Creolizing Rousseau

Jane Anna Gordon, Neil Roberts

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783482825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

In 1967, C.L.R. James, the much-celebrated Afro-Trinidadian Marxist, stated that he knew of no figure in history who had “such tremendous influence on such widely separated spheres of humanity” within a few years of his death as the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While this impact was most pronounced in revolutionary politics inspired by political theories that rejected basing political authority in monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church, it extended to European literature, to philosophies of education, and the articulation of the social sciences. But what particularly struck James about Rousseau was the strong resonance of his work in Caribbean thought and politics. This volume illuminates these resonances by advancing a creolizing method of reading Rousseau that couples figures not typically engaged together, to create conversations among people of seemingly divided worlds in fact entangled by colonizing projects and histories. Doing this enables us to grapple with the meaning of creolization and the full range of Rousseau’s legacies not only in contemporary Western Europe and the United States, but in the Francophone colonies, territories, and larger Global South.

Chapter 1

Comparative Political Theory, Creolization, and Reading Rousseau through Fanon

Jane Anna Gordon

The awareness of mixed origins does not mean that individuals can spontaneously retrace the flows that contributed to shaping their current practices and environment. Indeed, the long-term impact of cultural imports is often proportional to the capacity to forget that they were once acquired or imposed . . . How many Italians today do not see the tomato as an intrinsic part of their cultural heritage? How many Native American leaders would dare to reject the horse as culturally foreign? . . . [W]e could prolong the list interminably in a number of directions: Latin America without Christianity, India without English, Argentina without Germans, Texas without cattle, the Caribbean without blacks or rum, England without tea . . . Culturally, the world we inherit today is the product of global flows that started in the late fifteenth century and continue to affect human populations today. Yet the history of the world is rarely told in these terms. Indeed, the particularity of the dominant narratives of globalization is a massive silencing of the past on a world scale, the systematic erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters that have marked human history throughout the globe.

—Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003: 34)

I offer, in what follows, a discussion and critique of comparative political theory, an outline of what it means to creolize political theory, and present an example of this alternative approach through bringing together the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon.

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THEORY AND DISAVOWAL

The terrain within the U.S. academy for creolizing political theory was significantly prepared by recent developments in the subfield of comparative political theory. Informed fundamentally by hermeneutics and postcolonial thought, comparative political theory has, from the outset, aimed to expand what is designated thought, in the words of Roxanne Euben, to ensure that “‘political theory’ is about human and not merely Western dilemmas . . . [making] room for the possibility that there is humanly significant knowledge outside the confines of the Western canon” (1999: 9–10). For Fred Dallmayr (2004), echoing the challenge of Leo Strauss some decades before, especially in the aftermath of September 11th, political theorists fiddled as Rome burned. In the face of grand and pressing problems requiring bold imagination, we theorists had in sizeable numbers retreated into rehearsing canons—seeking to be enveloped in the worlds of classical texts rather than using them to respond to our own. Dallmayr therefore beckoned to theorists to retrieve a more coherently distinctive role for ourselves at the forefront of developing languages and idioms for an increasingly global civil society. Regularizing such confrontations with difference, he contended, promised to unsettle and re-politicize the creedal quality of core ideas in Western political thought.

What is more, from its very beginning, comparative political theory has been marked by an unusual degree of methodological self-reflexivity rooted in an awareness of the instructive and prohibitive lessons of both theoretical and empirical forays into “comparisons” with “non-Western worlds”. With Dallmayr, for example, he warned first against “imperialist modes of theorizing”, in which one portion of the globe would monopolize the production of shared meanings and practices that should “only arise from lateral interaction, negotiation, and contestation among different, historically grown cultural frameworks” (2004: 29). In addition, he advanced, worldly theory would emerge out of a middle course between the methods of abstract generalists and of narrow specialists, neither through seeking “indiscriminate assimilation” nor radically untranslatable otherness (1999: 3). With Euben, comparative endeavours in fact constituted a “reclamation” of political theory’s foundations. At the time of Herodotus, she observes, a theorist was, in Sheldon Wolin’s words, “a public emissary dispatched by his city to attend the religious festivals of other Greek cities” (1999: 10–11).¹ As evident in the instances of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat and Alexis de Tocqueville, theory transpires out of journeying to alien political worlds that stir a critical sense of the peculiarity of one’s own institutions, challenging their seeming inevitability by nurturing self-understanding that grounds an enlivened sense of possibility.

