Armando Salvatore

The Public Sphere

‘This is an ambitious, original and sophisticated work that breaks new ground in several fields. Salvatore’s comparative analysis of traditions and civilizations places the whole debate on the public sphere and civil society in a broader context. The discussion of parallels and connections between European and Islamic traditions is particularly insightful. The multitraditional focus is underpinned by a distinctive hermeneutical approach that rescues the notion of genealogy from its postmodern practitioners and puts it to better uses. Philosophical and sociological interpretations of the Axial Age are drawn into dialogue with main currents in contemporary social theory. Last but not least, Salvatore proposes a new reading of Giambattista Vico, an enigmatic but crucially important figure in the history of European thought, and makes the most convincing case so far presented for his relevance to current debates.’ Johann P. Arnason, La Trobe University, Melbourne/Charles University, Prague

The public sphere and Muslim identities

The historical and contemporary development of certain informal and formal articulations of Muslim social and political identities and forms of association in Muslim-majority and Arab societies has facilitated the emergence of a public sphere and limited the coercive power of state authority. This article suggests how a greater focus on religious ideas and forms of association can enhance the concept of the public sphere so that it better accounts for developments in these societies and in European societies themselves.

Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal Connectedness

Abstract This study explores the question of if and how associative bonds based on violence, control and self-restraint mediated by contractual relationships become institutionalised within societies and discusses the cultural factors that determine this threshold. It investigates the trade-off between formalised forms of interaction that safeguard individual rights and secure state control, and less formal modes of civility that deepen trans-state interconnectedness. It asks whether civility is the result of a global civilising process in the sense highlighted by Norbert Elias, whereby affect control is matched by formal norms guaranteed by legitimate institutions, or whether it is rather the much more complex constellation of specific actualisations of the more general trade-off as just defined. After summarising the current twists of the meaning of civility against the background of liberal and modernist precedents and delineating the alternative patterns of civility within Islamic, especially modern Ottoman, history, the analysis critically interrogates Webers notion of Verbrüderung as the pre-modern root concept of organised forms of common action, mutual solidarity and civic participation. Finally, it questions whether this idea fits the historic forms of association in the Islamic world, in particular the privileging of a lower threshold of institutionalisation of the associational bond than has traditionally been found in the European experience—and which survives in the current anxieties about resurgent mahalle (neighbourhood) informal governance in the AKPs Turkey.

Socio-Religious Movements and the Transformation of “Common Sense” into a Politics of “Common Good”

This chapter explores the philosophical and epistemological foundations of the variety of notions of the “public” utilized—explicitly and implicitly—by socio-religious movements to define and justify their ideologies and actions to achieve social power. Our hypothesis is that contemporary Muslim socio-religious movements attempt to formulate and implement discourses of common good that aspire to legitimate specific forms of political community, based on distinctive methods of public reasoning. These discourses are often in tension with modern liberal conceptions of the public sphere; specifically, they remain unbounded by the strictures of liberal norms of publicness premised on atomistic views of the social agent and contractually based notions of trust, by a strict interpretation of the dichotomy between private and public spheres, and by the ultimate basing of public reason on private interest. What socio-religious discourses and movements primarily base their public reason on is a practical reason sanctified by religious tradition, however variably interpreted. Such a perspective provides these discourses with a level of fluidity and adaptability that accounts in large measure for their success in mobilizing large numbers of people to their cause.

Introduction Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies

The collection of essays in this volume examines how modern public spheres reflect and mask—often simultaneously— discourses of order, contests for hegemony, and techniques of power in the Muslim world. Although the contributors examine various time periods and locations, each views modern and contemporary public spheres as crucial to the functioning, and thus understanding, of political and societal power in Muslim majority countries. Part I of this volume analyzes the various discourses and technologies operating within Muslim public spheres; part II investigates how they impact and interact with the construction of moral and legal arguments within Muslim societies.

Eccentric modernity? An Islamic perspective on the civilizing process and the public sphere

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia. The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process. While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context.

Introduction: Rethinking the Public Sphere Through Transnationalizing Processes: Europe and Beyond

Public sphere reloaded — reevaluating its claims in response to transnationalization The public sphere has emerged as a key concept in recent social scientific debates on the performance of liberal democracy and the democratic self-constitution of society. Building on Habermas’ (1989 [1962]) seminal work on the transformation of the public sphere, this notion has been employed to conceptualize the social and communicative underpinnings of democratic politics in modern societies. Based on the separation between the public and the private, the public sphere provides a historically bound and culturally specific solution for the creation of social bonds beyond the family (Eder 2006). Specifically, the public sphere offers a bridge between the fragmentation of modern social life on the one hand and the concept of a solidarity-oriented and democratically organized society on the other. The key ingredient to this solution is theorized as rational public discourse that provides the communicative link between autonomous individuals as ‘citizens’, unifies them as ‘the people’, and integrates them into a mode of collective self-government (Eder 2003; 2006; Peters 1994; Somers 1995). Questions have been raised, however, about the generalizability of the public sphere model in terms of understanding how different societies construct social bonds and constitute themselves as democratic ‘publics’.

