The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization 9780231535045

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The Disclosure of Politics

New Directions in Critical Theory

New Directions in Critical Theory Amy Allen, General Editor New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones Democracy in What State? Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa

The Disclosure of Politics Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization

María Pía Lara

Columbia University Press    New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lara, Maria Pia. The disclosure of politics: struggles over the semantics of secularization / Maria Pia Lara. pages cm.—(New directions in critical theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16280-7 (cloth: alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-231-53504-5 (e-book) 1. Religion and politics. 2. Secularization. 3. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title. BL65.P7L34 2013 322'.1—dc23

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover photo: photo by Grant Faint © Getty Images References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

2012050236

To Nora R abo tnikof for sharing with me “The Secret of Her Eyes”

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale)

“For Benjamin, the past is not “there” to be discovered, nor is it “here” to be invented. . . . It requires instead a willingness to intervene destructively as well as constructively, to shatter received wisdom as well as reconfigure the debris in new and arresting ways” —Martin Jay, “Force Fields”

Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1 1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change: The Emergence of the Concept of Emancipation 29 2. The Model of Translation: From Religion to Politics 59 3. Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model: Conceptual Transformation 70 4. Blumenberg’s Second Model: The Persistence of Mythical Narratives 79 5. Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics: Semantic Innovation Through Religious Disclosure 99 6. Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization: The Enlightenment as Problematic 125 7. Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model: Bringing Justice Into the Domain of Politics 141 8. The Disclosure of Politics Revisited 166 Notes 187 Bibliography 217 Index 225

Acknowledgments

T

his book is the result of several courses that I taught first in New York: a postgraduate course called, like the book, The Disclosure of Politics, then two more in Mexico on the same issues at my university (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa). I wish to thank those students from the New School whose works and commentaries enriched my course and allowed me to gain some clarity in my project of writing this book. Their names are Shelby Canterbury, Nahed Habiballah, Diana S. Mattison (her help and commentaries were very good and useful), Dean R. O’Hara, Timoth J. Palmer, Grant T. Shafe; to those who were not registered but whose contribution was equally important for me: Celina Bragagnolo, Mark Kelly, and Will (whose last name I do not know). I also received good feedback from my students in the two courses I taught at my university. I wish to thank Francisco Yedra, Diego Arroyo, Ernesto Cabrera, Arizbet Lira, Octavio Martinez, Erik Soria, Luis Flores, Iyazu Cosío, Andrea Escobar and Liliana Arcos. I also need to thank, most especially, for carefully reading several versions of the manuscript: Martin Saar and Chiara Bottici, whose good insights,

xii  Acknowledgments

sharp criticisms, and helpful suggestions were invaluable in the completion of the final manuscript. By the same token, I received wonderful commentaries and suggestions at the Prague Conference of Philosophy and Social Sciences where I presented several chapters in the last few years. My special thanks to Maeve Cooke, who gave me very good suggestions and proposed revisions of the first chapter. I also wish to thank, most especially, Bill Scheuerman, Claus Offe, Gary Minda, and Amy Allen. Again, special thanks to Alessandro Ferrara who invited me to give a lecture on the first chapter of this book at his seminar in his university in Rome, where I benefited from many good questions and commentaries as well as sharp critical insights. My gratitude to Massimo Rossatti and the other participants in that seminar. I am also very grateful to Eduardo Mendieta and Craig Calhoun for inviting me to participate on a seminar on Habermas’s work about religion and the public sphere. All those who participated in it gave me good critical insights. I am especially indebted to Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and, again, Maeve Cooke and Cristina Lafont. I owe a greal deal to Richard J. Bernstein; he offered the invitation to work for the philosophy department during 2009/2010. The work at his university turned out to be fundamental for my project. Dick Bernstein has always been generous to me and his insights about my work were always helpful and stimulating. His friendship has given me so many things that this recognition should extend to the most personal of levels. In the same way, I need to thank Carol Bernstein for her friendship and her intellectual and emotional support over many, many years. During a trip I made to Spain to participate in a conference on Hannah Arendt and Agnes Heller, I was able to give another lecture on the chapter on Hannah Arendt. For this opportunity, I must thank Angel Prior, Fina Birulés, and Cristina Sánchez. Their stimulatingquestions and comments gave me a chance to think more deeply through many of the issues in this book. I also enjoyed very good conversations on the subject of my book with many colleagues and close friends: Nancy Fraser, Eli Zaretsky, Amy Allen (again), Nora Rabotnikof, Remo Bodei, Vanna-Gessa Kurotkschka (who unfortunately died, but her memory remains in my heart), Corina Yturbe, and Elías Palti. In Mexico I owe special thanks

Acknowledgments  xiii  to Sergio Pérez, Gustavo Leyva, Jorge Rendón, Jesús Rodríguez, and Tere Santiago because they were the first ones to listen and attended the first lecture I gave on my book. My most sincere gratitude goes to Kitty Ross whose help in shaping and styling my English has been invaluable; thanks to her my ideas sound coherent. I hope that this is not the last time we work together. I wish to thank Eric Jimenez for his help on the first draft of my book. I also owe much to Wendy Lochner, who has always supported this project and others on which I have been engaged. One can’t be luckier than I have been, sending her two projects that she has fully supported from their very beginnings. I want to thank my students and assistants for all their help, most especially Claudio Santander. My younger assistant, Laura Cabrera, has worked hard helping me with my courses to allow me to complete this book. Last, once again many thanks to my sisters Ana, Magali, and Silvia for being there while this project was evolving, for their support and love. And to Nora Rabotnikof whose friendship has been key for what I have become as a human being.

The Disclosure of Politics

Introduction

Genealogies

R

  ecently, Charles Taylor, among others, has written about the   different meanings that are attached to the concept of secularization.1 It seems clear from his analysis that we have only just become aware of the difficulties and problems that the term secularization suggests. The apparent separation of church and state and the ways we think about how religion and politics might interact are now open questions. Indeed, it is no longer unusual to see that political theorists from both the left and right are prepared to give up what we once took for granted, namely, the fact that, in modernity, religion was supposed to play only a secondary role in politics. Renewed interest in religion seems to be supplanting a critique of ideology and polemics when it comes to questions of justice and politics. Political theorists are arguing about how many political concepts owe more to religious semantics and structures than they do to another form of conceptual innovation, as we once thought.2 They seem to be forgetting the important contributions that politics has made.3 Indeed, politics seems to be losing ground. It is either underestimated altogether or presented as if it

2  Introduction

were a discourse or a realm that cannot be separated from religion. The so-called Weberian disenchantment has vanished. The renewed interest in religion has prompted an explosion of works about the different meanings of secularization. Just as modernity has come to be regarded as an assemblage of plural meaning occupying different historical and geographical contexts, the meanings of secularization seem to be undergoing a similar process. Indeed, secularization is a wide and ambiguous concept and, due to particular and contextual uses, it has also become a polemical one. As Reinhart Koselleck has eloquently argued, the term secularization can be called a concept, because, as a result of the historical vehicle of semantic transformation, it has vastly different connotations. Two things must be clarified here: one is that the term religion has been used in different ways throughout the history of Western thought. For the Greeks and the Romans, it meant something other than what we have come to accept with the Christian appropriation of the term. It was Plato who first coined the term political theology in his Republic to define the “science of politics.”4 For the Romans, on the other hand, the Latin word religare was related to forming a community: “to be tied back, obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman and hence always legendary effort to lay foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for eternity.”5 For the Romans, the term religion was almost synonymous with political activity, and it meant, literally, to be tied up with the past, with tradition. The term also connoted ties that articulated its relation to the law, since the Latin word lex was used to define a relationship: “These ‘laws’ were more than the means to re-establish peace; they were treaties and agreements with which a new alliance, a new unity, was constituted, the unity of two altogether different entities which the war had thrown together and which now entered into a partnership.”6 Thus, it was only when the Christian Church took the legacy from antiquity, from the Greeks and Romans, that the older semantic notion of religion became linked to the Augustinian translation of the Platonic world of “ideas” as truth and to the Roman notion of heritage as the meaning of foundation, which was ultimately reinterpreted as “the resurrection of Christ.”7 This historical step allowed for the institutionalization of the word religion as having an altogether different meaning from the one used by Greeks and Romans: The “politicalization

Introduction  3  of the Church changed [the semantics of] Christian religion.”8 In a way, the Christian faith became a “religion” not only in its postChristian sense but also in the ancient sense, as Hannah Arendt was keenly aware.9 This is the reason Talal Asad has not only questioned the post-Christian sense of the universal meaning of religion, but has also warned us about the danger of using it to build up a normative model. “There cannot be a universal definition of religion,” he writes, “not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes” (my emphasis).10 As we consider the complexity of the task of defining the transformation of the term secular, we do well to remember that we must frame any discussion about the history and changes undergone by this term according to its uses in different geographical places and contexts. Secular is derived from the word saeculum, which comes from the roots secus and sexus. It was connected linguistically to sex, generation, age, time to govern, the lasting of life, and a period of one hundred years. The modern transformation into the worldly concept of saeculum or “secular” (Weltbegriff) came to be related to the category of “century” (Jahrhundert), even though it had a pre-Christian origin. But this fusion of meanings only became common in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It was meant to express the passage from a religious to a secular state. Thus, the regular church became “secular.” The religious right has continued to use the word in this semantic sense up until the present. Though, the term was meant to describe a semantic opposition between the spiritual versus the secular (  geistlich/weltlich), the large-scale transformation of the concept is tied up with notions about the future and with the changing horizons of expectations and experiences of social actors, as Koselleck has clearly demonstrated in his work. This double structure of history and language allows for an interrelationship, a connection between our conception of time and the relation between past and future as well as between diagnosis and prognosis, which are articulated within the concept itself. This is the reason we need to use Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), which allows us to detect “[the] persistence, change, and novelty [which] are thus conceived diachronically along the dimension of meanings and through the spoken form of one and

4  Introduction

the same word.”11 By tracing back the continued use of the concept, its overlapping with different meanings and the thematization of the discarded ones as well as the new ones attached to it, we can find the indicators that allow us to relate the concept to the experiences and aspirations of social and political actors and their historical and contextual problems. My main argument for using Koselleck’s conceptual history is to claim that concepts not only have the capacity to translate and transform themselves from their original usage but can also become innovative if they end up disclosing new areas of political action. This is the reason Koselleck described these new goals as redefining the “horizons of expectations” of political actors.12 However, if we also acknowledge that history is involved in the transformation of the concepts, then we must agree that what Koselleck calls the other category—“spaces of experiences”—must be taken into account. These experiences are also significant because the actors undergo a transformation with respect to their projects, their struggles, and the political tensions involved in their efforts to change themselves and their own societies.

Debating the Concept The recent debate about how to understand the current meaning of secularization seems to be avoiding the lesson that a group of German theorists—Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas—thematized some decades ago. Before we can adequately explain why we use the term as we do today, we must trace its genealogy. For example, in A Secular Age Charles Taylor broadly conceives of three aspects of secularity, mostly from a phenomenological perspective: 1. The retreat of religion from public life, 2. the decline in belief and practice, and 3. the change in the conditions of belief.13 Taylor assumes that his criteria represents the standardized and commonly accepted account of how and what occurred with the different processes of secularization. But I claim that, before we can agree with Taylor, we need to know who the relevant political actors were in the development of secularism, when they began to use the term as they did, and why their expectations were related to their experiences through new and different ways of understanding the concept.

Introduction  5  In his attempt to describe the processes of secularization by differentiating between political and social notions, Alessandro Ferrara has taken an alternative approach.14 His account consists of, first, the political dimension embodied in the terms laïcité (its French version) or religious neutrality, meaning that the “narrative of its rise is coextensive with the narrative of the modern separation of church and state at the end of the religious wars.”15 Second, rather than seeing the phenomenon only through its political expression, Ferrara suggests that secularism has a social meaning, inasmuch as it reflects a process by which religious communities cease to influence the law, politics, education, and public life. According to him, today people are less concerned with following rituals and symbols that mark the significant moments of their lives and do not regard religion as one of their main concerns. As an example of the marginality of religion, he notes that art as an expression of religious feelings or inspiration has virtually disappeared. Ferrara argues that the distinction between political secularism and social secularism is useful because it allows us to draw nuances in the asymmetries and imbalances between historical traditions. To demonstrate the complexity of the processes of so-called secularization, he claims that we should reflect on the different ways that non-Western countries and traditions manage to cope with their own local and historical contexts. He maintains that this process is useful because it allows us to understand the ideological uses of secularization as it has dominated the Western political and social thought of the last three centuries. While Taylor is interested in the modern phenomenological experience of the different meanings of secularism, Ferrara helps us grasp how theories of democratic citizenship and the institutional separation of religion from politics need to be theorized further. Because juridical norms and forms of consciousness have developed at a more rapid pace than the religious ones, our notions of equality and toleration have been transformed. In his description of the ways in which religion and political neutrality have actually worked in democratic societies, Ferrara describes the compelling challenges that societies must face in the process of secularization. After thoroughly considering both Taylor’s and Ferrara’s accounts of secularization, I maintain that only Ferrara’s provides us with a

6  Introduction

perspective on how the different processes of secularization evolved and offers specific examples related to contemporary practices. Taylor presupposes that we have some common ground concerning those different experiences of secularization, but this position is difficult to accept because he sees the process of secularization as being universal. Thus we must acknowledge that Koselleck is right to point out that “the phenomenon of Säkularisation cannot be investigated solely on the basis of the expression itself. For the historical treatment of words, parallel expressions like Veweltlichung (secularization) and Verzeitlichung (temporalization) must be introduced; the domain of church and constitutional law must be taken on account historically; and, in terms of intellectual history, the ideological currents which crystallized around the expression must be examined—all before the concept of Säkularisation is sufficiently worked up as a factor in and indicator of the history to which it relates.”16 In order to understand the different meanings of secularization, I will begin by acknowledging that the German theorists on whom my book focuses had already identified secularization as an ambiguous concept because of its articulation of temporality. The subject of time has been the primary concern of philosophers of history since Hegel conceived of history as the locus of time. It is also “time” that completely transformed the social and political vocabularies of modernity. As Koselleck argues, “since then [when time was introduced], there has hardly been a central concept of political theory or social programs which does not contain a coefficient of temporal change, in the absence of which nothing can be recognized, nothing thought or argued, without the loss of conceptual force.” Without a “temporal perspective, specific concepts of legitimation would no longer be possible.”17 Thus this book is not a work on the genealogy of the concept of secularization, but, rather, on how the specific German theorists constructed different models of secularization in their debate about the conceptual change of politics and religion. The German debate about secularization shows how the historical development of certain concepts became constitutive of the spaces of the experiences and expectations of modern political actors and how those experiences and expectations ended up transforming the political landscape of Europe.

Introduction  7 

Transl ation, Transformation, and Innovation in Conceptual History Here is another point about the present debates on secularism that I intend to address: The religious roots of political concepts have an ideological core that must be thematized differently. Even if religion and the persistence of religious beliefs is the predictable response to globalization, I am doubtful about the current shape of the debate and about its outcome. Indeed the sense of defeat that characterizes recent efforts by political theorists is rather perplexing. For that reason I felt the need to retrieve a specific historical discussion about secularization— one that takes into account the spirit of our times but avoids the lack of clarity of the present debate. The authors who once discussed secularization—Karl Löwith, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas—also focused on the kind of political models they wanted to suggest. Through their debate, the question of the autonomy of politics became associated with the transformation of our conception of history and with the ways in which modernity altered our notion of time, specifically of time in relation to politics. The relationship between history and politics that was articulated in the German debate demonstrates the kinds of semantic relationships that can be established between religious and political concepts. By understanding this, we may gain some much-needed analytical clarity on the complicated relationship between religion and politics that still persists— and why it is still both a matter of dispute and a product of conceptual and historical change, transformations, and innovations. I think that the present debate has seriously exaggerated the interdependence of religion and politics because many of the studies that focus on politics now misinterpret or minimize the importance of modern political innovation. The issue of conceptual innovation offers us a perspective on how such concepts as public opinion, publicity, critique, and emancipation have played key roles in the development of political concepts throughout modernity—up to and including the present. In returning to the question of politics’ dependence on religion, it seems to me, there is a danger of forgetting that the privileged relationship between how actors and concepts related to each other

8  Introduction

is better expressed through Koselleck’s linking the categories of the “spaces of experiences” with the “horizon of political expectations.” While my goal is to illuminate some of the conceptual innovations that have occurred in politics in modernity, I do not argue for a return to the historical moment when theorists took for granted that the term secularization was, more than a description of contemporary events, a universal, normative model. Rather, I seek to show how conceptual history can help us grasp the difficulties and problems of conceptual transformations. Thus The Disclosure of Politics also focuses on how the question of secularization is related to the history of political concepts. Indeed, political theorists who designed a role for religion had explicit reasons for doing so, and their reasons were political through and through.18 Each chapter of this book focuses on the model for secularism proposed by a particular theorist—Karl Löwith, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas. Resounding through all these different approaches is the idea that secularization is really an argument about what kind of politics the theorist wants to preserve or to create anew and the categories she has developed to achieve this goal. It was not by accident that Carl Schmitt initiated the debate over secularization, for he was the first to offer the polemical definition of secularization as the translation of the religious semantic field into politics. Schmitt defined political theology as the name given to a specific evaluation of secularization as a model of semantic translations. According to his views on secularization—which are deeply informed by a cultural pessimism prevalent among the intellectuals of his generation—modernity is a process of decay. He writes on political theology as an effort to articulate and to develop a deep connection between a confessional Christian theology and a strong notion of state sovereignty (1922).19 By now it is clear that he wanted to develop crucial connections between a hierarchical conception of God as the omnipotent lawgiver and his ontological views of an authoritarian state.20 Although Schmitt described his views of political theology with the help of religious semantic contents, he nevertheless considered politics to be autonomous. Later he acknowledged that his earlier views on the concept of the political had changed—from 1927 and 1932–33— leading him to express the opinion that everything is potentially politi-

Introduction  9  cal and that politics can emerge in every domain of human existence. Thus it seems that even Schmitt derived more from his philosophicalmetaphysical anthropology than from a strictly religious ground.21 Accordingly, he used religion as a vehicle to convey his political goals and outlook insofar as religious semantics offered him the best articulation of his own understandings of power as domination and of his characteristic conception of sovereignty as the decisionism of a ruler. And it was Schmitt who influenced thinkers such as Reinhart Koselleck and those who followed. Reinhart Koselleck (Görlitz, 1923), a student of Schmitt and heavily influenced by him (Schmitt could not be his formal adviser, since he had been separated from his duties as a professor due to his collaboration with the Nazi regime), became the leader of the field that we know now as conceptual history.22 Koselleck’s notion of conceptual history was inspired by Dilthey’s project as it was reinterpreted—after “the linguistic turn”—by the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a method that allows us to establish dialogues with past traditions, authors, and their works. The use of this method in political theory has been the subject of criticism due to the asymmetrical results from the point of view of the interpreters.23 Nevertheless, we might consider Gadamerian hermeneutics and conceptual history to be two methods relating language to history, as though they bore family resemblances, to use the Wittgensteinian expression. Because conceptual history specifically concentrates on political and historical concepts through a genealogical account of their emergence and their possible disclosure of new political dimensions, this will be the method that we will be focusing on. Koselleck’s notion of conceptual history illuminates for us how the debate about secularization was also a struggle about the kind of political theory that modernity provided. In this debate certain thinkers sought connections between religious eschatology and imperatives for the translation of religious semantics into politics. Those thinkers were interested in highlighting the relevance of the state, the hierarchical notion of power, and the way to fuse them into a unity. Other thinkers, such as Hans Blumenberg, opposed the idea that modernity provided no innovation over and against religious translations. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age Blumenberg put forth a significant effort to refute Schmitt’s views about politics and modernity.24

10  Introduction

Crucial to his argument was his description of how modernity made possible new kinds of fields of action—like art and science—when actors regarded themselves as self-referential subjects. Later on, Blumenberg became more interested in how the realm of symbolic meanings, associated with his views on myth—expressed in his major book, The Work on Myth25—would be a more appropriate model for politics. There he was able to argue about the importance of the ways human beings deal with their existential anxiety (Angst) and the ways myths help them cope with those moments of total uncertainty. Blumenberg’s method involved reworking certain myths that had gained significance because they captured the human need for existential reassurance. In my view his work is a valuable contribution to a kind of politics that has been little explored,26 and I discuss what makes his contribution one of the most original ones in the debate. When he focused on the subject of symbolic meaning as a useful tool for a theory of politics, Blumenberg allowed us to envision the space of the social imaginary and of culture as vital sources for politics. He also offered a much-needed nuanced understanding of the way the spaces of experiences relate to the horizons of expectations of political and social actors. Hannah Arendt sought a way out of the Western philosophical tradition due to the horrendous experiences of totalitarian regimes and her skeptical views about the philosophical tradition and the history of politics. Because of the difficulties she faced in her task of separating herself from the specific political theories of her time, her views are not so easy to summarize. I will argue, against Samuel Moyn, that Arendt is not a “sketchy” thinker on political issues, but, rather, quite the opposite.27 When we examine her work carefully, it appears that, in focusing on the conflicts between philosophy, religion, and politics, she uses a sort of a genealogical criticism of the entire Western philosophical tradition. Her views about religion are historical reconstructions of different terms, just as her ideas about political concepts were related to Jesus’s actions—not in a religious way but in a “disclosive” manner. I show that she used religious narratives to suggest new ways with which to think about politics and power. Indeed, Arendt’s views about the secular should be thematized differently from the common interpretations of her work, since she questions the ways in which tradition fused religion, authority, and politics. Her intellectual approach

Introduction  11  had careful nuances, and I intend to elucidate them in order to demonstrate her originality and her critical efforts to emphasize the problems that reside within the Western tradition of philosophy in relation to politics and religion. Arendt made a significant effort to define the meaning of worldliness (the secular) as the capacity to build up an innovative theory of politics. In contrast to Schmitt, she refused to define politics as a matter between ruler and ruled, between the passive acceptance of and the active exercise of sovereign power.28 She succeeded in developing a new way of looking at politics, power, and freedom, even as she used Christian religious narratives as other thinkers had done in the past.29 She consciously connected herself to Spinoza through the deployment of the term multitude that he had first coined. Using the American Revolution as her example, she also constructed an empirical model of revolution—an exemplar of her conception of politics—as the locus of new beginnings and transformative actions. For Arendt, foundation and innovation go hand in hand. Jürgen Habermas, for his part, so thoroughly understood the intentions of Koselleck’s reconstruction of modernity that he took it as inspiration for building an entirely different model of politics, offering a perspective on how concepts can help social and political actors envision new areas for change. Habermas also saw how the actors’ struggles can contribute to changing the political landscape of expectations and developing the contents of new norms (human rights for example). By formulating a notion of the public sphere and of public opinion as central processes wherein democracy and justice are constructed by social and political actors, Habermas’s model presented an innovative program of deliberative democracy. His model of politics will help me illustrate the meaning of what I shall call the disclosure of politics, which I will discuss in the next section. On the other hand, Koselleck’s conceptual history allows me to show how his two main concepts establish the correlation between the limits of “the experiences” of actors and provide for “the horizons of their expectations.” Indeed, according to Koselleck, concepts not only provide social and political actors with tools for understanding the meaning of their actions, they are also vehicles of action. Concepts are thus mediators between symbolic and material institutions and between stimuli and actions. The social reality, the extralinguistic plots, are

12  Introduction

not limited to a linguistic frame, since the spaces of experience and the horizons of expectations involve a web of symbolic meanings that are tied up with their actions and goals. Concepts exceed their mere semantic or linguistic representation. This is the reason why, for Koselleck, a concept—insofar as it crystallizes historical experiences and expectations—can eventually alter, frustrate, or enhance the expectations and actions of political and social actors. By focusing on the transforming dynamic of semantic meanings, Koselleck gives us a valuable tool for understanding the way concepts can become either weapons of “political wars” or vehicles for social and political transformation. It is also through Koselleck’s notion of conceptual history that we can focus on the concept of “secularization” as what he called the Neuzeit, the so-called process of modernity (or Sattelzeit). Koselleck’s thesis, which was first elaborated in close collaboration with his teacher Carl Schmitt, was crystallized in his work Critique and Crisis.30 This book was an attempt to formulate a devastating critique of the whole process of modernity (and reason) by introducing a historical account uncovering how absolutism planted the seeds of the Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment, in turn, underwent a major transformation that Koselleck regarded as a crisis brought about by the association of the French Revolution (and other revolutions to come) with the concept of violence. For Koselleck, the development of the concept of a sovereign state (Thomas Hobbes) also introduced the first weapon of the Enlightenment, namely, the concept of reason. From then on, the crucial demarcation of public and private would set the stage for struggles between citizens and state in order to recover the political agency that was lost in the process of conceptualizing the sovereign state. The debate involving these issues unfolded in a dynamic struggle between two different conceptions of politics: the statist one represented by Schmitt and Koselleck and the deliberative one represented by Arendt and Habermas. For Koselleck, politics was embodied mainly by the state, and the citizens’ moral views were limited to the private realm. Because the state was the sole accountable political actor, citizens were left with no real outlet for political activity. Their obligation was to obey. The emergence of new ideas such as public opinion and emancipation as a result of the Enlightenment provided citizens with the capacity to act. Informed criticism would eventually lead to the development of

Introduction  13  a strategy against the state. From the perspective of statists, it was then (the late eighteenth century) that civil society and Enlightened criticism acquired their political character, for they embodied the “moral powers” as opposed to the “political powers” of the state.31 As Elias Palti has clearly pointed out, “the more that kings identified themselves with God as a transcendent identity with relation to the societies upon which they exercised their power, the more that these societies appeared as having an entirely autonomous existence independently of sovereignty. This was so, however, due to how they appeared embodying two different principles between them: the principle of justice and the principle of the administration.”32 At the same time, as the result of the transformed notion of time focused on the future rather than the past, the discipline of philosophy of history emerged. This took the place of prophecy as way of prognosticating the future. Political theories were used as weapons of war against the absolutist state, thus transforming the landscape of politics. This transformation was what Koselleck considered the major crisis that resided within the unsolved aporias of modernity. As we will see, it was precisely the new relationship established between morality and politics that turned politics into something entirely new: the subject of interest for theorists preoccupied not only with notions of power and domination but more generally with concepts of legitimacy and political justice. In that sense the struggles of politics to survive without religious semantics made it possible for new actors (civil society) to define themselves through political justice as they actualized a horizontal (rather than vertical) structure of social relations.33 Habermas’s conception of the Enlightenment shows how the disclosure of new concepts for the political transformed the bourgeois public sphere into a big tent shared by different groups, the space where public opinion would take shape as practical rights. In comparing Habermas’s model with Koselleck’s in the debate about secularization, we gain a better understanding of what was new about modern politics and how much it owed to the emergence of new concepts. We can also see how, as the measure of historical time becomes irreversible and creative, a place was set for new political designs to emerge, a place where agents can envision new experiences for acting and interacting politically. It is in this way that the immanence of history relates the immanence of politics.

14  Introduction

Immanence here does not mean that there are no normative possibilities of understanding social changes. Rather, it means that suffering and alienation are the main experiences that cause actors to set up new goals for social transformation. By connecting temporality, inequality, and exclusion with social and political transformations, modernity thus made conceptual innovation possible.

The Meaning of Disclosure I will use the term disclosure to define the capacity of a concept to open up a previously unseen area of interaction between social or political actors. In my view the best example of a disclosive concept is Kant’s concept of publicity. In “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784) Kant presents his theory of justice and democracy by way of his categories of publicity and the public sphere. Thus he opens up political theory to questions about the legitimacy of political power, because “the public use of one’s reason” allows for the free flow of ideas in which the deliberative processes are transparent and visible.34 Kant introduced the idea of a relationship between morality and politics because he thought that the government should act according to the law, and with this relationship he established the normative condition that granted legitimacy to the visibility of power: The exercise of state power needed to have checks and balances from civil society. Thus Kant introduced the notion of right as mediating between morality and politics. The concept of the public use of reason promoted the substantive ideals that were to be shared by citizens inspired by a moral outlook: Enlightenment, visibility, and the use of public reason were not understood as the mirror of nature, but as a shared and intersubjective ideal. In this sense Koselleck’s reconstruction of enlightened intellectuals leading their criticisms against the state is only a partial account of what happened. Indeed, Kant observes in “What Is Enlightenment?” that citizens “must obey” and comply,35 but not give up the capacity to express their criticism in public. Kant’s concept of publicity made it possible for “each citizen” to envision himself “comment[ing] publicly, i.e., in his writings, on the inadequacy of current institutions.”36 The situation Kant was describing made clear that no constitution would be possible without citizens’ critical questions.37 Thus Habermas,

Introduction  15  leaning on Koselleck’s notion of conceptual history, declares that “the usage of the words ‘public’ and ‘public sphere’ betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings,” and, he adds, “they fuse into a clouded amalgam.”38 Habermas excavates the different historical meanings given to terms such as publicity and public and clarifies that the public sphere did not require a name of its own before and took its function only when “it was specifically a part of ‘civil society,’” which, at the same time, established itself as the realm of “commodity exchange and social labor governed by its own laws.”39 Indeed, Habermas claims, “civil society [itself] came into existence as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority” (my emphasis).40 This account of a new schema for the interactions of political actors was reinforced because of the role they expected to play in politics. Arendt explores how Kant’s concern with politics led him to crystallize the concept of publicity as a new way to think about the relationship of morality to politics. She claims that Kant was convinced that a person could be a good citizen insofar as the state was a good state. But no state could be good without checks and balances from citizens and the existence of counterpowers to impose limits. As Arendt argued, “the bad man is, for Kant, the one who makes an exception for himself; he is not the man who wills evil, for this, according to Kant, is impossible. Hence the ‘race of devils’ here are not devils in the usual sense but those who are ‘secretly inclined to exempt’ themselves. The point is secretly: they could not do it publicly because then they would obviously stand against the common interest.”41 Thus, she concludes, “in politics, as distinguished from morals, everything depends on ‘public conduct.’”42 Kant’s concept of publicity described the basic human feature of “sociability,” which is also captured through the elements of political actions such as communicability (our need to deliberate about common interests with others) and the freedom to think, to publish, and to write with critical insight. How did Kant conceive of the idea of power acquired through publicity? For Kant, public deliberation should stimulate mutual enlightenment between the public and the state. Citizens’ education would be the antidote against arbitrariness. The transformative role played by enlightened elites or intellectuals was vital to generate public opinion. With that in mind, Kant thought his concept of publicity could help to eradicate the state’s arbitrariness and

16  Introduction

transform the will of individuals into a collective expression. Political authority was thus the result of the legitimacy of law built up in a constitutional republic. Likewise, political legitimacy was then related to moral authority. In creating an innovative concept that allowed actors to see themselves in a different scenario of new political interactions among other actors, Kant changed the territory of politics. It was through Habermas’s account that we also learned that, before the public sphere acquired its explicit political functions in relation to the state, private persons were already configuring an apolitical public sphere—the literary one—that would, ultimately, provide a training ground for the full disclosure of the political public sphere.43 Koselleck, for his part, explains that this happened “when eliminated from politics as a whole, the members of society would meet in wholly ‘non-political’ localities: at exchanges, in coffee houses or at the academies, where the new sciences were studied without succumbing to the State-religious authority of a Sorbonne; or in the clubs, where one could not pronounce judgment but where one could discuss the contemporary judiciary; in the salons, in which l’esprit could rule without commitment and did not carry the official stamp it bore in pulpits and chancelleries, or in libraries and literary societies where one talked about arts and letters, not about the policies of the State. . . . The outcome was an institutionalization behind the scenes, one whose political strength could not unfold openly.”44 Last, the term publicness became an organizational principle for the procedures of the organs of the state, and, in that sense, political actors also spoke of publicity. Parliamentary deliberations were public, the courts held trials in public, and the independent judiciary also had to be checked by public opinion. All these structural transformations had occurred and were provided by different social and political practices, which were first captured with Kant’s formulation of a disclosive concept. Finally, in his appendix to Perpetual Peace, Kant calls “the formal attribute of publicness” his main category of public right: “All actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public.”45 Publicity was an innovative concept and had no previous connection to any religious semantic content. As I have tried to show, this concept is key to understanding the development of modern politics; its disclosive capacities have continued

Introduction  17  to reveal other unimagined, previously unseen areas of interactions for social actors.

The Meaning of Transl ations In the late 1940s Karl Löwith became the first theorist to explore the differences in the notions of time between pre-Christian paganism and post-Christian eschatology (1949). For the Romans, the reckoning of historical time began at the beginning, with the foundation of the city of Rome. For Jews, the beginning was the world’s creation, situated through an eschaton. The view of history offered in the New Testament delineates the story of salvation as progressing from a promise to a fulfillment, focused on the figure of Jesus Christ. So, for Christianity, Christ’s birth became the chronological starting point, and according “to this central event the time is reckoned forward as well as backward.”46 Löwith claims that our habit of thinking in terms of the Christian tradition is the reason we divide all historical time into past, present, and future. The history of salvation acquired an impersonal teleology of a progressive evolution and transformed itself into a secular theory of progress. This was Löwith’s thesis about how religious eschatology was reintroduced into the philosophy of history and our conceptions of history, politics, and theology. His views about how the theological perspective became embedded in a secular translation were close to the ones previously exposed by Carl Schmitt, who coined the concept of translations as analogies.47 Schmitt claimed that it was Leibniz who first established the similarities between jurisprudence and theology. He argued that working out similarities through analogies was meant not as a way of “playing with ideas, whether mystical, natural-philosophical or even romantic” (37) but of finding common structures and then elaborating an identity. Furthermore, Schmitt insisted that, even in the most basic concepts and arguments of public law and positive jurisprudence, “the state intervenes everywhere”—at times as a deus ex machina, at others, as a merciful lord—but always by establishing an identity with the lawgiver, the executive power, the police, the pardoner, or the welfare institution. For this reason he concludes that the “state acts in many disguises but always as the same invisible person” (38).

18  Introduction

Thus Schmitt is keen to determine how the analogies help to establish the supremacy of the state; his concept of sovereignty was meant to explain this. Part of his efforts at acknowledging others who had previously transformed the “religious fiction” into the “juristic fiction” (39) was to show how the religious-political identity between the omnipotent God and the ruler was always visible in conceptual history. Schmitt explains his historical reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty by analyzing how Enlightenment thinkers—until the French Revolution—often spoke of an architect of the world whom they called a legislator. Later on, the sovereign was seen as an aspect of a deistic view of the world, and he got pushed aside and was supplanted by “the machine [that] now runs itself” (48). Schmitt charges Rousseau with allowing the people to become the true sovereign, and this was how “the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was thus lost” (48). During the nineteenth century, Schmitt claims, all concepts and political ideas emerged from immanence rather than transcendence, and from then on the “conceptions of transcendence will no longer be credible to most educated people, who will settle for either a more or less clear immanence, pantheism or a positivist indifference toward any metaphysics” (50). Schmitt blames the left-Hegelians—as atheists— who finally performed the most radical change: “Viewed from this perspective of the history of ideas, the development of the nineteenth century theory of the state displays two characteristic moments: the elimination of all theistic and transcendental conceptions and the formation of a new concept of legitimacy” (51, my emphasis). Schmitt’s strategy lies in recouping theology through reference to two key figures: Donoso Cortés, because he was “in complete accord with the thought of the Middle Ages, whose construction was juristic,” and Thomas Hobbes, because through his decisionistic thinking he acknowledged the meaning of the state’s motto “Autoritas non veritas facit legem” (52). For Löwith, on the other hand, modernity did not innovate; it translated. These translations posed a variety of challenges, but the eschaton filtered through them again and again. This view has similarities with a Gadamerian theory of translation.48 It also involves a construction of analogies of the same story of redemption, which seemed useful for new political theory. Through the establishment of similar

Introduction  19  goals like “redemption,” these theories of politics share with religion its semantic contents and coincide with one another. Löwith claims that “behind the visible figures and happenings, mysterious powers are invisibly working as archontes or primary agents (Rom. 13:1; I Cor. 2:8). Since Christ, these powers are already subjected and broken, but they are still powerfully alive. Invisibly, history has fundamentally changed; visibly, it is still the same, for the Kingdom of God is already at hand, and yet, as an eschaton, still is to come. This ambiguity is essential to all history after Christ: the time is already fulfilled and yet not consummated.”49 The reductionism of this theory of translations leaves little room to thematize differences between the kinds of translations that theorists have made. Consider the work of Hegel. Löwith considers Hegel the philosopher who became a master of translation. Granted, there is no doubt that Hegel made the most radical of translations between religion and philosophy. For example, he designed his philosophy of history against the pagan acceptance of fate. His conception of history was imbued with an irreversible direction toward a future goal, one that could be mobilized through reason and that embodied a philosophical God. For Hegel, God embodied reason and grounded its authority as an independent realm from religion. As Karl Löwith declares, “to harmonize the view of history, as it appears at first glance, with the ultimate design of the world or the ways of God, Hegel introduces the idea of the ‘cunning of reason’ which works in and behind the passions of men and their agents.”50 Modernity substituted obedience for responsibility; in that way, Hegel’s theory of absolute spirit left behind the classical world, whose conceptualization of fate robbed humans of any responsibility for their actions. Indeed Christianity articulated the very possibility of translations by establishing a conception of selfhood in relation to the absolute.51 With the coming of Christ, time is fulfilled, and, as a result, it is possible in the historical world to find religion (Christianity) translated into the form of secular freedom. This is Hegel’s true theodicy, “the justification of God in history.”52 Hegel transposed the Christian expectation of a final consummation into the historical process that now turned to itself. Löwith sees Hegel as the major representative of eschatological translations, responsible for bringing about a radical change in the

20  Introduction

way humans saw themselves. However, I claim that what made Hegel a truly innovative philosopher, one who entered modernity by transforming it, was his ideas about agency, the constitutive role played by conflict, the relationships between social actors and institutions, and, finally, the powerful connection between history, norms, and institutions. All these dimensions are overlooked and neglected in Löwith’s account and tend to remain hidden if we consider him only as a reductionist. Recently, Hegel’s pragmatism has been reexamined by some Hegelian thinkers, notably Robert Pippin, who is well aware of how Lowith’s and others’ interpretations were triggered because Hegel’s “turn toward the problem of accounting for historical change .  .  . looked worth attending to. This was particularly so since Hegel’s account was neither realist nor relativist, but [it] ‘promised some view of rationality of at least basic or fundamental conceptual change.’”53 One of the major notions that Pippin develops in Idealism as Modernism is Hegel’s understanding of the question of meaning through practice.54 “Hegel believes that such a sociality, as origin, condition of possibility of sense, can (ultimately if not originally) sustain itself and cohere among the subjects participating in it, only if somehow [they are] inherently ‘rational.’ Such sociality can function in making significance possible because it is governed by norms that are actively and in some sense self-consciously sustained by a community, as well as periodically undermined and altered.”55 According to this view, social practices gained authority because of an inner reflective force. Pippin insists that Hegel’s theory of sociability focuses on how individuals connect a normative meaning to their free activity (Gemeinschaft), which would not be possible if their capacity to regard agency were not first acknowledged. Thus Hegel understands mutuality and recognition as institutionally secured by a Rechtsstaat. In his own terms, Hegel’s claim takes into account the way in which our practices carry a memory of failed attempts and new resolutions to accept a norm. Though Pippin does not give Hans Blumenberg’s account much weight in his nuanced interpretation of Hegel, it is because of Blumenberg’s narrative about modernity that Hegel’s achievement is thus intelligible: Hegel coined a new concept of sociability based on agency. This perspective will be fully explored in chapter 3, which focuses on Blumenberg and his work on The Legitimacy of the Modern

Introduction  21  Age (which was mainly conceived as a critical answer to Karl Löwith’s thesis on translations). A second example of nuanced translations can be found in the work of Karl Marx. The materialistic interpretation of history attempted in Marx’s work is portrayed by Löwith as a synthesis of all his categories (class struggles and the relations between labor and capital) into one “comprehensive historical pattern.”56 If, for Hegel, the world had become philosophical, for Marx philosophy had to become worldly. Marx was capable of establishing new ties between the past and the future because he interpreted history as developing its own conditions of offering a final solution for the antagonism between capital and labor, between oppressor and oppressed. What is less evident in Löwith’s account is Marx’s idea that chances for emancipation are possible and feasible through self-education. Marx thought that, through his writings, he could help political actors acquire knowledge about transforming their situation. This dimension of Marx’s program does not escape Koselleck’s attention, who notes that “what was novel about Marx was his conception of the repetition represented by the actual revolutions of 1830 and 1848 as merely a caricature of the great French Revolution; on the other hand, he sought to effect this repetition in consciousness so that the past might be worked off. Marx sought to engender a learning process which would, through the acquisition of a new revolutionary language, found the singularity of the coming revolution.”57 Thus Marx invented a new conception of revolution as a conscious claim to leadership. The temporalization of certain concepts imbued agents with responsibility and the “instruments for direction” of a historical movement. As Koselleck clearly demonstrates, “they are not simply indicators, but factors in all those changes which have overtaken civil society since the eighteenth century.”58 Marx also made use of and defined the disclosive term ideology by allowing actors to alter the functioning mode of sociopolitical language. Clearly, this process sparked a true struggle over the concepts—and over the power to interpret the concepts—of consciousness, behavior, and possible actions. Marx’s greatest achievement in introducing this new sense of the concept of ideology was to disclose how utterances could be called errors, lies, or prejudices. Thus, as Koselleck acknowledges, “ideological criticism” became a “linguistic weapon.”59

22  Introduction

Finally, Löwith’s main concern was to highlight the way in which the post-Christian world became a “creation without creator, and a saeculum (in the ecclesiastical sense of the term) turned secular for lack of religious perspective.”60 This world, says Löwith, is Christian by derivation and anti-Christian by consequence. Paradoxically, Christianity’s major failure was its incapacity to make the world Christian. Löwith’s pessimistic conclusion was that “the whole moral and intellectual, social and political, history of the West is to some extent Christian, and yet it dissolves Christianity by the very application of Christian principles to secular matters.”61 Löwith’s pessimism ends up questioning the kind of hope brought by Christian redemption. And, he concludes, “The Pandora myth, as told by Hesiod, suggests that hope is an evil, though of a special kind, distinguished from the other evils which the box of Pandora contained. It is an evil which seems to be good, for hope is always for the better. But it seems hopeless to look forward to better times in the future, since there is hardly a future which, when it has become present, does not disappoint. Man’s hopes are ‘blind,’ i.e., unintelligent and miscalculating, deceptive, and illusory.”62 By embracing the ancient notion of history (historein), Löwith seeks to replace the modern conception of progress and hope in the future with a wiser classical perspective, based on the “eternal return of the same,” in which experience acquires more weight. The past will become the place of the legitimacy of tradition (Gadamer). The role of experience, however, will be taken on by Koselleck, who will develop it more systematically with his conceptual history.

The Realms of Immanence Versus Transcendence Let me say a few words about the dialectics between immanence and transcendence in relation to politics. As I hope I have shown, Carl Schmitt discussed the need to return transcendence to politics because of his specific conception of politics as political theology. But Schmitt is not alone in this effort: The entire history of Western politics is riddled with efforts to use religion for politics and to use politics for religion. In fact, the history of politics—and the development of political theologies—can be seen as a dynamic historical struggle in

Introduction  23  which political theorists tried to achieve their goals and provide a different scenario through the development of their concepts of politics. With regard to the actual debate, we might again raise the following question: Is transcendence a necessary attribute of politics? The answer is ambiguous, as it depends on the reason or purpose transcendence is seen as essential. In the redemptive view, for example, such as the one proposed by Marx, a central focus of his project was showing how to materialize revolution using a transcendental force. This force—which was inspired by the meaning of divine justice—came from the belief that political actors were involved in a struggle for the liberation of all human beings. Their hope in and commitment to the goals of redemption inspired them to perform their task even if they might fail, because a major goal of salvation was to find the means to end suffering, injustice, and oppression on earth. The redemptive force that Marx captured with his doctrines later came to be regarded as religion. Leszek Kolakowski described this as the tragedy of communism, as its interpreters believed they were embodying a utopia. Indeed, Marx’s followers regarded Das Kapital as a new bible. But when his doctrines were applied to communist societies, there was no place for criticism. This was one of the features of Marxist politics that Löwith grasped with horror. On the other hand, when postmodern theories declared the death of ideology and the communist regimes in the Western world were defeated, an ideological void opened, which made possible the return of political theologies. This occurred before various theorists understood how instructive the history of politics and political theology is about the difficulties that lie at the basis of defining the specific meaning of politics. What can we say, therefore, about the political theologies of such thinkers as Walter Benjamin or Johann Metz? Are they really relevant at the present moment? Habermas seems to believe that this may be the case. He claims, if political theologies help us formulate our normative conceptions with a “sensitivity to time” and make us aware of the risks of our current historical situation, that it is possible.63 I have many doubts about this. Claude Lefort describes the time in which we are living with great lucidity: Rather than seeing democracy as a new episode in transfer of the religious into the political, should we not conclude that the

24  Introduction

old transfers from one register into the other were intended to ensure the preservation of a form that has since been abolished, that the theological and the political became divorced, that a new experience of the institution of the social began to take shape, that the religious is reactivated at the weak points of the social, that its efficacy is no longer symbolic but imaginary, and that, ultimately, it is an expression of the unavoidable—and no longer ontological—difficulty democracy has in reading its own story, as well as of the difficulty political or philosophical thought has in assuming, without making it a travesty, the tragedy of the modern condition? [my emphasis].64 What is “the tragedy of our modern condition”? To interpret Lefort’s question, we need to focus on how the phrase refers to the kind of devices modern politics has created. The creation of new arenas for social interaction was the biggest achievement of modernity. Modernity brought us the political concepts that belong to politics in its immanent conditions. Furthermore, modern politics deals with freedom and contingencies such that we cannot accept a place for transcendence without creating unsolvable problems for politics. The history of conceptual change is instructive in thinking about how politics became the space that allows for the creation of institutions to control power, to appeal to public deliberations in terms of norms, and to define the best ways in which we can actually learn to live together. But this task is difficult. It involves deciding the limits of power, enhancing the possibilities for freedom of action, and crystallizing our goals of justice within one common project and constitution. History has shown us that the experiences of political actors have also included failures, setbacks, and considerable amounts of suffering. This is precisely why we must understand concepts as mediating between the expectations of actors and their experiences. Before considering some of the concepts related to the immanence of action and power, I will quote Hannah Arendt’s views about the relationship between politics and religion. Arendt clearly understood that “the Church needed politics, both the worldly politics of secular powers and religiously oriented politics within its own ecclesiastical realm, in order to be able to maintain itself on earth and assert itself in this world—that is, as the visible Church, in contrast to the invisible, whose

Introduction  25  existence, being solely a matter of faith, was entirely untouched by politics. And politics needed the Church—not just religion, but also the tangible, spatial existence of religious institutions—in order to provide its higher justification and legitimation.”65 What changed in modernity—Arendt claims —is that politics needed new “arenas” for political actors, and they only found these when new concepts were formulated. According to Arendt, we should be able to find the place where politics and theology connect if we think about the issues in two different ways. First, Arendt argues, because philosophy and theology are both concerned with man in the singular (93), their views coincide on many important points. At the same time, she says, politics “deals with the coexistence and association of different men” (93) with a variety of different views and public presence. Yet no single concept of man can take into account the needs of such a broad spectrum. Politics is not about metaphysics; it is postmetaphysical—which is why it needs to be framed as an immanent subject. On the other hand, philosophy claims that there is something political in the term man, as if this were its essence. To this claim Arendt responded that “this simply is not so; man is apolitical” (95, my emphasis). Aristotle used the word politikon as “an adjective that applied to the organization of the polis and not a designation for just any form of human communal life, and he certainly did not think that all men are political or that there is politics, that is, a polis, no matter where people live” (116). Politics only arises between men; it is a constructed and difficult interrelationship, “there is, therefore, no real political substance” (95). Arendt sees a second connection between politics and philosophy in the monotheistic conception of God, since both philosophy and theology centrally place the concept of God “in whose likeness man is said to have been created” (95). So, philosophy describes man as a metaphysical entity who only becomes plural by adding a repetition of the same and fusing these instances into one general concept. Political theorists define, and are concerned with, “man” as a solitary entity and see their task as defining his “essence.” This conception of man as an isolated being was taken by Hobbes, who offered his own solution to this apolitical state of nature with the help of a theological device: the contract. In so doing, politics became entangled with a philosophical conception of the human as an isolated being and with a theological conception of society owing to the religious device of the covenant.

26  Introduction

Thus, Arendt claimed, “the West’s solution for escaping from the impossibility of politics within the Western creation myth is to transform politics into history, or to substitute history for politics” (95). In contrast to this way of thinking, Arendt clarified the origins of the word politics. She reminded us that it came from the Greek polis— the city—and it was in the city where we first find the concept of politics. Politics was the fundamental space where humans can become “truly free” through their actions, for “freedom exists only in the unique intermediary space of politics” (95). This notion of politics was distinguished from communal (religious) life, because—according to Arendt—the polis was the real place for freedom: “being free and living in the polis were, in a certain sense, one and the same” (116). Thus Arendt argues in favor of thinking about politics as it arises in the spaces between men who are different and who need to construct their rules of coexistence together. In Arendt’s view, the most important activity of free life moves “from action to speech, from free deeds to free words” (124). In other words, freedom is about spontaneity, plurality, and the contingencies of action. Thus we discover that her concept of freedom takes shape only when we understand it in terms of the empirical and historical traces of living societies, wherein Arendt found her immanent notion of politics. Other elements of her perspective help us grasp in more depth the immanent character of politics. First, Arendt argues that though a person can initiate something with an action, she is not the owner of its ends, for the contingencies of the ends are always at stake. A second point concerning this immanent framing of politics lies in Arendt’s ideas about power. She argues that the best illustration of the fact that, in Greek politics, “freedom of action is the same thing as starting anew and beginning something,” is the word archein, “which means both to begin and to lead” (126). For her, a person who initiated something was a “leader” who sought companions to help him carry his action to fulfillment. The original meaning of the word prattein is “acting” (126). The Romans also spoke of this kind of action as a foundation where a beginning had been made (initium; 126). Thus, political action does not occur in isolation and, in this sense, always entails acting with others. Acting with others is how power is felt. Power belongs to no one, but it can be felt when people come together and act in concert. Action is also related to spontaneity, because “it depends on organizational

Introduction  27  forms of communal life to the extent that it is ultimately the world that can organize it” (127–128). It is then that the “world” as a political entity emerges, and as such it becomes “the substance and meaning of all things political” (129). Finally, Arendt concluded that “this world of relationships most certainly does not arise out of the strength or energy of the individual but, rather, out of the many, and it is out of their being together that power arises, a power that renders even the greatest individual strength powerless” (162). Thus both actions and power need to be understood under this immanent frame. Immanence is ultimately the substance of politics, but is not devoid of normativity. For similar reasons, Lefort claimed that we can only understand the history of democracy as an immanent process. All the social movements of the 1960s—the American struggles for civil rights, the feminist struggles for equality, the multicultural struggles for recognition—were innovative actions that were made possible by the precise use of concepts. Concepts become powerful only if they succeed in both transforming our notions of civil, political, and social rights and influencing the development of their institutionalization (as rights of recognition and as rights of inclusion).66 When we find it difficult to envision new normative designs, we often revert to narratives from the past. It is for this reason that nowadays we seem to have arrived at a crossroads where the turn to political theologies only shows our lack of political imagination—a situation that Lefort refers to as a “social deficit.” Social movements, which need to be understood in terms of the normative sources of the social imaginary, have brought about other conceptual innovations. Here, too, conceptual history might be useful. We need to see how, as a result of certain concepts or the novelty of political aspirations, actors learn to design new scenarios. These scenarios involve differentiating between the probability of making real changes and the possibility of short-term symbolic satisfaction . Actions occur when actors and theorists are simultaneously capable of understanding how to fill the gap that separates their experiences from their expectations of what formulating a concept involves. In this sense we could also speak of politics as the space in which actors learn how to do things with concepts. An immanent conception of politics conceives of power as an empty placeholder. In the past the conception of religious power provided

28  Introduction

a reference to an entity (God) that was transcendent and could be embodied by a concrete figure (the king). Since modern times, however, politics has accepted a notion of power that is immanent, which belongs to no one in particular. Furthermore, power is, symbolically speaking, also an empty placeholder. With this insight in mind, Arendt concluded that “there is also the additional insight that power is generated with the establishment of a sphere of political action, whatever its defined limits, and that freedom can protect itself only by constantly watching over the exercise of such power.”67 Finally, when modern political theorists of democracy developed their strategies to substitute the concept of authority for one of legitimacy, they also concluded that the subject of power is filled with our conceptions of society “without any possible determination,”68 since this is what is at stake. As Claude Lefort suggests, if power belongs to the realm of immanence, “it is because the division of power does not, in a modern democracy, refer to an outside that can be assigned to the gods, the city, or holy ground; because it does not refer to an inside that can be assigned to the substance of the community.”69 It is in the division of powers that we find the fundamental experience of the internal division of modern politics, and this historical process made clear how democratic constitutions were finally able to emerge as one of its main subjects. Thus the real subject of modern theories about democracy is the institutionalization of possibilities for conflicts over redefining justice. Politics is, according to Lefort, “the field of competition between protagonists whose modes of action and programs explicitly designate them as laying claim to the exercise of public authority. This immediately reveals the link between the legitimacy of power and the legitimacy of conflict that seems to constitute politics, but it must also be noted that this phenomenon presupposes the coming together of a number of conditions relating to social life as a whole: freedom of association and of expression, and the freedom of ideas and of people to circulate them.”70 In sum, it was through conceptual history and in discovering how politics belonged to the realm of immanence that it truly gained its autonomy from theology. Modern politics established its grounds by relating societies to their experiences and hopes of its own institutionalization.

