orientations as they show up in manifest communications (Bühler 1982). This decisive conceptual move loosens the focus on the

156  Hans-Herbert Kögler actualized social practices and institutions and thereby allows for a much wider spectrum of such realizations. It can thus better appropriate and relate to the actual diversity of cultural and traditional backgrounds as they appear in a post-Axial world and pluralistic society. Turning the focus away from the validity claims and toward the cognitive capacities to understand and articulate subjective, intersubjective, and representational acts opens up a much broader and less distinctive (and thus less Westernized) approach toward meaning and cultural contexts. What is at stake in intercultural and interreligious understanding is now not to be decided and articulated on the level of manifest truth claims (Turner 2022). On that level, as I have shown elsewhere, the logic of a prejudicial assimilation is deemed to set in due to the application of one’s own standards of evaluation and justification (Kögler 1999). This is why I suggest that we approach the normative domain of understanding the Other, including the universal recognition as an irreducibly individual as self-related, i.e., capable of reflexive self-relation, and as such as a universal subject to be respected, via the role of the cognitive capabilities. To hermeneutically acquire the multilayered symbolic expressions of the Other, we will then first come to understand the Other’s perspective before we may proceed toward judging it on our terms. Indeed, the terms of judgment may have undergone change themselves. If we claim that ‘understanding precedes criticism’ – without excluding a normative judgment in the end – we base our claim on the possibility to actualize the meaning-perspectives of the Other based on the shared cognitive capabilities that we as human interpreters bring to the interpretive process. Since the hermeneutic approach aims to situate the interpretive acts ‘within’ one’s own as well as against the backdrop of the Other’s self-understanding, it also opens up a much richer perspective onto the issue of empirical-scientific truth claims. Empirical or factual truth-bound conceptions of reality (or segments of it) now show themselves as always already embedded within cultural contexts, the disclosure of which as holistic horizons – without denying the self-sufficiency of their distinct empirical claims – puts these scientific practices and beliefs literally into their cultural place. Recognizing this emergent embeddedness of scientific or theoretical claims, which Husserl and Heidegger already emphasized as an essential gain in cognitive insight, allows us to challenge dogmatic conceptions of established scientific truths or progress, thereby opening up alternative empirical pathways to explain phenomena. Furthermore, relating science back to its cultural contexts will go a long way to anchor the technological application of scientific insights via engineering into their now better understood social environments. The illusion of a ‘scientific view from nowhere’ has all too often led ideologically to the belief in a technology that can be securely applied to ‘nature itself’ anywhere. So even if science would not be hypostasized into an all-encompassing worldview (as in scientism), its conceptualization as a free-standing empirical disclosure of nature as a pre-existent unchanging reality often led to dramatic distortions in its efficacy. While the validity of empirical truths can be

Traditions of transcendence  157 abstracted from their contexts of origin, the application of scientific results needs to mediate these with their contexts of use. Finally, the issue of science and its cognitive relevance brings our hermeneutic meta-critique of formal pragmatics full circle due to the need to be cognitively competent vis-à-vis how science works. If the discursive orientation of science via its situated empirical-analytic fallibilism is not understood, scientific change may be identified with arbitrariness and unreliability as such. To be able to distinguish well-grounded from unfounded assertions has shown itself of crucial relevance in the political struggles of our day. After all, if the cognitive promise of the Axial Age vis-à-vis a reflexive self-understanding as a universal achievement of all human beings should not be disappointed, the relevant capabilities seem indispensable. These capabilities entail, as we aimed to show, a culturally mediated awareness of the irreducible dimensions of existential selfhood, the normative respect toward all, and the recognition of empirical truths. But they must also include a reflexive awareness that such capabilities are prone to be challenged and undermined by dogmatic and authoritarian practices and institutions, while nevertheless being inherent in the processes to understand our traditions and our place in nature. At the end, we are thus led back to the need of developing a critical reflexivity vis-à-vis the transformations of the post-Axial world so as to distinguish justified truths from ideological or distorted abuses or applications of knowledge.

Notes 1 Jaspers conceives of three essential cultures as sites of the Axial Age breakthrough, including the West (Mosaic monotheism and Greek metaphysics) and India and China. For the controversial debate, which started in the eighteenth century, about which cultures take part in it, see Assmann 2018. 2 In this vein, Jaspers speaks of the aim of speculative thought to lift itself up towards Being itself, in which a mystical union with God or Being is achieved or intended, or as the spirit coming-to-oneself within Being, or as a unio mystica, as becoming one with the Godhead, or as becoming a tool for the will of God – which objectifying speculative thought expresses in an easily misunderstood form. 3 Accordingly, the ‘transcendence’ of the mundane world is both radical and yet allows for a wide variety of ‘substantial definitions’ or ‘semantic articulations:’ the Western construction of an eternally ideal ‘world’ over against the sensuous temporal realm, as in Plato or the Mosaic traditions, is merely one option; others include an idealized yet itself humanly defined realm, as in Confucianism’s ideal past (See also Árnason et. al. 2005; Joas 2013). 4 “Transcendence migrated into the text, where the subject came to experience both herself as subject, and as a window into the transcendent. The legibility of the world, as both revealed and interpreted text, became the very transcending of the world, that is transcendence from within legibility, that is textuality, of the world” (Mendietta 2018, 299). 5 Still much later this stance is endorsed by Dilthey who sees objectified texts as the source of historical consciousness. 6 In the following section I draw on ideas and arguments developed in Kögler 2020b.

158  Hans-Herbert Kögler 7 This orientation overcomes idealism because it situates the self in a substantive cultural tradition; it overcomes romanticism because what the text says is not about the psyche or inner self of the Other. 8 See Gadamer (1989, 330–332). Gadamer’s notion of a ‘fusion of horizons’ aims to keep a higher, quasi-transcendent, and yet historical truth alive amidst the radical situating of understanding. The diversity of ontological assumptions against which interpretive understanding takes place cannot fuse all those substantive worldviews into one single new metaphysics. While any attempt at understanding will draw on one’s own beliefs and assumptions to begin the process, the reconciliatory fusion of the full substance of the involved traditions and cultures is both illusory as it would be necessarily assimilationist and ethnocentric. 9 See Habermas (2008a) and Kögler (1999, chapter 3). This view has been driven home by Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s social theories which convincingly lay out how the background of situated subjectivities are substantially defined by social environments defined by power relations and social hierarchy (see also Searle 2012). 10 For Gadamer, in contrast to our more pragmatic truth conception, truth emerges as the transcendence of mere opinion in the sharedness of its content. This ‘ideal’ transcendence, while always to be renewed, is ultimately grounded in an ideality of writing that reveals the Platonic roots of Gadamer’s thought. Speech allows to be written down and as such reveals its ideal meaning: “In writing, the meaning of what is spoken exists purely for itself, completely detached from all emotional elements of expression of life and communication” (Gadamer 1989, 392). And in leaving no doubt that this is the normative orientation interpretation should take, Gadamer adds: “A text is not to be understood as an expression of life but with respect to what it says” (Gadamer 1989, 392). This neo-ideational view of hermeneutic truth and meaning naturally culminates in what Gadamer calls his ‘speculative view’ of language, in which the whole process of interpretation is defined by the event of tradition which transcends the power of the reflexive self, forcing it to integrate into the objective all-encompassing process of tradition. Since “all being that can be understood is language” (ibid., 474), language is seen as the all-defining quasi-transcendental horizon of intentional understanding. The objective ascendance to a shared truth disclosed in the – admittedly always historical, ongoing, open-ended – process of interpretive understanding is thus the event of tradition and remains tied to it. 11 Habermas has further articulated his intuition here with reference to the controversial Popperian idea of three worlds: subjective, social and objective. See Habermas (1983, 77–84). 12 As the taken-for-granted background of practically embodied and unchallenged assumptions, it provides the Alltagswelt, the world of everydayness and its convictions and values, the necessary unifying and action-enabling sense of certainty. 13 For Habermas, the ‘anthropomorphism’ of Axial Age worldviews thus comes at a certain price. The diversity and uniqueness of the domains of subjective-experiential or intersubjective-normative phenomena and relations, as well as the relation to an objective world as such, are integrated into an all-encompassing concept of (metaphysical) truth in which facts, norms, and subjective expressions are equally determined by an objective order of things. 14 It should by now be clear how such a hermeneutic appropriation of tradition both respects the transcendent dimension of Axial worldviews and yet emphasizes how the necessarily symbolically mediated and thus interpretive actualization preserves universal features of understanding. In a reflective (and modest?) presentism, Habermas’ genealogical project in his new two volume history of (Western) philosophy aims to reconstruct how religious thought productively impacted our secular philosophical self-understanding so as to articulate the relative autonomy of practical (over against theoretical) reason (see also Habermas 2008a, 2019; Kögler 2020a; Kögler 2020b).

Traditions of transcendence  159 15 The other three value-orientations that participants in a religion-inclusive postsecular society have to share are the existential self-determination of one’s good life, the superiority of truth-claims regarding external reality by empirical natural and social science, and the reflective awareness of one’s own cultural identity within a plurality of religious, metaphysical and theoretical traditions (Habermas 2010). 16 To be sure, it may have been set up in its tracks, through the transcendent, detached and non-dialogic conception of truth, as we find it in Parmenides, Plato, not to speak of Democritus. Heidegger’s late philosophy can be seen as one big struggle to dis-entangle our sense of truth from this metaphysical conception of objectivity, as it can also be seen Rorty’s efforts to overcome a representationalist conception of truth. 17 To be sure, the focus on natural phenomena is later expanded and the ‘sciences’ evolve to include social and human sciences, the status of which remains ever since then challenged. As sciences geared toward ‘objective’ knowledge and truth, they must maintain a certain observer’s perspective, and yet as knowledge practices dealing with meaningful phenomena, they must equally draw on our own qualitative or ‘subjective’ relation to the ‘object domain.’ The struggle against scientism, i.e., the reduction of all knowledge to standards which evolved in empirical studies of natural phenomena, begins within the sciences themselves. 18 In a further radicalization of what religious discourse may now still have to offer – besides the secularization of the divine dialogue into a discourse ethics which is already underway for Habermas – Habermas suggests that the ritualistic contexts of current worldreligions (which they – in contrast to secular or metaphysical cognition – never abandoned) may hold a further potential for a yet-to-come-solidarity and thus even further advance secular practical reason. See Mendietta 2018 and Matustik 2020 for further discussion. 19 Habermas’ rejects Hegel’s philosophy of history as a metaphysically overblown account of a normative developmental logic projected into the actual forces of history and society. Yet he maintains a developmental account of the unfolding of rationality potentials via his ideal-typical construction of a normative cultural and societal evolution. In Habermas 2019, he rejects Hegel as remaining captured in the framework of a philosophy of consciousness which gets extended to whole societies as meta- or super-subjects, which in turn undercuts the universal claims of practical reason. Moral validity claims are ultimately for Hegel subservient to the ‘ethical life’ of the respective background culture. 20 In the context of his discussion of the postsecular public sphere, Habermas suggests (see also footnote 15) certain minimal standards that a religious consciousness, if it is to participate in the modern democratic public sphere, must accept. These include the right to determine your own life trajectory, a universal morality, the validity of scientifically established truth, and, as a fourth ‘cognitive requirement:’ the reflective awareness of the partiality or contingency of one’s own historical-cultural tradition, including one’s religious identity, as a context within which one approaches the dimensions of the irreducible dimensions of selfhood, normativity, and empirical truth (Habermas 2008b; Habermas 2010). 21 For an excellent immanent criticism of Habermas’s developmental model, see Strydom 1992.

References Árnason, Jóhann (2005), “The Axial Age and its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate.” In Jóhann P. Árnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Bernd Wittrock (eds.), Axial Civilizations and World History. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 19–49. Árnason, Jóhann (2013), “Rehistoricizing the Axial Age.” In Robert Bellah, Hans Joas (eds.), 337–365.

160  Hans-Herbert Kögler Árnason, Jóhann, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Björn Wittrock (eds.) (2005), Axial Civilizations and World History. Leiden, Brill. Assmann, Jan (1997), Moses The Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Assmann, Jan (2013), “Cultural Memory and the Myth of the Axial Age.” In Bellah/ Joas (2013), 366–407. Assmann, Jan (2018), Achsenzeit. Eine Archäologue der Moderne. München: C.H. Beck. Bellah, Robert (2011), Religion and Human Evolution. From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bellah, Robert, Joas, Hans(eds.) (2013), The Axial Age Discourse and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bühler, Karl (1982) Semiotic foundations of language theory, New York & London: Plenum Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1989), Truth and Method. New York: Crossroads Publishing Company. Habermas, Jürgen (1983), Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1987), Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1993), Postmetaphysical Thinking, Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2008a), On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (2008b), “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use of Reason’ in Religious and Secular Citizens.” In Habermas, Jürgen (eds.), Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 114–147. Habermas, Jürgen (2010), “A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society,” interview with E. Mendieta, SSRC. Habermas, Jürgen (2017), Postmetaphysical Thinking II: Essays and Replies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 3–27. Habermas, Jürgen (2019), Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 1: Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen; Vol. 2: Vernünftige Freiheit. Spuren des Diskurses über Glauben und Wissen. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Jaspers, Karl (1953), The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Joas, Hans (2013), “The Axial Age Discourse as Religious Discourse.” In Bellah Joas (ed.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 9–29. Kögler, Hans-Herbert (1999), The Power of Dialogue. Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kögler, Hans-Herbert (2017), “The Religious Face of Evil.” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory (BJCT), 1(2), 21–46. Kögler, Hans-Herbert (2019), “Autonomie und Überschreitung. Burchstücke einer hermeneutischen Theorie der Agency.” In H-H Kögler, A. Pechriggle, R. Winter (eds.), Enigma Agency. Bielefeld: transcript, 81–112. Kögler, Hans-Herbert (2020a), “Introduction: Challenges of a Postsecular Public Sphere.” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory (BJCT), 4(2), 5–16.

Traditions of transcendence  161 Kögler, Hans-Herbert (2020b), “Tradition, Transcendence, and the Public Sphere: A Hermeneutic Critique of Religion.” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory (BJCT), 4(2), 107–146. Kögler, Hans-Herbert (2020c), “A Genealogy of Faith and Freedom.” Theory, Culture, and Society (TCS), 37(7–8), 37–46. Matustik, Martin (2020), “Which Axial Age, Whose Rituals? Habermas and Jaspers on the ‘Spiritual Situation of the Present Age.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 47, issue 6, 1–14. Mendieta, Eduardo (2018), “The Axial Age, Social Evolution, and Postsecular Consciousness.” Critical Research on Religion, 6(3), 289–308. Searle, John (1985), Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John (2012), The Making of the Social World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strydom, Piet (1992), “The Ontogenetic Fallacy: The Immanent Critique of Habermas’s Developmental Logical Theory of Evolution.” Theory, Culture, and Society, 9(3). Turner, Stephen (2022), “Naturalizing Kögler.” In L̓ubomír Dunaj, Kurt C.M. Mertel (eds.), Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics. London: Bloomesbury, 87–102. Vattimo, Gianni, Rorty, Richard (2007), In Santiago Zabala (ed.), The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

11 A secularity sui generis? On the historical development of conceptual distinctions and institutional differentiations in Japan Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr Introduction In this chapter we refer to a central theme from research on Axial Age civilizations, and relate it to the current debate on secularism, secularity and secularization: the observation that these civilizations experienced a “comprehensive rupture and problematization of order”, to which they responded “by elaborating new models of order, based on contrasts and connections between transcendental foundations and mundane lifeworlds” (Árnason et al. 2005: 2). Against this background, they developed specific characteristics: a “broadening of horizons” towards potentially universalistic experiences, “an ontological distinction between higher and lower levels of reality, and a normative subordination of the lower level to the higher”. These are all taken as “signs of enhanced reflexivity” (ibid.). This reflexive potential, common to Axial Age civilizations, was then “channelled into specific contexts and directions” (ibid.). Shmuel Eisenstadt elaborated on these “channels”, arguing that “Multiple Modernities” resulted from the different responses to Western modernity, based on diverse civilizational backgrounds. Both Árnason’s and Eisenstadt’s approaches therefore combine elements of commonality as well as of distinction. This is echoed in our talk of Multiple Secularities (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012; Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr 2021; Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2021), addressing the patterns of distinguishing between “religious” and “non-religious” spheres or practices on the semantic as well as on the institutional level. We see these distinctions and differentiations as both antecedents to and resources of secularity, far removed from modern political secularism. We argue that they are made in response to specific reference problems, and are aligned with specific guiding ideas. Originally, our discussion centred around modern national configurations and their history, but it has since been expanded to premodern configurations. In many ways, then, our perspective corresponds to the debate on the Axial Age. There has been extended discussion on whether the Axial Age should be treated as a distinct historical epoch, or if a typological approach would be more appropriate, focusing on “axiality” as “heightened levels of reflexivity and agency” (Árnason 2012: 338). Jóhann Árnason has argued against the latter, calling for a rehistoricization of Axial Age research, and for its DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-14

A secularity sui generis?  163 provisional demarcation as a historical epoch. He has suggested distinguishing between phases of religious innovation “within a cultural universe dominated by cosmotheism and an uncontested sacral power center” (ibid.: 342), and the Axial Age period, in which these presuppositions were fundamentally questioned. Furthermore, in relation to Eisenstadt’s hypothesis of a “secondary breakthrough”, as in the case of Christianity and Islam, Árnason argues for situating both these civilizations within a new historical period, one to which the ascendancy of empires was central (ibid.: 344). Árnason’s review of scholarly works on a range of Axial Age civilizations leads to his call for a closer analysis of the diverse and changing relations between religion and politics in this period (ibid.: 363). We take this as the starting point for our considerations, and suggest linking historical analyses of Axial Age civilizations with sociological analyses of secularity. If the Axial Age is essentially about a rupture that separates the realms of sacred and political power, it seems obvious to relate this to sociological conceptualizations of the differentiation between religious and non-religious spheres as one central element of secularization theories. Whereas one might easily set aside the normative and teleological implications of secularization theory, this differentiation between religion and other domains, especially politics, seems less dispensable. It implies the weakening power of religion over other societal spheres, but also the growing autonomy of religion vis-à-vis political power. Whereas some consider this a generalizable feature of modern societies, others perceive it as insolubly linked to the West, with its anchorage in the Christian tradition, and only imported into non-Western regions through Western colonialism. Accordingly, it has been argued that not only the concepts and practices of secularism, but even the mere application of the religious–secular binary to non-Western contexts are anachronistic and euro-centric. Secularity is considered a specific property of the (modern) West, which non-Western civilizations did not develop out of their own resources. It is here that analyses of the ‘Axial Age and its consequences’ are of specific relevance. Despite different civilizations having followed different paths of modernization, it is nonetheless worth looking for premodern antecedents to, or sources of, the modern secular–religious divide. This divide has two levels: conceptual distinctions related to the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the supramundane, or the religious and the nonreligious, embedded in worldviews and forms of world articulation; and forms of institutional differentiation, which are connected to these conceptual distinctions, and which relate to specific forms of agency. This is not meant to neglect differences in civilizational developments or in forms of dependence and power. The development of secular types of order was indeed closely intertwined with Western modernity, and secularism was part and parcel of the colonial enterprise. However, this is not the whole story. As the research on Multiple Modernities has convincingly shown, different methods of coping with Western modernity developed against specific civilizational backgrounds; some sharing the experience of a fundamental

164  Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr rupture in their past, as works on Axial Age civilizations have highlighted. Studies of the respective civilizations have even argued for the existence of a “secular age” in ancient India (Bhargava 2016), a secularism “avant la lettre” in premodern Japan (Swyngedouw 1979), or an “incipient secularism” in documents of premodern Islam (Yavari 2019). Whereas it might seem anachronistic to use the terminology of secularism or secularity for premodern phenomena, what these works rightly point out is the existence of boundary demarcations akin to those between religion and non-religion, with divisions of labour or zones of neutrality, long before Western secularism or even the Christian mission came into the picture.

Japan: paradox of a non-axial secularity? In the following, we will connect Axial Age theory and the concept of Multiple Secularities by investigating the emergence of conceptual distinctions akin to the religious–secular divide and the related forms of institutional differentiation. We shall also consider the configurations and forms of agency from which these developed. We argue that such distinctions and differentiations emerged in various civilizations, becoming resources for distinctions between the religious and the non-religious, and for secular developments in the modern era. In contrast to others, we highlight the early emergence of such distinctions and differentiations as a commonality between various civilizations, without questioning their diversity resulting from different prior cultural conditions and different forms of encounter with Western modernity. We aim to thereby historicize the concept of an original transcendence/ immanence divide in civilizational analysis, and to give it a stronger empirical turn. Our focus in the following is on premodern Japan. It is remarkable that two important modernization theorists and leading protagonists of the concept of “axial civilization”, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Jóhann Árnason, have dealt so thoroughly with Japan – the “comparative historian’s delight and despair” (Árnason 1997: xiv). Both published extensively (Eisenstadt 1996; Árnason 1997) on the particularities of Japanese civilization and its path to modernity. In the following, we address only some aspects of these inspiring works, in particular their interpretation of Japanese religious history, informed by their studies of “axial civilization”. Both authors’ interest in Japan is sparked by the observation that it is the only example of a “fully successful non-Western modernization”, despite its being a “non-axial civilization” (Eisenstadt 1997: 123). As Árnason adds, many Western observers believe that Japan exhibits “a paradoxical combination of essential difference and contingent similarity” (Árnason 1999: 34). According to Eisenstadt, the supposed “non-axiality” of Japanese civilization – which creates the “paradox of non-axial modernity” (Eisenstadt 1997, 1999) – resulted from the suppression of certain orientations, in particular the transcendental and universalistic ones (Eisenstadt 1999: 86). He thus follows the line of Robert N. Bellah, who claimed that, despite the strong presence of transcendentalism in medieval Japanese Buddhism, “the note of transcendence

A secularity sui generis?  165 was soon lost. It was drowned out by the ground bass […] of the Japanese tradition of this-worldly affirmativeness” (Bellah 1991: 119). Eisenstadt attributes this to a Japanization and “de-axialization” of axial Buddhism. Árnason shares Eisenstadt’s emphasis of the “[r]adical particularism” (Árnason 1999: 34) and “the exceptionally pronounced otherness” of Japanese civilization, which he associates with a specific “pattern of collective identity” (ibid.). He deviates from Eisenstadt, however, in both his interpretation of Japanese history and the concept of axial civilization.1 Although generally agreeing with “Eisenstadt’s analysis of the Japanizing process as a de-transcendentalizing and de-universalizing turn” (Árnason 2003: 56), Árnason sees Japan less as a “non-axial civilization” but rather as a “civilization sui generis” (ibid.: 43). Japan, he argues, has realized “the possibility of societies ‘singularizing themselves’ within a broader civilizational field […] thus developing into autonomous variants of a shared civilizational pattern” (ibid.). This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the two authors’ studies on Japan, however.2 We will deal only with the aspects that directly concern the question of a Japanese path to secularity. The connection between modernization theory and secularization theory is obvious, as is the fact of a multiplicity of both “modernities” and “secularities”. Classical modernization theories tend to assume that secularity is a necessary concomitant, if not a precondition, of modernity. Thus, if the Japanese path to modernity is clearly distinguishable from Western modernity, this might also apply to its path to secularity. Following Weber, both Eisenstadt and Árnason attribute paramount importance to the influence of Christianity, with its universalist and transcendentalist orientation, in Europe’s path to modernization. The apparent paradox of Japanese modernization lies precisely in the fact that Japanese civilization, by contrast, allegedly suppressed the universal and transcendental tendencies of Buddhism, in favour of a radical particularism and the “ground bass of this-worldly affirmativeness”. Given the assumed importance of a strong notion of transcendence to the distinction between religion and the secular, the establishment of secularity in modern Japan is thus as much in need of explanation as its path to modernity: We must face the ‘paradox of a non-axial secularity’. A prerequisite for any form of secularity is the differentiation of a special area of social action that is defined as religious. As McCutcheon (2007: 178) states, “‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ are […] co-dependent categories”. The distinction between transcendence and immanence is, in turn, central to the formation of a global concept of religion. In other words, binary distinctions between transcendence and immanence tend to precede the religious/secular distinction (Casanova 2012: 191). Thus, if the idea of transcendence, central to Buddhism, has not been able to establish itself in Japan, the question arises as to whether the secularity of modern Japanese society merely represents a copy of Western standards of social order and legitimate governance, or whether, analogously to Japanese modernity, it developed out of its own resources – a “secularity sui generis”.

166  Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr Horii Mitsutoshi seems to exclude this possibility, maintaining that “there was no ‘religion’ in premodern Japan. Therefore, there was no ‘secularity’ in premodern Japan, either” (Horii 2018). Drawing on rather dubious secondary materials, he suggests that the distinction between transcendence and immanence “historically emerged in the civilizations of India, Judea, and Greece, but not in other places such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Japan” (Horii 2021: 223). A problem with most Western studies postulating Japanese exceptionalism is that they are not based on historical sources. This entails the danger of unquestioningly accepting “what Japan specialists write as if it were virtually always correct” (Reader et al. 1998: 244). To put it simply: We think that Eisenstadt, Árnason, and many others run the risk of falling victim to a historical myth, propagated by Japanese Meiji ideologues, which systematically downplays the importance of Buddhism as a cultural force, in favour of a nativist construction of Japanese cultural history. In this context, Grapard rightly speaks of the so-called Meiji Restoration as “Japan’s ignored cultural revolution” (Grapard 1984), which involved a radical reconfiguration of the supporting epistemic and social structures. As early as 1868, Buddhism and Shintō were forcibly separated (shinbutsu bunri), followed by a campaign to “abolish Buddhism and destroy Śākyamuni” (haibutsu kishaku). In 1869, propagandists (senkyōshi) were appointed to spread the “Great Doctrine” (daikyō) throughout the country – an ideology based on the ideas of the nativist Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), which aimed at establishing a “non-religious” state-Shintō, and the “unity of ritual and rule” (saisei itchi) under the authority of the deified tennō (Lokowandt and Zachert 1978; Antoni 2016: 196–200). The state ideology of New Japan was ultimately summarized in the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyo ̄iku chokugo) of 1890. The success of this cultural revolution can be explained by the fact that its protagonists succeeded in creating “plausibility structures” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 174–189) that suggest the persistence of a cultural substratum throughout history. Thus, they managed to conceal the radical rupture that the forced opening of Japan had actually entailed. At its core, their narrative of Japanese modernity is founded on the claim that a primordial natural state of Japanese civilization had been restored with the restitution of the “heavenly ruler” as the true head of state, the cultivation of “the national essence” (kokutai; cf. Antoni 1991, 2016), and a reunification of ritual and rule. The original way of Japan, it was claimed, had been contaminated for many centuries by Buddhism and Chinese civilization. Crucial to the nativist narrative, however, is the claim that the influence of both Buddhism and Chinese cultural elements on Japanese culture was merely superficial. Both Eisenstadt and Árnason seem to adopt this story. Árnason contends that Buddhism and Confucianism “did not simply interact and mix with indigenous traditions […] but rather, they became parts of a much more uncommon pattern which allowed for an ongoing recombination of traditions without mutual absorption or concluding synthesis” (Árnason 1999: 44). He also sees this pattern of appropriation of foreign

A secularity sui generis?  167 cultural elements without absorbing the religion on which the corresponding civilization is based, in the encounter with the West after 1868: “Japan proved exceptionally receptive to Western civilization without any significant opening to its dominant religion.” From this he concludes “that Japan represents a case of religious under-determination” (ibid.: 44). For historians of religion such statements seem questionable. There is little historical evidence for the presence of a coherent and resilient civilization in sixth-century Japan, for Chinese civilization and Buddhism to have encountered. The legitimist state myth, to which the Meiji ideologues refer in their conception of the modern, tennō-centric state, did not emerge until almost 200 years after the introduction of Buddhism, and did so with the participation of Buddhist authors. The mythological, especially the cosmogonic, elements in the imperial chronicles Kojiki (publ. 712) and Nihon shoki (publ. 720), which appear genuinely Japanese, and form the basis of the “invented tradition” of Shintō, are also massively influenced by Chinese cosmological concepts.3 Even Yoshida no Kanetomo (1435–1511), the mastermind of the first school of Shintō unrelated to Buddhist institutions, had no conceptual resources at his disposal other than Buddhist and Chinese categories, while reinterpreting them in a peculiar fashion (Kanetomo and Grapard 1992; Scheid 2001). It is noteworthy that Kanetomo not only adopts central terms and concepts of Buddhism and Chinese philosophy, but even makes his “One and Only Shintō” (yuitsu shinto ̄) a universal religion. The kami, the Japanese gods, are declared creators not only of Japan, but of all countries. The Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the progenitor of the imperial dynasty, shines her light on the whole world (Scheid 2001: 249). Rather than a “de-axialization” of Buddhism, then, we witness an “axialization” of Shintō. Yet even the interpretation of Amaterasu as a universal goddess, it could be argued, ultimately goes back to Buddhist discourses in which she was identified with the “primordial Buddha” Dainichi 大日 (“Great Sun”). From the perspective of Buddhist thinkers of the Middle Ages, “the great empire of Japan” (dai nihon koku 大日本国) was in fact not only the “land of the gods” (shinkoku; cf. Kuroda 1996b), but also “the original land of Dainichi” (dainichi no hon no koku 大日ノ本ノ国)4 – an idea to which Kanetomo explicitly refers (Scheid 2001: 303–304). Árnason’s “dual civilization” model also underestimates the Buddhist impact on the cultural and political development of Japan. Árnason rightly recognizes that Japan had already laid the foundation for a dual ruling ­structure – imperial court and state bureaucracy – in its early state formation, starting in the seventh century. This culminated in the “secondary state formation” of the Edo period (1603–1668), with the establishment of the military government of the shōgunate, which nevertheless had to be legitimized by the politically impotent tennō. The separation of “effective [secular] power”, i.e. “the bureaucratic state”, from “legitimate [sacred] authority”, i.e. “the imperial institution” (Árnason 1997: xvi; 62), is usually considered a feature of an axial civilization (ibid.: 64).

