Object Of Critique Research Articles

Institutionalization of a Formalized Intergovernmental Transfer Scheme for Asylum Seekers in Germany: TheKönigstein Keyas an Indicator of Federal Justice

AbstractCrisis-induced refugee migration raises questions of fair responsibility-sharing among political territories. This is relevant for nation states and for subnational territories alike. Theories addressing this problem have mainly been developed with regard to international responsibility-sharing. They assume collective action problems when it comes to organising intergovernmental transfer schemes, something which cannot be easily overcome. It is not well understood how effective transfer schemes can be institutionalised when no hierarchical decision-making is in place. Complementary to that perspective, this paper builds upon constructivist institutional theories that suggest paying more attention to guiding ideas, which can be called upon when intergovernmental transfer schemes are at stake, and to criteria of rationality that can legitimately claim to embody this idea. Legitimate criteria of rationality are typically the result of “investments in form”, i.e. social practices which imbue material objects with certain qualities so that they stand for particular guiding ideas. The article tests this assumption empirically by tracing the institutionalisation process of the Königstein key (Königsteiner Schlüssel) as a dynamic formula for determining state quotas in Germany's refugee federalism. While important precedents of physical intergovernmental responsibility-sharing in refugee matters had already existed in West Germany, their translation to the territorial dispersal of non-German asylum seekers was highly controversial in the 1970s. In this case, resorting to the Königstein key proved to be feasible in part because, by then, the formula had already become a symbol of the idea of federal justice through its use in a variety of different and far less controversial policy fields. However, during the recent wave of refugee immigration it has increasingly become the object of critique.

Ideology in Management Studies

AbstractIdeology is a core and contested concept in the social sciences, but also long deployed in management research to highlight the political, embedded and/or obscuring nature of ideas. Indeed, many would argue that management itself is inherently ideological in legitimating or privileging managerial interests and concealing other groups and ways of organizing. In the first systematic review of how ideology has been conceptualized in management studies, this paper explores its diverse and changing meanings in order to develop and sustain the concept. It is based on a heuristic review of 175 articles and 41 books published between 1956 and 2018. Further developing categories used in the social sciences around its role, we found views of ideology as: (1) domination; (2) legitimation; (3) interpretation; (4) integration; and (5) normative logic. In addition, emerging perspectives were identified where ideology was (6) an object of critique or (7) fantasy structuring social reality. We describe, illustrate and evaluate these often internally diverse and interrelated perspectives, as well as comparing them with sometimes competing notions within the management field, such as discourse, culture and legitimation. We also bring together the different approaches and argue for a pluralist, but not infinitely flexible, approach to the concept. In doing so, we identify research agendas for ideology within management and organization studies.

Жиль Делёз среди новых материалистов: материалистическая диалектика против неовитализма

This article is dedicated to examining the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in the context of the debates unfolding within contemporary materialism between two currents: materialist dialectic and neovitalism. For the neovitalists (Iain Hamilton Grant and Jane Bennett),Deleuze is a crucial precursor, while for the materialist dialecticians (Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek,and others) he is rather an object of critique. This article, however, points to the proximity between Deleuze’s philosophy and none other than materialist dialectic. Paradoxically, this proximity is revealed in Deleuze’s understanding of life, which proposes the division of life into inorganic and organic forms, an affirmative reinterpretation of the death instinct and the necessity of subjective counter-actualization.

When ‘feminism’ becomes a genre: Alias Grace and ‘feminist’ television

Alias Grace is just one of the many recent TV shows that was labelled ‘feminist’ so quickly and with such ease that one is left to wonder how much of a genre ‘feminism’ has already become. This article interrogates what is at stake for ‘feminist’ critique in labelling cultural phenomena as ‘feminist’. I argue that certain ways of reading Alias Grace as a ‘feminist’ show preclude an alternative reading in which Alias Grace emerges as a critique of ‘feminism’ itself. What is at stake in the debate on ‘feminism’ in popular culture is thus not only whether or not we can recognise the potential for ‘feminist’ critique that resides within popular culture, but also whether or not we can allow socio-cultural phenomena, like TV shows, to take ‘feminism’ as an object of critique: to generate the kind of critical movement that renders futile any attempt to stabilise, or reify, the signifier ‘feminism’ as an ahistorical object with fixed meanings – as a genre even. In so doing, I take it that there is no privileged site from which to engender such movement; and I do not take popular culture as a self-contained domain that could qualify for being such a site. The point, then, is not to treat Alias Grace as a representative case study in popular ‘feminism’; but rather, to demonstrate, by way of Alias Grace, the complex and contradictory readings that socio-cultural phenomena are amenable to, and which in turn give rise to critical possibilities that unfold from within these phenomena. Reading Alias Grace critically, as I understand it in this article, means allowing it to be, at one and the same time, a reflection on itself and a reflection on the world in which it so quickly comes to be labelled ‘feminist’.