1 The Semantics of Conceptual Change The Emergence of the Concept of Emancipation

M

y focus in this chapter is on conceptual history and on innovation in political theory. First, I must say a few words about why I regard conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) as the most appropriate method for the subject of conceptual innovation. Gadamer’s development of hermeneutics as an interpretive method of theories and traditions proved fruitful for many areas of social knowledge.1 The major contribution of hermeneutics is its ability to articulate the relationship between language and history as traditions. After the linguistic turn, the English school of the history of political theory, exemplified by Quentin Skinner,2 developed its own versions of hermeneutical and political interpretations, which were based on a more analytic framework than Gadamer’s. Skinner—and others like him— was interested in the performativity of texts and saw a need to treat them intertextually by showing how theories (and their authors— even ancient authors) could be placed under questioning from a contemporary point of view. This method entailed the acknowledgment of a common horizon between present and past,3 between author and interpreter, and between one tradition and another. This approach produced what Gadamer called the hermeneutical circle. Gadamer’s

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method was useful when applied to works of art, history, and theories of law. Skinner’s method, on the other hand, was less successful. Criticism arose because these kinds of political inquiries effectively produced a very particular way of understanding authors and concepts.4 Skinner claimed that it was important to relate an author’s concept to his beliefs. As an example of his method, he offered this gloss on the Machiavellian term virtù: “It gains its ‘meaning’ from its place within an extensive networks of beliefs, the filiations of which must be fully traced if the place of any one element within the structure is to be properly understood.”5 At the same time, however, Skinner claims that it is impossible “to embark” on such a task without a considerable overlap of “our beliefs and the beliefs of those whom we are trying to investigate.”6 As a result, Skinner’s interpretations (the socalled fusions of horizons, in the Gadamerian sense) do not entirely avoid the same charge of ventriloquism that the English-school theorists had raised against more traditional historians. Skinner explains that when embarking on the historical task of interpreting specific texts within their historical contexts, the relation between authors and their beliefs is what counts. Nevertheless, as he describes it, the goal is “to acquire a perspective from which to view our own form of life in a more self-critical way, enlarging our present horizons instead of fortifying local prejudices.”7 In conceptual history, by contrast, the emphasis is not on theories or on authors nor on whose voices and prejudices can be recovered in the present. Rather, the focus is on the concepts themselves and their genealogies.8 The uses of a concept—its particular ways of being invested with a contextual meaning and its possible transformations—are the subject of conceptual history. As I said in the introduction, concepts are the link between the experiences and expectations of political actors and their actions. While conceptual history is concerned with the beliefs or intentions of the theorists who formulate political concepts, its main focus is the concepts themselves—their historical emergence, transformations, and uses by the agents or political actors. Because concepts are articulated through semantic webs, concepts relate to one another in complex ways. By demonstrating how history shapes the experiences and the expectations of political actors, conceptual history explains how the past experiences of actors relate to their present expectations as well as to their future projects.

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  31  I maintain that the genealogical reconstruction of concepts through conceptual history is a more productive way to understand political theories than Skinner’s method. I further maintain that the processes of construction of concepts in modern political theory were guided by the efforts of political actors to separate religious from political semantics. While there is nothing new about saying that modern political theories were born out of the struggle to separate religion from politics, I claim that political concepts and theories about politics are also important tools for understanding the emergence of new kinds of political agency. Modern theories thematized the problem of the secular, for it was this term that had spurred social actors to create a new vocabulary for politics. In this chapter we will see how specific conceptual innovations developed as a result of changes in the semantics of such concepts. In the first section of the chapter I will analyze how, in their genealogical accounts, Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck connected concepts such as democracy, the state, emancipation, and the notion of critique to the web of a disclosive process of semantic transformations. From my particular vantage point as a philosopher (not a historian), my aim is not to engage in the production of a conceptual history, but, rather, to show how conceptual history as a method was used by Arendt and Koselleck to explain the way specific notions of political agency have undergone a change or a transformation. In discussing the first concept—democracy—we will see that the transformation took place as a result of two main factors. First, the concept contained enough ambiguity to include many possible new meanings. Second, this ambiguity allowed the concept to acquire a normative space within which it related to the emancipatory goals of political actors. Thus “democracy” was transformed from a description of a form of government in classical Greece into a megaconcept of transhistorical magnitude that comprises the experiences and expectations of the actors who were involved in the process of transformation. The next concept I shall look at—the “state”—is what Koselleck is best known for, as this was the subject of his first major contribution to conceptual history. In his book Critique and Crisis,9 he shows how the concept of the state became a counterconcept as a result of Enlightenment criticism—developed by philosophers and the literati—that equated it with hierarchical domination. Thus the state

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became the target of revolutions to come. The reason for examining this concept is to demonstrate how the transformation of a concept entails a dynamic change that can turn it into a counterconcept. I will juxtapose Habermas’s interpretation of this transformation with that of Koselleck, because the two accounts are opposed, and they will help us understand how a different interpretation of the concept of the state is illuminated in each theorist’s political views. The third concept—revolution—has been studied by both Arendt and Koselleck. Their genealogies will clarify the extent to which their efforts at reconstructing the concept are also aimed at separating it from its earlier connection to the idea of violence. Once we realize where both accounts were originally situated, it is particularly interesting to see the ways in which they are similar and yet so different. Arendt’s and Koselleck’s efforts to add new meanings to the concept of revolution will be helpful in understanding their goals as political theorists insofar as the empirical and historical examples they both use are meant to highlight the transformation of an original concept into something altogether different. The initial linking between the concept of revolution and violence will be broken once revolution becomes connected to new ways of thinking about past experiences and new goals, namely, the goal of emancipation. Thus the concept of revolution helps to disclose a new territory of political agency and of more horizontal political interactions. The fourth concept, emancipation, is a prime example of how a web of concepts becomes entangled with the linguistic capacity of actors for the disclosure of their interrelationships. Indeed, the way one concept connects to others is predicated upon the opening up of the horizon of new political expectations. Thus, by focusing on four particular concepts, I will show how political actors convey their novel aspirations and historical experiences through the use of a specific vocabulary that is disclosive of new spaces of political interactions. In the second part of the chapter, we will see how Koselleck formulated his theory of conceptual history as a way of explaining his two main categories: the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectations.” These two realms allow us to situate actors over and against their goals and actions. Using notions like political agency and disclosure—which are generally adopted from Koselleck’s theory of concepts and counterconcepts—I will develop a systematic

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  33  account of the theory of conceptual history. Indeed, Koselleck introduced several tools in his analysis of conceptual history that deserve our careful consideration.

The Features of Concepts Koselleck claims, first, that a concept must have an original signification, but it must also remain ambiguous. Second, the historical development and uses of a concept show how it possesses a “carrying capacity,” that is, it carries the potential of being invested with new and additional meanings that allow it to become a vehicle for actions. Third, these two features make it possible for the concept to be related to other concepts and to position itself on a conceptual map through its constitutive historical changes. This dynamic involves not only the movements of the concept itself but the ways it relates to other concepts. Negative valences, for example, can make a concept situate itself as the opposite of another that possesses positive meanings. (Think, for example, of how today we position the term democracy against the term tyranny.) Thus, insofar as concepts entail a specific understanding of political actions, the significance of the concept might be clarified through its conceptual mapping. Koselleck claims that formulating new concepts always involves the positioning of counterconcepts, since they express and clarify how shifts in aspirations and experiences affect the concepts’ semantics. Koselleck introduces the category of counterconcept in two different ways: First he posits the counterconcept as containing a meaning inscribed with a signification that allows the concept to position itself in the spatial mapping of its historical transformation as a dynamic relationship. The past experiences and transformations of the aspirations of political actors are always at stake in the conceptual mappings of concepts. When a concept captures a specific signification, it immediately unleashes the movement of a counterconcept as its opposite. This map of concepts and counterconcepts indicates the shifts in mentality and goals and expectations of political and social actors. The second way in which Koselleck conceives of political concepts and their counterconcepts is fundamentally influenced by the definition of politics that his former teacher, Carl Schmitt, used as his

34  The Semantics of Conceptual Change

major principle: political identities are ontologically situated within his distinction of “friends and foes.” I will demonstrate in this chapter how this view contradicts the first way of understanding concepts and their historical mappings. If we consider the first principle of spatial conceptual mapping, namely, that a concept has no fixed meaning, no fixed political identity possesses an inherent opposite. Concepts only situate themselves as opposites once their political goals of excluding others become clear,10 and this opposition is brought about through specific political strategies of the actors themselves.11

Conceptual History as a Genealogy of Politics I will focus on how Reinhart Koselleck, with his method of conceptual history, has given us a theory of the semantics of conceptual building and translation. My argument will show the ways in which his method was inspired and influenced by the work of Hannah Arendt,12 although the two theorists had very different perspectives on the meaning of politics. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that the dynamic of translation from one realm to another produces the transformation of the semantic relation between religion and politics in terms of political agency. Indeed, theories about the meaning of the secular have always been concerned with political action. The work of a philosopher of history like Koselleck, influenced by Arendt’s genealogical analysis and conceptual distinctions, shows that the process of developing new political theories is not a single process of semantic translation; it also involves techniques of transformation and innovation.13 It is well known that Hannah Arendt employed a methodological principle according to which she viewed changes in the meaning of political terms in light of their historical reconstruction. Her method is a sort of a genealogy. So conscious was she of the power of concepts that she endeavored to introduce innovative conceptual distinctions between revolution and violence, force and power, work and labor. Indeed, she understood quite well not only that semantic layers of meanings are historical and contextual, but that they also define and design a political landscape. Let me explain what I mean by the layers of semantic definitions and why I find the genealogy of political

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  35  conceptual formulation useful. Koselleck argues that a society cannot exist without common concepts and that the most important concepts are political, for they are related to the field of action. Following Koselleck’s position, one might also argue that our concepts are founded on political systems and embedded in a complex semantic web. But they are far more complex than being mere parts of a linguistic community. Moreover, a society and its concepts exist in a relation of permanent tension. The tensions involved in the creation or transformation of the semantics of a concept involve the new aspirations of political actors, which are related to their experiences. Thus my interest in focusing on the history of the formulation of political concepts relates to how those concepts possess a “carrying capacity.”14 This term means that a concept must possess sufficient ambiguity to allow it to acquire different meanings, which unfold through the new ways in which social and political actors relate their aspirations to their experiences. The full capacity of a concept is revealed in its persistence and in its ability to generate specific relations to other concepts, on which they originally depend, that allow for the disclosure of further meanings. The history of the concept of democracy is an example of what I mean by carrying capacity.

The Concept of Democracy: Its Transformation From Descriptive Term to Expression of a Normative Political Horizon When the concept of democracy first appeared in the Greek polis, it was meant as a constitutional form that dealt with procedures and regularities. While some vestiges of this meaning are still included in the way we understand the term, democracy has acquired a different meaning since the concept of popular sovereignty first appeared in the modern world. As soon as it became related to the notion of “the people,” the ambiguity of the concept deployed two different meanings as a result of the fact that the will of the people and the foundations of the exercise of power (sovereignty) come from two very different locations of meaning and semantic origins. Elias Palti has argued that the concept of democracy captures an unresolved tension, or an unsolvable problem, which he traces back to

36  The Semantics of Conceptual Change

the scholastics’ way of thinking about the question of power.15 Democracy defined a form of government, but it was also used to define the community that existed prior to the establishment of a political identity through a social contract. The term democracy immediately became connected to the question of who exercises the power, since the institutionalization of a political order presupposes a partition between the government and those being governed. For scholastics like Suárez, as Palti argues, the dimension of “the political” developed because it became clear that there could be no political community without a sovereign.16 If, for Suárez, political authority implied that sovereignty belonged, on the one hand, to a sole source (the king) and, on the other hand, to a form of government and a source of justice defined by the people, these two different sources presented an unsolvable tension. With the absolutist regimes came a change in the way the two notions were fused. The absolutist conception of sovereignty is a static one in which the king is invested with esoteric knowledge, since he and only he can represent divine power. At the same time, the king’s political identity is split into two different dimensions: as a divine authority and as a human being. One is a religious principle; the other is mundane. This fundamental dualism was partially solved once the sovereign’s power was imbued with a transcendental meaning and could thus be connected to religion . But the king’s legitimacy remained an open question, since, despite his transcendent authority, the king was still a human being. (For a time, a political theology solved this dilemma. This is the reason why both Koselleck and Palti argue that the absolutist regime fomented the tensions already present in the system, which were just as the scholastic political philosophers had described them.) Eventually this tension reached a point of no return: The king embodied the esoteric notion of the divine, as if God had given the king’s power a transcendental character. The king also embodied divine justice, since God created the principles of justice that were articulated in the natural order. But as soon as the Enlightenment idea of government, which provided a rational, that is, nonreligious, nontheistic foundation for the source of political power, took hold,17 the concept of divine sovereignty began to erode. With the notion that a government is attached to functionaries who are not anointed by God, the question-

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  37  ing of the sovereign king opened the door to a new split. Sovereignty and the form of government became the two different dimensions to give meaning to legitimacy, and both were fused into the figure of the king. But once the monarchy was subject to critical scrutiny, they again became split, and sovereignty became just one form of government among others. It was in this way that the place vacated by divine sovereignty came to be inhabited by the concept of the people (as popular sovereignty). This modernized conceptual development, in which the notion of the people was key to redefining new horizontal organizational forms that included the notion of a modern state and its social consequences, finally defeated the absolutist fusion. “Invocation of the rule of law and the principle of equality took up and modified old meanings,” as Koselleck put it.18 Primary in this regard was the connection of the term rule of law to the term equality, which had become the aspiration of political actors who redefined the term democracy.19 There were further modifications, such as the novel experiences of political actors.20 Yet what we must realize is that the ambiguities of the new concept are not easily traced. For this reason, we must focus on the way in which the concept of democracy undergoes dynamic transformations. The historical intermingling of semantics and the deeper thematization of the meanings that were attached to concepts become clearer once we can reconstruct the historical changes and uses that arise from specific contexts. Consider, for example, how Pierre Rosanvallon has explained how some of the ambiguities involved in the term democracy (he calls them the problems and aporias of the concept) were attached to the experiences of the social actors and the transformation that the concept has undergone. He also claims that the modern conception of democracy was originally linked to the notion of “the people,” itself such an indeterminate concept that the disclosed dimensions of the signification of democracy were not initially apparent. It was only after the emergence of the concept of representation— which was considered the locus of the new signification of democracy—that the question of who the “people” were became a significant problem to be solved.21 Indeed, the concepts of representation and of sovereignty are incompatible, since in this modern view it seems difficult to reduce a plurality to a singularity. When political actors were forced to define “the people,” they realized that such a notion was an imperative (for their new expectations

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were aimed at a more horizontal version of democracy), and yet it was ungraspable. Ernesto Laclau has given much thought to this problem in his book On Populist Reason.22 Laclau argues that the innovation of deploying the semantics of a universal signification “transmitted to other links of the chain, which are thus also split between [the] particularism of their own demands and the popular signification imparted by their inscription within the chain,” is complex and that this chain consequently made the concept into an “empty signifier” that could never be filled.23 For Sofia Näsström, the gap between the definition of “the people” and the dimensions of its meaning only shows that “a fully legitimate people [being the embodiment of the term] is indeed impossible to achieve.” But she rightly concludes that “therein resides its power,” since “the criteria of legitimacy makes the people into a site of perpetual contestation.”24 Näsström’s analysis clarifies how both the dimension of historical contingency and the immanence attached to the concept of democracy transformed it into a normative concept. The meaning of the concept of democracy has become an embodiment of a radical transformation on the actors’ expectations “by arguing that the people is the outcome of historical forces”—of a past “agreement,”25 a “retroactive” process of legitimacy,26 “democratic iterations,”27 or historical “storytelling”28—it is possible to free democracy from its relationship within the nation-state and affirm the idea of democracy as an “ongoing and incomplete” process of incorporating new normative claims of more horizontal political relations and of new ways to think about social inclusion.29 Thus Näsström’s argument highlights the way the concept has evolved as a normative political goal about social inclusion. Nancy Fraser has also expressed similar views about the issue of inclusion, arguing that it is for this reason that we need to thematize radical democracy in the face of misrepresentation.30 Fraser coined the word misframing to clarify how the concept of democracy has become a hallmark of political theories, because such principles of equality have been attached to it. Therefore democracy as a concept has unveiled the way in which the space that defines membership becomes a normative agenda precisely because it opens up the question of who decides membership and why. Another issue attached to the concept of democracy that has preoccupied political theorists concerns the clarification of the criteria or the validity for determining the distinction between reason-as-truth

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  39  and reason-as-opinion, since validity—traced through the content of defining—now put horizontal relationships at stake. Indeed, the concept of democracy had to develop its own form of horizontal reasoning as a measure of validity, but this has also been problematic. For example, Arendt thought that the problem of truth was a legacy of Plato’s vision of politics, which she interpreted as injecting the metaphysical notion of ideas-as-truth into the realm of politics. Thus she rejected this notion, because she feared it would unleash fundamentalist ideas into politics. Instead, she opted to rescue the Socratic concept of political-claim-as-opinion.31 Understanding the problem of Arendt’s argument about truth, Habermas, early in the 1990s, reworked the question of opinion32 and transformed it into a process utilizing the Rousseauian concept of the “general will” (volonté générale), connecting it to Julius Fröbel’s, which “anchors” it “in a procedure of opinion-and-will-formation that determines when a political will not identical with reason has the presumption of reason on its side.”33 Thus it became a form of an exercise of purification of the multitude’s opinion—the plurality of opinions— which would transform itself once one of the opinions had gained hegemony; only then and thereby would it become a process of “rational will formation.”34 Questions about representation are also related to numbers and reason. Liberal theorists have discussed the issue of the majority as one of legitimacy. The utilitarians have reworked this subject throughout the last century.35 As Rosanvallon argues, “This tension resides in the fact that modern forms of authority use universal suffrage to establish political equality at the same time that they require an increasingly rational power based on depersonalization.”36 This tension has become apparent only by retrospectively detecting where the semantic change established new tensions between the aspirations of political actors and their actual experiences. Another tension is what I will call the modern quest for “normative disclosure.” This occurs as a result of the attempt to define “adequate forms of social power,” since popular sovereignty has many difficulties expressing itself in representative institutions, which end up questioning their own legitimacy in one form or another. Finally, when democracy was related to the modern notion of emancipation, a new problematic appeared based on the two different,

40  The Semantics of Conceptual Change

and potentially conflicting, vectors on which emancipation rested, namely, the personal and the collective. The question then became how to understand individual projects of emancipation along with those belonging to the group or a community. This problematic helps us appreciate how the difficulties of political concepts are related to fundamental problems in the experiences of political actors and their changing expectations. The concept of democracy today still possesses enough ambiguity even if its valences continue to unfold into multiple new positive significations. These ambiguities refer to what I have called the tensions and aporias of the concept of democracy or to the concept’s carrying capacity. Despite the problems they raise, the so-called tensions and aporias remain fundamental to the way that the concept of democracy dynamically transformed its original meaning and continues to unfold in new, multiple positive significations. Consider, for example, how we began to see further structural tensions when theorists such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, among others, theorized about democracy as an ideal type. The aim of their normative universalism was to establish the proper contents of rational deliberation, define the meaning of popular sovereignty, and develop a universal criterion for justice based on the legitimacy of juridical rules. Critics such as Rosanvallon have argued that normative universalism—“normative disclosure”—is closer to the sphere of law and ethics than to the actual realm of politics and that it has often ignored the aporetic and contingent dimension of politics. However, I argue that Rawls and Habermas have played a fundamental role in articulating the new aspirations of modern and contemporary political actors. They have been successful in disclosing new perspectives for the expectations of political actors, because their models have offered new conceptualizations of political interactions that best express the normative meaning of democracy. Indeed, they have helped design a deliberative project that is a more radical exercise in equality of participation and profited from the way a concept’s ambiguity can help actors envisage new forms of political participation. Yet one must be clear about the tensions that these political exercises have stirred up, especially in relation to their normativity because, as we have learned from the different ways of defining modern, secular, and religious questions, there is no single valid model of democracy. Politics is the space of plurality. An ideal type of

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  41  democracy can be helpful in nourishing the expectations of political actors, but its universality lies in its iterations. Every society develops new significations in order to produce its own semantic iterations, best suited to its concrete problems. Thus, if the processes of democracy have a history, we must also conclude that democracy has a history too. When conceptual history focuses on the concept of democracy, it can help us trace how the history of concepts or their genealogies become the true laboratories of political agents. Conceptual history also helps us understand the landscape that corresponds through the concept and its historical tensions and aporias, which become apparent when new dimensions of the concept are problematized. Historically, though, as Arendt has reminded us,37 the initial connection to the rule of law, as it was re-articulated through the modern disclosive notion of equality38 along with the invention of the rights of men and citizens, provide the link to the modern notion of democracy. Social subjects sought the crystallization of their aspirations for change when they thought that they could become equals with one another, because of the fact of their being human, and they created laws that helped them protect those views about political agency and the relation of agency to their being human. The historic declaration of the rights of men and citizens during the French Revolution was the reference point of this new horizon.39 These claims to rights ended up conceptually disclosing new constitutional rights—political, civil, and social. These conceptual distinctions were later formulated as the result of social and political transformations and struggles brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the immanent dynamic of the historical changes provided by the actors’ new expectations. In this way, the use of the concept of democracy captured new valences: “It became a concept characterizing a state of expectation which, within a historical-philosophical perspective—be it legislative or revolutionary—claimed to satisfy newly constituted needs so that its meaning might be validated. Finally, ‘democracy’ became a general concept replacing the [ancient term of the] ‘republic’ (politeia) that consigned to illegality all other constitutional types as forms of rule.”40 The twentieth century was one of many conceptual displacements of emancipative semantics. The concept of revolution was at its peak during the first sixty years of the last century. The Soviet and Cuban revolutions were considered two successful projects that embodied the

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symbols of the political actors’ emancipation. Postcolonial struggles were also taking place around the world. However, since the concept of revolution was originally linked to the concept of violence—an association that had generated problems during the eighteenth century— major doubts about the connection between these two terms could not be erased until other historical experiences had come to pass, which also produced other traumatic outcomes. During the 1950s and 1960s the term democracy had a negative valence, as it was related to capitalist states and their institutions. But the practices and habits of political actors were also changing, insofar as the political upheavals involved young people. In The Age of Extremes Eric Hobsbawm argues that “the number of French students at the end of the Second World War was less than 100,000. By 1960 it was over 200,000 and within the next ten years it tripled to 651,000.”41 Many of these students were women, and many of their mothers were already working outside the household. The younger generation of student activists transformed their ways of socializing, which now included intense discussions about politics in universities, coffeehouses, and study groups where the students debated and learned from the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other revolutionary authors. As they organized themselves into social movements, they developed their political views with tools of critique against authoritarian institutions: they wanted to transform society, but they were unclear about how to do it. Violence represented the most extreme and vital expression of their understanding of the term revolution. Many of the students’ demands—particularly in France and the United States—were aimed at destroying the “authoritarian” rule of bourgeois institutions in their own countries. But they were unsuccessful largely because, as Boltanski and Chiapello have demonstrated in their study of capitalism,42 this critique became integrated by capitalism in its efforts to reactivate itself. In the 1970s, young people who had organized themselves into guerrilla groups turned to violent actions against their states. The tragedy of these undertakings can be exemplified by what happened in Italy with the violence unleashed by the Red Brigades, in Germany with the Baader-Meinhof group, and in many Latin American countries with the Tupamaros, the Montoneros, and other armed guerrilla organizations. This form of revolutionary violence unleashed

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  43  aggressive responses from the states, and many of them, as a result, turned into bloody military dictatorships. These experiences were crucial in the way that political actors would recover the meaning of the term democracy as it slowly returned to the scene of the original expectations and took on new positive valences. The final rehabilitation of the term came with the fall of the communist regimes in Europe. By then it was clear that the concept of revolution had lost its appeal for political actors. The women’s liberation movement had already substituted the term liberation for revolution, and their hopes and goals were aimed at transforming the whole of society in a nonviolent way. The semantics of the term democracy reactivated the goal of creating more horizontal relations in public and in private by challenging the domination of men over women. Simultaneously, the positive meaning of the term was also recovered through the struggles for workers’ rights around the world and the experiences of African Americans during the civil rights’ movement in the United States, which was led by Martin Luther King and inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s peaceful struggle of liberation in postcolonial India. These struggles were the real success of the new actors who rearticulated the connection between experiences and aspirations and imbued the term democracy with its most positive valence: democracy was the most radical form of political organization and an end in itself.

The Dynamic Shifts of the Concept of the State and How It Became a Counterconcept Let us consider another complex and multilayered example: the concept of the state. In its beginning, state related to many other domains and governmental functions, such as, domination, domain, bourgeoisie, legislation, jurisdiction, administration, taxation, and army. Koselleck argues that there were a variety of circumstances in which the term the state became the umbrella for different meanings. These meanings are important to the extent that the word can be thought of separately from that which it signified. However, “signifier and signified coincide in the concept insofar as the diversity of historical reality and historical experience enter a word such that

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they can only receive their meaning in this one word, or can only be grasped by this word”43. For Habermas, for example, the modern concept of the state was legally defined as a power that possessed internal and external sovereignty.44 Habermas points to the historical period of modernization as a crucial moment of change that brought about the separation of the state from civil society. It was then that the state acquired the meaning of a counterconcept and was defined as the state apparatus. Initially, its function was limited to being an administrative and tax institution. Along with the processes of modernization came the separation of the state from the economy. Although the separation of the private and public existed in antiquity, it was in the period before the French Revolution that the state was posited as the main institution of the public realm, and liberal theories banned it from intervening in the economy. This is why liberal theories defined the legal framework of the state as the infrastructure necessary for capitalistic commodity exchange and for labor. However, the financial needs of the state were met by privately generated taxes. A further transformation of the concept came when the state established a link with the concept of the nation. In antiquity, the classical Roman terms natio and gens were contrasted with civitas. However, the Roman republic used populus to define the community of a city instead of concepts such as tribe or nation. Later definitions of nation described communities of shared descent, geographically integrated through common language, customs and traditions. This usage extended well into the Middle Ages and modernity, at which time the words natio and lingua were used as if they were equivalent. Around this time, natio acquired a meaning opposed to the nonpolitical usage in a different context. As Habermas explains: “The feudal system of the old German Empire had been superseded by corporative states (Ständenstaaten) based on contracts in which the king or emperor, whose power depended on taxes and military support, granted nobility, the Church, and the towns privileges, and therewith limited participation in the exercise of political power.”45 Eventually, many of these states became countries. With the term nation, the aristocracy acquired its political existence, while “the people”—that is, the mass of subjects or the “multitude,” as Arendt called them—were denied one. The conceptual development

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  45  of the term, however, was a modern effort of fusing ethnic and political identities into one. Because the Greeks, differentiated ethnos from demos, political identity had nothing to do with culture. Demos defined how the political communities organized themselves after the polis. This is the reason, Bernard Yack argues, that “distinguishing civic from ethnic understandings of nationhood is part of a larger effort by contemporary liberals to channel national sentiments in a direction— civic nationalism—that seems consistent with the commitments to individual rights and diversity that they associate with a decent political order.”46 For Koselleck, it is here that we first find “the state” becoming the target of intellectuals and citizens who organize struggles to abolish it in order to claim their own political space of agency. Modern theories were dealing with these questions and proposing ways of solving the tensions. For Habermas, the transformation of the absolutist state into a people’s state was captured in expressions like “the revolutionary implications of the slogan ‘the King in Parliament’ in England and the identification of the ‘Third Estate’47 with the ‘nation’ in France.”48 Finally, the relationship of the state to the nation as a modern product came with the transformation of the Adelsnation, the nation of nobility, into the Volksnation, the nation of the people, which took place in the late eighteenth century. This occurred as a result of “a deep transformation in consciousness inspired by intellectuals, a transformation first accomplished by the urban, and above all formally educated, middle classes, before it found resonance in the wider population and gradually brought about a political mobilization of the masses.”49 As Benedict Anderson claimed in his work Imagined Communities,50 popular consciousness had a significant effect on the development of “national histories.” The achievement of the nation-state solved two problems at once: it became a new form of legitimacy, and this legitimacy created a new and more abstract type of social integration.51 It is here that we again find the space of normative disclosure. These historical changes led to the modern state’s being defined through the sovereignty of state power, which had originally been embodied in the prince. It also led to the conceptual differentiation of the state from society. And, with this shift from royal to popular sovereignty, the emergence of rights of subjects as human and civil rights transformed the entire political landscape.52 The process, however, was not without internal tensions, since

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the double meaning of the definition of citizenship was also the result of granting legal rights—that is, membership rights—that implied defining the notion of political membership as a cultural community. What is of more interest to us—in order to see how these tensions are relevant to the way semantic shifts added to concepts—is the process by which the mobility of a concept provides the changing positions of its counterconcepts. Habermas has argued about the necessity of adding new significations to the concept of the state because of this fusion of the cultural interpretation of political-membership rights. The modern concept of the nation-state also has become more ambiguous, since it was perceived as embodying an institution that established a more abstract level of social integration. Habermas called this concept of the nation-state “Janus-faced.”53 This description, which reveals the concept’s ambiguity, shows the tension implicit between the universalism of an egalitarian legal community and the particularism of a community united by a historical contingent destiny. Thus, as we have seen, the word state possessed potentialities of meanings, and, as a concept, it united within itself these potentialities, both good and bad. Furthermore, as we have seen, a concept is not only an indicator of practical and social relations, it is also a factor in defining them. In this way, “a concept always establishes a particular horizon of potential experience and a conceivable theory,”54 thus delimiting action. Nothing can occur without this kind of conceptual normative disclosure, as efforts from political theorists to capture the new spatial dimensions of actions and social interactions between agents and the fulfillment of their goals. As we have seen, the concept of the state went through a process of significant transformation in the eighteenth century with the decline of absolutist regimes. Under such regimes it had gained a negative valence, and all the revolutions that followed aimed to destroy it. Revolutionary theories described the necessity of struggle against the state because it was considered an apparatus of domination. The state only recovered its positive valence once the welfare state became a reality. By instituting policies related to enforcing the social and civil rights of citizens, the state as welfare state was reinvested with the meaning of administrative mediator between citizens and their constitutional laws. These historical changes were the products of the postindustrial revolutions. As the notion of the welfare state has begun to disappear

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  47  from our contemporary vocabularies and practices, we have started to discuss and theorize again about the possible new roles of the state in our globalized era.

The Emergence of the Neuezeit: Revolution and Emancipation There is a third concept that illustrates how conceptual history can help us understand the relationship between a concept and its carrying capacity. I am referring to the concept of revolution, which both Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck were concerned with—its possible meanings and the transformations it has undergone. These redefinitions led to the disclosure of previously unseen expectations and show that Arendt and Koselleck had specific concerns about revolution because of its long-standing association with violence. Arendt, concerned with the legitimacy of revolution, wanted to rethink and reconstruct the concept in order to rescue it from its negative semantic meaning of an endless violent revolt. (The relationship between violence and revolution will be the subject of chapter 5, on Arendt and her model of politics.) For Koselleck, the multiplicity of definitions of a concept betrays the term’s difficulty to describe different social and political practices. If revolution, as a modern term, was first used to describe an upheaval or civil war as well as a long-term change, the transformation of its semantics reveal how challenging it is to trace its development as an ambiguous concept. For Arendt, the concept of revolution had little in common with the Roman use of mutatio rerum or of the civil strife that occasionally disturbed the Greek polis.55 As Arendt saw it, the Romans and the Greeks were experienced at dealing with change and violence, but, because they understood time as a cyclical phenomenon, they regarded change as a return to the same. Indeed, the classical conception of history as cyclical changed, and violence appeared as “falling back into a different stage, but neither of them, that is, change and violence appeared to bring something altogether new” (21). Two things changed this way of thinking about upheavals and time: one was the experience of social actors’ not accepting how things were and increasing their aspirations

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for change. The other transformation of the concept of time occurred after the story of Christ enabled a secular notion of time as a new beginning. The modern concept of time, with its emergent notion of new beginnings, assigned an altogether new meaning to it. With regard to the first one, Arendt recalls that “the social question began to play a revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, and who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of poverty, and [in how] the labouring poverty-stricken multitude [saw this] as [not] inevitable and eternal” (23). Only after this had happened did the social question and the rebellion of the poor assign to the term revolution a significant role in actors’ political aspirations. With regard to the second, Arendt expressed her doubts about the frequent claim that modern revolutions had a Christian origin. She claims that “the argument supporting this claim usually points to the clearly rebellious nature of the early Christian sect with its stress on the equality of souls before God, [however] its open contempt for all public powers, and its promise of a Kingdom of Heaven—notions and hopes which are supposed to have been channeled into modern revolutions” (26, my emphasis)—were not the reasons for the change of its semantic definition. What moved the term revolution one step forward in its transformation was “the birth of a new, secular realm and the first stage of this secularization was the rise of absolutism, and not the reformation” (26). If Luther helped dissolve the bond between authority and tradition, his attempt to base authority on the divine word contributed to the loss of the concept of authority in modernity and not the establishment of a new sense of equality. Nevertheless, Arendt argued that Christianity did play a role in the transformation of revolution, albeit in a different fashion. Christian philosophy broke with the ancient concept of time by conceiving of the birth of Christ as a new beginning—a unique and unrepeatable event and a new way to interpret the old Roman concept of foundation. The modern concept of revolution was thus inextricably bound to the notion that the course of history had suddenly begun again, entailing the possibility of a new story unfolding itself. Arendt thinks of this event as the beginning of a unique story, its plot making room for the emergence

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  49  of a modern notion of freedom.56 Freedom is connected to the experiences of actors in relation to contingencies, in relation to a conception of history as immanent, and both freedom and experience were key in the way social actors understood the new meaning of the term revolution: “Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.”57 So aware is Arendt of the importance of introducing concepts and of their historical development that she concludes: “Each new appearance among men stands in need of a new word, whether a new word is coined to cover the new experience or an old word is used and given an entirely new meaning. This is doubly true for the political sphere of life, where speech rules supreme” (my emphasis).58 Koselleck followed Arendt’s historical reconstruction of the word revolution by using almost the exact same language and examples that she had used in her essay about the meaning of revolution.59 Koselleck also noticed that only since the French Revolution has the term revolution gained an “ambivalent and ubiquitous semantic potentiality,”60 with a carrying capacity that allowed other new concepts to disclose dimensions of new political actions. Like Arendt, Kosselleck explains that the notion of time first had to change, and he notes that it was Haréu who brought us this enlightened observation: revolution entailed a transformation, because it no longer signified a “turning over at the time” or “a return of the movement to the point of departure,” as it was meant in its original Latin usage. What Haréu actually meant was that, until modernity encouraged the expectations of political actors who sought radical change into something altogether new, a limited number of constitutional forms dissolved and replaced each other. 61 As we have seen, both Arendt and Koselleck thought that the concept of revolution was problematic because other meanings—such as violence, for example—were also attached to it. For Arendt, another problematic association was the idea of “irresistibility,” a naturalistic metaphor that was used to describe the fact that the position of the stars shifts according to a preordained pattern. Arendt claimed that this emphasis on the irresistibility of actions was so attached to our modern conception of time that even contemporary political actors have associated it with revolution. Arendt traced the moment at which this conceptualization appeared to the night of 14 July 1789, when Louis XVI heard of the fall of the Bastille, followed by the liberation

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of a few prisoners and the defection of the royal troops. He exclaimed to Rochefoucauld-Liancourt: “C’est un révolte.”62 To which Rochefoucauld-Liancourt replied: “Non, Sire, c’est une revolution.”63 Koselleck agrees entirely with Arendt and explains that this naturalistic streak “derived directly from the cycle of the stars, among which, since Copernicus, even the earth could be counted.”64 But Koselleck attempts to go further into the complexities, explaining that the concept of revolution—which was initially only a “physical-political” notion—was transformed into something completely different when the syllable re came to be a part of the word evolutio.65 The added re was an explicit way to indicate that there was a return to something previously established. Hobbes used the word revolution in this way when he described the events taking place in the twenty-year period, from 1640 until 1660, as a revolution (the English revolution). According to Koselleck, Hobbes “saw a circular movement, leading from the absolute monarch via the Long Parliament to the Rump Parliament, then to Cromwell’s dictatorship, and back via oligarchic intermediary forms to the renewal of monarchy under Charles II.”66 Even if the naturalistic metaphor remained attached to the meaning of a political revolution—with the assumption that time remained itself uniform and was repeatable—things were soon to be different. Koselleck explains that the transformation that took place changed revolution from a transhistorical concept into a metahistorical one— “completely separated . . . from its naturalistic origin and henceforth charged with ordering historically recurrent convulsive experiences.” This new emphasis provided the term revolution “with a transcendental significance,” since it “becomes a regulative principle of knowledge, as well as of the actions of all those drawn into revolution.”67 The bloody wars of the Middle Ages had been followed by a century of religious confrontations, riots, revolts, insurrections, rebellions, internal and civil war, all of them related to “the suffering and [the] experience of fanatical confessional struggles” (43). Koselleck explains that the old civil wars were conceptualized according to a perspective based on social order (Stände) and were thus conceived as bellum civile. This is the reason civil war and revolution were not interchangeable terms, although they were not seen as mutually exclusive. If civil wars meant bloody events of feuding because of structural or religious oppositions, over time the struggles themselves were seen as anarchic

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  51  and as the counterconcept of order, which eventually led to positing the state as the counterconcept of civil war: “The State, symbolically elevated in the Baroque era as a person, prohibited bellum intestinum by monopolizing the right of force domestically and the right to declare war externally” (44). If revolution was a transhistorical concept—which came to describe different upheavals—social unrest and rebellions were seen against the background of constitutional order. Thus a true political revolution could only be conceived as a repetition. So what made a complete transformation possible? The answer is given by both Koselleck and Arendt, as they articulated this change through their conceptual history method. Before the French Revolution there were no words to express the ways in which political expectations were aimed at transforming the whole schema and in which the rebels came to be seen as the subjects of new state. Indeed, as Koselleck argued, before this happened, “Social emancipation as a revolutionary process still lay outside experience” (44). Koselleck departs from Arendt’s ideas about innovation when he argues that the key factor that allowed revolution to acquire its full meaning as a modern concept was the idea of the acceleration of time. The “tempo of historical time has constantly been changing,” he wrote, “and today, thanks to the population explosion, [the] development of technological powers, and the consequent frequent changes of regimes, acceleration belongs to everyday experience” (47). (In this sense, Koselleck would absolutely agree with Hartmut Rosa’s diagnosis about modernity and the acceleration of time.)68 He claimed that the notion of the acceleration of time imbued in political theories made those theories substitutions for prophecies of a revolution to come, due to “an unconscious secularization of historical expectation.”69 While Arendt agreed with Koselleck that the notion of time as acceleration was fundamental for the change in the semantics of the concept of revolution, she never believed that political theories substituted for prophecies. Instead, she blamed the notion of irreversibility for the fact that theories made history appear as if it had a goal of its own. What seems more interesting to me than the relationship between revolution and the acceleration of time is the idea that the concept of revolution became the counterconcept of the state. Koselleck claims this can be shown through the neologism contre-révolutionnaire, which was translated into German—around the year 1800—as Staatsfeind,

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that is, the enemy of the state.70 Therefore, a new experience disclosed a horizon of social interactions, which created the various phases that ultimately led to the unfolding of the revolution of 1789. With this event we can see how the experiences of political actors moved from the spatial to the temporal and made prognosis an implicit and irreversible trend for all political theories. We have now come to the thought expressed at the beginning of this section: that Arendt considered revolution to be a concept that followed a path from the political to the social. What was original about this concept was the idea that the goal of a political revolution should be the social emancipation of human beings through the transformation of their social structure. If, for Koselleck, the French Revolution was the primary example of this goal, for Arendt the only successful revolution she cared to rescue was the American. But both authors agree that the most important feature of the change occurred, “once the declaration of human rights had opened up the social space of expectation, [for] every program strove for further realization in the name of freedom or equality or both.”71 Indeed, as Arendt argues, “There is no period in history to which the Declaration of the Rights of Man could have harkened back. Former centuries might have recognized that men were equal with respect to God or gods, for this recognition is not Christian but Roman in origin; Roman slaves could be full fledged members of religious corporations and, within the limits of sacred law, their legal status was the same as that of the free man. But inalienable political rights of all men by virtue of birth would have appeared to all ages prior to our own as they appeared to Burke—[as] a contradiction in terms.”72 Furthermore, Arendt argues that the Latin word homo “signified originally somebody who was nothing but a man, a rightless person, therefore, a slave.”73 What is noteworthy about this radical transformation is that historical contingencies and the immanent emergence of aspirations of social actors defined such experiences and expectations as the result of political struggles to change their given circumstances at birth into the political definition of the inalienable rights of men.74 The term men became a conceptual device that articulated equality as an innovative and valuable political dimension possessing normative disclosure. Indeed, as Arendt confirmed, the term revolution became a radical political position once it was endowed with a reality of its own, specific to the political realm alone.

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  53  In the eighteenth century the changing expectations of the social actors provided new goals, which were visualized as a new beginning, a true political phenomenon. During the Enlightenment, through the transformation of this conceptualization of revolution, the challenge of emancipation—as an embodiment of an expectation—made social actors demand the eradication of all forms of domination by humans over humans.75 What had started as an ethical principle of self-rule became a political demand for “inner freedom[  , and this] can only exist if it is also realized outwardly.”76 Needless to say, even if Koselleck regarded the French Revolution negatively, it did not stop him from seeing how the concept of revolution was connected to new aspirations brought about by a change in the political claims for rights. This historical outcome is definitely tied up with the emergence of a particular notion of emancipation. Koselleck recalls that emancipatio in the Roman Republic was derived from the phrase e manu capere, which described the legal act by which the head of a family (the paterfamilias) could release his son from paternal power. Koselleck explains that the term lost its specific meaning in Roman law and came to designate a natural state of coming of age, to maturity, once a young man had reached a specific age limit (twenty-five years at most). This term was transported into the Middle Ages as a technical, legal term, and has also been used in German common law. The linguistic usage was flexible and elastic, and around the year 1700 the age of maturity was related to the idea of independence and came to be described as emancipation. This way of interpreting the term was more influenced by the law rather than by other nonlegal theories. The counterconcept of emancipation was domination (Herrschaft). Curiously enough, in the Middle Ages the use of the term Knecht (vassal) was aimed at describing someone who—even when he had attained maturity—could not liberate himself from servitude in the feudal system. Koselleck explains that, during those times, there was no term for a general release from domination. And this void is what emancipation came to signify in the late eighteenth century: “The decisive transformation of meaning was brought about not by legal language but rather by the psychological, social, political, and, above all, philosophical usage of the word” (251). It is precisely through the coinage of certain semantic terms, which relate to the immanence of new interactions between social actors and

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their general social relations and behavioral patterns, that the expansion of the concept of emancipation achieved its full potential. On this point Koselleck’s conceptual history provides us with conclusive testimony: it was not through the noun form of emancipation, but first through the verb (the action) and the adverbial usage of the term that its semantic novelty disclosed itself. Looking back at antiquity again, we can find out how emancipare—which was used as a transitive verb—meant “to sell, or to dispose of” (252). Once it was used in a vernacular form in Italy and then in France, England, and Germany, its reflexive usage allowed it to extend its meaning from the common law sense of having reached a mature stage into signifying the life that one has as an act performed by one’s own authority. Indeed, to emancipate oneself was something that was unconceivable in the Roman tradition, and, as Koselleck explains, “the introduction of the reflexive verb ‘to emancipate oneself’ (sich emanzipieren) [illustrates] a profound shift of mentality” (252). After the initial use by philosophers, poets, and intellectuals, its meaning was extended in its active sense, reaching beyond groups and institutions to entire peoples. Of interest to our general argument is the fact that the anthropological and psychological shifts in meaning were directed against the Church, theology, tradition and authority, and, when the term reached the political public sphere, the landscape was forever changed. When Kant wrote about emancipation, he moved one step further, because the change from a natural stage of maturation to a moral and political “imperative” made the linguistic usage more powerful; for maturity had become a “historical perspective on the future of a politically self-ruling humanity” rather than a juridical matter (253). The immanence of conceptual transformation was unleashed: part as reality and part as the goals of social actors, this came to redescribe a new way of understanding freedom. As it became a historic-philosophical process-concept, it was also a guiding concept for action. And its full disclosure occurred during the 1960s, when emancipation came to be seen as the common denominator of all things related to justice, “for all demands aimed at the eradication of legal, social, political, and economical inequality” (254). Even if Koselleck denies that the term has acquired new valences, we can argue against him that, in recent times, peaceful revolutions, such as the political one led by Gandhi, the civil rights movement led by

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  55  Martin Luther King, and the feminist and gay revolutions, were experiences of transformation that did not include violence. Indeed, all these revolutions had positioned themselves against violence. Violence became the counterconcept of revolution. The feminist revolution, for example, developed new ways of defining the political and the private with the slogan “The personal is political.” Since the human rights movement has changed our political vocabulary, the private as a counterconcept of the political has also changed; it has moved away from that earlier mapping. Feminists stopped using public and private as if they had no previous history or always had the same semantic meaning. Further conceptual modifications followed other revolutions that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The revolution that took place in Czechoslovakia was called the Velvet Revolution because of its peaceful nature; thus a new positive valence became attached to the concept of revolution. The declaration of the rights of man and citizen in both the French and American revolutions led very slowly to a fuller disclosure of the term equality on the grounds that before those revolutions categories of people—like women and slaves—were banned from the political public sphere.77 These social actors understood that in order to become political actors they needed to liberate themselves from their roles as defined by the private realm. This understanding of new kinds of rights of inclusion, and the development of the concept of the public sphere, heightened the social and political expectations of the actors involved in the major revolutions of the twentieth century. New social and political goals allowed them to change the vocabulary of political revolutions and develop new concepts. We have begun to see other examples of peaceful struggles in the Middle East, where the usage of terms such as the streets and references to the names of a city’s main squares have acquired new meaning. Consider how the Egyptians used Tahrir Square to symbolize freedom. Thus we see how liberation struggles are connected to urban sites. In a recent article in the New York Times, Nezaar AlSayyad claims that “Tahrir Square’s rise to prominence is a testament to how place and history come together unexpectedly. Although its Arabic name means ‘liberation,’ and although it is one of the oldest squares in modern Cairo, Tahrir never carried much meaning for Cairenes until recently.”78 The term revolution seems to be disappearing from the landscape of emancipation, and the liberation from tyrants and tyrannies seems to have been replaced by metaphorical combination of terms such as the Jasmine Revolution.

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Thus emancipation is an obvious example of the ambiguity that Koselleck claims is necessary for a concept to be clear. The term can be used to describe many different claims: as the eradication of personal domination by one group of humans over another, as a liberal claim in favor of the rule of law, as a democratic quest for radical changes in favor of the sovereignty of people, or as a means of abolishing economic domination. It is a key word in all vocabularies concerning justice, as it has become its most important tool for fighting against every form of domination. Arendt drew a particular conclusion about the Neuezeit. If history had to become the medium of political prophecies of salvation, as Koselleck had argued, it had first to become world history. It was through this notion of “world history” that the concept of history occurred via political origin: It was preceded by the French and American Revolution, both of which prided themselves on having ushered in a new era for all mankind, on being events which would concern all men qua men, no matter where they lived, what their circumstances were, or what nationality they possessed. The very notion of worldhistory was born from the first attempt at world politics, and although both the American and the French enthusiasm for the ‘rights of man and citizen’ quickly subsided with the birth of the nation-state, which, short-lived as this form of government has proved to be, was the only relatively lasting result of a revolution in Europe, the fact is that in one form or another world politics has been an adjunct to politics ever since.79

A Conclusion: The Future Envisioned Through Immanent Critique As we have seen, both Koselleck and Arendt argued that time affected the vocabulary of the political realm.80 Kant was an innovator in the sense that, in his book Perpetual Peace, he used the temporal connection of the future to an ethical goal. His idea of the future was linked to a constitution that separated the different powers now working on behalf of democracy, and this new political project aspired to become

The Semantics of Conceptual Change  57  a cosmopolitan one (deterritorialized). Koselleck argues that concepts such as democracy and republic ceased to be merely descriptive. Through the introduction of a historical movement, which allowed for a space of political agency, political actors created the human obligation to intervene on behalf of those ideals. Then concepts such as liberalism followed within the spectrum of theories oriented toward the future with a view to emancipation. They were soon followed by other terms, such as socialism and communism.81 Thus, even if Koselleck and Arendt concluded by offering different arguments about political binaries and the function of time in a changing landscape of concepts, they both thought of the temporalization of the future as the element that introduced a new scenario for political theories. Indeed, in conceptual history the movements and dynamics of change are often introduced with the help of the use of endings like ism. Jeffrey C. Alexander explains that the prefixes modern, anti, post, and neo reveal “not only competing theoretical positions but deep shifts in historical sensibility.”82 Some of these terms have been specifically used to indicate a transitional stage, and their counterconcepts—monarchy, aristocracy, conservative, servility—connected this panoramic view of the past to the future and located agents in the transitional period between past and future. As we have seen in the second part of this chapter, it was in the twentieth century that the concept of revolution acquired a new meaning, allowing the temporalization and dynamics of movement to provide a disclosive normative dimension to the human project of transformation. Finally, as I have said earlier, emancipation appeared to absorb the semantic notion of an irreversible proceeding that would lead to the self-determination of humankind. These concepts, argued Koselleck, allowed agents to see themselves as possessing responsibility while investing their energies in the processes of self-creation. Concepts like these articulated a new diachronic force that was simultaneously sustained for both speaker and for audience. With this perspective in mind, Koselleck and Arendt have demonstrated that concepts possess an internal temporal structure that activates political agency. Political and social concepts can become instruments for the direction of historical movements. They are not only indicators of changes in time but actual factors of those changes. As such, theories begin to color each other with ideological frames. Ideologicalization of one’s opponents can also become a

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mechanism of controlling political language. The influence of political terminology was broadened beyond the previous space over which only scholars and nobility had control. The bourgeoisie and other members of civil society also learned to manipulate and use language in such a way that, as Koselleck noted, there were struggles over concepts: “This challenge of linguistic control and consequently power over the direction of consciousness and behavior altered the internal temporal structure of concepts.”83 New concepts awakened new expectations; they called for objectives and desires that needed to be fulfilled. Finally, the process that began with the development of the historical theory of the secular entered deeply into the structures and minds of people in everyday life. At this particular moment, a new space has opened: the space of immanent critique. Theories, concepts, attitudes, programs, and forms of behavior are all seen as graduated and making use of different ideologies, and for the first time ideological narratives can be referred to as errors, lies, or prejudices. Political agency has turned language into a powerful weapon. Lies can be detected, errors can be reversed and corrected, and prejudices can or must be removed. Ideological criticism ensues as a differentiated process, since it seeks to distance itself from the problematic it wishes to expose. Concepts begin to be used with a wider range of abstraction. Indeed, as Koselleck argued, “The more general the concepts, the greater the number of parties that can make use of them.” “Concepts became catchwords,” and “in this way, a competitive struggle develops over the proper interpretation and usage of concepts.” Finally, “Democracy [as we have seen] has become a universal constitutional concept, all camps claiming it for themselves in different ways.”84 It is here that the space of immanent critique has made it possible to display new struggles for a proper interpretation of such a concept. Thus, according to Koselleck, the modern innovation of political thinking about the Neuzeit (saeculum) inaugurated the processes of critical thinking and the formation of consciousness. Both processes, which enabled new senses of political agency, derived from a complex combination of society and thinkers appropriating new notions from historical communities. The constructions of political and social theories were the result of thinking about how different notions of time affect history and its agents and how closely concepts were related to future actions in politics.