168  Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr However, Árnason’s picture of a dual civilization, which was politically based on the separation of secular power and sacred authority, is incomplete. It is true that, especially in medieval Japan, the imperial court (kuge), endowed with “sacred authority” (ken’i), was juxtaposed with the warrior nobility (buke), which increasingly exercised “effective power” (kenryoku). The historian Kuroda Toshio has shown, however, that the “temple nobility” (jike) formed a third power bloc, involved in shaping the architecture of power. In effect, we are dealing with a ternary structure: (1) Political power was exercised by the “warrior nobility”; (2) the exercise of power was formally legitimized by the tennō, who was in reality powerless and functioned only as a symbolic figure;5 (3) the sizeable Buddhist “temple nobility” acted as powerful landlords,6 enjoying extensive legal autonomy in their domains, and employing enslaved peasants as well as “warrior monks”. As with the “warrior nobility”, the legitimation of the “temple nobility” depended on official recognition by the tennō. One might object that the mere reference to the economic, political and military relevance of Buddhist institutions does not itself disprove the theses of Árnason, Eisenstadt and others. None of them denies the importance of Buddhism per se. They do, however, assume that Buddhism had been “deaxialized”, and thus could not be considered as a motor of modernization to the same extent that Christianity was in Europe. This is where our critique comes in. Everywhere “axial” religions and their successors subordinated themselves to particularistic interests within existing power structures, became part of particular collective identities, and were primarily concerned with this-worldly benefits. This does not diminish the contribution of “axial religions” to their respective civilizations, however. Universalistic religions, through their conceptions of transcendence, facilitate a mental distancing from the social world; an external and critical perspective, which is then conducive to a higher degree of reflexivity. Árnason, however, questions whether reflexivity, in terms of a “second-order thinking”, is “automatically associated with transcendence” (Árnason 1997: 69). However, if the two are not inextricably coupled, the alleged de-axialization or “de-transcendentalization” of Buddhism in Japan does not create a paradox with respect to Japanese modernization and secularization. The question then arises as to which cultural resources, other than the notion of transcendence, enabled the Japanese to develop such a high degree of reflexivity, which is assumed to be necessary for modernization. Here, Árnason focuses particularly on state formation and cultural comparison – the emergence of a “dual civilization”. If we understand correctly, Árnason’s view is that the great civilizations – first China, and later the West – constituted the functional equivalents to the notion of transcendence in Japan: By constantly observing itself in the mirror of these civilizations, Japan developed a high level of reflexivity, without adopting the transcendentalism so typical of axial civilizations. As Árnason writes, A dual civilizational identity is characteristic of the Japanese tradition from the outset: it is affiliated to the China-centred East Asian complex

A secularity sui generis?  169 and at the same time characterized by very distinctive traits of its own. This structural duality is the key to historical changes in attitudes to the outside world. […] But the pattern that took shape in interaction with the Chinese world is also reflected in Japanese reactions to Western expansion and its civilizational dynamics. (Árnason 1997: xvi) We agree with this observation, but are not convinced by the assumption that Buddhism failed to provide another cultural resource for the development of reflexive rationality in Japan. Irrespective of the question as to whether a strong notion of transcendence is a precondition for modernization, it must be considered necessary for the emergence of secularity. Thus, we are primarily concerned with the viability of the assumption of Japanese “immanentism” and “particularism”. Premodern Japanese literature contains countless references to the vanity of human existence, the corruptness of human society, and the depravity of human nature. Thus, it is considered necessary to strive for liberation from the cycle of birth and death, through Buddhist practice with the help of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Bellah, too, concedes that already Prince Shōtoku (574–622) “declared that the world is a lie and only the Buddha is true” (Bellah 1964: 359). He further states that “in the Kamakura period the conviction that the world is hell led to orgies of religious suicide by seekers after Amida’s paradise” (ibid.: 359–360). It should be added that religiously motivated suicides, aiming at rebirth in the Pure Land Sukhāvatı ̄ of Amida or in the paradise Pot ̣alaka of Kannon, were still widespread in the Edo period (Kleine 2006; Moerman 2007). Thus, it is clear that it is at least an oversimplification to claim that in Japan the chasm between transcendent and secular orders was entirely abandoned in favour of more “immanentist” interpretations (Eisenstadt 1999: 84–85). Some influential schools of Japanese Buddhism certainly propagated a form of idealistic monism, which could amount to a radical world affirmation. Here, all existence was considered to be an emanation of the Buddha, part of the Buddha’s mind, and thus originally in the state of perfect awakening (hongaku). This thus rendered the quest for salvation in a transcendent sphere unnecessary (Habito 1995; Stone 1995; Sueki 1995). However, by far the largest tradition of Japanese Buddhism,7 the Pure Land tradition, has always insisted on a strict distinction between the “corrupt world” (edo) we live in, and the perfectly transcendent “Pure Land” (jo ̄do) of the Buddha Amida, which was to be striven for. For the question of an indigenous development of secularity in Japan, however, one paradigm is decisive, propagated by all Buddhist schools, and accepted by mundane rulers until well into the nineteenth century. From the eleventh century, the doctrine of the “interdependence of the nomosphere of the Buddha and the nomosphere of the ruler” (buppō o ̄bō so ̄’i) prevailed as a valid paradigm (Kuroda 1996a; Kleine 2013, 2018, 2019). What is noteworthy here is that the ternary structure of rulership suggested above – constituted

170  Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr by the three power blocs of court nobility, warrior nobility, and temple nobility – is conceptually broken down to a dual domination by mundane (seken) and supramundane (shusseken) powers. Here, both the tennō and the warrior nobility are assigned to the ruler’s (mundane) nomosphere (ōbō). This model deviates from Árnason’s “dual structure” of “effective power”, instead resembling the model of a differentiation between religion and politics, often associated with the “axial breakthrough”. According to the dominant paradigm of state theory in premodern Japan, the “division of sacred and secular authority” (Árnason 1997: 64) is not between the emperor and the bureaucracy, but between the “nomosphere of the ruler” and the “nomosphere of the Buddha” (buppō).

Japan’s specific axiality as the driving force for a distinctive path to secularity Before providing a counter-narrative to the “paradox of non-axial secularization,” a disclaimer seems appropriate. The study of Japanese history brings to mind the Buddhist parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant: depending on the sources one focuses on, a different picture emerges. Our own analysis is based primarily on Buddhist sources from premodern and early-modern Japan; as a result, a certain “Buddhist bias” cannot be ruled out. Our description of the ‘elephant’ thus provides a counter-narrative to the Meiji master narrative, which continues to shape the historical consciousness of many Japanese to this day – and consequently also the image of Japan held by Western observers. It must be noted, however, that until the late seventeenth century, intellectual discourse was dominated by Buddhist authors, who therefore played a significant role in shaping ideas on the relationship between mundane and supramundane power. Indeed, it was not until around 1700 that a noteworthy counter-discourse developed, initially by neo-Confucianism-informed thinkers, who increasingly adopted a nativist, xenophobic, and anti-Buddhist position. Their constructions of a true Japanese culture, a “national essence” and specific “folk spirit” free of continental influences formed the ideological framework for the Meiji Restoration. This being said, a study of historical sources confirms the assumption that Japan not only underwent an independent process of modernization, but also followed a distinct path toward secularity. However, Eisenstadt and Árnason’s thesis of the de-axialization of Buddhism in the course of its Japanization, given as an explanation for the Japanese Sonderweg, is not tenable. Therefore, we would like to present our own thesis on the Japanese trajectory towards a specifically Japanese form of secularity. First of all, what is the distinctive feature of Japanese secularity? Since the present separation of religion and state can be described as a dictate of the post-World War Two US-led allied occupation forces, it does not represent a specifically Japanese configuration of the religious and the secular. If there is a specific form of modern Japanese secularity, we must focus on the period between 1868 and 1945. In this period, shrine Shintō (jinja shinto ̄) held an ambiguous status as a supposedly non-religious state cult, a national

A secularity sui generis?  171 ideology, and the foundation of public morality. The religious status of Buddhism, Christianity, and “sectarian Shintō” (kyōha shintō), on the other hand, was beyond question. They were recognized as independent religious communities, based on a faith which one could, but (unlike in the Edo period) did not have to, individually profess. In this regard, the legal status of religious groups in the period between 1868 and 1945 did not differ significantly from those in European nation states. The principle that religious affiliation is based on an individual (albeit not free!) confession was already visible in the religious policy of the Edo period. Moreover, the confessional character of Buddhism was established with the emergence of the Buddhist reform movements of the thirteenth century, and the concomitant popularization and individualization of Buddhism. Especially in the Pure Land school, great importance was attributed to individual confession and deeply internalized belief. Leading thinkers of this influential Buddhist tradition accordingly propagated an almost modern-sounding relationship between individual faith and public duties. As early as 1344, Zonkaku (1290–1373) described the relationship between the nomosphere of the Buddha and the nomosphere of the ruler as … the two wings of a bird or the two wheels of a cart. It is untenable that even one should be lacking. Therefore, one protects the Ruler’s Law by means of the Buddha’s Law, and one reveres the Buddha’s Law by means of the Ruler’s Law […] Whether attached to the mundane or to the supra-mundane, we look up to beg for grace and favours. How could we disregard the Ruler’s Law? (Shiji Senkō Sho’in 1889: 549–550; cf. Kuroda 1996a: 283) These ideas, still widely quoted in the latter half of the nineteenth century, were further developed by Rennyo (1415–1499) in his letters to the community: If there are any of you who have heard the meaning of our tradition’s true faith in the otherpower [of the Buddha Amida] and become decisively settled, you must store the truth of that true faith in the bottom of your hearts […]. Do not slight the provincial military governors and local land stewards, claiming that you have attained true faith; meet your public obligations in full, without fail. […] Besides this, in particular, take the ruler’s laws as your outer aspect, store true faith in [Amida’s] otherpower deep in your hearts, and take [the] secular [principles of] humanity and justice8 as essential. Bear in mind that these are the rules of conduct that have been established within our tradition. (Shinran et al. 1996: 68) Here, a clear distinction is made between internal faith in the Buddha Dharma, and the external demeanour as a subject having to adhere to the laws of the ruler. Not explicitly emphasized here, but presupposed, is that the content of the ruler’s law is determined by Confucian social ethics, legitimized by the

172  Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr gods, and enforced via threat of divine punishment. Accordingly, from a Buddhist perspective, Confucianism and Shintō belong to the ruler’s mundane nomosphere. The nomosphere of the Buddha supports the nomosphere of the ruler through the “domestication of the masses” (Weber 1988: 551)9 via moral instruction, and protects it through powerful rituals. We thus find a clear distinction between the nomosphere of the Buddha and that of the ruler. The former is related to absolute transcendence, and is represented and controlled by Buddhist institutions; the latter is focused on inner-worldly purposes, is represented by the tennō, and is enforced by the respective state institutions (with the help of the gods). We thus find it inaccurate to declare a de-axialization in the sense of a “de-transcendentalizing turn” here. But what about the supposed “de-universalizing turn”? This complex question cannot be answered exhaustively here. Insofar as the concrete relationship between the two nomospheres is addressed, a particularistic perspective is undoubtedly adopted. This stems from the fact that the ruler’s nomosphere can only claim validity within the ruler’s own territory. Accordingly, there are a variety of local or national rulers’ laws. From the Buddhist perspective, by contrast, the Buddha Dharma is universally valid. As a system of norms, whose goal is the implementation of a mindset and way of life conducive to transcendent salvation, it concerns all people worldwide – indeed, even non-human sentient beings, such as animals, gods, and spirits. The tension between religious universalism and political particularism is discussed in detail in the first publication of the famous thinker Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō (1870–1966). In his New Theory of Religion (Shin-shūkyō ron) of 1896, he writes: At first glance, one might think, state and religion appear to be extremely opposed, the reason being that the state is something founded on discrimination, whereas religion necessarily upholds a comprehensive egalitarianism. Religion sees its ultimate purpose as the realization of a cosmic ideal; the state sees as its ultimate purpose the preservation of its own existence […] Religion professes universal brotherhood and enjoins against making any distinction between self and other; the state is based on the principles of loyalty and patriotic sentiment, and exhorts its citizens to independence. Religion never hesitates to question the existence of the state and history; the state always acts on the basis of its own selfcentered interests. In this way, religion and the state are incompatible. (Suzuki 1896: 249; Kirita Kiyohide 1994: 53) A few years earlier, authors in the tradition of the Pure Land Buddhist school had expressed Buddhism’s universal claim to validity in terms of a hierarchical inclusivism, thus attempting to resolve the tension between the political particularism of the ruler’s law and the universalism of the Buddha Dharma (cf Kleine 2022). Fukuda Gidō (1805–1891), a cleric of the Jōdo Shinshū, makes remarkably strong claims in his Discussion of the Primacy of Ruler’s Law in the True School [of Pure Land Buddhism] (Shinshū ōhō ihon dan; publ. 1877):

A secularity sui generis?  173 Confucius and Laozi were both advanced bodhisattvas and messengers of the Buddha. Also, the way of humanity and justice is originally a teaching of the Buddha. […] Fuxi, Nüwa, Master Kong (Confucius), Master Lao (Laozi), and Master Yan[hui] were all messengers of the Buddha. Therefore, it is clear that the path of humanity and justice is also originally a teaching of the Buddha. The ruler’s law and statecraft are also the teachings of the Buddha. […] Shintō is the teaching of the Buddha, too. The path of filial piety is the teaching of the Buddha. The worthless scholars do not fathom the broad-heartedness of the Buddha Dharma. In their bias they merely reject its supramundane teachings (shusse no kyo)̄ and do not understand that it also expounds methods for ruling the world (jise no ho)̄ . (Fukuda 1877: 27–28) The perspective adopted here is not only transnational, but clearly universalistic: the Buddha is the originator of all moral norms – whether mundane or supramundane. Buddhism thus cannot be reduced to its other-worldly aspects. The other-worldly character of the Buddha Dharma should not be neglected, however, as stressed by Hakoya Tokuryō (1803–1892). In his On the Doctrine of Buddha Dharma and Ruler’s Law Being Like Wheels and Wings (Buppō obō rinyoku gi; publ. 1887), Hakoya argues similarly to Fukada, but emphasizes Buddhism’s orientation towards transcendence. Additionally, he highlights the special position of the ruler’s law of Japan, in contrast to those of India and China. He adds a notion of supremacy conducive to an expansive imperialism that soon after became state policy: The one that unites the ruler’s laws of the three countries,10 cares for the people, and civilises them so that there be peace on earth, is the ruler’s law of Japan. […] When we speak of the ruler’s law today, we take the commandments of the gods and the teachings of Confucianism as the ruler’s law. The primal intention of the appearance of the Buddha in the world was to save [sentient beings] from birth and death. However, it is not the case that he did not teach secular laws (seken no hō). […] In the Sutra on the Correct Interpretation of the Ruler’s Law11 the issue of governing the state by means of the ruler’s law is expounded. This secular law is a law aimed at controlling the person and controlling the world, and in addition to enable [men] to be reborn in the human sphere or in a heaven. In particular, what is taught in numerous sutras is filial piety, and a lack of filial piety is a great sin. In this way, the secular law is taught, but in order to liberate oneself from birth and death, one must cut off love and affection. (Hakoya 1935: 2)

174  Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr Of particular relevance to the question of the alleged de-axialization and “this-worldly affirmativeness” of Japanese Buddhism is Hakoya’s emphasis on the specificity of the Buddhist lifestyle, fully focused on the goal of salvation, which is basically incompatible with the secular lifestyle based on Confucian social ethics (Hakoya 1935: 3). In our view, these quotations show quite clearly that the assumption of the Japanizing process as a de-transcendentalizing and de-universalizing turn is hardly tenable – at least not in its generalizing form. The interrelated theses of the “absence of a transcendental/secular distinction” (Horii 2021: 223), of the “de-axialization” of Buddhism in Japan, and thus of the improbability of an independent path to secularity do not, therefore, seem plausible. The image of a non-axial civilization is the result of an ideological campaign that began with the Meiji Restoration, rather than a historically adequate description. The question remains, however, as to whether we can identify epistemic and social structures in premodern Japan that might have functioned as indigenous resources for a Japanese configuration of secularity. We would like to advance the thesis that a forerunner of “modern secularity” had already been realized in the Edo period. There was a clear separation of state institutions from Buddhist institutions, but within a legal framework that was determined by the state, and on which religious institutions were not allowed to exert any influence. Religious institutions enjoyed protection and support from the state, whilst also having to submit to the state’s legal system. It was recognized that professing a Buddhist denomination was (in theory) an individual decision based on personal faith, but it did not absolve the believer from his duties as a law-abiding and loyal subject. This is a fairly modern form of secularity,12 for the development of which no Western models were needed. Contrary to Eisenstadt’s assumptions, both options were available as cultural resources in the Meiji period: the universalist/transcendentalist and the particularist/immanentist. The Meiji reformers opted for the latter when it came to the creation of a national myth, which allowed for a rapid modernization according to Western standards, without a concomitant substantial loss of cultural identity. As Árnason has rightly pointed out, this pattern of creative and selective appropriation of exogenous elements had been continuously cultivated in Japan since the seventh century. Contrary to his assumptions, however, we suggest that the “dual civilization”, in the sense of Japan’s analyzing itself through the mirror of other civilizations, was not a mere substitute or functional equivalent for the supposedly missing notion of transcendence. Instead, it was an additional factor alongside ideas of transcendence. It perhaps even became an additional advantage, in terms of the formation of rational reflexivity in Japanese civilization – a reflexivity conducive to the formation of a specific Japanese modernity and secularity.

Notes 1 For an in-depth discussion of the differences between Eisenstadt and Árnason, see Smith 2002; cf. Reader, Ian. “Studies of Japan, Area Studies, and the Challenges of Social Theory: Review of: Japanese Civilization: A Comparative

A secularity sui generis?  175 View. By S. N. Eisenstadt: Social Theory and Japanese Experience: The Dual Civilization. By Jóhann P. Arnason: Difference and Modernity: Social Theory and Contempoary Japanese Society. By John Clammer: Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption. By John Clammer.” Monumenta Nipponica 53, no. 2 (1998): 237-255. 2 Cf. Bottiger 1998; Reader 1998; Deutschmann 2000; Smith 2002, 2011; Spohn 2011. 3 Remarkably, Chamberlain spoke of the “invention of a new religion” in Japan as early as 1912 (Cf. Chamberlain 1912). It is equally remarkable that the character of modern Shintō as a politically motivated innovative construction was subsequently generally overlooked in both Japan and the West. 4 The Keiran jūyōshū 溪嵐拾葉集, a medieval Buddhist text, states: “An oral tradition says that the core meaning of the [the designation] ‘Land of the Origin of the Sun’ is in fact ‘Original Country of the Great Sun[buddha]’. 傳云。本[obviously misspelled for 大]日本國ト者。心ハ言フ大日ノ本ノ國也 云云” (T76, no. 2410, p. 693b19). 5 Whereas, as a clan, the imperial family was still powerful. 6 Kuroda estimates that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, up to 60% of all productively exploitable estates were owned by Buddhist monasteries and temples. McMullin 1984: 23. 7 According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs (bunkachō 文化庁) the Pure Land denominations counted more than 22 million “believers” in 2020, i.e., almost twice as many as the second-largest group of denominations. Bunkachō 2021: 51. 8 Humanity/humaneness and justice/righteousness are regarded as the two cardinal virtues among the “five unchangeable [virtues]” (gojō) of Confucianism – humanity, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and fidelity – when it comes to governance and statecraft. 9 The power of Buddhism to tame the people is mentioned even in the “Seventeen Article Constitution” ascribed to crown prince Shōtoku (574–622). English translation: Aston and Barrow 1998: vol. 2, 129; Chinese text: Japanese Historical Text Initiative, University of California at Berkeley. 16 January 2018, last accessed. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/jhti/cgi-bin/jhti/kensaku.cgi 10 The “three countries” here are India, China and Japan. In a broader sense, it refers to all civilizations influenced by Buddhism. 11 Ōbō shor̄ on kyo ̄; full title: Butsu’i uten’o ̄ setsu o ̄bō sho ̄ron kyo ̄ (T14, no. 524), transl. by Amoghavajra (705-774). 12 On the discussion of early modern secularity in Japan, see also Rots and Teeuwen 2017a, 2017b; Paramore 2017.

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Part IV

Making Theory Contextual Through Civilizational Analysis: Place, Politics, Situatedness

12 Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere Religio-Civilizational Imaginaries Via East–West Entanglements Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse Western Religio-Civilizational Imaginaries and Their Revision The study of Islam and what is nowadays often called the Islamosphere has stimulated a critical reconceptualization of the notions of religion, civilization, and their relations to modernity over the last fifty years (and in an accelerated fashion during the last three decades)—whether intended as a single (and originally Western) modernity or as “multiple modernities” producing a diversity of original paths in various regions prior to the Western imperial and colonial hegemony. And yet, despite the increasing mutual entanglements between “East” and “West”, however imagined, since the colonial era, social theory is still hegemonized by Western views, as also reflected by the role played in global academia by Western-made notions of religion and civilization since the nineteenth century. The idea that Islam is both a religion and civilization has come under scrutiny only in the last three decades (for a thorough review, see Ahmed 2017). While, as famously stated by Marshall Hodgson, “[i]n the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars might well have supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim” (Hodgson 1993: 97), during the following centuries Europe, including Russia, started to ‘roll back’ the historical gains of the Islamosphere. This was the same period during which Europe’s encounter with China posed fresh challenges in terms of religious and civilizational commensurability. It is noteworthy that in the course of the same process through which the first seeds for European standards of comparability were implanted, Europe started developing its own forms of cosmopolitanism, later culminating in the celebrated eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. Sociologist Bryan Turner reminds us how the early modern European cosmopolitanism incarnate in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ view of a “commerce of lights” between Europe and China (Perkins 2004) displayed more significant affinities with non-Western ideas than with the cosmopolitan thought that would later ambivalently support Europe’s hubristic and imperialist mission civilisatrice (Turner 2013a [2005]). Leibniz’s move relied on, but also refined (at least philosophically), the rather pragmatic campaign inaugurated by the Jesuits’ China mission from the late sixteenth century onwards. The German philosopher and courtier thought that Western Christendom as DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-16

182  Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse a whole, both Catholic and Protestant, shared fundamental metaphysical ideas with China. According to Leibniz, this embryonic cosmopolitan connection provided the key to making obsolete the contentions between European Catholics and Protestants and justifying their reconciliation. And yet this worldview was not simply the outcome of an inner rationalizing move to overcome Europe’s own provincialism, well represented by the post-Reformation diatribes and conflicts within Western Latin Christendom. It provided a philosophical highway to what was starting to appear as a plain ruse of colonial and imperial reason, namely imposing European standards of governance and rationalization on the entire world. The seeds of Western cultural imperialism nourished by double standards originated in the fragile power balance of the seventeenth century, when the emerging European Westphalian system faced still powerful Muslim and Asian empires (ones committed to knowledge) – most notably the closest to Europe, the Ottoman Empire. It is significant that in his seventeenth century’s cosmopolitan opening to China Leibniz refrained from seeing the Ottoman Empire as a key actor or a potential mediator. Quite the opposite, in a move that made him a precursor of Western colonialism in the Islamosphere, he devised a plan of military conquest of Egypt which he aimed to submit to the French king. Symptomatically, however, this plan was intended not only (or perhaps not even primarily) as a way to strengthen Europe, but rather to divert energies from inner-European divisions and unleash them against what he saw as a barbarous, backward, and threatening Other represented by the Ottoman Empire (Almond 2010: 17–28). This idea, even if aborted, set a precedent to the plan that Napoleon would execute one and a half centuries later and more generally to what became the European imperative of solving “the Eternal Eastern Question” (as infamously formulated by nobody less than Karl Marx during the time of the Crimean War, 1853–56: Yilmaz 2012: 11). Clearly, the plan envisioned putting boots on the ground, including armies of scholars, like those who participated in Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the Levant. It is true that, revising and somewhat complexifying the demonization of the Islamic Ottoman realm entertained by Leibniz, more than a few leading European thinkers, including German ones (not, however, Kant; see Ahmed 2017: 35–45), belonging to the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and later philosophical currents, like Hume, Voltaire, Goethe, Herder and Nietzsche (Jackson 2007; Almond 2010), manifested more nuanced, even positive appreciations of Islam (whether identified with Arab culture or Ottoman rule). And yet, in the philosophy of history’s edifice of the most representative European thinker of the modern age, Hegel, the realm of Islam appeared as a rather abnormal sideshow in the unfolding of human civilization, trapped in backward-looking primordialism – unlike China and India that represented at least intermediate civilizing stations in the march of reason in human history (Salvatore 2021a: 45). Even at the zenith of its power in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire appeared to European eyes as the seedbed of Oriental despotism and provided the ideal contrastive idea, through authors

Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere  183 ranging from Montesquieu to Tocqueville (Arjomand 2004), to Western Europe’s looking itself on the mirror, in its trajectory from eighteenth-century Enlightened Despotism to the Anglo-American type of liberal democracy. Oriental despotism and the successor notion of patrimonialism became the signet of the impossibility, in the Islamosphere, of a rationally structured society, based on the organic solidarity theorized by Durkheim. The academic knowledge production that unfolded in Europe in parallel to colonial enterprises contributed to make the Islamosphere the very antithesis of a modern structuring of state, civil society, and a secular ethos. This was no pure philosophical enterprise. It consisted in mapping and surveying the East/Orient by deploying the combined archival, philological, archaeological, and ethnographic power-knowledge apparatus of Euro-American academic humanities, equally resting on ideas of ancient civilizations and world religions. This academic enterprise upgraded the knowledge produced by travelogues, diplomatic dispatches, and press editorials, converging into a climax of religio-civilizational imagination and intelligence gathering (Salvatore and Obuse 2022). German scholarship stood out for its construction of the Islamosphere as a counter-mirror to the realm of inwardness and autonomy that Western philosophy (in both a Kantian and post-Kantian vein) saw as intimately belonging to the history of Europe and the wider West. Georg Stauth has succeeded in showing with unique analytic acumen the crucial nexus between the ideas of prominent German orientalists like Carl Heinrich Becker and leading social theorists like Max Weber and Norbert Elias. According to Weber, in contrast to the Christian focus on an inner domain of personal redemption (or simply Innerlichkeit), Islam promised the faithful mostly sensual rewards (Salvatore 2021a: 46). Elias, with his theory of the civilizing process, focused on how the inner disciplines feed into the mechanisms of bureaucratic steering that colonial enterprises contributed to build and refine. In this way Elias provided a better sociological account of Innerlichkeit than Kantian and neo-Kantian postulates. Either way, cross-cultural knowledge and the geocultural mapping of the East/Orient versus the rational and reflective West fed into an unfolding religio-civilizational imagination. After World War II, this type of European scholarship was exported into US academia increasingly under the sway of modernization theory (Salvatore and Obuse 2022). The Austrian orientalist Gustave E. von Grunebaum, first at the University of Chicago and then at UCLA, was active in distilling for the American humanities (at their interface with the rising social sciences) Weberian ideas of the cultural uniqueness of the “Occident” and updated the diagnosis of the civilizational deficit of Muslim-majority societies as irremediably exposed to a culturally alien, Western program of modernization – an idea that culminated in the infamous, post-9/11 call by Bernard Lewis (2002) of What Went Wrong? (Salvatore 2021a: 47). That the history of thought cannot be disjointed from geocultural mapping has been convincingly argued by Bryan Turner, who spoke of the making of “axial space” (Turner 2013b [2001]), by alluding to the meaning of

184  Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse “axial” associated with Axial Age theory and its ramifications, which we don’t need to recapitulate in a volume dedicated to one of the leading scholars within this field of study, Jóhann P. Árnason. Turner addressed, in particular, the orientalist obsession with the “originary” as the impulse for producing imaginative cartographies of authenticity with their matching teleologies. Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) has contributed to clarify how the rise itself of the paradigm of “world religions” in the nineteenth century’s European universities reflected the scholarly endeavor to rescue the originary, authentic kernel of ancient great traditions, primarily of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This move, in turn, necessitated building a dichotomy between the charismatic outburst of the originary momentum, mostly associated with the ‘founder’ of a particular tradition – like Gautama Buddha or Jesus Christ, but also Socrates – and its entropic diffusion, dissipation, and, ultimately, alleged corruption of the authentic origin. This type of academic knowledge succeeded in remedying the substantial failure of pre-academic European theological discourses in affirming the truth of Western Christianity over its contenders, mainly Islam. It was only with the institutionalization and the increasing globalization of categories of religion and civilization that the discourses of philology, archaeology, biblical studies and, increasingly, Orientalism were able to affirm postulates of Western religio-civilizational superiority both within geocultural maps and in the historical timeline leading to the triumph of reason. The identification of the two “cradles” of Western culture, namely “Athens and Jerusalem” (Brague 2002 [1992]), facilitated sectioning the Orient under the umbrella of the Eternal Eastern Question by targeting the closest and most interactive Other, the Ottoman Empire (Yilmaz 2021: 14). Turner’s intervention has the merit to turn the Weberian idea of the charismatic breakthroughs of world religions via prophets and sages of the West and the East (which later Axial Age theory took over and refined) into the dialectic (which became particularly acute during the culmination of Western colonial and imperial power prior to World War I) between religio-civilizational segmentation and the potential opening of a circulatory, even cosmopolitan axial space. Unsurprisingly, the twin concepts of religion and civilization survived various turns in this Western trajectory of knowledge production, to the point of finding an even more solid definition and use among the two most prominent critiques of the Western academic tradition of studying Islam and the Islamosphere, namely Marshall Hodgson and Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Hodgson was also the earliest and one of the rarest scholars of Islam ever to constructively engage both Weber and Axial Age theory, at the beginning of his monumental work The Venture of Islam (Hodgson 1974). In this trilogy, the Islamosphere was depicted as the hub of a sort of post-trans-axial cosmopolitan circulation of ideas, people, and commodities, as well as opening to a variety of mutual religio-civilizational influences. Despite being a student of von Grunebaum, growing as a theoretically and sociologically gifted historian, Hodgson was able to innovatively articulate the conceptual binary of religion and civilization. Part and parcel of Islam’s success and cosmopolitan

Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere  185 spirit (Lawrence 2021), according to Hodgson, consisted in deploying suitable ways to inflect religion through a channel leading from the inner personal level to an institutional and public one. This is a theme that Hodgson borrowed from Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1962) and found congenial to his own approach (Salvatore 2020). In a key footnote in volume 1, Hodgson wrote: Wilfred C. Smith in The Meaning and End of Religion … had pointed out that the notion itself of ‘a religion’, as an integral system of belief and practice held to be either true or false, is relatively recent, as compared with the notion of ‘religion’ as an aspect of any one person’s life, which may be more or less true as that person is more or less sincere or successful. Even in the Irano-Semitic sphere, where ‘religions’ were earliest and most sharply set off as self-contained total communities, the notion of ‘a religion’ as a system was slow to prevail and has become dominant only in quite modern times. He suggests that what we generally have to deal with are cumulative traditions through which religious faith has been expressed. I am indebted to him for sharpening my awareness here. (Hodgson 1974: I, 79, n. 3) Hodgson, who was a committed Christian as a member of the Society of Friends or Quakers, singled out Islam as a (in Smith’s sense) personal faith, and distinguished it from Islamdom, a term Hodgson coined to designate a web of social relations and institutions, or, more generally, a civilizational sphere. Most crucially, and unlike Smith’s critique of the reification of religion, Hodgson’s Islamdom did not deplete, by way of routinization and institutionalization, the authentic core of personal faith, but represented the socio-cultural ecumene incorporating the religio-civilizational pluralism inherited from the pre-Islamic dynamics of the entire Irano-Semitic zone. This feature facilitated a receptivity to Hellenic, Sanskritic, and Sinitic influences. In other words, Islamdom throve at the intersection of a plurality of traditions, whereby the ongoing civilizing process (to use Elias’ term) it incorporated provided the sociological prism through which to process and synthesize cultural diversity (Salvatore 2021b). Hodgson argued that “Islam found itself in a vital and diverse cultural environment. It was only when it entered into these other dialogues, in fact, that it could become significant for cultural life at large” (Hodgson, 1974: I, 85). With the growth of the Islamosphere over the centuries, such dialogues extended well beyond the Irano-Semitic zone, into Central, South and Southeast Asia, and also comprised Buddhism. Jóhann P. Árnason (2006) has had the specific merit of showing how Hodgson saw Islam as civilizationally imbricated within Islamdom. This development allowed the creativity of institutional dynamics to increase its contributions to the making of “a religion” not just in spite, but thanks to the unique diversity of the populations embracing Islam (Árnason 2006: 26). As noted by Árnason, Hodgson was able to open up a debate on the inherent dialectics of unity and diversity making out the dyad of Islam as Islamdom (ibid.: 26–46).