Schelling and protestant theology

ABSTRACTFrom the beginning of his philosophical career Schelling, a former student of theology at Tübingen, influenced Protestant theologians in Germany. He contributed to biblical studies as well as to dogmatics. A controversial point was his conviction that religion needs a foundation in speculative reason. This was a position criticised by Schleiermacher but shared by Carl Daub and Philipp Marheineke. It played also a major role in the discussions about the history of dogma initiated by Ferdinand Christian Baur and David Friedrich Strauß. After Schelling stopped publishing at the end of the second decade of the 19th century, his influence on theology dropped, and his late philosophy became an object of critique by the theological Hegelians.

Ideology in Management Studies

Ideology is a core concept in the social sciences and, in management, has long been deployed to highlight the political and embedded nature of management ideas and practices. We provide an overview, classification and evaluation of the meanings and use of ideology in the field of management studies. This is based on a review of 169 peer-reviewed empirical and theoretical articles and 41 related books published between 1956 and 2015. We find seven dominant views of ideology in management studies and connect them to different broader social science conceptualizations of ideology as: (1) domination; (2) legitimation; (3) a way of describing and explaining; (4) social integration; (5) a normative logic; (6) an object of critique; and (7) a fantasy structuring social reality. In doing so, we draw attention to the variety of contributions of ideology to understanding management and organisations and conclude by outlining its continuing relevance and avenues for future research.

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

Rethinking expeditions: On critical expeditionary practice

The expedition’s complicity in the imperial project of conquest, extraction and settlement has placed it as an object of critique, but largely discredited its significance as a valid research method in the critical social sciences. Yet dismissing the expedition merely as an imperial remnant risks ignoring more nuanced histories that bear no resemblance to myths of conquest and masculine heroics. Instead, this paper considers the expedition as a malleable practice that can be critically appropriated and manipulated in ways that retain and further the critique of violence and knowledge production, while also experimenting with creative alternatives to some of its conventions.

An Inventory of FearThe Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, RonaldHutton, Yale University Press, 2017 (ISBN 978‐0‐3002‐2904‐2), xv + 360 pp., hb $30The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic, OwenDavies (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2017 (ISBN 978‐0‐19‐960844‐7), xiv + 314 pp., hb £25

AbstractA study of two recent contributions to the scholarship on witchcraft and magic uncovers an uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand, authors argue that magical practices should now be interpreted on their own premises; on the other hand, attempts to take seriously the experience of magic are bracketed and ‘disbelief’ in magic is encouraged. I argue that such disbelief affirms, ironically, the polarization between religion and magic which is the object of critique and arises from an unexamined fear, directed principally at religion and Christianity. When left unexamined, this fear of religion takes the place of the historically attested religious maligning of magic studied by contemporary scholars, and, it is proposed, results in discourses of violence that repeat, unwittingly, the very stereotypes which modern accounts of witchcraft and magic set out to eradicate.

Marx, Engels and the critique of academic labor

Articles in Workplace have repeatedly called for increased collective organisation in opposition to a disturbing trajectory: individual autonomy is decreasing, contractual conditions are worsening, individual mental health issues are rising, and academic work is being intensified. Despite our theoretical advances and concerted practical efforts to resist these conditions, the gains of the 20th century labor movement are diminishing and the history of the university appears to be on a determinate course. To date, this course is often spoken of in the language of “crisis.” While crisis may indeed point us toward the contemporary social experience of work and study within the university, we suggest that there is one response to the transformation of the university that has yet to be adequately explored: A thoroughgoing and reflexive critique of academic labor. By this, we mean a negative critique of academic labor and its role in the political economy of capitalism; one which focuses on understanding the basic character of ‘labor’ in capitalism as a historically specific social form. Beyond the framework of crisis, what productive, definite social relations are actively resituating the university and its labor within the demands, proliferations, and contradictions of capital? With the production of this special issue of Workplace, we hope to contribute to a negative critique of academic labor that not only helps make these social relations more transparent, but situates academic labor as an object of critique within the discourse of recent developments in Marxist praxis.