2 The Model of Translation From Religion to Politics

J

ürgen Habermas has argued that “although the assumption toward secularization holds for most of Europe, the explanatory power of the secularization hypothesis is now a matter of dispute because the causal connection between secularization and social modernization is no longer posed only as a diachronic and self-referential issue within western culture.”1 For that reason, he continues, “the encounter with religion as a contemporary intellectual formation requires secular thought to engage in a reflection of its own origins that takes the form of a genealogy of secular post-metaphysical thought within the horizon of the Axial Age and of the discussion of faith and knowledge in the High Middle Ages.”2 A particularly fruitful exploration of these issues was undertaken by some German philosophers of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichten) who were the first to focus on the processes of secularization as semantic translations in modernity.3 In their work one sees a concern for developing a genealogical method to show how the formulation of political theories exemplified the complex relationship between religion and politics. As we will see, an important polemical debate on the meaning of secularization in terms of conceptualizing political theories took place between Karl Löwith and Hans

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Blumenberg. In this chapter I will focus on Karl Löwith’s literal translation of religious contents into politics. In the following chapter I will contrast Löwith’s model to the one developed by Hans Blumenberg, who represented secularization as a process that allowed new political concepts to solve problems outside the scope of the religious realm. Blumenberg also developed a second model, which I will call the myth model, and I will discuss it in chapter 4. This is a departure from his original position into a conceptual reworking of the semantic realm as crystallized in mythical narratives. Blumenberg saw these narratives as strategies recovered and refashioned in order to provide humanity with a means of coping with existential anxiety (Angst). In chapter 5 I will present Hannah Arendt’s vision of the task of politics and discuss her views on concept building. This will be seen as similar in some respects to Blumenberg’s second model, but departs from his by establishing— in the process of defining the autonomy of the political—a dimension of political disclosure, which she envisions not as a means of semantic translation but as revealing the new territory of political interactions between agents. The fourth model of politics I will present, which I call the disclosive model, is my own. Inspired by some of Arendt’s contributions to this debate, I will suggest that my model is the one that is most relevant to the disclosure of new spaces of social and political interactions between political actors. In discussing this last I will also reference Habermas’s use of disclosive concepts. These different models will be seen as ideal types, since many of the authors—particularly Arendt—used mixed versions when dealing with their understanding of the process that produces political theories.

Time and the First Stage of Political Narratives Structural change over time was the subject, first, of the history of Christianity and, later, of philosophers of history who made the concept of time a subject of importance. But this was not a simple linear process, since it involved different dimensions in which time was felt to be an experience, lived as a political project. According to Reinhart Koselleck, the narratives of the anticipation of the end of the world and its continual postponement were a constant presence in the

The Model of Translation  61  outlooks of prophets, religious leaders, and intellectual and political actors. Time was seen as a sign of God’s will, and the end of the world was interpreted as the moment of final judgment. Koselleck argues that “the Emperor was the katechon of the Antichrist.”4 Such a specific way of understanding temporality, which reflected the Church’s teachings, predominated even after the Reformation had transformed the cultural situation in Europe. The compression of time was one of the indicators of the end of the world; thus the interpretation of the final judgment as imminent became the telos of these theories. The organized Church suppressed dissenting prophecies, considering them dangerous to the unity of the empire. For the same reason, the Church made thinking about the future one of its most important fields of study and control.5 The unknown eschaton was one of the political ways in which the Church exercised its authority. This enabled it to become a self-constituting institution with a world vision. Prophecies about the end of the world were used as integrative factors, but by the time prophets wrote about precise dates they stopped being considered useful. In this way the history of the Church became the history of salvation. When the Reformation began, the vision of the future changed considerably, and it did so for political reasons. Since religious parties could not arrive at a peaceful settlement, politicians thought they should be concerned with the temporal and not the eternal. “Heresy no longer existed within religion,” argues Koselleck; “it was [then] founded in the state” (8). Peace became the subject of concern among theorists, and they acknowledged that the religious potential for politics was exhausted. There was a need to broaden the dimensions of thought about the future in order to cast it in a new light. Koselleck shows that this was not a straightforward process, but required several complicated steps. First, the final judgment of the world was endlessly prolonged; second, astrology, which played a very important part in political prognostication during the Renaissance, was discredited; and, third, the Holy Roman Empire lost its eschatological function. As Koselleck argues, it was “Bodin here [who] played a role as historian which was as path-breaking as his foundation of the concept of sovereignty. In separating out sacral, human, and natural history, Bodin transformed the question of the end of the world into a problem of astronomical and mathematical calculation” (10). Hence the

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liberation of human history—through being cut off from its sacred roots—and the legitimation of the modern state became one and the same. The absolutist state struggled against all kinds of religious and political predictions. Predictions about the future were banned in the seventeenth century. The philosophers made war against prophecy. History fell into secular classifications: Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modernity. Concepts about the future were refashioned in light of rational prognosis, and the subject of the philosophy of historical processes became a discipline of its own (Geschichtsphilosophie). Thus the counterconcept of prophecy was prognosis. This significant change made the future seem a domain of infinite possibilities. Prognosis respected the boundaries of the political, because prognosis itself is a political action that relates to novelty. Koselleck argues, paradoxically, “In the domain of politics constituted by the actions of sovereign rulers, though only in this domain, nothing particularly new could happen” (15). In other words, religion was the subject of translations into the political realm. The idea of history as introducing a secular conception of a new future freed modernity from its past. “A consciousness of time and the future begins to develop in the shadows of absolutist politics, first in secret, later openly, audaciously combining politics with prophecy. There enters into the philosophy of progress a typical eighteenthcentury mixture of rational prediction and salvational expectation. Progress unfolded to the degree that the state and its prognostics were never able to satisfy soteriological demands, which persisted within a state whose existence depended on the elimination of millenarian expectations” (17). Since prognosis also implies diagnosis, a specific correlation between past and future was simultaneously introduced. For Koselleck, “Progress opened up a future that transcended the hitherto predictable, natural space of time and experience, and hence— propelled by its own dynamic—provoked new, transnatural, and longterm prognoses” (17). What appeared in this new scenario is the figure of the prophet-philosopher, the only one capable of combining political calculation and speculation on a “future liberated from Christian religion” (17). For Karl Löwith, it was the Christian reckoning of time that made a central event’s translation, “which occurred when the time had been

The Model of Translation  63  fulfilled,” the purpose of historical narratives.6 This event relates time to space forward and backward, so that human history “is delineated as a history of salvation, progressing to fulfillment and focused on Jesus Christ” (182). Without the semantic charge of sin and final redemption, this historical narrative would be unnecessary and unintelligible. The efforts of philosophers to explain religious history in terms of profane history were always in conflict. But Löwith claims that the “articulation of all historical time into past, present, and future reflects the temporal structure of the history of salvation,” allowing us to conceptualize secular time through “our habit of thinking in terms of the Christian tradition that the formal division of all historical time into past, present, and future times seems so entirely natural and selfevident” (185). Löwith also argues that, even if the central event of the Christian faith has less relevance in modern times, secular narratives maintain their logical antecedents and consequences. Indeed, they interpret “the past as preparation and the future as consummation, thus, reducing the history of salvation to the impersonal teleology of progressive evolution in which every present stage is the fulfillment of past preparation. Transformed into a secular theory of progress, the scheme of history of salvation could seem to be natural and demonstrable” (186). As Löwith explains in his discussion of the main example of the philosopher-prophet , this ambiguity “is essential to all history after Christ” (188). Karl Löwith’s Model of Religion Translated into Politics: The Literal Model Karl Löwith begins Meaning in History (1949) by describing the connection between the philosophy of history and a theology of history in which history is the concept that defines the “fulfillment of salvation” (1). He says that the “philosophy of history originates with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfillment and . . . ends with the secularization of its eschatological pattern” (2). As we can see from this claim, Löwith considers the term secularization as a defining form of translation. Translation here means finding an analogy between religion and politics.7 This translation is enacted by the introduction of the eschatological into the philosophy of history. Indeed, Löwith claims that history is an attempt to grasp its own meaning, or that of the eschaton, through the semantics of suffering in historical action. This concern

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with suffering is a religious motif, and it comes directly from two distinctive narratives that deal with suffering in the Western world: the myth of Prometheus and the crucifixion of Christ. Löwith explains that, even though one refers to a rebel and the other to a servant, both combine the hidden hope of redemption. Second, Löwith says that when philosophers of history started raising questions about the meaning of history, their perspectives on and their conceptions of time were different. For those who were able to connect with the religious realm—namely, with a preestablished horizon of ultimate meanings, such as in Judaism or Christianity— the meaning of history seemed perplexing, since it could lead into a vacuum that “only hope and faith can fill” (4). To conceptualize history as the history of salvation was the only possible answer. And the key political figures were prophets, preachers, and teachers. It was for this reason, argues Löwith, that the destinies of nations were linked to the divine. If God created all things, then there is a purpose in history, and it is a transcendent one. History is defined as the movement of time with a purpose as its goal. This is the telos of history. What we find here is that, with the introduction of a telos, the future is opened and exists as a space in which actors can situate their expectations and hopes. This space of expectation came first to the Hebrew prophets. Löwith argues that the Christian and post-Christian outlook on history is futuristic, perverting the classical meaning of historein, which is related to present and past events. In the Greek and Roman mythologies and genealogies the past is re-presented as an everlasting foundation. In the Hebrew and Christian view of history, the past is a promise to the future; consequently, the interpretation of the past becomes a prophecy in reverse, demonstrating the past as a meaningful “preparation” for the future. Greek philosophers and historians were convinced that whatever is to happen will be of the same pattern and character as past and present events; they never indulged in the prospective possibilities of the future. (6)

Since the ancients believed in a predestined fate, and the Church too believed in a divine plan, the modern belief in the idea of an open

The Model of Translation  65  future brought the concept of agency to a new level: action could be the response to the unknown future, because it was also a human creation. Löwith regards this semantic transference from the eschatological perspective of history to the political view of action as the way modernity reinterpreted the paradox of not knowing what the future will bring by making it compatible with the idea that we do not have direct access to God’s knowledge. Löwith maintains that this “is the solution to the difficulty of a partial freedom within a partial fatality [as it] restates, though in weaker terms, the old theological problem of the compatibility of divine providence with free will” (11). Thus, according to Löwith, with the eschatological view of history, one reappraises the belief that the history of mankind is directed to a final purpose whose ultimate goal is to make it a better world. This persistence of the eschatological is the legacy of Jews and Christians, and “the moderns elaborate a philosophy of history by secularizing theological principles and applying them to an ever increasing number of empirical facts” (19). According to Löwith, Marx is the veritable portrait of the philosopher-prophet. His great historical sense led him to view history as a process moving toward a final world of revolution and world renovation. Marx uses the terms prehistory and future history, thereby dividing what would be understood as the meaningful process of history. “Far from having an all-too-human compassion for the individual destiny of the proletariats, Marx sees in the proletariat the worldhistorical instrument for achieving the eschatological aim of all history by a world revolution” (37). Marx best represents the inspiration of the Schmittian model of politics, with its distinction of “friends and foes,” since Marx’s view “possesses a distinct feature: it has simplified the class antagonism by focusing into ‘two hostile camps,’ facing each other directly for a final showdown between the bourgeoisie and proletariat” (38). Thus the proletariat is the heart of future history, and Marx is its “brain” (38). Eschatology ends up saving Marx from seeing politics as a permanent struggle, for he envisions an emancipation of classes in which the free development of the individual will bring peace and happiness to all. Löwith’s reading of Marx demonstrates his notion of literal translation, since he interprets what Marx is doing as “a transparent messianism” (44), namely, “an old Jewish messianism and prophetism—

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unaltered by two thousand years of economic history from handicraft to large-scale industry.” Thus he maintains that the last antagonism between two hostile camps of bourgeoisie and proletariat corresponds to the Jewish-Christian belief in a final fight between Christ and Antichrist in the last epoch of history, that the task of the proletariat corresponds to the world-historical mission of the chosen people, that the redemptive and universal function of the most degraded class is conceived on the religious pattern of Cross and Resurrection, that the ultimate transformation of the realm of necessity into a realm of freedom corresponds to the transformation of the civitas Terrena into civitas Dei, and that the whole process of history as outlined in The Communist Manifesto corresponds to the general scheme of the JewishChristian interpretation of history as a providential advance toward a final goal which is meaningful. Historical materialism is essentially, though secretly, a history of the fulfillment and salvation in terms of social economy. What seems to be a scientific discovery from which one might deduce, after the fashion of Marxist “revisionists,” the philosophical garb and the relic of a religious attitude is, on the contrary, from the first to the last sentence inspired by an eschatological faith, which, in its turn, “determines” the whole sweep and range of all particular statements [my emphasis]. (45)

While Marx is a critic of religion, Löwith argues that he modifies the previous scheme, in which free acceptance of humiliation and redemptive suffering transforms itself into the hope and expectation of earthly happiness. The goal of translation from the religious realm to the secular is to recover the notion of salvation. By depriving “religion of all its sources and motivation” (49), Löwith claims, Marx’s theory achieves this. Marx, according to Löwith, does not want to fight against heathens but against earthly idols (capitalism). He finds in capitalism a new way to erect idols whereby the “fetish-character” of our commodities brought by the capitalist ways of production objectify things and humans. Thus “the commodity form of all our products is the new idol which has to be criticized and changed” (50). Löwith extends his criticisms of Marx’s religiosity by adding that, though

The Model of Translation  67  Hegel “identifies the history of the world with that of the Spirit, his understanding of history retains much less of its religious derivation than does Marx’s materialistic atheism. The latter, in spite of its emphasis on material conditions, maintains the original tension of a transcendent faith over against the existing world, while Hegel, to whom faith was only a mode of Vernunft or Vernehmen, had, at a critical turning-point in his intellectual history, decided to reconcile himself to the world as it is: existing, real, and reasonable. Compared with Marx, the greater realist is Hegel” (51). What can we say about this interpretation of Marx’s project? In the first place, we can point out that Löwith’s account of Marx’s conceptual transformations is not entirely accurate. Löwith’s model of literal translations obscures the innovative spaces of Marx’s contribution to political theory. Marx may have been an inspired translator of the semantic contents of the religious realm, but he was also a very creative theorist. And it is in the merging of these dimensions that his genius lies: the semantic reconfiguration of the religious notion of salvation or redemption to be used as a political force as well as his disclosure of new scenarios of power and justice in which human beings become capable of understanding themselves also as agents of change. The effect of change is to move the realm of theory into a new direction for action (praxis). Capitalism makes humans appear like cogs, so Marx deploy his theoretical arsenal to transform the proletariat into an active agent of change. Precisely because of his view of change and revolution, Marx recovered Prometheus’s myth and not Christ’s. I will discuss this in greater detail in the next chapter, when I address Blumenberg’s account of mythical narratives. Marx was not only a theorist but also the political agent of a broadbased revolution that he himself sought to guide. He outlined a path to future victory for the weakest class, and, although the historical revolutions of his time were not successful in contemporaneously vindicating his political theories, his diagnoses and his method disclosed potentials of change that have survived him, lasting with increasing persistence. Indeed, as Koselleck argues, notwithstanding all the historico-philosophical premises that guided his interpretations, in his specifically historical writings, on the Revolution of 1848–49 and the uprising of the Commune,

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he wrote as a person who was vanquished, if not like someone vanquished. He had to accept the situatively unique defeat as the intellectual spokesman of the proletariat, and from it, he sought to gain long-term explanations meant to guarantee future success. This is why he succeeded in developing methods of ideological critique that sought to correlate long-term economic processes with contemporary politics. The method that he constructed has survived him, even if the actual development of history did not occur as he expected [my emphasis].8 Marx understood that his contribution to social theory was more political than philosophical. His theory was meant to disclose the ills and causes of social oppression as well as to articulate a path to transformation.9 Furthermore, if we really look back at the origin of political concepts, as Koselleck has done, we find that there were no contested views of power (Herrschaftsformen) or of the legality of rule (Herrschaft) before or during the early eighteenth century.10 In the late eighteenth century the Enlightenment put forth the proposition that all human beings should aspire to autonomy and freedom from oppression. Guided by a new critical theory, it also strove to transform the material conditions that oppression was based on. Thus, “no theological or moral doctrine of inner freedom, of the equality of all humans before God, or of their equality given by nature ever questioned indenture labor, serfdom, servitude, or slavery institutions—all of which spread in the most terrible way in the early modern period.”11 The disclosive meaning the concept of emancipation acquired in the late eighteenth century was “brought about not by legal language but rather by the psychological, social, political, and, above all, philosophical usage of the word” (my emphasis).12 The claim that emancipation presupposed the critical question of domination (Herrschaft) was brand-new and unique in the history of concepts, and it was Marx who gave it its full sense of disclosure. Marx made this precise term, emancipation, his guiding concept, and, looking back at its history, we can see how the concept evolved into the realm “of political struggle, [where] emancipation was, at the latest since 1830 employed everywhere: First, in order to acquire individual and personal equal rights with respect to pregiven civil and legal conditions. Second, it was used for the purpose of making possible equal rights for groups: classes,

The Model of Translation  69  social strata, women, particular churches, and religious groups, entire peoples. Third, emancipation aimed at freedom of rule and equal rights for all of humanity, for the world, or for the emancipating time, as one could emphatically say then.”13 It is precisely for this reason that Marx’s legacy and method survive well into our times with everrenewed force. Without his contribution to the disclosure of fields of action and his notion of immanent critique, no twentieth-century revolutions would have ever existed, and no one would have attempted to change oppression through revolutions.

Löwith wrote Meaning in History with the goal of critiquing the notion of progress and its relation to Christian eschatology. Even though his thinking was shared by many theorists during the 1940s and 1950s (as we have seen, even Koselleck agrees with some of Löwith’s main ideas), his work was not systematically criticized (except by Blumenberg’s efforts to prove him wrong). Meaning and History also focuses on Jacob Burckhardt’s view of history (as well as on Spengler’s and Toynbee’s), for Löwith was already thinking about the possibility of promoting an alternative perspective inspired by the pagan cyclical view of the cosmos first conceived by the Stoics. (Here Nietszche comes to mind.) Löwith’s main goal was to undermine the belief in progress and underlying idea of the irreversibility of historical change. Even though Löwith’s account clearly resembles Carl Schmitt’s, I agree with Bernard Flynn that he had another purpose in mind, for while “Löwith never used this formulation [of political theology] in Meaning and History, he does argue such a thesis, but for him it is an unmasking of apparently secular notions that are really theology in disguise.”14 Burckhardt’s view of history is interpreted by Löwith as the “soundest modern reflection of history,”15 because he understands both classical and Christian positions without committing to either of them. Paradoxically, Löwith’s work survives mainly because of his ideas about literal translation. But he failed to make clear why the pagan view of history provides a better perspective for a philosophy of history related to politics. It will be Hannah Arendt’s recovery of the Romans and the Greeks, together with her criticism of modern eschatology, that will clarify what Löwith’s theory could not.

3 Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model Conceptual Transformation

A

  lthough Hans Blumenberg wrote the first version of The Legiti  macy of the Modern Age in 1966, critical responses from Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and others forced him to revise and expand his manuscript until it was finally published in 1976. Blumenberg’s book offered a different account of secularization than Löwith’s account in Meaning in History (1949, as noted in the previous chapter). Blumenberg was trying not only to develop a less negative view of the secular from that offered by Heidegger, Löwith, and Schmitt, he was also undertaking the great task of explaining that the questions raised by the moderns were “legitimate” because they were products of new experiences articulated through particular historical contexts.1 Thus Blumenberg used conceptual history as well. He chose to call his book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, because Löwith had characterized modernity as an illegitimate way of secularizing the eschatological into history and of defining its relation to political theory.2 In spite of the monumental nature of Blumenberg’s work, his purpose was to introduce what was in the end a subtle argument about distinguishing between the continuity of “transfigured substances” and the continuity of problems and functions in modernity.3 This is

Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model  71  the reason his model is called reoccupational.4 The book is divided into four parts. The first one is dedicated to critically exploring theses of secularization, especially as developed by Karl Löwith. The second section deals with Blumenberg’s view of history as immanent, in which he tries to demonstrate the continuities between the problems posed by the Gnostics and the efforts of various Christian thinkers to develop them, finally crystallizing in the ways that made modernity a new, self-conscious, and assertive era. The third section examines the development of the experiences of “curiosity,” once considered an impediment to knowledge. Blumenberg shows how it arose and how modernity transformed curiosity into a virtue. The fourth and final section takes Nicholas de Cusa and Giordano Bruno as exemplary figures of the embodiment of two distinct positions: one that expresses the attitudes and character of the Middle Ages; another articulating characteristically modern attitudes. For all his subtlety, Blumenberg does not reject the fact that, in some respects, eschatological Christian themes have been translated into modernity. Rather, he maintains that some of the main categories of modernity, such as progress, cannot be understood as simple translations. Thus his work might be what Martin Jay has called a “weaker” version of the thesis that the semantic contents of eschatology were simply recovered in modernity.5 As we will see in this chapter, Blumenberg uses the concept of secularization to show how Christians were already in the process of translating their own views into secular discourse when their experiences provided them with a new perspective on the role of religion. Blumenberg’s critique of Löwith’s major thesis has two main arguments: on the one hand, he argues that the modern idea of progress articulates an immanent process of development. Thus history can only be understood as an immanent process. It is not imbued with a transcendental perspective, nor is it merely a translation of the idea of salvation. On the other hand, he argues that if there is an element of “hope” in the modern view of the future, it is not the result of the Christian translation of the final judgment. According to Blumenberg, the constructive efforts of the moderns are essentially attempts to cope with contingency, which are propelled more than anything else by their existential suffering and fears (Angst). The existence of hope, he argues, is attributable to the major successes in science.6 Blumenberg

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adds that the concept of progress can be related to new experiences and practices and perspectives that have nothing to do with Löwith’s views. Consider, for example, the overturning of Aristotelian science by cooperative, long-term scientific enterprises undertaken by modern thinkers and aesthetic innovations, such as the novel and modern art in general,7 which express the changing views and aspirations of modern subjects. Blumemberg’s idea of the way Christianity relates to modernity through its changed conception of the self (Taylor’s concept of the “buffered self”) converges on an idea of progress that involves transformations of a semantic field through its connections to new practices.8 Consider the failure of eschatological expectations, which forced the reinterpretation of the eschaton as an event that had already happened. Thus Blumenberg’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte)9 is meant to show that the modern period is continuous with the Christian era because the same questions continue to be asked. Blumenberg also distinguishes between individual and collective attitudes, arguing that it was the new interest in individual eschatology that made humans more concerned about their own particular fates, while that of the community took the shape of an open-ended collective project in which the importance of personal salvation was diminished. In this sense, Blumenberg considers the Gadamerian notion of tradition too radical. According to Blumenberg, traditions need not be seen as fixed on doctrines or ideas that are immune to change.10 Rather, the persistence of the human activity of inquiry is essentially related to human existential angst. Blumenberg’s main point here is to assert that modernity is not entirely new if we conceive of novelty as creation out of nothing. For Blumenberg, semantic transformations develop out of an awareness of the contingent existence of the world. Accordingly, the introduction of the concept of scientific method attests to a change in the experiences of subjects who began to see themselves as part of a generative process of collective knowledge. Blumenberg argues that it was precisely these kinds of changes in attitudes that allowed the conception of truth to change in modernity. This was also the reason, he argues, why this collective project, because it belonged to humanity, was framed in terms of the immanent process of history: “for what defines the modern is precisely its attempt to ground itself on the basis of human self-assertion rather than theological dispensation.”11

Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model  73  Therefore Blumenberg’s defense of what he calls the legitimacy of the modern age is not meant to insist that the process of modernity in toto must be defended as pure novelty. Rather, he is arguing that the moderns put forth a new set of questions that showed them “reoccupying” a territory or a position once occupied by the medieval Christian schema of creation and eschatology: “The patterns and schemas of the salvation story were to prove to be ciphers and projections of intraworldly problems, like a foreign language in which is expressed the absolutism of the world, of man, of society, so that all unworldliness would be a metaphor that had to be retranslated into literal speech. The problem in such a case, quite logically, is not secularization but the detour that made it necessary in the first place.”12 Blumenberg’s enigmatic expression here may be explained by means of the reoccupation thesis or reoccupational model. First, by “retranslation” he means that human beings’ fears and angst were an expression of their deep uncertainty about the meaning of life, and their anxiety was not assuaged, nor were their questions answered, by religion. The key here is that the reoccupation thesis links these concerns to the type of response given to inherited issues relating to the fact of being human, thereby unleashing a dynamic of inquiry. The new questions about contingency were based on a field of experience in which religion was largely seen as irrelevant, the old answers inadequate. These “considerations then led Blumenberg to affirm that early modern scientific culture is both continuous with late medieval theological-religious sources and in other respects discontinuous with these sources. It is continuous insofar as it addresses itself to questions set by late medieval theology, but discontinuous insofar as it responds to these questions with answers intrinsically different from those given previously.”13 This is the reason Blumenberg begins the section by arguing that Hannah Arendt referred to an “unequal worldlessness” as the hallmark of the modern age. For Arendt, Blumenberg notes, “modern man, when he lost the certainty of the world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world.”14 Arendt’s critical view of modernity is expressed in the failure of moderns to provide a new political vocabulary different from the religious one. Indeed, for Arendt, “worldliness” is the political project, whereas unworldlessness is the metaphysical one, the world of ideas or consciousness. Blumenberg invokes Arendt

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because she understood that “what must be gained in the way of precision in order to make the concept of secularization fit for use in historiography” were her own categories of worldiness and unworldiness.15 For Blumenberg, worldliness is the site of self-assertion. For Arendt, human beings—having lost the meaning of the world as God’s creation—continued to construct political concepts from metaphysical ones rather than construct a new theory of the world, of politics. Blumenberg claims Arendt’s “precision” is helpful in her critical commentary, for she addresses the void, which Blumenberg later describes as the space left by religion and afterward reoccupied. According to Blumenberg, Arendt saw “the modern age [not] as a continuation of Christianity by other means, but as a continuation in the same direction, a direction of world alienation [Entweltlichung].” What Arendt really meant was that “man has ‘removed himself’ from the earth to a much more distant point than any Christian otherwordliness had ever removed him” (8). According to Blumenberg, the problem with Arendt’s view, and also with Löwith’s, is that they pose the question as an either/or. Worldliness and unworldliness are the only alternatives, because “when transcendent ties and hopes are abandoned, there is only one possible result” (9). This binary in presenting the issue only disguises the characterization of secularization as some “alienated formation” dependent on an “original” one. Thus, Blumenberg argues, we should not think of secularization (Verweltlichung) as an exchange of worlds or as a process of rationalization of religion by some exogenous agent. Rather, it is a process of rationalization, immanent and internal to the development of religious concerns. Thus the necessity of beginning a genealogy of conceptual coinage by giving evidence of “transformations, metamorphosis, conversion to new functions, along with the identity of a substance that endures throughout the process” (16). If secularization, according to Blumenberg, was a category of interpretation that “arose from a metaphor based on the historical legal concept of the expropriation of church property” (12), such a way of defining it now only proves that we are still missing parts of the immanent process of modernity in which social practices furnish new answers. The result of these processes is what Blumenberg has defined as “the eschatological view [that] secularized itself.”16 What (for Löwith) was the task of translation through analogies must (for Blumenberg) be corrected by an effort at disanalogy through the understanding of the

Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model  75  immanent process involved. The idea of progress, for example, must be understood as an internal development.17 When it was realized that the second coming of Christ was not possible any time soon, the unfulfilled prophecy transformed itself into a secular account of how human beings reconcile themselves with their existence. Thus, adds Blumenberg, “if one wished to characterize the process I have outlined as one of ‘secularization’—even though historically it does present itself in an unexpected place—then in any case it would be not secularization of eschatology but rather secularization by eschatology [my emphasis].”18 It follows that the reoccupation thesis is not meant to signal a stark difference from Löwith’s interpretation of eschatology. Rather, for Blumenberg, the fact that modernity reoccupied the space left by religion is one reason we should focus on the semantics of conceptual change. He maintains that this is only possible through an internal account, a narrative that focuses on how the claims of the modern era were the only possible outcomes, due to the way religious questions were first posed. The second section of Blumenberg’s work focuses on exposing the common pattern of questions and answers as they were presented in both medieval and modern times. The strong thesis of this section is that the modern age is the result of the overcoming of Gnosticism, whose greatest challenge the Middle Ages failed to resolve. When Blumenberg refers to the Christian contradiction—the problem of understanding evil in light of divine creation—he rightly argues that philosophy could not solve it.19 His example here is the Gnostic author Marcion, who placed the good outside of the world and, by so doing, justified the existence of evil. Augustine’s theodicy revalorized God’s creation by inserting Marcion’s dualism into humankind. The task of revaluing the world took elements from Greek cosmology and situated humans beyond any possibility of redeeming themselves from original sin. Thus the heritage of Gnosticism was not overcome but only translated. Possibilities for self-assertion appeared as an alternative to Gnostic dualism once the medieval synthesis (from the Greeks and from the Christian legacy) began to unravel. This came about due to the criticisms of William of Ockham, who questioned this synthesis by radically doubting the intelligibility of the cosmos, which had been neutralized by Epicurus’s claim that we could not articulate a

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certain kind of order in the world from the experience of chaos. For those nominalists who believed in the unlimited will of God, this task was impossible. The result of this bitter interpretation was that philosophers could not account for evil, irrationality, and chaos. Paradoxically, as religion lost its role as a modality for understanding the world, human beings began asserting themselves: “The converted Gnostic had to provide an equivalent for the cosmic principle of evil in the bosom of mankind itself. He found it in inherited sinfulness, as a quantity of corruption that is constant rather than being the result of the summation of individual faulty actions.”20 So, if God was first conceived as responsible for all evil, Blumenberg claims that “the concept of bad [Bösse]21 in the world had been displaced and continues up to the present to be displaced continually further and further: The bad [Bösse] aspect of the world appears less and less clearly as a physical defect of nature and more and more (and with less ambiguity, on account of the technical means by which we amplify these things) as the result of human actions.”22 What Blumenberg is trying to assert is the idea that human autonomy is what evolves from this kind of interrogation, one that “regards history as the sum total not of man’s effort to exonerate God but rather of the demonstrated—and bearable—possibility of doing without God.”23 This decisive step is what prepares humans for their modern conception of “self-assertion,” which will be fully represented in Blumenberg’s account of the work of Immanuel Kant. What can we say about the defense of modernity Blumenberg mounts? The first thing to note is that Blumenberg’s model of secularization allows for the spaces of translation already considered in Löwith’s model, but he rejects wholesale its larger scope of what happened between the Christian tradition and the modern one. He wisely suggests that novel experiences and historical immanence are the elements that illuminate for us the immanent processes of transformation. We might be better off if we could understand these immanent processes of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) and thus see that worldliness (Verweltlichung) has inhabited the functional space once occupied by theological-religious sensibilities. Blumenberg shows how this change (from theological-religious positions to worldliness) allowed the emergence of possibilities for making semantic transformations through the construction of concepts. These appear not as total creations but as immanent historical transformations. The prob-

Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model  77  lem, however, is that Blumemberg’s narrative is highly speculative, and many of his major claims are difficult to prove. This makes it an easy target. I agree with Robert Pippin, for example, when he raises doubts such as: “Did the ever accelerating requirements of the notion of an omnipotent God play as decisive a role in the destruction of the possibility of teleology, the growth of nominalism, the ‘hiddenness’ of God, and the ‘abandoned’ character of the world? Did all of this contribute decisively to the origin of the modern ‘retrieval’ of the world under the banner of human ‘self-assertion’? How much of this is a story of actual influence, and how much a kind of ‘ideal’ phenomenology of the logical relation of issues?”24 Pippin’s critique leads me to raise a third point: Blumenberg’s interpretation of the transformations of modernity—of the beginning of a self-assertive era—is so radical that it is impossible to see how he can also claim that secular translations of the religious realm have any merit at all. This apparent contradiction has not escaped the notice of Martin Jay, who calls Blumenberg’s position a sort of “pragmatism” because of its radical connections of experiences (questions and answers) to conceptual formulations.25 Jay argues that that a “more optimistic Christian tradition . . . may well have anticipated the later doctrine of progress in certain respects.” But Blumenberg’s defense of modernity cannot but ignore such a possibility.26 Missing from this narrative are also the best exemplars of the Jewish messianic tradition, such as Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Ernst Bloch. These eschatological views are oriented not only to the past but also to the future (Bloch), and they resuscitate categories, like memory and hope, that played such an extraordinary role in the work of other thinkers such as Karl Marx. What is relevant to our understanding of conceptual history is the fact that these thinkers valued the utopian potential of “salvation” for their political theories precisely because the energy it generated could make political change possible and desirable. Another problem is that Blumenberg’s strong conception of selfassertion avoids drawing any critical conclusions. Consider, for example, the postmodern critiques about the self, the so-called grand narratives, or the symbolic replacement of God by science. These critiques would lead us back to the beginning, namely, that those antimodern critiques were not entirely mistaken in interrogating the hegemonic conception of humans derived from the idea of God’s omnipotence.

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Jay correctly reminds us that Heidegger and others “were on to something in deploring the rise of an aggressive self treating the world as nothing more than a means to human ends.”27 It is precisely the term legitimacy that these antimodern and postmodern critics have questioned. Another critical conclusion that seems most paradoxical when considered from this point of view is that Blumenberg not only seeks to “legitimate” modernity as an era, but he also ends up legitimating the premodern world. That sort of defense of religion, however, misses important questions and erases variants or breaks that could undermine the project of modernity’s legitimacy.28 Finally, in his effort to develop his critical analysis of the concept of semantic translations in favor of the concept of reoccupation, Blumenberg makes a further claim that is relevant to our discussion, namely, that Carl Schmitt’s conception of political theology camouflages his real political purposes. Blumenberg argues that, for Schmitt, “secularization [is] an intentional style [which] seeks a relation to the sacred as a provocation.”29 Thus he concludes that Schmitt’s gesture of reconnecting religion to politics was a purely political device, and not the other way around. For Blumenberg, Schmitt’s claim about the existence of political theology is an example of “the strongest version of the secularization theorem,”30 in which the so-called analogies are not supposed to be real conceptual transformations but only translations. Blumenberg claims that Schmitt’s political theology is only a “metaphorical theology,”31 since in his secularization theory he had already placed in a person the attributes of “the quasi-divine person of the sovereign [who now] possesses legitimacy, and has to possess it, because for him there is no longer legality, or not yet, since he has first to constitute or to reconstitute it.”32 According to this view, what is constructed is religion, not politics. Precisely for that reason, the weakest version of secularization is a better alternative to the eschatological translation scheme of Löwith, and this is Blumenberg’s choice, which forces us to consider a different model.

4 Blumenberg’s Second Model The Persistence of Mythical Narratives

B

lumenberg’s second model of how humans cope with existential angst is not concerned with translations or reoccupations; it focuses on myth. And, unlike most Western philosophers, Blumenberg does not present myth as a stage that precedes logos.1 In her book A Philosophy of Political Myth, Chiara Bottici reminds us that the word mythos originally denoted “word” or “speech” and that it acquired the semantic meaning of being a narrative or a tale only in the Homeric era (eighth century bc). Thus mythos was first conceived as synonymous with logos,2 and only later did it come to mean the opposite of logos. As Bottici explains, by approaching the world in a fundamentally different way, philosophy anticipated the eclipse of the old mythological tradition and relegated the semantic space of mythos to pure “fiction.”3 The tradition of classifying the mythic historical stage as prior to science and rationality (logos) and of defining myths as nonrational was still widespread as late as the second half of the last century, according to Ernst Cassirer, whose work on myth is considered classic. Cassirer conceived of myth as nonrational,4 while Blumemberg’s position, in not seeing myth as necessarily irrational, was more nuanced.5 He contends that myths are about what

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is meaningful to human lives—life, death, the afterlife, men, women, harmony, order, obedience, communities, traditions, and so on. They do not explain anything;6 they do not make intelligible what is unintelligible. Rather, they orient and console humans, and that is their function.7 Through myths we find ways to cope with “our existential angst (Lebensangst]), as Kierkegaard would say, and the “absolutism of reality” (Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit),8 and transform them into something manageable.9 Myths have a “function” against fear and the contingency of time (they also help us kill time) and are therefore a necessary and essential part of human life.10 Religious texts—but not all religious myths and stories that belong to different religious traditions—are parts of these prelogical, mythical narratives, since they articulate the dogmas and control and organize their transmission to the public. Only the religions of “the Book,” as Bottici argues, “are fundamentally hostile to the myth,” because the “written word became the means through which God revealed himself as a unique God [and] the biblos became the bearer of an absolute claim to truth that was alien to myth.”11 Poets like Shakespeare stayed away from using biblical figures, Bottici claims, because of an explicit “verbal prohibition of images.”12 This is the reason Blumenberg conceived of an antithesis between myths and dogma, but he acknowledges that, in religion, “the great surprise is that the theological dogmatics is only a special case of the need to have precise knowledge about what is invisible—whether it be vortexes or gravitation, the Trinity or grace—and not to allow anyone to make different assertions about it. And this on account of the assumption that absolutely everything depends on the truth, or even on one truth—from finitude of a proposition, an infinity of consequences results.”13 Indeed, as Blumenberg argues in terms similar to Jan Assmann’s conception of monotheism:14 “In spite of his freedom from theological bias, Burckhardt [for example] finds something lacking in myth that only became familiar and almost normative for him as a result of a history that was deeply affected by dogma: a form of definition of the religious material, its modality as something decided, and a sanction against poetic frivolity and informal dealings with it. . . . The way the terms truth and lie are used has important consequences.”15 While monotheistic religions depend on the truth held by one book, myths appear in the realm of polytheism.16

Blumenberg’s Second Model  81  The work of myth is determined by the relationship between narrators and their audience. Blumenberg argues that “this work presupposes familiarity with what it is done to, not only in, those who perform it, but also in those who have to take it in, receptively. It always presupposes a public that is able to respond to the mechanism of reception.”17 Chiara Bottici calls this an “interrelational model,”18 and it can be argued that its logic obeys a theory of reception or of spectatorship that functions dialogically. We begin by realizing that myths are stories that possess a constancy of expression as well as an equally “pronounced capacity for marginal variations.”19 This feature is what makes myths transmittable through tradition. The variations are efforts at trying out new and personal ways in which to present them. But if myths are possible because they help us deal with anguish (or angst), anxiety, and unknowable fears, then, by the same token, we might say that they arose from naming those things that appeared fearful and unfamiliar. As Blumenberg argues, “All trust in the world begins with names, in connection with which stories can be told. This state of affairs is involved in the biblical story of the beginning, with the giving of names in Paradise. But it is also involved in the faith that underlies magic and that is still characteristic of the beginnings of science, the faith that the suitable naming of things will suspend enmity between them and man, turning it into a relationship of pure serviceability.”20 So language is the precious tool of creation, and myth, which is the story of the first finding of names, becomes an aesthetic operation. In modernity, names were created and discovered for nearly everything.21 Myths, however, are not only simply stories, they are also narratives that provide meaning by making this significance (Bedeutsamkeit) connected to our innermost essential fears. Myths are plural because they can be retold and recreated (the mythologem is expressed in many variations), and each version of the story has its own legitimacy. The difference with sacred history is that it expresses the monotheistic dogma that God established a contract with humans, and, since only one story exists, God regards this contract as being the truth, His single history. As Blumenberg argues: “In dogma, the One is offered as the Ultimate: but stories cannot be told about it, unless it were a story of how it ceased to be the One. The dilemma of history of Christian dogma lies in its having to define a Trinitarian God from the

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plurality of which no license for myth is allowed to follow. . . . Dogma, having awakened a need for myth, immediately summons it back to raison (reason).”22 Mythic thought is opposed to religious tales and dogmatic thought, but, as we have seen, myths have a rational function, which is not opposed to logos but complementary. In this way Blumenberg’s myth model is truly unique, as he argues that the legitimacy of the modern age inaugurated a self-assertiveness in human behavior and led to the transformation of Christianity after it arrived at a dead end. Yet this new theoretical model of narratives claims that fears and anguish are permanent and that a deficit of reason is associated with myth. Furthermore, because myth and logos are not opposed but complementary, mythmaking stimulates tolerance and plurality as opposed to dogmatism and prejudice. Myths can evolve only in the sense that they can be rewritten and recreated, but they are also radically historical. No primeval origin or archetypical figure is untouchable. On the contrary, myth possesses a dynamic through which the myth is recovered and refurbished. At the same time it explores new dimensions related to the new ways in which problems are interpreted. Blumenberg shows how the myth of Prometheus was first defined and, later, redefined and how these multiple iterations—changed, mutated, and transformed—retained their validity as presentations of particular problematics. “To speak of Prometheus results from the need to test the assertion that one should regard him as the ‘first inventor of all the good arts and sciences, consequently also of philosophy, among the Greeks.’ All of the stories attributed to this figure result from what he had done for the Greeks, when ‘he improved their savage and coarse manners, made their dispositions tame, and cultivated them.’ For Bruckner, [for example] the fashioning of men no longer has any rebellious quality, any relationship to the Fall and the loss of Paradise. Having fashioned men is only a metaphor for a civilizing performance that ‘first brought the Greeks’ savage dispositions into a human form.’ In this context, for Prometheus to be punished would be totally unintelligible; the chaining to the Caucasus, therefore, is a misinterpretation of his perseverance in the practice of science.”23 The changing circumstances are expressed in a kind of selection of “traits” so that the different versions of the myth can be considered as historical processes of its telling and retelling. Its texture over time—in the

Blumenberg’s Second Model  83  sense that mythmaking produces meaning as a process of becoming significant (Bedeutsamkeit)24—persists through “its initial condition,” “its [first] representation,” which is why myths are “irreversible” (301). Narratives, including the modern narrative of the successes of science, progress, technology, and so on, are not “secularized” versions of eschatology or the introduction of a new narrativization of a secular myth. Modernity shares with other epochs the persistence of mythical tales; thus myths are not alternatives to or antecedents of rational accounts. This theory asserts that no rational account can displace the function of myth. We are continually threatened by the “absolutism of reality,” which is why significance making is a human practice that has survived because of its specific functions. Blumenberg’s bold conception of myth is developed through his specific technique of the work on myth. In this theory we do not find transitions from myth to religion or from myth to logos. Myth opens up a process of cognitive work. Myth also enhances the work of logos. Mythic meaning and resolution are intensely self-conscious efforts.

Tools and the Filling Up of Normative Spaces in Blumenberg’s Model Work on Myth is a complex model, and I will focus on some of its tools and some of the areas Blumenberg leaves undefined. First, Blumenberg’s model could be considered a useful account of mythmaking only in terms of its aesthetic dimension. If we were to apply his theory of myth to the political realm, we would find it lacking a normative approach. Perhaps its most important shortcoming is that his model leaves little room for the development of normative criteria for what he calls significance (Bedeutsamkeit). There is no thematization of the normative criteria for analysis of good or bad myths. Consider, for example, what Blumenberg says about this normative perspective: “to project [his theory] onto schema of progress would be an ill-considered way of providing it with contemporaneity. It has its own procedure by which to exhibit a directed process, by telling and gaining of space, and the change in forms in the direction of human ones between the night and chaos of the beginning and a present state that is left undefined” (113). If, indeed, “the world ceases to contain as many monsters” (113),

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it is because of the specific therapeutic help provided by mythmaking. As a result, we need to develop the criterion of differentiation between progressive and exclusionary myths. We cannot avoid this “ethical dimension” in which mythmaking provides meaning to the claims for inclusion or exclusion articulated by various identitary groups, such as nations (113). Myths make sense to people because people identify with myths. But, since not all reasons people identify with myths are ethically good, using myths for political purposes can have unintended consequences. Indeed, some of these purposes are extremely dangerous and can lead to horrible, exclusionary political initiatives, such as wars or genocide or ethnic cleansing. If the goal of myth is to “make the world friendlier” (113), then we need more than just a descriptive theory of myth and its reception. “Being at home in the world” is the normative space of an ethical analysis, since it is important to understand how and why myths are used for political purposes. In Blumenberg’s model, though, the success of mythmaking and the processes of its transformation are left to the contingencies of a myth’s historical reception. To what extent can we say that some mythmaking—while being well received by its audience—is used for terrible political purposes, for example, in order to destroy others or develop false theories about race and supremacy? Blumenberg provides no answers to these questions. And for this reason his theory can be criticized, because assuaging fears and angst cannot be the only basis of a model of mythmaking; it leaves out the most important ethical question for politics: “How can we learn to live together?” A political theory of mythmaking should thematize how myths can be filled with exclusionary values of the ideological kind. Thus we need the help of a theory of ideologies.25 The fact that a myth has succeeded over an extended period of time is not a criterion by which we can judge its value or “worthiness.” The fact that a myth is historically successful sounds much like Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Selection over time must also be contrasted with a normative criterion that would help us determine how and why a myth has been accepted and the negative purposes rather than the good ones make it dangerous. Indeed, myths must be considered from a perspective that not only explores them semiotically as a system of meanings but also hermeneutically clarifies those meanings in terms of the content and context of their political purposes and ideologies.26

Blumenberg’s Second Model  85  Fortunately, Blumenberg does give us some hints about how we might reconstruct the notion of significance (Bedeutsamkeit) in the processes of political mythmaking, as it is rereworked by certain political thinkers. In his multilayered description of the myth of Prometheus, for example, he focuses on how the philosophers of modernity initially couched their theories of politics in myth. The importance of myth here relates to order and chaos in the political realm. First, Blumenberg shows that, in the description of the three forms of state—democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy—Thomas Hobbes used an allegorical interpretation of the Prometheus myth to give weight to his preference for a monarchical form: “The theft of fire would mean that by human invention, laws and justice were taken by imitation from monarchy. Prometheus the shaper of man presents himself as the one who animates the multitude, the dirt and dregs of mankind, as it were, by means of fire that is removed from its natural source, into the single civil person whose exercise of power is then called aristocracy or democracy” (374). Later on in Hobbes’s tale, Prometheus deviates from his original condition of political rationality and, as a result, men artificially put other forms of state together from the ashes of monarchy. Hobbes produces his own narrative in which rationality contains, in a single act, the innovative condition of order that results from it. As Blumenberg explains: “Prometheus does not stand for the primary act of foundation of the state, whose form is prefigured, instead, by Zeus’s sovereignty, but for the rampant secondary artificiality whose motive is seen in the envy that causes the opponents of monarchy to pursue their political endeavors” (374). With such a claim, Blumenberg means to say that Prometheus’s artificial creation was not meant to defy the divine sovereignty and power of Zeus, but to set up a rational construction that would stop that of others who would claim their own preeminent power. Jean-Jacques Rousseau likewise pursues a different sort of account of order resulting from chaos. In a complicated argument developed by Blumenberg to prove that, in the scheme of order and chaos, Rousseau was also inspired by the mythical figure of Prometheus, he searches this claim back to the second part of his prize essay in response to the Academy of Dijon in 1750. There Blumenberg finds Rousseau already making reference to an Egyptian ancestor of Prometheus, the god Theutus, who invented the sciences and, for that reason, transformed

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himself into the enemy of humanity. Rousseau took the story of Theutus as the inspiration for the irreversibility of humans in the state of nature and the dangers that culture brings to humankind. According to Blumenberg, this heuristic explanation shows “all the characteristics that readily suggest a glance at Prometheus” (381). He appears in Rousseau’s work in connection with the idea that bringing fire also introduces other problems (of being burned, for example).27 Rousseau goes on to develop his tale of order and chaos in describing the primeval state of nature and the chaos that follows the exit from it and the possibility of envisioning the reestablishment of order through the institutions of the social contract. If we take Blumemberg’s lead when he considers the introduction of political narrative in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, we see that both thinkers were searching for a myth to connect to their theories of the social contract as acceptable grounds for political action. In this sense we can say that political theories can become prophetic.28 Consider, for example, the weight Blumenberg places on such myths being well received because the public finds them relevant to their real political experiences. In view of Blumenberg’s failure to address the context and evaluative contents of myths’ reception, we need a theory of the social imaginary in which the figure of Prometheus gains new significance and thereby establishes a relation with the common experiences and hopes of a community. This new normative agenda begins by reinforcing the myth’s significance in terms of solving specific problems. A second perspective becomes possible if we acknowledge that myths are complex and have many layers. But even if they escape rigid conceptualizations because of the many dimensions involved —the aesthetic, the moral, and the practical-political—their ideological contents should be considered part of the materials that makes them successful. Thus, as Bottici argues, “what renders a myth specifically political is not an already political content of the story that it tells, but the fact that the story that it tells comes to ‘make significance’ of the specifically political conditions for a certain group or society.”29 Blumenberg, in his examples, illuminates the way in which Hobbes and Rousseau mixed their “rational” theories of the social contract with mythical connections that helped them articulate the importance of action as a legitimate step toward fulfilling collective aspirations for a new political order. The clarity of these examples

Blumenberg’s Second Model  87  aids us in understanding why mythmaking narratives establish specific political goals. Third, we should also realize that there are differences between political narratives and historical narratives, and a conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) is the proper method to find the connection between them. In historical narratives there is an implicit demand for moral meaning. In political narratives the demands are for action. Both narrative forms are concerned with the relation between the interpretation of the needs of the present with the possible transformation of the future because of actors’ newer expectations. Indeed, in the historical narrative of something that has happened in a community, the sequence of the events is chosen by the historian, and the events themselves gain significance because of the way they are organized or plotted. The plot can be seen as a “moral drama.” The historical narratives offered to the public need to be understood within the framework of a theory of judgment, because narratives are presented so that spectators can learn to judge them.30 On the other hand, a political drama is presented to the people so they can react to it. The goal here is not only to stimulate action but to make that action a meaningful collective effort. Both political and historical narratives need a theory of judgment to frame the analysis of spectators and of actors. In the same way, the public that listens to a myth—either a political or historical one—needs a theory of political judgment, because history always reflects the point of view, interpreted for the present, of its victors. Any historical narrative presupposes not only memory but also oblivion. Indeed, as Chiara Bottici argues, “myth is the politics of history.”31 Thus we need a normative criterion for distinguishing between historical and political narratives, because, even if the two sets of narratives are analytically distinct, they are intertwined. When considering a historical narrative with an explicit moral dimension, a critical perspective helps us understand how and why things could have been different. With a political narrative, on the other hand, a critical perspective stimulates action to achieve particular goals. Thus it is important to rescue Blumenberg’s category of significance, because humans are not only concerned with the question of how to protect themselves from what they fear, or from what provokes anguish, but also with the question of how they can live better