186  Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse The compound of religion and civilization provided an essential conceptual box both to Comparative Religion and related subdisciplines and to Oriental Studies as they developed in Europe and was rearticulated in starkly innovative approaches like Hodgson’s. It continues to play a role within Axial Age theory, as also manifested in the title of one of the latest books within this area of studies, significantly titled From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond (Arjomand and Kalberg 2021). While Axial Age theory quite from its beginnings, with Karl Jaspers, intended to bypass or at least dilute current notions of religion, it did so at the cost of moving back toward the centrality of the concept civilization with a theoretical stubbornness that has generated a counter-swing of the pendulum and the recent coining of the expression “axial religion.” This term was hardly ever conceptualized (not to say used) by Jaspers or the historical sociologists who later took over Axial Age theory, until it was propped up by the remarkable success of the last book of Robert Bellah (2011) well beyond the academic public usually adept at Axial Age theory and its spinoffs, like the theory of multiple modernities. This trajectory suggests that it is difficult to overcome the centrality of the concept of religion by investing into civilization. And yet the merits of Hodgson consisted in critically repurposing the religio-civilizational imaginary, taxonomy, and mapping. He did so by emphasizing the connectedness that characterized the Islamosphere’s proto-globalization, most notably through the frontier zones with Buddhism in Central, Inner and Southeast Asia that do not appear on the map of the Axial Age. Hodgson’s program was not merely powered by retooling the concepts of religion and civilization. He laid the seeds for questioning the geocultural mapping that relied on the Eurocentric religio-civilizational imagination. In 1944, at the eve of a new era, with the upcoming polarization of the Cold War, and long before Said’s indictment of the Western construction of the Orient, Marshall Hodgson denounced how the European cartographic construction and projection of “Asia” affected Western geopolitical thought well into the era of Anglo-American hegemony. Hodgson indicted the Mercator projection for singling out Europe as a continent, artificially constructing Asia as another continent, and putting the former at the symbolic centre of the world map (Geyer 2018: 61). Hodgson’s early attempt at provincializing the Euro-American West was already projected into a decolonial future. He was profoundly aware of the dawn of a post-Western era, while he became a non-violent activist against war and oppression, including the internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians during World War II, while regretting that the Japanese government had chosen violence and war (ibid.: 57–58). The West stood before the urgent task to de-orientalize Asia. In a note included in a book project he wrote in 1945, he intimated (in full caps): “There is no Orient” (ibid.: 61). While taking such positions Hodgson represented a unique intellectual vanguard in the West also against the Orientalism still resilient in large swaths of Marxist thought. At the same time, however, his critical positions were internal to a Western dialectic and did not take into account the reasons why thinkers and activists from the Middle East, India,

Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere  187 China, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Japan had been developing, since the late nineteenth century, a counternarrative of pan-Asian and pan-Islamic solidarity that produced a counterhegemonic remapping, but not an erasure, of the notions of Asia and the East/Orient. One cannot fight a colonial and imperial geocultural mapping with no mapping.

The Japanese Imagining of Islamosphere’s Centrality An alternate type of religio-civilizational imagination was in the making during the rise to power of Japan in the post-Meiji era. And it was not long before Japanese scholars and intellectuals began endeavoring to figure out and place the Islamosphere on the map. Inspired by Toshihiko Izutsu (1914– 1993) and his life trajectory prior to his move to the West (Canada) and the Middle East (Iran), Hodgson developed a Western-critical analysis of the trajectory of Islamdom’s religio-civilizational imaginary, which partly converged with the non-Western perspective offered by Izutsu. Through their shared close relationship to Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Hodgson and Izutsu were well acquainted with each other’s work (Salvatore and Obuse forthcoming). However, due to Hodgson’s premature passing in 1968, he missed the last part of Izutsu’s career, which catapulted the Japanese scholar beyond the stellar academic credentials he already enjoyed within Western Islamic Studies in the 1960s and into an unrivalled fame in the Muslim majority world as a non-Muslim scholar of Islam. In Japan, nowadays, Izutsu is considered a towering intellectual for reasons that do not even primarily comprise his work on Islam, despite his unique merit of placing the study of the Islamosphere within a broader investigation of the thought and practice of a variety of intertwining traditions, Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic (Krummel 2019: 9–11). Originally a philosopher of language more than religion, Izutsu valorized non-Western concepts and practices. He problematized (and laid significant seeds for overcoming) the limits of the Western comparative method in studying religious phenomena. He did so by instituting historical and meta-historical connections among different Eastern and Western traditions (Izutsu 1983 [1980–82]). In the process, Izutsu placed Islam at the centre of the AfroEurasian map of interconnectedness and circulation of religious ideas and practices. His program was invigorated by his close collaborations with institutions of Western academia, most notably through his increasing involvement with Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s creature, McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies (IIS), from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, which included activities at its Tehran branch. Izutsu’s trajectory exemplifies a leading non-Western perspective on the Islamosphere matured via living through intense and shifting East–West entanglements. He seldom explicitly referenced Axial Age theory and never bought into the conceptual compound of religion and civilization. At the same time, his approach was premised on deflating some of the key dichotomies that energize Axial Age theory and its underlying religio-civilizational

188  Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse thinking, like between the magic/shamanic and the prophetic, or the archaic and the axial. His approach helped re-position, if not transcend, the notions of religion and civilization still entertained by Axial Age theory and provided foundational ideas for a hermeneutic, rather than civilizational sociology of East–West mutual entanglements. Following Izutsu, one can study how religio-civilizational thinking, or the making of axial space, has provided forms of geocultural mapping that help explain constructs of world religions, civilizations, as well as their distinction vs connectedness – and to “reOrient” this study particularly to its neglected side, namely the proactive responses of those intellectual actors within what the West called the Orient, who over several generations have engaged in altering the global mapping that was first undertaken in the context of Euro-American colonial and imperial ventures. Selcuk Esenbel has suggested that such an alternative approach may be seen as the counter-hegemonic inheritance of how pre-World War II studies of the Islamosphere in Japan were nourished by geocultural orientations resisting Western hegemony (Esenbel 2011: xiv–xx). This Japanese perspective included a crucial Ottoman/Turkish nexus providing an alternative to the “Eternal Eastern Question” (Yilmaz 2012: 11). A few historians have dedicated their work to reconstructing how the history of post-Meiji intellectual and scholarly developments in Japan unfolded in striking parallel (and close connection) to those in the Ottoman Empire. The interaction displayed an often-neglected counterpart to the Western building of a fictional, orientalist Orient via the Eastern Question. In the process, the East/Orient of the West was overwritten via different combinations of strategic interest and religio-civilizational imagination and “reOriented” to a more organic idea of the East/Orient cemented by inter-Asian connectedness.1 Far from merely looking at Europe (Worringer 2014: 25–42), in the last third of the nineteenth-century Ottoman modernist elites were increasingly enthralled by Japan’s trajectory of modernization, which included constitutionalism and the growth of military power. Japan’s living confutation of Western racial and civilizational hierarchies allowed the Ottoman public to turn the discourse on the Eastern Question against the West. A climax was reached with Japan’s victory in the war against Russia, which at the time represented the most formidable European colonial empire in Asia (Aydin 2007: 77–83). The growing global admiration for “the Rising Sun” allowed Tokyo to host converging pan-Asianist and pan-Islamist activities, which played into the contradictions of the Western civilizing discourse, torn between universality and exclusiveness (Aydin 2007: 35–36; 192–193; Worringer 2014: 2). The enthusiasm of pan-Islamist activists for the rise of Japan was paralleled by Japan’s gradual development of an “Islam policy” (kaikyo seisaku) oriented to an “Islamic area” (kaikyoken), a concept quite neatly matching the Islamosphere. This construction was inscribed within a vision of “Oriental history” (Toyoshi or history of Toyo, the East/Orient) that was invested in images of distinctively Eastern/Oriental patterns of connectedness and power brokerage. Japan’s Orient by Stephen Tanaka has dealt with the building of such Oriental history in Japanese academia starting in the late 1890s, mainly

Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere  189 through the work of Kurakichi Shiratori (1865–1942), a student of the German historian Ludwig Riess, who belonged to the school of Leopold von Ranke. Shiratori’s work reflected the German goal of building up a research school providing for the tasks of a national university intent on training bureaucratic elites (Tanaka 1993: 25). Toyoshi was opposed to Seyoshi, the history of the West by the West, establishing itself as the centre of the entirety of the world, so that Seyoshi ended up seeing itself as world history (ibid.: 47–48). This strategy required a competitive form of religio-civilizational thinking that pushed Europe back into a contingent and quite eccentric, rather than teleologically given, centre. The primary outcome (and, at the same time, instrument) of this operation was the notion itself of Toyo as the East/Orient. This competitive construction of the East/Orient hinged on relativizing the Japanese dependence on the Chinese cultural zone (or Sinosphere), within a long-drawn-out repositioning of Japan’s identity that started long before the onset of the modernizing Meiji era (ibid.: 29). The notion of Toyoshi also predetermined the Japanese remapping of the Islamosphere, whereby Inner and Central Asia were not considered as tributary to China and, along with the Middle East, were included within Toyo (while curiously, at least initially, Southeast Asia was not: ibid.: 48). The idea of Japan’s belonging to a religio-civilizational space identified with the Sinosphere, which was common in Western Orientalism, was countered by examining the hypotheses of older connections of Japan to either Malay Polynesian or Ural Altai populations, evolving through a thalassocracy that included territories and peoples distributed both on continental and insular/ oceanic regions of Asia. Both scenarios presupposed an ethnically mixed cultural formation, whose trajectory and success owed (even more given its underlying diversity) to specific (and powerful) cultural, religious, and political symbols and institutions, rather than to any identity that accorded with the Western colonial and racialized vocabulary of the time, which produced labels like “Far East” and “yellow race” (Tanaka 1993: 72–77). The hypothesis of a predominant Ural-Altai connectivity ended up prevailing against the Malay-Polynesian one within Toyoshi. Significantly, in 1905, the same year of the Russo-Japanese War, Shiratori stated that in order to learn about Japan’s origin he needed to go to Central Asia (Tanaka 1993: 78). Given that the space between the Irano-Semitic area and the Sinosphere, with Central Asia in its middle, had developed within Western Orientalism into a favorite terrain of philological analysis of complex texts and fed into the paradigm of comparative linguistics, the realization of the importance of Central Asia within Toyoshi opened up a new frontier of competition with Western scholarship not only on the decipherment of textual sources but also on their religio-civilizational contextualization. As much as the making of a convenient Orient served Europe’s self-positioning as the inheritor of all civilizations and the harbinger of the singular, present, and future world civilization, so was Toyo the terrain for Japan’s own self-positioning in the modern world (ibid.: 80–82) – only that in this case the linkage to Central Asia could take the form of a shared historical destiny, through the construction of what

190  Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse at times was proclaimed as an Ural-Altai brotherhood to which Japan belonged both linguistically and politically. Undeniably, the ongoing clash with the expanding (and threatening) Russian colonial empire played a role in building this narrative-cum-mapping. The entire enterprise was openly justified in terms of breaking the Japanese dependence on Western scholarship in ways that turned into open criticism of its lopsided methodologies, “employing crude philological methods, using utterly obscure passages, and drawing premature conclusions” (ibid.: 88). And yet, it wasn’t just a question of competition with (and critique of) the West. There was a still larger vista of opportunity. The Ural-Altai hypothesis provided Shiratori the crucial materials to finalize the religio-civilizational repositioning associated with Toyo, by placing the Mongols – rather than the “Caucasians” preferred by the West that identified racially with them – at its centre. Through the lenses of Toyoshi the Mongols emerged as the engine of world history sweeping through Eurasia, foreshadowing a rather positive appreciation of their world-historical role that is now dominant, or even a cliché, in global academia. Most noteworthy was the main corollary of this postulate: namely that through the broad geocultural stretch of the UralAltai hegemony and connectivity in world history, ranging well into Europe and based on multiethnic melting, Shiratori exploded the European racialized hierarchy benchmarked on the supremacy of Indo-European languages, peoples, and religions and asserted a more egalitarian hegemony – though, this time, of the East over the West. At the very least, East and West could not, or should not, any longer be related in the supremacist way engrained in Western Orientalism (Tanaka 1993: 88–93). This sense of mission to overcome Eurocentrism was shared broadly among Japanese intellectuals and scholars involved in Islamic Studies on the eve of and during World War II. Moreover, the geocultural mapping undertaken in Japan was more comprehensive than the Western one and was not restricted to axial spaces or confined to the impact of world religions. This step was supported by the way Japan’s pre-Buddhist heritage was reimagined by several intellectuals and leaders (Izutsu included) in ways that could not be reduced to a nativist reflex suiting the Japanese imperial restoration and pre-World War II imperialist undertakings. This type of religio-civilizational imagination often had the merit of recognizing the porosity of the fault lines between Buddhism and Islam, thus reinforcing the centrality of Central Asia. While at the zenith of European imperialism the Western geocultural mapping considered Central Asia as a zone of transition lacking an autonomous civilizational identity, in the Japanese reimagination of Toyo Central Asia was envisioned as providing an essential geocultural connectedness among what the West considered as separate religio-civilizational blocks. Unsurprisingly, a character like the Japanese Buddhist Count Kozui Otani (1876–1948) became a successful contender to European Silk Road explorers like Ariel Stein and Sven Hedin. Otani played a crucial role in this process of countermapping and showed how from a Japanese perspective the gaze toward India as the cradle of Buddhism necessarily passed through Central

Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere  191 Asia (Küçükyalçın 2018) – even for those, like Otani himself, who were not primarily interested in Islam (which, even then, could not be excluded from the mapping process). The Western idea of the Silk Road was thus coopted into the counterhegemonic work, like the one performed by Shiratori and Otani, of reshuffling (but also complexifying) the East–West coordinates. This geocultural move became even more daring in a later approach that put the Islamosphere straight at the centre of the map, precisely during the years when Izutsu was coming to maturity as a young scholar. Before the making of Hodgson’s Islamdom, the centrality of the Islamosphere found a crisp expression through the idea of Chuyo, which relativized the polarization between Toyo and Seyo (the West/Occident). Translated as “the Mediant,” or “Middle Ocean” (Usuki 2007: 207–211), Chuyo was coined during World War II by Hajime Kobayashi, a scholar of Islam in Inner and Central Asia engaged in the wartime “Islam policy.” And yet, the term survived the Japanese defeat in World War II and in the 1970s Tadao Umesao, the founder of the prestigious National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (Minpaku), repurposed it for the new era. This original Japanese type of geocultural mapping cannot be reduced to sheer strategic engineering. It was motivated by deeper cultural aspirations. The study of Islam was certainly promoted from above in the 1930s, when Izutsu came of age. And yet, as stressed by Hans-Martin Krämer (2014: 620–621), a genuine intellectual interest from below was also instrumental in making this opening to Islam more than a contingent political move by government and militarist circles and corporate interests. Clearly integral to the rise of pan-Asianism, the interest in Islam was nourished by a cultural curiosity quite remote from the highest spheres of military and imperial politics and capitalist strategies. What is most relevant here, and affected the young Izutsu, was the growth of a cultural appeal, which pan-Asianism exploited rather than created and prompted an appropriation of Islam through explicitly Japanese lenses. The importance of Islam from a Japanese grassroots perspective during the prewar era was often expressed through a longing for a type of prophetic spirituality and culture not contaminated with the Western imperial will to power. Islam played perfectly well into Japan’s transcivilizational repositioning and became instrumental in several programs to overcome Eurocentrism. The Islamosphere was understood as integral to Asia if not to the East/Orient and often admired through the prism of a political messianism heralding an era of liberation from Western global hegemony.

Towards an East–West Synthesis in Repositioning the Islamosphere In such a historical, political, and cultural context, Toshihiko Izutsu encountered Islam. This occurred in 1937, when he met in Tokyo the leading Tatar scholar and activist Abdurreshid Ibrahim (1857–1944), who became his first teacher not only of Arabic but also of the Qur’an (Wakamatsu 2014 [2011]: 50–51). Izutsu’s discipleship with a Muslim public personality coincided with the time when Ibrahim attained the zenith of his fame in Japan and was

192  Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse appointed as the Imam of the brand-new Tokyo mosque, erected in 1938 with the massive support of both the Japanese government and leading corporations (Krämer 2014: 619). Significantly, the Tokyo mosque was built in Central Asian style and became a rallying point of the Tatars who had escaped the Russian Civil War after the Bolshevik Revolution and found asylum in Manchuria before moving to Japan (Esenbel 2011: xxi). Izutsu’s second teacher of Arabic, Musa Bigiev Jarullah (1875–1949), was even more famous than Ibrahim as a leading Muslim reformer and intellectual of the age. Musa recognized Izutsu’s remarkable intellectual capabilities and transmitted to him a sense of mobility and transregionality in the quest for knowledge. It is also significant that both of Izutsu’s Arabic and Qur’an teachers were deeply engaged in promoting justice and defending the rights of the weak at the culmination of the age of European imperialism. They had been at the vanguard of the intersection of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism from the beginning of the twentieth century to the eve of the Pacific War (Wakamatsu 2014 [2011]: 50–51; Komatsu 2018; Brandenburg 2020). Their commitments and networks propelled them to travel to various parts of Asia and the Islamosphere. Izutsu’s encounter with these two Muslim personalities imprinted on him a lasting impression of Islam as both a living tradition and as a cosmopolitan powerhouse. Signally, both Ibrahim and Jarullah were from Central Asia rather than the Middle East. And yet it is also significant that thanks to their mentorship, Izutsu became the first Japanese author to systematically study Arab thought, to which he dedicated his first book publication (Izutsu 1941). In the last part of his life, during the 1980s, Izutsu started to frame his investigations in terms of a program on Toyo Tetsugaku or “Oriental philosophy” (Wakamatsu 2014 [2011]: 291–3). At first sight, and judging by the name, this program might appear as a surprisingly self-orientalizing move, for a scholar like Izutsu who had been intensely exposed to the beginnings of the criticism of the Western orientalist episteme. However, one should compare his initiative to the one that had led first to the launch of Toyoshi (“Oriental history”) and then to imagining the Islam-related “Mediant” sphere of Chuyo. On the other hand, Izutsu’s program reflected a mild and reflexive type of geocultural mapping largely immune to the temptation of a competitive Orientalism resting on a revised religio-civilizational imagination. The program aimed to find resonances among various Eastern/Oriental thought currents and schools (in particular, Islamic, Sinitic, and Buddhist) and should be considered a further, and more refined stage in the intellectual and imaginative remapping shared during the late and postcolonial eras by several different personalities from the Middle East, India, China, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Japan who were uncomfortable with Eurocentric orientalist categories. We can see here an embryonic type of a hermeneutic sociology dispensing of either “religion” or “civilization” as master categories, while relativizing the weight of historical East-West dichotomizations. Izutsu’s program relied on a universalist conception of human knowledge, while refraining from buying into the rigidity of conceptual universals. Relying on his Buddhist sensibility, Izutsu drew a universal compass by

Overwriting the Orient and the Islamosphere  193 combining the search for a shared ontological ground with a hermeneutic horizon determined by the incessant dialectic of emptiness and articulation, chaos and cosmos. Robert Bellah attempted a roughly comparable move with his magnus opus (2011), also under the sway of his progressive Christian orientation (Bortolini 2021a). However, despite his double expertise on Japanese Buddhism and Islam, which he shared with Izutsu, he remained hostage to the axial zoning of religio-civilizational thinking into four areas of higher spirituality (Ancient Israel, Greece, India, and China). In spite of his intense work relation with Wilfred Cantwell Smith, which Bellah shared with Hodgson and Izutsu and brought him to McGill’s IIS as a postdoctoral fellow for two years (during which he learned Arabic and studied Islam; Bortolini 2021b: 268–269), this self-inflicted limitation characterizing his overall trajectory made him miss the connectedness of an Islamosphere of the middle (comparable with Chuyo), skip Iran altogether (which was rather central for Izutsu, who lived there for more than ten years, between the late 1960s and the late 1970s), and remain bound to fundamentally Western (even more, specifically American) religio-civilizational parameters. Likewise, Bellah did not relativize, but instead reinforced Axial Age’s theory fixation on origins. While this theory continues to regard Islam at best as a late-night party crasher into the civilizational club (Salvatore 2021b: 161), Izutsu’s conceptual mapping restored the Islamosphere to the core of Middle Earth, both geoculturally and historically. Far from being extinct, the combined heritage of Toyo and Chuyo is reflected in how the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Minpaku, Osaka, has been conducting, since 2016, a new research program directed by Tetsuo Nishio. The program aspires to transcend the weight of entrenched, area-specific limitations by reconceiving the Islamosphere through transregional lenses (Nishio 2021: 359). Here Nishio brings to fruition his profile as a linguistic anthropologist committed to valorize the legacy of Izutsu, with whom he was in direct correspondence as a young scholar, while repurposing the notion of Chuyo revived and publicized by the previously mentioned founder of Minpaku, Tadao Umesao. After warning against using Eurocentrism as an alibi, in his concluding essay to the volume 30 Doors to the Middle East/Islamosphere Nishio sketches a universalist view of human culture overcoming the type of geocultural thinking that legitimized area studies, while effecting a simultaneous distancing from both the Western and the Japanese imperialist legacies in the production of knowledge on the Islamosphere. Overcoming religio-civilizational imaginaries through a transregional perspective cannot entail, however, interrupting altogether the mental and scholarly operations of mapping but requires positively embracing the continuous fluctuations and mediations within East–West entanglements. Within this perspective, Nishio values Chuyo as a tool for valorizing the various layers of globalization associated with the history, sociology, and anthropology of the Islamosphere. He suggests relying on Izutsu’s legacy for providing the essential intellectual and conceptual toolkit and on Umesao’s heritage for devising a complex, yet

194  Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse flexible, cognitive cartography disallowing the temptation of either flat cultural translations or, inversely, notions of conceptual incommensurability promoted by some postcolonial approaches (Nishio 2021: 355–362; see also Obuse and Salvatore 2022: 871–872). This suggestion appears resonant with the “ontological turn” that has largely evaded the attention of area studies, but also with the more recent “oceanic turn” that has laid a stress on transregional circulation and connectedness (see Green 2014; Duara 2015). It also echoes the call for retrieving seeds of a non-hegemonic, dialogic and openended “ethnological imagination,” previously buried within layers of hegemonic Western social theory. This call was issued by Fuyuki Kurasawa (2004), a Japanese Canadian scholar who studied with Jóhann P. Árnason and pleaded for a post-orientalist engagement with the Islamosphere’s fluid cosmopolitanism (see also Turner 2013a [2005]: 156–157). There is now a new vista of cross-cultural, global awareness that links Kurasawa’s project to that of Izutsu and Nishio, auguring a Japanese-inspired pattern of a multi-nodal world history drawing resources from dialogic Western thought but no longer hostage to Western hegemonic religio-civilizational thinking.

Note 1 In the rest of this section, we provide a summary of the analysis of the Japanese perspective on the Islamosphere provided in Obuse and Salvatore 2022.

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13 Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis Reflections on Russia’s Trajectory Yulia Prozorova

Religion and Politics in Civilizational Analysis Relations between religion and politics, their (trans-)formative potential and complex long-term societal effects constitute the core research problematic of civilizational analysis in historical sociology whose major theoretical underpinnings draw on the pioneering studies and intellectual legacies of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The reconsideration of the classical sources and their research agenda on power, dominance, and religion’s structural impact in the works of Norbert Elias, Benjamin Nelson, and Shmuel Eisenstadt revived civilizational analysis in contemporary sociology and gave rise to its major versions and analytical trends. Elias focused predominantly on the long-term civilizational process and state formation in the West, on the historical dynamics of the cultural standards of ‘civilized behavior’ and power networks but the issue of religious–political connection was beyond the scope of his research. Nelson and Eisenstadt shared, albeit from different analytical angles, a common interest in sociocultural processes and cultural-symbolical structures, which shape human conduct, institutional settings, and civilizational configurations. In Nelson’s terms, “civilizations come to serve as cultural prerequisites for the relatively enduring organization of different sorts” (Nelson 1973: 90). Nelson himself addressed the religious rather than political problematic but his studies of the ‘structures of consciousness’, ‘intercivilizational encounters’, and ‘civilizational complexes’ provide crucial insights for the further elucidation of cultural premises of politics and civilizational variants of the religious-political interplay. Given the limits of this introductory section, I will confine myself to those contributions to the field that explicitly focus on the religio-political problematic. Since his early theoretical studies on ‘the relation between “ideas” or “culture” and social structure’, Eisenstadt expresses specific interest in the political projections of cultural-religious orientations and the impact of ‘religious-civilizational frameworks’ on ‘the patterns of change of political systems’, empires, great revolutions, political modernities, etc. (Eisenstadt 1980: 13; 1981). In his comparative studies of historical civilizations, Eisenstadt examined the ‘social and cultural linkages’, effects of cultural traditions and symbolic frameworks on the constitution of ‘major institutional DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-17

198  Yulia Prozorova arenas’, structure of power, the dynamics of political systems, and the origins of ideological politics (Eisenstadt 1981). He paid particular attention to the role of elites as “linkages between the cultural and institutional spheres”, religious or intellectual heterodoxies, sectarian movements and political conflicts as major impetus for social changes and the transformation of civilizations. Eisenstadt’s most seminal studies of the Axial Age breakthrough, and the emergence and legacies of the Axial Age civilizations, unveil profound political effects of the axial cultural shift. The vision of the disjuncture between the transcendental and the mundane order, radically different from the preceding conception of homology between the cosmic and social orders, is associated with different religious frameworks of salvation and their distinct ‘political ethics’. The discovery of the transcendence as a source of normative orders and regulations, and institutionalization of the axial conception of tension was linked to a growing reflexivity, questioning, and transformation of the mundane order. An intimate relationship between the cultural-religious orientations and political organization thus appeared to be integral to the Axial Age, the period of “the formation of culturally entrenched structuring principles for macro-institutions” (Wittrock 2005: 64). This entailed a new meaning and societal role of the political as an implementation of cultural visions and programs of salvation, making politics a domain of soteriological significance and giving rise to ideological politics and elite. The Axial innovations associate with the new visions of sovereignty, the decline of sacred kingship, the desacralization of the figure of king-god, and the emergence of the conceptions of a higher authority (God and Divine Law) to which a secular ruler is accountable (Eisenstadt 1981). Eisenstadt’s interpretations of the Axial Age, axiality, pre-axial legacies, and post-Axial Age civilizational trajectories do not acquire uncontested agreement, but it is secure to conclude that the interrelations of culture and power are definitive and formative for civilizational patterns. The comparative analysis of civilizations allowed Eisenstadt to distinguish analytically the ‘civilizational dimension’ of human societies regarded as a combination of cultural ontological visions of the world with “the definition, construction and regulation of the major arenas of social life” (Eisenstadt 2000). The mutual influences and reciprocal conditioning between cultural and institutional components, alternative and conflicting interpretations induce various institutional forms and trajectories. Drawing on Weber’s sociology of religion, Eisenstadt argues that “at least in historical civilizations, religion provided some components of the broader civilizational premises and frameworks, and this partly determined the ways in which religious activities and organizations became related to political processes” (Eisenstadt 1993: 13). In his reflection on the ‘civilizational dimension of politics’, Eisenstadt highlights an analytical duality of religion—as a distinct social institution of beliefs and ritual practices, and as fundamental premises of social order (Eisenstadt 1993). Thus, Eisenstadt reconsiders religion as a ‘meta-institution’ albeit redefined in civilizational terms (Árnason 2014b: 17), a viewpoint further developed by Jóhann Árnason.

Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis  199 Árnason’s version of civilizational analysis is an ambitious intellectual project, which reconsiders classical legacy and post-classical sociological debates, critically reexamines, and creatively integrates civilizational scholarship with the hermeneutical approach and the philosophical problematic of the imaginary. Árnason reintroduces Nelson’s concept of ‘intercivilizational encounters’ into his integrative civilizational framework sensitive to historical contexts and variability with an explicit comparative agenda, suggesting that ‘the religious-political nexus (‘le théologico-politique,’ as some French authors have called it) is a particularly rewarding starting-point for strategies of comparison’ (Árnason 2006: 108). Árnason states that in all axial cases, ‘cultural traditions were intertwined with distinctive long-term patterns of political life’, and ‘traditions that trace themselves back to the Axial Age are bound up with specific dynamics of state formation, interstate formation and empire-building’ (Árnason 2005: 20–21). Historical forms of political organization, state- and empire-building are a realization of political imaginary and cultural definitions of power. The programmatic principles of Árnason’s civilizational research aspire to ‘bring political power’ (Knöbl 2010: 94) and ‘history back in’ (Árnason 2012). Árnason’s inquiry into ‘political-religious horizons’ and his account of the ‘religio-political nexus’ suggest a reinterpretation of the Eisenstadtian ‘civilizational dimension’. First, Árnason argues to expand the chronological boundaries of civilizational dimension, whose focal aspect, the connection between religion and politics, albeit being most prominently expressed in the axial civilizations, can be traced in historically preceding early civilizations or structurally different stateless societies (Árnason 2014a, 2014b). Second, Árnason agrees with the duality of religion mentioned by Eisenstadt – as a distinct institution and as a framework for other institutions, ‘[i]n the latter capacity, it defines the horizons of overall institutional articulation and development’. However, the meta-institutional capacity is attributed not to religion alone but to the ‘religio-political nexus’, which can be subsumed under the concept of a civilizational dimension: ‘The political dimension, in the sense of an overall distribution of power translating into social rules, is the primary domain of integration, and during most of human history, it was intertwined with the religious sphere’ (Árnason 2014b: 17–18). Árnason’s revised chronological limits introduces for comparative civilizational analysis a broader spectrum of religio-political configurations. Weber, in his typology of institutional forms of domination and historical patterns of interrelations of sacral and political power, distinguished a hierocracy (in the forms of priestly legitimated ruler as an incarnation of God, and theocracy as a fusion of sacral and secular authorities represented by a king-priest) and caesaropapism, a subjugation of sacral power to secular ruler (Weber 1978). Later reflection on Weber’s typology points out a conceptual ambiguity and a marginalization of ‘theocracy’ (Murvar 1967; Árnason 2017). Caesaropapism also claims theocratic properties since ‘every power comes from deity’ and different charismas assume the transcendental foundation, ‘ultimately every charisma is akin to religious powers in that it claims at least some remnant of supernatural derivation; in one way or another, legitimate

200  Yulia Prozorova political power therefore always claims the “grace of God”’ (Murvar 1967: 71; Weber 1978: 1162). Árnason focuses on exemplars of persistent, albeit historically diverse forms of the religio-political nexus not included in Weber’s typology or systematically analysed – sacral rulership and theocracy (Árnason 2017). The trajectories of pre-axial civilizations were closely related to the varieties of the religio-political nexus manifested in a form of sacral rulership, particularly sacred kingship, ‘both older and more universal than the world religions of salvation’, ‘often the cornerstone of ancient cosmologies of world order’ (Arjomand 1984: 5; Árnason 2014b). Its dramatic transformation was instigated by the Axial ‘breakthrough’ and the rise of monotheism, which demarcated a crucial rupture with the cosmological vision of homology of religious and political reality represented by the king-god. A related line of inquiry traces the effects of monotheism on the religio-political processes and distinct articulations and forms of power it gave rise to. The fundamental innovation of monotheism that emerged in ancient Israel was the ‘categorical separation’ of the realms of divine and politics, which made religion an autonomous sphere endowed with superior authority and normativity. The earthly ruler was desacralized and sovereignty was attributed to the sole divine creator and legislator, and salvation became his sole property and responsibility (Assmann 2005a, 2009). The pre-axial unity of God and king was ‘broken through’; however, it was not totally abandoned but transformed, redefined and ‘paradoxically reaffirmed in the new axial formulations’ (Bellah 2011: 266–267). The sacral rulership proved open to reinterpretations in different civilizational contexts and persisted to exist in later historical formations shaped by axial legacies and monotheistic traditions (Árnason 2014b). The union of political power and religious salvation reappeared in the forms of theocracy, Byzantine caesaropapism, or the domination of spiritual leaders over secular rulers in early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheism respectively, as monotheistic political theology ‘easily shifted from criticism of the state to legitimation of the state’ (Assmann 2009: 48). As monotheistic divine sovereignty could not be directly translated into political power structures, so the de-legitimation of sacred kingship in the Jewish counter-model ‘turned out to be an opening to re-sacralization in more complex and derivative terms, as well as to struggle between alternative models’; theocracy ‘appears as a pattern capable of significant differentiation, internal critique and long-term historical impact’ (Árnason 2017: 126). As Bellah points out, ‘nothing is ever lost’, and older representations and visions of power may affect historically distant religio-political frameworks and institutions, e.g. of kings who ruled ‘by divine right’ or presidents who act in accordance with a ‘higher power’ (Bellah 2011: 267).

Religio-Political Nexus: Political-Theological Dimension The abovementioned variations of the religio-political nexus rely on distinct political theologies, religious concepts, representations, and institutional

Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis  201 forms adopted as components of secular legal or political frameworks, definitions, and models for the political structures and organization of mundane order. Claude Lefort (1988) defines the interrelations between religion and politics as basically a ‘theologico-political’ problematic. Conceptual, symbolical, ritual, intellectual transposition, exchanges, and reciprocal adaptations between religious and political spheres uncover the mechanics of gravitation between them. Also, political theology is concerned with the emergence of religious and political imaginaries and concepts, their ‘systematic structure’, and the related problem of affinity between traditional religions and their modern secular counterparts. This section focuses on the politico-theological aspect of the religio-political nexus that is still awaiting a more systematic analysis in civilizational studies. Political theology is found throughout history,1 and although most extensive discussions and comprehensive studies consider European cases, the problematic of political theology is not limited to the Western experience. In the West, the religious imaginary and articulations were integral for the political-legal frameworks and projects of kingship, monarchic sovereignty, and state. The institutions of the medieval kingship and the modern absolutist state evolved as confluence, a ‘spiritual-secular hybridism’, ‘a result of the infinite cross-relations between Church and State,’ and the fusion of ‘canonist mysticism’ with the ‘institutionalism of the Roman Law’ (Kantorowicz 1955). The ‘cross-relations’ assumed exchanges and borrowings of vocabularies, symbols, practices, and insignias of secular and religious politics, which gave rise to the new meanings and frameworks of the monarchical sovereignty, the king’s relations to the supernatural, the church, and the ruled collectives. These exchanges accompanied the evolution of the legal conceptions of the absolutist “Mysteries of the State” and the duality of the figure of the king – as ‘one person’ but with ‘two bodies’ (Kantorowicz 1955, 1957). The fundamental premise of the medieval and early modern religio-political nexus lies at the level of the imaginary: ‘the mimetic relation of the king, the church, and the state to God’, which bring about reciprocal conceptual, symbolical, ceremonial, and structural imitations between secular and ecclesiastic authorities (Gebauer and Wulf 1995: 75). The pope was styled as ‘Prince’ and ‘true emperor’, and the hierarchical apparatus of the Roman Church represented a ‘prototype of an absolute and rational monarchy on a mystical basis’, while at the same time the secular State tended to become ‘a quasi-Church or a mystical corporation on a rational basis’ (Kantorowicz 1957: 193). The new monarchies evolved as ‘“churches” by transference’, and the late medieval and modern commonwealths were influenced by the ecclesiastical model, and the all-encompassing spiritual prototype of the corpus mysticum of the Church (Kantorowicz 1957: 194-197). Hermeneutics of the initially liturgical idea of the corpus mysticum entailed a series of reinterpretations and gave rise to ‘corporal’ terms in the politico-legal discourses. Finally, that led to its secularization, application to the secular polities and its reflection in the political ideologies of territorial states, where it approximated the concept of the king’s body politics. Political frameworks of royal

202  Yulia Prozorova absolutism relied on the divine-right theory, claiming the royal authority to be derived from God directly, not from the people, so the king could not be bound by law (Burgess 1992). Carl Schmitt, whose seminal contribution to the politico-theological problematic preceded Kantorowicz’s works on the topic, developed a juristic approach to the political theology. He states that ‘[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state… – but also because of their systematic structure’ (Schmitt 2005: 36). Thus, political theology assumes the theological genealogy and ‘systematic structure’ of the modern political concepts, the structural consistency of the juristic conceptual construction of historical-political reality and its metaphysical representation, ‘systematic analogy’ or ‘structural resemblance’ between theological and juristic concepts (Schmitt 2005: 43–46). The political is structured by analogy to theology, e.g. the law is analogous to the creatio ex nihilo, the lawgiver – to the omnipotent God, the exception – to the theological “miracle”. The monarchical state reflects the theistic worldview, the transcendence of God vis-à-vis the world in the doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is consistent with the concept of transcendence of the sovereign vis-à-vis the state in the concurrent political philosophy (Schmitt 2005: 49). The principle of ‘identical correlation’ between the theologico-metaphysical image of the world of a particular epoch and the structure of the form of its unquestioned political organization is in line with the premise of ‘civilizational dimension’ as a religio–political nexus – a combination of basic cultural-religious worldviews with the constitution and regulations of political realm. Schmitt’s theory unveils the conceptual ‘systematic analogy’ between the political and the cultural-theological constructions in the context of de-theisticized political articulations and ‘disincorcopated’ power. In pre-democratic societies, sovereignty and the “place of power” found its representation in the king’s body, and the theological was inseparable from the political domain (Lefort 1988). The democratic principle of the people’s sovereignty and mass politics excludes ‘the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty’, and undermines the theological justification of power as being derived from God, removes the theistic and deistic concepts of God from politics and assumes “the place of power” to be “empty”. Since the nineteenth century, political doctrines of the state rest on the concept of immanence and new legitimacy, in which the will of God has to be transformed into an immanent entity. However, due to ‘a homology of theological and political concepts’, the political conceptual frameworks of the secularized modern world retain the theological imprints. The dogma of human rights is a modern representation of the theological notion of unity of humanity, the idea of utopia is a secularized interpretation of paradise, and the communist ideal is a secular reflection of chiliastic eschatology. Political abstractions reflect theological patterns, a ‘“theology” of the secular world’. Modernity brings about an ‘atheistic theocracy’ (Geréby 2008: 11–12).

Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis  203 The rise of democracy signaled the ‘breakdown’ of the mechanism of incarnation, disincorporation of power, while the theological and the political “became divorced” and the efficacy of the religious is no longer symbolic but imaginary (Lefort 1988: 255). As the development of the modern democracy, in fact, signifies a rupture with the previous mechanisms of the political-theological engagement and the representation of power, it is widely agreed that that relations between politics and religions have not interrupted but continue in new modality. The immanentist orientation, which marginalizes or excludes the divine and transcendental, however, evokes new meanings of transcendental and manifestations of the sacred, which elevate the secular politics to a deified reality: “When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods” (Voegelin 2000: 60). Modern politics, political movements, and ideologies emerge as atheistic secular religions – democratic ‘civil’ and totalitarian ‘political’ – and perform structural and functional affinity with traditional religions, in some cases intending to substitute them. ‘Politics as religion’ or ‘sacralization of politics’ are secular reiterations of the religio-political interplay in the context of modernity. Politics with its symbolic-ritual complex becomes analogous to religion, political views correspond to a religious system of beliefs and political entities such as nation, state, and party acquire position of sacred entities (Gentile 2006). Politics determines meanings and aim of individual and collective existence, with subordination of the destiny to supreme entity; it also promises salvation, and proposes visions and practices for the organization of the mundane order according to certain ideals – liberty, equality, socialism, etc. ‘Secular’ and ‘political religions’ were initially designated to modern dictatorship and totalitarian projects. However, modern democratic and nationalistic movements also assume religion-like features drawing on religious experience and frameworks. The view of politics as a projection of theology is paralleled by a counter-perspective—that theology derives from the politics, and it is politics that designs theology. Geréby supports this assumption appealing to Assmann’s thesis on the political determinism of religions (Geréby 2008: 12). Assmann claims for ‘the birth of religion out of the spirit of the political’ and ‘theologization’ of the political, thus opposing the thesis that history leads irrevocably to secularization (Steinmetz-Jenkins 2011: 514). Assmann’s extensive research of the religion in the ancient Egypt and biblical monotheism uncovers a ‘semantic relocation’, a specific ideological reaction to the dramatic historical experience, when the concepts, rhetoric, and political institutions of protection, loyalism, alliance, treaty, and vassaldom were transferred from the mundane sphere of politics to the transcendental realm of religion to model a new framework of relationship between God and man (Assmann 2005a). Assmann argues that ‘monotheism is basically political theology’ emerged as ‘religion of liberation’, ‘originally a political religion, in the sense of a sacralized political movement’ (Assmann 2005b: 148; 2009: 45–46). The justice and law were also theologized – transferred to the transcendental and elevated to the status of divine will (Assmann 2004, 2009: 52–56).

204  Yulia Prozorova In the vein of the ‘theologization’ perspective, Erik Peterson, in his influential treatise Monotheism as political problem, challenges Schmitt’s political theology, examines the origins of the ‘divine monarchy’ concept and claims for its political grounding. Historically, the concept of divine unity emerged together with the decision on unity in the political realm: ‘the ultimate formulation of the unity of metaphysical construction of the world is always coand predetermined by a decision for a particular political conception of unity’ (Peterson 2011: 71). Thus, the most significant theological concept of God as the sole divine sovereign of the cosmos has political genealogy (Rosenstock 2014: 324). The emergence of monarchic monotheism was conditioned by political aspirations to institute the unity of the state and a centralized power, as it happened in the pagan antiquity, or by ethnocentric politics, as is the case in Jewish monotheism. The theological concept of divine monarchy, therefore, is ‘an ideological reflex of the farthest point that centralized political power has reached at any given historical moment’ (Rosenstock 2014: 325–328). Both perspectives, the political theology and the theologized politics, represent the complexity and creativity of constitutive relations between the religious and the political. They assume a shared field of meanings, concepts, and symbols whose transference, ‘relocation’, mimesis, and analogies are mediated through imagination and interpretations.

The Religio-Political Nexus in Russian Civilizational Trajectory Christianization of Rus’ in the late tenth century under the leadership of a local ruler was essentially a political move pursuing the domestic and external interests of the elite. With the expansion of Christendom’s frontiers, Christianization correlated with political domination – the local political elites were able to consolidate their power and establish control over the respective territories, which contributed to the formation of new polities, the rise of monarchy and state-building processes (Berend 2007). Christianity introduced and made Rus’ gain access to the distant legacies of the Axial Age – a conception of disjuncture between the mundane and transcendental orders presupposing a relationship between the religious norms and political frameworks (Prozorova 2021). Kievan Rus’ entered the civilizational orbit of the Eastern Christianity as a new member of the Byzantine Commonwealth (Obolensky 1971) and the ecclesiastic subjugation to Constantinople promoted the transmission of Christian Byzantine “structures of consciousness”, imaginary of God as the single divine creator and legislator, society’s heteronomy and submission to a higher other-worldly authority. The neophyte political elite became acquainted with Christian political theology and acquired a particular political ethos for which the Byzantine Christian Empire provided crucial models – the Christian cult more sharply focused on ruler’s authority, autocratic regime of Godly-instituted power of earthly ruler subjugated to the divine laws and accountable to God, the twofold foundation of the mundane realm, the sacerdotium and imperium, and symphonia between these two interdependent but autonomous authorities

Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis  205 working in harmony, “the Byzantine emphasis on an intimate church and state relationship” (Nielsen 1989: 510; Shepard 2007). After the conversion, the Church “became a second institution, along with the Riurikid dynasty, that gave shape and definition to the emerging state” (Martin 2007: 9). Although the role of conversion and new religious representations should be considered in the complex environment of cultural encounters and interacting traditions, it is Christianity and the Byzantine political theology that comprised dominant cognitive, conceptual, and semantic frameworks constitutive to the political imaginaries and later patterns of monarchy, autocratic sovereignty, and caesaropapism. The understanding of the nature and the image of princes as Christian rulers and conceptualization of their authority in Christian terms were drawn on biblical and Christian examples and parallelisms of early Kievan princely power with the ancient Hebrew kings (Hanak 2013). The prince was regarded as “the icon of Christ—the earthly replica of the prototype divine ruler” with such epithets as “beloved of God,” “guarded by God,” “beloved of Christ,” “pure of faith,” “most pious,” “orthodox” (Poppe 1991: 20–21). The princely authority was subjugated to the Christian law and no reference can be found to the Roman imperial principle “the ruler is not bound by the laws” (Valdenberg 1916; Vernadsky 1973: 287–288). Christianization, however, ‘did not implant the theory or practice of monarchy’ in Kievan Rus, which remained an aristocratic state with a grand prince in Kiev being a primus inter pares (Shepard 2007: 409; Ostrowski 2012: 30). Nonetheless, the early experience of sole rulership constituted a frame of reference for later power interpretations. The rise of the Tsardom of Moscow and the superiority of the Muscovite princes required a legitimizing ideology, and the Church “supplied the young Russian monarchy with a ready-made theory of divinely ordained royal absolutism borrowed from the Church of the Byzantine Empire” (Karpovich 1944: 13). The religious themes, theological terminology, and ceremonial imagery drawn from Byzantine models and religious sources constituted the dominant framework for the interpretation of the grand princely power. The fall of Constantinople, the centre of the Christian Empire, along with the emancipation from the Mongols2 created a political-symbolical context promoted the autocratic tendencies. The authority and status of the Russian ruler as the senior patrimonial prince changed to the Godly-instituted autocrat of all Russia. The autocratic vector and the ecclesiastic centralization were supported by the church hierarches who “provided religiously sanctioned claims for Moscow’s political hegemony over Rus’ modeled on Byzantine practice” (Miller 1994: 290). Ivan III was proclaimed “samoderzhets”, an autocratic independent sovereign, the heir to Constantine and the Christian tsar acquiring primacy in the Orthodox world. The religio-political theory of “Moscow as the Third Rome”, “theocratic eschatology” followed the Byzantine thesis of the impossibility for Christians to have the Church, but not to have the Emperor, and elevated the status of the Muscovite grand prince to the supreme sovereign of Christian nations, an ecumenical ruler and the protector of Orthodox Christianity (Schmemann

206  Yulia Prozorova 1954; Zhivov and Uspenskii 1987). The idea of translatio imperii and messianism of the Russian kingdom as the protector of the Orthodox Christianity inherited from Byzantium as the “Second Rome” contributed to the Russian state ideology, collective identity, and imperial imaginary. It gave rise to “a national system of theocracy” as the Russian people “had been chosen for a special mission in which the history of the world will be accomplished” (Schmemann 1954: 122). The emerging autocratic ideology was underpinned by a political-theological conception of “theocratic absolutism” articulated by the leader of Possessor’s monastic movement, Joseph Sanin (Volotskii), “an early theorist of absolutism” (Raeff 1949). His conception employed the Byzantine thesis that the tsar is man in essence, yet in power of office he is like God, the tsarist monarchy is a reflection of heavenly monarchy on earth and that tsar is a “son” of the Most High, equal to the Highest God by his dignity (Buss 2003: 112). The Russian ruler was regarded as the only source of unlimited power, was placed higher than the Byzantine emperor, and was attributed a priestly character (Diakonov 1889: 99–103; Raeff 1949; Murvar 1968). The religious nature of the tsar’s autocracy and the supremacy of the secular authority over the sacral became indisputable. The Josephites laid ideological foundation to the subservience of the church and “societal monism”, the unity of the religio-political dominance characteristic to the Russian religio-political nexus, which correlates with the increasing legitimation, sanctification and supernatural rationalization of unlimited political power (Murvar 1968). The autocratic regime was established together with the institutionalization of tsarship embodied by Ivan IV who adopted the title of “tsar”, the “Orthodox and Universal Emperor”, a bearer of “the truly Orthodox Christian autocracy” (Sokolskiy 1902: 221–228; Halperin 2014). Ivan’s own theology of self-deification and tsar’s likeness to God, along with the ideology of sacred kingship developed by the Metropolitan Macarius, brought about the most radical conception of the Muscovite autocracy and theocratic state (Hunt 1993). The tsarist autocracy was interpreted and practiced as independent, unlimited, and undivided rulership of the Christian tsar, whose power is exhaustive and determined by the monarch’s will, and the obedience to such power was a Christian duty (Valdenberg 1916: 356). Ivan IV held office in imitation of Christ, being accountable only to God and thus being above human law and not subjected to human legislation (Zhivov and Uspenskii 1987: 56; Miller 1994: 300; Uspenskii 1998). The religious imaginary of unity and indivisibility of the ecclesiastic body and the vision of Orthodox faith and religious sphere being coterminous with the political boundaries was associated with the territorial unification and expansion of the Muscovite state, ‘gathering of Russian lands’, and the imperial politics. The Mongol practices of power and administration are among the referential models for the Muscovite state and autocracy, although ‘the Russian strategies of subaltern adaptation made it very difficult to distinguish Byzantine disguises of Mongol imports from Mongol-inspired’ (Ostrowski 1990; Árnason 2000: 41). The Byzantine and Mongol ‘monistic’

Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis  207 pattern facilitated the adoption and blending of the Mongol ‘theory and practice’ of rulership with the Byzantine, Roman, and biblical concepts of sacral rulership and Godly-chosen divine and holy ruler justified in terms of Christian conceptual-symbolic complex (Murvar 1971: 507). The Byzantine Christian Empire constituted a powerful imaginary for Muscovy and later Russian cultural-political dynamics. The assimilation of the title of “tsar” and elevation of the patriarchate signified “a restoration of the Byzantine Empire” on the Russian ground (Uspenskii 1998: 88). The formation of a centralized state and institution of autocracy was accompanied by the increasing dependence of church from the state and sacralization of secular ruler. By the seventeenth century, the conception of sacral tsarship and tsar as an earthly projection of God or even God for his people with a divine sanction to supervise the mundane and ecclesiastic matters was generally recognized. Patriarch Nikon’s project to restore autonomy and even supremacy of sacral authority was the last opposition to the state before the final governmentalization of the church (Kapterev 1912). The abolition of the Patriarchate and the ecclesiastic court by Peter the Great in 1721, the subjugation of the sacerdotium to the imperium and limitation of ecclesiastic influence on the state matters ended the semblance of symphonia. The resultant caesaropapist pattern of dominance accompanied the instalment of absolutism. The new configuration was substantiated with the divine right thesis that the ruler is a representative of God on Earth and his will is identical to that of God and that supreme power is absolute and not bound by human laws. In the Russian version, this conception claims a divine sanction for every historically evolved form of political power without exclusions (Gurvich 1915: 11–14). The church was secularized and governmentalized, becoming a “projection of the state”, a “branch of political administration” (the Holy Synod), and an institution of state-appointed clerical dignitaries with clergy as spiritual bureaucrats integrated into the state apparatus supervised by the secular authority (Weber 1978: 1162). The Russian tsar was represented as a secular absolutist monarch, an emperor and the “theocratic basileus”, as the head of the Russian church he adopted some of the patriarch’s functions, being perceived as this-worldly “terrestrial God”. The new state paradigm assumed total unconstrained control of the ‘absolute’ police state and its offices upon individuals and finally solidified the “monistic-patrimonial system” (Murvar 1971). Even after the creation of the elected Duma in 1906, Nicholas II viewed his authority as God-given and hence absolute (Wirtschafter 2006: 63–64, 68). The sacral rulership, a fusion of political and religious authority, was characteristic for the imperial period. The imperial authority took shape as a religio-political institution, combining the Orthodox Byzantine traditions of theocracy with the Western rational principles of early modernity. The mystical spiritual character of the Orthodox Christianity was not conducive to the rational transformation of the world and this-worldly salvation through political and economic activities. The revolution and the Bolsheviks envisaged a new society created on the grounds of materialism, atheism, emancipation from the religion, human

208  Yulia Prozorova autonomy, and secular rationality. For Marxists, Christianity was the pillar of the tsarist autocracy, the old-world alien archaic associated with superstition, injustice, and oppression, the ‘opium’ for which atheism, an integral ideological component of the Soviet regime, was an antidote. However, the relations between religion and politics at the onset of the Soviet regime were more complicated than antagonism between them assumed by the Marxist atheism. One should not overlook the imaginary of the revolutionary Christ and the pro-religious movement of pre-revolutionary socialists reinterpreting Marxism in terms of secularized theology, an atheistic religion (‘Godbuilding’, ‘bogostroitelstvo’), and a pro-revolution movement of churchmodernizers among the clergy (‘Renovationism’, ‘obnovlenchestvo’), whose major proponents, Anatolii Lunacharskii and Alexander Vvedenskii respectively, participated in the public dispute on the topic “Christianity or communism” in 1925 (Lunacharskii 1926). Lunacharskii agrees on the collectivist, communal, democratic, communistic, and revolutionary aspects of early Christianity (Boer 2014). Influenced by Feuerbach, he argues that Marx advances the elevation of anthropology to the level of theology and makes human self-consciousness a religion (Lunacharskii 1908b: 31). Regarded as ‘religious atheism’, Marxism addresses the fundamental religious question on the relationship between human life and nature, it proclaims ‘remaking of the world’, mastery over nature and emancipation – a revolution in human self-understanding revealed by the proletariat. God must be created, not searched for, it is ‘humanity in its ultimate potential’, the struggle for socialism and human mastery is God-building itself, and regnum gloriae designates a human victory over nature (Lunacharskii 1908a: 156–159). Socialist collective-centrism comprises a worldview of the novel non-mystical anthropological religion without God that divinizes humanity, releases human autonomy in relation to the nature, and satisfies religious need to be a part of a greater whole (Boer 2014; Steila 2019). Lunacharskii’s project of religionized socialism, albeit criticized by Lenin and later reconsidered by the author, corresponds to the fundamental imaginaries and orientations of the communist modernity. The Revolution of 1917 also instigated the ‘revolution’ within the church. The initial intention of the left-leaning heterogeneous Renovationism movement was to modernize the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), to adapt its activity and perspective to the new revolutionary and communist regime, revise its attitude and accommodate canonic and liturgical tradition to revolutionary ideals and socialist doctrine. Nikolay Berdyaev elucidated the religious origins of the Russian Revolution and Soviet communism in terms of political religion as indigenous Russian cultural-religious phenomena. He reveals an analogy between the religious and ideological orthodoxies, especially in their messianic, totalitarian, and oppressive orientations. The communist state conceives and installs itself as a ‘sacral kingdom’ with a ‘reverse’ ‘communist theocracy’ – analogous to the pre-revolutionary autocratic monarchy as theocratic tsarship since they both rely on the ‘dictatorship’ of worldviews, totalitarian and essentially religious. Communism is antagonistic to other religions because it pretends to be a

Religious-Political Problematic in Civilizational Analysis  209 religion itself; it inspires religious aspirations and provides responses about the meaning of life so that the state acquires and adopts the functions of the Church. Socialism claims messianic faith with the proletariat as the class-messiah, and the party as the protector of its idea (Berdyaev 1906; Berdyaev 1955). The Soviet ‘socialist religion’ suggests inner-worldly ‘salvation’ in the institution of the socialist “new world”. The religious concept of the ontological schism between the mundane and the divine orders is therefore replaced by the temporal disjuncture between imperfection and injustice of now-worldly reality and then-worldly utopian socialism. Marxism-Leninism appeared as a salvationist and messianic political religion suggesting total reconstruction of society by using central political institutions and making political system the sacralized arena for the self-salvation and self-sacrifice (Riegel 2005).

In lieu of a Conclusion The Soviet regime searched for the ways to control the church, and after turbulent years of repressions, a new concordat was established. The ROC professed absolute loyalty and recognized the Soviet regime and its interests in 1927 by stating in its “Declaration” that the church leaders are with the Soviet people and with the Soviet government. The church accepted the atheist state in exchange for legalization while being converted into a dependent constituent of the Soviet totalitarian monistic configuration, although formally the church and the state were separated. The church hierarchs attempted to theologically justify the communist regime. This paradigm of church loyalty to the state (unofficially termed ‘Sergianism’, after Patriarch Sergius) with state control over the Patriarchate remains effective, but in a reinterpreted framework after the dissolution of the USSR. The ROC proclaimed independence from the state staying a non-state religion; however, it explicitly claims to participate in social and political life along with the restoration of the doctrine of symphonia within the legal framework of separation with the secular state (‘Osnovy sotsial’noi kontseptsii Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi’ 2000). The resulting configuration resembles a perpetual asymmetry in state– church relations. The official church supports nationalistic, traditional, ‘patriotic’, and anti-liberal dispositions of the post-Soviet Russian state, the idea of a strong centralized state, and provides religious justification and symbolic legitimation for the conservative ideological orientations and domestic political initiatives (Knox 2003; Anderson 2007; Maslovskiy and Shangin 2014). The theopolitics of the church in its ‘canonical territory’ correlates with the state’s geopolitics and Putin’s imperial revanchism and ‘civilizational’ project to reassert influence in the post-Soviet space. The post-Soviet church has assisted the instauration of an illiberal authoritarian regime in contemporary Russia. The ‘monistic unity’ with political domination, and the unification of religious and political powers subjugated and embodied by an autocratic ruler or a state authority, represents Russia’s paradigmatic pattern, which reproduces in different historical contexts within different politico-theological or political-ideological frameworks.