Immanent Critique as Self-Transformative Practice: Hegel, Dewey, and Contemporary Critical Theory

ABSTRACT There are two traditions of immanent social critique. One of them, prominent in contemporary Frankfurt school critical theory, regards the immanence of critique as a quality of the standard employed. Such a conception of immanent critique needs to show, prior to the concrete practice of critique, how the standard is immanent in the object of critique. Showing this is the task of a “model of immanent critique.” The other tradition, going back to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and practiced in particular by Dewey in his later works, regards the immanence of critique as the form of critical practice itself. Because such a conception of immanent critique does not, at the outset, ask how the standard is immanent to its object, it also does not need a model licensing critical practice. Indeed, it must be inherently hostile to any attempt at modeling immanent critique because the immanence lies in the power of critical practice to transform any models it applies.

The Irony of Critique

The Irony of Critique Daniel Rosenberg Nutters (bio) Criticism After Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political Jeffrey R. Di Leo, ed. Palgrave Macmillan www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137428769 229Pages; Print, $69.99 Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s collection Criticism After Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political emerges at a moment when academic critique—a politically animated critical skepticism that draws upon the insights offered by deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and various forms of historicism—seems to have become stale, ineffective, and formulaic. Now that scholarship has debunked assumptions about the transcendental value of art, unmasked myth, illusion, and ideological aberrations, opened up an insular canon, exhumed repressed voices and forgotten histories, and demonstrated the complicity of the liberal-humanist tradition with the worst of Western Civilization, what next? The digital humanities, new formalism, surface and distant reading, new materialisms, and the self-proclaimed return to aesthetics represent some of the new critical fashions competing to carry the baton for literary studies into the twenty-first century. They promise relevance, innovation, a renewed political urgency, the ability to overcome common impediments such as the critic’s fallible subjectivity, and different ways of “reading” that can yield new forms of historical and sociological knowledge. With a range of new methodologies from which to choose, what is left of what Di Leo calls “the modus operandi of the humanities,” namely, critique? Invoking the essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” by the French sociologist Bruno Latour, Di Leo argues that there is a frustration with “a mechanical form of critique that responds more or less the same way to any and all new events.” He thus poses the following questions to the volume’s contributors: How do we engage criticism at a time when critique seems to have run its course? What does sustained theoretical research and discussion look like when the notion of critique is under attack? Might we be confronting an aesthetic, practical, philosophical, New Formalist, or New Critical emphasis on the literary text? What, if anything, is the political project of literary and cultural criticism after critique? Di Leo’s concise introduction orients Criticism After Critique toward future generations who, he argues, “are just coming to critique [and] will do so in a less doctrinaire manner” than orthodox scholars of a “Baudrillardian, Foucaultian, or Jamesonian” persuasion. The eleven essays in the collection thus offer a diverse set of responses pithy in length but demanding in intellectual rigor. The range of figures they engage—Kant, Adorno, Žižek, Rancière, Derrida, and Foucault as well as Danto, Cavell, Rorty, Wittgenstein, and literary examples including Yeats, Morrison, Carson, and the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau—point to the numerous topics and subjects covered. It is the ability to cover a wide terrain without losing sight of the past, present, and future of critique that makes Di Leo’s collection an important intervention into what can only be described as the latest chapter in literary criticism’s perpetual crisis of self-identification. Criticism After Critique is divided into three sections sandwiched between Di Leo’s introduction and an afterward by R. M. Berry. The first section, “Criticism, Judgment, and Value,” provides an overview of some of the central contexts leading scholars to question the value of critique. David Shumway’s opening essay offers a short genealogy of critique. Taking his starting point from Žižek’s critique of ideology critique, Shumway explores the Kantian origins of critique and traces its legacy through German Idealism, philology, and the rise of the New Criticism to highlight how the humanities continually reproduces oppositions such as “interpretation versus judgment…hermeneutics of suspicion versus the hermeneutics of recollections …the text as object of critique and the text as bearer of knowledge” that also ironically sustain it. Sue-Im Lee’s contribution contextualizes the disillusionment with critique by examining the relation between the surge of interest in neglected literature (e.g. writing by minorities and disenfranchised groups) and the decline of aesthetic judgments. By summoning Arthur Danto, Lee emphasizes the need to theorize a way of making value judgments that might complicate the familiar conflict between the academy’s democratization of literature and...