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lives. A bridge between political myths and historical narratives cannot be made without a political theory of judgment for the spectators—who are also actors. Returning to the example of Hobbes, we can see how his experience drove him to articulate the connection between myth and an emergent strategy—the social contract—that would help stimulate appropriate action by the very people who would grant the legitimacy of a state. The notion of significance needs a theory of ideology and a theory of political judgment because myths allow us to reimagine institutions and social and political practices. For this reason I think Paul Ricoeur was right in pointing out that ideologies and narratives are guided by their shared connection to the social imaginary.32 Hope for change and political transformations cannot exist without a theory of ideology that allows us to trace the roots of significance in any given political narrative. As we will see when we discuss Hannah Arendt’s work in chapter 5, a critical analysis of ideologies is necessary for a theory of judgment, but only because conceptual history would force us to give an account of how and where a myth emerges. While ideological narratives and mythical narratives are both “mapping devices that orient in the social and political world,”33 they are not identical. To be successful, political myths need to be embedded in a dramatic or emotional narrative, while ideological theories do not have this requirement. But when the political and the ideological fuse, as they often do, the effects on the spectators are much more powerful. Consider Leni Riefenstahl’s epic film, The Triumph of the Will, about the myth of the Aryan race. Narratives of myths can provoke a powerful emotional and uncritical response from the public. Since Blumenberg’s theory of myth relies on a theory of reception, and since he sees political myths as being significant through their acceptance by spectators, I argue that his theory of myth is incomplete. Specifically, it needs further clarification on the link connecting a theory of political reception (articulated in terms of semantic meanings constructed with the aim of providing significance) to normative contents that achieve concrete political goals. To help us better understand Blumenberg’s incomplete concept of significance, we will direct our attention to another issue related to the social imaginary—the makers of the myths on which Blumenberg focuses. So let us now turn to Goethe, Thomas Mann, and, to a lesser

Blumenberg’s Second Model  89  extent, Sigmund Freud. In describing Goethe’s intense effort to develop a mythical narrative about Prometheus in his “Ode to Prometheus,” Blumenberg focuses on the power the image of Prometheus exerts on Goethe.34 The image of Prometheus that Goethe finds so irresistible and compelling is situated in the realm of the social imaginary, in the space where the myth already occupies our dreams and fantasies. Goethe obviously identifies with Prometheus in his own quest as a creator. A combination of an “image and consciousness of the self”—of Goethe’s mirror image—extends to the entire process of reworking the myth and rescuing the image of Prometheus as an “icon of the workshop,” which “could be related to [the task of] the aesthetic genius. Indeed, Blumenberg observes that “the poem brings to light” the tapestry of historical circumstances that enabled Goethe to achieve the creative expression he had sought (414). Blumenberg explains that “to say that Goethe’s ‘Ode to Prometheus’ extends the process of creation across the decade in which historical events were also resonating within the work—the Sturm und Drang’s movement and Romanticism’s transcendental identity with God—cannot be taken as a historical causality.” The reception of the myth was, in itself mythical, because, as Blumenberg argues, Goethe “describes the effect of the mythical poem as the emergence of a background [Untergrund] that was unknown to the rationality of the century and to the intentions of its most distinguished representatives, and unexpected by them. Seen in retrospect, what he later identified as the central myth of his form of existence is coordinated specifically and precisely with such an event” (415). This example shows how the historical consciousness of the author—of Goethe—is demonstrated by his efforts to find the proper expression of the myth while, at the same time, interpreting the new semantic contents of his age. He ends up producing the poem that would relate to a collective consciousness. But what make Goethe’s quest to find his life’s meaning in the myth of Prometheus intelligible are the historical roots of that quest, specifically, the attempts by Sturm und Drang and Romanticism to occupy God’s place. These efforts were connected to Goethe’s intentions and expressed the work’s meaning, its explicit signficance. The myth of Prometheus was “close to Goethe throughout his life,” Blumenberg tells us, and “he was stirred [by it] again and again, as he was comparably stirred only by Faust” (430). It is Goethe’s affinity with the protagonist, his identification, that fused his project

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of self-creation to the historical reworking of the myth of Prometheus. This gesture resonated with the public because the historicized framing opened up a new interpretative space from within which the myth was reworked and rescued from the social imaginary. “Ode to Prometheus” helps us connect the social imaginary to the historical specificity of Goethe. Charles Taylor gives us a good definition of the social imaginary that can help us see what is at stake: “By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (my emphasis).35 I like this definition because it shows the importance of how we—ordinary people—imagine our social surroundings through images, stories, and legends that satisfy our longings, express our values, and influence our perspective on life and the world. Within the work of the social imaginary, common practices and shared understandings of how things fit into a schema become possible. Myths are vehicles that carry social expectations, and these are also related to our social practices through the power of the social imaginary. Thus myths connect to our own particular historical dimensions (our factual context and situations), which are in turn connected to the development of our normative expectations. When creators focus on specific myths and reinterpret them, they can also introduce moral values that end up infiltrating bits and pieces of our social imaginary. A process that starts as an effort to redraw the contours of our world might end up as part of all the mechanisms of our social imaginary. As Blumenberg’s account make clear, creative artists like Goethe already know about these layers of interconnections. Goethe’s quest for selfcreation led him to develop a theoretical understanding through which he became the embodiment of both the myth of Prometheus and the historical transformation of an era. In other words, Goethe became his own exemplar.36 The second example of a great mythmaker is more complicated, since it involves Goethe as well as two other interpreters of myths, Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann. Goethe and Mann are connected

Blumenberg’s Second Model  91  here because of Napoleon. The transformation of Goethe’s view on Prometheus came about, in part, because of the historical prominence that Napoleon had acquired in the minds of the public who witnessed his rise. For Mann, the connection took on a different dimension, which reflected the social imaginary of his times, wherein the figure of Napoleon had already been conceived of as a sort of Prometheus. Like Goethe, Mann was always interested in certain myths; indeed, this might have been the reason Mann started reading Freud.37 Blumenberg cites a letter written by Freud to Arnold Zweig describing an encounter with Mann at a lecture Mann gave on Freud’s work. Blumenberg observes that we can no longer make the scene—with this speaker [Mann] and this listener [Freud], at this most terrible time, in this most threatened of all locations—present to ourselves in pregnancy. Part of this is also the anything but coincidental fact that the one of them was in the midst of his greatest epic work, the Joseph tetralogy, which he had already been writing for more than a decade, while the other was working on the last of his speculations, and the one that would probably astonish his contemporaries most of all: the book (composed of three individual essays), Moses and Monotheism. Both were contributing in their own ways, to the myth of a mythless God, who tolerated no images or stories around him. (516)

Blumenberg tells us that Mann had read Totem and Taboo, which he considered the most important of Freud’s writings, and he was very conscious of Freud’s recovery of the myth of Moses from the political role into which it had already been obviously drafted. Blumenberg claims that both were immersed in the intellectual developments of mythmaking. In November 1911 Freud writes to Thomas Mann about their encounter, telling him how he had enjoyed reading the new volume of the Joseph story. Blumenberg interprets Freud’s interest in Mann’s Joseph in these terms: “If Joseph, in Egypt, had found guiding principles for his life in the pre-imprinted mythical models of the patriarchal past, for whom could Joseph [Freud’s Joseph], in his turn—after an appropriate phase of latency—have been the mythical prototype, ‘the

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secret demonic motor’? The answer is: for Napoleon” (517). Indeed, Blumenberg argues, Freud analyzed Napoleon as having invented a Joseph complex, “by way of the ‘motor’ of the unconscious, the principle of repetition propels [Napoleon] as the superior strength— continuously operating, dangerously undealt-with, always ready to burst out—of the life that has already been lived, that is formed once and for all [by the myth of Joseph]” (518). Thus, Blumenberg adds, Freud is interpreting Napoleon as having taken Joseph’s fantasy—but Freud is also a reader of Goethe—and “what is crucial is that this vague classification of the phenomenon . . . elevates unfamiliarity to an element of its definition” in this new process of working on mythmaking (518). In exploring Freud’s interpretation of Napoleon’s link to the Joseph myth, Blumenberg considers there to have been analogies between Napoleon and Joseph: both had many siblings, both were not the firstborn, and, last but not least, Napoleon had an older brother whose name was Joseph. For Napoleon, then, according to this analysis, “to eliminate Joseph, to take his place, to become Joseph himself, must have been Napoleon’s strongest emotion as a young child” (519). What is fascinating about Blumbenberg’s analysis is that he sees Freud as a “backward-facing prophet when he extrapolates Napoleon’s Egyptian escapade from the Joseph complex” (519), for Napoleon, “who remained fixated on his puberty fantasies, was blessed with incredible luck, inhibited by no ties apart from his family, and made his way through life like a sleepwalker, until he was finally shipwrecked by his folie of grandeur” (520). Thus Napoleon had to go to Egypt, but it is Mann who later writes that “where else could one go but Egypt if one were Joseph and wanted to loom large in the brothers’ eyes?” (520). In this interpretation of Napoleon’s journey, although he had failed in his mission to Egypt, he nevertheless had to behave as if he had been successful: “he had to treat Europe as though it were Egypt, in order to become the nourisher of his brothers” (520). Thus Napoleon, following the example of Joseph, “took care of his brothers by making them kings and princes” (520). Blumenberg’s account can only be understood if it creates a space for significance out of the social imaginary, a space by means of which connections with myths are forged by the people, some of whom will also become mythical figures in their own times. These great fictions all draw on the unconscious motives of the

Blumenberg’s Second Model  93  individuals who appear in the interpretation—individuals who project their own expectations onto a myth. The as-if-Egypt was Europe and the as-if-Napoleon acting like Joseph—a “father of his brothers”—all these are elements of symbolic meanings woven into a complex tapestry of fact and fiction that suggest how much we owe to our favorite myths. They become the precious material of psychic prehistory that Mann and Freud shared in their mythmaking. The ironic tone Mann gives to his Joseph in the repetition of the primeval story shows how conscious he was that “the repetitions, which are embedded in the security provided by primeval history, easily give up the seriousness of those primeval stories, which, as it were, ‘did not yet know’ that they were prototypical” (521). And if we go back to Goethe’s interest in Napoleon, we can see how differently he regards the emperor, since he still endows him with the qualities of uniqueness that belonged to the original myth of Prometheus. Moreover, Goethe finds a positive self-identification with Napoleon because he relates to “the mythical summation of their incomparable relationship and their unique existential claims” (523). Thus people can become myths because their personal qualities enhance the reception of older myths as they explore the political significance of the myths’ historical context. These examples not only allow us to see how myths are connected to the social imaginary, but how they also help us understand that the unconscious and our shared aspirations belong to specific historical times. Here again we are confronted with conceptual history and our experiences and expectations.

Is It Fear, Hope, or the Will? By Way of a Conclusion In summing up, we find that Blumenberg’s work insists on angst or anguish as the single motor of mythmaking. This is a strong—indeed a too strong—claim that raises many doubts, as I will show. In this last section I will focus on three authors who appear in Blumenberg’s monumental study whom he considers examples of great thinkers who used their own myths not only to deal with their angst but to show how myths respond to dimensions of human behavior that are beyond angst. These three thinkers, Freud, Marx, and Nietszche, had different

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strategies for mythmaking. According to Freud, human beings are essentially threatened from within by self-enslavement and lack of self-mastery. Freud translated the conditions of weakness, menace, and fear into the relationship among the ego, the superego, and the id. He named our neuroses after Greek myths and connected them to his much larger effort to build a theory of culture (from within the social imaginary). Blumenberg traces how Freud lived his own odyssey (Joycean, of course): “on a single day in a small provincial town in Italy, Freud came into the ‘red light district’ three times, unintentionally, and the greater his dismay and his haste to get free of the quarter, the more certainly the circle closed. Who else but Freud would have experienced that in this way and would have been able to enact himself so impressively the fixation of sexual matters, with this trick of the id?” (87). According to Blumenberg, Freud realizes here that the concept of “significance” is ambivalent and coercive, because this term represents “the uncanny as the inescapable, the meaningful as the unmistakable” (87). The Oedipus complex is built on this epiphany, since Freud discovered or invented it not only because it reveals the deepest human desires—murder of one’s father and incest with one’s mother—but also because it assumes that, “as an instinctive impulse of infancy, an unexpressed inclination to return home to the mother, in opposition to the centrifugally directed claims of reality, represented by the father” (87), is always taking us on our own private odyssey. Mastering the Oedipus complex will be the meaning of the lesson not to return home—or not to return home right away. Blumenberg treats Freud not only as one who makes myths but also as a mythmaker who gives his myths a functional role. According to Blumenberg, Freud invented a total myth “of the final return home to the original state” in order to show the death instinct as the story of the history of humankind (and as a total myth that resembles another, Nietzsche’s myth of the eternal return).38 Thus Freud is not only a great mythmaker but also a creative thinker who understands the conceptual importance of significance in mythmaking: “it ties acute experiences and important current events into the context of long familiarity and creates prefiguration, but also a decrease in the expectation of freedom, a decrease in what is conceded to candor and ultimate self-knowledge, since these come under the protection of the unrecognized preestablished patterns [Vorgegebenheiten]” (95). For Blumenberg, Freud’s is the clearest example of a

Blumenberg’s Second Model  95  theory of myth whose function is to protect against angst or anguish. It is also a good model for showing how to combat dogmatism. What is missing from Freud’s account, however, is a sense of hope; he ended up building a theory of culture with pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of total transformation. For Freud, angst is related to the limits of human freedom in coping with neurosis—a position in stark contrast to Blumenberg’s functional theory of myth. It would be interesting to engage in a critical comparison of these two theories of myth in order to see why they have developed such different ideas about the role of mythmaking. For Marx, alienation and domination are forces that oppress humans. Blumenberg writes that “Marx looks upon Prometheus, as the ‘most eminent saint and martyr’ in an imaginary philosophical calendar.” If there is a gesture of rebellion in this, then the father of gods—against whom a philosophical dissertation could most readily help one to become a martyr—would have been Hegel, who had been dead for a decade. But the uprising is still more comprehensive. It is philosophy itself that, in one of the hypostases that the author effortlessly accomplishes, makes Prometheus’s rebellion its own rebellion, its confession, and its motto “against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity” (584). Thus, according to Blumenberg, Marx himself embodies the mythical figure of Prometheus because he will help human beings liberate themselves from the fear of external forces of domination, as if they were purely structural forces. In chapter 23 of Das Kapital, however, Marx gives Prometheus to the proletariat as the symbol of its mythical embodiment: “chained by a law of nature to the naked rock of capitalist production” (591). Thus humans become the true subjects of emancipation. In his own narrative Marx assumes that “Prometheus is clearly moved away from the act of creation and admitted into history as one of its notable episodes, not as the act of its original foundation” (589). The metaphor of the chain is meant to connect the law of shared causality of available labor power and the expansive power of capital. In such a way, capitalism is seen through the lenses of myth. Two aspects of Marx’s use of myth need further explication. First, in his theory of surplus value (Mehrvert), for example, he not only shows the full force of his position against the external forces that

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oppress humanity, he also shows that surplus value is a key category in the structure of production and, as a structure, it symbolizes a chain of power. As such, it relates to an order of domination—of authority— that is exerted as if it were a natural, legitimate form of domination:39 “Seen from the point of view of ‘capitalist accumulation,’ Prometheus on the Caucasus is no longer the victim of the tyrannical despotism of the father of gods, but rather of the inexorability of that ‘absolute general law’ that forces oppressors and oppressed together into a single historical action—though, to be sure, this is only a result of the cunning [Hinterlist] of the reason in this history, as a means of driving them to the point where their destinies inevitably diverge” (592). This is the key point, since Marx is more interested in the process of transformation provoked by his narrative (his critique of ideology) than in only naming the structures of domination. His goal was to change society, not to tame human anxiety. A second problem in Blumenberg’s interpretation of Marx is that he ignores how the myth of the proletariat’s embodiment of the Promethean project is achieved through the translation of its messianic hope. (Perhaps Löwith’s model could fill in one part of the description of Marx’s task, but there is more to it as well. For Löwith, redemption was a strong political target, and it embodied a prophecy to change the future. This was partly why Marx’ theory of redemption was so political and so powerful.) Marx develops a theory of ideology, a method that inaugurates a new framework of critique. This means that his theory is not focused on giving names to things, but rather on introducing an altogether new frame of reference wherein the categories of critical thinking enable human beings to learn and to struggle against the forces of power and domination. Thus, instead of developing a theory of bourgeois solutions for the anguish of his times, Marx’s concerns are widely emancipatory through and through. Finally, Blumenberg’s interpretation of Nietzsche exposes the real differences between these thinkers. Nietzsche is sometimes a collaborator and sometimes a major rival. For example, they have similar views about the aesthetic dimensions of myths yet opposing positions about the space of the aesthetic. Blumenberg privileges the functional role of myth, while Nietzsche considers art the only possible answer to the anxiety of our existence. They both reject the predominance of logos. As we have seen, Blumenberg takes this position because he sees

Blumenberg’s Second Model  97  logos and mythos as complementary; for Nietzsche, it is because the self-sufficiency of existence, as derived from the Socratic paradigm, is another sort of remythologizing. The starkest opposition between the two thinkers lies in their differing views on the purpose of myth: to reflect humanity’s tragic condition versus to console us for our tragic fate. Here, according to Blumenberg, are the three major conceptual points on which he and Nietzsche disagree: (a) Nietzsche has a heroic agent in his view of history (Übermensch), (b) Nietzsche does not see that the purpose of myth is to make life acceptable (his tragic vision), (c) Nietzsche’s views on myth are more metaphysical than historical. (This is also Heidegger’s critique). Nietzsche was an ancestor of the theory of myth and was also opposed to the idea that myth is merely the stage that precedes logos. For him, myth only reflects our tragic position while facing the irremediability of life, with Socrates giving the plebeian response to the challenges of life as tragic. There is always some sort of irresolution of tragic meaning, what he calls the Dionysian abyss, and the only possible consolation in the face of this abyss comes from aesthetic forces and the will. So, even if Nietzsche’s early views changed in his later works, his theory of myth is the very opposite of Blumenberg’s strongest claim that we engage in mythmaking because of our anguish, anxieties, or fears. Indeed, at the heart of Blumenberg’s criticism is his effort to challenge Nietzsche’s views because they undermine his focus on the functional role of myth. For Blumenberg, Nietzsche’s efforts at transforming the myth of Prometheus are directed at reversing the tale of the “fall” of the mythical figure, because he sees this figure as an elevation: “Nietzsche had discovered a new aesthetic function for Prometheus, that of typifying the opposite of the Socratic divergence from the veracity of the tragic consciousness” and thus “the transformation of the suffering Prometheus into the triumphant one, the Titan into the Olympian, takes place, as it were, on the quiet” (565). According to Blumenberg, Nietzsche not only misread authors, but, even more provocatively, he distorted the historical understanding of the work of myth solely to accommodate his antibourgeois views. For Nietzsche—who is clearly exploring the deepest roots of aesthetic pleasure—the ineffability with which we face the suffering of

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Prometheus or any other tragic hero finds its full expression in tragedy. Aesthetic enjoyment is produced as a kind of pain. To look for consolation in tragedy is to miss the point. This is the power of art. Thus Nietzsche reworks the Promethean story against the figure of Socrates as representing the logos. And, if Nietzsche’s narrative is erected against the anxiety of living without gods, “it turns out that the ‘death of God’ in Nietzsche’s proclamation, is precisely an event in a tragedy, which history itself has become” (605). Nietzsche, however, will adjust his reading of the Prometheus story so that the rivalry of Zeus and Prometheus will no longer be a dynastic affair. The worst provocation to Zeus is that the world can succeed as a work of art. It is a matter of the will, Blumenberg argues, that Nietzsche’s myth lacks any moralizing tendency precisely because he envisions an amoral artist god. So, Blumenberg asks, how do you then neutralize what had once been considered Zeus’s hostility to humans? In Nietzsche’s schema, however, slavery is part of the essence of culture (note the coincidences with Freud): “The Greeks, we are told, had never entirely succeeded in forgetting what the apparent clarity and cheerfulness of their culture rested on: ‘Culture [Bildung], which is above all a true need for art, rests on a frightful foundation: But his foundation makes itself known in the dawning perception of shame’” (606). Thus we find that Nietzsche’s theory of myth is a different effort to understand tragedy and the human. It is also a novel theory of culture wherein tragic sensibility is the focus of concern—neither society nor emancipation, nor anguish. These three authors make the case against Blumenberg’s view of angst or anguish. His theory is too restricted and too cautious, and, as a result, it fails to make the connection between a normative perception of mythmaking and the real function of a political myth, which is action.

5 Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics Semantic Innovation Through Religious Disclosure

M

y fourth model will be based on Hannah Arendt’s project on the autonomy of politics, as it has been developed in her essay “What Is Authority?” her book On Revolution, and essays published in the posthumous volume The Promise of Politics. As Andreas Kalyvas has observed, these writings have received less attention than others, or have been less well understood, because of the general complexity of Arendt’s positions and her intricate reconstructions of the origins of concepts.1 It is in those writings that she also developed her positive idea of revolution. In this chapter I will demonstrate that her model of secularization (worldliness) about politics’ need for disclosive concepts is a highly productive step. I will begin by showing that her analysis of the loss of the Western concept of authority in modernity and her ideas about creating an autonomous space for politics provide the internal connection for all her essays on secularization. Second, I will focus on how, in On Revolution, she rescues the Roman concept of authority as foundational and connects it to her model of the American revolution. Third, I will show how she uses the method of political disclosure by taking religious images and mythic figures to open up the space for new kinds of political interactions among political

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agents. (This is in contradistinction to Löwith’s version of translation, which finds analogies between religion and politics.) I will also contrast her theory of myths and mythmaking with Blumenberg’s. In so doing I will present her views on religion’s role in conceptual history by describing her method of thematizing the emergence, transformation, and innovation of concepts, moreover, I will discuss her ideas about action, power, and freedom as seen through the immanent practices between political actors. An important part of my argument will be that representation of Jesus’s actions take on new semantic meanings because of the sense of political agency that has been ascribed to them. In my view, Arendt’s model is the first step toward a full disclosure of new categories, which can provide a different perspective on what is at stake when we engage with ideas “thinking without a banister.”

Get ting Rid of the Concept of Authority In her essay “What Is Authority?” Arendt describes her understanding of the relationship between religion and politics. She does so from within a strong analysis and critique of the concept of authority, as it was taken from the Platonic epistemic legacy. As is her custom, she begins by saying that the concept of authority has been linked to obedience as a form of rule (and violence), but that the political problems present in the Western tradition might be solved if we engage with other ways of thinking about politics, for example, with the Roman political tradition as it has been recovered through the American Revolution. Plato had already described authority as comprising the hierarchical position of the ruler,2 a position that was later reiterated by the Christian tradition. Plato had managed to establish a transcendent connection to the world of ideas, of truth, which allowed him to legitimize the hierarchical position of reason. My claim is that by separating the idea of authority from the Western notion of politics, Arendt imagined a way of investing politics with a new conception of power and action. She made a bold move when she argued that the concept of authority was lost in modernity and that there was no need to recover it as such. She also argued that religion used this transcendental connection to legitimize sovereign rule, and the result was a problematic dependence of politics on religion. Part

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  101  of her claim is based on the fact that she did not trust the Western tradition of philosophy, because of its reliance on the idea of epistemic truth occupying all spheres of signification. Contrary to what Samuel Moyn argues, her reconstruction of how the concept of authority emerged is not “sketchy,” but rather very revealing about her idea of the meaning of politics.3 She describes how the term truth came to be associated with political validity and how, with the introduction of the temporal connection of worldly time, the Roman notion of authority as foundation came to be “translated” by the Western tradition as the beginning—the moment of the foundation—of Christianity. Her use of conceptual history starts by clarifying where the notion of authority truly came from, for, if “we wish not only to comprehend the actual political experiences behind the concept of authority—which, at least in its positive aspect, is exclusively Roman—but also to understand authority as the Romans themselves understood it theoretically and made it part of the political tradition of the West,”4 we need some conceptual history. For that reason Arendt, in “What Is Authority?” reconstructs the way in which the Platonic use of the term truth was linked to the political-religious notion of hierarchical rule. Her strategy is to seek—through her historical reconstruction of concepts—the reason why Plato did not rely on the actuality of Greek political practices when he first defined the concept of authority as truth for political matters. Plato defined authority not as persuasion or violence but rather, in a transcendent way, as providing the ground of reason and truth for collective obedience. Arendt argued (along with Max Weber) that, if authority is indeed what makes people obey,5 Plato proposed using it to establish the legitimacy of reason. It was thus incumbent upon Plato to connect validity with transcendence so that he could bypass the necessity for physical violence and, instead, introduce authority as the power of the philosopher king. Arendt argues that it was through Plato’s definition of politics as truth, later taken up in a Christian interpretation through Saint Augustine’s Latin translation,6 that the Western tradition connected authority to religion and tradition. This explains why the link between religion and politics became inextricable as well as why Arendt claimed we should get rid of it. In a recent essay on this topic, Patchen Markell claims that, “for some readers, Arendt’s most obvious contribution to our thinking about rule lies in her forceful denial that ruling has any proper place in politics at

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all, notwithstanding its central position in the tradition of Western philosophical thought.”7 Thus, Arendt fought forcefully to redefine the understanding of politics by establishing a positive conception of power and its innovative articulation through action. But let us return to Arendt’s narrative to see how she deals with leaving behind a concept of authority as rule and epistemic truth. Plato first approached the concept of authority in his Republic, where he thought that the philosopher king should rule with the tools of reason. “This combination of reason and rule implied a danger to philosophy,” claimed Arendt, and she recalls that Kant warned about that unhappy liaison, since he clearly understood that “the possession of power corrupts the free judgment of reason.”8 Plato wanted the philosopher to rule, but this was motivated not by his interest in the polis but rather for the sake of philosophy (as his traumatic reaction to what had happened to Socrates). Plato thought that truth as an authoritative discourse was more effective than coercion or persuasion; his problem was how truth would compel others who were not philosophers. In the end, by linking truth to transcendence, he conceptualized the “tyranny of reason.” Arendt claimed that Plato “solved [the dilemma of obedience] through the concluding myth of rewards and punishments in the hereafter.”9 For Arendt, it was clear that Plato did not believe in this myth but wanted to ensure that the rest of the citizens did. In order to legitimize coercion as a principle of truth, he connected transcendence to the existing models of hierarchical relationships—such as between the shepherd and his sheep or the helmsman of a ship and the passengers—as if they were political metaphors of natural relations. These specific examples of asymmetrical positions made his conception of authority authoritarian.10 Since these references were taken from private life, Arendt claimed, the asymmetry between one and the other was translated to the political position of the ruler and the ruled. Plato used other examples, however, because he wanted to make sure that the relationship itself was the compelling motive for obedience. Hence, ideas are the truth of the world, and they transcend the sphere of the human because they have an existence of their own. Therefore, the connection between truth and transcendence became the definitive solution since they were fused together through the notion of authority. “The ideas become measures only after the philosopher has

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  103  left the bright sky of ideas and returned to the dark cave of human existence,” Arendt writes. “In this part of the story Plato touches upon the deepest reason for the conflict between the philosopher and the polis. He tells of the philosopher’s loss of orientation in human affairs, of the blindness striking the eyes, of the predicament of not being able to communicate what he has seen, and of the actual and imminent danger to his life [as it did with Socrates’ example]. It is in this predicament that the philosopher turns to experiences and images, the ideas, which operate as standards and measures, and finally, in fear of his life, uses them as instruments of domination.”11 Since ideas become the standards of measures beyond this world, the essential character of an authoritarian government legitimizes the exercise of power beyond the sphere of power, that is, by inventing transcendence. Plato discovered that the rewards and punishments granted by obedience worked in a much better way than actual violence, but by establishing the connection of authority to transcendence he ended up by fusing authority with domination (Herrschaft) and attaching it to the sacred (das Heil).12 This semantic identity between domination and authority also linked them conceptually, which, as a result, came to be used with the German notion of violence (Gewalt).13 It was because of the versatility of this fusion that Christianity utilized parts of the Greek concept of authority, which by then comprised not only a fundamental portion of the religious realm but also a necessary device for the justification of all political hierarchical rule. Arendt claimed that ideas had “nothing to do with political experience, and the problem of action.” Rather, they pertained to the experience of the philosopher in his task of exercising contemplation. Plato—the philosopher—is the expert on ideas, and it was he who also claimed that, as standards, ideas can become the law (Laws). This is the step where authoritarian laws compel citizens to blind obedience instead of allowing them to question authority and rule and their originary sources. The metaphor of seeing instead of doing is what Arendt argued that Plato had constructed through his claim that philosophy’s idea of truth was useful for politics.14 He defined its sphere of validity in these terms: “[If] the interest of the philosopher and the interest of man qua man coincide, both demand that human affairs, the results of speech and action, must not acquire a dignity of their own but be subjected to the domination of something outside their realm.”15 So Plato became the fundamental

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influence in the Western tradition with respect to connecting truth and transcendence to politics. Arendt also analyzes Aristotle’s attempt to produce a concept of authority, but he employs a different, albeit equally unsuccessful, analytical strategy. She notes that Aristotle took his examples from the private realm of households and the experiences of the slave’s economy. He conceives of authority as iterated in the position of the teacher vis-à-vis the student, a relationship modeled after the authority exercised by the father in the education of his children. By recovering the exercise of teaching as the authority of tradition, Aristotle sought to legitimize another kind of hierarchical rule taken from the private domain, the household. Thus, Arendt concludes, “Aristotle, as far as I can see, was the first to appeal, for the purposes of establishing rule in the handling of human affairs, to ‘nature,’ which established the difference . . . between the younger and the older ones, destined the ones to be ruled and the others to rule” (116). The household is not a political community but a “monarchy,” a “one-man rule” (116). Arendt claims, however, that education is rightly understood to operate within the frame of authority, because child rearing and education need the leading figure of a person whose knowledge and experience grant him the authority to teach the younger generations. But this relationship is not useful for politics. Nevertheless, Arendt maintains that only with the Romans did the “educational character” of the ancestors come to represent “the example of greatness of each successive generation” as reframed under the conceptualization of foundational memory (119). In the Christian tradition, domination came to be linked to the sacred by establishing an identitary connection with authority. In this way, the sacred not only enabled domination but also helped to establish the inextricable connection between religion and politics made explicit by the Christian philosophers. Arendt believed that it was precisely because of this historical development that modern politics has failed to provide a different concept of authority. The image of the pyramid, which Arendt describes as defining an authoritarian government in traditional political thought, is an image that “can be used only for the Christian type of authoritarian rule as it developed through and under the constant influence of the Church during the Middle Ages, when the focal point above and beyond the earthly

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  105  pyramid provided the necessary point of reference for the Christian type of equality, the strictly hierarchical structure of life on earth notwithstanding” (98). In light of the foregoing, I maintain, contrary to Samuel Moyn’s argument that Arendt’s examples “in discussing secularization .  .  . assume, albeit most often in silence, that Christianity quite specifically is the antecedent to Western Modernity,”16 that Arendt’s views are well articulated and clear. Arendt claimed that the notion of authority became central to political philosophers because it implied a transcendent connection to a hierarchical form of government. It was also the political solution that translated divine power into the rule of one (the concept of sovereignty). Therefore, she explained, modern politics should not be concerned with rescuing a concept of authority from this Greek legacy, because such a theoretical notion belongs to the realm of religion, and “whatever fulfills the function of a religion is [also] a religion.”17 Instead, Arendt turned her focus to the Roman understanding of the concept of authority, where it was understood as the act of enlarging a foundation—though this conception was also translated into Christian philosophy as the foundation of Christianity connected to the historical moment of the birth of Christ. Arendt asserted that modern politics should not be concerned with rescuing the concept of authority, which arose from this particular Platonic-Christian development and the Roman notion of foundation. Foundation was also used as a device to situate all historical time in terms of the sole moment of the foundation of Christianity. If we follow the formulation that the beginning of time became the beginning of Christianity, we can conclude, from Arendt’s account, that Christianity invented the Western concept of religion. It ended up being tied with the transcendental forces of divine power, conceiving human history as the Western religious enterprise founded with Christianity. Seen in this way, the concept of religion establishes a necessary connection to the transcendental realm of God and to the beginning of worldly time, while modern politics introduces the freedom and the contingency of collective actions. Politics must deal with how human beings engage with one another through building up a world in common and manage the difficulties of living together and making our own rules. The Christian religion deals with our faithful commitment to God’s rules (the covenant); it belongs to the realm of the metaphysical,

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while politics must be conceived as a postmetaphysical project. The success of the Christian religion lies in its allowing a connection to the other world—the world of transcendence, of salvation, of redemption, and, ultimately, of hope. The realm of the political, on the other hand, deals with the purposes of constructing a world to be shared with others. Freedom and contingency are its proper territory. In her view of modernity, Arendt claimed that atheism cannot be a substitute for religion and religion cannot be the model of politics. And she adds that, if we forget why politics needs its own realm, one connected to the immanence of human actions, we will end up facing again the dangers that Plato tried so hard to prevent, namely, that “violence can [easily] become the substitute for authority.”18

The Legacy of the Roman Republic and Arendt ’s Interpretation For the Romans, the foundation of a new body politic became the central, most decisive beginning of their history. It was regarded as a unique event, and politics meant finding ways to preserve the founding of the city of Rome. In “What Is Authority?”19 Arendt sets herself the task of explaining why she thought this conceptualization of foundation marked a fundamental difference with the Greeks. The Roman understanding of religion was different from our current understanding of the concept . For the Romans, “religion literally meant re-ligare” (121). (As I explained in the introduction, the word was almost synonymous with political activity, and it meant, literally, to be tied up with the past, with tradition.) In contrast to the Greek gods who lived on Olympus, Roman divinities lived in the world of humans. Because they were involved with the notion of authority as foundation, as being tied up with the past by building up a cornerstone, a beginning of a whole and almost legendary project, they had acquired a “deeply political content” (121). In laying the foundations, one would be tied up with eternity through memory and history. “The binding power of the foundation itself was religious, for the city also offered the gods of the people a permanent home” in this world; thus foundation was political through and through (121). Virgil was the main character of the Aeneid, and he recovered the heroic legacy of the Greeks (the spirit of Hector) and resurrected the

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  107  enterprise of building a new community from this sacred cultural and historical heritage. In considering the myths of the polytheist Roman culture, Arendt explains that Janus was the god of beginnings, while Minerva was the goddess of remembrance.20 For Arendt, the myths of Janus and Minerva are to be taken as political “images” of the beginnings and the recovery of memory that disclose or unveil a new potentiality of relationships among political agents through foundational acts. The political community relies on this new understanding because Janus and Minerva represent two important political activities that humans must consider for themselves in allowing their stories to become political exercises of the community with the purpose of enlarging a foundation. A story has a beginning, which for Arendt means the possibility of starting something new. This is what the figure of Janus discloses: it is unique and it comes into being as a political manifestation of a collective action (a project) tied to freedom. The goddess Minerva provides memory as a distinctive political action recalling a unique moment that binds the community as such. As religious images, these two gods perform their tasks of disclosure by bringing significance to the common project of politics. This scenario frames the actors’ actions with new semantic contents where there was none before. These actions of commemoration or augmentation renew the force of the authority of the founding by allowing the beginning to have the singular significance of endowing, on the one hand, the project of foundation with permanence through memory and, on the other, the act of recapturing the story through memory. With this account of the Roman project, Arendt is able to recover the original Latin meaning of the word religion as the action of religare, which means to be tied back, to be obligated to the enormous and almost superhuman and legendary effort to lay foundations to the community.21 The Romans inherited the Greek legacy of Homer and made it their own. Through Virgil’s account of the sufferings of Hector and Achilles, the story of Hector becomes an eternal myth, worth preserving in the collective memory.22 For the Romans, being religious meant being tied up with their past. It is for this reason, Arendt tells us, that religious and political activities were considered almost identical, since the binding power of the foundation was itself a religious legacy that the city sought to augment by offering the gods a physical place, in the political activities

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of the city, to live within their community. Arendt tells us that this is the context in which the concept of authority originally appeared. Authority, derived from the word auctoritas, is also connected to the verb augere—which means to augment: authority was the process of augmenting the foundation. Arendt connects her rescue of the Roman tradition of foundation to the action of augmentation through the work of an author. An auctor works with myths, but, in this case, the author is not the builder but the one who inspired the whole enterprise and whose spirit is represented in the building itself. This is where the Roman notion of religion acquires its political sense. So, in Arendt’s account, the concept of myth appears—as it also does in Blumenberg’s second model—but only because it has acquired a proper political significance within the community. For Arendt, the role of myth is not functional as it was for Blumenberg. Rather, it is an inspiring action, which becomes part of the collective story of foundation by being reappropriated in a new political project. There is less emphasis in the leadership of the action (agon) and more weight on the meaning of the action itself. Furthermore, the acts of augmentation for the Romans are played out within an institutional Republican frame—the Senate—that embodies the political institution the Romans considered worthy of authority: Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit (“While the power resides in the people, authority rests with the Senate”).23 The senators possess authority because they are the ones who must make the political decisions and who can add weight to the initial foundation.24 The Senate’s contribution to the remembrance of the original action, enlarged or augmented by its new power to make political decisions, led Arendt to draw parallels with “Montesquieu’s judiciary branch of government.” But the power does not belong to the Senate; it belongs to the people. The authority then derives from the foundation, and it binds every act back to the beginning of Roman history, adding weight with each single action that is woven into the whole. Curiously enough, in Arendt’s rescue of the Roman idea of foundation as her novel theory of myth, the great Greek authors such as Homer became part of that legacy only by the hands of the Romans, not the Greeks. For the Romans, polytheism was a political exercise or the vehicle that allowed them to translate and recover other people’s significant myths and historical figures. An author is not a prophet

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  109  but a poet who establishes the significant ties between past and future only when the community appropriates the mythical tale. In so doing, the author knows when his action of foundation could be taken as an act of the enlargement of a foundation, as an inspiration of a political enterprise, as a new beginning.25 This process allows for the development of what Bonnie Honig has called the “fable”: “Like all spectators’ stories, it is meant to inspire us, just as classical examples of founding emboldened the American revolutionaries. The fable must take the place of the constative in order for Arendt to theorize a viable politics for modernity, a politics born not from violence but from power, a non-foundational politics that is legitimate, authoritative, stable, and durable.”26 This fable is, of course, to be articulated through memory—in the minds of the citizens, just as in the acts of augmentation the American founding fathers were supposed to recover their revolutionary spirit by establishing a parallel with the Roman foundation. What was fundamental in this recovery is that, as an act of recollection, of augmentation, it erases the “violence and ambiguity” from the scene of augmentation, which was originally founded in the story. What remain are the heroic textures to enlarge the collective project that inspired the act of foundation. To illustrate this point, let us recall a scene of the foundation’s enlargement in Shakespeare’s Henry V, where Henry delivers his famous call to arms on the eve of the battle of Saint Crispin’s Day. In a future act of commemoration as foundation to his soldiers,27 he describes the heroic actions of those men who will die in the next day’s fighting, which will be remembered “from this day until the ending of the world.” Unfortunately, as we have seen before, the Roman tradition was also fused with the Platonic-Christian legacy. As a result, those parts of the Christian doctrine that would have had great difficulty assimilating to the Roman structure—the revealed commandments and truths of a transcendental authority—were then reintegrated into Christianity by adding the Roman notion of foundation via a new translation. The key event of the story of Christ was taken as the beginning of the entire enterprise of Western culture and of Christianity. The heirs of Platonic and Roman philosophy, the philosophers of medieval times (Augustine and Thomas), who fused and translated both traditions (Greek and Roman) to a Christian one, made authority a complex conception of domination, truth, and tradition. Politically, the

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most powerful consequence of the amalgamation of Roman political institutions with Greek philosophical ideas was that the Church was able to interpret Christianity’s vague and conflicting notions about life and the afterlife in light of the Platonic political myths.28 Thus the Western tradition elevated itself into the ranks of dogmatic certitude, with an elaborate system of rewards and punishments for deeds and misdeeds that did not find their just retribution on earth.29 What is novel about Arendt’s conceptual history is that, contrary to Blumenberg’s positive account of this fusion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, she claimed that the amalgamations of Greek philosophy with Christian interpretations were made for political reasons and not religious ones—because they had already proved to be helpful devices in the Platonic myths and in the way that Christianity used the Roman notion of tradition and foundation as the beginning of historical time. Furthermore, Arendt claimed, it was Plato who coined the word theology.30 This word is used in a strictly political discussion in The Republic when the dialogue deals with the founding of cities.31 Arendt concludes that the new theological god is neither a living God nor the god of philosophers, nor a pagan divinity. Rather, he is a political device, “the measurement of measurements,” the standard according to which cities may be founded and rules of behavior laid down for the multitude. Arendt goes on to explain that, for Plato, theology did not mean an interpretation of the words of God, whose sacred texts were to be found in the Bible. Rather, theology was part of a political science, more specifically, the part that is taught to the few about how to rule the many.32 Thus the doctrine of hell continued to be used for political purposes.33 This is a story, Arendt tells us, where the Platonic concept of hell was reintroduced into Christian dogma. It strengthened the notion of religious authority to the point where it could hope to remain victorious in any contest against secular power. The price to be paid for this Western legacy was that the Roman concept of authority was forgotten, and an element of violence entered Western political-religious thought. Arendt’s conceptual history clarifies the way in which her critique is intended to prove that Christianity created a new notion of religion, which was very different from that of the Greeks and the Romans. Arendt’s views, powerfully presented in her analysis, were in full agreement with those developed much later by Talal Assad,34 who has consistently argued that the Western notion of

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  111  religion was created by the Western world as if it were the normative “model” of religion. According to Arendt, Christianity brought us the ambiguous legacy of considering its tradition as emblematic of modernity. Furthermore, Arendt tells us, the most significant consequence of secularization was the suppression of the only political element found in traditional religion: the fear of hell. Without this belief about final judgment in the afterlife, modernity experienced a tragic loss, namely, the lack of fear that one’s deeds can easily become the beginning of human catastrophes. No doubt, here Arendt was thinking of the arrival of such figures as Hitler and Stalin, her two main examples of totalitarian regimes.35

The Immanence of Freedom, Action, and Power Having finished this first part of her conceptual reconstruction, Arendt was ready to narrate her model of the autonomy of politics, since both in On Revolution and in her posthumous work The Promise of Politics she had positioned politics within an immanent frame. Her starting point is to define freedom as an immanent process. This process is seen less as the disclosure of heroic actions (the agon) than as a way in which collective political actions become constitutive of politics. She proceeds by connecting freedom to action and contingency. Freedom and actions are related, because only through actions can politics be manifested.36 And freedom is connected to contingency because no one knows what the end of an action will be. Because we don’t have total control of these ends, contingencies are the immanent material of political actions. Freedom is defined by Arendt as a new concept of politics. Andreas Kalyvas has captured a disclosive definition of freedom in arguing that it is the capacity of a political community to “lucidly institute new spheres of political participation, forms of selfgovernment, and forums of public deliberation and contestation and thus to consciously shape and determine its political existence.”37 Arendt’s notion of freedom is disclosive because it can be considered a possibility or, better yet, an experience in which an action emerges without having established previously causal links to institutions of order and it radically changes the expected course of history by opening

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up a new possibility for political actors. In her narrative Arendt describes the way in which foundation is a means of augmentation, as she wishes to reestablish the original Roman meaning of religion as religare, that is, of building up community. Hence she defines two different modes of freedom: the freedom of the founding and the freedom seen in the disclosure of actions. Freedom establishes a connection with beginnings. These beginnings are also vehicles of power, since acting in concert is the way that communities experience the immanence of power. Indeed, for Arendt, the community of free and equal individuals decides jointly to lay down the power of political actions that make for new beginnings. There is no room for an extrapolitical source, a metaphysical principle, or any kind of transcendental agency. Instead, what we find here is a model of equality and the recovery of the Republican institutions based on her ideal of the Roman republic and its American interpretation. Freedom is also the condition of the founding because there is no “irresistibility,”38 only a choice granted by the actors’ consciousness about the importance of their collective deed. The only commitment the actors make is to political action, to the preservation and to the amendment of their own foundation. The commitment to augmentation preserves the revolutionary spirit of the founding. Actions do not loose their originality; they are performative acts of construction rather than mere repetitions. The political world we construct as a collective enterprise is thus more than the actual appearance of actors and more than the space in which they act. It is here that the world of politics as a human construction turns into the world of new possibilities for action by inaugurating a political vocabulary that describes how these new spaces emerge into the world of possibilities (worldliness). The political and civil institutions are the spaces of plurality and of multiplicity of actors. Arendt was not hostile to religion as such, and she praised the Romans for their polytheism. Religion and narrations could have a place in her theory—not through translations but through the disclosure of new spaces for political actors. Indeed, stories played a major role in Arendt’s views of politics. Like the Hebrews and the Romans, she understood the powerful effect of stories about freedom and how they transmitted the strength of a collective project of liberation or permanence in this world.39 But Arendt had a very special connection to one Christian figure—Jesus—whom she interpellated as a

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  113  source of powerful semantic innovations.40 She produced a reading of Jesus’s actions as capable of interpreting the new disclosing images of politics. She explains how they changed the scenario of politics, a view not different from the one she had offered regarding the roles played by Janus and Minerva in the Roman religion. Arendt presented Jesus’s acts of forgiveness and promise as the full disclosure of political images, which provide spaces of political interaction. According to Arendt, they opened up a new scenario for politics through the disclosive device of “seeing as.” Both acts, to forgive and to promise, are seminal in the narrative of Jesus, because they revealed his ability to understand human failures and vulnerabilities. The significance of Jesus’ actions crystallize in images that disclose their potentialities only after they are reinterpreted as political actions. The space of freedom and contingency now appeared before humans as a project for making mutual promises (mutuality), not before God but between human beings. Humans’ mutual promises will constitute a political contract between them, and it will not need to be legitimized by God, only by one individual to another, as peers. Because humans are prone to error, they need a space of forgiveness in order to begin anew. Since no one has full control over the end of his actions, and since error is an essential part of human freedom, promises and forgiveness are needed in the realm of politics. Arendt went further in her exploration of politics when she connected her ideas of freedom and action to a radically modern concept of power that dealt with freedom and contingency. In her two chapters in On Revolution, “Foundation I” and “Foundation II,” Arendt goes back to the Romans once again. As we have seen in chapter 1, she had a positive opinion of the Roman notion of authority, but she was also searching for a way out of the Western tradition: She needed to get rid of the theological legacy of a sovereign will and the hierarchical notion of the rule of one and she wanted to purify politics from violence and nonpolitical phenomena. In this effort she finally linked action to a modern, immanent conception of freedom. Through that connection she could disclose the double nature of action: as contingent and as the powerful and innovative way in which humans could change things. In her essays on foundation and revolution, she chose to leave behind the perplexities and “vicious circles” of the constituent power and constituted powers (as developed by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès),

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the notions of the creation and the creator (political theology), and the differentiation between the moments of Schmitt’s extraordinary politics and Kalyvas’s ordinary times (as Kalyvas interpreted Arendt and Schmitt).41 At the center of her essays was a concern about sovereignty and hierarchical rule along with an overarching quest to place beginnings and political actions in the realm of immanence. Both essays show that she regarded power as collective, as emerging from within an immanent process of acting in concert. Her historical example—the project undertaken in the late eighteenth century by America’s founding fathers—was not a mythical account of gods or of an ancient tradition. Rather, she described how these men were capable of establishing a new country—a political project—being inspired by the act of writing a constitution and by capturing the dynamics of people’s concerted collective moving forward. Power could be the opposite of religious authority and rule, she claimed, because the founding fathers were inspired by the political foundation of Rome, albeit with one basic difference: “The constitution that derived its general authority [came] from the subordinate authorities (authorized bodies such as districts, counties, townships, etc.).” Contrary to earlier notions of political rule relating to God, Arendt interpreted her historical example as a singular political experiment, as a particular case. By the same token, the founding fathers were never tempted to derive law and power from the same origin. The seat of power for them was the people, but the source of authority was to become “the Constitution, a written document, an endurable objective thing, which, to be sure, one could approach from many different angles and upon which one could impose many different interpretations, which one could change and amend in accordance with circumstances, but which nevertheless was never a subjective state of mind, like the will.”42 Thus, Arendt’s notion of power became the space where mutual promises take place. The power resides in the people, but belongs to no one in particular. The task of politics was not to justify the domination of one person against the others, but rather to enable a way of generating, conceptually speaking, specific kinds of actions between peers, specific to the political domain, that could be shared by all. This notion of power is disclosive because it reveals a field in which one can envision human interaction within a collective space that had not been conceptualized as such before. This space appears as soon as power is

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  115  shared, as soon as agents can establish their collective goals to pursue political transformations. That is why we can say that power is like a “miracle,” because it enables people to act in concert. It has been suggested that Arendt used the word miracle in much the same way Carl Schmitt had done with his decisionistic theory. I do not agree with this way of interpreting Arendt. In my view, unlike Schmitt, Arendt removes the word miracle from its religious Christian source, and, instead, she uses it to describe an event that discloses the possibilities of freedom. Moreover, she uses it to make the point that in politics things can be changed by human actions even if the conditions seem almost impossible. Kalyvas captures this sense when he explains that “freedom is increasingly defined as a spontaneous, extraordinary event that erupts in the midst of the ordinary and the everyday, as an experience of the singular act that, like a miracle, shatters the preestablished instituted order of things and radically changes the expected course of history by opening up [disclosing] new possibilities not determined from antecedent causes.”43 Arendt’s notion of politics is meant to defy the belief that history has a teleology or that political situations are predetermined. The sharing of power with others comes through the possibility of seeing that we can change things if we act together. Power and immanence can become entangled through these kinds of actions. Power is also splintered into different functions. Arendt is concerned with how to control the abuses of power, so she recovers different dimensions and spaces where power is limited by other spheres of power. It is in this way that power can be the object of checks and balances.44 Arendt’s notion of power is not reduced to domination or to the administration of the state, but it bears the imprint of a new kind of collective enterprise seeking the empty space voided by the concept of authority. What she brings to light is the notion of legitimacy. Legitimacy is not linked to obedience as authority was, but rather to the capacity of actors to act as well as to question any rule that does not promote sharing power. By proposing her concept of worldliness (Verweltlichung) as its reference, Arendt is finally able to give us the proper conceptual framework for politics. This concept means that we do not need transcendence for politics. Immanence is the proper frame, because politics is defined by the power expressed in collective actions, by our capacity to initiate actions and to create possibilities to transform the world we inhabit.

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Politics means constructing the world with others. Put simply: politics became an autonomous source of action only when those who were interested in ideas about power and government replaced their questions about authority with a new set of demands about the kinds of actions that actors perform to legitimize a new beginning. It was not based on any external authority but on achieving legitimacy through the shared exercise of power. This was a historical transformation that turned from an initial hierarchical notion of authority (represented by divine rule) into the task of constructing an innerworldly government based on the sharing of power among equals. Arendt understood that the political quality of power lies in its being self-generating. It derives from nothing but itself.