210  Yulia Prozorova

Notes 1 Examples of political theology are found from antiquity as a part of tripartite theology constitutive to the polis order, in Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian reflection on monarchy, city, empire, Latin Medieval perspectives on monarchy and church, Byzantine theories of Christian Empire, symphony between church and empire, imperial office, and later in Muscovite ‘Third Rome’, early modern and modern conceptions of sovereignty, civil religion, Catholic Reichstheologie, etc. 2 The Muscovite ruler was represented as the one who rebelled against the non-Christians, he had to destroy the image of the Mongol khan as ‘tsar’, the legitimate suzerain during the Mongol domination (see Cherniavsky 1959).

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14 Regionality and civilizations in the Americas Considerations on civilizational analysis in the context of American modernities Jeremy C.A. Smith In this chapter, I advance a concept of ‘regionality’ that further elaborates a small and yet significant aspect of Jóhann Árnason’s framework of civilizational analysis: the relationship of regional constellations to civilizations and multiple modernities.1 In attempting to add to Árnason’s observations on regionality, I refer to two kinds of region in the Americas: sub-state territories and larger multinational zones (some of which are “world regions”). As an example of a region internal to national territories, I sketch a profile of the South-west of the US. For the second kind of region, I compare Central America and the Caribbean. Regionality in each is constituted differently. Transnationalism as an experiential base distinguishes Central America’s past from the Caribbean, which has been formed by the flows of civilization. Both are multicivilizational regions or zones of intercivilizational engagement. Viewing these from the vantage point of civilizational analysis and historical sociology, I make three arguments: First, the regionality of regions varies within states and from one multinational zone to another. Second, the encounters and engagement of civilizations are vital to the institution of places as regional. They invoke external interlinkages as influences in endogenous dynamics. Third, following Árnason directly, the relationship of civilizations and regions is also variable, and it is variable on both sides of the equation.

Introduction: regionality in theory I begin with perspectives on regions within states. In considering intra-national regions and the concept of multiple modernities, Knöbl unpacks the notion of region in the Americas. He identifies seven regions, two of which were internal to the United States (Árnason 2018: 195). In a less-well-known essay in which he addresses multiple modernities and civilizations, Knöbl argues that the concept of region has multiple flexible applications of interest for historical sociology and significant advantages of examining the contingencies of state formation (2006). This specific essay has special interest here for its account of the American South. Knöbl’s interest lies in the contingent impact of regional consciousness in state formation. The region has been an abiding opponent of the national state, contrapuntal in its constitution DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-18

Regionality and civilizations in the Americas  215 within the process of state formation. His analysis emphasizes one variant of the institution of intra-national regions. Árnason adds Mexico and Central America to the list to reach nine. I agree with this list, but with some caveats around the interlinkage of the US, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. More generally, I add the following corrective: intercivilizational engagement is also a vitalizing component of regions in the Americas. The engagement and encounters of civilizations often institute regions through external interconnection, as well as regions producing themselves, as it were, via their endogenous creations (Smith 2017). Seen from this angle, regions are made of multiple connections, as well as emerging from internal dynamics. This applies for subnational as well as larger regional constellations. Knöbl’s theoretical approach and my concept of intercivilizational engagement post-date the articulation of regions in the human sciences as complex social constructs. For historians and some sociologists, detecting the borderlands of shared experiences has been the priority in demarcating regions (Adelman and Aron 1999; Martínez 1994; Reséndez 2005). Seen as intercultural zones (Adelman and Aron 1999, 814), borderlands superseded the category of the frontier as the historical-geographical joint of civilizations. They have been places of contact, exchange, and focal points for the collision of great powers. In new world borderlands, more than rivalries of empires and states are put to the test; indigenous alliances also came under pressure. There is no sense amongst advocates of the borderlands paradigm that the historical categories exhaust experiences of regionality. Instead, the shift in language is meant to herald a change in underlying understanding of the multinational and multicivilizational pasts of specific types of region. In this context, regions become the fault lines between states – sometimes arbitrary in appearance – which fluctuate dramatically with the growth of interdependence, colonization and exploitation, or war. In all this, it is important not to detract from the contingent institution of place and place-based cultures. The shift to borderlands research has been a vitalizing step in re-problematizing subnational regions. Yet, it remains imperative that we understand that the regionality of regions varies within states and from one nation to another. Contributions from historical sociology and civilizational analysis could serve to enlarge the historical and comparative scope of analysis and thereby underline this point about variability. Turning to multinational regions, perspectives in international relations and interarea studies have expanded alongside efforts to overcome neglect in world history of some regions (Bentley et al. 2005; Katzenstein 2005, 2010). Other variations have been immensely interesting for comparativists in the post-Cold War era. As Arjomand, Katzenstein, and their respective collaborators powerfully argue, regionalism was on the rise, with one consequence being the manifestation of the kind of plurality of world regions to which contemporary civilizational analysis is relevant (Arjomand 2014; Katzenstein 2010). The manifest regionalisms coming in the wake of the decline of superpower rivalry boosted a third generation of social scientists (Arjomand 2014, 23–61). Contemporary civilizational analysis was central to this endeavor.

216  Jeremy C.A. Smith

Civilizational analysis and region How do scholars of civilizations conceive of region? Árnason begins with Weber’s notion of “cultural areas” (Kulturekreise), which alludes to the relationship of regions and civilizations but could be taken further. Árnason goes on to define regionality as historic “regional clusters of societies” (Árnason 2003, 220). “Region,” therefore, for Árnason, really refers to world or multinational region. They are constellations like civilizations, but not reducible to them. Arguing with and against Durkheim and Mauss, Árnason cautions that the relationship of region and civilization varies widely from one constellation to another. Both region and civilization are dynamically subject to re-composition. There is one further noteworthy feature: encounters between civilizations also occur in regional contexts (Árnason 2003, 217–218). This is one of his trademark insights and he applies it throughout his comparative and historical case studies. Seeing a wide range of historical civilizations instituted in engagement with one another, Árnason urges comparative investigation of cases in which there is high incongruence between regional and civilizational constellations or at least an illuminating atypicality of case study: [T]he aim is… to develop a framework within which different constellations can be distinguished and compared… Some civilizations are more regional than others, and some regions are more civilizational than others, but the task of civilizational theory is to account for the spectrum of variations on both sides, rather than to single out the most congruent cases. (Árnason 2003, 315) The principal point here is that the integration and differentiation of civilizations through intercivilizational encounters creates a great variety of regional worlds. Indeed, the backdrop to modernity – actually, the conjuncture of multiple modernities interacting with Europe – entails a collision of regions and civilizations (Árnason 2020, 77–80, 87–92). In all respects, Árnason’s characterization of the creation of civilizations emphasizes context-dependent instantiations of social imaginaries. Concreteness matters, and it matters in every step Árnason takes to divine a conceptual language and a set of analytics (in the imaginary significations of wealth, power, and meaning) for comparative analysis. From the vantage point of international relations, Peter Katzenstein projects a similar stress on regional specificity. In his characterization of AngloAmerica, he critiques Hartz for assumptions about the unity of Anglo-America, looking instead to spheres of internationalized influence and disunities of the nation-state (Katzenstein 2012). His focus is simultaneously on subnational and multinational regions. Arguing that world regions are made porous through political practice, he defines them by their integration into global and international institutions and processes, which in turn can enhance dynamics of provincialization within states (Katzenstein 2005,

Regionality and civilizations in the Americas  217 2–30). Katzenstein demarcates the provinces of Anglo-American societies with subtlety and nuance, finding contingency and fluidity in regional places (Katzenstein 2012). When it comes to the period in focus in the current work, this approach poses questions of transnationalism situated in the social-historical of civilization identities, empire building, and decolonization, as well as raising issues of sub-national regionalization. Eisenstadt’s landmark theory of multiple modernities could apply a category of world region without risking a conflation with the major civilizations in his scope. Eisenstadt takes the analysis of regional diversity further when he posits a diverse Western hemisphere arising from the radical transformation of the civilizational premises of the Spanish, British, and French empires (S.N. Eisenstadt 2002). Encountering and violently colonizing indigenous civilizations, new world societies formed through the crystallization of new national collective identities, social and political orders, elites, forms of protest and conflict, and a differentiation of the cultural landscapes. Although he confines his analysis to the split between Latin and Protestant America, Eisenstadt gives preliminary notes on regional variation within the Americas as a whole. He breaks Latin America down into an Andean American region, a Europeanized southern Cone, the homogenized mestizo countries, and the multiracial societies. Local and provincial identities matter, especially in Latin America. The preliminary analysis is suggestive of further development. Before beginning a substantive analysis, I have a few words on my notion of “intercivilizational engagement” (Smith 2017). Encounters and engagement between civilizations contribute significantly to simultaneous historical processes of creation and destruction. However, the patterns are variable, often depending on the instantiation of imaginary significations in different and engaging formations (including openness to intercultural encounters). Intercivilizational encounters and engagement may heighten operative dimensions of violence in processes of creation and destruction. This pattern is spectacularly evident in the multicivilizational world of the Americas from the Conquest onwards. The enormous violence and destruction that indigenous civilizations, peoples, and their worlds suffered has attracted widespread interest since the 1970s. Yet there was a density of cultural, linguistic, political, and economic transactions, interactions, and interchanges over time, often unnoticed and undocumented in the human sciences. I cast that density of connectedness as part of intercivilizational engagement – a tissue of interactions across four dimensions: migration, economic exchange, cultural traffic between societies, and various mutual derivations of polity arising from the connections of states. The approach to each region emphasizes one or more of these dimensions.

Regions within: US South-west As my reasoning rests on the notion of intercivilizational engagement, I opt for a more expansive vision of this historic region. We can treat Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Southern California as

218  Jeremy C.A. Smith the South-west on the basis that this is Hispanic and Anglo-America’s zone of engagement in migration, economic and cultural transfers, and political envelopment within the US. Interaction in this zone generated a definitive social-historical for the region. The case for a larger geography also has support from a world historian of civilizations (Fernández-Armesto 2014). Fernández-Armesto extensively captures the Hispanic presence in US history and its interaction with Anglo-America. Including First Nations arguably makes the case for a larger South-west stronger. This was, after all, a zone of engagement for First Nations, which were the one civilizational force with a continuous and long history throughout the lands from the North-west of the continent through to the Rio Grande. Accompanying this geography is periodization focused on two phases. The South-west’s tumultuous origins in the growth of American influence in northern Mexico is the first. The second concerns growing binational linkages at the end of the twentieth century. Linkage further integrated the states of northern Mexico and Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California as a border region in which the legacies of Anglo and Hispanic America intermingled with the growth of conflict. This leads to the following tentative contention. Regionality defines otherwise distinct states of the South-west, when intercivilizational heritage is most prominent. Prospects for the extension of slavery motivated southern states to support annexation of northern Mexico. By the early nineteenth century, New Mexico and Texas were well-developed Spanish borderlands under pressure from a large neighbor entering a phase of rapid expansion (Adelman and Aron 1999, 829; Howe 2007, 24–28). From the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to the end of the war with Mexico, processes of state formation and intercivilizational engagement intertwined to influence the creation of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and southern California. During the early decades, migration of Anglo-Americans into Mexico’s northern states had a profound effect and portended a forthcoming war (FernándezArmesto 2014, 135–138; Howe 2007, 659; Reséndez 2005, 37–45). The steady invasion of US settlers stimulated a developmental logic that disproportionately benefited the US (Reséndez 2005, 93–117). Growth of a regional trading system linked the region economically to the eastern states (Martínez, 1994, 34). Two episodes destabilized the region further for Mexico. The interlude of the independent Texan republic made the Southwest a landscape of considerable flux. Second, war with the Comanche in West Texas put local Anglo-Americans in a position of dependence on the US for military support (Belich 2009, 346). As more Anglo-Americans moved into Texas and New Mexico, the density of their presence increased the magnetism of the US. The two states rapidly became border states of the US. In the aftermath of the 1848 war, the US lorded it over Mexico in negotiations, taking a different approach to the one they took with Britain in other negotiations (Howe 2007, 733–743, 800–809). The war realigned international relations in North America pointedly in favor of the US. It delivered

Regionality and civilizations in the Americas  219 the largest single territorial acquisition of any presidency (Howe 2007, 809). The impact on the region was complex, as Reséndez avers when he writes that “it was a conquest mediated by Mexico’s core-periphery tensions and a tangle of economic interests linking Mexico’s Far North with the United States. Conquest thus entailed both imposition and acquiescence, rivalry and complicity” (Reséndez 2005, 241). The addition of California further altered the proportions of the region. California’s life after the Spanish Empire began explosively with the discovery of gold (Howe 2007, 813–822). In a two-hundred-hour period in 1848, the US acquired California in the treaty settlement and locals discovered gold there. In this juncture in which the US seized the South-west, the national state became a continental power with a Pacific vista. The gains corralled Britain and France, ensuring that the US would be a major power in the hemisphere. Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico missed the spectacular gold rushes that California enjoyed and missed the accompanying economic and demographic booms (Belich 2009, 346–349). Nevada got the rush, but then not the demographic boom. Nevertheless, there were other impulses of growth. Mormon settlement in Utah gave that state a new cast. With stronger links to the east, Colorado’s good fortunes continued in mining gold, silver, and other minerals lasted beyond a takeoff in the 1860s. The emerging populations were substantial enough to be integrated into regional and transcontinental railways. Overall, the region diversified greatly spectacularly but diversified well. I situate the second phase in the last third of the twentieth century, a time when cross-border linkages accentuated the Hispanic character of the borderlands region. This region is the most Hispanicized in the country due to the long-term presence of northern Mexicans and the entry of immigrants from Central America. Historians and sociologists have eloquently described such borderland zones as places of multiple and bicultural identities too difficult to label neatly (Newman 2006). The category of “frontier” can no longer apply equitably to the regionally circumscribed community in these zones (Buezas 1991; Martínez 1994). Familiar nation-state capacities had far less traction in a binational region where the border is, on one hand, enforced and, on the other hand, essentially inoperable. The coexistence of a highly patrolled border with a binational zone inhabited by millions of essential yet impermanent workers is inescapable but seems paradoxical. Such conditions produce a fear of Hispanic “invasion” in parts of the South-West, while communities from South Texas, Las Vegas, San Diego-Tijuana, and even Los Angeles live and thrive on migrants, many of whom frequently travel back and forth between Mexico and the US. Circular and return migration, along with an economy of remittances, amplify the transnational character of the region (Fernández-Armesto 2014, 309–310; Leal and Limon 2013). Remittances have become a stand-alone industry, so much so that Mexico’s government incorporates it into its economic forecasting. Not all of this has a positive value. Border vice is an industry with stimuli reaching deep into states of both countries (Bowman 2005). A crisis image circulates well beyond the lands, towns, and cities of this long border region.

220  Jeremy C.A. Smith At the same time, this state of affairs has engendered different kinds of civic participation and belonging (McNevin 2007). Significantly, citizenship movements reflect and animate the renegotiation of place in the region. Based on activism for an expansion of rights to belong, undocumented migrants and supportive labor unions, churches, and student groups have issued a challenge to the meaning of US citizenship by claiming rights to stay, access vital services, and participate in civil society. The ecumenical sanctuary movement brought the historic strength of many Christian churches together. City governments accommodating and supporting migrant demands have inadvertently become partners in consubstantially building up a social movement around migrant-worker communities. Labor unions on both sides of the border joined environmentalists in building transnational links in direct response to NAFTA. Solidarities of this kind seized the unprecedented opportunities afforded by North American integration to press claims around community development and active citizens in Latinized zones of the South-west, on one hand, and promote labor rights in northern Mexican states, on the other. They contributed to a common identity of border region people shared by Hispanic Mexicans and Anglo-Americans across the Rio Grande. Out of all this, remarkably the United States is the only imperial power to have integrated this region with a distinct identity (Fernández-Armesto 2014, 78–79). The sense of belonging comes from civic sources, including participation in community-building and the implementation of multicultural policies, as well as cultural traditions. One aspect of belonging is the development of cross-border linkage. Immigrant transnationalism is especially strong in and around Mexican associations in California and Texas (Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2004). Furthermore, from the 1990s, it was evident that Mexican governmental authorities have been able to aid US-based communities directly. Add to that, the invisible transactions and cross-border circuits between immigrants and communities in Mexico and the picture becomes that of a porous border. A process of re-Hispanicization of the South-west came to prominence toward the end of the millennium. Anglo-Americans found themselves squeezed into minority status in southern California and New Mexico. With the profound historicity of Mexico in play, the myths of Mexican-America have begun to alter the memory-scape of the region. At the same time, the ascendancy of immigrant mobilization has produced conflict with both the Republican Right and its large support base, particularly in California. While the struggles for citizenship and recognition have not gone away, the re-Hispanicization of the region has ushered in a new phase of intercivilizational engagement.

The region writ large: geographies of the imagination As I outline in the opening passages, the axes of creation of multinational and world regions are distinct from the regions within. Multinational regions exceed empires; yet empires are basic to their modernity. Nations are the major

Regionality and civilizations in the Americas  221 state forms; yet transnationalism and multinational exchange and coordination always feature. Intercivilizational engagement is also animated in world regions. The Caribbean and Central America are explored here. With Árnason’s point about regions and civilizations in mind, I contend that both are multicivilizational regions instituted in centuries-long interaction of indigenous, African, and European civilizations. Central America is a multinational region distinguished by historical consociation arising from shared experiences of unity and intercivilizational engagement. In the Caribbean, experiences of intercivilizational flows associated with colonization can create geo-cultures capable of migrating, as it were, throughout the world. There are other candidates: the reconfigured North Americas, the Southern Cone, Andean America (where indigenous civilization and its imaginaries have undergone a revival), or Amazonian America (where deep intrusion into indigenous worlds represents a threat to planetary ecology). In each case, the most momentous developments in regionalism are in the postwar era or even later. In other words, they have shorter historical trajectories than the ones I prefer for historical and comparative sociological analysis of the Americas. My selection follows the goal of working in larger historical frames.

The Caribbean The Caribbean is widely regarded as a crossroads of civilizations. The terra-oceanic form of the archipelago lends it unity, even as island societies divide it. In geological and geographic terms, it is one of the largest, deepest, and most connected seas in the world. The unity and diversity are social-historical as well as geological. All the evident diversity begs the question, what unities can we associate with the Caribbean? These flows of intercivilizational engagement give Caribbean societies regionality. I will briefly comment on one: migration. When it comes to the impact of colonialism and immigration, the devastating transformation brought about by the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion was dramatic. Populations entirely transplanted via slavery, indenture, or migration wholly transformed the archipelago. Slavery drove the settlement of the conquered islands with de-territorialized peoples from elsewhere (Cohen 2008, 127–128). The most complete transformations were St Domingue and nineteenth-century Cuba. The slave apparatus, mode of production, and lines of trade are long gone. There are, nevertheless, living demographic and cultural legacies. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, new streams of migrants came to the region. Many were from Atlantic Europe but also Asia. In this period, emigration within the region increased. Constant creolization has been part of an Antillean modernity. In the span of languages spoken and demography made, this Antillean modern exceeds colonial modernity (Maglia 2016, 286). Not only has this zone of intersecting civilizations drawn peoples to it from every continent and uniquely transformed them; it has also produced what scholars claim are its own delimited diasporas (Cohen 2008, 124–135; Maglia 2016). To produce such diasporas,

222  Jeremy C.A. Smith people from the region have set migration patterns matched by few others. They have followed routes between island homes and metropolitan Europe and North America in a circle of migratory movements. In some places, connectivity between home and host cities is greatly enhanced by extensive community efforts in both places. The link of former British colonies to the UK is the strongest demographic nexus. Migrants communicate the experiences of work, business, sport, unemployment, poverty, racism, and belated social mobility in the UK back through family and peer networks to their place of origin. Regular British West Indian visits to homelands in the Caribbean reinforce family connections across the Anglosphere, giving visitors the opportunity to renew relationships and fulfil obligations (Stephenson 2002). There is a modernist family model in the reciprocity sustaining such transnational connections. Care of family members and selfhood and identity are bound up in cross-Atlantic families of this kind (Goulbourne 2002, 161–183). In these ways, the diaspora commemorates its own existence and communicates family and social memories of ancestral origins to kin, friends, and peers. In the 1980s and 1990s, the strength of connection with family, community, and homeland led increasing numbers of emigrants to return to the West Indies (Goulbourne 2002, 184–205). The pattern is not limited to Britain. The circular migration to French, Dutch, and Canadian cities has been lower in volume, but should not be overlooked. In magnitude, connections into the US are another matter. Prewar immigration brought skilled professionals to the cities. They made large expatriate black communities, a development underestimated in historical and sociological research and frozen out of public understanding (James 2002). Millions moved in the postwar period. Cubans and Haitians congregate in Miami in large numbers. New York hosts Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Haitians, and Dominicans in even greater numbers. A community of Dominicans in Boston densely connected to its base of origin in Miraflores have increased their impact on the city over time (Levitt 2001). Other cities generate other immigrant experiences for smaller communities. Expatriate communities there and in Europe came to constitute a major source of tourism by the end of the century, due to the rate of return visits to the Caribbean (Duval 2004). Like their counterparts in Britain, many chose to return to their ancestral homes and in slowly increasing numbers. This distinctly international character is the mark of Caribbean intercivilizational engagement. The flows through the Caribbean are not only of a structural and institutional variety; they also characterize ontological aspects of existence experienced there. Colonialism is a big legacy for the region. Yet colonial modernity does not exhaust its institutional and material composition or the nature of its social-historical experience.

Central America As a region, Central America is coexistent with the flows of the Caribbean yet being separate at the same time. Empires that conquered and integrated

Regionality and civilizations in the Americas  223 territories, peoples, and economic life and defined cultural worlds dominated pre-Colombian and then colonial Central America. Its modern regional identity began life in the chaotic collapse of the Spanish Empire, a process in which the isthmus diverged from Mexico and costal South America. Since the 1890s, the region has been the geographic center of an interregional nexus between the Caribbean and the Pacific (Abulafia 2019, 856–859). Central America’s distinct regionality issues from a shared memory of transnational self-government, insertion into the world economy, and the development of regional inter-governmental agreements and treaties, and the emergence of a human rights discourse. The end of Spanish colonialism heralded attempts to constitute a federal state on the legacy of shared cultural origins. For the five states in the United Provinces of Central America (1823-39), regionalism overcame factionalism for a time. Its legacy was a lasting tension between supranational tendencies and national divisions that endured right through to the end of the twentieth century. These supranational tendencies included a collective memory of regional consociation, numerous exile communities with multinational connections, the endurance of indigenous communities and culture, and transnational solidarities around human rights and fragile citizenship (Roniger 2011b). Nationalism emerged in a dialectic of national institutionalization and regional connectivity. Roniger writes that nationalism “emphasized Central American solidarity and patriotism” in this period in which nascent nationalist ideologies lacked the integrative capacity that even Argentina and Mexico could harness (Roniger 2011b, 48). Transnational cooperation between armed opponents of US interventions as a regional phenomenon had a significant political impact at the local level, particularly in Nicaragua. From their inception, regional independence movements took opposition to North American hegemony to the heart of their self-understanding. In the twentieth century, nationalist historiography inputted these patriotic tropes of nineteenth-century resistance heroes into collective memory (Roniger 2011a, 257– 261). Although patriots, they were remembered as regional heroes too. Consequently, commemoration of the foundation of Central America’s republics often programmed the regional dimension of its key events into national myths, particularly into the myth of heroic armed resistance. Augusto Sandino’s war with the US in the 1930s took over many of the archetypes of national and regional memory. Indeed, Sandino would become a transnational trademark of late-century solidarity movements and exile communities. Central America’s insertion into the regional economy centered on the monopoly position American companies captured in the first three decades of the twentieth century. There are few contemporary equivalents of foreign monopoly to match this. Alongside this penetration, American investment in the Panama Canal, rail, and communications had pre-conditioned caudillo and liberal elites to extensive American involvement. The US captured ownership of the Panama Canal setting a trend in US involvement. With heavy investments in agriculture, rail, and mining, US enterprises as economic agents spread corporate culture and discipline to agrarian sectors in

224  Jeremy C.A. Smith Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (O’Brien 1996). Yet their greatest impact was political destabilization necessitating US intervention (O’Brien 1996, 47–54; see also Roniger 2011b, 63–65). At their least intrusive, American interests merely exercised a disproportionate influence on national policies on taxation, prices, and wages. Often enough, American involvement in the early years of the twentieth century brought gunboats and marines. No local developments mark out policy developments in Caribbean and Central America, though the heavy influence of American capital brought its own mode of organization to labor and welfare. Union disputes, rebellions, and general discontent engulfed politics in the 1920s and 1930s in Honduras and Nicaragua. The consequent labor struggles turned on an axis of colliding worlds with the entrepreneurial spirit and Taylorist practices of US companies directly challenging the self-sufficient agrarian imaginary of peasant life. As well as labor conflicts in Honduras and Nicaragua, the US encountered Sandino’s revolutionary peasant army. Sandino’s armed campaigns went further than disputes with agricultural and factory workers, but both shared common roots in the challenge to the peasant world, which was felt most acutely in Western Nicaragua, where Sandino was based. In the depths of the Depression, all these battles started to turn in favor of United Fruit and their smaller counterparts on the Atlantic Coast of the region (O’Brien 1996, 100–106). Undercurrents of regionalism did not lie dormant. They featured in the Cold War era, particularly in the surge in regional institutions and agreements in the 1960s, such as the Central American Common Market and the Organization of Central American States. Both promoted visions of developmentalist modernity, which corresponded with the developmentalist program of many national governments. The promise was straightforward: an instituted society of constantly modernizing social and political institutions and improvement in the quality of life. This promise of modernity may not be within reach for Central America, but regional associations and governmental programs were strategic institutions for governments endeavoring to promote growth and seek support from the US. The US had an additional reason to support regional association. Checking communist influence and maintaining stability were strategic priorities every bit as important as direct capitalist interest. Transnational solidarity was not confined to the social-economic goals of modernization It also took a political form. International links have acted as a political conduit for decades. The links have been instruments through which democratic and revolutionary politics have been communicated. As historical memory, the cultural and political myths of Central American consociation and international solidarity continued in émigré communities and human rights networks in the 1980s and 1990s. The latter lived and thrived through a host of solidarity activities, including the enactment of émigré memory, a kind of transnational recollection and forgetting in which national identity matters even though it is loosened from the nation. Émigré memory communicates and shares, first, acts of memory-making from back home

Regionality and civilizations in the Americas  225 and, second, controversies about commemorating the past, particularly in contexts of violent repression and human rights abuses (Hatcher 2018). Regional cooperation helped end civil wars and dictatorships in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Esquipulas Peace Plan symbolized region’s termination of civil warfare and political violence and a turn to human rights (Roniger 2011b, 121–127). Involvement of the Organization of American States and the UN emphasized the transnational character of the agreement. Negotiating peace and security was itself a process of learning regional cooperation for a generation of government cadre conditioned by years of violent conflict and warfare. The path from there became more difficult and uneven as states sought to entrench human rights. Comparison of reconciliation processes in post-civil war El Salvador and Guatemala reveals contrasting degrees of success in achieving shared understanding—based on accountability and justice—of cruel and brutal acts of violation in the past. The role of Guatemalan human rights groups with both transnational connections and grassroots organization seems to be a major distinguishing factor setting the two experiences apart. How durable the spirit of regional cooperation is in the context of twenty-first-century democratic government is a question beyond the present work, however.

Conclusion The dual conception of region and regionality, used here as internal to territorial states and a reference to multinational regions, brings civilizational analysis to conceptions of regional place. Adding my own approach in civilizational analysis, this chapter takes as its subject some of the most abundant intercivilizational zones of the Americas. The flow of peoples, and the fusions, confrontation, and combinations of cultures occurs in provincial zones and transnational regions. The US South-west has a collective Hispanic memory that is partly mobile, migratory, and external to the nation-state, yet also invested in North American places, and institutions. As a region, it was born in conflict with Mexico and the First Nations. Confrontation of cultures and economic engagement in cross-border markets for labor, goods, and services at the end of the century resulted in a new wave of political contestation. If the South-west’s is an inward-oriented regionality, then contrastingly the world region of the Caribbean is, in character, ever outward-oriented. Its social historical is diasporic and migratory, a collective creation of historical experiences of colonialism, slavery, dynamic cultural and economic flows, and a landscape of competing imperial powers. While the region struggles for robust political sovereignty and independent economic diversity, its cultural resources are creolized and creolizing and thus continue the impulses of intercivilizational engagement. Central America’s fate has not been as bright. Yet democracy looked viable at the end of the 1990s. The isthmus seemed to have a strong sense of regionality derived from common experiences of state-making at a national and regional level and, in the negative, suffering economic heteronomy.

226  Jeremy C.A. Smith With these regions as case studies, I argue that regionality of two kinds ascends from the social historical institution. Geographical zones in which intercivilizational engagement is pronounced generate especially conspicuous substate and transnational regions. Each case is historically and geopolitically specific yet shows this core characteristic of intercivilizational engagement. The chapter suggests civilizational analysis as a paradigm offering potential for richer understanding of the geographical institution of place in America’s multiple modernities.