Long Live the Tributary System! The Future of Studying East Asian Foreign Relations

Long Live the Tributary System!The Future of Studying East Asian Foreign Relations Saeyoung Park Keywords international relations, Westphalian system, Sinocentric world order 中華世界秩序, IR turn in history, David Kang, East Asia before the West, China’s rise, hegemony, Sino-speak, imperialism Almost a half century has passed since the publication of John King Fairbank’s edited volume, The Chinese World Order.1 Since then, the tributary system has come to serve as something of a synecdoche for pre-1900 East Asian international relations. Briefly, the “institutional and textual complex” known as the tributary system describes the practices, norms, and structures of East Asian foreign relations.2 As an aspirational “Chinese world order,” this hierarchical system cohered around the premise that China represented the apical center of civilization. The tributary system became a professional and canonical object of enquiry through Fairbank’s work during the mid-twentieth century, but it has older origins.3 The tributary [End Page 1] system as we know it was born in the moment of its imperial destruction—in the global harmonization of Westphalian norms, when “modern” diplomatic practices and ideas of sovereignty replaced preexisting East Asian regimes of international relations.4 In terms of its contemporary scholarly relevance, the tributary system’s capacity to inspire research outside of History and Area Studies no doubt makes it one of the field’s most famous exports. Yet, the very community of specialists that has given birth to it has also consistently exhibited an uneasy relationship with the tributary system. An object of critique from the moment of inception, a public and dissatisfied fine-tuning has characterized most of its existence; even its most well-known iteration, such as Fairbank’s Chinese World Order, is framed as a corrective response to enduring and persistent problems in tributary system literature.5 A flawed yet powerfully resonant paradigm, acceptance of the tributary system’s existence has been given most grudgingly. As recently as 2009, James Hevia remarked (in another introduction to a special issue) that their project had been motivated by John Wills Jr.’s observation that the “‘tribute system’ was a wreck” and one could wonder “if there was anything to be salvaged from it.”6 Optimistically and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I would like to start this HJAS special issue by “officially” declaring that the tributary system is not dead. Long live the tributary system! In fact, recent signs of life suggest a flourishing return far beyond the mere whispers of new perennial shoots. But readers need not fear, this special issue offers insights for both those [End Page 2] who are dismayed as well as those who are thrilled by the tributary system’s putative resurrection. But which tributary system’s health am I cheekily exalting in this essay? This question is tricky because the tributary system possesses multiple, contested, and overlapping dimensions. Some scholars posit the tributary system as (a) a historical, lived experience, (b) a research category of analysis, (c) an explanatory theory that organizes historical phenomena, and sometimes (d) a theoretical model that may have predictive applications. Hence, critical discourse first requires a determination of which tributary system is in play, as a scholar’s estimation of its historical accuracy and viability may not match that same scholar’s assessment of its power as an International Relations (IR) model. Some tributary systems never died and were never in danger of being ignominiously retired as an outdated topic.7 Disambiguating the congeries of tributary systems not only facilitates clear scholarly communication it also ensures efficacious critique that can travel across disciplinary spaces to audiences with variable concerns. The stakes in reappraising early modern East Asian international relations are not the same today as they were when John Wills led the first wave of revisionist scholarship on the Sinocentric world order. The past decade has witnessed a significant and transformative resurgence of interest in premodern foreign relations and the tributary system. This new “IR turn” has been driven primarily by scholars outside of History and early modern Area Studies.8 The IR turn’s interpretive scope has accommodated an enormous range of questions, including recent scholarship on the “American tributary system” as well as a...

Infrakritik og proximering. Om at finde den rette afstand

In this paper, we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation and research. Taking our point of departure in a notion of critique as finding the right proximity introduced by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we discuss alternatives to critique as based on a position detached from the object of critique. Our analysis shows that critique is immanent to the practices we study and already to some extent conceptualized by the practitioners. To further problematize the already ongoing critical engagements in the organizations we study, we relate our ethnographic descriptions to work done on infra critique (Verran, Willerslev). In conclusion, the relation between the notion of critique as infra-critic and scholarly critical practices is commented on. We find proximation to be a useful concept as an infra critical description of ongoing experimentation with professional identities and organizational boundaries.