In addition, Euben stresses that comparative political theory cannot rely upon and should endeavour to challenge any perception of cultures as radically distinct or hermetically sealed. Countering a dangerous tendency also emphasized by Gerald Larson (1988) and Michaelle Browers (2008), that comparing “Western” with “non-Western” philosophical writing fosters the misperception that these traditions developed in parallel, independently of one another, Euben focuses on ambivalent treatments of Western modernity in Muslim thought, illuminating internal fissures in both that belie their presumed opposition. If historical designations of this sort (“West”, “non-West”, “Islam”, etc.) cannot simply be dispensed with—since they are forms of representation embedded in mythologies that anchor our understanding (Zerilli, cited in Euben 1999: 12), and, however imperfectly, remain shorthand for constellations of sources, issues, and methods of argumentation that while constructed through post facto agendas produce family resemblances and recognizable attributes (Godrej 2009)—they still obscure messy and interpenetrating histories. After all, argues Euben, the possibility of engaging in comparative discussions is a function not of radical difference but of the mutual indebtedness of worlds now juxtaposed as discrete. In the case of “the West” and “Islam”, for example, both are fundamentally shaped by Semitic traditions, texts considered classical within Europe were reintroduced to its readers through preserved Arabic translations, and the Golden Age of Islamic thought was defined by efforts to forge syncretic fusions of Greek and Muslim resources.²

The difficulty, however, is that the auspices of “comparative thinking”, for all of their necessary and skillful qualification, especially by Euben, Godrej, and Browers, while garnering professional permission to undertake various intellectual projects, are in some cases misleading and in others, as Andrew March (2009) has suggested, even a misnomer. After all, much of the work going on within this rubric is not comparative at all, but instead sustained and sophisticated studies of rich domains of thought beyond Western Europe and Anglo-America by what once would have been called area specialists (see, for instance, Jenco 2007).

For work that is premised on grappling with converging difference, there are other concerns. For March, for instance, if a driving impetus to comparative endeavours is to redress detrimental exclusions of important voices that have left the canon highly partial, this is not merely a comparative consideration but instead an effort to produce better political theory more generally. It is in that spirit that I have undertaken to read Rousseau through Fanon here and elsewhere (2009, 2011) or that Godrej (2006) reads John Rawls with and against Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The value and implications of Fanon and Gandhi are not limited to the particular contexts of Martinique or Algeria or India but more broadly illuminating to the world of thought.

For Leigh Jenco, the problems are rather different: First, if one is not aiming uncritically to reproduce the ethnocentric categories that comparative political theory seeks to transcend, one must attend as much to the method of inquiry in culturally situated traditions of scholarship as to their substantive ideas. These approaches to how one undertakes one’s scholarship are intended to make distinct traditions accessible to committed and hardworking outsiders.

These modes of difference are overridden, however, in the reification of dialogue. Even if Hwa Yol Jung (1999, 2002, 2007) and Dallmayr do at times suggest the desirability of protracted fusions of horizons in “lateral universals”, the prevailing skeptical and hermeneutic emphasis is on mutually illuminating, potentially transformative, tolerant conversation. This poses troubles often also put to Habermasian discourse models. In sum, such approaches frequently fail to grapple with the non-neutrality of language and the inadequacy of framing speech as inherently discrete from the logic of force and violence. The egalitarianism assumed for dialogic purposes may not be a feature of the cultures brought together and efforts to move beyond the limits of dialogue produces a horrible circle: either one makes decisions concerning rules and protocol in advance with the implication that the dialogue itself becomes the covert enforcer of those norms or the method requires an endless dialogue about dialogue within which conversation of other subject matter can never begin (Jenco 2007: 744).

It is striking that Dallmayr’s (1996) classificatory scheme of modes of cross-cultural encounter includes conquest, conversion, assimilation/acculturation, partial assimilation/cultural borrowing, liberalism/minimal engagement, conflict/class struggle, and dialogical engagement. The first three, for him, are hegemonic and hierarchical models that comparative political theory should eschew as destructive. Partial assimilation, in his account, takes place on an unequal basis and can easily follow a melting pot model, one of ambivalent syncretism or of genuine mutual transformation. While liberal models tend towards isolation, the alternatives of struggle are too contentious and unstable. It is therefore dialogue, for Dallmayr, that exemplifies respect for otherness beyond assimilation and radical untranslatability.

Ideally, argues Browers, comparative political theory would involve each participant viewing himself or herself as subject and object. More frequent, I would suggest, is the difficulty articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois as (unpotentiated) double consciousness, that both the dominant and less powerful counterparts see themselves through the eyes of the former. Still, Browers emphasizes, most instances of conceptual change, for all of their inequality, more closely resemble partial assimilation and cultural borrowing in what amounts to instances of transculturation or a process through which more marginal groups, often on the political defensive, if unable to determine the content of what is relevant to their reflection on political life, select and invent among ideological elements from more metropolitan cultures, determining how they will be used. Conceptual innovation, in such circumstances, emerges precisely from what a more Skinnerian approach would consider mistranslation: Rather than trying, as specialists and scholars would, to assure that we demonstrate due respect for otherness by understanding the ideas’ meaning in their original context of emergence, we simply put them to work in our own life worlds (2008: 16).

Examples of fruitful mistranslation are multiple. In artistic domains we might consider Vincent Van Gogh’s efforts to develop a Dutch style of painting through emulating the bright, sharp line and colour of Japanese prints circulating in his day or the unique sound of British singer Sting’s early efforts to sing Caribbean reggae. In politics, an example is Danny Postel’s recent reflections on the vibrancy of engagements with classical liberalism in the context of contemporary Iran.