Conflict and Justice In her formulation, however, Arendt missed one important element of the political that relates to power: justice. She does not address the ways in which citizens actually became equals.45 While she imagined citizens deliberating, she never defined the kinds of things they should be deliberating about.46 In this sense, her view of politics seems narrow. It is clear that Arendt moved away from any concept of justice because she thought that it belongs to the extrapolitical dimension of morality (and the social) and could easily be turned into a fundamentalist claim.47 This is the reason she puts so much effort into explaining why the Americans were the only ones who solved the problem of the social and how their legacy allowed them to qualify as equals despite the obvious problem of the existence of slavery.48 Her concern with establishing an immanent frame for the political could be one of the reasons she failed to see that a political conceptualization of justice was missing from her analysis. Her concept seems to ignore the fact that a certain dimension of power operates as a reaction to domination. Indeed, positive power can also be a reaction against the inertia that surrounds the designing of institutions and the resulting prejudices that can arise around them. There is a key connection between justice and power. Inequality and privilege are dimensions of our lives that cannot be ignored when we talk about power. Actors are allowed to question the status quo that organizes

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  117  the spaces they are forced to occupy outside the political order, and they do so precisely because they understand that they are not in the Kingdom of Heaven, but on earth. Nothing needs to be as unfair as it is, including institutions. For Arendt, politics is all about constructing a world in common. Aristotle was wise enough to understand that justice was a key problem for politics. Several issues must be confronted here. First, it seems that Arendt’s concept of immanence leads her to deny a place for justice, because she thinks of justice as tied to transcendence. I claim this problem can be avoided if we agree that there is a possibility of formulating a notion of justice within the framework of action and immanence that would be suitable for politics. To do this, we would have to consider the historical process through which our present notions of equality have changed as a response to pressures for inclusion exerted by groups heretofore excluded. Arendt’s essay, “The Meaning of Revolution,”49 which I have discussed at length in chapter 1, offers a clue. In that essay she explains how, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, there were rebellions and revolts whose goal was not to challenge the established order of things. Arendt claimed that “the social question began to play a revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of poverty, and the labouring poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal” (22). So the expectations of political actors about the possibility of change developed along with the coining of new words (such as the term revolution, of course) to describe one such possibility. She traces these seminal experiences (the “rebellion of the poor”) and the rise in expectations back to the “American colonial experience” (22), but the stage was set by Locke—“probably under the influence of the prosperous conditions of the colonies in the New World—and Adam Smith, [who] held that labor and toil, far from being the appendage of poverty, the activity to which poverty condemned those who were without property, were, on the contrary, the source of all wealth” (23). Consciousness of these experiences enabled social actors who were beginning to aspire to liberation “to play a truly revolutionary role” (23). Arendt clearly endorses the possibility of political changes brought by the new ways of seeing things,

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and she takes care to point out the mistake of connecting the new expectations of the social actors with the sources of religious inspiration. She emphatically concludes that “a few words need still to be said about the not infrequent claim that all modern revolutions are essentially Christian in origin, and this even when their professed faith is atheism. The argument supporting this claim usually points to the clearly rebellious nature of the early Christian sect with its stress on the equality of souls before God” and “its promise of a Kingdom of Heaven—notions and hopes which are supposed to have been channeled into modern revolutions, albeit in secularized fashion, through Reformation.” Here again, Arendt clearly links worldliness or secularization to the rising expectations of those actors who began to understand the new world as different from the old: as one among many possibilities and political designs. If we look at this essay about the meaning of revolution, Arendt’s words can be taken as an anticipated reply to Samuel Moyn’s concern that Arendt was unclear about the interconnection between secularization and revolution.50 “Indeed, it may ultimately turn out that what we call revolution is precisely that transitory phase which brings about the birth of the new, secular realm,” she writes. “But if this is true, then it is secularization itself, and not the contents of Christian teachings, which constitutes the origin of revolution” (26, my emphasis). That Arendt is thinking of the sense of injustice contained in the political experiences of modern actors is clear when she adds that “the first stage of this secularization was the rise of absolutism, and not the Reformation; for the ‘revolution’ which, according to Luther, shakes the world when the word of God is liberated from the traditional authority of the Church is constant and applies to all forms of secular government; it does not establish a new secular order but constantly and permanently shakes the foundations of all worldly establishment” (26). As we have seen before, for Arendt, Christianity only played a role once Christian time had been introduced, since secular time “constituted a new beginning as well as a unique, unrepeatable event” (27). To return to Arendt’s views of the immanence of politics, I must point out her emphasis on the fact that the experiences of injustice in the political realm allowed actors to hold changed expectations about equality. In addition, Arendt points out that it would be reasonable to assume the newness of modern time plotted out in a story

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  119  never known before or told before” and about to be narrated. At that specific moment (1793), “the novelty of the story and the innermost meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spectators alike” (29). And it was, Arendt argues, with the “emergence of freedom” that actors soon learned that they could play a new political role (29). Thus “this relatively new experience, new to those at any rate who made it, was at the same time the experience of man’s faculty to begin something new” (34). Just as Koselleck related the categories of the “spaces of experience” to the “horizons of expectations,” so too did Arendt in order to explain that the actors who undertook the transformation of the status quo linked their revolutions (the French and the American) with another event of vital importance: “the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” (45). Through such devices, the actors’ expectations opened up new spaces where claims for justice were conceptualized in terms of equality. Equality was clearly a part of these expectations, and it possessed the semantic content of being a universal and “inalienable political right of all men by virtue of [their] birth” and not of privilege (45). Thus, even if the idea of equality first appeared in the Greek cities, it was limited to white aristocratic males. Later on, Arendt claims, it is possible that “former centuries might have recognized that men were equal with respect to God or the gods.” But “this recognition is not Christian but Roman in origin; Roman slaves could be full-fledged members of religious corporations and, within the limits of sacred law, their legal status was the same as that of the free man” (45). It was only when inequality became an experience of discontent during the absolutist era that the expectations of modern actors allowed this semantic transformation of the concept of equality. The term revolution, was also a precipitating factor in that it came to describe a new beginning as a political phenomenon and it entailed the possibility of “a new order of things” (46). Thus, the novus ordo saeclorum was no longer a blessing given by the “grand scheme and design in Providence” and novelty was no longer “the proud and, at the same time, frightening possession of the few” (47). Arendt’s ideas about justice can be understood from within the context of the immanent process through which actors began to understand that their status did not reflect a natural order of things but was a set or a design that could be changed for the better.

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Comparative studies of anthropology and history have started to locate the idea of equality in different practices present in many cities around different parts of the world and not only in Greece. And their findings are striking, since they suggest the possibility of finding the concept of justice as related to social exclusion in places where immanence was also the source of political action. The comparative historian Marcel Detienne, for example, argues that “comparison, but not of a parochial kind, is an immediately effective way of escaping from the claustrophobic sense of being trapped between an endless ‘Greek Miracle’ and an incurable obese ‘Western civilization.’ For thirty years now, the field of comparison has been expanding to include other societies and new continents.”51 Detienne claims that immanent practices of equality and deliberation were common examples of new beginnings in many cultures and that they changed in different historical times. He goes on to observe, “As I made my way between such rewardingly contrasting cultures, it occurred to me that ‘justice’ would surely not be an incongruous category in the formation of what we shall now continue to call ‘a place for politics’” (110). His studies show that “the relationship of justice between people—who are equal and similar—is by no means irrelevant to the constitution of the political link” (110). A second important finding of Detienne’s research is that cities promoted a different understanding of citizenship by first establishing new ways of mutual recognition (107). In light of Detienne’s research, we must ask ourselves how we came to question the narrower premodern notion of equality. Arendt’s claim is that it was precisely with the modern notion of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” together with the people’s sense of a new plot unfolding, that a historical transformation occurred. The demand for the explicit recognition of their rights and imagining new ways of relating to one another led people to question the status quo. Detienne argues that, even if “the equal rights of citizens decreed by the French Revolution had no meaning outside the philosophical context of the eighteenth century” within the nation-state (112), the decree was inspired by the historical processes of debates about who was to participate and what the conditions were for doing so. Indeed social structures and institutions are also about violence and exclusion. And Arendt’s immanent version can help us focus on the creation of concepts, because actors respond dialectically to their experiences

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  121  and their expectations. As Koselleck has argued about the history of concepts, “The connection between everyday events is pregiven in an undifferentiated way, for humans, being endowed with language, are co-originary with their social existence.”52 There are no social activities or political deals without discussions and public debates and without the participation of those who articulate their dissent to institutions and social practices. There is another way to rescue Arendt’s views about the relationship between morality and politics, which is also an account of reactions to injustice presented within an immanent frame. Consider, for example, how she continuously praises Socrates’s statement that “it is better to be wronged than to do wrong.”53 This rather perplexing statement can be interpreted in light of a political struggle and a moral conflict about injustice. Arendt’s admiration suggests that she envisioned the possibility of thinking about injustices not as a way to sanctify the sufferer but as a way to preserve the coherence of the polis. It also suggests that Arendt understood this precept as reflecting Socrates’ awareness of the contextual meaning of injustice. In her view, justice is not a given concept that possesses a transcendent meaning—such as a moral commandment or a categorical imperative—beyond the realm of action. Justice only becomes explicit as an expression of a political conflict that appears in the public debate in the polis and in the moral consciousness of Socrates. If we assume that Arendt considered this statement of Socrates as the only one to clarify that the sufferer can help us contextualize the injustice more precisely, then it becomes more disclosive and less paradoxical. This is the place where a political judgment about what needs to be done is possible. Indeed, if we consider the fact that only the sufferer has a clear view of what needs to be done, then his task is to make the disclosure of injustice a subject of public debate. He does this to attract the community’s attention and encourage deliberation about how to transform institutions. This is a ruse that Arendt uses in order to explain that “what counts is that a wrong has been done; and for this, it is irrelevant who is better off, the wrong-doer or the wrong-sufferer. As citizens, we must prevent wrong-doing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong-sufferer, and spectator, is at stake; the City has been wronged.”54 Finally, we also need to thematize the question of justice in relation to violence in Arendt’s analysis, for, as I will show, she conflates

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different issues: the violence produced by sovereignty (which leads her to reject violence as a possibly useful device for politics) and that which relates to questions of injustice. Arendt rejected the French Revolution because it was a violent process that led to more violence. As she saw it, part of the problem lay in the eagerness of the French revolutionaries to reinstate the transcendent and violent notion of authority: “Theoretically, the deification of the people in the French revolution was the inevitable consequence of the attempt to derive both law and power from the selfsame source.”55 But, according to Arendt, it was Robespierre who made continuous appeals to justice because, “he needed an ever-present transcendent source of authority . . . so that an absolute Sovereignty—Blackstone’s ‘despotic power’—might bestow sovereignty upon the nation.”56 This transcendent notion of authority functioned as the “fountainhead of justice from which the laws of the new body politic could derive their legitimacy.”57 As I mentioned earlier, and as we can see from this passage, Arendt was really thinking about two different questions: the violence that resulted from trying to recover a concept of sovereignty and the way that Robespierre articulated the concept of authority, as it related to questions about justice, to legitimize the revolution. Arendt was right to criticize the French revolutionaries for trying to recover a divine notion of authority and identify law with power. And she was correct to separate them for the purpose of recalling how differently the Romans thought about law. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans understood laws only as the “means to establish a connection between different entities” for the sake of the community,58 a view not far from Monstesquieu’s understanding of the law’s mediating role.59 The second question, however, had to do with distinguishing between how French revolutionaries (particularly Robespierre) used the notion of justice to grant legitimacy to his rule and how citizens enabled a revolution because they were against privileged status and unfair institutions. In Arendt’s view these issues have been conflated, while the conflation of institutional power and domination has not even been considered. According to her, it would be better to maintain that, in politics, justice and authority do not have to be identified. What is required is that an appropriate connection be made between justice and legitimate power so as to change things and to understand how conflict arises when institutional power and social

Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  123  exclusion become identified in a way that damages the principle of equality among individuals. What remains to be considered is how social inclusion and equality relate to each other as political problems with regard to justice and political institutions. How can they be thematized within the realm of immanent actions? Social movements can and do have an alternative to institutional violence that engenders political exclusion. The key notion here is conceptual transformation. How else are we to give full meaning to the notion of beginnings if a beginning is not about the embodiment of expectations from social actors in order to change social and institutional arrangements for the good? Arendt’s insight could be better developed if we established mediations between a political concept of justice and action and political actions and democracy. Patchen Markell has already began this process in his essay “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Arché, and Democracy.” There Markell explains that “what makes a beginning a beginning for Arendt, what lends it its eruptiveness, is not its degree of departure from what preceded it, but rather our attunement to its character as an irrevocable event, which also means: as an occasion for response. This suggests that the status of being a beginning is not acontextual: beginnings are always beginnings for some agents; specifically, for those from whom the beginning calls for a response. Now, however, Arendt has told us that what it means is to ‘call to full existence’ something that one would otherwise merely suffer passively.”60 Thus Markell highlights that those who are compelled to act are models of suffering; they are the ones who can inaugurate a new set of transformations. It is not difficult to find historical illustrations of actions, in the sense of good beginnings, once we realize that they are responses by those who suffer. One exemplar of suffering—or of heroism—with regard to Roman slavery is certainly Spartacus. This historical figure is an emblem of how, even in the remote past, excluded agents questioned social institutions—even if Spartacus did not want to change his position as a slave, only the harsh conditions that slaves endured. This less radical hope for change is intelligible only when we keep in mind how conceptual history makes the connection between hopes about equality and the concept of emancipation. And, as Arendt has explained, this connection occurred only in the eighteenth century. The processes that take place when social movements raise their claims for social inclusion (justice) were fundamental for the way

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actors have historically transformed their understanding of equality. These processes are immanent and not transcendent in any way, which is one more reason why conceptual history can illuminate issues in political theory. There is no prior transcendent notion of justice beyond the frame of politics. On the contrary, for those actors who are interpellated by their positions of exclusion from participating in the political realm, when they do articulate their claims for inclusion they manage to offer new perspectives on what must be changed. If successful, these performative claims modify our conceptions of justice. In the long run the struggles of social movements have led us to question our previous, narrower notions of justice and equality. Because revolutionary freedom entails the promise of transformation, Arendt thought some responses were extraordinary to the extent that they could be called miracles. She realized that the immanent contingency of action is what led social groups to defy social determinations, historical precedents, and natural causalities, subverting established political inequalities and hierarchies. It is only through a deeper understanding of why one presents a commitment to the project of change that justice appears as a necessary dimension linked to power and action. As such, power and action can be situated in the political dimension without a transcendent device. The outcome belongs entirely to the politically disclosive realm of freedom.

6 Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization The Enlightenment as Problematic

I

n previous chapters I have often referred to Reinhart Koselleck’s work, especially his method of conceptual history, which I consistently find useful with regard to questions of translation and innovation in the emergence of secularized forms of political concepts. Koselleck is also helpful for understanding the dynamic feedback between the formulation of a concept and the social reality that creates the space in which the concept is accepted and used. In this chapter I will focus on Koselleck’s largely negative assessment of the ways in which the problem of politics versus morality has been addressed in Enlightenment thought. Koselleck’s model of secularization is important for our analysis because it has affinities with the work of Karl Löwith and Carl Schmitt, particularly with their ideas about eschatology, politics, and history. Koselleck’s ideas about the way Enlightenment concepts concerning publicity and the public sphere changed our views about politics and morality have much in common with Habermas’s as well. But whereas Koselleck thinks the Enlightenment’s contraposition of morality and politics was mostly destructive, Habermas sees it as a positive, stimulating new way to conceptualize participatory democracy. I will thematize the work of both thinkers on this issue and compare them.

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In addition, I think Koselleck’s model is useful because in it he identifies the two significant ways in which political theorists conceptualize politics. There are theorists who understand politics as related to the concept of sovereignty, the role of the state, and the efforts of political parties to get elected by citizens whose only participation in the political process is voting. There are other theorists who understand politics as related to the modalities by which active citizens contribute to developing a participatory democracy. Koselleck’s conceptual history and his narrative of secularization explain how these two distinct positions emerged during the Enlightenment and disclose the inherent tensions between them. As we have seen in chapter 1, Koselleck has written extensively about four categories that pertain to our analysis of the differences between concepts that are religious in origin and the innovative and disclosive conceptions of politics. These categories—crisis, revolution, critique, and emancipation—have undergone enormous transformations since they were first formulated, but Koselleck’s first model of secularization, as presented in Critique and Crisis, connects them to theological or religious semantics. In the first part of this chapter I will focus on the concept of crisis, while in the second I will discuss his concept of revolution, critique, and emancipation. I argue that the categories of critique and emancipation are innovative or disclosive, and I will discuss Koselleck’s analysis of what, specifically, they disclose. I will also show how those categories have shaped the future of politics and democracy. From that perspective, my review of Koselleck’s’s first model is not entirely negative. I claim that this model provides us with two specific categories that are fundamental for politics: the space of experience (social practices, habits, and so on) and the horizon of expectations (how these categories open up expectations among social actors that were not there before the concept disclosed a new space for political and social interactions). Reinhart Koselleck wrote Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society because he was concerned with the way the concept of critique was deployed as a filter for morality in the modern articulation of crisis and politics. In his account of secularization and of the ways the Enlightenment changed our views about politics, both politics and morality are related. Koselleck’s model of modern sovereignty is at the center of his concept of politics. He argues that

Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  127  absolutism was an outgrowth of the religious wars and that the ultimate defeat of the absolutist state was the result of the separation of religion from the public domain—an act that signaled the beginning of the autonomy of politics. Koselleck considers the genesis of the modern concept of utopia within the context of the political struggles waged during the Enlightenment against absolutism. He claims that the Enlightenment reconstructed the relationship between politics and morality after religion was banned from the public sphere and that, as a result, political autonomy was damaged. He considers the main problem of what he calls the posttheological era to be justifying politics and morality without being able to reconcile them. The conceptualization of this problem is a major contribution of his work, as our modern conceptions of politics reflects this unresolved tension. I use Koselleck’s historical reconstruction of the concept of emancipation to highlight its centrality for devising new ways to relate past and future and inaugurating new ways in which theories of justice and politics use the concept of historical transformation. I conclude by showing both the virtues and deficits of Koselleck’s model and explain what he means when he says that certain theories of politics are not only diagnostic but prognostic.

The State and Sovereignty Versus the Public Sphere Koselleck argues that Enlightenment concepts—such as Kant’s concept of publicity and its relation to the public sphere—destroyed the notion of politics and power derived from the absolutist state (along with the religious connection between political power and sovereignty). He claims that this was made possible because a perverse connection was created placing critique and the insertion of morality on an equal footing in the frame of politics. According to Koselleck, the process of enlightened critique led to a crisis, which itself transformed the secular. Like Löwith before him, he argues that the translation of eschatology into secular theories about progress allowed the philosophy of history to replace religion.1 Much like Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, he focuses on the novelties of modernity, which he considers an extraordinary agent of transformation that led

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to certain new practices struggling against the state and against the autonomy of politics. However, if Blumenberg considered self-assertion a positive agent in the development of personal responsibility, Koselleck interpreted it as deliberately provoking an intervention from morality, which he considered hypocritical because morality presents itself as nonpolitical. In this battle waged by political theorists against religion, he tracks the origins of the secular. Hobbes maintained that it was pointless to subordinate ethics to politics when societies faced the political alternative of peace and war. Thus, he proceeded to expel “conscience” from the realm of the state and considered the private and the public as separate spheres.2 In his historical reconstruction, Koselleck argues, “once implemented by the State the separation of morality and politics hence turns against the State itself” (11). When the citizen experienced himself as powerless, he realized that the existing rule was overpowering, and he reacted against the State in his role as a moral agent. Here politics and morality begin to develop a dichotomous relationship. Since citizens perceived morality as a space of alienation, as a burden, they assumed that they had to transform their marginalization from power by making a “virtue out of necessity” (11). The state, on the other hand, was supported by the military and the bureaucracy, two institutions of control that, together, focused all their efforts on developing a suprareligious and rationalistic field of action. The theoretical, rational term raison d’état denotes the importance of the state in governing its citizens. It was this way of conceptualizing things that made possible a politics without regard to moral considerations. This is also the beginning of the origin of the concept of sovereignty as understood by Carl Schmitt. The princes, argued Koselleck, needed to stand in front of the religious parties with a power that could force them to declare complete obedience. Thus the rulers asserted themselves in a position of absolute power and recognized no authority over them other than God, “whose attributes in the political and historic field they appropriated” (17). The assumption by the sovereign of total responsibility over his subjects required and presupposed his absolute sovereignty. Assuming all responsibility for the preservation of peace and order and having the right to determine the actions of the state, the prince was therefore freed from guilt. The exclusion of morality from politics was not directed against the secular dimension of morality but against

Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  129  the political claims of religion. According to Koselleck, Hobbes made an analogy between the sovereign and his subjects as that between God and king. Hobbes played a major role in establishing the autonomy of politics because he elaborated an extrareligious, suprapartisan position, which enabled him to propose the affairs of the state as a process of collective consent. The Reformation, and the split in religious authority that resulted from it, produced a space where men could examine their conscience in isolation from others. As conscience was removed from the space of the state and became a property of private morality, laws acquired the authorizing stance of politics, and citizens were forced to accept the ruler’s absolute political sovereignty as a “moral necessity” (31). The highest obligation of the state was the protection of citizens, and this goal could only be achieved if the citizens ceded their rights to the sovereign who would then represent them. The earthly state was considered a mortal God. Or a great machine whose laws and levers only moved according to the sovereign’s absolute will. With such arguments, Hobbes could claim that reason embodied the order of the state, and that only this position allowed morality to coincide with politics. On the one hand, morality forced men to submit to the ruler; on the other hand, the ruler put an end to civil war. The ruler is granted moral authority because he has to maintain order. Koselleck argues that the subsequent emancipation of reason in the Enlightenment became the force that destroyed the absolutist state precisely because Hobbes put such an emphasis on reason. Thus the neutralization of conscience by politics coincided with the secularization of morality. Thus morality, “striving to become political, would be the great theme of eighteenth century” (39). Moral doctrines would be the real heir of religion. Locke coined the phrase “the law of opinion” as a third type of law, separate from the divine and legal laws (54). Even if citizens lacked executive power, they still had the power to exercise their moral judgments, albeit in secrecy (55). The morality that Hobbes excised from politics (the state) was brought back by Locke, who expanded it in two ways: First, the obligatory aspect of morality no longer belonged to the individual citizen, but to society at large, as “a structure” taking shape in “clubs” and other forms of associations.3 Second, bourgeois ethics, which Koselleck claimed was secret and unspoken, moved back into the public domain. What Locke had unleashed was a decisive

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challenge to the powers of the absolutist state. In his analysis of how citizens came to constitute a novel social stratum in the public sphere, Koselleck attributed responsibility to the secret Masonic lodges, the literati, the illuminati, the intelligentsia, and bourgeois society in general.4 Koselleck views “the Republic of letters” as the scenario in which the category of criticism first appeared as a result of the fact that collective consciousness had turned these types of exercises into a common task (being the judges of all).5 What began as the art of judging a fundamentally nonpolitical experience turned out to be politically charged. Critique gained traction when it was presented as the device whose functions could be separated from those performed by religion through revelation. Koselleck argues that criticism gave way to hypocrisy, because it was used as a disguised political weapon against power.6 Bourgeois intellectuals understood power only in terms of its abuse. Enlightenment practices pushed criticism to its utmost limits: the critic saw himself as the king of kings,7 leading him to identify progress with revolution. From then on, competing claims between the authority of the state and the authority of society gave way to various prognostications of revolutions to come. These theories acquired legitimacy because they were developed, for the most part, as theories of the philosophy of history.8 Along with the development of the philosophy of history as a discipline, which replaced all religious theories about salvation and redemption, what became apparent in the theories (whose value will be determined by history) was the indirect guidance of political events by an internal moral realm. It is this tension that led to the catastrophes that have occurred globally from the eighteenth-century revolutions to the present.9

Critique as a Weapon Against the State It was Pierre Bayle who turned criticism into an essential function of reason. As it turned out, criticism outgrew its initial limits as an activity that originally belonged in the domains of philology, art, and aesthetics. Criticism soon colonized all fields as an art of “arriving at proper insights and conclusions via rational thought.”10 Because criticism was considered an impartial judge—because of its dual role as

Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  131  defender and prosecutor—the critic was made an authority of reason. Koselleck argues, that here the activity of criticism first began to shape notions about the future: “There was nothing left for the critic but to see progress as the temporal structure appropriate to his way of life.”11 The role of morality took a new form when the spheres of reason and religion were finally separated. It was Voltaire who first engaged in literary, aesthetic, and historical criticism, which indirectly took religion and the state as his primary targets. This is where the notion of criticism acquired its political significance and dignity. The initial alliance of reason and the state, which Hobbes had been the first to establish, had now disintegrated. Koselleck argued that critics became partisans in their assumed role of judges of the state.12 At that point the critic moved from the position of moral authority to spokesman of public opinion. Criticism spelled the death of kings. Critics made mendacity their primary strategy for destabilizing the state and promoting revolution. Morality had already turned the previous arrangement of the state upside down, and all its rationality in organizing human political affairs ultimately undermined the autonomy of politics. Thus Koselleck concludes that “the King as ruler by divine right appears almost modest alongside the judge of mankind who replaces him, the critic who [now] believed that, like God on Judgment Day, [he] had the right to subject the universe to his verdict” (118). This is the way the Enlightenment unmasked the king: through a forceful moral critique, it showed him to be a usurper, deprived of any historical significance. In the long run, the king would be considered a brutal tyrant. However, Koselleck argues, the real usurper was the critic, since “by addressing the King on equal terms the subject became a representative of the nation, the instrument of truth, virtue and humanity. The ceaseless unmasking of others led the unmasker into self-delusion. . . . Pushing criticism to its utmost limits, the critic saw himself as the King of Kings, [as] the true sovereign” (119, my emphasis). Ultimately, Koselleck argues, criticism declined into hypocrisy. While they had begun by remaining separate from the state, so as to be able to function properly, when they transcended the limits of their role as moral conscience, they placed themselves above the state. The perverse outcome of the emergence of criticism launched by the bourgeoisie was ultimately the destruction of the state’s authority. The competing claims to authority on the part of the state and society

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gave rise to prognostications of revolutions. Koselleck argues that the French Revolution was the radical result of this struggle. It was also the beginning of the weakening of the concept of sovereignty (130). And the discourse of the philosophy of history would have the task of disclosing the plan to conquer those under attack. As theology’s successor, the philosophy of history, through its internal morality, would become the indirect guide of the political events that determined the course of history. As Koselleck argues, “the divine plan of salvation was secularized into a rational plan of history, [and] it also became the philosophy of history that assured the course of the planned future” (133). Nevertheless, Koselleck thought that there was a tension in this position, since planning the destruction of the state and seeing history as a natural force brought theorists closer to establishing the utopian final goal. For, with the abolition of the state, revolution was the natural next step. Koselleck suggested that the intellectual enterprise of critique had eroded political power. It had first turned the prince into a man, and it followed with the transformation of the previously individual power of decision into the “moral legitimacy of the political power of decision.” And, finally, it resulted in the concept of sovereignty’s being shared by all members of society. Paradoxically, for Koselleck, it was Rousseau— who feared the revolution he was about to witness—who saw “the fiction of the secular State” (162). Indeed, as Rousseau searched for a way to connect the state with enlightened morality, he paved the way for revolution. Koselleck concludes that “Rousseau’s crucial step was to apply the concept of sovereign will, which the Enlightenment had excluded from its purview, specifically to the moral autonomy of society” (163). The result was the concept of volonté générale. Koselleck was not only worried about the impossibility of thinking about sovereignty in these “fictional” terms, he was also critical about the fact that this way of thinking was unrealizable. He charges Rousseau with turning the “secret of the Enlightenment”—that is, disguising a political position as a moral one—into a principle of politics. It is not difficult to see in this radical condemnation of the Enlightenment an exaggerated and distorted view of the process of secularization. It is a manifestly wrong view because of its totalizing ambition to explain everything except questions about how social actors confronted the challenge presented by the secrecy of the state’s actions.

Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  133  All the good qualities about the perspective of critique—of publicity, for instance, or of the ways in which public opinion can be generated— and the need to restrict the power and the secrecy of the state are not even discussed by Koselleck (although, as we have seen, he did discuss them in his later works). Habermas takes up this other perspective, but develops it in a completely opposite way. Against Koselleck, Habermas used the same literature and the same political concepts to develop a view of politics that enables citizens to become active agents of a nonstatist view of politics. A second point to consider here is how Koselleck’s defense of Hobbes’s conception of power turns against Hobbes himself, and leads him closer to Carl Schmitt and the latter’s radical defense of the state, his views on sovereignty, the power of decision (of the rule of one), and the state of exception. What Koselleck ignores are the possible dangers and excesses contained in the ruler’s discretionary raison d’état. These “reasons” were hidden from the scrutinizing view of citizens because there was no space of real accountability within the absolutist state. Its actions were legitimized prior to the decision (in accordance with divine power). However, there is another way of interpreting this portion of Koselleck’s as less conservative than one might think. Nora Rabotnikof—who has written about different models of the public sphere13—argues that it is only possible to defend Koselleck’s analysis if we take it is to be a full account of the complex and problematic tensions between politics and morality as they first appeared during the Enlightenment. These tensions are evident in the view that the absolutist state was a solution to the religious wars—a solution that established itself by engendering different relations and realms of action for sovereign and citizens and by conceptualizing the difference between politics as the realm of the public versus morality as the realm of the private. Here the absolutist state embodies the public, the common good, and the general interest (transcending the particular interests of religious citizens). Paradoxically, the actions of such a state are not public at all: they are based on the secret of the state, which rests on an almost religious conception of the sovereign as an embodiment of the will of God and on the belief that political power is discretionary, located, as it is, on the will and the responsibility of one private man, and he is “hidden in his chambers.” On the other hand, in this tension

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we see an emerging civil society. Though this civil society has been excluded from political power, it is strengthened by other social practices. Cultural, artistic, moral, and economic practices will encourage civil society to become an independent model of authority that will be critical of political authority. This kind of society—an educated public—becomes the object of the immanent tensions generated by the historical absolutist’s way of solving the religious wars. Seen in this light, Koselleck’s aim is to present two different views of how modern politics operates, contextualizing and embodying the struggles in these two different actors. As interpreted by Rabotnikof, Koselleck’s approach allows us to see the real contradictions between these two political agents: the state, whose ambition is to undertake political responsibility for the decision-making processes, and civil society, which, by contrast, appears as irresponsible. The historical outcome of this tension shows us why Koselleck thought that only Hobbes’s notion of the modern state could solve the problem of politics versus morality. The state, defining as its task the preservation of the peace of the nation, occupies the moral position. And citizens are compelled to obey such a state, because doing so was the best possible option— the most reasonable way—to avoid chaos and war. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment, by interrogating the authority of the state, allowed civil society to seize the source of authority from the state and provide a perspective that allowed citizens to theorize the state as a tyrant. Thus, Rabotnikof argues, Koselleck’s negative diagnosis of modern politics shows how the historically constructed dualism of morality versus politics was embodied in two different political actors who lacked the tools to find any possible mediation point of agreement. Each agent claimed its own authority, and each one grew isolated from the other. It is true that Koselleck’s historical analysis effectively allows us to understand that the foundational discussion is centered around the question of what politics should be about and that the historical turning point of the Enlightenment was the moment when these two agents began the struggle to define their own territories of legitimacy. Rabotnikof thinks that it is useful to reflect on Koselleck’s criticism of intellectuals as divorced from the empirical and complicated issues of real politics, and she argues that Koselleck’s position is useful for our own perspective. The final argument against Koselleck’s view of

Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  135  criticism is that, paradoxically, it involves describing the disclosive powers of such a category. Koselleck’s historical reconstruction of how critique turned into a kind of political weapon is illuminating. What is less convincing is the charge of hypocrisy with which Koselleck weakens efforts by independent intellectuals to question discretionary actions, the secrecy of decisions, and the arbitrariness of policies. In this regard, Kant was very clear that whatever lies in secrecy “is evil by definition.”14 The transformations that took place during the Enlightenment made it possible to see the space of politics as much wider than the one offered by the absolutist state. With regard to different interventions by intellectuals, consider, for example, the role played by Émile Zola in the Dreyfus affair. A brief synopsis: in the closing months of 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the French General Staff, was accused of espionage for Germany. He was tried behind closed doors and convicted. In July 1895 Colonel Georges Picquart, who was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, was removed from his position as the chief of the General Staff and transferred to a dangerous post in Tunisia. Two public events relate to this first part of the story. First, in June 1897, Picquart informed the vice president of the Senate that certain evidence, which had been presented during Dreyfus’s trial as proof of his guilt, was dubious. At the same time, Bernard Lazare published his first pamphlet about the issue: Une erreur judiciaire :La verité sur L´Affaire Dreyfus. Four weeks passed until Zola published his “J’Accuse” in Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore in January 1898. In the meantime, Picquart was arrested. Zola was also tried for calumny against the army and was convicted by an ordinary tribunal and the court of appeals. Seven months later, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy—the real traitor—was dishonorably discharged. A few days afterward, Colonel Joseph Henry confessed that he had forged several pieces of evidence in the “secret” Dreyfus’ dossier and finally committed suicide. It was only then that the court of appeals ordered an investigation of the Dreyfus case. The military had ignored all the evidence implicating Esterhazy, who was the sole person found guilty of treason against the French state. Only because of the efforts of an esteemed French intellectual and writer like Émile Zola was the government’s anti-Semitism brought to light. If it had not been for Zola, and others like him, who publicly proclaimed their charges against the

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French state, Dreyfus would never have received a fair trial and would have died a traitor. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt astutely exposes the political implications of the Dreyfus affair. She argues that widespread hatred of the Jews and the suspicions of the Republic and of Parliament were the two main reasons for Dreyfus’s persecution. She demonstrates that French anti-Semitism was most apparent in the army, a state institution, The army, which functioned as a caste system, supported reactionary and antirepublican movements, as did the Jesuits and the Catholic Church, who had lost their positions of privilege. Thus Arendt claims that when the Jews started seeking equality in the army—by pursuing higher military careers—“they came face to face with the determined opposition of the Jesuits who were not prepared to tolerate the existence of officers immune to [the] influence of the confessional.”15 The clergy and the army fought against the possibility that marginal movements—such as the Jews and the Masons—would exert their influence “behind the scenes.”16 So, as we can see, the people involved in undermining the authority of the state were the same ones who wanted to prevent the assimilation of the Jews. As Arendt tells the story, “during the Dreyfus crisis each was able to exploit this popular notion by hurling at the other charges of conspiring to world domination. The slogan, ‘secret Judah,’ is due, no doubt, to the inventiveness of certain Jesuits, who chose to see in the first Zionist Congress (1897) the core of a Jewish conspiracy. Similarly, the concept of ‘secret Rome’ is due to the anticlerical Freemasons and perhaps to the indiscriminate slanders of some Jews as well.”17 For Arendt, the goals of undermining the legitimacy of the Republic and of getting rid of the Jews were orchestrated by reactionary groups like the army, rather than by the illuminati and intellectuals.18 Thus Arendt praises Picquart, who “was not a hero, nor a martyr,” just a decent man, a citizen “with an average interest in public affairs who in the hour of danger (not a minute earlier) stands up to defend his country in the same unquestioning way as he discharges his daily duties.”19 There is no romanticizing in Arendt’s perspective, yet she does praise Zola—as well as others who upheld the same principles20—because he was not supported by the “mob.” Quite the contrary: “all accounts agree that if Zola, when once charged, had been acquitted he would never have left the courtroom alive.”21 According to Arendt, the

Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  137  military and the clergy worked hard to inspire fear among the public with an elaborate tale regarding conspiracy fantasies about the efforts on the part of Jews and Masons to destroy the French Republic. And, yes, Zola made a big effort to shift public opinion and win over the workers (if only partially), as she concludes, for “the real achievement of Zola, which is hard to detect from his pamphlets, consists in the resolute and dauntless courage with which this man, whose life and works had exalted the people to a point ‘bordering idolatry,’ stood up to challenge, combat, and finally conquer the masses.”22 Finally, there is an additional point about the disclosive potentials of critique where Koselleck contradicts himself. In his analysis of how his theories of conceptual history actually work, he acknowledges that nothing is as powerful as a concept, but the concept by itself means nothing if it does not take into account the disclosure of the spaces of experiences and the horizons of expectations of social actors. What is fundamental about this human activity—of politics—is that it allows societies and citizens to question the limits and the perils of power through immanent criticism. Without the distancing effect produced by criticism, there can be no political judgments. This is the reason Arendt so forcefully defends Kant’s ideas about reflective judgment and its conditions of impartiality. Koselleck himself agrees when he says that “criticism is the art of judging.”23 For Koselleck, however, it is criticism’s connection to truth that makes it suspicious of authoritarianism. This charge can be avoided if we consider the concept of criticism as politically disclosive: it can become a device that allows us to describe or interpret new way of seeing things. It requires specific interactions among people with different points of view. The exchange of opinions about various issues could lead to the possibility of seeing things the way other people do and judging which perspective provides more insight for understanding and resolving the conflict being discussed. Habermas first realized the potential in opening up a new space of interactions for political actors to engage with one another. The public sphere is also the space in which agents can discuss theories that illuminate the struggles and expectations of the times, discern the moral wrongs committed by institutions, and interrogate the modalities by which power is exercised. These kinds of judgments contain a cognitive stance, since they engender an understanding of injustice, oppression, and social exclusion.

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Koselleck has also worked out the potentials of the cognitive contents of critique in relation to his two main categories: the horizons of expectations and the space of experience. He shows how experience can provide information and produce knowledge. In the same way, he demonstrates how aspirations are crystallized in new categories that ultimately lead to new actions. Thus critique is a vehicle of potential disclosure since it implies not only moral wrongs but also “an emancipatory projection of a good society” (Cooke), because agents “must themselves decide, in deliberation with others, what change means in the circumstances in question and what possibilities for change are available.”24 Without critique there is no possibility of emancipation. Criticism as a disclosive category resulted from Enlightenment practices of the political education provided by civil society.

Emancipation as the Force of Change In the books that followed Critique and Crisis, Koselleck is less conservative. His restraint is particularly evident in The Practice of Conceptual History, in which he returns to analyzing concepts formulated during the Enlightenment. In this account he maintains that, until the eighteenth century, humans did not always question themselves about those excluded, nor did they question forms of power and the legality of ruling.25 He considers Étienne de La Boétie the first thinker to conceive of servitude as an obstacle to freedom of the will, which then must be abolished. The Enlightenment is the cradle of transformation because the eradication of domination by humans over other humans begins to seem possible. Indeed, as we have seen in chapter 1, Koselleck argues that “the expansion of the concept of ‘emancipation’ [developed] finally to the point where it acquired revolutionary potential, [which] took place—linguistically and socio-historically—not in the civil sense of the noun form of ‘emancipation,’ but first in the verb and adverbial usage of our term.”26 Koselleck argues that the verb emancipare was used transitively, and it meant to sell or to dispose of. In Italy and France in the fourteenth century, and in England and Germany in the seventeenth, emancipate had a reflexive usage. As we have seen earlier, the meaning of the term extended from the common law sense of having reached the legal age of maturity to include an act

Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  139  performed on one’s own authority, meaning that one could achieve selfemancipation. Kant first captured this connotation with his enlightened principle of coherence: sapere aude (“dare to be wise”). Koselleck argues that when the term became reflexive it signaled a profound change in mentality. This principle was first used by philosophers and poets to mean getting rid of presuppositions and dependency, as the Kantian formula claims.27 In Rabelais’s usage, for example, one could emancipate oneself from God and reason so as to indulge in the passions, as one might also become emancipated from the slavery of ignorance. For Montaigne, one could emancipate oneself from the rules of nature and pursue freedom. Indeed, as Koselleck argues, “such anthropologically and psychologically legible shifts were directed against the church, theology, tradition, and authority, and rapidly had an effect in the political sphere as well.”28 A curious aspect of Koselleck’s analysis is that, where the French saw it as a positive mode of transformation, the Germans registered emancipation negatively, as if the meaning were “to break from due obedience.” The positive connotations spread faster and more widely in England, where it came to mean the emancipation of oneself from established governments. The word’s capacity to disclose extended beyond the sense of self-authorization and expanded into a new sense of legitimacy: from nature, from all authorities, by reason, of free will. Since the period of the Enlightenment, the reflexive concept of emancipation has meant the effort to subject all forms of traditional rule to criticism so as to be changed and justified. This is the enlarged—disclosed—meaning of emancipation. Indeed, as Koselleck argues, “the unilateral act of state power, placing someone on equal footing in terms of civil law through emancipation (which remained rigorously preserved in the legal language of the Napoleonic code), was challenged by the demands of those who knew how to legitimately emancipate themselves.”29 Koselleck rightly argues that it was Kant who, knowing the original Roman meaning, gave emancipation its disclosive dimension when he interpreted it as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” The act of maturation was no longer seen as a single legal action but as a process of the agent’s self-transformation. Kant transferred the meaning from a legal act to a moral and political imperative. As such, it also framed a historical perspective in which the future of humanity would crystallize in self-rule. The term could be understood as part

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of a reality and as part of a goal. During the Paris revolution, Georg Forster leaned on the Kantian sense of the term when he used the concept of emancipation as self-liberation. As Koselleck explained, “in this triangle between natural pre-givens, subjective or collective selfauthorization, and the establishment of legal norms, ‘emancipation’ gained its new historical quality.”30 It became a disclosure of a picture of society entailing its own transformation. What Koselleck describes as an authentic case of a historico-philosophical process-concept is what I call its disclosive qualities, that is, its possession of the power of being a guiding concept of action. For Koselleck, “emancipation provided the common denominator of justice for all demands aimed at the eradication of legal, social, political, or economic inequality.” At every turn, “the term became a concept that demanded the eradication of personal domination by humans over humans; it was both liberal, in favor of the rule of law, as well as democratic, in favor of the sovereignty of the people; it was interpretable in a socialist fashion, in favor of community of property, as well as being the supposed means of abolishing economic domination.”31 Finally, Koselleck’s conclusions about the limits of the concept of emancipation provide a valuable warning. He claims that it is not possible to posit emancipation in a general, abstract way (in laws, for example). It must be considered first in the context of particular human relationships. Economic and political emancipation often collide. It is because of this and other complexities about the actualities of emancipation—in terms of equality—that Koselleck argues that emancipation can be effectual only “if it is thought iteratively.”

7 Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model Bringing Justice Into the Domain of Politics

I

n this chapter I will concentrate on Jürgen Habermas’s sociological and historical-political writings about secularization and the public sphere and show how they can be framed as his version of conceptual history. I argue that his formulation of a new political concept of justice as social inclusion can be interpreted as a disclosive model of new political relationships. I will also discuss some of Habermas’s more recent essays about translating religious contents into the public sphere, in which he addresses issues I have been dealing with in this book.1 I will also analyze his latest efforts to radicalize his ideas about social inclusion through a process that I call the desecularization of the informal public sphere. Finally I will argue that we should put aside the problematic questions of translation and return to some of Habermas’s insights about the public sphere in order to construct better strategies with which to critique the powerful political myths that have been articulated against religious minorities, such as “the clash of civilizations” and “fundamentalist religions.” I maintain that a perspective based on aesthetic disclosive truths and religious insights must focus on how informal religious practices and core beliefs can and should enhance our ability to learn from and

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respect one another as well as to articulate better notions of solidarity. Such a perspective must also critique the ways in which Europe and the United States, particularly Hollywood, have polluted the European social imagination with distorted narratives about religious minorities. With these efforts, such a perspective will allow us to recover concepts of the public sphere and of learning from narratives that express moral and religious dimensions. In the previous chapter I explained that Habermas’s account of modernity and secularization represented an alternative to Koselleck’s first model.2 In his political writings, especially The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas, despite having taken a road similar to that of Koselleck’s in explaining the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere,3 engaged in a refutation of the latter’s pessimistic and conservative views about the significance of the public sphere during the Enlightenment.4 In thinking about the public sphere, however, Habermas’s aim was to rehabilitate Kant’s concept of publicity and show how the disclosure of a field of interactions between political agents led Kant to identify a category that has become essential to modern politics: the concept of the public use of reason (subsequently further developed by John Rawls).5 This disclosure has also been helpful in Habermas’s efforts to elaborate further the concepts of public opinion as an informal arena for debate and deliberations among citizens. Habermas rearticulated the original concept of publicity as a twostep process: first, actors extend the horizon of the literary public sphere aesthetically through their own actions of reading, judging, deliberating, and theorizing about themselves. Second, through the use of critique about general issues, public opinion, and innovative ideas abut political deliberations, actors transform the political public sphere. Habermas argued that the public sphere is a collective space, a political laboratory, in which people learn to see themselves as exercising new social (literary and dialogical) habits and new political practices (the participatory right to public debate, freedom of expression, the role of critique, and so on). He outlined the political qualities of the public sphere, because the flow of information informs citizens about what needs to be discussed collectively. Though initially Habermas didn’t engage with the issue of social exclusion—as feminists argued when The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere first

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  143  appeared6—in his subsequent revisions, especially in his reply to his critics in Habermas and the Public Sphere,7 and, in a much more systematic way, in Between Facts and Norms,8 he deals with the question of exclusion, which has now become a central theme in his work. When Habermas first focused on the general bourgeois public, he was interested in documenting the political function of the public sphere as an “organ for the self-articulation of civil society.”9 He considers that what happened during the formation of the bourgeois public sphere was not meant to destroy politics but, rather, to create a new way of thinking about politics. However, one can see that the points where his narrative coincides with Koselleck’s are striking, although the conclusions that each of them draws are radically different. What Koselleck condemns, Habermas approves. Habermas gave a positive definition of public opinion as “a principle opposed to arbitrariness and subject to the laws immanent in a public.”10 Later on, Habermas’s initial idea about the public sphere as an informal arena underwent a complete process of disclosure. In his deliberative ethics, for example, he often spoke of solidarity as the other side of justice, which results from the political process of achieving influence and hegemony through public opinion.11 This insight, when articulated in its political dimension, is useful if we focus on how the public sphere explains the relationship between solidarity and hegemony. Recently he has argued that an “abstract solidarity mediated by the law arises among citizens only where the principles of justice have penetrated more deeply into the complex of ethical orientations in a given culture.”12 Now he seems to doubt that it is sufficient to say that an abstract notion of solidarity can be expected in plural societies. With this new claim, Habermas is suggesting that there must be learning processes that enable citizens to become open to other ways of gaining a more substantive notion of solidarity. He sees religion as the proper candidate for this job.13 Habermas’s conception of the dynamics of the public sphere has evolved through his dialogue with his critics, and he has engaged with a more sociological approach to the subject of the public sphere versus constitution making, given the fact that he has both academic and empirical knowledge of the issues.14 For Habermas, the challenge was to give a better account of the dynamic possibilities of the public sphere as a space of mediation between the state and social actors. Thus he turned his attention to “new” social movements that

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operated within the frame of actions and reactions, the proper territory of politics, which focuses on the immanence of action and their historical accounts.15 This point is crucial for our discussion regarding a conceptualization of justice based on experiences of exclusion by social actors rather than of a justice based on an ideal type located in a formal category or inspired only by religious contents. Since Habermas’s whole schema was based on a category that reveals the dynamics of social movements, he understood that the reactions of excluded actors were always based on their experiences about exclusion. When these experiences give content to their claims for inclusion, political actors end up formulating their claims as universal appeals for a wider notion of justice. These processes are immanent, and Habermas has considered them to be fundamental to his actual views about the public sphere. He detected the influence that politics and publics have on each other. He argued that social movements have two distinctive strategies: an “offensive” one and a “defensive” one. In the offensive one, “publics” (in the plural) bring issues to the attention of the entire society, define ways of approaching problems, propose possible solutions, supply information, and so on. Defensively, these publics also attempt to gain public influence for themselves, generate counterpublics, consolidate new collective identities, expand rights, and reform institutions.16 However, these social movements are mainly concerned about social inclusion and the measures needed to transform institutions and achieve their rights of inclusion. This allows me to interpret Habermas’s concept of political justice within the dynamic conception of the public sphere as potentially disclosive. While John Rawls was concerned with defining justice through the traditional formulation of the social contract, Habermas sidestepped it precisely because political actors now have the task of redefining justice through their claims for inclusion.17 Thus, Habermas argues, “a discursive or deliberative model replaces the contractual model: the legal community constitutes itself not by way of a social contract but on the basis of a discursively achieved agreement.”18 Actors are able to identify problems and describe why and how they need to change our narrower versions about social inclusion,19 mostly because they are affected by these problems—sometimes to the extent of being excluded from mainstream society. The participation of counterpublics is fundamental in gaining influence by presenting their reasons,

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  145  and in this manner they generate solidarity.20 In this view, hegemony is also a product of the immanence of action, but in my interpretation of Habermas’s work there is a strong emphasis on the expressive capacity of actors to make their claims in an eloquent, vibrant way,21 so that their views can gain influence and acceptance from other groups.22 Publics are plural, and communication renders them porous, too. Public opinion is also the result of successful strategies of deliberation on these problems, gaining hegemony through their proposals for transforming institutions. Thus Habermas argues that the “boundaries inside the universal public sphere as defined by reference to the political system remain permeable in principle. The rights of unrestricted inclusion and equality built into the liberal public sphere prevent exclusion mechanisms of the Foucauldian type and ground a potential for self-transformation.”23 Therefore the project Habermas designed, by taking the best disclosive categories of the Enlightenment, conceives a different kind of politics from the one envisaged by Koselleck. Communication and participation are now activities that pertain to the political domain, because the public sphere is a new normative category as well as an empirical space for action and visibility. When processes of social interaction give rise to experiences of injustice, they generate political conflicts. These conflicts are expressed in critical claims among actors until they catalyze the growth of social movements and generate new subcultures.24 With their controversial presentation in the media, such publics might reach the larger public and subsequently gain a place in the political agenda. For Habermas, public reasoning is a pivotal category because our demands must be articulated in ways that disclose new methods for envisioning rights of inclusion. As we have seen before, disclosure here means that these rights have been asserted by excluded actors as powerful expressions that begin to unveil previously unseen territories of injustice, exclusion, or domination.25 However, Habermas’s conception of the good society still bears a metaphysical connection with utopian ideals of self-transparency and self-sufficiency. This remnant of “utopian ideas” is connected to his model of the ideal speech situation, and, as Maeve Cooke has argued, it became closely linked to notions of redemption associated with the philosophy of history, which Koselleck criticized extensively.26 Carlo Invernizzi Accetti presents a more radical perspective on this ideal feature in Habermas’s work when he argues that

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“Habermas develops a conception of democracy articulated around the notion of ‘communicative rationality’ which ultimately ends up reintroducing an element of political theology through the very means that were sought to overcome.”27 For Invernizzi Accetti, Habermas’s communicative rationality retains “an essentially theological structure because it postulates a criterion of validity that transcends concrete practice” and, as a result, “it reintroduces an absolute standard.”28 Indeed, with the figure of the ideal speech situation, Habermas proposes a telos that is meant to connect empirical questions with normative ones. Invernizzi Accetti claims that Habermas’s position ultimately formulates a political theology because this figure of the ideal speech situation presupposes the existence of a source that contains a transcendent criterion of validity. In order to excise this perilous perspective, which can lead to questionable utopianism and finalism, Maeve Cooke has argued that Habermas’s theory must acknowledge that one must leave “decisions regarding its material substance to historically situated agents who must respond to specific experiences and exigencies.”29 In a more recent work,30 Cooke has also pointed out that Habermas’s notion of political legitimacy would have to accept that there is a definition of truth outside consensus,31 and that it implies a “shift in perception,” a disclosive operation, that can be considered “epistemically significant for it has an important impact on the assessment of rationality of the validity claims in question.”32 Cooke argues that Habermas’s notion of legal-political validity runs into the same kind of problems that his notion of moral validity did, because he conceives of a consensus— performed within his idealized deliberation—that would conclude “with a single right answer.” She proposes an alternative conception of democratic legitimacy in which he accepts—as he does in Between Facts and Norms—that legal and political decisions and norms “draw on moral, pragmatic and ethical considerations.” The key element here is that the shifts in perception can arise from reasons that are internally discursive and not only subject to but also a result of external disclosive factors. In Cooke’s view, this new scheme inverts the relationship between consensus and practical truth; for “truth [as disclosure] commands a rational consensus.” If something can be held as truth by someone, every rational person can also undergo “the requisite shifts in perception, [and] would have to agree to it.” Thus, if we consider

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  147  Cooke’s arguments seriously, we can see that when subjects perceive things and consider how those things should change, they are obliged to justify their views, which already exist within horizons mediated by history, context, and embodied subjectivity. The legal/political validity would be granted with a logic independent of the argumentative process; for now it “is construed as an argumentation-external source of epistemic quality.” It is clear why, following Cooke, I have interpreted Habermas’s more sociological theory of politics as being enhanced by the justificatory deliberations with which citizens must engage in order to achieve greater inclusiveness. Here we can see how Cooke’s arguments fit better with Habermas’s attempts to explain the processes of social inclusion vis-à-vis social movements by making the actors responsible for disclosing the meaning of justice. In his recent work Habermas also offers his interpretation of Arendt’s legacy in terms of his own political theory. He says that Arendt’s notion of power inspired his own theory regarding the power to mobilize and influence parliament.33 The effectiveness of power is connected to the way it becomes a source of legitimacy. Recall that Arendt claimed that power is immanent and that “no one is really able to possess it” (147). Habermas has further argued that power is “an authorizing force expressed in ‘jurigenesis’—the creation of legitimate law—and in the founding of institutions” (148). By aligning power with law, as Habermas argues, “law joins forces from the outset with the communicative power that engenders legitimate law” (149). Morality passes through the law as it engenders ways to broaden the possible horizon of interpretations that concern claims for social inclusion. What Arendt left untouched, namely, the notion of social inclusion as a definition of justice, has been taken up by Habermas in the connection he makes between lawmaking and this new kind of power connected to the system of rights. Habermas argues that law should become the medium through which communicative power is translated into administrative power. This step will not only empower actors, as Arendt wanted, it will also bring the empowerment of actors within the framework of statutory authorization. It is this kind of legitimacy that Habermas claims can only be the outcome of a whole process of discursive formation (147). The agents of deliberation in the public sphere must find out how their claims of inclusion can agree with other illocutionary obligations. This is a distinctively political, self-conscious

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exercise, which succeeds only when the law incorporates the results of this deliberation as rights of inclusion. Here Habermas neutralizes Koselleck’s criticism of civil society. In contradistinction to Arendt’s problematization of the concept of sovereignty, Habermas conceptualized it as popular sovereignty and connected it both with Kant’s concept of publicity and with Rousseau’s notion of the general will. His conception of rational will formation is located in this systematic Kantian-Rousseauean theory. The process of deliberating about issues related to justice—such as social inclusion—was the result of visualizing how subjects can become hegemonic once the public understands their claims and accepts them as necessary for transforming both subjects and social institutions. Habermas took one more step in defining popular sovereignty as procedural and showed that sovereignty could be rescued and translated into political terms.34 This aspect of his theory—inspired by the work of Julius Fröbel—asserts that there are no immediate relations of identity between sovereign will and collective actors. It is the process of developing public opinion as will formation that “determines when a political will [is] not identical with reason [but] has the presumption of reason on its side.”35 It is in the way the process takes shape that a popular sovereignty is established as its legitimate outcome. I will return to this question, but let me state here that if we think of sovereignty as not pertaining to anyone in particular, but rather expressing itself only as the result of a process, then we can see that the concept is more in tune with modern ways of conceptualizing political categories. Arendt was not only against sovereignty, as we have seen, but she was also against the authoritarian perspective of politics defined as epistemic truth. For her, there was no truth in politics, only opinions. Koselleck was also against the idea that epistemic truth should play a role in politics. Since Habermas was concerned with reintroducing a politically located concept of justice to debates in the public sphere, he had to reestablish the validity of claims expressed by the actors. It is not epistemic truth that is needed in politics, but rather, as Maeve Cooke has argued, cognitive improvement, which can be detected in normative claims for social inclusion. Because of his concerns about bringing religion back into public deliberation, Habermas had not worked on this issue until recently. Now he asserts that religious translations are acceptable as long as actors do not claim that they carry the

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  149  force of epistemic truth, which is legitimate only insofar as it relates to claims of scientific validity. According to this perspective, one may argue that when actors claim their rights of inclusion in a larger society the contents of their arguments must disclose the factual value of their critique of exclusion,36 and only then can they partake of the public use of reason.37 The concept of public reason is Habermas’s solution, inspired by Rawls, to the Arendtian dilemma. This new spatial territory produces a new relationship between morality and politics. Habermas’s notion of popular sovereignty has another dimension. Sovereignty is not the embodiment of power in a particular person but a subjectless and anonymous process of will formation. If, for Arendt, power is defined as subjectless, for Habermas, sovereignty is also subjectless. As Habermas argues, sovereignty “makes itself felt in the power of the public discourses.”38 Against Koselleck’s criticism, this immanent view of the process of deliberation and of power formation substitutes the Rousseauean fiction of the volonté générale for a disaggregated discursive formation that aims at the consent of the participants. Finally, Habermas understood why Koselleck—like Carl Schmitt— was against civil society as an emergent collective actor. Even if Habermas accepts Koselleck’s view that, in modernity, society has lost “its politomorphic features”39—and notices that this loss has led to a certain degree of “depoliticization”—citizens took a crucial step when they turned to the public sphere in order to fight for their own rights of political participation. This modern process is precisely what changed our historical views about the meaning of politics. Indeed, Habermas clarifies that, in this way, politics “within liberal states [expresses itself in] the substance of sovereign power gradually dissolved in the acid bath of democratic law-making; and legal norms gradually penetrated and decomposed the hard decisionistic core of sovereign discretion” (21). Understood in this way, it is the praxis of constitution-making— exercised by the citizens—that “gives their [participation] a political form by means of positive law” (21). As such, civil society is an actor who “now bears the political responsibility for social integration” (21). Therefore, as Habermas concludes, the self-empowerment of citizens “strips the legitimation of political power of its metasocial character, in other words of the reference to the warrant of a transcendent authority operating beyond society” (21).