Note 1 As well as elaborating on the conference paper and considering feedback, this chapter brings material from my recent monograph American Imaginaries: Nations, Societies, and Capitalism in the Many Americas (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2022).

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Regionality and civilizations in the Americas  227 Goulbourne, Harry. (2002), Caribbean Transnational Experience. Kingston: Pluto Press: Arawak Publications. Hatcher, Rachel. (2018), The Power of Memory and Violence in Central America. New York; Heidelberg; Berlin: Springer. Howe, Daniel Walker. (2007), What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press. James, Winston. (2002), “Explaining Afro-Caribbean Social Mobility in the United States: Beyond the Sowell Thesis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44(2): 218–262. Katzenstein, Peter. (2005), A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Katzenstein, Peter. (2010), Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Katzenstein, Peter. (2012), “The West as Anglo-America,” in Anglo-America and its Discontents: Civilizational Identities Beyond West and East, edited by Peter Katzenstein, 1–30. London: Routledge. Knöbl, Wolfgang. (2006), “Of Contingencies and Breaks: The US American South as an Anomaly in the Debate on Multiple Modernities,” Archives Européennes des Sociologie, 47: 125–157. Leal, David L. and Jose Limon. (2013), Immigration and the Border Politics and Policy in the New Latino Century. New York: Springer. Levitt, Peggy. (2001), The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maglia, Graciela. (2016), “Otros Caribes: de las antillas al continente (sudamerica centroamerica y norteamerica),” Revista ideroamericana, LXXXII(255–256): 285–288. Martínez Oscar, J. (1994), Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. McNevin, Anne. (2007), “Irregular Migrants, Neoliberal Geographies and Spatial Frontiers of ‘the Political’,” Review of International Studies, 33(4): 655–674. Newman, D. (2006), “Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue,” European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2): 171–186. O’Brien, Thomas F. (1996), The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Portes, Alejandro, Christina Escobar, and Alexandria Walton Radford. (2004), “Immigrant Transnational Organizations and Development: A Comparative Study,” in Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (Dis)order, edited by Eliezer Ben Rafael and Yitzak Sternberg, 559–594. Leiden: Brill. Reséndez, Andrés. (2005), Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roniger, Luis. (2011a), “Connected Histories, Power and Meaning: Transnational Forces in the Construction of Collective Identities,” Journal of Classical Sociology, 11(3): 251–268. Roniger, Luis. (2011b), Transnational Politics in Central America. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Smith, Jeremy C. A. (2017), Debating Civilisations: Interrogating Civilisational Analysis in a Global Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stephenson, Marcus L. (2002), “Travelling to the Ancestral Homelands: The Aspirations and Experiences of a UK Caribbean Community,” Current Issues in Tourism, 5(5): 378–425.

Part V

Jóhann P. Árnason’s Replies

15 Replies to criticisms and suggestions Jóhann P. Árnason

Questions of theory and methodology Suzi Adams deals more directly with the genealogy of my work than any other contributor to this volume, and must therefore be answered at somewhat greater length. Applying the method of hermeneutical reconstruction, as she has done in her work on Castoriadis and other thinkers, she convincingly identifies some loose ends and untravelled paths. The text raises two key questions, both related to the interpretation of Castoriadis’s work and the task of taking his reflections further. As will be seen, her discussion also leaves the reader with some loose ends; but both of us can invoke the general situation of social theory, still faced – to use Castoriadis’ expression – with crossroads in the labyrinth. The first question has to do with the being of the political. Here I must begin with some corrective remarks, more on matters of relative emphasis than of principle. I have never disputed (in fact, I do not see how it could be disputed) that politics is entangled with the political. On the other hand, it is true that the dimensions of this entanglement must appear in a different light when going beyond what I have so far written on the subject; that aspect of the issue will be considered below. It is also true that I stress the internal pluralism of the social-historical, and hence the specific features that demarcate the political sphere from other domains, more strongly than Castoriadis did. The French tradition to which I relate most directly – Castoriadis, Lefort, Gauchet – tends to emphasize the uniquely totalizing character of the political; my approach differs from them in that it allows for totalizing perspectives and projects grounded in multiple spheres, more specifically in the three socio-cultural “orders of life”, to use Weber’s term: the economic, political, and cultural domains. Moreover, totalizing logics grounded in different domains can intertwine. The religio-political nexus is a historically crucial combination of cultural and political attempts to impose unity on the differentiated social-historical field. A totalizing economic dynamic is commonly attributed to modern capitalism, but it has a longer history. The emphasis on networks of exchange in recent scholarship on global history underlines that point, although the connections in question were for a long time less important to the constitution of human societies than was the religio-political nexus. DOI: 10.4324/9781003275046-20

232  Jóhann P. Árnason That brings me to the question of the distinction between politics and the political, important but irritatingly ambiguous and variously understood by different authors. It should not be identified with the difference between the political sphere as a particular domain and its totalizing impact. Politics can take a totalizing turn, even become what some authors have called “absolute politics”, with claims to provide an exclusive or overriding meaning to human life, and/or transform it in a radical way. The political involves specific structural features of the political sphere as well as broader interconnections. Loosely speaking, the political is about preconditions, underlying meanings (in particular the significations inherent in political culture) and extended contexts (not least geopolitical ones); politics is about struggles for power, projects of change, and visions of an alternative order. Whatever we make of politics, it has something essential to do with action, and that leads on to Suzi’s second question: what can we make of Castoriadis’s suggestive but frustratingly brief remarks on “doing”, as le faire is rendered in English? It makes sense to link this issue to the history of neo-Marxist attempts to conceptualize action in a less reductionistic way than orthodox Marxism had allowed for. The concept of praxis was most central to these arguments, and Suzi notes my inconclusive variations on that theme. I am now disinclined to continue in the same vein; the concept of praxis seems too closely linked to visions of history as human self-realization. In a sense, this is the same reservation that I had about Kosík’s work in the 1960s, but with much more fundamental implications; it now reflects a different understanding of history, due to engagement with themes not yet properly grasped in the 1960s: the cultural worlds of different civilizations, the constellations and metamorphoses of power (a topic markedly underdeveloped in the neo-Marxist philosophies of praxis), the plurality of socio-cultural spheres, the dynamics of successive and divergent globalizing processes. It may be useful to link the question of le faire to the point that Hans Joas makes in his book on the creativity of action, about theories of societal constitution – an approach still very much in the making (Giddens’ theory of structuration was a gesture in the same direction, but did not really get off the ground). The idea is that we need a theory that does justice to action as well as its generation of and involvement in patterns and processes, irreducible to a logic of action or interaction. But after raising this very important issue, Joas focused on other related problems (the genealogy of values and the power of the sacred) and has not come back to the discussion in his book on creativity. One way of reactivating the question (in my view a rather promising one) would be to link up with the recent debate on Max Weber’s sociology, sparked by the publication of his collected works. The traditional idea of Weber as a “methodological individualist” has been shown to be inadequate; various commentators (not least Stefan Breuer) have noted that Weber’s substantive analyses cannot be understood without allowing for the level of emergent orders. But when it comes to the elaboration of basic concepts, Weber retreats to a more restrictive position and begins with a simplified concept of action. We can assume that the retreat was meant to be provisional,

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  233 in line with Weber’s strategy of proceeding on several fronts, with temporary limitations of field and focus; as fate would have it, however, the move toward a more complex and integrated paradigm was never made. I think that further critical reading of Weber would help to clarify the relationship between action and its multiple contexts; and this use of a classic source can throw light on the different but not unrelated questions arising when we read Castoriadis’´ sketchy remarks on le faire in light of his much more developed ontology of the social-historical. If Castoriadis´ explicit reflections on doing cannot take us far, there is another approach to be tried: an exploration of underlying links to other, more prominent or at least more easily elucidable themes. Suzi considers two moves of this kind, but both of them raise complex questions, going beyond what can be clarified here. One of them concerns the relationship between doing and instituting. For Castoriadis, the difference and the interaction between instituting and instituted society belongs, in the first instance, to the trans-subjective dimension of society, which is – as he convincingly shows – not reducible to intersubjectivity. It is not clear to me that a concept of trans-subjective action would be meaningful; it seems more promising to allow for a historically changing part of collective action in instituting processes. That point of view would, of course, entail a closer look at the interrelations of actions and processes. Castoriadis did not discuss this question at any length; in his main work, it is overshadowed by the unilateral emphasis on an ontology of social-historical creativity. Some partial or implicit references to processes and movements involved in them may be found in his analyses of Ancient Greece. The history of the Greek city-states certainly contains cases and episodes inviting that kind of treatment; the reform of Athenian society at the end of the sixth century BCE, commonly associated with the name of Cleisthenes, is very difficult to reconstruct in detail, but seems to have involved a powerful combination of intellectual elaboration, popular activism and charismatic leadership. The other question has to do with ways of relating to the world, already marked out at the elementary level of doing. Suzi distinguishes two aspects, world formation and world opening, akin to what other authors have called worldmaking and world disclosure, but with some distinctive implications. She proposes to link this problematic to the debate on politics and the political, evidently with a stronger emphasis on politics and thus from a viewpoint closer to Castoriadis than to Lefort or Gauchet. The general idea is a sound one, but the relative weight of politics and the political may vary from one historical case to another. If we take the example of the Greek polis, the developmental pattern seems to involve both sides. A peculiarly self-limiting process of state formation gave rise to a strong but also problematic conception of the political as a space for dispute between alternatives and therefore also as a background to the “unending interrogation” stressed by Castoriadis; this was obviously a case of world opening primarily sustained by a political transformation. The history of the Roman empire reveals a very different dynamic: world opening through conquest. Ongoing expansion brought the

234  Jóhann P. Árnason Romans into direct contact with the Greek world, and thus with vastly broader cultural horizons. As a result, the Romans did not simply go Greek, as has sometimes been claimed; rather, the encounter led to the formation of the most fundamentally bi-civilizational empire in history, and that became in due course an arena for the spread of Christianity, which had to undergo the twin – not ipso facto congruent – processes of Hellenization and Romanization. Finally, we may consider the world-opening impact of modern revolutionary imaginaries and practices as a third example, and there it is primarily the enlarged and ideologically transfigured scope of politics that appears as the key factor. A few words should be added on the being of the question, which Suzi discusses with reference to Castoriadis and Patočka – hellenocentric thinkers, both of them, though not quite in the same sense. Patočka’s “emergence of problematicity” is obviously akin to Castoriadis’s “endless interrogation”, but the former seems to place a stronger emphasis on the experiential aspect and the speculative reach of the cultural attitude (or collective mindset) in question, whereas the latter is more focused on social context and creation. But whichever approach we prefer, the culture of questioning is a part of social-historical being, and more particularly of its twofold political dimension. In that regard, I am inclined to stress the primacy of the political, more than Suzi does. It is the underlying, culturally grounded and institutionally embedded conception of the political that makes both the exercise of philosophical reflection and the pursuit of politics possible. The two did not develop in tandem; important philosophical innovations appeared in places that had no corresponding political record, and although there was a certain culmination of both aspects in fifth- and fourth-century Athens, it took a paradoxical turn: Athens became the most radical democracy among the poleis, but its most influential philosophers were highly critical of that condition. Jiří Šubrt’s contribution raises a large number of conceptual questions, in a somewhat freely associative fashion; here I cannot engage with all of them, but will pick out those that seem to me most pertinent, and explore connections between them. It seems appropriate to begin with the question of historical sociology as one of the contending paradigms within the social sciences. Its growing output and influence in the later decades of the twentieth century was accompanied by controversies about its self-understanding and its proper place in the broader setting of social inquiry. Those who saw it only as another branch of an established science, applying to the past much the same set of methods that mainstream sociology had tested on the present, were at odds with advocates of more ambitious hopes to achieve a historical turn in sociological thought. Šubrt belongs to the second camp, and so do I; the dispute is still very much alive, and some of those who agree with us have warned against what they call the “domestication of historical sociology” through work of the former kind. The obvious way to counter that trend is to defend and articulate the paradigm status of historical sociology.

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  235 Šubrt’s approach to that task is to counterpose the historical-sociological perspective to constructivism, which he sees as the most dominant mainstream mode of theorizing. This line of argument is convincing, but calls for some qualifications. It is worth underlining more strongly that constructivism has taken two very different forms. One variant stresses the primacy of individual actions and meanings, regarded as building blocks of social reality; the other theorizes construction as the modus operandi of social systems. The much-read Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann is a classic formulation of the first version, and Niklas Luhmann’s work is the uncontested model of the second. Some of Šubrt’s formulations suggest (although he does not say it in so many words) that he wants to include Habermas’s theory of communicative action among the constructivist options; that seems justified if we take the work in question to be arguing that social relations, including the mechanisms of coordination that can acquire a logic of their own, are created and transformed through communicative activity. These protean manifestations of constructivism raise doubts about its claims to provide a clear-cut key to understanding the social world. On the other hand, it is hard to deny that it has a case, or a grain of truth, inasmuch as it insists on the non-givenness of social phenomena; we might, in other words, say that it represents an incipient insight into the historical character of the social world, and thus a point to be taken up and developed by historical sociology. This is the reason why Shmuel Eisenstadt, whose overall work will certainly never be characterized as a constructivist project, occasionally used a language akin to constructivist terms when he wanted to emphasize the non-natural status of the whole domain of sociological inquiry (this was part of his case against the functionalist approach that had wanted to subsume human societies under a given framework for the analysis of living systems). But the problem with full-fledged constructivisms is the assumption of a final constructing instance, be it human or systemic. The alternative offered by historical sociology is the idea of a field in process (not to be mistaken for the erstwhile “process without a subject”, of Althusserian fame; there are subjects, but they are always already entangled in processes). I have no disagreement with Šubrt’s emphasis on social processes. But some additional remarks on the ramifications of that category may be useful. At least three analytical levels should be distinguished. The most elementary one has to do with the ultimate processuality of social reality, i.e. its temporality and its eventful character. A second level concerns the processual constitution of key frameworks and institutions. Norbert Elias’s work on state formation was not only meant to trace a genesis, but also to theorize the state as a process, rather than a stable structure; the same applies, by implication, to other historical formations, from economic regimes to the cultural patterns of civilizations. Adaptation to a processual view is particularly important for the last-named theme, if it is to become as central to social theory as it deserves. Finally, there is the problematic of long-term processes, including the added level of complexity that appears when we take the intertwining of multiple such processes into account. The unfolding of a self-contained

236  Jóhann P. Árnason processual dynamic, overriding intentions and projects, is not the only relevant aspect to be noted. Long-term processes, seen as separate or in conjunction, are also conducive to changing perspectives for intervention, and to crossroads of alternatives. The implications of these qualifying remarks will become clearer if we connect back to basic issues in the articulation of social theory. The attempts so far made to set the course for a theory of societal constitution, as defined above in the comments on Suzi Adams’s chapter, have tended to place a one-sided emphasis on structure as a counterpole to action (Giddens’s outline of structuration theory is a case in point; it hints at the processuality of structures, but does not confront the question of the structuredness of processes, and its limits). The explicit addition of processes to the picture is both a reminder of limits to the reach of intentional action and an extension of the conceptual space within which the problem of constitution must be tackled. One more point may be added. Theories of action, including those that minimize its impact, have to deal with the question of meaning; a processual perspective throws light on ways in which implicit meanings can be brought to the fore through the course of events, as well as on the role that elaborations of meaning can play in the reorientation of processes. These reflections should clarify the context for responding to Šubrt’s further suggestions for debate; but they will have to be taken up on another occasion. Said Arjomand and I share a strong commitment to civilizational analysis, with some differences in emphasis and terminology. His proposal to bring civilizations in as an important example of levels and formations often described as “glocal” is a good starting-point; the civilizational level is a crucial link between global history and more localized developments. But this also means that we have to examine its changing interconnections with other such intermediate formations. Marshall Hodgson, whose work has been a major source of inspiration for both Arjomand and myself, noted the historical importance of world religions and dominant cultural languages (Hodgson 1993); there are good reasons to add regions and empires. The last-named theme is particularly prominent in contemporary debates, but all of them are relevant to the question of civilizational impact on and adaptation to other large-scale and long-term units of the social-historical world. The main focus of Arjomand’s chapter is on what he calls world regions. I take the reference to “world” to have a double meaning: the formations in question constitute cultural worlds in the sense that they achieve closure of meaning to a relatively high degree, and at the same time, they relate to fields and forces beyond their borders in a way that makes them relevant to global history. To put it another way, they seem characterized by a paradoxical combination of self-contained identity and high-level connectivity. To quote Arjomand’s own terms, they are sites of intra-civilizational as well as intercivilizational encounters. For him, India is a paradigmatic example of this pattern. The long and shifting coexistence of Buddhism and Hinduism would then appear as an intracivilizational encounter, the Islamic presence in Indian

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  237 history as an intercivilizational one. In view of this very complex constellation, it is tempting to opt for a narrower definition of a world region than the one used by Arjomand, and to compare that category to cases that might be described as crossroads regions. The contrasts between India and Central Asia would seem illustrative of that distinction. The Indian experience is a key piece of context for another part of Arjomand’s argument. He signals agreement with Richard Eaton’s account of a Persianate period in Indian history (Eaton 2020; this author dates the “Persianate age” from ca. 1000 to 1765). That record links India with a development beginning earlier and unfolding in a larger area of the Islamic world: the emergence of a Persianate cultural domain. My understanding is that Arjomand does not disagree with Hodgson’s conception of Islamicate civilization, reconfirmed by Michael Cook’s description of Islam as the only world religion that is also a civilization (Cook 2015: 20); consequently, the Persianate sphere cannot be seen as a separate civilization, but it is more than a case of linguistic differentiation. The revival of the Persian language is accompanied by reactivated traditions of kingship, including a specific ethics of justice, and by distinctive versions of religious life, associated with Sufism and culminating in the adoption of Shi´ism as the official religion of the Safavid empire. With these features in mind, it seems appropriate to speak of a civilizational variant. This invites some comparative reflections. Civilizational languages, used across cultural borders and endowed with superior or even sacred status, are a world-historical phenomenon and enter into varying combinations with other formative factors. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and classical Chinese are the other examples that come to mind (Arjomand follows Eaton in regarding the interaction between the Persianate imprint and the Sanskrit “cosmopolis”, so labelled by Sheldon Pollock, as the key to India’s civilizational constellation). But there are a few interesting differences to be noted. In some cases, the civilizational language is – sooner or later – confined to a more limited role than it had at first claimed, and local languages become vehicles of cultural creation, with consequences that can extend into the political sphere; Pollock calls this “vernacularization” and has compared the Indian and the medieval Western Christian patterns. Another variant is the East Asian one, where a certain vernacularization occurred soon after the entry of Korea and Japan into the Chinese civilizational orbit, but the civilizational language retained its primacy by imposing its writing system on languages to which it was ill suited. The rise of Persian as another civilizational language alongside Arabic can hardly be described as a case of vernacularization, because of the wide reach of the newcomer; if we look for another case of two coexisting civilizational languages, the shared dominant position of Greek and Latin in the Roman empire suggests itself. But in that case, Greek did not have to be revived; its unique status predated the empire and the civilizational ascendancy of Latin. Vernacularization was markedly absent; in fact, what happened was a mass extinction of local languages. A further noteworthy aspect was that both dominant languages succeeded – Greek first, then Latin – in becoming sacred languages of a new religion.

238  Jóhann P. Árnason Contrary to Arjomand’s use of “alternative modernities” as a synonym for “multiple modernities”, I prefer to reserve the former term for what I have elsewhere called “counter-paradigms of modernity”, versions of modern civilization that took shape as challenges to a dominant model, or to a cluster of variants perceived as an order to be contested (“the West”, to mention the obvious example); and for the notion of an alternative to be appropriate, the challenge must involve some kind of global ambition or claim to historical superiority. In this sense, alternative modernities are, first and foremost, a twentieth-century phenomenon, and the relevant cases are Communism and Fascism. Whether the most radical phase of Japanese ultranationalism should be included in the latter category has been a matter of controversy, but the most recent scholarly discussion of the subject (Hedinger 2021) makes a strong case for describing imperial Japan from the 1930s onwards as an integral part of a global Fascist challenge. As for possible later aspirants to alternative modernity, the Islamic version seems – judging from the present state of things – to have failed; the only successful revolution in that name was too closely identified with a minoritarian branch of Islam to gain the allegiance of other Muslims, let alone a more global support. Whether China’s composite economic and political regime can plausibly claim to embody an alternative modernity is best treated as an open question.

Rethinking the concept of modernity/ies through the lens of civilizational analysis The comments and criticisms put forward by Peter Wagner and Wolfgang Knöbl reflect a more long-standing, sustained and intensive exchange of views than those of other contributors, and my reply is only an attempt to take that debate one step further. Peter’s text is first in line; rather than following the progress of his argument in detail, I will outline a set of conceptual clarifications that should go some way to meeting his concerns, and then briefly touch upon a few historical issues. I admit that in my work there has been some hesitation between “non-normative” and “meta-normative” as ways of describing the fundamental irreducibility of the modern condition to a normative project or a progressive logic of history. The normative conception of modernity is in my opinion more alive – not more tenable - than Peter suggests, but I would not agree that “meta-normative” is always a better expression of critical distance from it than “non-normative.” The former term does help to grasp the connection between underlying patterns and the normative claims and visions through which they become historically active, but it nevertheless indicates a closer connection to normative claims than “non-normative”; the latter term may be more appropriate when we are dealing with modern transformations that have little to do with any normative inputs or expectations. Peter and I share a strong connection to Castoriadis, but also the conviction that his account of core modern significations must be modified in major ways; however, my proposed revision differs from Peter’s in important respects.

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  239 My starting-point is that the meaning of autonomy must be clarified in terms of imaginary significations, not just as a matter of relating to them in a specific and historically rare way; and if we take that view, the next step is to look at the historical contexts where the visions of autonomy are articulated and become active. In the case of the emerging and unfolding modern world, this means taking into account the whole spectrum of human self-affirmation, from visions of domination over nature to imaginings of radical social transformation and freely developing individuals. This implies a relativization of the contrast between autonomy and mastery, prominent in Castoriadis’s work (on this point, Peter and I are in agreement); mastery over nature has not only been seen as a precondition for social emancipation, but also as an exemplification of the rationality needed to achieve the latter; the clarification of differences between controlling nature and constituting society is an ongoing long-term task, and the understanding of self-defeating repercussions on the environmental level is a recent turn. Another twist to this problematic is the view taken in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, where domination over nature and within society (the latter assumed to have survived and swallowed revolutionary change) are fused into one paradoxical and self-perpetuating continuum of self-inflicted oppression. But it is also possible to posit a distinction between autonomy and its hubristic derailments (that is the line I took in The Labyrinth of Modernity); this is, admittedly, a difficult rule to apply, but the critique of hubris can be conceived as a permanent effort, and there are undeniable examples of hubristic projects in modern history. This perspective on the modern constellation may shift the focus of comparison with ancient Greek precedents. In the context of a debate on ideas of progress in classical antiquity, Christian Meier argued that the Greeks developed what he called a Könnensbewusstsein, a consciousness of ability to act, change and create. Although Meier did not particularly emphasize that point, this mentality could slide into hubristic excess, from the tyrants (some of whom were, however, more prudent than others) to Athenian power politics. This twist to the question of Greek autonomy does not in any way devalue Castoriadis’s analyses of connections between politics and philosophy (in fact, his view of democracy as a tragic regime is a reminder of dangers and temptations inherent in autonomy), but it suggests a broader horizon. I am untroubled by the suggestion that there are conservative undertones in my theorizing. Some time in the 1970s, Leszek Kolakowski wrote an essay called “How to be a conservative liberal socialist”; his thesis was that it is possible to imagine a coherent position drawing – in selective ways – on the three traditions mentioned in the title. The argument can be taken seriously without accepting the particular combination that Kolakowski had in mind; if we look for examples of thinkers fitting the general description, Emile Durkheim and Jan Patočka may be the first who come to mind. Affinities and divergences between Wagner’s position and mine may be summed up in a few points; they all require more extensive discussion than can be attempted here, but I will at least indicate some reasons for taking the line I do. We both reject the idea of modernity as a project, and although the

240  Jóhann P. Árnason currently most influential version of critical theory, Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, cannot be reduced to that view, we agree that it – in Peter’s words – “underestimates the ambivalences at the core of modernity”. Peter is more confident about conceptual mapping of the modern socio-cultural field than I am, but he proposes to do that by “connecting experiences of modernity across historical time”, rather than in terms of modernization theory or a general theory of evolution. I share his opposition to the latter approach; but my scepticism about systematic conceptualization – or, in other words, my more radical historicism – has to do with multiple sources of uncertainty. They include human creativity (that term is here, as in Castoriadis’s work, used in a value-neutral sense) as well as the vast domain of unintentional consequences; we must also reckon with the influence of diverse historical legacies and changing global constellations. In short, the field in question is so open to differentiating and transformative forces that theorizing should stay in step with history and cannot aim at any kind of closure. A further divergence concerns the impact of normative projects on the historical destinies of modernity, which Wagner clearly rates more highly than I am inclined to do. I think this is not unrelated to the questions of wealth and power as components of the field in which the imaginary signification of autonomy becomes operative. These interconnected spheres and their institutional forms are particularly conducive to processes that disrupt and transcend normative projects; Wagner’s perspective, as outlined in his contribution, is not particularly attuned to that problematic. A more specific concern is the massive discrepancy between the normative aspirations of major modern revolutions and their actual results. The reasons for a sceptical view of the modern balance between achievements and predicaments come to a head when we consider the civilizational crisis that now seems imminent. A multi-secular pattern of growth has set humanity on a collision course with nature, at a point where social and political capacities for correction seem very limited. The scientific revolution, indisputably central to the modern unfolding of autonomy, has not been an unmixed blessing; it has, in particular, enabled the invention of weapons so destructive that they threaten the very survival of humankind. Attempts to integrate them into military planning have not been abandoned, and further proliferation is not unlikely. Both the ecological and the military threat are aggravated by enduring geopolitical circumstances. The legacy of the twentieth-century “age of extremes” has emerged ever more clearly in the first decades of the twenty-first century: interstate competition and imperial rivalries overshadow both the supposedly irresistible globalizing dynamic and the even more chimerical vision of a road from democracy to cosmopolitanism. On top of all that, the battered but still disabling remnants of the ideological delusions that took hold between 1989 and 2008 – the world governed by market forces, the society of sovereign and unrestrictedly self-defining individuals, and a global “post-national” constellation – obstruct both understanding and practical grasp of the crisis dynamics. Neither Wagner nor I will accept the idea of a sustained normative advance towards greater individualization.