Repositioning ‘Islamdom’ The Culture—Power Syndrome within a Transcivilizational Ecumene

This study articulates the leitmotif of civilizational analysis (the interaction of power and culture) with regard to the relation between religion and the state within the Islamic civilization or ‘Islamdom’. In a first step, it clarifies, by reference to Marshall Hodgson, the extent to which his view of Islamdom as a transcivilizational ecumene can fit into a comparative type of civilizational analysis. The comparative approach to civilizational analysis can be enriched by reevaluating the specific Islamic pattern of mild legitimization of power through culture, and by integrating into the analysis the resulting field of tension vis-à-vis Western power and its supporting normative paradigms. In a second step, in order to better grasp the forms of power governing this field of tension, the article critically reconsiders Rémi Brague’s characterization of Western European civilization as the outcome of an expansive ‘Roman road’ that matched culture with power by investing into the charisma of corporate entities: first, the church, then the state. Against this double background, the study shows that the culture—power syndrome that is proper to Islamdom as a transcivilizational ecumene does not consecrate a separation of ‘religion’ from the body politic, but promotes the building of expansive patterns of connectedness.

Secular Formations and Public Spheres in a Transcultural Perspective

There is a wide consensus on the secular character of Western societies. This is particularly evident in their articulation of the private and public spheres, based on the assumption that secular norms require that religious groups stay away from public arenas. The Habermasian public sphere appears then as a prototypical secular arena. The paper explores how the Habermasian notion can be enriched in a transcultural perspective. It shows that several Muslim actors are key contributors – and not opponents – to the renewal of the secular process, both within European societies and at a transnational level, notwithstanding their original understanding of the public sphere and of its normative fundaments.

Review: Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003, 380pp. incl. index, 58.00/US

The aim of this book is to provide a fresh conceptual opening of the thriving field of civilizational analysis and to propose new tools for anchoring this field both within comparative historical sociology and social theory. On the way to this end, the work also marks important signposts within the sociological theory of modernity. The author believes that the project to theoretically upgrade comparative civilizational analysis is inseparable from the current undertaking at theorizing and analyzing ‘multiple modernities’. The first theoretical issue that is common to civilizational analysis and to the theory of modernity is the thematization of the relation of culture and power. Civilizations primarily differ as to the way this relation is articulated. This key issue also affects the question of social differentiation (p. 5). If applied to civilizations in the plural, both issues need original approaches, compared to the solutions provided by the mainstream, Western-centred ‘sociology of societies’. Through the frame of civilizations, via their different trajectories, we are confronted with not just a variety of societies within modernity, but with a plurality of modernities developing out of diverse and asymmetric civilizational backgrounds (p. 13). Various patterns of collective action forging power through the conceptual frames to action provided by religious and cultural traditions, determine the creativity of civilizations and differentiate them both internally and externally (p. 59). The most synthetic definition of the undertaking is provided at the end of the book: ‘civilizational analysis – at least in its more ambitious and conceptually articulate versions – is very much about taking seriously the idea of diverse ways of being-in-the-world’ (p. 357). Civilizational analysis-cum-theory thus proves better equipped than a ‘sociocentric approach’ for the task of integrating some leitmotif of classic social theory, such as the exploration of the interpretive prisms and practical orientations of social agents, and their intrinsic diversity (p. 60). Pioneers of such a concept of civilization as a corrective to the unilateral notion of society were no less than Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. For them, thinking in terms of civilizations allows one ‘to identify the most comprehensive and self-contained forms of social life’ (p. 70). It facilitates a focus on the cultural configurations or traditions which provide the ‘meta-institutional’ depth to frames of social action. This approach contrasts with a view of society as a systemic convergence of effects, or even as a ‘hyper-system’ of discrete and differentiated, sectorspecific logics of action (p. 78). It becomes clear that civilizational theory cannot be reduced to a variant of cultural theory, but has the potential to spearhead a comparatively oriented social theory. Culture is not analyzed per se but in conjunction with power, as the forging ground of those notions of legitimacy through which power becomes socially pervasive (p. 104). If Durkheim’s meta-theoretical reflections were still too isolated from comparative explorations (p. 86), the Weberian intervention was only a partial remedy to this comparative European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 327–331