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One More Step: Desecularizing the Informal Public Sphere? We have seen how Habermas has brought back to the public sphere a political conception of justice. This political conception, as opposed to a moral one, functions through the definition of social inclusion, thus it is grounded in the way social movements generate universal claims about rights of inclusion and seek to gain influence among citizens. In democratic societies these rights can be broad: rights to lead proper lives (with enough economic resources), rights to political participation (in the civic and political community), social rights (in terms of work, labor, and health resources), and so on. These rights have been crystallized in democratic constitutions in a disaggregated way. As we have seen earlier in Habermas’s own formulation, the dynamics involved in the process of conceptualizing rights and justice are immanent and require that actors consider a wider perspective when they formulate their views on social inclusion. But if Habermas has brought back a conception of political justice, his next step has been to radicalize the position that social inclusion entails recognition of the need for a place in the informal public sphere where citizens would be allowed to deliberate on issues with religious content. I maintain that this position not only desecularizes the informal public sphere but also complicates the issue of validity, since Habermas argues that agents must make an effort at translating their religious views into secular concepts. Though the origins of Habermas’s formulation of the concept of translation have often been attributed to John Rawls, some of his arguments have complicated the discussion that concerns the desecularization of the public sphere. Habermas focused on how to formulate his theory of the public use of reason through John Rawls’s own strategy of translating religious content into a democratic one. Earlier, he had coined the disclosive concept of the overlapping consensus, later venturing into a bolder formulation. Rawls developed his idea of public reason with the aim of establishing what kind of political relations citizens must have with one another. He also formulated a separation of the background culture (the culture of civil society) from the public political culture. In Rawls’s own words, the idea of public reason “arises from a conception of democratic citizenship in a constitutional democracy.”40 This kind of relationship has two features: one related to the basic structure of

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  151  society, the other related to the political status of citizens as free and equal, capable of exercising “their political power as a collective body.”41 According to Rawls, citizens are reasonable when they agree on the terms to a fair deliberation about what constitutes the most reasonable conception of political justice. Rawls accepts that there might be disagreements about which specific conceptualization of political justice is the best, but all will agree, in principle, that those offered are (somehow) reasonable, “even if barely so.”42 This agreement, for Rawls, rests on the principle of reciprocity, which determines the nature of the political relationships that are set as conditions for the debate. Thus Rawls argues that public reasoning belongs to a political conception of justice. He also argues that public reason serves to protect and encourage social stability. With this idea of public reason, Rawls guarantees the existence of pluralism in a democratic society. In discussing pluralism in relation to the political culture, Rawls defines his proviso: “that reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious and non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any given time, provided that in due course proper political reasons—and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines—are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support.”43 If initially Rawls maintained that both citizens and officials refrained from appealing to exclusively religious or other totalizing reasoning in their debates on the public sphere, later he seems to accept the possibility that the use of such reasoning must not be limited in all public discussions.44 Citizens could draw on their religious views in the informal public sphere if public reasoning is offered simultaneously in the formal public sphere before legislative decisions are made. However, as Cristina Lafont has explained, “since it has not been established who is obliged to provide proper political reasons, a division of labor in the informal public sphere may seem compatible with the proviso.”45 Yet Rawls insists that citizens should make use of their duty of civility by thinking about themselves as if they were legislators. The proviso seems to apply to all citizens, because they must first accept the principle of reciprocity, which forces them to use reasonings that all citizens can accept. Thus, for Rawls, only reasonings that have already been translated into political reasoning can count in determining which proposal should be accepted. In his view, the fact that we have to allow the discussion of religious content to take place

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in the informal public sphere does not mean that nonreligious reasoning are the only ones that are fundamental in the debate—and he can maintain this view because what he claims is that the two coincide, since allowing religion to be discussed publicly constitutes an additional condition that ensures the sincerity of the participants. In his most recent work Habermas takes up the challenge posed by Rawls in his proviso and formulates a more democratic one.46 Indeed, addressing some of Rawls’s most problematic points, Habermas coined the term postsecular to acknowledge the public understanding that “religious fellowships, in view of the functional contribution they make to the reproduction of motivations and attitudes that are societally desirable,” must be a part of deliberations in the informal public sphere.47 In particular, Habermas is interested in responding to questions that have been raised regarding the neutrality of Rawls’s conception of fair deliberation vis-à-vis the religious views of minorities. For the purposes of understanding Habermas’s recent efforts at desecularizing the public sphere, I will review the most relevant objections that have been raised by his critics. Cristina Lafont has nailed the difficulty Habermas faces in his latest writings about social inclusion. The problem of desecularizing the public sphere places the burden on secular citizens rather than religious ones. One main problem for both Rawls and Habermas is clarifying those who are allowed to use their religious views in the public discussion. Recall that Rawls made the distinction between the background culture and the wider political culture. In Political Liberalism he seems to imply that only in the background culture may citizens make use of their religious views and that these views are constrained by the limits of public reason when the discussions developed in the wider political space or in the legislative forum. However, as Lafont has noted, Rawls, in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” claims that, even if secular reasonings are primarily located in the wider political culture, “there is a need for full and open discussion of fundamental questions in the background culture.”48 Thus, just as citizens must think about themselves as if they were legislators, as Rawls insists, Lafont concludes that they “are never released from the obligation of thinking of themselves as if they were legislators following public reason, at least when fundamental political questions are at issue” (my emphasis).49 And, “by accepting the principle of reciprocity, all citizens recognize that only the second type

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  153  of reasons counts in determining which proposal should be enacted.”50 Lafont intuits that Rawls strategically repeats discussions whose basic premises coincide with democratic principles so as to convincingly assert sincere participation in the claims raised by all citizens.51 Indeed, it is precisely the question of sincerity that concerns Habermas when he raises the objection that many citizens cannot feel comfortable with Rawls’s artificial division between the background culture and the wider political culture. Habermas thinks that religious citizens are forced to find secular justifications that are independent of their core beliefs, and in many cases it is impossible for them to reconcile these secular reasons with their deeper religious beliefs. Lafont argues that the problem in attempting to explain religious reasons by appealing to secular ones is that “there is no guarantee that such reasons are available.”52 Nevertheless, Habermas suggests a narrower interpretation of Rawls’s proviso, namely, as an “institutional translation proviso,” which means accepting that “secular translations” must be offered only by officials. That position notwithstanding, Habermas claims that a great deal of what he once saw as disclosive can be now accepted as genuine translations from old “Christian ideas.”53 According to this new perspective, concepts such as “responsibility, autonomy, justification; or history and remembering, new beginning, innovation, and return; or emancipation and fulfillment; or expropriation, internalization, and embodiment, individuality and fellowship,” have been somehow translated into the philosophical discourse without undergoing “deflation and exhaustion.”54 Clearly, this claim is set against the whole of Habermas’s previous work, and it seems difficult to defend it in light of our earlier analysis of several different models of conceptual history. It is even more difficult to understand what he means by “translation” when he cites Walter Benjamin’s work as an example of secular translation.55 Habermas seems to be ignoring Benjamin’s negative views on progress, and his formulation of the concept of “memory” (as a morally imperative duty citizens have toward those who are gone) is not simply translation; it also entails a disclosive dimension.56 Thus, collective memory is a political device that serves as a filter against domination or the hegemony of the winners. In my view, this is an exceptional example (Hannah Arendt’s work is another) of using religious semantics to disclose political spaces. What made Benjamin an exceptional philosopher of history, who resisted making the

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concept of progress a central point of his philosophy of history, was his complex articulation of a religious core with an aesthetic dimension connected to morality and justice, an articulation that crystallized in his concept of “anamnetic solidarity.” This redemptive concept disclosed a new way to think of the relationship between morality and political justice. It is based on a commitment to regarding the past as a site of learning, but it also entails a critical perspective on the way in which societies and “civilizations” are simultaneously sites of barbarism. Benjamin always related his views to art, and he used this interconnection to provide us with a bridge between religious semantic sources of meaning and disclosive devices from art. For example, he used Paul Klee’s painting of an angel—Angelus Novus—to construct a metaphorical narrative about history in order to disclose what only art can show. He described the angel (of history) being moved forward by the brute force of “progress,” but when the angel looked back all that was visible were the terrifying ruins of the past. Arendt claimed that “metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. What is so hard to understand about Benjamin is that without being a poet he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard the metaphor as the greatest gift of language.”57 Arendt called Benjamin a “pearl-diver,”58 and this is a better description of his talents than “translator,” because it suggests that he succeeded in what many do not. We will come back to Benjamin’s metaphor about the so-called progress of history at the end of this chapter. To return to Habermas: his proposal about secular translations releases citizens from the burden of justifying their suggested policies with secular reasons. One feature of Habermas’s proposal that suggests a more democratic dimension is that he describes the informal public sphere as the place not only for extensive, reciprocal deliberations but also for communal learning. Nevertheless, as Lafont has argued, Habermas’s strategy of moving Rawls’s proviso one step up to the level of the formal public sphere is not a real solution. Lafont claims that, once we are faced with conflicts of a religious nature, Habermas’s proposal has the same limitations as that of Rawls: “translation presupposes overdetermination.” Lafont claims correctly, as it presupposes that we can arrive at the same conclusions via different epistemic routes. The problem of translation is that it places religious convictions in an epistemic position. And, as Maeve Cooke has well

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  155  argued, it is hard to maintain an epistemic position for religion in public debate, because some religious intuitions are impossible to translate into semantic insights that may be framed by deliberative paths of rational thought. This impossibility does not rest on the fact that they are irrational, but on the fact that they belong to a realm of such existential complexity that their sources might be opaque and untraceable, even for the subjects themselves. Thus Habermas is still trapped in the same kind of problem as Rawls and has to face the same kind of criticism.59 Moreover, Lafont argues that whenever we face objections in informal public spheres they reappear in the formal ones. The real question is: How can officials (the parliament) find translations when these have not been found by their own agents before? I claim that the strategy of desecularizing the route from the informal to the formal public sphere only accentuates the difficulties between the two different realms. Religious convictions, feelings, and views might not be easily translatable because they cannot be the subject of conceptual semantics. They are much better captured through stories.60 Another major difficulty arises, which concerns possibilities for a debate that would utilize different kinds of reasons, namely, the limitation placed on ideological critique (a “weapon that should be available to secular citizens as well”). This limitation can be a fundamental reason that arguments defending religious beliefs are even more difficult to sustain. Immanent critique should not be limited to religion precisely because values are not the exclusive property of moral or religious semantics; they are used also as political arguments or as ideological weapons. Furthermore, there are values in the ethical domain— the Sittlichkeit—that can distort and even erase the values of morality. Obedience, for example, is not only a basic value of military ethics but of some religions as well. A third, even more problematic issue involves a model using the Judeo-Christian transformations or translations as normative universal examples. It is not certain that other religions can deploy their own translations into the secular in the same way that the JudeoChristian tradition has done in Western history. Even if they would be willing to do so, the history of their dogmatic development might be devoid of similar examples and hence preclude such a process. The phenomenological experiences of religion are also hard for epistemic “reasons” alone or rational “learning processes” to capture, precisely

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because many of these experiences are subjective. And, even if they are existentially shared by a community, they are difficult to understand through concepts alone. Lafont reminds us that we must consider three distinct dimensions of the ethics of citizenship: the moral, the political, and the epistemic. If a religious citizen is forced to follow laws she considers morally objectionable, it follows that her position on the constitutionality of matters related to political justice—matters that have nothing to do with divine authority—may also be affected. Moreover, by desecularizing the process from the informal public sphere to the formal one, we might effectively erase the Rawlsian precondition that, in a democracy, everyone should agree with the basic principles of equality of participation. Consider, for example, that women’s rights became universal and egalitarian only after they were first recognized as basic and constitutional in the formal public sphere. This is an example of what Habermas has noted, that the porousness allowing the movement of the informal into the formal simply underlines the fluidity of both. However, when we imbue religious contents with political significance, we run the risk of losing the distinction between the two spheres, because the distinction between public and private evaporates. Consider, for example, that if constitutional rights granted to women have not been accepted in the private sphere of any culture or religion, women will remain disadvantaged. They will not be able to participate in the informal arena (sports, education, work outside the home) because the husbands and families who still dominate in their own private domains see no reason to respect the boundaries of public versus private. As we have seen, Rawls suggested that citizens should think as if they were officials of democratic culture, that is, of a wider political culture. For Habermas, however, religious or authoritarian positions can begin to collide in the informal public sphere, even before participants engage in informal public debates. Thus if we open this space to different ways in which religious beliefs can be interpreted, which can only be granted and enforced by a democratic state, the right of participation of all people will be lost precisely because it does not recognize the right of participation as a right of all. It is because of the secular protection of women’s rights as human rights that the informal public sphere appears as an arena that allows for the possibility of such debate. Consider examples of how, in a democratic state like Israel,

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  157  orthodox religious communities have become aggressive and violent toward women’s public appearance and participation. Many religions believe that the proper place for women is within the family and deny them their equal rights as political actors. For Habermas, however, the most important problem is the epistemic one, since he argues that undue cognitive burdens are asymmetrically imposed on religious citizens. The heart of this issue—crystallized in Habermas’s conception of political justice—is the principle of legitimacy: No one can determine a priori what does or does not belong in the public sphere. By the same token, no one should be barred from participating in the informal public sphere. But Habermas’s radical view of social inclusion now faces the possibility of becoming self-contradictory. As Cristina Lafont has argued, as a result of Habermas’s effort to remove the limitations placed on religious citizens in the informal public sphere, a new asymmetrical burden has been placed on secular citizens, particularly on women. These citizens (in this case, women) “cannot make public use of their sincere beliefs, if they happen to be of a secularist type that contradicts the possible truth of religious claims.”61 Thus Habermas’s position brings back the question of asymmetry, only this time it is placed on the side of the secular citizens and of women. Habermas argues that the cognitive burden imposed on secular citizens is actually a fairer way to distribute the cognitive burdens between religious and nonreligious citizens. After all, he claims, religious citizens must accept the need of translation as a condition of deliberating in the institutional or formal public sphere. However, secular citizens not only have to consider the self-reflexive conditions (toward other religions, the authority of scientific knowledge, and the priority of secular reasons in the formal public sphere), but they must also “develop a self-reflexive epistemic attitude toward the postsecular world [and the desecularized informal public sphere] in which they live” (247). In this Habermasian scheme, the civic virtue of mutual respect must somehow prevail, while secular citizens and women are expected to transcend their secular ideas—their modern attitudes—and their previous notions of what they can bring into the public sphere. As Lafont explains, “citizens with a secularist stance are not allowed to make use of their sincere beliefs in public deliberation and thus will have to come up with alternate reasons that are ‘independent of their authentic beliefs’” (248).

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The problematic question of the desecularization of the informal public sphere runs counter to the democratic notions of social inclusion and equality. Here the only citizens required to exercise selfrestraint or censorship are the secular ones. I find Lafont most eloquent in her criticism when she discusses the meaning Habermas gives to the expression “taking religious views seriously.” Lafont argues that to take religious views “seriously,” one is obligated “to evaluate them strictly on their merits and, thus, to be prepared to offer the counter-arguments and counter evidence needed to show why they may be wrong, in case one thinks they are” (249). This constitutes the idea of reciprocity that grants legitimacy to public deliberation. It is considered to be an obligation toward all citizens and as such it is still embedded in an epistemic frame. In this new version of the informal public sphere, secular citizens have limits imposed on them by the postsecular informal public sphere. Lafont argues that, in order to take the religious views of all citizens “seriously,” one must first realize that what is at stake is not an epistemic issue, as Habermas claims, but the dimension of the “political.” Habermas is effectively liberating religious citizens from the obligation to “do nothing more” (251). This asymmetry in the obligations between secular and religious citizens liberates the religious ones from the reciprocity principle, and in the process it destroys the normativity of the informal public sphere in which one could argue with other citizens and be forced to listen to their points of view. Without the obligation of justification, religious citizens would not have to comply with their duties as democratic citizens. For that reason, I claim that this particular proposition implies a dangerous desecularization of the informal public sphere. A second relevant criticism has been raised by Simone Chambers, who examines the semantic and existential difficulties of translating the contents of religious views into secular ones. Religious language, she argues, carries moral meanings that cannot easily be accommodated by philosophical or political vocabularies. While it is true that Habermas himself is keenly aware of the limitations of philosophical language, Chambers reminds us that the problem of transparency is what is most significant when we try to translate a religious meaning into a secular one. She claims that it is precisely because religious language is closely involved with religious-cum-phenomenological experiences that the content of possible translations are not all available to all

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  159  citizens. The religious person is connected to an existential realm, a space where differentiations are nonmaterial and nonepistemic because they are about establishing personal relations with God— with something beyond the world of politics. These are feelings and intuitions that can be felt and believed in subjectively, but they can be opaque or, rather, untranslatable to anyone outside their realm. Chambers agrees with Lafont that the problem is not epistemic, but political and cultural. Chambers is right in saying that Habermas’s analysis, which points out the similarities between religious truth and aesthetic truth, is not an answer to the problem of translations. While aesthetic expressions and religious experiences are related to the ineffable, it is precisely the way in which the aesthetic dimension confronts the ineffable that allows artistic truth to be present through showing (through metaphors and images, for instance) rather than through deliberating or formulating a concept about it. It is in the process of showing images and making connections with these images that artistic truth expresses the ineffable. Indeed, aesthetic truths operate by bridging the gaps between understanding and sensibility. In the case of religion, this process is even more complicated, since existential connections between religious beliefs and the self cannot always be forged through conceptual religious notions (some religions even forbid them). In many cases, religious experiences are very private and personal. Art is expressive and public, and, as Kant thought, it can be shared by all because spectators have a common ground (the sensus communis) and share a common judgment. It is difficult to see how this sensus communis might be established among citizens who have different religions and do not share secular views. Chambers also alerts us to the differences between art and religion, since “the carrier of aesthetic meaning relevant for morality is autonomous art, while for religion the meanings that interest Habermas have not been differentiated into an autonomous sphere but are widely diffused through the lifeworld.”62

From Politics Back to Discussing the Pl ace of Political Theology In his essay “The ‘Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” Habermas finally replies directly to

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Carl Schmitt’s notion of secularization. He focuses on how Schmitt defined the concept of “the political” to mean “the whole” infused “with religious connotations, a transcendent entity that guarantees the unity and cohesion of the polity.” According to Schmitt, and his student Leo Strauss, the political is a wide domain of human affairs, encompassing the religious as well as the metaphysical. For both these authors, the political was a “binding source for all authority.” Recall that in her essay “What Is Authority?” Arendt provides a critical genealogy of authority, which she locates initially in the philosophy of Plato, then finding it transformed into the Roman conception of foundation, and finally seeing it fused in the Christian medieval tradition. Arendt’s problem with this concept was that authority had been inextricably linked to religion, tradition, and metaphysics. Habermas is also well aware of this problematic connection; hence he claims that the “productive amalgamation of theology and Greek metaphysics into the twofold form of a Hellenized Christianity and a theologically shielded Platonism” was forged from the semantic contents of the concept of the political that Schmitt and Strauss wanted to recover for their own political purposes. The legacy of political theology was helpful to Schmitt, because he defined the power of the sovereign through a transcendent, religious conception. On the other hand, Strauss was also invested in this particular conceptualization of the political because he wanted to recuperate a connection between this concept and natural law. It is obvious that Koselleck’s views on sovereignty were influenced by Schmitt, since Schmitt wanted to renew the concept of the political in the context of a strong concept of sovereignty. Of course, Schmitt was thinking about an authoritarian mass democracy, and it is in this sense that he claimed the Weimar Republic had reduced the political to mere “entertainment.” In his opposition to political liberalism, Schmitt defined sovereignty as the “highest underived authority.” Habermas claims it is for this reason that Schmitt’s definition is linked to his highly idiosyncratic view of political theology,63 and Habermas argues against Schmitt when he says that we don’t need it—or at least not in this fashion. Schmitt arrived at his conceptualization of the sovereign state through his formulation of political authority, which, for Schmitt, draws its legitimacy from the belief in the authority of an all-powerful God. Habermas claims that Schmitt is well aware of the constructivism of this argument, which

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  161  allows him to force a sort of continuity between the absolutist state and the modern one. Habermas argues Schmitt ignores two main features of the early modern state that undermine his own narrative of continuity: its formation was also linked to the emergence of both capitalism and pluralism.64 These two conditions triggered the gradual dissolution of the mutual interpenetration of political and social structures in traditional societies. As we have seen, Habermas claims that, in societies that have achieved economic independence, people who had been relegated to the private sphere, who had struggled historically to participate in the public sphere in order to claim their social and civil rights, transformed the political landscape into something altogether different from the one described in the Schmittian model. In the same way, the Reformation also helped transform the political landscape with authoritative edicts for toleration that ended religious wars and recognized religious freedom. But these efforts, attributed to the nascent liberal regimes, Koselleck argued, had a perverse effect, because they entailed the “depoliticization” of political actors.65 The purpose of Koselleck’s charge against civil society was to show how the destruction of the absolutist state led to bloody revolutions and, finally, to a crisis. Schmitt, on the other hand, saw the political as the basic tool of preserving the pure decision of the sovereign. This is the reason, Habermas argues, that “the meaning of ‘the political’ for those authors does not reside in the fight itself but in the ability of political leaders ‘to distinguish between friend and foe’ and in the willingness of the nation to take up the combat for the assertion of its own way of life.” Thus Schmitt’s concept of the political is his main weapon against radical democracies. Schmitt had a peculiar reading of sacred history, which allowed him to legitimize the charismatic leader who exerts his right to a decision because he interprets his battles as the final battle against evil. Habermas warns us that, inasmuch as “Carl Schmitt’s clerico-fascist conception of the political is a matter of the past, it must serve as a warning to all those who want to revive political theology.” For Habermas, however, the most important consequence of constitutional secular states is the disappearance of the figure of the sovereign from the collective self-image. The political self-empowerment of citizens also strips the legitimation of political power from its metasocial character and ends up rendering the concept of the political

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superfluous or unnecessary. Habermas shows in this essay how Schmitt wanted to preserve the authoritarian dimension of sovereign power and legitimize the relation of sacred history to mass democracy. This is why Schmitt mined the concept of the political. Yet Habermas opens the door for others who maintain that religion cannot be separated from politics. In his recent writings he has defended the political theologies of Walter Benjamin and Johann Metz, and his reasons for doing so are obviously related to the current political situation: a diminished conception of politics as a mere administrative task, one that has even been renamed “governance.”66 The latter term, Chiara Bottici claims, was “originally coined to denote a form of authority which is not fully ‘political,’” but “a particular network-like form of authority which situates itself above that of nation states. As such, the concept has been associated with the crisis of the nation states and of the traditional sites of democracy, in favor of transnational and supranational bodies that escape the traditional mechanisms of representative democracy.”67 Indeed, as the nature of politics changes, we face the challenge of a reductionist project at the hands of specialized agents (professional politicians) who only feel one pressure—the economic one. Paradoxically, Habermas seems to have concluded that, in order to meet this crisis of political imagination as well as to deal with the question of social exclusion, we must find ways to build up a postsecular community. Because of this perspective, Habermas chooses to recover what he calls the Rawlsian version of political theology. According to Habermas, Rawls’s perspective on “religious doctrines and religious communities remain relevant even for the process of justifying a consensus on a secular conception of political justice because the secularization of the state must not be confounded with the secularization of society.” Habermas now claims that, since “society has not been completely secularized, secular reasons cannot accomplish its task of justifying constitutional principles without getting support from the religious and metaphysical doctrines of the corresponding communities.” In this sense, the political has now migrated to civil society, which retains its reference to religion. Habermas claims then that, with these recent attempts to renew the political, the burden has intensified to identify and justify the true political reasons by which we can all abide. The danger of opening this Pandora’s box of religious

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  163  views is that we may end up renewing Schmittian claims against which Habermas has previously fought so hard.68 The question for Habermas is whether we can find better conceptual tools than postmetaphysical reason and an abstract notion of solidarity to express our concern for solidarity and social inclusion. Habermas’s concept of “constitutional patriotism” seems to be losing its grip, partly because postmodernity has weakened the tools of reason, so we must look elsewhere for these sources of solidarity. Perhaps we should reconsider solidarity vis-à-vis religious insights from a different perspective. Arendt understood that the binding power of a community’s actions was inextricably linked to its sense of freedom and to a clear idea of the political project. She argued that the political has a validity of its own, which is organized on the basis of experiences, not on theology—for religion can only be replaced by another religion. For Arendt, the stories derived from religious sources can become inspirational for the community, but first they must be infused with political disclosive powers. How, though, can this be achieved if what is lacking is political imagination?

Coda: Political Imagination Versus Polluted Narratives Habermas initiated a formidable critique for the “postsecular” with the aim of finding new ways of introducing questions of social inclusion and solidarity. There is no doubt he is particularly concerned with what is happening in Europe, but also, to some extent, in the post-9/11 United States. Habermas visited New York right after that terrible event, and while there he met with Jacques Derrida, who shared with him his concern about the troubling question of excluding religious minorities.69 Later Habermas captured the Zeitgeist of this crisis of politics when he argued that “markets, which cannot be democratized like the administration of the state, are taking over an increasing number of regulatory functions in areas that hitherto were held together in a normative manner, that is, by political structures or via pre-political forms of communication.”70 He went on to conclude that “in view of these conflicts and the outrageous social injustices of a global community that is profoundly fragmented, disappointment

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grows with each new failure along the path (first begun in 1945) to give international law the quality of a constitution.”71 The hopes of a cosmopolitan international society died after the financial crisis. Now he is convinced that politics is not the only discourse in crisis; philosophy too has reason to be “willing to learn from religious traditions.”72 The question here is why go back to philosophy and not to politics? For Habermas, the answer seems to be found in his concern with the question of solidarity, which is related to the social exclusion of religious minorities in nonperipheral societies. For other theorists, however, the so-called return of religion might be the result of the revival of local identities rather than an affirmation of values that were once perceived as universal. But if Habermas is worried about the demoralized state of politics and the lack of a better way to engender solidarity, then we must be willing to imagine a way to think about solidarity through means other than translation. Solidarity is a feeling; it is a reaction to something perceived by actors when another person suffers. Noninstitutional religious sources have been successful in generating a sense of solidarity because of the ways they recover narrated experiences from the excluded and make them public in order to produce positive reactions from the so-called spectators. Thus we have to return now to the transnational public sphere and detect the ways in which hegemonic groups have used certain stories to legitimize the exclusion of religious minorities from becoming part of European and American society. Hans Blumenberg’s theory of myth is instructive here, as it allows us to reflect on why these “mythical narratives” of exclusion have such power in a people’s hearts and minds. The myth of the alien, the so-called other, has restored and strengthened exclusionary efforts. Such polluted narratives that inflame the social imaginary must be questioned by other counternarratives. Samuel Huntington’s concept of the “clash of civilizations” is the mythical basis of these exclusionary views, which have sometimes been held by governments (Sarkozy’s in France, Berlusconi’s in Italy, the British Conservative government in its repression of minorities) and sometimes by citizens themselves (individuals who claimed their right to freedom of expression as their main weapons against Muslim societies, such as the editors of the Danish newspapers that published the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed or the Swiss referendum against the building of minarets ).

Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  165  Blumenberg showed that myths are not irrational and that they possess their own kind of logos. Myths are the ways in which societies cope with their existential anxieties against the chaos of the world and their fear of the “absolutism of reality.” Chiara Bottici has offered a cogent explanation for the reason certain myths are easily accepted in spite of the fact that they are blatantly exclusionary and purely fictitious. She argues that “a political myth” works “on a common narrative that grants significance to the political conditions and experiences of social groups.”73 She also points out that Huntington had already succeeded in inserting his “myth of the clash of cultures” in the social imaginary and the public sphere even before the destruction of the World Trade Center because his plan was “already in the making” (my emphasis).74 Thus, Bottici argues, “intellectual discourses could never have produced a political myth without the work that took place at the unconscious level” and “the condensational capacity of a political myth is particularly evident in the power of the icons that are transmitted in the media” and become parts of the social imaginary without any critical efforts from citizens.75 Hollywood films are important global narratives, which have provided many of the images and conceptions of “the other” that have strengthened the clash-of-civilizations thesis. We must recover the public sphere as mediational source and find a different kind of narrative to articulate our criticism and our positive social experiences. We must find a narrative that involves inclusion. I will argue for a narrative with such a disclosive potential in the concluding chapter.

8 The Disclosure of Politics Revisited

A

 ll human action, all political and subjective agency, entails a  conceptual framework within which actors make sense of their actions and projects. The concepts I have discussed in this book entailed the disclosure of a new way of thinking about politics during the eighteenth century, which transformed the way social agents saw themselves, their experiences, and their future.1 This process allowed them to imagine concepts such as critique, emancipation, and the political role of civil society as part of negotiating the space between their expectations and their actual political experiences. After examining six different models of secularization, it is appropriate to return to this concept of the disclosure of politics and see where it has taken us. With the help of Koselleck’s conceptual history, we have learned that a concept sets a limit—the horizons of meaning—for an action. In our discussion of the processes through which political concepts were first formulated, we saw the ways in which the dynamics between the expectations of social agents and their political experiences are articulated. As we know, the methodology of conceptual history is particularly useful in our analysis of the debate about secularization:

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  167  Conceptual history helps us understand not only how the dialectical relationship of religion to politics developed but also why. The disclosure of politics explains that the processes of secularization were also deep processes of semantic transformation and translation. Politics as such underwent a historical conceptual shift with the expansion of political roles filled by those who would become the new political actors. Indeed, as Koselleck has argued, “the saecula, or Jahrhunderte, as one could say in German after the 17th century, take on historical meaning peculiar to themselves. They become the pacemakers of temporal reflection.”2 This reflection places historical consciousness at its very center. Time affected “the entire linguistic stock and, from the period of the French Revolution at the latest, colored the entire political vocabulary.”3 Political concepts became imbued with new goals and ideals in such a way that a train of isms were used to describe the way in which conceptual movements take place at different historical moments. Kant’s concept of republicanism inaugurated the project of the Enlightenment, soon to be followed by liberalism, socialism, and communism. Today all those concepts have been replaced by the term democracy. As Rosanvallon has argued, “the pluralization of the forms and the temporalization of democracy have to be continued by a reconsideration of the fields of the political.”4 It was this element of temporalization that not only transformed old concepts but also helped to develop new ones that articulated the connection between conceptual innovation and the future of political praxis. In this dynamic process, emancipation lost its original meaning—as the ritual ceremony celebrating male comingof-age—and opened itself to a new semantic meaning as the process of self-determination in which humans—as the actors of their lives— should invest their political and social energies. As Koselleck notes, emancipation is “the most important concept, central to all questions of state in the present, of our time.”5 More recently, political theorists such as Enrique Dussel have argued that it is time to replace the term emancipation with one less politically charged (that is, less Eurocentric), which better defines the achievement of a state of political autonomy and also evokes anticolonial struggles.6 Dussel proposes the ancient term liberation, so well understood by Arendt. Arendt recalled: “As far as the men of the Revolution were concerned, there were only two foundation legends [of liberation] with which they were fully acquainted, the biblical story of

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the exodus of Israeli tribes from Egypt and Virgil’s story of the wanderings of Aeneas after he had escaped the burning of Troy.”7 If the term emancipation replaces liberation, then what becomes of the term revolution, which liberation had replaced? We could conclude with Martin Jay that perhaps the “maximalist fantasies of redemption and epochal transformation” have exhausted its potential meaning, and we no longer need to use the concept of revolution, except that emancipation might transform itself once more.8 These semantic shifts make us aware of how modern actors have begun to frame their struggles for liberation. The interpenetration of different ways of thinking about the term emancipation points to the need of a reformulation of the very object of politics. The historical moment we live in makes it clear that politics no longer exists only in relation to power or describes how societies are self-instituted through normative concepts such as the collective identity of “the people.” Contemporary politics should be about organizing a common life through “regulation and distribution of rights and goods among men and women.”9 And the core of politics must relate not only to the norms of political justice (which means that we must reconstruct our concept of democracy) but also to the new modalities of introducing innovation through political disclosure. Habermas might have intuited this and led us to the debate on the postsecular as a possible new way of thinking about social inclusion. On the other hand, we have seen how Koselleck’s methodology of conceptual history explored the difficulties that surround the formulation of concepts and showed the load of historical and ethical connotations accumulated on political categories. As we have seen, a concept becomes semantically richer if it incorporates widely diverse contents. With the help of Koselleck’s studies on the modifications of meaning and how they form a semantic web, we have become aware of the importance of conceptual innovation. Indeed, the different sedimented meanings of a concept like secularization can only appear as a result of genealogical research carried out within the framework of conceptual history. The aim of this book has been to show how different political theories conceptualized secularization as a specific concept of a historical transition. Such a transition seems to be occurring now. Even the term postsecularization, which has been defined as historical and descriptive, can no longer be used to define a unique

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  169  universal process of historical transformation. We must still understand how this nominal description of our times opens up a specific, critical revision of the term secularization in Western societies. If European exceptionalism lies precisely in the fact that secularization took place there, as Habermas has argued, we need conceptual history to contextualize the possibilities of varying relationships between religion and politics in different places, historical times, and geographies. Depending on which religion we have in mind, the relation between political actors and their public spheres will entail different kinds of processes of social and political interactions. Societies in confessional Catholic Europe, where the Church helped the state establish authoritarian governments, were very different from societies in Protestant countries where liberalism took hold. This particular historical perspective suggests why Cristina Lafont and I, as well as others, are critical of the role of religion in the public sphere. At the same time, we acknowledge, as Judith Butler has argued, that, just as there are a variety of religious positions on the role of religion in public life,10 there might also be different ways to interpret secularization. It should be clear by now that, because of its historical context, the term postsecularization remains an ambiguous concept.11 As Butler argues, “secularization may be a fugitive way for religion to survive, and . . . we always have to ask which form and path of secularization we mean” in order to contextualize the specific place of religion vis-à-vis the public sphere.12 Recall that what makes the method of conceptual history useful for theorizing political theories is that it allows us to see the original formulations of political concepts and how those formulations, articulated, over diverse political periods, the social experiences and new expectations of actors. These, in turn, led to structural transformations. As Elias Palti argues, “concepts thus work as the underpinnings for structural connections.”13 Through Koselleck’s analysis, and Habermas’s recovery of the original meanings of concepts such as critique and emancipation, we begin to understand the deep changes that have occurred in the horizons of expectations that circumscribe the experiences of modern actors. In this context we have seen how the different models of secularization claim a particular conception of politics in relation to religion. This debate about secularization—related to arguments about how religion was or was not involved in the process of formulating political

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concepts—has shown how wrong was Carl Schmitt’s claim “that all 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, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.”14 The theological understanding of power in seventeenth-century Europe arose with an image of society as if it were a single being. But the history of modern politics showed how the sacralization of the will was by no means just an innocent invention. As Rosanvallon claims, “From Louis de Bonald to José María Donoso Cortés, a whole line of traditionalist thinkers painted an image, a prejudicial one to be sure, of what they called ‘democratic madness.’” And, for those who opposed it, the “meditating on the avatars of the French Revolution, [from] liberal thinkers, for their part, called during the same period for a more modest politics that would take distance from too ambitious an exercise of the will.”15 In “What Is Authority?” Hannah Arendt demonstrated how Plato formulated the concept of theology to use it as a political weapon.16 Thanks to Arendt, we have also learned how the concept of religion came from the Latin word religare,17 which, to the Romans, meant to build up the foundation of the community. Arendt thus proves that even the word religion had political roots, and not the other way around.18 Because Arendt’s philological knowledge was vast and because she understood what was at stake in the historical development of a concept, she always returned to a concept’s origin, in other words, to conceptual history. As we have seen, her method has many similarities with Koselleck’s method of conceptual history. Both thinkers show the complexity of constructing the realm of politics vis-à-vis experience and the ways the concept of hierarchical relations, which originated in political thought, enabled its appropriation by a single monotheistic religion. With this perspective, we can understand why Arendt claimed that the concepts of authority, religion, and tradition were fused in the Western political philosophical tradition in such a way that it was almost impossible to disentangle them. Hence her refusal to locate her own theory in that tradition.

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  171  Recently, George Kateb has suggested the term secular disposition to denote the “readiness” of some thinkers who struggled to “fight free of prevailing religious beliefs and to submit religion to such standards that are not religious.”19 One of those major thinkers was, of course, Arendt. Arendt was not the only political theorist who thought about the fusion—the continuity in the philosophical tradition from the Greek to the Roman and finally to the Christian conception of politics and religion—that culminated in the crystallization of certain dilemmas during the Middle Ages. She also opened new political territory by identifying the political concepts that would survive this fusion without retaining any of their transcendental shadows. Hans Blumenberg was one of the major contributors to the project of conceptual history. Even though he only joined the group of conceptual historians in 1960—in their joint project of the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte20—he articulated his perspective on secularization as a complex process of continuities and discontinuities. Indeed, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, he demonstrated Karl Löwith’s reductive understanding of the eschatological translations that religious semantic meanings had undergone when transferred into the philosophy of history and the theories of politics. But Blumenberg was mostly focused on refuting the kind of transcendental connection established by Carl Schmitt’s political theology.21 He showed that immanence and a new way of asking questions, which had been considered sterile, moved and changed the process of secularization . Blumenberg sought to give a different account of the meaning of secularization by introducing a pragmatist view of how actors solved their problems by changing their perspectives about this world (or the next). Blumenberg argued that, through innovations in science and art and with the introduction of new concepts about social subjects and their relationships to this world, modernity had inaugurated a new way of coping with practical problems. His focus on the innovations of modernity demonstrates that, contrary to accepted wisdom, Europeans did not gain power and influence because of the empires they built, their travels to other continents, their scientific and technological discoveries, or even because they were the first ones to initiate a revolution against absolutism with the French Revolution. He argues that none of these historical and political achievements would have been possible if conceptual transformations had not previously taken place. Furthermore,

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he claims that the notion of secularization could never have become a disclosive concept if the actors had not already thought that the world was being stripped of its mysteries. Hence the emergence of the concept of worldliness. Blumenberg’s efforts showed that innovation in conceptual building had occurred simultaneously in modernity, and that there was enough evidence to say that the legacy of Christianity had been transformed into something else. For this reason, Blumenberg also agrees that concepts frame our capacity to envision new ways of social interactions between actors. Blumenberg attempts to resolve issues related to politics when he shifts his focus onto the realm of symbolic reality. He also frames his theory on myth in terms of conceptual history.22 Exploring the symbolic dimension through indirect analysis, Blumenberg describes how mythmaking is a fundamental strategy that helps political and social actors understand themselves and cope with the contingencies of history and their existential anxieties about chaos and the unknown (the absolutism of reality). In a way, we can say that Blumenberg’s Work on Myth revealed how the layers of meanings beneath the visible surface of political and cultural myths are actually thicker, more complex, and more essential to politics than we have realized.23 Blumenberg focused on the theory of myth because he realized that, among the different layers of reference, religion was only one of the sources, and not even the most important, of political myths. Myths carry the potential of imbuing a sense and significance to the reading of political complexities. Prometheus’s story—a myth that has been reworked for centuries—is an essential myth inasmuch as it presents an agent’s confrontation with existential fears and engagement with the question of taking responsibility for his actions. Blumenberg’s views about the contingency of the reception of mythmaking are best understood alongside his efforts to show how certain myths have survived and others have not. This is where the importance he places on the concept of significance acquires political conceptual strength, because his discussion of the importance of the symbolic meaning of political actions comes from understanding myths and narratives as a way of coping with reality. The religious reference that Blumenberg seeks to capture with his study of myth is significantly different from Löwith’s. Recall that, for Löwith, politics had an eschatological meaning and that political theories and the philosophy of history substituted for

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  173  prophecy about revolutions to come and so-called earthly redemption. For Blumenberg, prophecies and myths are related to politics because of their significance in people’s minds and hearts and because prophecies—creating and reworking myths—are one method through which humans exorcise their fears. Furthermore, he argues that the underlying assumption when myths are deployed in this manner is that religion can become a pluralistic device, a more tolerant space where even polytheism regains its ancient place. The role of mythmaking— myth being the meaning-producing endeavor that it is—is closely tied to contingencies, but those contingencies tell us something about specific contexts, subjects, and political goals. Those subjects are, in the end, the only ones that have the capacity to realize themselves in mythical narratives. Myths can be exclusionary or inclusive, and they can help articulate modes of experiencing the political world. Thus we need to keep them in our field of vision when we focus on the political landscape where we need to maintain a critical perspective. Recent theorists, such as Richard Kearny, Bonnie Honig, and Maeve Cooke, have begun to work on narratives and mythical accounts in order to locate the semantic meanings that Habermas argues are opaque for philosophy. Kearny, for example, claims that in “suspending questions of belief and disbelief, we identify [ourselves] with heroic re-enactments of the great religious myths as if they were true. But because we are operating with [a] poetic license, we— spectators (theoroi) of [the] staged event—enjoy a certain freedom from the events portrayed.”24 Thus we can have a critical standpoint. In Kearny’s account the gods who appear in religious myths are not real explanations of our universe, but they provide the space of hermeneutical interpretation through poetic knowledge and a search for “negative capability,” a place where one is immersed in the mysteries of life. Kearny claims that, with this negative capability, we find ourselves exposed to the others, to the “strange,” to the imagination.25 But even if faith cannot be reduced to fiction, fiction organizes the realm of metaphors, and metaphors are more effective in producing conceptual innovation. And through narratives that focus on otherness as parts of ourselves, we find the most fundamental experiencing of the Other. Kearny argues that the great examples of strangers such as Moses,26 who play a fundamental role in religious myths and narratives, should allow us to imagine the “Stranger as a Guest.”27

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In her book Democracy and the Foreigner, Bonnie Honig has worked on mythical narratives that bring the role of the stranger or the foreigner to a collective project of foundation. She develops an Arendtian perspective in which she describes the myth of Immigrant America as “inextricably linked” to the stranger and portrays the foreigner not only as beneficial to the nation but as an “agent of national re-enchantment who might rescue the regime from corruption and return it to its first principles.”28 For Honig, so profound is the significance of this myth that it has been adopted by many different ideological positions. By drawing on and shoring up the popular exceptionalist belief that America is a consent-based nation, founded on choice and not inheritance, civic or ethnic ties, it rescues the foreignness of the masses for a national project. “The exceptionalist’s America is anchored in a rational voluntarist faith in a creed, not in bloodlines, individualism, or organicism—in mobility rather than in landedness. The people who live here are (or are descended from) people who chose to come here, and in this fact America is supposedly unique. In short, the exceptionalist account normatively privileges one particular trajectory to citizenship: from immigrant to ethnic (as developed by Michael Walzer rather than as by Alexis de Tocqueville) to citizen.”29 For her part, Maeve Cooke argues, in her recent essay “The Limits of Learning: Habermas’ Social Theory and Religion,” that Habermas focuses on translations as part of a project on “semantic regeneration.”30 Thus she maintains that the development of novel meanings provides new ways in which we can situate ourselves. These images and narratives present us with “new reasons for acting,” as “they explore new paths in life.” Even though she uses the term translation to mean “disclosure” as I have been using it, her views about certain narratives of the other allow us to articulate “motivating and inspirational contents.” Furthermore, she argues that her notion of translation is inspired by Kant’s conception of aesthetic activity, and it involves the use of the imagination as the operation that opens up the spaces for new interpretations about the self and the world.

Justice and Politics Once Again In contrast to Koselleck’s negative assessment of social actors’ questioning the relationship between morality and politics during the

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  175  Enlightenment, Habermas claims that this process was crucial for the modern transformation of politics. Once religion had been separated from the political realm, social agents had to rethink the role that morality played in politics outside the framework of religion. After all, religion was not only interested in questions of morality; it also provided the existential and transcendental meaning with which human beings imbue their lives.31 Nothing assures us that religious paradigms are helpful in solving conflicts that arise from inequality and social injustice. When institutionalized religion was banned from public life, the force of moral arguments was the only paradigm available to political actors to set the standards for defining good government and the kinds of political activities that were related to morality. What was involved here was moral imagination, not religious semantics.32 During the Enlightenment, actors took the initiative to close the gap between religion and politics. They left behind concepts such as authority and hierarchical power and concentrated on formulating new ones about legitimate power and the ethical requirements for exercising it. This shift allowed innovation and disclosure to become the framework for a modern theory of politics. Despite Schmitt’s heavy influence on Koselleck’s work, one can rescue some of his insights about political theories. Koselleck was not totally wrong when he was concerned with the question of how the struggles to insert morality back into the public realm could easily lead to chaos, since actors see themselves as embodying positions that are solely moral ones. This is a potentially dangerous situation for the concept of civil society. If social actors see themselves as embodying moral positions, then it is possible for them to ultimately destroy political institutions such as the state. Think, for example, of how the American Tea Party movement has tried to destroy Barack Obama’s efforts to establish an effective and just health-care system and a job-stimulus program. Clearly, a strong state does not mean an authoritarian state. Civil society should not be the only actor in the political landscape, but its role is unquestionably important. Among other reasons, civil actors, together with political theorists, provide a normative basis for theories of the state. Neoliberalism has done much to destroy the welfare state, and we need new ways of considering how to rescue this concept, without which no social policy is possible. Koselleck’s critique can help us see that we cannot do without a democratic conception of the state, for it is one of the most important

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categories and institutions for a theory of politics. Koselleck is also right in arguing that, without a proper notion of the state, we are left with an incomplete picture of what politics is all about. Indeed, if power has a place in the political realm, as Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort have so forcefully argued, then a theory of politics must theorize not only how to pose limits to state power but also how different realms of power can exist within a state, such that one power counterbalances the other powers, and how shifts in power can lead to new ways of articulating different struggles of social movements and political parties. Thus power is also about the institutions that allow positive power to develop and exercise its potential, while giving agents the chance to participate in public decisions that concern the whole of society. If the state allows us to think about sharing power, civil society allows us to construct a theory of politics that cannot do without political justice. It is not an accident that an Arendtian such as Lefort has given us a most interesting evaluation of how, in modern society, political authority has been transformed into the concept of legitimacy in which power is seen as an absence. Only if political legitimacy is conceived as an empty space can social actors begin to negotiate their political projects, accept their fallibility, and realize how, only provisionally, they resolve conflicts. That was the radicalization Lefort, building on Arendt, brought into this postmetaphysical perspective. With this theoretical move, he brings us back to considering the importance of the symbolic order on which Blumenberg first focused as a fundamental dimension of politics. Lefort’s formulation allows to accept that the symbolic space of power must remain empty, because it is imperative that we preserve the possibility of redefining and renegotiating our social and political structures and we can only do so by acknowledging that there are no final ideas, no substantive principles, no transcendental “banisters” on which to build our modern political projects. I agree with Carlo Invernizzi Accetti when he claims that Lefort’s “empty place of power” refers to the way contemporary societies are structured around absences, for “what is absent is therefore precisely the theological-political element that grounds legitimacy on stable foundation, giving society a fixed and definite representation of how it ought to organize itself—like the medieval notion of the King’s mystical body, or Habermas’s teleological conception of the ‘ideal speech situation.’”33 Without a king representing the power of god, modern

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  177  societies only have self-criticism to help them renegotiate and redefine their organizational form. Both Arendt and Lefort agree that politics is the realm of indeterminacy concerning ultimate ends and basic foundations. But it is also the space where theorists who want to change the world for the better must formulate concepts—the fundamental tools for political transformations34—that can be grasped by the shared collective social imagination. Arendt and Lefort would consider this conceptual realm to be providing us with a space that opens up an “empty” universal. This is what Arendt means by leaving behind authority and what Lefort means by leaving behind any kind of absolute foundation. With this in mind, we can understand legitimacy in a new way: The source of legitimacy remains indeterminate precisely because it needs to be empty. It introduces an element of doubt. Political questions and criticism must be raised immanently on the basis of what human beings are capable of imagining. Actors make fallible efforts that can be revised or criticized. There are no ultimate designs or foundations, no telos or a priori end that can fill up the space of politics; only disclosive concepts can make possible new and more inclusive definitions of the meaning of a good society. Pierre Rosanvallon argues that politics was once “the religion of the will,” and its sacralization became not only a problem for modern democracies but also a solution.35 That whole system imploded at the end of the last century, but we cannot ignore the fact that we have also seen a remarkable self-organizing civil society, which has come to substitute for the unified notion of the will. As society has become more complex, so the claims and needs of citizens have multiplied and disseminated. However, Rosanvallon argues, “the history of this ‘decline of the will’ suggests that it is above all a metaphysics of the will that has disappeared at the end of the twentieth century.”36 It would be a mistake to accept that such a story needs to be repeated.