Secularism on the Edge: Rethinking Church-State Relations in the United States, France, and Israel. Edited by Jacques Berlinerblau, Sarah Fainberg, and Aurora Nou

This is an edited volume of papers and interviews drawn mostly from an academic conference of the same name at Georgetown University’s Program for Jewish Civilization in February 2013. Volumes of this kind feature certain well-known limitations: rather than elaborating a scholarly approach at length or investigating a case in-depth, they often gather a series of reflections that may or may not hang together coherently. What such volumes can do well, however, is bring together scholars who are not normally in dialogue and help give readers a sense of the scholarly “lay of the land” on a new, complicated, or contentious topic. This collection does indeed do this well. In recent years, “secularism” and its various cognates (including those with the ubiquitous academic “post-” prefix) have become important keywords in the various disciplines that study religion in public life. Religious studies, theology, political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies, and law have all seen a proliferation of secularisms as objects of critique, defense, description, and analysis. In the humanities and social sciences, this phenomenon rivals “neoliberalism” in its contemporary ubiquity.

Passive education

This paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education nor does it propose that passive education is in any way ‘better’ or more important than active education. Through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and B.S. Johnson, and gentle critiques of Jacques Rancière and John Dewey, passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of ‘learnification’, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Guest editors’ IntroductionEssentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Melanie K. Yazzie (bio) and Nick Estes (bio) There are no two sides to this story. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Interview with Nick Estes Badger is always in Dakota stories and he is always asked many questions even though he is not important . . . But, he always has something to say . . . he always has an answer . . . Sometimes he is right but, just as often, he is wrong. Quite wrong. But what he does, you see, is . . . he keeps the plot moving . . . Without him, you see, the story would come to an early and unsatisfactory end. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn ON HISTORY In July 2013, we sat down with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at a restaurant in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. Nick got to know “Liz” (as she is known to colleagues and friends) through their mutual work to address pervasive anti-Indian racism in Rapid City. Until meeting her that day Melanie had never spoken with Liz, despite having written a [End Page 9] master’s thesis on Cook-Lynn’s role in shaping American Indian intellectual history. Even before fully understanding the profound impact she had on our maturation as scholars, activists, and committed Native nationalists, we were both long-time students of Cook-Lynn. We were extremely familiar with her foundational role in the development of American Indian studies and her unwavering commitment to the livelihood of Native people and nations. Between us, we had read, used, and cherished her entire oeuvre of fictional and nonfictional work. Our three-hour conversation with Liz on that humid summer afternoon in “the heart of everything that is,” He Sapa (the Black Hills), will endure as a high point for both of us in our careers as Native scholars. Even though we covered many topics, historical eras, and biographical details during our conversation with Liz, one particular comment of hers stood out. We were mocking the prevailing expectation that scholarship on Native history must maintain “objectivity” by counterbalancing Native perspectives with those advanced by a U.S. national narrative, though this expectation never operates the other way around. In the frank and eloquent style for which she is known, she stated, “There are no two sides to this story.” Although much has changed in academia and its treatment of Native peoples and their histories, it is still assumed that the notion of objectivity guides the social and hard sciences and history toward attaining “truth.” Objectivity, or the popular idiom that “there are always two sides to every story,” implies that disciplines like history exist in a politically and historically unbiased vacuum, untarnished by their imperial and colonial origins as instruments of power and domination. Cook-Lynn’s unequivocal proclamation that there is only one side to history forces the trope of objectivity out of the arena of assumption and places it as an object of critique within a long-standing and deeply rooted tradition of Native intellectual history that predates, endures, and challenges U.S. colonial occupation. In so doing, she forces scholars of history to contend with the prior and ongoing existence of Native people and political entities in the lands and histories of the United States that it has claimed as its own only through imperial conquest.1 Cook-Lynn noted during our conversation she has been dismissed as an “essentialist” by other scholars many times for proclamations like “there are no two sides to this story.” She chuckled about this. Anyone in the humanities who does what could be considered critical work knows that being labeled an essentialist can sometimes be seen as (and sometimes is) an academic death sentence. We observed how often the label of essentialism has tended to undermine the entire purpose of American Indian studies to emphatically and unapologetically defend and foster tribal survival. Cook-Lynn has long used the term “survival” to describe the purpose of American Indian studies. In New Indians, Old Wars, she offers one of her many meditations on survival, posing the [End Page 10] question, “How can a native people survive within and alongside their historical oppressors?” She goes on to state that this “is not a rhetorical question. It...