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  241 Wolfgang Knöbl’s chapter calls for a rather different kind of response. Here the discussion must start with an acknowledgement of the lessons he drives home, more forcefully – to the best of my knowledge – than any historical sociologist has done before. In the first place, the connection he makes between the state and the social imaginary breaks new ground; reminders of the cultural factors involved in state formation have been put forward before, but the focus on ways of imagining the state takes that line of argument one step further. And as Wolfgang shows, these pathways of the imagination differ from one cultural tradition to another, within and beyond Europe; they lead to varying visions of statehood, which in turn have practical consequences. A second theme is the high level of contingency in the historical development of state institutions, and the resultant divergence of long-term paths. Finally, Knöbl stresses the late appearance of key institutions and policies, often taken for granted by contemporary theorists of the state. Norbert Elias criticized conceptions of the state as a stable given and argued for a processual approach; the implication of Knöbl’s critique – although Elias is not explicitly mentioned – is that a processual view still needs to guard against projections of present achievements into past beginnings; Elias´ work is not entirely immune to such temptations. The taking on board of these critical reflections may help to articulate a response to Knöbl’s comments on the concept of modernity and its puzzling history. As I see it, his underlying concern is that those who equate modernity with a historical epoch of several centuries, characterized by some kind of enduring or unfolding pattern, might be making a mistake analogous to the illusion of state continuity. To clarify that issue, I will first do a brief excursion into conceptual history, with a focus somewhat different from Knöbl’s, and then try to link the results to the idea of modernity as a civilization. It is generally agreed that when the sociological classics used the adjective “modern”, they were thinking of phenomena characteristic of their time and experienced as causes or symptoms of a radical rupture with older traditions and institutions. These thinkers never used the substantive “modernity.” There is, however, a third term, in a sense intermediate between the two just mentioned: “modernization.” Its origins have been debated, and Wolfgang Knöbl has written one of the most exhaustive texts on that topic. Here I would like to single out an important but little noticed case. In his 1917 article series on parliament and government in a reformed Germany, Max Weber refers to the combined and convergent dynamics of capitalism and bureaucracy as “modernization” (Modernisierung); he also uses the term “progress” (Fortschritt), but consistently in quotation marks (Weber 1988: this text has generally been classified among Weber’s political writings, and hence neglected by those primarily interested in his sociological theories and analyses, but although he never wavered from the view that political positions could not be deduced from scientific arguments, this is where he came closest to associating theory and politics). The concept of modernity did not come into the picture until much later, and when it became widely used, different reasons were at work on opposite sides of the intellectual spectrum. For those

242  Jóhann P. Árnason who came from Marxist or neo-Marxist backgrounds, the shift to modernity as a frame of reference was a way of overcoming the reduction to capitalist development that had been a persistent feature of Marxist approaches (this was, by the way, the road I took between the neo-Marxism of Zwischen Natur und Gesellschaft, published in 1976, and the revised framework of Praxis und Interpretation, published in 1988, where the focus on modernity becomes explicit). On the other side, the advocates of modernization theory could, as the picture of modernizing change became more complex, raise the question of an overall meaning, and even consider the further possibility of distinguishing between normal and anomalous versions. Parsons reconstructed a “main pattern”, most adequately realized in the United States, but allowed for markedly atypical cases, such as Japan and the Soviet Union; they were in his view structurally unbalanced and therefore ultimately bound to converge with the mainstream. This qualified admission of diversity does not go far enough to engage with the idea of “multiple modernities”, but it may be suggested that the turn to modernity as a framing category entails an opening to history and consequently paves the way for a theorizing of plural paths and patterns, in the spirit of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s work. If we take this view of the conceptual history at issue, a case can be made for a certain logical sequence. The reflection on modernity as an epoch and an order begins – after a long initial phase of historical experience – with a term meant to grasp the fact and the meaning of a rupture; it continues with a concept that serves to articulate the rupture as a process; and the final step is an interpretive framework that aims to define (and differentiate) a complex pattern unfolding through multiple processes. If we understand modernity as a civilization, this development invites comparison with self-reflective trajectories of other civilizations. This is obviously not the place for a detailed exercise of that kind, but to briefly illustrate what I have in mind, we might think of stages in the self-reflection of ancient Greek civilization (or, to put it another way, the civilization of the polis), culminating in the interconnected, divergent and mutually illuminating Platonic and Aristotelian approaches. Another case in point would be the self-interpretation of Chinese civilization in successive phases. Kurt Mertel sets out to explore the affinities between civilizational analysis and an evolving tradition which he identifies as “left-Heideggerianism” and links – more specifically – to recent variations on the distinction between politics and the political. This is a complex and difficult terrain, and here I can do no more than a brief reconnaissance from the civilizational side. But to stake out a provisional common ground, it seems best to begin with some comments on the two levels of political life. The concept of the political has a history of controversies and revisions, magnified when the distinction from politics came to be seen as an essential aspect. Carl Schmitt’s pioneering but enduringly problematic attempt to theorize the political was primarily prompted by a need to distinguish a foundational dimension from the mutating modern state, which had turned out to be a transient embodiment of the political. A separate and secondary notion of

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  243 politics only enters the picture to the extent that Schmitt wants to demarcate – and de-value – the kind of political activity that unquestioningly conforms to the framework of an existing state. The shift from a distinction between the political and the state to a distinction between the political and politics is mainly a result of French debates (Moyn 2016 is a useful survey of this phase, but leaves a bit to be desired; for one thing, Castoriadis is not mentioned). The attractivity of the distinction owes something to the analogy with Heidegger’s dichotomy of the ontic and the ontological (not a connection that Schmitt would have welcomed). But it is very difficult to find a common denominator for the proposed definitions of the political. They include references to the very constitution of society as well as to a framework for articulating social division in the most general sense; in other cases, the emphasis is on elementary structures of power, as distinct from politics in the sense of confrontation between alternatives; finally, a more restricted focus on modern conditions highlights the structures of the nation-state and its multi-faceted relations with a larger state system. Rather than attempting an inventory of these variations, I will briefly sketch a possible civilizational approach to the issue. The civilizational dimension of human societies, as defined by S.N. Eisenstadt, consists in the intertwining of world-making cultural articulations with institutional patterns. Within this overall framework for the constitution of societies, a particular role must, as I have argued elsewhere (Árnason 2014a), be ascribed to the religio-political nexus. A close interconnection of religious and political components, on the levels of ideas and institutions, has been a recurrent but highly mutable feature of historical societies. If the concept of meta-institution is to be applied, this is its proper object. But if the basic distinction between the sacred and the profane is retained as a defining characteristic of religion (compatible with different intermediate level in different cultures), there is always a certain latitude for profane aspects of the political, in contrast to its sacral moorings. This elementary difference can become the starting-point for more far-reaching autonomization; but such processes are of multiple kinds. The long-term dynamics of state formation result in transformations of the political sphere, with ramifications throughout other domains of social life. A different matter is the formation of cultural orientations that prioritize the political as a key field of human activity. In this sense, Christian Meier has written about the emergence of the political in Ancient Greece (Meier 1983). Modern revolutions add yet another figure of the political, perceived as a realm of future transformations upgrading the human condition. The most extreme expression of that vision was a new and at first sight upended version of the religio-political nexus: ideologies best described as secular religions opposed political projects to traditional religious doctrines, but in so doing, they adapted to religious models of thought and institutional practice. In short, the distinction between politics and the political has been understood in too many different ways to be recapitulated here; but a civilizational perspective seems capable of integrating a range of historically effective meanings attributed to this categorial division. As for the interpretations

244  Jóhann P. Árnason preferred in recent writings by anglophone authors (some of whom are cited in Mertel’s paper), it is tempting to read their reflections on the political – seen as a site of conflict and an opening to change – in light of recent shifts in the radical imaginary: a more adequate grasp of the political is proposed as a substitute for lost expectations of revolution. Mertel’s own project goes further than that. As I understand, he would like to synthesize three sources. The tradition of Heideggerian Marxism, drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein to sharpen Marxian ideas of self-realization and disalienation, is to be combined with a more positive reading of Heidegger’s views on the social realm as an existential dimension (much less appreciated by the Marxists who took notice of his work); to this is to be added an ecological perspective, responding to the present crisis of societies committed to unrestrained growth. This is a very ambitious programme, and I confess to not being very optimistic about the political hopes which it is obviously meant to inspire. On the other hand, and to conclude, I am not at all averse to the idea of re-reading Heidegger in a more systematic way, now that virtually his whole work has become available (and without undue emphasis on the Black Notebooks). There is no doubt that the phenomenological and hermeneutical underpinnings of civilizational analysis can benefit from that.

Modernity in the plural: civilizational analysis and the Axial Age debate I find much to agree with in Hans Schelkshorn’s paper. He rightly insists that the revived discussion about the Axial Age is linked to the re-theorizing of modernity, but not in the way that references to axial sources would prefigure specific interpretations of the modern world. Rather, the efforts to connect these two key problematics of historical sociology have opened up a space for debates and alternative views on both sides. The axial genealogy of modernity has sometimes been taken to imply a promise given and renewed, a modern reactivation and clarification of visions first – and with inevitable ambiguity – articulated in axial traditions. This results in a normative conception of modernity as a project, which I reject for the same reasons as Schelkshorn does: it involves an arbitrary exclusion of prominent and momentous forces in modern history. Another approach stresses the supposedly parallel features of axial and modern transformations; this is not necessarily linked to normative claims, but even so, the idea of modernity as a second Axial Age does not stand up to closer examination; the spectrum of modern cultures and societies, as well as their interrelations, is very different from the picture emerging in scholarship on the Axial Age. To mention only the most important contrasts, the globalizing dynamics of the modern world go very far beyond anything that happened in the Axial Age; and there is no axial parallel to the most expansive version of modernity, originating in Europe but resulting in a great variety of combinations with the legacies and indigenous modernizing trends of other traditions. I would, however, enter a major qualification to the claim that Eisenstadt and I have aligned ourselves with the defenders of the Enlightenment. Our

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  245 understandings of autonomy as the core cultural orientation of modernity differ on many points, but what we have in common is the emphasis on the ambiguities and divergent interpretations of autonomy, resulting in a pattern far too complex for identification with the Enlightenment. The inclusion of Romanticism is an important part of that picture. Far from equating modernity with the Enlightenment, I agree with Schelkshorn’s rejection of this thesis, and would even add something to his arguments against it. He rightly observes that it “blends out possible processes of enlightenment in earlier epochs of humanity, both within and outside of Europe”. Some historians of classical antiquity have described the sophist movement as the Greek enlightenment; and there are episodes in Chinese intellectual history that would deserve a similar label. Schelkshorn also notes the significant differentiations within the Enlightenment, most thoroughly analyzed by Jonathan Israel; a blanket identification with modernity obscures the importance of these divergences. What I would add is a stronger emphasis on early beginnings of modernity. If we follow Blumenberg (as I think we should), the decisive departure from the Christian world-view came long before the geological extension of the horizon of the past. The modern notion of progress goes back to early stages of the scientific revolution. It is true that Blumenberg is not explicitly concerned with modernity; but the German term Neuzeit, which he uses, is commonly taken to refer to an epoch beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that is where I would place the beginnings of early modernity, as distinct from the more advanced phase that takes off in the eighteenth century. Schelkshorn’s idea of Entgrenzung, “de-limitation”, is easily compatible with the approaches to modernity explored in my work. His argument is that core ideas of modern civilization (I prefer that term to “societal systems”) originated in “epochal de-limitations from the antique-medieval worldview”. The examples range from the idea of an infinite universe and the more tangible enlargement of the oikumene through transoceanic expansion to Bacon’s “vision of the unlimited production of new things.” There is still much work to be done on the conceptual history of the transition to modernity, and my impression is that this focus on de-limitation can be a useful complement to Blumenberg’s paradigm of Umbesetzung, centred on the kind of change that happens when a new idea prevails but has to enter into the context associated with an old one and respond to some of the demands inherent in that position. I have some problems with the description of multiple modernities, in the sense shared by Eisenstadt and myself, as a “middle path between the extremes of modernization theories and Huntington’s clash of civilizations.” That could only be the case if the idea of multiple modernities were situated within the same universe of discourse as the two alternatives (they are not wholly separate paradigms; Huntington’s reservations about modernization theory have to do with its reach rather than its content; he subordinates modernizing processes to the permanence of the “ultimate tribes.”) As Schelkshorn notes later in the text, the idea of multiple modernities, properly understood,

246  Jóhann P. Árnason presupposes the interpretation of modernity as a new type of civilization; and that constitutes a more radical disagreement with both Huntington and the theorists of modernization than those two sides have with each other. A brief discussion of Hans-Herbert Kögler’s text should also begin on the note of fundamental consensus. His analysis of the Axial Age, its interpretations and their ongoing disputes is too rich and complex for a detailed answer to be possible here, but I can at least indicate the main areas of agreement as well as the points where differences begin. First and foremost, I agree on the primacy of interpretive frameworks; my reflections on the Axial Age have also emphasized the hermeneutical dimension, defined by world orientations. This implies a constitutive and continuing involvement in traditions, and I would add that the concept of social imaginaries is needed to grasp the horizons of meaning that enable both new departures and divergent interpretations. Traditional backgrounds and resources are already important for the breaks taken to mark the beginning of axial reorientations. Although Castoriadis did not work with the concept of the Axial Age, his analysis of the Greek mythical imaginary and its transformations by philosophical thought is relevant to this question; limited sources make it more difficult to trace such affiliations in the other axial cases, although some interesting connections have been revealed by work on ancient Chinese philosophy. The many-sided dynamic of traditions becomes more visible at the following stage. Axial innovations become founding patterns of meaning for new traditions; the development of the latter, combined with the increased availability of writing as a cultural technology, leads – as Kögler emphasizes – to the formation of paradigms and orthodoxies; but the surplus of meaning inherent in the broader social imaginaries, combined with the reflexive capacities strengthened by axial transformations, ensured the possibility of dissent. To conclude this part of the reply, I should signal my emphatic agreement with the following statement: “Only if the dark side of the Axial Age is included may we hope for a redemptive appropriation of its full potential.” Kögler’s own account of the dark side focuses on the dogmatic and authoritarian turns that can result from the submission to sacred or canonical texts; but the picture can be broadened, and visions of power are an important part to add. They range from the Greek tyrants to the unhinged lust for conquest personified by Alexander, to the imperial ambitions of his successors, and – last but not least – to the mobilizing techniques of the “warring states” in China. If Eisenstadt can be credited with translating the idea of the Axial Age into the language of historical sociology, it must be admitted that his interpretation sidelined some of the philosophical problems posed by Jaspers. Habermas’s history of philosophy is the most ambitious attempt to reinstate that aspect of the axial legacy. Here I cannot do justice to Kögler’s very detailed discussion of this problematic, but one fundamental issue should be briefly noted. Habermas’s universal pragmatics, more precisely his version of speech act theory, constitutes a set of presuppositions for both the theory of modernity and the retrospective account of axial world-views. In the former case, the focus is on linguistic preconditions for the differentiation of

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  247 socio-cultural spheres; in the latter, the categories of universal pragmatics enable a critical assessment of insights and limits. Kögler rightly notes that this frame of reference provides the basis for Habermas’s specific version of fallibilism; the three kinds of claims articulated in speech acts – objectivity, normative validity and authenticity – are exposed to testing, the lifeworld appears as the indeterminate horizon of that testing, and no particular claim is immune to refutation. But this is a fallibilism with fixed and immutable anchoring points, and it may be worth trying to relativize them. In all three cases, Habermas’s correlations between acts and claims are based on restrictive assumptions that can be questioned. With regard to empirical truth, this involves an opening to ontology. The question is to what extent the very idea of a factual statement can be subject to limitations by a relational and processual conception of reality (such perspectives are on the agenda of contemporary thought, although there is no established paradigm; Castoriadis’s notions of magma and “à-ȇtre” can be understood as indications of a particularly radical version). That kind of ontology will allow for undecidable conflicts of interpretations. On the level of norms, the relationship to values can be thematized and recognized as a problematizing aspect. Norms and values are intrinsically related, but not in the streamlined fashion often posited by sociologists; a value-orientation is both open to divergent interpretations in its own domain and involved in conflicts with other orientations. Max Weber’s reflections on different orders of life are the locus classicus of a revealing entry to this field. More recently, Hans Joas has theorized the formation of values and criticized the assimilation of norms and values. The third claim supposedly anchored at the elementary and universal level of speech acts, authenticity of expression, can be problematized through two different – but ultimately complementary – perspectives on consciousness and meaning. On one hand, there is the hermeneutical insight that meaning transcends intention – in multiple ways, from the implicit semantic surplus always involved in the use of language to the logic of meanings unfolding over time and through sequences of actions. On the other hand, the discovery of the unconscious, accompanied by a permanent controversy about its structure, has highlighted the limits of expressive subjectivity. Even if it is assumed that a reflective or dialogically mediated encounter with the unconscious can lead to enhanced autonomy, there can be no progress in that direction that does not also underline the limits of autonomy. To sum up, the notion of a straightforward and self-contained linkage between intention and expression is vulnerable to criticism at both ends, the inner world and the external medium. It might be objected that the categories of universal pragmatics are regulative ideas. But this does not affect the main points made above. The significance, weight and value of a regulative idea must be judged in relation to a context of meaning; in the present case, we are dealing with idealized borderline patterns with a very limited grasp of a more complex field. The condition of humans as “language animals” (Charles Taylor) is, to use Jan Patočka’s expression, a life in problematicity, exposed to more radical uncertainty than Kögler’s account of Habermas’s fallibilism would suggest.

248  Jóhann P. Árnason My response to the arguments developed by Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr will be somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, and in general terms, their reflections on patterns of secularity and paths of differentiation, including premodern developments, are very much in line with my approaches. We agree that conceptual ways, institutional forms and social-historical implications of distinguishing between religious and non-religious spheres are a matter for comparative historical research. On the other hand, some objections to specific criticisms of my views on both the Axial Age and Japan are in order; the problems are in part due to the authors’ neglect of relevant sources, although it should be noted that my most recent publication on Japan could not have been available to them. The debate on the Axial Age has been strongly reactivated during the last two decades, and I have participated in several discussions. I was from the outset critical of Eisenstadt’s unifying model of axial civilizations, but further reflection and exchange of views has led me to prefer an ever more historicist and minimalist conception of the Axial Age. The conclusive version of this view is summed up in my Blumenberg lectures (Árnason 2019), which Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr do not list among their references, but the main points made there are probably not alien to their line of thought. Against Eisenstadt’s typological definition of axial civilizations, I emphasize a historical view of the Axial Age. It is, in other words, to be seen as a period of exceptionally concentrated and radical changes, rather than as the birth of a new and lastingly paradigmatic civilizational model. The changes have primarily to do with the relationship between religion and politics, but they affect a broader socio-cultural context, and the overall pattern varies from case to case. As for the Japanese historical and civilizational trajectory, the most up-todate version of my objections to Eisenstadt’s interpretation is to be found in a recent issue of the Prague Journal of Historical Sociology (Árnason 2021). Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr wrote their paper before that source became available. But I have from the outset dissented more strongly from Eisenstadt’s view than their comments suggest. In Social Theory and Japanese Experience, I rejected the idea of Japan as a separate non-axial civilization and argued for analyzing Japanese patterns of culture, society and development as a variation on a broader East Asian civilizational constellation, based on Chinese foundations. Compared to other countries in the region, the Japanese experience represents a particularly original elaboration of a common ground; it was this combination of derivativeness and originality that prompted me to use the term “dual civilization”, but I have not insisted on it in later writings. To a certain extent, I accepted (and still accept) Eisenstadt’s description of the processes involved in Japanese adaptations of Confucianism and Buddhism. But since I do not accept the strict dichotomy of axial and non-­axial, I have from the beginning had fundamental reservations about the concept of de-­ axialization. And I have certainly never suggested that a de-axialization of Buddhism is “an  explanation for the Japanese Sonderweg” (neither did

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  249 Eisenstadt, for that matter; his argument was much more complex than that). And I have never said or written anything about a “functional equivalent” for a missing transcendence. I do not use that kind of terminology. That said, I am not unaware of gaps and shortcomings in my reflections on Japanese history, and I am not unsympathetic to the idea that developments during the Edo period prefigured modern secularity. But this is a complicated issue, and further discussion would - for one thing - have to engage with Herman Ooms’s very detailed and thought-provoking work on Tokugawa ideology (Ooms 1985), which is not included in Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr’s references (this book has, more generally speaking, not received the response that it merits). The reference to “neo-Confucianism-informed thinkers, who increasingly adopted a nativist, xenophobic, and anti-Buddhist position” is a bit of a shortcut. Finally, an objection should be made against the claim that “both Eisenstadt and Arnason attribute paramount importance to the influence of Christianity… in Europe’s path to modernisation”. Nobody disputes that Christianity was important; but it could only be described as paramount if the theory of secularization – in the sense of Christian themes and ideas being translated into secular projects – is accepted. I have never held that view, and as the first of my Blumenberg lectures makes clear, I accept the essentials of Blumenberg’s critique of secularization theory. As for Eisenstadt, his views changed over time, and they were – in particular – affected by his civilizationist turn. But in his last essays on modernity and modernization, there is a strong emphasis on religious sources that cannot be simply subsumed under the idea of a paramount Christianity. He stresses the importance of heterodox currents, not least those of the gnostic tradition, for the constitutive cultural and ideological orientations of modernity. I do not share that view, but I also disagree with Blumenberg’s frontally opposed interpretation of modernity as a second overcoming of Gnosticism (after the original Christian victory); that line of argument is not a necessary corollary of his objections to secularization theory. This is not to deny that both gnostic and anti-gnostic themes appear in modern culture, but neither aspect is dominant enough to define an epoch or a civilization.

Making theory contextual through civilizational analysis: place, politics, situatedness Michael Cook’s chapter in the new Cambridge World History, on the “centrality of Islamic civilization”, was already quoted in my comments on Said Arjomand’s paper. As Cook sees it, these terms apply to the timespan between the seventh or eighth and the sixteenth century. Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse’s paper is a reminder of the point that the centrality of Islam can be understood in a way different from Cook’s thesis, and with consequences that cast doubt on the very applicability of civilizational perspectives to the Islamic world. Such conclusions are foreshadowed by the use of the term “Islamosphere”; the argumentation of the present paper is somewhat

250  Jóhann P. Árnason sketchy, but knowledge of other writings by Salvatore helps to tease out the message; the best way to begin a response is probably to focus on the work of Marshall Hodgson and its implications. I share Salvatore and Obuse’s admiration for this great historian, as well as the view that more discussion of his work is needed. There is no doubt about the importance of Hodgson’s work for Western perceptions and interpretations of Islam. To appreciate his achievement, it should be seen in a historical context that goes back to the beginning of the modern era. As Hodgson (quoted by Salvatore and Obuse) suggested, the early sixteenth century was a high water mark of Islamic expansion and a moment when worldwide domination could seem within reach; but during the following early modern period, European powers successfully rolled back the Islamic offensive. Three landmark dates stand out: the Russian conquest of Kazan in 1552, the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683, and the defeat of the Muslim ruler of Bengal by the East India Company in 1757. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt may then be seen as the crowning denouement. This reversal of fortunes was accompanied by an ongoing consolidation of devaluing notions about Islam, affecting both European scholarship and opinions of a broader public. This is particularly striking when contrasted with other developments of the times. They are well summed up in Lévi-Strauss’s short but important text on the “three humanisms” (LéviStrauss 1973). As there described, three late medieval and early modern encounters have had a lasting and transformative impact on European visions of the human condition and its variations: the new view of classical antiquity developed during the Renaissance, the confrontation with societies of a previously unknown type during the conquest of the Western hemisphere, and the gradually developing contacts with the great civilizations of South and East Asia. The older, long more uneven but in the modern phase increasingly unilateral interaction with the Islamic world is not included in Lévi-Strauss’s sketch, but it is an integral part of the story; and so are the attempts to correct downgrading judgments, repeatedly made by scholars within the tradition now fashionably dismissed as “Orientalist.” Hodgson was not the first, but certainly the most important reviser of inadequate views on Islam, and as Salvatore and Obuse note, this entailed a major rethinking of two central concepts, religion and civilization. It will be useful to recall the main aspects concerned; they illustrate the general point that an unspecified rejection of “religio-civilizational mapping” does not take us very far. Concrete criticisms of each particular version are needed. Hodgson’s reconceptualization of religion centres on an emphatic distinction between its institutional and individual dimensions (it would be interesting to compare his views on these matters with those of Durkheim and his more or less faithful followers). The contrasts and distances in question are particularly visible in the spectrum of Islamic religiosity, from law and theology to the devotional piety of the Sufis. Hodgson analyzed this religious field in the context of a cultural, social and geopolitical configuration that stands out through its exceptional integrative capacity. Islamic expansion imposed a

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  251 previously unknown cultural unity on the region from Egypt to Iran; at a later stage, the Islamic world – at first very hard hit by the Mongol ­invasions – absorbed the successor states of the Mongol empire in the Near East, Central Asia and Russia; during the early modern era and beyond, new waves of Islamic expansion unfolded in Africa and Southeast Asia, without involvement of existing empires. This record of Afro-Eurasian integration (to use a regional label introduced by Hodgson) is obviously the main reason why Salvatore and Obuse tend to think of the “Islamosphere” as a transcivilizational formation, and in that capacity both a bridge and more than a bridge between East and West: it provides a horizon for critical reflection on the more narrowly defined units and identities on both sides. They also refer to it as a case of proto-globalization. Hodgson, however, took a different view. He had no doubt that he was dealing with a distinctive civilization, and used the term “Islamicate”, rather than Islamic, to emphasize the complex relationship between a religious core and an institutional framework, as well as the multiple local identities and legacies that could be brought under an overall Islamic roof. As will be seen from my discussion of Hodgson (Árnason 2006), I am inclined to follow his line on this, but here the matter cannot be taken further. It should be noted that an intention to “provincialize the West” can hardly be attributed to Hodgson (and to “provincialize” the Euro-Atlantic region in modern times would, in any case, be about as meaningful as to provincialize the Islamic world from the seventh to the sixteenth century). Hodgson’s analysis of the “great transmutation” that began in Europe is far too nuanced and at the same time attentive to global ramifications for such terms to be appropriate. He dates the decisive chain of events from the late sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century and outlines it as “a change in the patterns of investment of time and money. This, as we shall see, occurred only in a special form, one that I shall call technicalistic, so that specialized technical considerations tended to take precedence over all others” (Hodgson 1974, v.3: 182; italics in the original). The three most momentous outcomes of this trend are the industrial revolution, the French revolution and an “almost equally unprecedented event: the establishment of European world hegemony” (ibid.: 177). For Hodgson, it is important that these epoch-making developments are consequences of an older and more general dynamic. The concept of technicalism presupposes multiple and specific contexts, each of which has its own kind of techniques, and “specialized technical considerations” have to do with maximizing a specific kind of output. Hodgson does not propose a list of the different spheres involved, but it seems clear that his thesis applies to economic and political life as well as to the pursuit of knowledge. He rejects the idea that the “Great Western Transmutation” could be equated with a breakthrough or a final triumph of rationality; in his view, rationalization (or, more specifically, “independent, innovative calculation” – ibid.:182) has always been at work in the constitution and adaptation of traditions, and is therefore not a defining feature of the early modern European transformation. Hodgson also cautions against the label of “progress”; and in that

252  Jóhann P. Árnason context, it is worth mentioning that he singles out early innovations in military practice as “a microcosm of the innovative technical specialization which was to be the hallmark of the Transmutation” (ibid.: 184). But whatever his reservations about a universal meaning of these changes, he had no doubt about their global ramifications. This view of European modernity is no less characteristic of Hodgson’s approach to world history than is his pioneering perspective on the “venture of Islam.” The section on Japanese perspectives is very interesting, but I lack the expertise to comment on the specific points made by Salvatore and Obuse. It is, however, worth reiterating that a discussion of Japanese approaches to Islam (and of their relevance to criticism of Western ones) must proceed on several levels. There is the philosophical effort to engage with Islamic traditions as an opening to ways of thinking beyond conventional delimitations of East and West (in this regard, the exceptional importance of Toshihiko Izutsu’s work is uncontested); the ideological references to Islam in varieties of Japanese Pan-Asianism; and the strategic issues involved in Japan’s search for allies. Japan’s relations with the Ottoman empire and its Turkish successor state, significant for both sides, are a particular chapter in this story, extensively analyzed in the writings of Selcuk Esenbel (whom Salvatore and Obuse quote). Yulia Prozorova takes up the question of the religio-political nexus as a central theme of civilizational analysis, and links it to a survey of the particularly striking and contrastful Russian trajectory. The interconnections of religion and politics are a crucial and persistent but highly variable factor in historical development; they have, however, received less than their due attention in the work of civilizational analysts. This is probably related to the prevailing emphasis – especially pronounced in Eisenstadt’s work – on a general interrelation between world-views and institutions, as well as on the specific  – and supposedly paradigmatic – transformation of that broad field during the Axial Age. The common denominator of axial breakthroughs, as defined by Eisenstadt, does not focus on religious orientations as such; it centres on the more abstract idea of an ontological distance separating transcendental and mundane reality. These overarching perspectives have led to a certain marginalization of distinctively religious aspects involved in cultural articulations of the world, and of their specific interaction with political patterns. But if debates on the Axial Age have, as I argue elsewhere (Árnason 2019), taken a turn that brings changing relations between religion and politics to the fore, there is a strong case for pursuing that line in a more comprehensive way. I have no significant objections to Yulia’s overall perspective on the religio-political nexus, nor to her analysis of the Russian experience (although I would put a question mark to the notion of Byzantine caesaropapism; Dagron 2007 has in my opinion argued convincingly against this traditional view). But some additional comments may be in order. It is true that political theology as a particular aspect of the religio-­political nexus (unequally developed in different cases, but enduringly present in

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  253 successive historical epochs, from ancient to modern times) has not been much discussed by civilizational analysts. Further work must engage with the seminal and controversial authors – Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson, Ernst Kantorowicz, Jan Assmann – mentioned in Yulia’s paper. A civilizational approach might attempt to thematize problems left unconsidered because of one-sided presuppositions and lack of debate between the protagonists. The question of political impulses to religious change or religious meanings – more or less radically translated - inherent in the political sphere, often decided beforehand on unclear grounds, could be placed in the context of interaction within a civilizational framework, rather than a unilateral primacy of one side or the other. It will be easier to do this in some cases than in others; for obvious reasons, less can be said about ancient Egypt than about late antiquity or the medieval world. With regard to the last-named example, mention should be made of Leidulf Melve’s important but too little known work on politico-theological disputes in the public sphere that developed during the investiture controversy of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries (Melve 2007). Another possible theme for comparative civilizational reflection is the varying capacity to activate alternative theological ideas against the over-identification with political power. Peterson’s analysis of trinitarian theology as a counterweight to the monotheistic merger of Christianity and empire is a classic source; theological inspirations and justifications of revolutionary change in the Islamic world constitute a major but still far too little studied field for comparative inquiry. Some comments on the religio-political landmarks and mutations in Russian history may be added. It is, in particular, worth underlining that the two crystallizations of the religio-political nexus in a despotic form, the Muscovite and the Stalinist one, resulted from intercivilizational encounters of a very complicated kind. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century consolidation of Tsarism was the crowning episode of a peripheral state-building process, initiated on the outskirts of the proliferating multi-central polity grouped around Kiev. But it also reflected a long history of subaltern interaction with a dominant successor state to the Mongol empire (a case where the concept of one-sided mimetic rivalry seems appropriate), as well as a radicalizing reactivation of Byzantine political theology. As Yulia shows, the Byzantine reconnection served to filter and disguise the borrowings from erstwhile Mongol overlords. The combination was fraught with potential excess, and it soon took a self-destructive turn: with the “time of troubles” at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was a major breakdown, obviously important for later imaginings of chaos and destruction resulting from social upheaval, but the regime was resilient enough to engineer a successful restoration. Less than a century later, it proved amenable to a civilizing project, as contradictory as it was consequential. The transformative processes triggered by Peter the Great’s policies amounted – among many other things – to a redefinition of the religio-political nexus, downgrading religious institutions but not at all diminishing the autocratic power boosted by a religious tradition.

