Issue 181, April 2024
Secularizing Trends
Articles
Ecumenical critical theory, pluralism and developmental trends
Critical social theory is a late product of the Enlightenment, though pushed beyond its original intentions. It then developed mainly with Marxism, but since the beginning other strands have been important, such as anarchism, feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism and environmentalism. The immanent critique of modernity must be seen indeed as ecumenical. In its plurality, it must have however at its core the realisation of equal freedom and full solidarity that remains an unfulfilled promise and offers a criterion of demarcation for critical theory. The diagnosis of the times for critical approaches also depended on identifying long-term developments, especially within Marxism, but this seems to have been almost entirely forgotten. I will argue that it is both possible and necessary to resume this strategy. Finally, I ask how we connect these conceptual issues to praxis. The article concludes with a more substantive discussion of political modernity.
Utopia as compensation for secularization
In this article, I argue for an historical understanding of the relationship between ideology and utopia/utopianism that positions the latter as a specifically modern compensation for the loss of the cosmologically grounded, unitary ideology supplied by the late medieval Christian Church. This claim relies upon but revises Fredric Jameson’s early theorization of the collaboration between ideology and utopia/utopianism, which emphasizes that utopian elements allow ideology to offer subjects a ‘compensatory exchange’ for their complicity. Developing my central argument requires considering the current viability of the ‘secularization thesis’, which classically associated modernization with secularization but which has undergone heavy criticism and revision by social scientists over the past half-century. These theoretical discussions, finally, are couched within a critical appraisal of the status of utopianism in contemporary politics.
Transubstantiation as a normative process: James Joyce and Carl Schmitt in 1922
The thesis that legal norms are rooted in theology is not new. It is worth considering, however, to what extent not only singular norms, but also models of normativity are the structural representation of theological concepts. In this article, I consider transubstantiation as one of such ideas. I analyse its place in two political theologies published at the same time (in 1922): Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology and James Joyce’s Ulysses. I argue that both thinkers used the idea of transubstantiation as a normative mechanism to deal with anomie that encompassed European societies after the First World War.
Why the turn to matter matters: A response to post-Marxist critiques of new materialism
Theories of new materialism have gained increasing traction in the social and human sciences in recent decades, as thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett have reinvigorated the philosophical interest in topics such as the agency of nonhuman matter, the relational nature of existence and the limitations of anthropocentric forms of inquiry. However, these theories have faced criticism from post-Marxist critical theorists, who argue that theories of new materialism blunt social and capitalist critique and promote obscurity by flattening the world to a single ontological plane. In this article, I argue that these critiques rely on mischaracterizations of new materialist scholarship and that theories of new materialism can in fact help us re-examine – not reject, as their critics suggest – the role of critique, responsibility and human politics in the context of the Anthropocene and its unfolding ecological crises.
Not so ‘dumb money’? Constituting professionals and amateurs in the history of finance capitalism
Kristian Bondo Hansen and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou
This article examines the historically contentious relationship between the financial market and the public as discussed in academic literature, financial journalism and prescriptive how-to invest handbooks during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although financial markets thrive off active public participation, speculating at stock and commodity exchanges has been a sanctioned ritual reserved for a privileged minority. We argue that the financial establishment’s intent to control market access through financial entry-barriers (such as exchange membership fees and margin requirements) has been part of a bigger story we need to understand: a history of delegitimating uninitiated ‘lay speculators’ through the construction of exclusionary narratives about unfit amateur investors and morally corrupt publics. We conceptualize this process as an ongoing and delicate boundary-making exercise contributing to a market participation discourse that has been characterized by a set of reductive binaries, such as those of insider–outsider, professional–amateur and speculator–gambler. We show, however, that attempts to delineate popular participation in financial markets through these binaries have been complicated by the idea that besides being a force of market instability and collective irrationality, the public was a largely untapped source of liquidity. We argue that today’s discourse on public participation in financial markets resuscitates these simplified narratives and propose a more nuanced view of non-professional market participants being both destabilizers and liquidity-providers.
Revolution as a transition from empire to nation-state(s): Comparing the Soviet and Chinese paths
How did revolutions facilitate empires’ transition to nation-states? This article compares the Bolshevik and the Chinese Communist Revolutions. It conceptualizes this Soviet–Sino comparison through three dimensions of nation-building: separating from a universal community, building a national cultural core and overcoming internal ethnopolitics. Both socialist regimes accommodated the nation-state model by fusing centralized control with limited autonomy for ethnic minorities. Yet, whereas the Soviet Union claimed to be a universal union of nation-states, which was supposed to keep accepting new members until it covered the entire globe, the People’s Republic of China resembled a typical nation-state that preserved multiethnicity and enclosed borders under the title of the ‘Chinese Nation’. In analyzing the influence of revolutions, this article probes three relations: inter-revolution, revolution–society and revolution–counterrevolution. Arising after the Bolsheviks as a follower-revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was confined to a national component of the USSR’s global communism project. This shaped the CCP’s enclosed geographical activity space, Han-dominated ethnic composition and the consciousness of national liberation. The CCP’s mobilization covered far wider social strata than the Bolsheviks’ had, which engendered stronger manpower and motivation to transform the traditional culture into a national culture. Being weak at its borderlands, the CCP was cautious about the doctrine of ‘national self-determination’, not daring to make it a geopolitical weapon for revolution export as the Bolsheviks had done in founding the Soviet Union. Owing to each of these differences in revolutionary trajectories, the CCP was more receptive to ‘China’ than the Bolsheviks were to ‘Russia’, and this led to two distinctive ways of reorganizing empires into nation-states.
Reading Campeanu through Lewin: A contribution to the political history of Stalinism
Emanuel Copilaş
Owing to various reasons, Stalinism still represents, according to this essay, a fertile intellectual topic. Therefore, my aim here is to offer a reading of Pavel Campeanu’s works on Stalinism – a relatively unknown Romanian Marxist – through the social history of the Soviet Union in general and of Stalinism in particular advanced by Moshe Lewin. The argumentation advances by taking into account the overall historical frame of the debate (Eastern and Western Marxism during the Cold War) and by stressing some key issues like primitive accumulation, legitimacy, a certain overstretching of the concept of Stalinism and, finally, the issue of totalitarianism. The stake of the essay resides in claiming that Campeanu’s analyses of Stalinism, original and convincing as they are, may favor, in the above-mentioned issues, and regardless the author’s intentions, interpretations belonging to or deriving from the totalitarian school of Cold War and Soviet Studies.
Review essay
Gramsci’s Notebooks: In these times
Peter Beilharz
Book reviews
Book review: The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre
Book review: Normative Intermittency: A Sociology of Failing Normative Structuration
Nicola Marcucci
thesis eleven 