Moralism and Its Discontents

This essay examines three recent monographs wrestling with the question of what’s living and what’s dead in Frankfurt School critical theory. What’s living, these books argue, is the project of a critical theory oriented towards universal values of human emancipatory; what’s dead is a certain neo-Kantian version of this project that collapsed political morality into a moralization of politics. This essay examines how each of these works charts a different path through this puzzle of politicizing morality without moralizing politics. It argues that what these works is a profound distrust of time at the heart of critical theory, a distrust that reiterates a drive towards moralism even where it is the object of critique.

Feminism's there: On post-ness and nostalgia

Over the past decade, feminists born during and after the rise of women's liberation have become increasingly preoccupied with the movement's past – its documents and artefacts. This is evident in publications such as Elizabeth Freeman's Time Binds and Victoria Hesford's Feeling Women's Liberation, as well as artistic interventions by artists such as Sharon Hayes and Allyson Mitchell. In different ways, these theorists' and artists' projects each enact a longing for and reassessment of 1970s feminisms. At the same time, a younger generation of feminists comprising women born since 1980 has begun to look back to 1990s feminism as a site of longing and an object of critique. While both generations continue to distance themselves and their projects from nostalgia, this article suggests that rather than reject nostalgia entirely, these projects in fact bring feminist nostalgia into relief, pointing to both its dangers and possibilities.

Pope Benedict XVI: Joseph Ratzinger on Politics

Modern Western civilization, shaped not least by the Enlightenment, is the ever present background to Ratzinger's project. (1) It is both a stimulus and a partner in dialogue, a source of inspiration and an object of critique. Ratzinger is acutely aware of any change of mood in the world around him and so is capable of assessing the slightest blip in that mood, thanks to what one might call his finely tuned theological seismograph. He is sensitive above all to the cultural changes caused by the shifting of those philosophical and tectonic plates under the surface of day-to-day politics, which invariably lead to earthquakes. This sensitivity is what gave his opening lectures on the university at the beginning of each semester an excitement and a popularity, which attracted the most diverse of students. It is these underlying cultural tectonic plates that grab his attention as a theologian. One of these tectonic plates is the living Christian tradition; another could be given the collective name of the Enlightenment and its aftermath. The influence of the Enlightenment is, in his estimation, both positive and negative. The modern world born of the Enlightenment is both the product of Western Christian civilization and at the same time has become the greatest threat not only to Christianity but to humanity itself. To distinguish the positive contribution of the Enlightenment project from its life-threatening errors (and so to save what is best in the Enlightenment tradition, such as liberal democracy) is one of the primary tasks he set himself in his reflection on politics. It is the main thrust of his contribution to the debate in Munich, January 2004, with Jurgen Habermas, one of Europe's main spokesmen for the Enlightenment today. (2) Ratzinger's Political Science What I want to sketch very briefly are some features of Ratzinger's political science, as it were, or, more precisely, his understanding of life. Foundational for Ratzinger's theology of politics (3) is the distinction between the sphere of faith and that of politics first expressed in the apodictic statement: Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's (Mt 22:21). This, the true Christian revolution, amounted, in effect, to the liberation of politics from the sacral sphere, thus for the first time in history opening politics up to the sphere of human judgement and decision, the sphere of practical reason, personal responsibility--and so of ethics. (4) It implies the separation of state and Church, the former a community of necessity (we are born into it) characterized by compromise, the latter a community of freedom or conviction (we are baptised into it), one characterized by non-negotiable principles. It also defines the limits set to authority: that authority does not extend into the most intimate, personal sphere, that of worship, faith, and morals. Political life is, rather, defined by justice in temporal affairs. In its turn, freedom of worship can be seen as the basis of all human rights and the ultimate barrier to totalitarianism. According to Ratzinger, this was essentially the unique contribution of the martyrs to the progress of civilization. As a religion of the persecuted, and as a universal religion that was wider than any one state or people, it [Christianity] denied the government the right to consider religion as part of the order of the state, thus stating the principle of the liberty of faith. (5) This he maintains was the soil out of which, in the course of history, the Enlightenment sprang. (6) The Enlightenment was born in places where Christianity, contrary to its own nature, had unfortunately become mere tradition and the religion of the state. It is to the credit of the Enlightenment, Ratzinger adds, that it drew attention afresh to basic Christian values and gave reason back its own voice. (7) One of its products is modern, liberal democracy. …