254  Jóhann P. Árnason The second crystallization, beginning with the Bolshevik takeover, was based on a double-edged relationship to Western versions of modern civilization, but the original understanding of that connection had to be revised very soon after the first step. The takeover would not have happened without the illusory expectation of a worldwide or at least European revolution, and this perspective was equated with a more progressive sequel to the developmental goals already realized by Western capitalism. When the illusion evaporated, the ambiguity of this stance mutated into a more polarized vision. On one hand, the imperative of catching up with the existing West in geopolitical and geo-economic terms became a guideline for modernizing the slightly diminished Russian empire now ruled by the Bolsheviks; on the other hand, an ideology originally formulated in radical opposition to the established Western order was adapted to the self-contradictory project of “socialism in one country” and served to justify a return to imperial strategies of modernization from above, in vastly more violent ways. An ostensibly secular version of the religio-political nexus was integral to this model. Its later history, like that of its Muscovite predecessor, includes both a time of troubles and a civilizing project, but in reverse order. The civilizing project was Gorbachev’s failed reform of the Soviet regime; the time of troubles was the rule of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, aptly described as “market Bolshevism” by two well-informed observers (Reddaway and Glinski 2000). What then followed was neither a restoration nor a coherent alternative order, and can at this stage only be described as a slow but irresistible political regression. Jeremy Smith’s exploration of historical regions in the Americas is a welcome complement to the mostly Eurasian examples of regionality in my work. I do not think there are any significant disagreements between us, as far as the general approach to civilizations and regions is concerned, but the move across the Atlantic broadens the horizon of reference. The concept of region is an eminently flexible and multipliable one, and there is nothing wrong with that; it serves to identify various levels of shared situations, destinies and experiences. There are regions within regions, within and between states, within civilizations and across their boundaries. I have tended to equate the concept with the German Geschichtsregion, “historical region”, and think of regions as shaped by long-term historical experiences. That applies very clearly to the region in which I have been most interested, Central Europe. Its contours and characteristics have a medieval background (a continuous history of region formation can be traced back at least to the beginning of the second millennium of our era). Within Central Europe, we can – also on historical grounds – distinguish between two sub-regions; East Central Europe is a widely accepted category, and as I have argued elsewhere (Árnason 2014b), a case can be made for the much less frequently acknowledged idea of West Central Europe as a region in its own right. On the other hand, Central Europe as a whole was during the high and later Middle Ages a part of Western Christendom, a civilization that was achieving its definitive regional shape (except for later expansion on the Iberian peninsula) roughly at the same time as the central part embarked on a distinctive history. The

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  255 medieval Western Christian world exemplifies both a pattern of internal regional differentiation and of relatively clear coincidence between civilizational and overall regional boundaries. One way of understanding the crusades is to see them as a failed attempt to expand civilizational reach into the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. In contrast to such historically grounded examples and approaches, Smith’s American perspective draws attention to the phenomenon of emerging regions. The regionalization of the United States is obviously still in progress (Smith’s description of the new Southwestern region is convincing), and one of the questions arising in that context concerns the impact of this process on the much-discussed polarization of American politics; the experience so far suggests that changes to regional composition do not translate as directly into political terms as the various predictions of new “natural majorities” have suggested. Smith’s comments on the Hispanic background and the repeated waves of Hispanic immigration are convincing, but it is by no means clear how the stronger Hispanic presence will interact with the civilizational crisis that seems to be unfolding in the US. The distinctive question of the borderlands, briefly considered in Smith’s paper, merits a few additional words. Borderlands have also come to the fore in recent scholarship on Eurasian history, but here they are most frequently discussed in connection with the problems and vicissitudes of imperial rule, particularly with reference to Russian and Chinese experiences. In the Russian case, this has brought up the issue of the borderlands factor in the run-up to revolution as well as in its aftermath (Rieber 2014, Blanc 2018), and the role of political actors with a borderland background; Rieber’s analysis of Stalin as a “man of the borderlands” is a good example. Another reminder is the present situation in the borderland par excellence, Ukraine. It would be interesting to compare the historical destinies of Eurasian borderlands, often characterized by long continuity or sustained development of identities, with the more mobile borderlands of the western hemisphere. In the United States, the question of what to do or not to do in the gradually conquered borderlands was one of the factors leading to civil war in 1861. A brief final comment on the uncommonly fascinating case of the Caribbean may be added. As Smith argues, this region is to a particular degree shaped by encounters and engagements, often of a very violent kind. It is also an example of how distinctive events can contribute to the profile of a region. The Caribbean has seen two spectacular, very different but equally atypical revolutions: the slave revolution in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century and the Cuban revolution of 1959. Both of them have been romanticized in later accounts, but there is still work to be done on assessing their historical significance. It is also worth recalling that both the most serious and the most grotesque episode of the Cold War happened in this region. The most serious one was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, extensively discussed in a stream of publications and analyzed in greater depth in some recent scholarly works; the present return to great power confrontation with an inbuilt danger of escalating moves will ensure an active interest in lessons of

256  Jóhann P. Árnason this near disaster for the foreseeable future. At the other extreme, the 1976 “revolution” in Grenada and the subsequent American intervention exemplify – both to the same degree – the self-caricaturing potential of revolutionary and imperial visions.

Concluding remarks I would like to thank all contributors to this volume for their valuable work, and to express the hope that our discussion will continue in some other ways. Given the constraints of space, my replies are unavoidably selective, and there is much more to be said on every single chapter. Civilizational analysis, the central theme for most of the authors, is a very contested approach, both because of its intrinsically difficult aims and due to massive prejudices against it; the many-sided reflections contained in this book should do something to strengthen its case. It remains, in my opinion, the most promising key to past and present history.

References Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2006), “Marshall Hodgson’s Civilizational Analysis of Islam”, in Islam in Process, edited by Jóhann Páll Árnason, Armando Salvatore and Georg Stauth, 23–47. Bielefeld: Transcript. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2014a), “The Religio-political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections”, in Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives, edited by Jóhann Páll Árnason and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski, 8–36. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2014b), “Central Europe: Visions, Models and Presuppositions”, in Mitteleuropa. Zwischen Realität, Chimäre und Konzept, edited by Petr Hlaváček, 132–159. Praha: Collegium Europaeum, Univerzita Karlova. Árnason, Jóhann Páll. (2019), Weltliche Autonomie und Religion in der Konstitution der Moderne. Soziologische und Sozialphilosophische Perspektiven. BlumenbergVorlesungen, Bd. 3. Freiburg: Herder. Arnason, Jóhann Páll. (2021). “Civilizational Aspects of Japanese History: Continuities and Discontinuities”, Historická Sociologie, 2021(2), 105–132. Blanc, Eric. (2018), Revolutionary Social Democracy. Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917). Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill. Cook, Michael. (2015), “The Centrality of Islamic Civilization”, in The Cambridge World History, v. V: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE – 1500 CE, edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar and Mary E. Wiesner-Hanks, 385–414. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dagron, Gilbert. (2007), Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eaton, Richard M. (2020), India in the Persianate Age. London: Penguin. Hedinger, Daniel. (2021), Die Achse. Berlin-Rom-Tokyo. München: C.H. Beck. Hodgson, Marshall. (1974), The Venture of Islam, v. 1-3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hodgson, Marshall. (1993), Rethinking World History. Essays on Europe, Islam and World History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Replies to criticisms and suggestions  257 Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1973), “Les trois humanismes”, in Anthropologie structurale deux, 319–322. Paris: Plon (written in 1956). Meier, Christian. (1983), Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Melve, Leidulf. (2007), Inventing the Public Sphere. The Public Debate During the Investiture Contest, c. 1030-1122. Leiden; Boston: Brill. Moyn, Samuel. (2016), “Concepts of the Political in Twentieth-century European Thought”, in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, edited by Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons, 291–311. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ooms, Herman. (1985), Tokugawa Ideology. Early Constructs, 1570-1680. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2000), The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms. Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Rieber, Alfred. (2014), The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. (1988), “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland”, in Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914-1918. Studienaugabe der MaxWeber-Gesamtausgabe, I/15, edited by Max Weber, 202–302. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Index

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. action 2, 11, 14, 20–21, 23–24, 26–31, 34–35, 36n3–36n6, 42–47, 64–67, 69–71, 73, 100, 106, 124, 155, 158n12, 165, 232–233, 235–236, 247; see also agency; interaction aesthetics 23–24, 42, 124 Adorno, Theodor W. 6, 110n8, 128, 130 agency 13, 96–97, 99–102, 104, 106, 108, 111n20, 136, 162–164 Americas, the 14, 50, 58n1, 70, 81–83, 86–89, 127, 129–130, 183, 186, 188, 193, 214–226, 254–256 anthropology 2, 15n1, 23–24, 28, 36n6, 55, 193, 208 anthropo-centrism 20–21, 23 appropriation 21–23, 105–106, 108, 109n2, 110n10, 111n20, 133–135, 139, 142–146, 149, 153–156, 158n14, 166, 174, 191, 246 Arendt, Hannah 74n4, 92n12 Argentina 82, 87, 223 Asia 13, 52, 54, 120, 168, 182, 185–191, 221, 237, 248, 250–252, 254–255 Assmann, Jan 13, 117, 133–134, 136, 138–143, 150–151, 154, 157n1, 200, 203, 253 autonomy 3, 14, 19, 25–29, 33–34, 36n4, 37n16, 37n24, 51, 64–74, 74n3–74n4, 81–82, 97, 101, 107, 120–121, 124, 126–129, 150–152, 155, 158n14, 163, 165, 168, 183, 190, 200, 204, 207–208, 239–240, 243, 245, 247; see also heteronomy axiality 11–13, 15, 22, 32–33, 37n27, 48–52, 54, 117–127, 129, 133–146, 148–159, 161–165, 167–168, 170, 172, 183–184, 186–188, 190, 193, 198–200, 204, 244, 246, 248, 252; see also de-axialization; non-axiality

Berlin, Isiah 7, 15n3 Blumenberg, Hans 6, 118, 245, 248–249 borderland 16n10, 215, 218–219, 255 Buddha 120, 134, 139, 167, 169, 170–173, 175n4, 184 Buddhism 52, 54, 120, 123, 164–174, 175n4, 175n6, 175n9–175n10, 184–186, 190, 192–193, 236, 248 bureaucracy 78–79, 82, 85–86, 88–89, 99, 127, 139, 167, 170, 183, 189, 207, 241 Byzant 125, 200, 204–207, 210n1, 252–253 capitalism 6, 41, 52, 78–79, 88–89, 121, 126–128, 130, 191, 224, 231, 241–242, 254; see also economics Castoriadis, Cornelius 3, 6–7, 11, 14, 19–26, 28–29, 33–35, 36n2, 36n9, 37n16, 37n22–37n24, 38n31, 65, 68, 71, 79, 96–101, 107, 136, 231–234, 238–240, 243, 247–248 China 8, 10–11, 16n14, 117, 120, 122–123, 125, 141, 157n1, 166–169, 173, 175n11, 181–182, 187, 189, 192–193, 237–238, 242, 245–246, 248, 255 Christianity 16n9, 54–55, 118, 120, 124–125, 129, 150, 153, 163–165, 168, 171, 183–185, 193, 200, 204–208, 210n1–210n2, 220, 234, 237, 245, 249, 253, 255; see also Jesus Christ civilizational analysis 4, 6–7, 11–14, 25, 32, 38n31, 49, 52, 98–99, 106, 108, 110n11, 111n16, 164, 197, 199, 214–216, 225–226, 236, 238, 242, 244, 249, 252–253, 256 Civilizations in Dispute 3, 15n6, 51, 54, 117, 121, 126, 128, 165, 216 Člověk a dějiny 21

Index  259 comparative research 1–4, 6–7, 14, 26, 30, 32, 34, 37n17, 48–51, 54, 57, 58, 65, 68–69, 72, 78, 88–89, 91n5, 98–99, 164, 186–188, 189, 197–199, 215–216, 221, 237, 248, 253 Confucianism 36n6, 136, 157n3, 166, 170–174, 175n8, 248–249 Confucius 120, 134, 139, 173 contextuality 7, 20, 27, 35, 105, 143, 146 contextualization 12, 78, 89, 189, 249 contingency 3, 10, 21, 49, 69, 72–73, 77, 96–97, 99–100, 104, 146, 150, 153, 159n20, 164, 189, 191, 214–215, 217, 241 cosmopolitanism 1–2, 9, 51–53, 129–130, 150–152, 154, 181–182, 184, 192, 194, 237, 240 communism 202, 208–209, 224, 238; see also Marxism, USSR Critical Theory 1, 6, 36n4, 55, 71, 96, 110n4, 110n8, 110n13, 111n16, 240; see also Frankfurt School cultural premise 128, 197 cultural world 12, 50–51, 53, 223, 232, 236 de-axialization 165, 167–170, 172, 174, 248 determinism 8–10, 44, 51, 119, 203 democracy 1, 6, 10, 25–26, 45, 65, 73, 78–79, 81, 107–108, 120, 123, 126, 136, 159n20, 183, 202–203, 224–225, 234, 239–240 despotism 182–183, 253 de-transcendentalization 104, 168, 172, 174 dialectics 2, 27–28, 54–56, 90, 133, 135, 145, 184–186, 193, 233, 239 disclosure 3–4, 12, 24, 29, 96, 101, 103–104, 106, 108–109, 110n4, 111n20, 125, 143–144, 146–149, 152, 155–156, 158n10, 233 Durkheim, Émile 2, 6, 21, 36n4, 40, 52, 89, 183, 197, 216, 239, 250 economics 10, 15n6, 43, 45–46, 84–85, 118–119, 130, 235 Edo period 167, 169, 171, 174, 249 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1, 3, 6, 12, 14, 22, 32, 37n27, 40, 50, 77, 117–127, 137, 162–166, 168–170, 174, 174n1, 197–199, 207, 235 Enlightenment 8, 49, 56, 63–65, 81, 118–121, 124–125, 127–130, 152, 181–183, 239, 244–245

Europe 1, 7–9, 27, 50, 56, 63, 65, 70–71, 83, 85–88, 91, 118–121, 124–131, 165, 168, 171, 181–184, 186, 188–190, 192, 201, 216, 221–222, 241, 244–245, 249–252, 254 Eurocentrism 7, 111n20, 117, 119–120, 134, 153, 163, 186, 190–193 Elias, Norbert 3, 6, 27, 40–41, 46, 49, 110n11, 183, 185, 197, 235, 241 Fascism 118, 153, 238 foundation 3, 23, 27, 31, 58n4, 99–100, 104, 110n10, 120–121, 129, 130, 148–149, 151, 154, 162, 167, 171, 188, 199, 204, 206, 223, 242, 248; see also post-foundationalism Frankfurt School 6, 92n11, 96–97, 107, 110n8, 110n13, 117–118 freedom 29–35, 63, 68, 72, 100, 103, 124–125 Future that Failed, The 3, 77 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 133, 138, 143–145, 151, 158n8, 158n10 Gauchet, Marcel 6, 25–26, 28, 231, 233 globalization 7, 9–10, 41, 50, 57, 125, 184, 186, 193, 232, 240, 244, 251 Greece 1, 33, 120, 123, 141, 153, 157, 166, 193, 233–234, 237, 239, 242–243, 245–246 Habermas, Jürgen 1–2, 6, 12–13, 15n4, 49, 63–64, 67, 73, 90, 92n12, 110n8, 117–125, 127–128, 133, 143, 146–155, 158n9, 158n11–158n14, 159n15, 159n17–159n21, 235, 246–247 Hegel, G.W.F. 28, 45, 81, 102, 110n16, 118, 120, 151–152, 159n19, 182 hermeneutics 2, 6, 11, 13, 20–21, 23, 27, 30–32, 35, 36n4, 37n12, 37n21, 37n29, 55, 68, 96–99, 102, 105–106, 109n2, 110n4–110n5, 111n16, 133–139, 143–147, 149, 151–157, 158n10, 158n14, 188, 192–193, 199, 201, 231, 244, 246–247 Heidegger, Martin 30, 96–99, 105–108, 109n2, 110n4–110n6, 110n12, 110n14–110n15, 111n20, 118, 144, 156, 159n16, 243–244; see also Left-Heideggeriansm heteronomy 34, 65, 71, 107, 204, 225 Hinduism 50, 52, 123, 184, 236 historicity 7, 19, 32, 37n23, 104, 109, 220 historicism 88, 144, 240, 248

260 Index historization 13, 21, 48, 50, 78, 89, 97, 133, 162, 164 Hodgson, Marshall 13, 51–52, 181, 184–187, 191, 193, 236–237, 250–252 Horkheimer, Max 7, 128, 130 Huntington, Samuel 50, 121, 125, 245–246 Husserl, Edmund 30, 118, 156 imagination 13, 33, 101, 147, 183, 186–188, 190, 192, 194, 204, 220, 241 imaginary 19–25, 27, 29, 33–35, 38n32, 65, 67–71, 74n2–74n3, 77–80, 83–85, 87–89, 91, 103–104, 137, 186–187, 199, 201, 203–204, 206–208, 216–217, 224, 239–241, 244, 246 immanence 13, 133, 138, 140, 142, 151, 155, 164–166, 169, 174, 202–203; see also transcendence institution 2, 4, 13–14, 19, 21, 25, 34, 66–68, 71, 77–80, 84–89, 99–101, 121, 123–124, 128, 135, 136, 141, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155–157, 162–164, 167–168, 172, 174, 184–185, 187, 189, 197–201, 203, 205–207, 209, 214–216, 222–226, 234–235, 240–241, 243, 248, 250–253 interaction 2, 15n2, 16n13, 23, 42, 44–46, 51–53, 148, 169, 188, 217–218, 221, 232–233, 237, 250, 252–253 interpretation 1–2, 7, 9–10, 13–14, 21, 24–25, 27–28, 32, 37n29, 54, 64–72, 74n2, 77, 82, 89, 91, 103, 105–106, 117–122, 124, 127–128, 133–147, 149–151, 154–166, 157n4, 158n8, 158n10, 158n14, 164–165, 167, 169, 173, 198–202, 204–206, 208–209, 231, 242–250 India 50–54, 120, 122, 136, 141, 157, 164, 166, 173, 175n10, 182, 186, 190, 192–193, 236–237 Iran 12, 50–51, 53–57, 185, 187, 189, 193, 238, 251 Islam 8, 51–57, 58n4, 163–164, 181–185, 187–188, 190–193, 200, 236–238, 249–253 Islamosphere 13, 181–189, 191–194, 194n1, 249, 251 Izutsu, Toshihiko 13, 187–188, 190–194, 252 Jainism 54 Japan 1, 3, 7, 13, 15, 77, 127, 164–170, 173–174, 174n1, 175n3, 175n10, 175n12, 186–194, 194n1, 237–238, 242, 248–249, 252

Jaspers, Karl 12–13, 32, 117–123, 125, 133–135, 137–138, 143, 150, 153–154, 157n1–157n2, 186, 246 Jesus Christ 134, 194 Joas, Hans 6, 15n4, 20, 36n4, 36n6, 117, 157n3, 232, 247 Judaism 9, 200, 204, 210n1 Kant, Immanuel 15n3, 49, 118, 123, 151–152, 182–183 Kantorowicz, Ernst 201, 253 Koselleck, Reinhart 66, 80–81, 92n12 Kosík, Karel 6, 11, 21, 23–24, 27–29, 37n14, 37n28, 232 Krejčí, Jaroslav 6 Laozi 11, 120, 173 Labyrinth of Modernity, The 4, 15n6, 65, 69, 73, 77–78, 121, 125–126, 216, 239 Lefort, Claude 6, 109n3, 201–203, 231, 233 Left-Heideggeriansm 12, 96–99, 102, 108, 109n2, 242 Löwith, Karl 92n12, 124 Luhmann, Niklas 68, 128, 235 macrosociology 117, 123, 128 macro-social phenomena 7, 41–42, 44 Manichaeism 54 Marchart, Oliver 96–97, 99–102, 106, 109n3, 110n12–110n13, 110n16, 111n20 Marcuse, Herbert 6, 97, 102, 106, 108–109, 110n5, 110n8, 111n22 Marcuse zu Marx, Von 2, 22 Marx, Karl 20, 22–23, 27–28, 36n3, 36n9, 37n13, 37n21, 45, 67, 81, 110n16, 130, 182, 208, 244 Marxism 1–2, 6, 15n6, 23–24, 27, 43, 63, 90, 96–98, 100–102, 107–108, 111n16, 111n20, 186, 208–209, 232, 242, 244 Mauss, Marcel 6, 89, 216 Meiji restoration 13, 166–167, 170, 174, 187–189 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6, 23, 24, 28–29, 37n12, 37n14 metaphysics 13, 21–22, 30–35, 38n30, 99, 102–105, 120–125, 130, 133, 137, 145, 148–154, 157n1, 158n8, 158n13, 159n15–159n16, 159n18–159n19, 182, 202, 204; see also post-metaphysics methodology 10–11, 41–42, 98, 106–109, 190, 232 modernism 55, 70

Index  261 modernity 1, 3–4, 6–7, 10, 11–12, 14–15, 25, 48–50, 54–58, 63–73, 74n3, 77–78, 84, 87, 89–91, 92n10–92n12, 98, 103, 107, 117–130, 133, 142, 147, 151, 155, 162–167, 174, 181, 186, 197, 202–203, 207–208, 214, 216–217, 220–222, 224, 226, 238–242, 244, 246, 249, 252 modernization 1–3, 12, 45, 49, 55, 63, 84, 87–88, 117, 121, 125, 148, 163–165, 168–170, 174, 183, 188–189, 208, 224, 240–242, 244–246, 254 Mojtahed-Shabestari, Mohammad 55 Mongol empire 190, 205–207, 210n1– 210n2, 251, 253 multiplicity 1–3, 11–14, 32, 46, 48–50, 54, 56–57, 65–66, 77, 82, 98, 118, 120–121, 124–127, 140, 151, 162–165, 181, 186, 214–217, 219, 226, 231, 233, 235, 238, 240, 242–243, 245, 247, 251, 254 Mughal empire 53, 58n2 Muscovy 205–207, 210n1–210n2, 253–254 nationalism 14, 83, 162, 166, 170–171, 174, 203, 206, 209, 223, 238 Nelson, Benjamin 3, 6, 197, 199 non-axiality 164–165, 170, 248 orientation 4, 7, 12–14, 23, 29, 43, 50, 55, 66–67, 70, 74n4, 77, 102, 133–137, 139–140, 142–145, 147, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158n7, 158n10, 159n15, 164–165, 173, 188, 193, 197–198, 203, 208–209, 236, 243, 245, 246–247, 249, 252 Orientalism 50, 52, 183–184, 186, 188–190, 192, 194, 250 Ottoman empire 16n10, 182, 184, 188, 250, 252 Parson, Talcott 63, 68, 242 Patočka, Jan 6, 21, 29–33, 35, 36n2, 37n23, 37n24, 37n27, 37n29, 96, 234, 239, 247 particularism 9, 79, 150, 165, 168–169, 172, 174; see also universalism particularity 2, 7, 12, 40, 48–49, 68–70, 80–81, 88–89, 98–99, 102, 136, 140–142, 145, 147, 150, 153–154, 164, 168, 184, 202, 204, 232, 243, 247, 250, 252; see also universality Peripheral Centre 3, 77 Persianate world 12, 50–54, 56, 58n2, 237

Peterson, Erik 204, 253 phenomenology 6, 11, 20, 23–24, 27–32, 35, 37n12–37n13, 37n22, 37n29, 38n32, 96–99, 102, 109n2, 136–137, 244 philosophy 2–4, 6–14, 15n1, 15n3, 19, 21, 23–25, 28–33, 36n1, 36n4, 37n16, 38n30, 64–65, 67, 73, 90, 92n12, 96, 105, 109, 110n5, 117–122, 124–125, 127–130, 143–144, 146–149, 151, 154, 158n14, 159n16, 159n19, 167, 181–184, 187, 189–190, 192, 199, 202, 232–234, 239, 246, 252 pluralism 13–14, 19, 32, 48, 50, 54, 68, 140, 156, 185, 231 plurality 3, 23, 25, 40, 64, 68–70, 73, 78, 98–99, 103, 105, 127, 134–135, 150, 159n15, 185, 215, 232, 242, 244 pluralization 32, 98, 134, 150, 155 political, the 11–12, 14, 19–22, 25–27, 29–30, 33, 35, 37n16, 67, 96–97, 99–102, 104, 106, 109, 203–204, 231–234, 242–244 post-foundationalism 12, 96–99, 105–106, 109n2 post-metaphysics 12, 104, 118, 121–122, 124–125, 127, 146–148, 151 post-secularity 151, 153, 159n20; see also secularity praxis 11, 20–21, 23–24, 27–29, 36n4, 37n28, 96, 232 Praxis und Interpretation 2, 22–23, 27–28, 36n4, 37n21, 242 provincialization 49, 58, 251 public sphere 54, 57, 79, 81, 89, 91n5, 127, 141–142, 148, 151, 153, 159n20, 171, 185–186, 188, 191, 208, 222, 250, 253 Rawls, John 63–64, 67 reductionism 7–8, 15n6, 16n9, 27–28, 152, 232 religion 9–10, 13–14, 23, 35, 41–44, 50–57, 89, 117, 119–125, 129–130, 135, 138, 140–142, 145, 149–154, 156, 158n14, 159n15, 159n18, 159n20, 162–172, 174, 175n3, 181, 183–190, 192, 197–209, 210n1, 236–237, 243, 248–253 religio-political nexus 14, 25, 35, 197, 199–201, 204–207, 231, 243, 252–254 regionality 14–15, 37n22, 49, 57, 89, 105–106, 214–219, 221, 223–226, 251, 254–255 regionalism 215, 221, 223–224

262 Index republicanism 58, 81, 83, 87, 91n2, 125, 220 revolution 20, 28, 54, 65, 69, 71, 73, 81–85, 87, 89, 124–125, 130, 133, 166, 192, 197, 207–208, 224, 234, 238–240, 244–245, 251, 253–256 Roman empire 122, 129, 205–206, 207, 210n1, 233–234, 237 romanticism 15n3, 158n7, 182, 245 Russia 1, 3, 7–8, 14–15, 86, 181, 188, 190, 192, 204–209, 250–255 Schmitt, Carl 202, 204, 242–243, 253 secularity 13–14, 158n14, 159n15, 159n18, 162–171, 173–174, 183, 198–203, 206–209, 240, 243, 248–249, 254 secularization 45, 120, 124, 150, 153, 159n18, 162–163, 165, 168, 170, 201–203, 207–208, 249 Shintō 166–167, 170–173, 175n3 situation 3, 10, 41, 43, 56, 70–73, 74n4, 80–82, 84–85, 106, 108, 124, 134, 144, 231, 254–255 situatedness 97, 100, 104–105, 115, 134, 142–146, 148–149, 151–153, 155, 157, 158n9, 217, 245, 249 Smith, Wilfred C. 184–185, 187, 193 sociology 1–4, 6–8, 11–12, 15n1, 32, 36n4, 40–50, 58n2, 63–64, 66–69, 72, 77–79, 89–91, 102, 106, 110n4, 110n13, 117, 119, 121, 123–125, 127–128, 130, 163, 181, 183–186, 188, 192–193, 197–199, 214–215, 219, 221–222, 232, 234–235, 241, 244, 246–248 social theory 1, 7–8, 12, 14, 21, 49, 57–58, 63–66, 72, 96–98, 99–100, 102, 105, 109n2, 158n9, 181, 183, 194, 231, 235–236 Social Theory and Japanese Experience 3, 77, 164, 167–170, 248 Socrates 30–31, 33, 120, 134, 184 sovereignty 43, 80, 83 Soviet Union 1, 3, 208–209, 242, 254 state 1, 12, 14, 26, 41, 53, 56, 57, 78–90, 121–123, 126–128, 166–168, 170–174, 175n8, 183, 197, 199–209, 214–221, 223–226, 233, 235, 238, 240–243, 246, 251–254 symbol 31–32, 189, 201 symbolic 35, 42, 50, 103, 106, 107, 137–140, 142–143, 148, 152, 155–156, 158n14, 168, 186, 197, 201, 203–205, 207, 209, 225

Taoism 10, 36n6, 121, 123, 137 Taylor, Charles 26, 79, 96, 247 theology 14, 118, 125, 148, 184, 202–206, 208–209, 210n1, 250, 253; political theology 200–206, 209, 210n1, 252, 253 totalitarianism 35, 118, 123, 128, 203, 208–209; see also fascism tradition 1, 6, 8, 12–13, 32, 40, 49–51, 54–57, 96, 101–102, 105–106, 108, 110n13, 110n16, 118, 120, 122, 125, 128, 133–146, 149–157, 157n3, 158n7–158n8, 158n10, 158n14, 159n15, 159n20, 163, 165–169, 175n4, 184–185, 187, 192, 197, 199–203, 205, 207–209, 220, 231–232, 237, 239, 241–244, 246, 249–253 traditional societies 48, 65, 118; see also modernity transcendence 13, 30–33, 35, 37n27, 101, 103, 121–122, 124–125, 127, 129, 134–135, 137, 140–143, 148–150, 152–153, 157n3–157n4, 158n8, 158n10, 158n14, 159n15, 164–166, 168–169, 172–174, 188, 193, 198, 202–203, 240, 247, 249; see also de-transcendentalization transcendental 31, 33, 35, 99, 104, 107, 110n6, 123–124, 137, 162, 164, 168, 174, 198–199, 203–204, 252 transnationalism 108, 173, 214, 217, 219–226 Ukraine 9, 255 universalism 4, 8, 120, 127, 129, 141–142, 150–151, 158n14, 162, 164–165, 168, 172–174, 192–193 universality 7–8, 12, 48–49, 58, 64, 85, 105, 118–119, 121, 125–129, 130, 133, 135–136, 138, 140–143, 146–147, 149–157, 159n19–159n20, 165, 167, 172, 188, 192, 200, 216, 246–247 United States of America 15n7, 56, 81, 83, 89, 214, 219–220, 242, 255 Weber, Max 2, 6–7, 9, 15n8, 19, 23, 37n13, 40, 49–52, 56, 66, 68, 77–78, 82, 89, 92n10, 107, 118, 147, 165, 172, 183–184, 197–200, 207, 216, 231–233, 241, 247 Weltliche Autonomie und Religion in der Konstitution der Moderne 248, 252 world formation 11, 20–21, 24–25, 29, 32–35, 233; see also disclosure world-interpretation 2, 137, 149

Index  263 world region 11–12, 14, 50–54, 56–57, 58n1, 214–217, 220–221, 225, 236–237 worldview 2–3, 13, 105, 121–125, 127, 129–130, 133, 136, 140–141, 148–149,

152, 154, 156, 158n8, 158n13– 158n14, 163, 172, 202, 208, 245 Zarathustra 120 Zwischen Natur und Gesellschaft 2, 242