But there is an additional fear that must be added to criticisms of the preference for tolerant dialogue over the empirically informed considerations of how political conceptual innovation more likely transpires. The scholarly work that has emerged in response to Dallmayr’s still very recent clarion call and deliberate creation of professional space both at meetings and through publishing venues, has been a tremendous resource for those who remain primarily interested in the history of ideas and its approximation as the canon as well as those concerned with more contentious contemporary debates.³ It has rendered impossible the vast majority of defences of the adequacy of the straight march repeated in course after course and reprinted afresh each year in countless new textbooks from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche. Although works eminently worthy of careful and repeated study, the tenacity of this line-up would have many conclude that nothing less than the historical surge of reason, at least in the political realm, leapt from fifth-century Athens to the Roman Empire to the warring city-states that became Italy to Western Europe. One cannot simply amend by assimilation figures from Confucius and Mencius to Alfarabi and Avveroes to Gandhi and Sayyid Qutb since, at the very least, they reveal the current absence of a viable singular framework for conceptualizing the moments that comprise a world history of political ideas.

Additionally, in terms of more contemporary debates, comparative political theory has aimed explicitly to counter Samuel Huntington’s (1993, 1996) framing of the post–Cold War moment as a “clash of civilizations” seeking out self-illuminating dialogues with precisely those deemed incomprehensible “enemies”.

Still, although avowedly framing and contributing to a global dialogue that would incorporate the Americas, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the full diversity of the expanse called Asia, it is unmistakable that, but for a few very important exceptions, comparative political theory of the last decade has revolved almost exclusively around discussion between Euro-America and the East Asian, East Indian, and Muslim worlds. This is particularly worrying when several recent titles suggest that comparative political theory has in many cases been reformulated as “inter-civilizational dialogue” (Dallmayr and Manoochehri 2007; Gebhardt 2008; Bowden 2008).

One might attribute this pattern of inclusion and exclusion to a contingent matter of the biographies, skills, and professional commitments of the subfield’s pioneers and to its still early stages. It is after all both unrealistic and unfair to expect what remains a small community of scholars to do everything. And every emergent research area will be an expression of the projects of those that inaugurate them. One could emphasize as well that the sustained engagement required to redress the genuine dearth of scholarly work focused on Arab and Chinese and Indian thought.

At the same time, these patterns seem too consistent and unremarked upon to express only these idiosyncrasies. They mirror after all something all too familiar: the ethnographic paradigms of the age of exploration and colonialism through which the West typically viewed its non-Western counterparts. East and West Asia have been the object of derisive European and U.S. “orientalizing” that amounts to egregious forms of misrecognition. At the same time, there has seldom been doubt—one could go so far as to say that orientalizing was a perverse expression of precisely the acknowledgement—that ideas, complex civilizations, and genuine political challenges can and would continue to emerge from these regions. As Frederick G. Whelan (2009) recently illustrates, although it became commonplace in European thought, if at times disputed, to disparage eastern civilizations as despotic and fundamentally lacking in individual dynamism, these regions were those of “sultans” as opposed to those, in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment parlance, of “savages”.

Perhaps one could suggest that the occlusions I have mentioned are not that but instead a function of a particular academic division of labour in which some regions are the purview of postcolonial thought (even though it too increasingly mirrors similar patterns of monopoly and exclusion with East, South and West Asian writers eclipsing their African and Latin American counterparts in attention and citation), and of African American, Latin American and Ethnic Studies, and others of comparative political theorizing. The difficulty here is, as already noted, all of the civilizations brought into dialogue have some historical experience with conquest and colonization, and writers studying all of them draw, in varying degrees, on some relevant post-colonial insights.

One could contend as well that although always porous, some civilizational groups remain more distinctive, more intact—easier—to bring in as the discrete units that many comparativists aim to problematize. In other words, for all of the emphasis to the contrary, when it comes to who studies which regions, comparative political theory still needs geo-politico-spatial designators of the “near” and the “far”, the “here” and the “there”, with thought from the African and Latin diasporas seemingly appearing either too near or too far, neither quite here nor there, both insufficiently the same and inadequately different.

There are comparative political theorists w...

Table of contents

• Introduction: The Project of Creolizing Rousseau
• 1 Comparative Political Theory, Creolization, and Reading Rousseau through Fanon
• 2 Between Mestiçagem and Cosmopolitanism: Towards a New Social Arithmetic
• 3 Beyond Négritude and Créolité: On Creolizing the Citizenship Contract
• 4 Anténor Firmin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Racial Inequality
• 5 Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality and the Human Sciences
• 6 C. L. R. James, Political Philosophy, and the Creolizing of Rousseau and Marx
• 7 Rousseau, the Master’s Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism
• 8 Rousseau, Flight, and the Fall into Slavery
• 9 Pacha Mama, Rousseau, and the Femini: How Nature Can Revive Politics
• 10 Virtuous Bacchanalia: Creolizing Rousseau’s Festival
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors