The Disclosure of Politics

Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization

Maria Lara

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231535045
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Teoria critica

Postmodern political critiques speak of the death of ideology, the end of history, and the postsecular return of religious attitudes, yet radical conservative theorists such as Mark Lilla argue religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Returning much-needed uncertainty to debates over the political while revitalizing the very terms in which they are defined, María Pía Lara explores the ambiguity of secularization and the theoretical potential of a structural break between politics and religion.

For Lara, secularization means three things: the translation of religious semantics into politics; a transformation of religious notions into political ideas; and the reoccupation of a space left void by changing political actors that gives rise to new conceptions of political interaction. Conceptual innovation redefines politics as a horizontal relationship between governments and the governed and better enables societies (and individual political actors) to articulate meaning through action—that is, through the emergence of new concepts. These actions, Lara proves, radically transform our understanding of politics and the role of political agents and are further enhanced by challenging the structural dependence of politics on religious phenomena.

1

The Semantics of Conceptual Change

The Emergence of the Concept of Emancipation

My 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 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 so-called 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 reli...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Semantics of Conceptual Change: The Emergence of the Concept of Emancipation
• 2. The Model of Translation: From Religion to Politics
• 3. Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model: Conceptual Transformation
• 4. Blumenberg’s Second Model: The Persistence of Mythical Narratives
• 5. Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics: Semantic Innovation Through Religious Disclosure
• 6. Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization: The Enlightenment as Problematic
• 7. Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model: Bringing Justice Into the Domain of Politics
• 8. The Disclosure of Politics Revisited
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index