What Is the Meaning of the Code Word Post at Our Historical Crossroads? I raised a question in the introduction to which I must return before concluding. Today we talk about the postsecular When referring to

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globalization, we talk about the “post-Westphalian.”37 More recently, we have begun to see that some theorists are using a single linguistic term such as postdemocracy to characterize their time and that “the world that preceded the present must be characterized by another single broad term as well.”38 But, knowing that our time is a site of conceptual struggles, we must be able to defend the terms we use, confident that they express our hopes for the future and are based on the knowledge we have gained from past experiences As Jeffrey C. Alexander has argued, à la Koselleck, “intellectuals must interpret the world, not simply change or even explain it. To do so in a meaningful, reassuring, or in an inspiring manner means that intellectuals must make distinctions. They must do so especially in regard to phases of history. If intellectuals are to define the ‘meaning’ of their ‘time,’ they must identify a time that preceded the present, offer morally compelling accounts of why it was superseded, and tell their audiences whether or not such a transformation will be repeated vis-à-vis the world they live in. This is, of course, merely to say that intellectuals produce historical narratives about their own time.”39 And, I might add, the delineation of new categories can help us realize where they want to go. The term postsecular implies the return of religion, but I question whether it actually describes our times accurately and adequately. We cannot, however, arrive at a different term unless we first interrogate the specifics of the perceived religious turn that has colored our present debate. In my view, only disclosive terms that are related to the modern notion of democracy—and its horizontal way of understanding power and political interactions—can provide us with a new and broad-based spectrum of semantics to meet our needs for change.40 The term postdemocracy indicates that democratic societies are facing a challenge, especially now that many of them are at a critical moment partly because their utilization of a “descriptive” concept such as “governance [which] has constricted the scope of representative and democratic governments.”41 The term counterpublics, coined by Nancy Fraser, was part of her critique of Habermas’s use of the term public. Habermas not only reduced public to a normative and universal concept descriptive of a homogeneous group of people, but he also ignored the fact that such a gesture excluded marginalized groups and the force of their struggles.42 Rosanvallon argues that history has shown that democracies have always involved these tensions and conflicts.

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  179  And he concludes that what has radically changed is our relation to the political, namely, our “failure to develop a comprehensive understanding of problems associated with the organization of a shared world.”43 The main feature of this unpolitical activity is that “it combines democratic activity with non-political effects” (13). I maintain that our categories should reflect this particularly complex situation, which arises from the use of a term that describes the dynamics of actors as much as it presents the perspectives of excluded groups. Such a term is counter-democracy, which Pierre Rosanvallon has recently coined and contains the notion of critique (13). I find that the term is analogous to the concept of counterpowers that was once related to state power. Counterdemocracy as a term discloses the tensions that arise when actors are dissatisfied with their exclusion from (and within) institutional modern democracies and state democratic power, but, at the same time, it opens up the spaces where they can construct new forms of resistance. As real democracies have continually searched for counterpowers that could correct the course of the institution of democracy, counterdemocracy could be conceived as a product of this disclosive understanding of the counterpowers produced by citizens while exercising their right to critical public opinion. Rosanvallon argues that, ever since the French Revolution, the term surveillance began to be used not only to describe—in the Foucauldian sense—the tasks of vigilance coming from the state but also the ways in which citizens “inspect, monitor, investigate, and evaluate the actions of governments” (22). Recall that the exercise of responsibility we saw with the reintroduction of citizens’ horizontal responsibilities during the Enlightenment was central to the way that the counterpowers of political agents provided checks and balances against the powers of the state. Rosanvallon argues that three disclosive modes of oversight have since developed : vigilance, denunciation, and evaluation (23). For him, the term democratic-disenchantment must be scrutinized and counterargued through the deployment of the concept of counterdemocracy. He maintains that “the number of people participating in strikes, demonstrations, signing petitions, and expressing collective solidarity in other ways suggests that ours is not an age of political apathy” (13). Rather it is one in which activism has been radically transformed. What is of particular importance here is the change that

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has taken placed in citizens themselves: Rosanvallon argues that the idea of the “passive citizen” is more a myth than a reality. Grievances and complaints are no longer expressed only in the voting booth. And the new political vocabularies of activists—which include such terms as “non-governmental politics,” the “agitated left,” and “counter-powers”—suggests exactly the active engagement of the citizens with politics.” Counterdemocracy highlights a growing “social distrust,” which we should consider a healthy sign in terms of the destructive forms that politics has taken in modern institutional democracies. But we must not forget that, as Alexander warned us, the fact that we use a prefix such as counter to the term democracy is already a sign that we are in a time of transition: in the middle of an impasse that can go as well as it can go wrong. For the benefit of those who speak on behalf of postdemocracy, we should point out that this term reflects a critical view of the unfulfilled promises made in the name of democracy by specific representative governments. We should be aware that, in gathering the concepts mediating between the spaces of experience and the horizons of expectations, we are already situated in the laboratory of the present. Concepts should help us solve political problems, which mean immanent problems as they develop from concrete historical transitions. However the significance of transitions is not always obvious when they are taking place, and we can only determine their meaning by questioning our political goals. Koselleck demonstrates that modern expectations exist in an accelerated future. Thus, if modern political theories became prognostic about advancing changes, the emergence of the postsecular as a concept engenders another revision of the past that effectively erases our capacity to envision a future. The religious debate ignores and avoids a critical assessment of this nonfuture perspective—a critique that might help us understand why a discussion of the future seems to be evaporating from our present theories. In this context we can better understand why there is so much contention over the definition of terms such as postsecularization, postdemocracy, and even my preferred term counterdemocracy. We need to keep in mind that when political theorists talk about the present with the qualification of the prefix post, they are indicating that we have left something behind. Postsecular implies the return of religion, but,

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  181  as I have shown, such a historical shift must be examined critically in order to see what has and has not been achieved and why. In my view, such a critique has been absent from the actual debate. My hypothesis is that the return of religion is not a simple fact or the accumulation of new empirical data that we simply need to interpret and digest. We must ask ourselves why the religious turn has gained momentum and how a lack of ideological debate is informing the present. Recent efforts by political theorists who are focused on the return of religion show that they lack a coherent political project. Their only goal seem to be describing the indebtedness of political semantics to religion. They completely ignore the central aspect in the processes of the disclosure of politics, which is designing a conceptually innovative project with specific goals for changing the future. The Enlightenment categories that social and political agents formulated—namely, ideology, critique, and emancipation—have been left out of the theoretical picture. The critique that has been articulated against these categories in some postmodern theories has only benefited political conservatives. Recall, for instance, the celebrated declarations on the end of ideology by Daniel Bell and Francis Fukuyama. It is obvious now that their positions laid the groundwork for an attempt to theorize globalization as the end of ideology, as the end of history, as the end of the need for preservation of the concept of revolution. While the new narratives of globalization began to claim the destruction of barriers, of borders, of national versus global actors, Bell and Fukuyama claimed that the changes were only symptomatic of the final triumph of capitalism.44 Cosmopolitanists basically agreed with this view, and they immediately attempted to recover Kant’s theory of cosmopolitan world institutions and the insights it had offered. But they were ultimately unsuccessful at providing new concepts or developing a counterpolitical project to the conservative one. Just as the processes of globalization did not end poverty or bring about a fair and just redistribution of wealth, so the deregulation of markets and the free-float of capital managed to destroy any hope for a world transformation for the better. The left almost disappeared from Europe, and the U.S.-driven globalization effort allowed individuals to move between nation-states, but without gaining any political rights. These migrant actors have become the involuntary and unwanted hostages of wealthy countries. Moreover, fears about cultural differences have elicited violent

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reactions in prosperous societies against cultural diversity, plurality, and immigration. Even large political entities such as the European Union have failed to articulate and promote the original political project that is much needed in this post-Westphalian age. Wendy Brown is right when she claims that, “as it is weakened and rivaled by other forces, what remains of nation-state sovereignty becomes openly and aggressively rather than passively theological. So also do popular desires for restored sovereign might and protection carry a strongly religious aura. At the same time, declining nation-state sovereignty decontains theological and economical powers, a decontainment that itself abets the erosion of nation-state sovereignty.”45 Installed in the current conservative mood, the postsecular appears as a much-welcomed return to religious ideology, something that the Enlightenment thinkers worked so hard to leave behind. Of course, we can say that there is another group of theorists, including Habermas (who is actually pretty much aware of the dangers of the present historical moment), that seems to defend the idea of social inclusion. Habermas’s project of transforming the secular public sphere can be understood as an attempt to allow immigrants to participate in political debates in Europe without having to surrender their religious positions. Unfortunately, his efforts at finding better ways to theorize social inclusion do not cancel out those of other postsecularists who have helped forge a very conservative turn in European politics. It is clear, then, why the return of religion has been accepted as an almost uncontested “recovery” of conservative semantics and as the rescue of old, hidden political goals. In this sense the postsecular position privileges a European (and U.S.) understanding of religion and a defense of Western conservative values. Brown describes this historical moment accurately: “To speak of a post-Westphalian order is not to imply an era in which nation-state sovereignty is either finished or irrelevant. Rather, the prefix ‘post’ signifies a formation that is temporally after but not over that to which it is affixed. ‘Post’ indicates a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left behind, but, on the contrary, relentlessly conditions, even dominates a present that nevertheless also breaks in some way with this past. In other words, we use the term ‘post’ only for a present whose past continues to capture and structure it.”46 Brown claims that, while the concept and the practices of sovereignty seem to be in trouble, walls

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  183  have been built up to contain immigrants, exiled people, and violence with other forms of violence. As Marx noted so presciently, the capital does not recognize barriers and frontiers, but nation-states have proven incapable of developing normative political criteria to resist the deregulation of capital and prevent the colonization of their political and legal spheres by capitalism (as Habermas has described this process). At the same time, new religious forces and movements have inspired theorists to engage with the recovery of Western religious ideas. Hence the unacknowledged challenge of this postsecular moment makes me ask the following open question: Is this a return to defending the need to recover political theology?

An Exit: Conceptual Innovation To answer this question, I must go back to a number of points that I have made throughout this book. First, Arendt was afraid that in replacing political theology we would lapse into another form of religion. She argues that this was what had happened with totalitarian states (Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union) when ideology and history were reified as if they were new gods. Furthermore, ideology and history were seen as irresistible forces that resulted in the erasure of the possibility of dissent, the preservation of pluralism, and the defense of individual rights. Claude Lefort was equally concerned about the perils of totalitarian doctrines. He claimed that arguments in favor of race, the proletariat, or the forces of history could help fill the modern “empty place of power” with new representations of truth, unity, and homogeneity. To reiterate: political theory cannot be suffused with transcendental meanings, because such meanings carry the danger of becoming another kind of religion. As such, they could easily become authoritarianism. Second, we need to rescue some of the disclosive categories of critical theory. Modernity brought us the concept of ideology, meaning the critical framework that organizes the critical reception of actors’ own experiences. Ideology was originally related to subjects’ changing views about power. It made them aware of the processes and possibilities of change and afforded them an understanding of the fact that the transformation of inequalities was indeed a possible outcome of

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political actions. Recall that disclosure means the capacity to unveil what was previously unseen. In enabling subjects to imagine new modes of being, in interrogating the legitimacy of political actors, in questioning how inequalities affect some individuals while privileging others, theories of ideology aimed at the transformation of societies. Thus no political theory is complete without a theory of ideology, which presumably incorporates the ethical task of critical examination. Such an examination can occur if we define ideology not only in its negative version—as false consciousness—but also as an affirmation that there is no Archimedean point where the critical subject can situate herself, that the subject is, ultimately, perfectly capable of understanding when a myth may become exclusionary. This is why it is imperative that mythmaking be mindful of and alert to the danger of producing myths of exclusion along with myths of inclusion. Third, we need a theory of political imagination that reserves a role for the symbolic order and its specific relation to politics.47 Blumenberg’s views about mythmaking and Arendt’s conception of foundation can be seen as efforts that show us how political myths play a significant role in a theory of politics because they unfold toward a specific political project. Indeed, mythical narratives possess cognitive, practical, and aesthetic dimensions that are not easily distinguishable.48 Remember that Arendt developed her ideas about foundation as a highly charged drama and that she renarrated the American Revolution as the emplotment of a foundation. Blumenberg’s focus on the meaning of myth shows that a myth succeeds not only when its particular intended meaning is understood—in the example from Henry V, arousing the soldiers’ patriotism—but also through its reception over time, when the myth survives in any subsequent recoveries. This is exactly where Arendt provides a solution to Blumenberg’s purely contingent dimension. Arendt recovers the American foundation—as do American citizens—because the American foundational myth was inclusive and democratic, and it exemplified the meaning of emancipation. For Arendt, myths need not be only about fictions (Aeneas and Hector, for instance); they can also be about historical moments, which, with the help of historians, can be crystallized in future narratives about how people see themselves reflected in their moral legacy. Fourth, conceptual innovation is aimed at the democratization of political agency. Indeed, Habermas furthers the work of Blumenberg

The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  185  and Arendt in that he explores the idea that the innovative spaces of modern politics are the results of the formulation of certain concepts such as publicity, public opinion, and the emergence of a political role for civil society. Finally, we have said that a modern political theory must provide a political conceptualization of political justice. Both Habermas and Rawls were concerned with thematizing such a concept. Recently, Maeve Cooke has argued that we should abandon the idea of developing a theory based on a sole authority like Rawls or Habermas in order to explore democratic and nonauthoritarian modalities of arriving at a normative conception of political justice. She claims that an expanded critical theory should begin by transforming once more the relationship between theory and praxis.49 Following this logic, Cooke turns to Ernesto Laclau’s conception of “political representations” to help her explain her theory of regulative ideas as articulated through Laclau’s work on empty signifiers and symbolic operations. She presents Laclau’s argument that “an image does not express its own particularity, but a plurality of quite dissimilar currents of unconscious thought which find their expression in that single image” as being precisely about the symbolic representations that can be captured by her regulative idea, which deploys itself by “virtue of their material, [and] pictorial aspect” and can be accepted or rejected by political actors.50 More important to our discussion is that ultimately they are empty signifiers filled with the actors’ diverse expectations. For that reason only specific innovative concepts possess “a motivating power.”51 For example, our modern conception of the people is an empty signifier. Other similar notions also have this disclosive capacity, such as the modern concept of democracy and our diverse processes of “iterations” about human dignity, which have crystallized in the notion of “rights.”52 As Cooke argues, and as we have seen in the discussions of conceptual history, concepts can trigger actions because they articulate the experiences of actors in relation to their expectations. In conclusion: the inadequacy of our conceptual lexicon and dearth of new concepts are proof that we must once again review the relationship between theory and praxis. Cooke offers us a notion of praxis that has a Koselleckean texture in that it is based on actors’ intentional involvement in the process of changing the social order. Cooke defines

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praxis as “transformative social activity by autonomous agents concerned with the concrete possibilities for change for the better that are available in particular socio-cultural contexts.”53 Indeed, she argues, political agents are better able to evaluate the possibilities and means of their particular and contextual goals when they are capable of formulating their own regulative idea about the needed transformation. Thus, counterdemocracy seems the best transitional term in that it acknowledges that politics is once again changing and that change can be for the better. Now we must pay attention to the fact that, in the last decade, global actors have been indicating that something is missing from our political projects because extremely conservative policies continue to erode the rights of citizens and social actors. We must focus our attention on this issue. And I believe that accepting counterdemocracy as a working term is a good place to start, as it has the potential to capture those critical energies.

Notes

Introduction 1. See Taylor, A Secular Age, part 4, “Narratives of Secularization,” 423–504. 2. The most eloquent book on this theme is Beiner, Civil Religion. 3. I owe this insight to Alessandro Ferrara. 4. See Plato, The Republic. book 2, 79a. 5. Arendt claims that “theology to him [Plato] was part and parcel of ‘political science,’ and specifically that part which taught the few how to rule the many.” In “What Is Authority?” 131. 6. Arendt, “Foundation II,” 187. 7. Arendt argues, “Religion was the power that secured the foundation by providing a dwelling place for the gods among men. The gods of the Romans dwelled in the temples of Rome, unlike those of the Greeks who, though they protected the cities of men and might temporarily abide in them, always had their own home on Olympus, away from the mortals. . . . This Roman religion, based on foundation, made it holy duty to preserve whatever had been handed down from the ancestors, the maiores or greater ones. Tradition thereby became sacred and not only permeated the Roman Republic, but also survived its transformation into the Roman Empire. It preserved and handed down authority, which was based on the testimony of the ancestors who had witnessed the sacred foundation. . . . The new Christian Church became so profoundly Roman that it reinterpreted the resurrection of Christ as the cornerstone on

188  Introduction which another permanent institution was to be founded.” Arendt, “The Tradition of Political Thought,” 49–50. 8. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 125. 9. Ibid., 126. 10. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 29. 11. Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” published in the volume Futures Past, 83. 12. Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past, 267–288. 13. Taylor, A Secular Age. 14. Ferrara, “The Separation of Religion and Politics.” 15. Ibid., 78. 16. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschiste and Social History, 86. 17. Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Neuezeit’: Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Movement,” in Futures Past, 259. 18. Again, this argument is very well developed by Ronald Beiner in his book Civil Religion. 19. In his book Political Theology II, Schmitt seeks to demonstrate that Christian theology is essentially political, because the substructure of revolution has been set out in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. This was his counterattack, meant to develop simultaneously a critique of technological progress, modernity, and liberalism. See Schmitt, Political Theology II and Political Theology. 20. For a careful analysis of Schmitt’s contribution to the concept of sovereignty, see: Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. 21. See, for example, William Scheuerman’s analysis in which he claims that, “supposedly, Schmitt’s political theory relies directly on the theological assumption of original sin. When developing his argument Schmitt indeed does refer to some theorists of the authoritarian Catholic right. By the same token, Meier’s reading conveniently obscures the fact that Schmitt here repeatedly appealed to authors (for example, Machiavelli and Hobbes) who strove for a secularized, ‘realistic’ picture of human nature and sought to limit the role of the church in secular affairs. If this is political theology, it is a strange one indeed: some of the most influential high priests of Schmitt’s political theology were precisely those political thinkers who played a pivotal role in the secularization of modern political life.” Scheuerman, Carl Schmit, 232–233. Scheuerman refers to Heinrich Meier who has been an influential interpreter of Schmitt’s work based on his religious Catholic roots. See Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt. 22. During the sixties, Koselleck, along with his teachers Otto Brunner and Werner Conze, organized and designed three great dictionaries: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-zocialen Sprache in Duetschland (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1972–1997), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basilea: Schwage, 1971), and Handbuch politisch-zocialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985). Their efforts were concentrated on analyzing transformations that have occurred in the use and meaning of concepts. This school focused on the historical cultural muta-

Introduction  189  tions that occurred during 1750 and 1850, a period that Koselleck named as Sattelzeit (the beginning of modernity). 23. This criticism has been directed to Quentin Skinner and his hermeneutic work. See Skinner, Visions of Politics. 24. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. 25. Schmitt was also very interested in myth, as Michael Hoezl and Graham Ward noticed. Schmitt saw that, “politically, there is something subversive about such mythopoietic thinking, and Schmitt’s analysis of the sociology of juridical concepts demonstrates that he was more than aware of this. Mythopoietic thinking raises issues which can be neither easily debated nor easily interpreted.” Schmitt, Political Theology II, 21. 26. See Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth. The thinker who developed the most systematic conception of myth in Germany was Ernst Cassirer. See Cassirer, The Myth of the State. See also Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought. 27. Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” 74. 28. See, for example, the analysis of Andreas Kalyvas about these questions. See Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. 29. That Arendt used the Christian religion with a different meaning than the Christians can be compared to the work of Baruch Spinoza. He seemed to be an outsider from both religious traditions–Christian and Jewish—though he was a Jew. He is also a very original thinker with respect to his use of the notion of political theology. Consider, for example, Yirmiyahu Yovel’s allusion to Spinoza’s work as a “profound critique of religion.” But, “It is not hard to understand how a man who is neither a Christian nor a Jew [since he seemed to separate himself from both religions], but who is divided between the two or who possesses memories of the one existing within the other, might be inclined to develop doubts about both, or even question the foundations of religion altogether.” Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 6. That Arendt had read and had been influenced by Spinoza can be proved by her use of the Spinozan notion of the “multitude,” which appears in her essay “What Is Authority?” 108, 129, 130, 131; in her work On Revolution, 23, 48, 49, 50, 55, 57; and in The Human Condition, 8, 190, 267, 323. 30. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. 31. Nora Rabotnikof wrote a critical contribution to Koselleck’s model of the public sphere. Her work also focuses on Kant’s dilemmas about the relationship between morality and politics. See Rabotnikof, En busca de un lugar común. 32. Palti, “Del dominium regium al gobierno civil.” I cite directly from the manuscript. 33. Howard, The Primacy of the Political, 42 34. Kant says that “by the public use of one’s reason I mean that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public.” In “What Is Enlightenment?” 55. 35. Kant says, “He must simply obey. But he cannot reasonably be banned from making observations as a man of learning on the errors in the military service, and from submitting these to his public for judgment. The citizen cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed upon him; presumptuous criticism of such taxes, where someone is called

190  Introduction upon to pay them, may be punished as an outrage which could lead to general insubordination. Nonetheless, the same citizen does not contravene his civil obligations if, as a learned individual, he publicly voices his thoughts on the impropriety or even injustice of such fiscal measures” (my emphasis). See Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 56. 36. Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 57. 37. Ibid., 58. 38. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1. 39. Ibid., 3. 40. Ibid., 19. 41. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 17. 42. Ibid., 18. 43. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 29–42. 44. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 66. 45. Immanuel Kant, “Appendix” in Perpetual Peace, 125–126. 46. Löwith, Meaning in History, 182. 47. Schmitt argues that “conservative authors of the counter-revolution who were theists could thus attempt to support the personal sovereignty of the monarch ideologically, with the aid of analogies from a theistic theology.” In Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 48. The best account of translations related to the Gadamerian hermeneutic can be found in MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? 49. Löwith, Meaning in History, 188. 50. Ibid., 55. 51. This is what Taylor has called the “buffered self” in his work A Secular Age. 52. Ibid., 57. 53. As Robert Pippin argues, “Once the hold of a kind of neopositivist progressivism in intellectual history and history of science was broken, a different take on and interest in Hegel’s view were also possible. The Hegelian turn toward the problem of accounting for historical change, without empiricist or realist assumptions, but with an attention to the deep interrelation among intellectual and social practices (‘shapes of Spirit’), looked worth attending for. This was particularly so since Hegel’s account was neither realist nor relativist, but promised some view of rationality of at least basic or fundamental conceptual change.” In Pippin, Idealism as Modernism, 18. 54. See Pippin, Idealism as Modernism. 55. Ibid., 377. 56. Löwith, Meaning in History, 33. 57. Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” in Futures Past, 51. 58. Koselleck, “Semantic Remarks on the Mutation of Historical Experience,” in Futures Past, 262. 59. Koselleck, Futures Past, 265. 60. Löwith, Meaning in History, 202. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 204.

1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change  191  63. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology.” I am citing from an unpublished manuscript. 64. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theological-Political?” 187. 65. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 141. 66. Arendt refers to these struggles thus: “It was not without good reason that the modern world—which with greater determination than ever before regarded politics as only a means to the preservation and promotion of a society’s life and therefore strove to reduce political prerogatives to an essential minimum—came to believe, not unjustifiably, that it could deal with the problem of force better than all previous centuries. What it in fact achieved was the almost total exclusion of brute force, of the immediate domination of man over man, from the constantly expanding sphere of the social life. The emancipation of the working class and of women—two categories of human beings who had been subject to force throughout premodern history—clearly represents the high point of this development.” In The Promise of Politics, 148. 67. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 143. 68. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theological-Political?” 160. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 161.

1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change 1. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 2. See Skinner, Visions of Politics. 3. With regard to his method, Skinner writes: “Often there will be no prospect of translating terms in an alien language by means of anything approaching counterparts in our own. But this does not prevent us from learning the use of such alien terms, and in consequence finding out discriminations they are employed to make. If we can do this, we can eventually hope to understand the applications even of those terms which remain wholly resistant to translation. It is true that we can never hope to tell someone what those terms ‘mean’ by citing synonyms in our own language. The fact that translation is to this degree indeterminate seems inescapable. But the moral of this, as Quine long ago taught, is that perhaps we ought to give up the quest for ‘meanings’ in such an atomistic sense. . . . I am only pleading for the historical task to be conceived as that of trying so far as possible to think of what our ancestors thought and to see things their way. What this requires is that we should recover the concepts that they possessed, the distinctions they drew and the chains of reasoning they followed in their attempts to make sense of their world. What I cannot see is why this should be thought to require us to map their distinctions and the terms they used for expressing them on to very different distinctions and expressions we happen to use ourselves. Historical understanding is a product of learning to follow what Ian Hacking has called different styles of reasoning; it is not necessarily a matter of being able to translate those styles into more familiar ones.” Ibid., 47.

192  1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change 4. See, for example, what Skinner says regarding Machiavelli’s conception of virtù: “The historian cannot consider the possibility that Machiavelli may have been using the term with perfect consistency to express a concept so alien to our own moral thought that we cannot nowadays hope to capture it except in the form of an extended and rather approximate periphrasis. Perhaps, for example, he used the term if and only if he wished to refer to just those qualities, whether moral or otherwise, that he took to be most conducive to military and political success. (As far as I can see, this is generally the case.)” Ibid., 48. 5. Ibid., 49. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 25. 8. Skinner has written a chapter on Koselleck’s method of conceptual history in his book Visions of Politics. He even declares that he considers his method very similar to Koselleck’s. See Quentin Skinner, “Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,” in Visions of Politics, 175–187. 9. See Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. 10. In a chapter of his book Futures Past, Koselleck analyzes how political concepts presuppose their counterconcepts. The second way in which he conceives counterconcepts relates to the so-called definition of friends and foes. What Koselleck means by this is a political relation in which, whenever we define the identity of a group (ethnic, political, social, etc.), we are always presupposing those who do not belong to the group. This space of exclusion is not rigid or stable, but it changes because of the aims and goals of the political experiences and expectations of social actors. These processes begin with the simplest and most elemental reference to how we use the words we and you, which immediately establish political boundaries against those excluded. Examples of these conceptual political pairs are “Hellene/Barbarian,” “Christian/Heathen,” and even “human/nonhuman.” Koselleck claims that the definition of identity authorizes a political agency. What is peculiar about this Schmittian view is that Koselleck ignores the fact that identities, even if they are centrally bound by the distinction between “us” and “them,” also appear to be mediated by political goals (inclusive or exclusionary), particular meanings (constructed by subjects), and symbols of group identity, which are not a priori but historically defined by political and institutional devices usually controlled by a specific elite or group (in many cases, it is the state). Koselleck’s conception is too ontological and pays little attention to the efforts orchestrated around symbolic political construction. In this sense, Courtney Jung—who has written empirical studies on South African identities—has concluded that ethnicity and race, for example, are mobilized for the purposes of gaining power and access to resources located in government. Koselleck’s Schmittian views of identity imply, of course, that these constructions are political, but what he leaves untouched is that these processes are employed by institutional elites who play major roles in organizing the struggles to control resources and power. In institutional terms, states have played major roles in constructing internal enemies. These were precisely his arguments with respect to how Enlightenment thinkers constructed their visions against the state in his earlier work, Critique and Crisis. Thus identities may be politicized, but

1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change  193  are not inherently political. There are political factors that help construct conflictive positions of an “us” against a “them,” which means that identities are not primordially opposed. The factors that are helpful in the making of enemies have been identified by Courtney Jung’s empirical research, and they include the following: “political institutions, mobilizing discourse, material conditions, organization, and available ideology.” Jung introduced the concept of resonance to describe the forces that cause identities to become defined against an enemy. In this sense, she is right when she argues that “political identity is not innate, and does not spring from characteristics and ties determined by birth. It is the complex and multilayered result of that which is mobilized by political elites refracted through memories and networks of those who are mobilized. It is constructed in reciprocal engagement with a series of variables that make some identities and affiliations more salient and accessible to others. All individuals have multiple characteristics, commitments, and connections. Which develop political significance, and which of their potential identities individuals recognize, are contingent. I propose that salience and meaning are functions of the interaction over time, political institutions, mobilizing discourse, material conditions, organization, and available ideology. Political identity emerges presumptively indeterminate, fluid, and heterogeneous as the result of constant negotiation and renegotiation between subjects and contexts.” Thus the past use of historical and antithetical concepts is not only related to the power of producing semantic structures but also mediated by particular institutional and organized strategies, which are invested with some notion of a specific kind of political opposition. See Jung, Then I Was Black, 17. 11. I have developed this problem in my book Narrating Evil. See Lara, Narrating Evil, chapter 7, “Hearts of Darkness,” 135–161. 12. Reinhart Koselleck cites Arendt in his thematization of the word revolution in his chapter “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” in Futures Past, 44. 13. Useful in this regard is Giorgio Agamben’s text on the method of archeology and what he claims is the innovative view it offers: “Genealogy goes to war against this idea [of a primordial truth]. It is not that the genealogist does not look for something like a beginning. However, what he or she finds “at the historical beginning of things” is never the “inviolable identity of their origin.” Thus “a genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for their ‘origins,’ will never neglect as inaccessible all the episodes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning. . . . The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin.” Agamben, “Philosophical Archeology,” 83. 14. Koselleck, Futures Past, 74. 15. Elias Palti is a political historian whose major research on democracy was presented in a public lecture in Mexico in June of 2011, entitled “El nacimiento de la Democracia: El Discurso de la Emancipación Latinoamericana.” He is still working on this project, and I find his views on these questions very illuminating. 16. Palti developed this thesis in a previous lecture on June 6, 2011, in Mexico City.

194  1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change 17. This happened when Hobbes and the thinkers that followed him conceived of a form of government as a rational, administrative task. See Reinhart Koselleck, “The Hobbesian Rationality and the Origins of Enlightenment,” Critique and Crisis, 23–40. 18. Koselleck, Futures Past, 82. 19. Clearly, texts produced during the Enlightenment helped a great deal to articulate a notion of equality. If monarchies based their legitimacy on “divine rights,” kings occupied an imagined position as literally closer to God than other humans. They had a religious aura. Aristocrats were higher than commoners because of their noble birth; merchants were higher than servants, etc. The vertical hierarchy followed from the social positioning. And this changed once the Encyclopedia began to speak in the language of “equal, individual human rights.” It steadily gained ground because of the political campaigns of religious toleration and the abolition of slavery. The Edict of Toleration of 1787 used the language of rights (in a restrictive fashion). This term was used by the government not as a universal or inherent but as a limited privilege bestowed by monarchical favors. As Lynn Hunt says, the Latin roots of the word privilege translate as “private law” (privus = private; lex, legis = law), the very antithesis of rights based on universal, natural law.” See: Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights, 7. However, the first important document written by Abbé Raynal was his monumental history of European colonization, Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, published in 1770. Condorcet published a condemnation of slavery in 1781. And, by 1789, “The communication system had evolved and literacy had more than doubled (reaching 50 percent for men and 27 percent for women); mail still took a week or ten days to reach the peripheries of the country, and the government still officially controlled book and newspaper publication, but it could not hold back the flood of pamphlets that now streamed forth on every imaginable political topic.” In Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights, 12. Finally, Sieyès attacked every form of legal privilege and pointed to the nobility as a class of parasites. The works of intellectuals and the ways in which they addressed the question of equality had unsettling consequences that brought to life a new notion of the individual. Privileges were no longer unchallenged, and rights had to be equal for every person. 20. For example, Pierre Rosanvallon argues that “three great waves of change transformed this situation. The first came in the 1960s in the form of decolonization when a great number of states, most notably on the African continent, adopted various forms of democratic institutions. The second wave in the 1970s reinforced the process of democratization across the world with the collapse of dictatorships in Europe (Spain, Greece and Portugal), Latin America (Brazil and Argentina) and Asia (Indonesia and Philippines). Finally, the crumbling of the Soviet Union and its satellite states after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 consolidated the process which then continued to spread.” Rosanvallon, “Democratic Universalism as a Historical Problem,” 539. 21. See Canovan, The People. 22. See Laclau, On Populist Reason, especially, “‘The People” and the Discursive Production of Emptiness,” 67–128.

1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change  195  23. Ibid., 95–96. 24. Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” 644. 25. As the theories of the social contract. 26. As the Romans saw their foundation. 27. As Jacques Derrida and Seyla Benhabib have used this term. See Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Limited Inc. See also Benhabib, “Claiming Rights Across Borders.” 28. As the Jewish diaspora conceived its origins. It can also be considered an Arendtian way of thinking about foundation. 29. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights Across Borders,” 645. 30. Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” 279. 31. Arendt argues: “The chief distinction between persuasion and dialectic is that the former always addresses a multitude (peithein ta plethe) whereas dialectic is possible only in dialogue between two. Socrates’ mistake was to address his judges in the form of dialectic, which is why he could not persuade them. His truth, on the other hand, since he respected the limitations inherent in persuasion, became an opinion among opinions, not worth a bit more than the nontruths of the judges. Socrates insisted on talking the matter through with his judges as he used to talk about all kinds of things with single Athenian citizens or with his pupils; and he believed that he could arrive at some truth thereby and persuade others of it. Yet persuasion does not come from truth, it comes from opinions; and only persuasion reckons and knows how to deal with the multitude. To Plato, persuading the multitude means forcing upon its multiple opinions one’s own opinion; thus persuasion is not the opposite of rule by violence, it is only another form of it.” Hannah Arendt, “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics, 13. 32. Habermas argues “Whereas with Rousseau the sovereing embodied power and the legal monopoly on power, Fröbel’s public is no longer a body. Rather, it is only the medium for a multivocal process of opinion-formation that substitutes mutual understanding for power and rationally motivates majoritarian decisions.” Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” (appendix 1), in Between Facts and Norms, 476. 33. Ibid., 475. 34. Habermas has been thinking and writing about the concept of public opinion since the late 1980s, beginning with his major work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 35. Indeed, it was John Rawls who brought this subject into question in his work A Theory of Justice. Many of his critics argue that he could not get rid of the utilitarian view of politics, which considers the validity of the majority as a crucial criterion for democratic processes. 36. Rosanvallon, “Democratic Universalism as a Historical Problem,” 546. 37. Arendt argues:”These two things together—a new experience which revealed man’s capacity for novelty—are at the root of the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had ever happened in the whole

196  1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change recorded history of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it in terms of successful reclamation of civil rights, would sound entirely out of place.” Arendt, “The Meaning of Revolution,” in On Revolution, 34. 38. See Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, also The French Revolution and Human Rights. 39. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. 40. Ibid., 82. 41. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 300. 42. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 43. Koselleck, Futures Past, 84. 44. Habermas, “The European Nation-State,” 107. 45. Ibid., 110. 46. Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” 104. 47. Indeed as Lynn Hunt claims, “On June 17, 1789, after six weeks of inconclusive debate about voting procedures, the deputies of the Third Estate proclaimed themselves the true representatives of the nation, they invited the deputies from the two other orders to join them as deputies of the National Assembly. By the stroke of a pen—once the deputies of the clergy and the nobility began to join them—the Third Estate had transformed the political situation of the country, and as the National Assembly it turned into writing a constitution based on new principles.” Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights, 14. 48. Habermas, “The European Nation-State,” 110. 49. Ibid. 50. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 51. Habermas, “The European Nation-State,” 111. 52. See Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. 53. Habermas, “The European Nation-State,” 115. 54. Koselleck, Futures Past, 84. 55. Arendt, “The Meaning of Revolution,” 21. 56. She argues that “the novelty of the story and the innermost meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spectators alike. As to the plot, it was unmistakably the emergence of freedom: in 1793, four years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, at a time where Robespierre could define his rule as the ‘despotism of liberty’ without fear of being accused of speaking in paradoxes, Condorcet summed up what everybody knew: The word ‘revolutionary’ can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom. That revolutions were about to usher an entirely new era had been attested even earlier with the establishment of the revolutionary calendar in which the year of the execution of the king and the proclamation of the republic was counted as the year one.” Arendt, “The Meaning of Revolution,” 29. 57. Ibid., 34. 58. Ibid., 35. 59. See Arendt, On Revolution. 60. Koselleck, Futures Past, 41.

1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change  197  61. Ibid. 62. François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld, Duke of La Rochefoucauld (11 January 1747–27 March 1827) was a French social reformer. On 18 July he became president of the National Constituent Assembly. 63. Arendt, “The Meaning of Revolution,” 47. 64. Ibid., 42. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Koselleck, Futures Past, 47. 68. Rosa, Beschleuningung. 69. Koselleck, Futures Past, 47. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 49. See also Hunt, Inventing Human Rights and The French Revolution and Human Rights. 72. Arendt, “The Meaning of Revolution,” 45. 73. Ibid., 46. 74. Lynn Hunt argues, “However much the subject of political negotiation and compromise at the time, the declaration exercised an enduring influence on all subsequent discussions of human rights. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Bill of Rights served to protect citizens from government and was composed only after the constitution itself was ratified; in France the declaration of rights provided the basis for government itself and was consequently drafted before the constitution.” Furthermore, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen laid out a vision of government based on principles completely different from those of the monarchy. According to the declaration, the legitimacy of government must now flow from the guarantee of individual rights by the law.” Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights, 15. 75. Indeed, someone like Olimpia De Gouges made an alternative Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen (1791), insisting that women were also entitled to those rights. She claimed that there was nothing in nature itself that justified the exclusion of women from the exercise of civil and political rights. I owe this insight to Chiara Bottici. 76. Reinhart Koselleck, “The Limits of Emancipation,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 250. 77. See Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. 78. Nezar AlSayyad, “Cairo’s Roundabout Revolution,” New York Times, April 14, 2011. 79. Arendt, “The Meaning of Revolution,” 53. 80. Koselleck, Futures Past, 258. 81. Ibid., 249. 82. Alexander, “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo,” 7. 83. Koselleck, Futures Past, 263. 84. Ibid., 264–265.

198  2. The Model of Translation 2. The Model of Translation 1. Habermas, “Essay on Faith and Knowledge,” 2. I am quoting from his manuscript. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. This is the way it is defined by Reinhart Koselleck: “As a historical discipline, Begriffsgeschichten is always concerned with political and social events and circumstances, although indeed, only with those which have been conceptually constituted and articulated in the source of language. In a restricted sense it interprets history through its prevailing concepts, even if the words are used today, while in turn treating these concepts historically, even if their earlier usage must be defined anew for us today.” In Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” 85. 4. Koselleck, Futures Past, 6. 5. Koselleck says that “the ban on the Joachimite theory of the Third Empire; the fate of Joan of Arc, whose determined affirmation of an unlicensed vision led to the stake; the death by fire of Savonarola: all serve as examples of the fate awaiting prophets whose visions were post-biblical in character.” Koselleck, Futures Past, 7. 6. Löwith, Meaning in History, 182. 7. As Carl Schmitt argues, secularization works with the aid “of analogies from a theistic theology.” He continues to explore this method of establishing analogies with his connection to the sociology of concepts because “this sociology of concepts is concerned with establishing proof of two spiritual but at the same time substantial identities.” Carl Schmitt, “Political-Theology,” in Political Theology, 37. 8. Koselleck,“Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change,” 82. 9. It is interesting to watch as Maeve Cooke reclaims Marx’s contribution as stimulating a vital connection between critical social theory and praxis: “By ‘praxis’ I mean intentionally guided, rationally based human activity aimed at changing the social order for the better. Transformative social activity of this kind, which aims at remedying social evils, seems to presuppose an explanation of their causes as well as of the ways in which they are disseminated and perpetuated. It appears, therefore, that in order to secure its connection with praxis, critical social theory requires less a model of normative justification than an appropriate explanatory model.” Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 191. 10. As Koselleck observes, “De la Boétie is probably the first modern thinker who wanted to show by reference to the element of free will (Freiwillingkeit) in every system of servitude that it could also be abolished by free will (freie Willen) (1577).” See Reinhart Koselleck, “The Limits of Emancipation: A Conceptual-Historical Sketch,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 249. 11. Ibid., 249. 12. Ibid., 251. 13. Ibid., 255. 14. Flynn, “Political Theology and Its Vicissitudes,” 190. 15. Löwith, Meaning in History, 26.

3. Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model  199  3. Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model 1. As Jay well understood, “Illegitimacy comes . . . not from lacking a proper parent, but rather from denying his generative power.” Martin Jay, “A Reflection on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” in Fin-de-Siècle Socialism, 150. 2. Löwith’s analysis of misconceiving the idea of progress as something new is meant to undermine modernity; he called it illegitimate because its central modern ideas were secularized versions of what were originally and properly Christian ideas. Martin Jay adds that “illegitimacy comes .  .  . not from lacking a proper parent, but rather from denying his generative power. This charge itself, so Blumenberg astutely notes, is a negative variant of an argument that can be traced as far back as Plato’s notion that whatever is true is merely a copy of an original Truth, which can be identified with a divine author. Its positive residues linger today in the kind of proof by etymological priority evident in the work of thinkers like Heidegger or Hannah Arendt, who reach back before the Christian era to an original language whose authentic meaning has somehow been corrupted.” Jay, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 150–151. 3. In fact, his account of this continuity could be called functionalist precisely because of how certain categories perform “functions” within certain problematics. 4. Blumenberg clarifies this: “The idea of ‘reoccupation’ says nothing about the derivation of the new installed element, only about the dedication it receives at its installation.” The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 49. 5. Jay, “A Reflection on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” 152. 6. In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor called this feature “the buffered self.” Taylor, A Secular Age, 27, 37–42,131, 134–142, 239, 262–264, 300–307, 363, 411. 7. Indeed, argues Blumenberg, “It is the comparison between literature and the art of antiquity, with its canonized exemplary status, and the output of one’s contemporaries. Here the idea of progress arises against the status of permanent prototypes as obligatory ideals. The querelles des anciens et des modernes is the aesthetic analogue of the detachment of theory from the authority of Aristotelianism.” The Legitimation of the Modern Age, 33. 8. Taylor, A Secular Age. 9. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. 10. Habermas makes a similar point in his polemic against Gadamer. See Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” 11. Jay, “A Reflection on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” 153. 12. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 6. 13. Harrington, “Theological History,” 12. 14. Ibid., 8. 15. Blumenberg, The Legitimation of the Modern Age, 8. 16. See Robert Pippin, “Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem,” in Idealism as Modernism, 270. 17. Blumenberg clarifies: “Analogies, after all, are precisely not transformations. If every metaphorical borrowing from the dynastic language treasures of theology were

200  3. Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model ‘secularization’ in the sense of transformation, then we would immediately stand before a mass of products of secularization that would have to be entitled ‘Romanticism.’” Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 93. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. The Gnostics had the problem of how to deal with the problem of good and evil if we accept that God created the world. This is what we recognize as the tradition of theodicies. 20. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 53. 21. A similar view is expressed in my book Narrating Evil. 22. Blumenberg, The Legitimation of the Modern Age, 56. 23. Ibid., 59. 24. Pippin, Idealism as Modernism, 273. 25. Jay, “A Reflection on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” 157. 26. Ibid., 159. 27. Ibid., 162. 28. About this problem, Pippin argues that “at those points where the research program of modern astronomy and physics does begin to look wholly discontinuous with the assumptions of the prior epoch, where some old questions cannot be ‘answered’ because the new answers to other old questions entail the rejection of the questions (the ‘point’ of history, the justification of curiosity), Blumenberg changes gears, in effect, invokes his reoccupation thesis, and seems to admit that those discontinuous, wholly new elements cannot be legitimated in the same way.” Pippin, Idealism as Modernism, 283. 29. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 104. 30. Ibid., 92. 31. Ibid., 101. 32. Ibid.

4. Blumenberg’s Second Model 1. This was Ernst Cassirer’s most influential claim. See Cassirer, The Myth of the State. 2. Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth, 21. 3. Ibid. 4. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vols. 2 and 3. See also Cassirer, The Myth of the State and Language and Myth. Blumenberg says, “for Cassirer the most important concept is one that is remote from the actual terminologies of philosophy and consequently is able to transcend their history—the concept of symbol. The theory of the symbolic forms allows one for the first time to correlate the expressive means of myth with those of science, but in a historically irreversible relationship and with the unrelinquishable presupposition of science as the terminus ad quem [goal toward which the process is directed].” Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 50. 5. Blumenberg argues, “Myth and philosophy would then have come from one root. By analogy to philósophos [wisdom loving] Aristotle constructs the term philómythos

4. Blumenberg’s Second Model  201  [mythloving], so as to be able to relate the philosopher’s predilection for what is wonderful to myth, since after all myth itself is composed of wonderful things.” Ibid., 26. 6. Blumenberg says that “although myth refuses, and must refuse, to provide explanations, it does ‘produce’ another life-stabilizing quality: the inadmissibility of the arbitrary, the elimination of caprice.” Ibid., 127. 7. As Blumenberg explains, “Myth is a mode of working up reality, which has its own legitimacy.” Ibid., 51. 8. Ibid. Our being vulnerable against all kinds of contingencies. See also ibid., 6. The absolutism of reality means the unknown or half-known exterior. 9. As Harrington clarifies, “mythic mimesis flows from affects of dread and anxiety in the face of an incomplete and insuperable and never totalizable exterior environment. Myth expresses a process of transformation of apprehensions of the ‘transcendent force of Otherness’ (Übermächtigkeit des jeweils Anderen) into specific representations of particular ‘transcendent powers’ (Übermächten). It is in this way that mythic symbolic contents help reduce the sense of estrangement from reality and exteriority.” In: Harrington, “Theological History,” 16. 10. Blumenberg explains: “stories are told in order to ‘kill’[vertreiben] something’ . . . ‘to kill fear.’” Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 34. He notes, “all trust in the world begins with names, in connection with which stories can be told.” Ibid., 35. 11. Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth, 48. 12. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 241. 13. Ibid., 233. 14. Assmann claims that “the relationship between monotheistic and archaic religions is one of revolution, not evolution. My argument, then, is that the monotheistic shift, which lies between the two images combined in the biblical writings as in a picture puzzle and organizes their differences, takes the form of a rupture, a break with the past that rests on the distinction between truth and falsehood and generates, over the subsequent course of its reception, the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Christian and Jews, Muslim and infidels, true believers and heretics, manifesting itself in countless acts of violence and bloodshed.” Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 11. 15. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 241. 16. Here too, Assmann agrees with Blumenberg: “by telling stories about the gods, myths bring order to human life. This meaning-endowing, foundational function likewise stands and falls with the principle of plurality.” Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 41. 17. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 274. 18. Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth, 100. 19. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 34. 20. Ibid., 35. 21. This dimension of modernity has been explored in great detail in the book La historia del nombrar written by the Spanish philosopher Carlos Thiebaut. See Thiebaut, La historia del nombrar. 22. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 260.

202  4. Blumenberg’s Second Model 23. Ibid., 375. 24. Blumenberg clarifies that the term is taken from Dilthey, but that “Eric Rothacker has laid down ‘a principle of significance.’ Its purport is that man’s historical world of culture things have ‘valences’ for attention and for vital distance different from those they have in the objective world of things that is studied in the exact sciences, in which the distribution of subjective value to phenomena that are studied tends, in the norm, toward zero . . . ‘Significance’ is related to finitude. It arises under the imposed requirement that one renounce the ‘Vogliamo tutto’ [We want everything], which remains the secret drive for the impossible.” However, Blumenberg clarifies that significance is hard to define but that “Heidegger associated it, together with ‘involvement,’ with the ‘world-hood’ of the world, and thus with the assemblage of being-in-the-world, from which objects, as ‘present at hand’ with their properties, must first be detached before one can bring to them a theoretical interest that is no longer subjectively ‘owned.’” Finally, he concludes that, “significance [Bedeutsamkeit] then becomes the quality of the world for the Dasein that is in it, as the functional specifications of which ‘significations’ [Bedeutungen]first becomes possible. . . . The terms familiarity (with the world) and significance (of the world for Dasein) correspond to one another and assist in the suppression of the separation of subject and object (a separation that has supposedly been left behind) by the unity of Being-in-the-world.” Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 67, 68, and 109. 25. I think that the best contemporary definition of ideology is the one developed by Maeve Cooke in her book Re-Presenting the Good Society. She takes up Ernesto Laclau’s definition of ideology, because he wants “to rehabilitate the notion of ideology in the sense of false consciousness.” Thus she first criticizes him because “Laclau maintains ideological distortion is a dimension of society that cannot be suppressed,” and “it is unclear how a critique of ideology is supposed to be possible.” Laclau gives no clues as how to deal with the “evaluative basis for intraideological critique.” Then she goes on to argue that “a first step in this direction [of her own revision to this conceptual understanding] could be taken by defining ideological closure, along the lines indicated by Butler, as the denial that certain normative contents are politically salient.” However, she argues, “a second step is also necessary. In addition to providing an account of what he [Laclau] means by (pernicious) ideological closure, Laclau has to clarify why ideological closure in this sense is ethically unacceptable. For this, however, he requires a suitable conception of ethical validity.” Thus, Cooke argues that “what is lacking in both cases is an idea of validity that would permit ethical criticism, even where these are acceptable from the point of view of the prevailing Sittlichkeit.” Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 102–103. 26. The purpose of Chiara Bottici’s book is to develop a theory of political myth. See Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth. 27. Indeed, as Blumenberg explains, Rousseau took the Greek treatment of Prometheus from Prometheus Pyrkaues, a fragment of a satyr play by Aeschylus, where Prometheus cautions the satyr not to set his beard on fire as he tries to embrace and kiss it . See Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 381.

5. Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  203  28. Chiara Bottici has captured this dimension of political theories when she argues that these prophecies are secular; see Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth, 178. 29. Ibid., 180. 30. Bottici has used this category to analyze the closure of a story in the grasping of historical and political events; ibid., 212. 31. Ibid., 215. 32. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. 33. Ibid., 196. 34. Indeed, Blumenberg argues that “Goethe had described the process by which he ‘took refuge,’ the process of search for and choice of an image, in the fifteenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit.” Quoting Goethe he explains that “this idea transformed itself into an image: I was struck by the old mythological figure of Prometheus, the Prometheus who, separated from the gods, peopled a world from his workshop.” Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 401. 35. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 36. To use a category developed by Alessandro Ferrara. See Ferrara, The Force of the Example, especially chapters 2 and 3, 42–61, and 62–79. 37. Thomas Mann wrote two long essays on his work. See Mann, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud. 38. These similarities between Nietzsche’s myth and Freud’s views appear in Thomas Mann’s understanding of both authors. See Mann, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud. 39. See: Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 56.

5. Hannah Arendt ’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics 1. Kalyvas argues that “this revival [of Arendt’s works] has neglected “On Revolution” and new political beginnings. As a consequence, her rich reflections on the politics of the extraordinary remain, with few scattered exceptions, relatively marginal and overlooked.” Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 187. 2. This feature of complexity seems to clarify itself only when we compare her concerns with those of Koselleck, Blumenberg, and the school of conceptual history. See chapter 1 and chapters 3 and 4 (this volume), which deal with Blumenberg’s model. In Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary Kalyvas also makes clear that Arendt shares concerns with Cark Schmitt. 3. Arendt says, “One aspect of our concept of authority is Platonic in origin, and when Plato began to consider the introduction of authority into the handling of public affairs in the polis, he knew he was seeking an alternative to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion as well as the common way of handling affairs, which was force and violence.” Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 93. 4. Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” 74.

204  5. Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics 5. Arendt. “What Is Authority?” 106. This is in fact Max Weber’s definition of authority. See Weber, Economy and Society. 6. Arendt argues: “Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom, and Plato hoped to have found such an obedience when, in his old age, he bestowed upon the laws that quality which would make them undisputable rulers over the whole public realm.” Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 106. 7. See Markell, “The Rule of the People.” As Andreas Kalyvas argues, “For Arendt, although the will was ‘Hebrew in origin,’ making its appearance for the first time in the Jewish tradition along with the divine lawgiver and his demand for obedience, it was not until Paul that it was elevated to an independent faculty—divine and human alike. The concept of the will was born at the very moment humans were confronted with the tantalizing moral question of whether to voluntarily obey the transcendental law and to freely choose the good instead of evil.” Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 214. 8. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 107. 9. Ibid., 108. 10. Maeve Cooke defines this authoritarian position as the “position [that] appeals to a transcendent, final authority . . . the crucial feature of this position, which sets it off from the preceding one, is that correct perception entails acceptance of the unquestionable authority of some transcendent power or idea. Thus, appeals to authority of a divine will, or to natural necessity, or to the logic of history, are typical.” Cooke, RePresenting the Good Society, 15. 11. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 110. 12. Arendt claimed that the enormous influence these tales have exerted on images of hell in religious thought proves just how useful they were, since they were designed for purely political purposes. Ibid., 111. 13. This is also Max Weber’s view of it. See Weber, Economy and Society, especially “Types of Domination,” 1:226–230. 14. This is what Richard Rorty called the metaphor of the mirror’s nature. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 15. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 115. 16. Moyn, “Hannah Arendt and the Secular,” 93. 17. Ibid., 102. 18. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 103. 19. Later, again, in the essays “Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis” and “Foundation II: Novus Ordum Saeclorum,” in On Revolution, Arendt expands further on these comments. 20. Here we find for the first time Arendt’s views about gods and myth. They coincide with Hans Blumenberg’s conception of polytheism as the paradigm that can best stimulate tolerance, because it requires the acceptance of multiple characters and the different gods translated from culture to culture as a valuable legacy. 21. Arendt says, “Religion was the power that secured the foundation by providing a dwelling place for the gods among men,” Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 49.

5. Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics  205  22. Arendt says, “The hero, the ‘doer of great deeds and speaker of great words,’ as Achilles was called, needed the poet—not the prophet, but the seer—whose divine gift sees in the past what is worth telling in the present and the future.” Ibid., 45. 23. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 122. 24. Arendt claims that “because the ‘authority,’ the augmentation which the Senate must add to political decisions, is not power, it seems to us curiously elusive and intangible, bearing in this respect a striking resemblance to Montesquieu’s judiciary branch of government, whose power he called ‘somehow nil’ (en quelque façon nulle) and which nevertheless constitutes the highest authority in constitutional governments.” Ibid., 123. 25. Arendt argues that “in their sense of the greatness of human deeds and events, the Greek historians, Thucydides no less than Herodotus, were the descendants of Homer and Pindar.” Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 46. 26. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, 108. 27. Henry the V addresses the soldiers and claims “that he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse. We would not die in that man’s company That fears his fellowship to die with us. This day is called the Feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day, and live old age, Will yearly on the virgil feast his neighbors And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.” Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, [And say, “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day”] Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words— Harry the King, Bedford, Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester— Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that shed his blood with me Shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And Gentleman in England now abed

206  5. Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. Shakespeare, Henry V, 4.3.40–66, 83

28. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 128. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 131. 31. Plato, Twelve Volumes, vols. 5 and 6. 32. Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 131. 33. But Arendt noticed that a fuller description of hell was really given by Dante. 34. Asad, Genealogies of Religion. 35. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 36. Recall that in “What Is Freedom?” Arendt rejects the connection between freedom and the will, as she claims that “freedom as related to politics is not a phenomenon of the will.” See Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future. 37. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 202. 38. “This notion of resistibility is at the center of Arendt’s re-covered conception of authority for modernity. Recall that for Arendt an absolute is illicit because it is irresistible. God, self-evident truths, natural law, are all despotic because they are irresistible. Because they are irresistible, they do not persuade to agreement, they command acquiescence.” Bonnie Honig, “Arendt’s Account of Action and Authority” in Political Theory and Desplacement of Politcs, 109. 39. For the Hebrews, the Exodus was the story of liberation from bondage. For the Romans, the foundation of the city of Rome is interpreted as an act of freedom. 40. Arendt explains that “Jesus found this remedy in the human capacity to forgive, which is likewise based on the insight that in action we never know what we are doing (Luke 23:24), so that, since we cannot stop acting as long as we live, we must never stop forgiving either (Luke 17:3–4).” And then, she adds, “what was lost by tradition of political thought, and survived only in the religious tradition where it was valid for homines religiosi, was the relationship between doing and forgiving as a constitutive element of the intercourse between acting men, which was the specifically political, as distinguished from the religious, novelty in Jesus’ teachings” (my emphasis). Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 57–58. 41. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. 42. Arendt, “Foundation I,” 157. 43. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 202. 44. Arendt argues that “there is also the additional insight that power is generated with the establishment of the sphere of political action, whatever its defined limits, and that freedom can protect itself only by constantly watching over the exercise of such power. What we today understand by a constitutional government, be it monarchy or republic, is essentially a government controlled by the governed and limited in its powers and use of force.” Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 143. 45. As we saw in chapter 1, however, she clearly signals that it was through the

6. Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization  207  modern investment in human rights as institutions that a radical change in the semantics of equality occurred. 46. For an extensive criticism of Hannah Arendt’s vague conception of the social and about issues related to conflicts about justice, see Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob. 47. Ibid. 48. I would like to thank my student Diana Mattison for thematizing this particular problem in my postgraduate course at the New School in the spring of 2010. 49. Arendt, “The Meaning of Revolution,” 21–58. 50. Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” 94. 51. Detienne, The Greeks and Us, 102. 52. Reinhart Koselleck, “Social History and Conceptual History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 24. 53. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 181. 54. Ibid., 182. 55. Arendt, “Foundation II,” 183. 56. Ibid., 185. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 189. 59. She claimed that “only Montesquieu ever used the word ‘law’ in its old, strictly Roman sense, defining it in the very first chapter of the Esprit des Lois, as the rapport, the relation subsisting between different entities.” Ibid., 189. 60. Markell, “The Rule of the People,” 10.

6. Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization 1. Koselleck argues that “a central target of the critical offensive, the Christian religion in its manifold divisions, prepared the charismatic historical heritage that was subsumed into the future-oriented world-view, in the most varied ways. We know of the process of secularization, which transposed eschatology into a history of progress. But, likewise, consciously and deliberately, the elements of divine judgment and the Last Day were applied to history itself, above all in the exacerbated situation.” Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 11. 2. Koselleck argues that, “insofar as conscience participated in the political world it became the controlling authority of the duty to obey.” Ibid., 37. 3. Organizations that Koselleck says were the places “where philosophers, for instance, devoted themselves especially to the investigation of the moral laws.” Ibid., 55. 4. “In the secret Masonic organizations, religious and political elements entered into a new kind of union. Rationalistic resurgences of the myths and mysteries of Antiquity and the unfolding of a dominant indigenous hierarchy characterized the leagues; as a whole, however, they were part neither of the Church or the State but a form of organization peculiar to the new bourgeois society. In essence, Freemasonry is as old as bourgeois society—if bourgeois society is not indeed a mere scion of Freemasonry.” Ibid., 71.

208  6. Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization 5. Koselleck argues that “in England and France the word associated with the concept of criticism was incorporated into the national languages from the Latin around 1600. The terms critique and ‘criticism’ (and also ‘critics’) established themselves in the seventeenth century. What was meant by them was the art of objective evaluation— particularly of ancient texts, but also of literature and art, as well as of nations and individuals.” Ibid., 105. 6. This position bears many resemblances with the one developed by Carl Schmitt, who argues that concepts such as “humanity” are ideological instruments of “imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.” He adds: “humanity is not a political concept, and no political entity or society and no status corresponds to it.” Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54–55. 7. Ibid., 119. 8. Indeed, Koselleck argues, “The philosophy of history substantiated the elitist consciousness of the Enlightenment. This was the power that the Illuminati possessed, a power shared with the whole Enlightenment. This was a threat: it revealed the plan of conquest to those under attack.” Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 130. 9. Koselleck argued that, “a central target of the critical offensive, the Christian religion in its manifold divisions, prepared the charismatic-historical heritage that was subsumed into the future-oriented world-view, in the most varied ways. We know the process of secularization, which transposed eschatology into a history of progress. But, likewise, consciously and deliberately, the elements of divine judgment and the Last Day were applied to history itself, above all in the exacerbated critical situation.” Ibid., 10. 10. Ibid., 108. 11. Ibid., 109. 12. “Therein lay the root of the ambivalence of criticism, an ambivalence that after Voltaire became its historical benchmark: ostensibly non-political and above politics, it was in fact political.” Ibid., 114. 13. Rabotnikof, En busca de un lugar común, 83. 14. In The Strife of the Faculties, Kant argues: “Why has a ruler never dared openly to declare that he recognizes absolutely no right of the people opposed to him . . . ? The reason is that such a public declaration would rouse all of his subjects against him; although, as docile sheep, led by a benevolent and sensible master, well-fed and powerfully protected, they would have nothing wanting in their welfare for which to lament.” Kant, On History, 145. 15. Ibid., 103. 16. Ibid., 108. 17. Ibid., 108. 18. Arendt claims that “toward the end of last century the Catholic clergy had been seeking to recover its old political power in just those quarters where, for one or another reason, secular authority was on the wane among the people.” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 101. 19. Ibid., 109.

7. Jûrgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  209  20. Such as Anatole France, E. Duclaux, Gabriel Monod, and Clemenceau. 21. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 111. 22. Ibid., 113. 23. Ibid., 103. 24. Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 197. 25. Koselleck argues: “No theological or moral doctrine of inner freedom, of the equality of all human beings before God, or of their equality given by nature ever questioned indentured labor, serfdom, servitude, or slavery as institutions—all of which spread in the most terrible way in the early modern period (frühe Neuzeit).” Reinhart Koselleck, “The Limits of Emancipation,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 249. 26. Ibid., 252. 27. An “emancipated heart” meant the [evasion ] of religious vows (René d’ Anjou, 1455). 28. Kosseleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 252. 29. Ibid., 253. 30. Ibid., 254. 31. Ibid.

7. Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model 1. Habermas, “‘The Political.’” I will also be using his dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger, which was published in English as The Dialectics of Secularization. 2. See Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. 3. See, for example, Habermas’s notes 8, 9, 11, 77, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, where he cites the work of Koselleck. 4. Ibid., 272. 5. Habermas argues that “Kant’s concept of publicity held good as the one principle that could guarantee the convergence of politics and morality. He conceived of the ‘public sphere’ at once as a principle of the legal order and as the method of the enlightenment.” Ibid., 104. 6. See Fraser’s essay, among others, in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” 7. Habermas claims in this reply that “I must confess, however, that only after reading Mikhail Bakhtin’s great book Rabelais and His World have my eyes become really opened to the inner dynamics of plebeian culture. This culture of the common people apparently was by no means only a backdrop, that is, a passive echo of the dominant culture; it was also the periodically recurring violent revolt of a counter project to the hierarchical world of domination, with its official celebrations and everyday disciplines. Only a stereoscopic view of this sort reveals how a mechanism of exclusion that locks and represses at the same time calls forth the counter effects that cannot be neutralized. If we apply the same perspective to the bourgeois public sphere, the exclusion of women from this world dominated by men now looks different than it appeared to me at the time” (my emphasis). Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 427.

210  7. Jûrgen Habermas’s Innovation Model 8. In this work he argues that “the political public sphere can fulfill its functions of perceiving and thematizing encompassing social problems only insofar as it develops out of the communication taking place among those who are potentially affected” (my emphasis). Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 365. 9. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 74. 10. Ibid., 82. 11. Habermas argues: “I have described the political public sphere as a sounding board of problems that must be processed by the political system because they cannot be solved elsewhere. To this extent, the public sphere is a warning system of censors that, though unspecialized, are sensitive throughout society. From the perspective of democratic theory, the public sphere must, in addition, amplify the pressure of problems, that is, not only detect and identify problems but also convincingly and influentially thematize them in such a way that they are taken up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes.” Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 359. 12. Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, 34. 13. Ibid., 33. 14. See, especially, Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; and then his section on civil society and the public sphere in Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 329–387. 15. This dimension can be seen in his work, ibid., 381. 16. Ibid., 370. 17. I found Maeve Cooke’s study about Habermas’s conception of the good society very illuminating. Cooke claims that “Habermas’ ideal of the ideal speech situation or, more generally, of a communicative rationalized life-world, do not merely evoke a picture of a (more or less) specific social condition; they conjure a picture of society that transcends the contingencies of human life and history and in which human finitude would have been overcome.” Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 166. However, if we recognize the centrality Habermas has given to the social actors who can gain influence and mobilize publics, what becomes evident is that the entire process is entangled as much in contingencies as in how actors acquire the capacity to formulate their claims to rights of inclusion in a manner that is universally compelling. It is this feature of immanence that I try to highlight in order to elude the transcendental notion that Cooke argues is still a remnant of metaphysics in Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. 18. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 449. 19. Ibid., 365. 20. Cooke argues that Habermas’s postmetaphysical notion of the good society possesses two features that are important for our discussion: 1. “the projected good society expresses a potential already contained within existing reality,” 2. Habermas seeks to avoid the accusation of finalism (Koselleck’s critique of philosophy of history), because Habermas’s view of the good society “must avoid teleological conceptions of the historical process. Instead, it must keep open the process of history by making emancipation a contingent matter, dependent on perceptions, interpretations, and interventions of concrete, historically situated, autonomous agents who respond to specific experiences and exigencies.” Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 165.

7. Jûrgen Habermas’s Innovation Model  211  21. Lara, Moral Textures. 22. About this expressive capacity see my book, ibid. 23. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 374. 24. Indeed, as Habermas argues, “the labor movement and feminism, for example, were able to join these discourses in order to shatter the structures that had initially constituted them as ‘the other’ of a bourgeois public sphere.” Ibid. 25. As Habermas argues, “political and social actors would be allowed to ‘use’ the public sphere only insofar as they make convincing contributions to the solution of problems that have been perceived by the public or have been put on the agenda with the public’s consent.” Ibid., 379. 26. By “redemption,” Maeve Cooke argues, one means, “making good a present (and possibly past) deficiency: the idea of redemption refers to a condition in which all relevant obstacles to human flourishing would finally be removed.” Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 166. 27. Invernizzi Accetti, “Can Democracy Emancipate Itself from Political Theology?” 254. 28. Ibid., 260. 29. Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 167. 30. See Cooke, “Violating Neutrality?” 31. Two problems arise from Habermas’s position on the ideal speech situation as a regulative idea and his notion of truth as moral consensus. Cooke addresses the first one by aligning with Wellmer’s critique of this notion in Habermas’s work, “since this is not something that human beings could find desirable, the ideal speech situation lacks the motivating (and hence the regulative) force that Habermas attributes to it.” Her objection is that, with this notion, we presuppose that there is a state of perfection. And, regarding the question of the coincidence between human knowledge and moral truth, Cooke argues that “it eliminates the moment of receptivity to the unanticipated and to the new that we associate with the best human intellectual achievements.” And “it is finalist, in the sense that it postulates a possible endpoint to the process of historical learning and creative human thinking, thereby denying the finitude of human knowledge, the contingency of human life and history and the creativity and freedom of human will.” Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 30. 32. Cooke, “Violating Neutrality?” 33. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 146. 34. Habermas suggests that Julius Fröbel “has recourse to the communicative condition under which opinion formation oriented to truth can be combined with the majoritarian will-formation.” Thus, “Fröbel’s position shows that the normative tension between equality and liberty can be resolved as soon as one renounces an overly concrete reading of the principle of popular sovereignty.” In Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” (appendix 1), in Between Facts and Norms, 475. 35. Ibid., 475. 36. I will focus on this in a more specific way further on. 37. Ibid., 486. 38. Ibid., 486.

212  7. Jûrgen Habermas’s Innovation Model 39. Habermas, “‘The Political,’” 20. 40. Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 577. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 578. 43. Ibid., 591. 44. For instance in Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 573–616. 45. Lafont, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 242. 46. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere.” 47. Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, 46. 48. Lafont, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 241 49. Ibid., 242. 50. Ibid. 51. Cristina Lafont argues that “by showing that their comprehensive and public reasons are not in conflict citizens on different sides of a highly contested issue can dispel doubts about their allegiance to the democratic ideal of public reason.” Lafont, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 243. 52. Ibid., 244. 53. Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, 44. 54. Ibid., 45. 55. Ibid. 56. Recall that, in their theories about redemptive translations, Koselleck and Löwith substituted prophecies for theories about revolutions. 57. Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin,” in Men in Dark Times, 153–206; 166. 58. Arendt explains that for Benjamin “there is no more effective way to break the spell of tradition than to cut out the ‘rich and strange,’ coral and pearls, from what had been handed down in one solid piece.” Arendt, “Walter Benjamin,” 196. 59. For the most relevant criticisms of Rawls’s idea of neutrality, see Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion in Decisions and Discussion of Political Issues,” 105. See also Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, 157. 60. Richard Kearny expresses a similar view in his book, Anatheism. 61. Lafont, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 247. 62. Chambers, “How Religion Speaks to the Agnostic,” 220. 63. Habermas claims that “this ‘right’ to decide over war and peace is, strictly speaking, not a right at all, but merely reaffirms the state of nature that exists between the warring nations in any case.” Habermas, “‘The Political,’” 18. 64. Habermas argues that “the modern state is tailored, on the one hand, to the economic imperatives of a system of economic exchange regulated by markets, and hence operating independently from political structures, and, on the other, to the participation of the bloody religious wars.” Ibid., 20. 65. Habermas states that “Schmitt is mistaken in attributing the dissolution of the amalgamation of religion and politics that we associate with the political in its traditional form only to the time, when the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century ratified the secularization of state authority.” Ibid., 21.

8. The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  213  66. See Chiara Bottici’s examination of the origin of this term in Imaginal Politics, especially chapter 8. 67. Ibid. 68. Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, 21. 69. See Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. 70. Habermas and Ratzinger. The Dialectics of Secularization, 36. 71. Ibid., 37. 72. Ibid., 42. 73. See chapter 7 in Bottici, Imaginal Politics. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid.

8. The Disclosure of Politics Revisited 1. Koselleck argues, “Only since the Enlightenment does the challenge of emancipation emerge, demanding the fundamental eradication of domination by humans over humans” (my emphasis). In Reinhart Koselleck, “The Limits of Emancipation,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 248–264; 249. 2. Koselleck, Futures Past, 246. 3. Ibid., 259. 4. Rosanvallon, Democracy, 209. 5. Koselleck, Futures Past, 261. 6. Enrique Dussel is one of the leading figures in the philosophy of liberation. See Dussel, La política de la liberación: Historia mundial y crítica and La política de la liberación, arquitectónica. 7. Arendt, “Foundation II,” 205. 8. Martin Jay, “Mourning a Metaphor,” in Essays from the Edge, 30–39; 39. 9. Ronsavallon, Democracy, 212. 10. Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” 70. 11. Habermas argues that “the expression ‘post-secular’ does more than give public recognition to religious fellowships, in view of the functional contribution they make to the reproduction of motivations and attitudes that are societally desirable. The public awareness of a post-secular society also reflects a normative insight that has consequences for the political dealings of unbelieving citizens with believing citizens.” In Habermas and Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, 46. 12. Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” 72. 13. Palti, “Del dominium regium al gobierno civil,” 7. I cite directly from the manuscript. 14. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36 15. Rosanvallon, Democracy, 190. 16. Arendt clarifies that “the passage in which [theology] is used occurs again in a strictly political discussion, namely in The Republic, when the dialogue deals with the

214  8. The Disclosure of Politics Revisited founding of the cities. This new theological god is neither a living God nor the god of philosophers nor a pagan divinity; he is a political device, ‘the measurement of measurements,’ that is, the standard according to which cities may be founded and rules of behavior laid down for the multitude. Theology, moreover, teaches how to enforce these standards absolutely, even in cases when human justice seems at a loss, that is, in the cases of crimes which escapes punishment as well as in the case of those for which even the death sentence would not be adequate.” And she concludes, “to be sure, Plato had no inkling of theology as we understand it, as the interpretation of God’s words whose sacrosanct text is the Bible; theology for him was part and parcel of “political science,” specifically that part which taught the few how to rule the many” (my emphasis). Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 131. 17. Ibid., 121. 18. The Spanish philosopher José Luis Villacañas argues that “the transformation of the Kingdom into the Institutional Church—and the eschatology that followed— is the crucial step in which the gnostics are underestimated because these theorists [Koselleck and Löwith] concentrate on questions about the time.” See Villacañas, “The Story of the End of Political Theology,” 148. 19. Kateb, “Locke and the Political Origins of Secularism,” 1003. 20. This journal was edited by Erick Rothacker, Karlfried Gründer, and Hans Georg Gadamer. 21. See Villacañas, “The Story of the Destruction of Political Theology,” 175. 22. Blumenberg reaches into the deepest layers of a myth’s history and metaphorical meanings to describe how it helps human beings find significance. 23. See also Jauss, Studien zum Epochwandel der äesthetischen Moderne. 24. Kearney, Anatheism, 10. 25. Ibid., 13. 26. See the very interesting interpretation of the role of Moses in Freud, Moses and Monotheism. See also Yerushalami, Freud’s Moses. The most interesting interpretation of Moses comes from Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses. In connection with Bernstein’s book, see also two other major studies on Freud: Derrida, Archive Fever and Assmann, The Price of Monotheism. 27. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 15. 28. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 74. 29. Ibid.,75. 30. Cooke, “The Limits of Learning.” I am quoting from a manuscript. 31. As George Kateb has argued, “morality would matter even if religion did not exist: in a good society, morality would not need religion’s support. The irony is that religion can incite to immorality unless it is corrected. The correction must be seen to employ familiar religious ideas and sentiments; but their use is for the purpose of neutralizing the bad moral tendencies of organized religion or religious movements and thus realizing essentially moral but non-religious purposes.” Kateb, “Locke and the Political Origins of Secularism,” 1007. 32. For a further exploration of the theme of moral imagination and the creation of rights, see Moyn, The Last Utopia.

8. The Disclosure of Politics Revisited  215  33. Invernizzi Accetti, “Can Democracy Emancipate Itself from Political Theology?” 266. 34. This is the concept coined by Maeve Cooke in her book Re-Presenting the Good Society, 196–197. 35. Rosanvallon, Democracy, 192. 36. Ibid., 195. 37. See Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? 38. Alexander, “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo,” 13. 39. Ibid. 40. Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy. 41. See Bottici, Imaginal Politics. 42. Fraser argues, “Virtually from the beginning, counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating, alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech.” In: Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 75. 43. Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 13. 44. Bell, The End of Ideology; Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. 45. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 62. 46. Ibid., 21. 47. This work has already begun with Chiara Bottici’s newest book Imaginal Politics. 48. See Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth. 49. Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 189–208. 50. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 96. 51. Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 190. 52. See Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism. 53. Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 197.

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Index

Absolutist regimes: democracy and, 36; during Enlightenment, defeat of, 127 Accetti, Carlo Invernizzi, 145, 176 Action: Arendt on, 111–16; change as effect, 67; immanence of, 111–16; politics and, 100; power and, 26–27 Adelsnation, see Aristocracy; Nation of nobility Aeneid (Virgil), 106–7 Aesthetic pleasure, 97–98 Agamben, Giorgio, 193n13 The Age of Extremes (Hobsbawm), 42 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 57, 178 American Revolution, 55 Anamnetic solidarity, 154 Ancient Greece, equality in, 119–21 Anderson, Benedict, 45 Angelus Novus (Klee), 154 Angst, in mythical narratives, 93 anti-Semitism, 136; see also Dreyfus, Alfred

Arendt, Hannah, 99, 111, 136, 170, 176; on action, 111–16; on authority, as concept, 100–106; conceptual history as concept for, 10–11, 34; on conflict, 116–24; criticism of modern eschatology, 69; on development of religion, 187n7; on forgiveness, 206n40; on freedom, 111–16; French Revolution and, rejection of, 122, 196n56; on immanence of politics, 118–19; on justice, 116–24; metaphor for, 154; on miracles, 115; on modernity, 73; multitudes for, 11; on obedience, 102; on power, 111–16; relationship between politics and religion for, 24–26; on resistibility, 206n38; on revolution, as concept, 47–48, 52; on Roman Republic, legacy of, 106–11; secularization as concept for, 4; on semantic transformations, 31; on sovereignty, 148; on truth, 101; worldliness

226  Index Arendt (continued) for, 11, 73, 115–16; see also Politics, autonomy of Aristocracy, 57; political development of, 44–45 Aristotle, 25; on authority, 104; on justice, 117 Assad, Talal, 110–11 Assmann, Jan, 80 Authority, as concept, 100–106; Aristotle on, 104; characteristics of, 109; within Christian tradition, 100; Cooke on, 204n10; domination and, 103; Greek legacy of, 104–5; in households, 104; in modern politics, 105; obedience and, 100; Plato on, 100; in The Republic, 102; resistibility and, 206n38; violence and, 103, 106 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 209n7 Bayle, Pierre, 130–31 Begriffsgesichte, see Conceptual history Bell, Daniel, 181 Benjamin, Walter, 23, 77, 162; anamnetic solidarity for, 154; on progress, 153 Between Facts and Norms (Habermas), 143, 146 Bloch, Ernst, 77 Blumenberg, Hans: Christianity’s relationship with modernity for, 72; conceptual history for, 59–60, 72, 171; criticism of Löwith, 71–72; on individual and collective attitudes, 72; on legitimacy of modern age, 73; modernity for, 9–10, 76; myth theory, 164–65, 184; on polytheism, 204n20; on principle of significance, 202n24; on progress, 72; secularization as concept for, 4, 60; self-assertion for, 77–78; worldliness for, 74; see also The Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Myth; Mythical narratives; Reoccupation model; The Work on Myth Bottici, Chiara, 79, 81, 87, 162, 165

Brown, Wendy, 182 Bruno, Giordano, 71 Burckhardt, Jacob, 69 Butler, Judith, 169 Carrying capacity: of concepts, 33; of democracy, 35 Cassirer, Ernst, 79–80 Chambers, Simone, 158–59 Change, as effect, 67 Christianity: authority within, 100; contradictions within, 75; domination and, 104–5; eschatology in, 69; hell as concept within, 110; innovation model of justice and, 155–56; modernity and, 72; as political, 188n19; revolution under, origins of, 48; Roman Republic influenced by, 109; semantic notions of religion for, 2; starting point for, 17; time as concept in, 62–63 The Church: politicization of, 2–3; predestination within, 64–65; separation of state from, 1, 5; temporalization for, 60–61; see also Religion Citizenship: cognitive burdens of, 157; democratic, 5; double meaning of, 46; for Koselleck, 12; Lafont on, 156; reciprocity as principle for, 151–53, 158; self-empowerment and, 149, 161; surveillance as part of, 179 Civil rights’ movements, 43, 54–55 Civil society, 149 Civil wars, revolutions compared to, 50–51 Clash of civilizations, 164 Clemenceau, Georges, 135 Collective memory, 153–54 Communism, 57, 167; ideology and, 23 Concepts: carrying capacity of, 33; counterconcept and, 33; features of, 33–34; genealogical reconstruction of, 31; historical development of, 33; innovation in, 29; negative valences

Index  227  in, 33; origin of, 99; through semantic webs, 30; see also Democracy; Emancipation; Revolutions; States Conceptual history (Begriffsgesichte): for Arendt, 10–11, 34; for Blumenberg, 59–60, 72, 171; definition of, 198n3; historical narratives and, 87; horizon of expectations in, 32; immanent processes of, 76; innovation of, 7–14, 183–86; for Koselleck, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 32, 34–35; for Löwith, 22, 59–60; methodology of, 166–68; political models of, 7–8; political narratives and, 87; semantic definitions for, 34–35; space of experience in, 32; transformation of, 7–14; translation of, 7–14 Constitutional patriotism, 163 Cooke, Maeve, 145–47, 154–55, 173–74, 185; on authority, 204n10; definition of ideology, 202n25; on good society concept, 210n17, 210n20; praxis for, 198n9 Cortés, José María Donoso, 18, 170 Cosmopolitanism, 181 Counterconcepts, 33; political concepts and, 192n10 Counterdemocracy, 179–80 Counterpublics, 178 Criticism: cognitive contents of, 138; disclosive potentials of, 137; expanding influence of, 130–31; hypocrisy from, 131–32; of immanence, 56–58; monarchies influenced by, 131; political power after, decline of, 132; sovereignty under, 131–32; as weapon against state, 130–38; of Western philosophical tradition, 10–11 Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Koselleck), 12, 126 Cuban revolution, 41 de Bonald, Louis, 170

Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, 119–20, 197n74; during American Revolution, 55; during French Revolution, 41, 55; political definition of, 52 Declaration of Rights of Woman and Citizen, 197n75 de Cusa, Nicholas, 71 De Gouges, Olimpia, 197n75 de La Boétie, Étienne de, 138 Democracy: absolutist regimes and, 36; ambiguity within, 40; carrying capacity of, 35; as concept, 31, 35–43; counterdemocracy and, 179–80; emancipation and, 39–40; equality and, 37; as government definition, 36; Habermas on, 40; immanence and, 27; innovation model of justice and, 146; misframing and, 38; misrepresentation and, 38; monarchies and, 36–37; normative disclosure as tension within, 39–40; Palti on, 35–36; postdemocracy, 178, 180; Rawls on, 40; representation as part of, 37; Rosanvallon on, 37; rule of law under, 37, 41 Democracy of the Foreigner (Honig), 174 Democratic citizenship, 5 Democratic-disenchantment, 179 Demos, 45; see also nations Derrida, Jacques, 163 Detienne, Marcel, 120 Disclosure: criticism and, potentials of, 137; within democracy, 39–40; emancipation and, 68, 139–40; freedom and, 111–12; in innovation model of justice, 145; meaning of, 14–17, 184; power and, 114–15 Divine justice, 23 Dogma, myth and, 81–82, 85 Domination (Herrschaft), 53; authority and, 103; Christianity and, 104–5 Dreyfus, Alfred, 135–37 Dussel, Enrique, 167

228  Index Edict of Toleration, 194n19 Emancipation: change from, 138–40; as concept, 47–56; counterconcept for, 53; democracy and, 39–40; development of, 53–54; disclosive properties of, 68, 139–40; etymology of, 53–54, 138–39; Kant on, 54; Koselleck on, 138–40; limits of, 140; for Marx, 68–69; as process-concept, 54; semantics of, 41–42; social, 51; text performativity and, 29–30; as transformation, 139 Enemy of the state (Staatsfeind), 51 Enlightenment: absolutist states during, 127; criticism, 31; equality during, development of, 194n19; political justice during, 175; public sphere during, 127–30; revolution as concept during, 53; violence and, development of concept during, 12 Equality: in Ancient Greece, 119–21; democracy and, 37; liberty and, 211n34; premodern notion of, 120; social inclusion and, 123 Eschatology: Arendt criticism of, 69; Christian, 69; in reoccupation model, 71; translations for, 19–20 Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin, 135 Ethnic identity, 45 Expectation, 64; in politics, 126 Ferrara, Alessandro, 5 Flynn, Bernard, 69 Forgiveness, 206n40 Forster, Georg, 140 Fraser, Nancy, 38, 178 Freedom, 49; Arendt on, 111–16; as disclosive, 111–12; emergence of, 119; immanence of, 111–16; irresistibility of, 112; power and, 113; space of, 113; Tahrir Square as symbol, 55 French Revolution: Arendt rejection of, 122, 196n56; declaration of rights

during, 41, 55; Koselleck on, 52; violence during, 12 Freud, Sigmund, 89–91; Oedipus complex, 94; on significance, 94 Fröbel, Julius, 39, 148, 211n34 Fukuyama, Francis, 181 The Future, as concept, 60–62; agency and, 65; expectation and, 64; prediction and, 62; prophecy and, 62 Future history, 65 Gadamer, Hans-Georg: criticism of Blumenberg, 70; hermeneutics of, 9, 29–30 Gandhi, Mohandas, 43 Gnosticism, 75–76 God: monotheistic conception of, 25; origins of modernity and, as influence on, 77; time and, 61 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 88–90; on Prometheus myth, 89–90 Good society, 145, 210n17, 210n20 Habermas, Jürgen, 142–43, 146; constitutional patriotism for, 163; on democracy, 40; on economic market systems, 212n64; on good society, 145, 210n17, 210n20; modernity for, reconstruction of, 11; political theology for, 159–63; principle of reciprocity, 151–53, 158; on public sphere, 137; rational will for, 148; secularization as concept for, 4, 59; on social inclusion, 157; on sovereignty, 148–49; on state, as modern concept, 44; see also Innovation model, of justice Habermas and the Public Sphere (Habermas), 143 Hebrew prophets, expectation for, 64 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 19–20; on religion, 67; sociability theory for, 20 Hell, as concept, 110 Henry, Joseph, 135

Index  229  Henry V (Shakespeare), 109, 205n27 Hermeneutics, 9, 29–30 Herrschaft, see Domination Historical narratives: moral dimension of, 87; political narratives compared to, 87–88 History: meaning of, 64; see also Conceptual history Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 85; autonomy of politics and, 129; on modern state, 134 Hobsbawm, Eric, 42 Hoezl, Michael, 189n25 Honig, Bonnie, 109, 173–74 Humanity, 208n6 Hunt, Lynn, 196n47 Huntington, Samuel, 164 Hypocrisy, criticism decline into, 131–32 Idealism as Modernism (Pippin), 20 Identity: ethnic, 45; see also Political identity Ideology: communism and, 23; as concept, for Marx, 21, 96; modern definition of, 202n25; from modernity, 183; narratives for, 88 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 45 Immanence: of action, 111–16; conceptual history and, 76; critique of, 56–58; democracy and, 27; of freedom, 111–16; justice and, 117; modernity and, 24; political ideas from, 18; of politics, 26–27, 118–19; of power, 111–16; power and, 28; social transformation and, 14; sovereignty and, 26–27; transcendence compared to, 22–28 Inequality, power and, 116–17 Injustice, 121 Innovation model, of justice: as deliberative, 144; democracy and, 146, 150; disclosive properties of, 145; good society in, 145, 210n17, 210n20; Judeo-Christian translations of, 155–

56; public sphere in, 141–43, 150–59; reciprocity in, 151–53, 158; separation of cultures within, 150; social movements and, 143–44; solidarity in, 164; validity of, 146 Irresistibility, 49; of freedom, 112 Jasmine Revolution, 55 Jay, Martin, 71, 77, 168, 199n2 Jewish tradition, will in, 204n7 Jung, Courtney, 192n10 Justice, political, 13, 174–77; Arendt on, 116–24; Aristotle on, 117; as divine, 23; during Enlightenment, 175; immanence and, 117; for Kant, 14; power and, 122–23; social inclusion as definition of, 147; social movements and, 123–24; violence and, 121–22; see also Innovation model, of justice Kalyvas, Andreas, 99, 111 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 56; on cosmopolitanism, 181; on emancipation, 54; justice theory for, 14; publicity for, 14–15, 127, 142; on taxation, 189n35 Das Kapital (Marx), 23, 95 Kateb, George, 171, 214n31 Kearny, Richard, 173 King, Martin Luther, 43, 55 Klee, Paul, 154 Kolakowski, Leszek, 23 Koselleck, Reinhart, 126; civil society for, 149; criticism of intellectuals, 134–35; on emancipation, 138–40; on French Revolution, 52; horizon of expectations for, 32; method of conceptual history for, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 32, 34–35, 166–68; on political activity for citizens, 12; political narrative for, 60–61; on revolution, 47, 49–51; on semantic transformations, 31; space of experience for, 32 Laclau, Ernesto, 38, 185

230  Index Lafont, Christina, 151–53, 156–57, 169, 212n51; on citizenship, 156 Language: mythical narratives and, 81; political agency and, 58 Law, theology and, 17–18; see also Innovation model, of justice; Justice, political Lazare, Bernard, 135 Lefort, Claude, 23–24, 28, 176, 183 Legitimacy, political, 13; formation of, 18; sovereignty and, 37 The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Blumenberg), 9–10, 20–21, 70, 110, 171; criticism of, 70; modernity in, 127–28 Liberalism, 167 Liberation, as political movement, 55, 167–68; see also Civil rights’ movements; Women’s liberation movement Liberty, equality and, 211n34 Logos, see Rationality Löwith, Karl, 63, 69–70; Blumenberg criticism of, 71–72; conceptual history for, 22, 59–60; criticism of Blumenberg, 70; model of translations for, 67, 171; modernity for, 18–19; on progress, 69, 199n2; secularization for, 71, 125; time for, 17, 62–63 Mann, Thomas, 88, 90–91 Marcion, 75 Markell, Patchen, 101, 123 Marx, Karl, 23, 77; as critic of religion, 66–67; on emancipation, 68–69; ideology as concept for, 21, 96; on mythical narrative, 95–96; prehistory for, 65; Prometheus myth, 96; repetition for, 21; revolution for, 21; surplus value theory, 95–96; translations for, 21, 65–66 Meaning in History (Löwith), 63, 69–70 Memory: collective, 153–54; as political action, 107

Metaphor, 154 Metz, Johann, 23, 162 Miracles, 115 Misframing, 38 Misrepresentation, 38 Modernity: Arendt criticism of, 73; for Blumenberg, defense of, 9–10, 76; God as influence on, 77; for Habermas, 11; ideology as result of, 183; immanence and, 24; in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 127–28; for Löwith, 18–19; mythical narratives and, 83; as tragedy, 24 Monarchies, 57; criticism as influence on, 131; democracy and, 36–37 Monotheism, 80; archaic religions and, 201n14 Morality: in historical narratives, 87; obligatory aspect of, 129; politics and, 121; truth and, 211n31 Movements, see Social movements Moyn, Samuel, 10, 101, 105, 118 Multitude, 11 Myth: for Blumenberg, 164–65, 184; dogma and, 81–82, 95; etymology of, 79; evolution of, 82; function of, 81, 96; personal identification with, 84; politics and, 173; purpose of, 79–80; social expectations in, 90; theory of reception and, 88 Mythical narratives: angst as motor of, 93; classification of, 79; constancy of expression in, 81; Dionysian abyss in, 97; films as modern version of, 165; ideological narratives compared to, 88; language and, 81; Marx on, 95–96; mimesis in, 201n9; modernity and, 83; monotheism and, 80; Nietzsche on, 97–98; normative space in, 83–93; political theory of, 84–87; Prometheus, 82–83, 85–86, 172; rationality and, 79, 97; religious, 80; for Roman Republic, 108–9; Schmitt on, 189n25; significance in,

Index  231  85, 88; social contract and, connections with, 86–87; social imaginary in, 90; Theutus, 85–86 Narratives, see Historical narratives; Mythical narratives; Political narratives Näsström, Sofia, 38 Nations: Adelsnation and, 45; aristocracy within, political development of, 44–45; civic nationalism within, 45; social integration in, 45; state as concept and, 44–45; Volksnation and, 45; see also Citizenship Nation of nobility (Adelsnation), 45 Nation of the people (Volksnation), 45 Neoliberalism, 175 Neutrality, see Religious neutrality Nietzsche, Friedrich: on aesthetic pleasure, 97–98; Dionysian abyss, 97; on mythical narratives, 97–98 Novelty, capacity for, 195n37 Obama, Barack, 175 Obedience, authority and, 100; Arendt on, 102; Plato on, 102 Oedipus complex, 94 On Populist Reason (Laclau), 38 On Revolution (Arendt), 99, 111, 113 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 136 Palti, Elias, 13, 169; on democracy, 35–36 Patriotism, see Constitutional patriotism The People, 45 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 16, 56 Philosophy of History, 13, 17, 19, 63, 65, 69, 127, 130, 132, 145, 154, 171, 172 A Philosophy of Political Myth (Bottici), 79 Picquart, Georges, 135 Pippin, Robert, 20, 77, 190n53 Plato: on authority, 100; hell, as concept for, 110; on obedience, 102; politi-

cal theology for, 2, 102, 170, 213n16; Roman Republic influenced by, 109; on truth, 101; tyranny of reason for, 102 Pleasure, see Aesthetic pleasure Politics: action and, 100; authority as part of, 105; etymology of, 26; expectation in, 126; historical shift of, 167; immanent character of, 26–27, 118–19; morality and, 121; myth and, 173; power and, 27–28, 100; prophecy and, 173; social movements and, 27; sovereignty and, 126; space of experience in, 126; as space of plurality, 40 Politics, autonomy of: authority, as concept, 100–106; Hobbes and, 129; memory and, 107; origin of concepts in, 99; truth and, 101 Political identity, 34; ethnic and, 45 Political justice, see Justice, political Political legitimacy, see Legitimacy, political Political Liberalism (Rawls), 152 Political narratives: historical compared to, 87–88; imagination compared to, 163–65; for Koselleck, 60–61; time and, 60–69 Political representations, 185 Political secularism, 5 Political theology: development of, 22–23; for Habermas, 159–63; for Plato, 2, 102, 170, 213n16; for Rawls, 162; in The Republic, 213n16; for Schmitt, 8–9, 78, 171, 188n19 Political theory: conceptual innovation in, 1; immanence from, 18; of mythical narratives, 84–87; theology and, 24–25; transcendence as part of, 23 Polytheism: Blumenberg on, 204n20; in Roman Republic, 108, 112 Postdemocracy, 178, 180 Postsecularization, 168–69, 177–83, 213n11; as return to religion, 178, 182

232  Index Power: action and, 26–27; Arendt on, 111–16; as collective, 114; as disclosive, 114–15; freedom and, 113; immanence and, 28, 111–16; inequality and, 116–17; justice and, 122–23; politics and, 27–28, 100; privilege and, 116–17; religious, 27–28 The Practice of Conceptual History (Koselleck), 138 Praxis, 198n9 Predestination, 64–65 Prediction, 62 Prehistory, 65 Privilege, power and, 116–17 Progress, as philosophy, 62; Benjamin on, 153; Blumenberg on, 72; as internal development, 75; Löwith on, 69 Prometheus, mythical narrative of, 82–83, 85–86, 172; for Goethe, 89–90; Marx on, 96; social imaginary in, 86 The Promise of Politics (Arendt), 99, 111 Prophecy, 62; politics and, 173 Publicity: development of, as concept, 16–17, 142; for Kant, 14–15, 127, 142; meaning for, 15; political actions and, 15; sociability and, 15 Publicness, 16 Public sphere: censors in, 210n11; desecularization of, 158; during Enlightenment, 127–30; Habermas on, 137, 142–43; in innovation model of justice, 141–43, 150–59; meaning for, 15; political qualities of, 142; sovereignty versus, 127–30; state versus, 127–30; women’s liberation movement in, 156 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 209n7 Rabotnikof, Nora, 133 Rationality (logos), 79, 97; see also Reason Rational will, 148; in Jewish tradition, 204n7

Rawls, John, 142, 144, 152, 195n35; on democracy, 40; political theology for, 162; on reasonableness of citizens, 151; on religious content, 150 Reason: as opinion, 39; as truth, 38; tyranny of reason, 102 Reciprocity, 151–53, 158 Reformation, 61 Religion: Arendt on development of, 187n7; etymology of, 2; Hegel on, 67; historical use of term, 2; for Marx, 66–67; mythical narratives in, 80; political activity and, 2; postsecularization as return to, 178, 182; renewed interest in, 1–2; separation of state and, 1, 5; temporalization and, 60–61; see also Monotheism; Polytheism Religious neutrality, 5 Religious power, 27–28 Reoccupation model: disanalogy within, 74–75; eschatological Christian themes in, 71; Gnosticism and, 75–76; modernity in, functions of, 70; progress in, 75; secularization as rationalization process in, 74; self-assertion in, 77–78; translations in, 73 Repetition, 21 Re-Presenting the Good Society (Cooke), 202n25 The Republic (Plato), 2; authority concept in, 102; theology in, 213n16 Republicanism, 167 Resistibility, 206n38 Resonance, 192n10 Revolutions: Arendt on, 47–48, 52; Christian origins of, 48; civil war compared to, 50–51; as concept, 32, 47–56; in Cuba, 41; during Enlightenment, 53; irresistibility and, 49; Jasmine Revolution, 55; Koselleck on, 47, 49–51; for Marx, 21; as metahistorical concept, 50; during Middle Ages, 50; multiplicity of

Index  233  definitions for, 47; peaceful, 54–55; as political phenomenon, 119; social emancipation and, 51; Soviet, 41; Velvet Revolution, 55; violence as, 42, 55; for women’s liberation, 43; see also French Revolution; Social movements Ricoeur, Paul, 88 Riefenstahl, Leni, 88 Roman Republic: Christian legacy as influence on, 109; legacy of, 106–11; mythical narratives in, 108–9; Platonic legacy as influence on, 109; polytheism in, 108, 112 Romanticism movement, 89 Rosa, Hartmut, 41 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 37, 177, 179, 194n20 Rothacker, Eric, 202n24 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 85–86 Rule of law, 37, 41 Salvation, 66 AlSayyad, Nezaar, 55 Scheuerman, William, 188n21 Schmitt, Carl, 12, 69; civil society for, 149; decisionistic theory for, 115; humanity as concept for, 208n6; on mythical narratives, 189n25; political identity for, 34; political theology for, 8–9, 78, 171, 188n19; on sacred history, 161; secularization for, as concept, 4, 125, 160, 198n7; on sovereignty, 128–29, 160; transcendence for, 22 Scholem, Gershom, 77 Scientific method, 72 Secular: etymology of, 3; salvation and, 66; see also Worldliness A Secular Age (Taylor), 4 Secular disposition, 171 Secularism, 5 Secularization: for Arendt, 4; for Blumenberg, 4, 60; as concept, 2, 4–6; for Habermas, 4, 59; for Löwith,

71, 125; model of, 125–27; polemical debates over, 59–60; postsecularization, 168–69, 177–83; as rationalization process, 74; for Schmitt, 4, 125, 160, 198n7; for Taylor, 1; translation of, 63; worldliness and, 118; see also Postsecularization Self-assertion, for Blumenberg, 77–78 Shakespeare, William, 109, 205n27 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 113 Significance, 202n24; for Freud, 94; in mythical narratives, 85, 88 Skinner, Quentin, 29–30, 191n3 Smith, Adam, 117 Sociability: equality and, 123; for Hegel, 20; publicity and, 15 Social contract, mythical narratives and, 86–87 Social imaginary, 86; in mythical narratives, 90 Social inclusion: equality and, 123; Habermas on, 157; as justice, 147; see also Justice, political Social integration, in nation-states, 45 Socialism, 57, 167 Social movements: civil rights as, 43, 54; defensive strategies for, 144; innovation model of justice and, 143–44; justice and, 123–24; offensive strategies for, 144; politics and, 27; women’s liberation as, 43; see also Revolutions Social secularism, 5 Social transformation, immanence and, 14 Socrates, 121 Solidarity: anamnetic, 154; in innovation model of justice, 164 Sovereignty: absolutist, 36; Arendt on, 148; Habermas on, 148–49; immanence and, 26–27; within model of secularization, 126–27; political legitimacy and, 37; politics and, 126; public sphere versus, 127–30;

234  Index Sovereignty (continued) representation and, 37; Schmitt on, 128–29, 160 Soviet revolution, 41 Space of experience, in politics, 126 Spinoza, Baruch, 189n29 Staatsfeind, see Enemy of the state States: anti-Semitism in, 136; checks and balances within, 14; civic nationalism within, 45; as concept, 31–32, 43–47; construction of internal enemies, 192n10; criticism as weapon against, 130–38; governmental functions in, 43; Habermas on, 44; Hobbes on, 134; nation as concept and, 44–45; public sphere versus, 127–30; separation of church and, 1, 5; social integration in, 45; surveillance as part of, 179; transformation of, during eighteenth century, 46; as welfare state, 46–47; see also Citizenship; Sovereignty The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 142–43 Sturm und Drang movement, 89 Surveillance, 179 Tahrir Square, as symbol of freedom, 55 Taxation, 189n35 Taylor, Charles, 4, 90; the buffered-self, 72, 190n51, 199n6; secularization for, 1 Temporalization (Verzeitlichung), 6; religion and, 60–61 Theology: law and, 17–18; political theory and, 24–25; see also Political theology Theutus, as mythical narrative, 85–86 Time: for Christianity, starting point of, 17; within Christianity, 62–63; the future, as concept, 60–62; as God’s will, 61; for Löwith, 17, 62–63; as philosophical concept, 6; political narratives and, 60–69; predictions

and, 62; progress as philosophy, 62; during Reformation, as concept, 61 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 174 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 91 Transcendence: immanence compared to, 22–28; in politics, 23; for Schmitt, 22 Transformation, see Social transformation Translations: for eschatology, 19–20; for Löwith, 67, 171; for Marx, 21, 65–66; meaning of, 17–22; in reoccupation model, 73; of secularization, 63 The Triumph of the Will, 88 Truth: as moral consensus, 211n31; Plato on, 101; political validity and, 101; reason as, 38 Tyranny of reason, 102 Unequal worldliness, 73 Velvet Revolution, 55 Verweltlichung, see Worldliness Verzeitlichung, see Temporalization Villacañas, José Luis, 214n18 Violence: authority and, 103, 106; during Enlightenment, conceptual transformation of, 12; as form of revolution, 42, 55; justice and, 121–22 Virgil, 106–7 Virtù, as concept, 192n4 Volksnation, see Nation of the people Walzer, Michael, 174 Ward, Graham, 189n25 Welfare state, 46–47; neoliberalism as influence on, 175 Western philosophical tradition, 10–11 William of Ockham, 75 Women’s liberation movement, 43; in public sphere, 156 The Work on Myth (Blumenberg), 10, 83, 172 World history, 56

Index  235  Worldliness (Verweltlichung): for Arendt, 11, 73, 115–16; for Blumenberg, 74; multitudes and, 11; secularization and, 118; unequal, 73

Yack, Bernard, 45 Zola, Émile, 135–37 Zweig, Arnold, 91