Political Quietism Research Articles

Is Intellectual Humility Compatible with Political Conviction?

Intellectual humility is often proposed, these days, as an antidote to the profound lack of respect, tolerance, and openness to other views in contemporary politics. Moreover, deficiencies of intellectual humility are clearly at work in now-familiar displays, in political discourse, of arrogance, dogmatism and related phenomena, like polarization. Although we agree that there are roles for intellectual humility, we identify two problems. First, previous research on the relationship between intellectual humility and political conviction has ignored empirical and theoretical work indicating that humility does often result in apathy or lack of political conviction. Second, there are different forms or kinds of intellectual humility which can relate to political conviction in many ways. We end the paper by describing a kind of political quietism, which includes quite different accounts of the nature of intellectual humility.

Apolitical Salafi: Between Religious And Citizenship Identity In Indonesia

The phase of Islamic resurgence in Indonesia since the 1980s and 1990s is characterized by the emergence of new dynamics within the Islamic movement, which have reshaped the religious landscape. One of these is Salafism, which was introduced through the Islamic movement originating from the Middle East. This group promotes the purification of Islamic teachings amid the various challenges faced in advancing the development of the movement. Therefore, this study focused on Apolitical Salafi group (political quietism), which has grown significantly in Indonesia. This qualitative study involved data collection through observation and in-depth interviews with key Salafi figures, followed by thorough data analysis. The results showed that Apolitical Salafi movement provided a new space for religious da’wah (preaching), specifically among the upper-middle-class and millennial generation in society. Conversely, this movement also avoided association with general elections, political parties, democratic practices, and resisted rulers because these activities are considered secular. In conclusion, Apolitical Salafi movement created a paradoxical ideological space for religion. This means that religious identity of Salafi Muslims should conform to its teachings, and as Indonesian citizens, they need to avoid interference in political affairs (political isolationism).

Al‐Azhar and the Salafis in Egypt: Contestation of two traditions

<scp>Al‐Azhar</scp> and the Salafis in Egypt: Contestation of two traditions

Coetzee's Carcer[e]al State: Michael K as Hunter-Gatherer

In Life & Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee appears thoroughly persuaded by those anthropological theories—still emerging at the time of the novel's publication—that were reconceiving hunter-gatherer bands as happier, healthier, better-fed, more leisured, and less socially stratified communities than the permanent settlements of agriculturalists. By depicting Michael as a nutritionally and spiritually satisfied forager upon the karoo and by figuring the labor camps in which he is intermittently confined as epitomes of the Neolithic (and subsequent) grain state, Coetzee endorses those intellectual currents that have now supplanted the optimistic narrative of the Agricultural Revolution with that of the Agricultural Trap. In short, the novel figures the adoption of farming as a hedonic catastrophe for the great mass of humankind. Thus, critics who register their disappointment with the novel's supposed political quietism have failed to grasp the text's longue durée concerns or to realize that Michael refuses to aid the guerillas because their victory would only impose upon him a different version of agro-culture. By the same token, many critics' insistence that Michael is a vaguely allegorical figure offering some unrealizable alternative lifeway is refined into sharper focus by the revelation of his anthropological specificity.

The Russian Gambit: Boris Akunin Chooses His Own Adventure

This paper connects Boris Akunin’s app-based novel Soulagine (2016) with the wistful historical revisionism that the author practiced since debuting his Erast Fandorin series of detective novels in the late 1990s. Akunin’s explorations of pre-revolutionary Russian politics attempt to recuperate the Soviet century by stipulating the possibility of avoiding it altogether: perhaps, with the intervention of the right historical actors ‒ namely, a hyper-moral James Bond-Sherlock Holmes hybrid ‒ it would have been possible to avert the calamity of the Bolshevik Revolution. The implicit glorification of the “good policeman” points to Akunin’s desire to discursively jettison the Soviet century as a historical aberration while calling for political moderation and a return to pre-revolutionary cultural norms. At the same time, the longer the Fandorin series continues, the more intense the impression of the Revolution’s ultimate inevitability becomes. By forcing his readers to confront the tragic endpoint of Fandorin’s journey down the slippery slope of Russian radicalism, Akunin didactically emphasizes the importance of political moderation and even conformism in the present. Even as their format dangles the promise of agency before Akunin’s readers, the hidden agenda of ludic-literary hybrids like Soulagine underscores Akunin’s commitment to a political quietism that avoids the pitfalls of radical change even in the face of society-wide injustice or accelerating authoritarianism.

Reading Resistances in Ralph Waldo Emerson and José Martí

This article takes as its starting point a consideration of the ways in which the ideological methodology of “New Americanist” criticism has closed off possibilities of reading that might choose to value ambiguity, contradiction, and excess – elements which militate against the discursive neatness of critique. In readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and José Martí, I argue that resolutely politicized interpretations of Emerson fail to do justice to the unstable texture of his prose. In turn, Martí's writing about the United States is more uneven, surreal and excessive than a straightforward account of postcolonial resistance allows. Both Emerson and Martí exhibit a discursive flexibility that puts pressure on readings driven by inflexible ideological parameters seeking to position both men within frameworks of political quietism and postcolonial revolution respectively. I explore how the idea of revolution is imagined by Emerson in ways that run counter to our more conventional understanding of political transformation. To be sure, Martí's revolutionary actions in the cause of Cuban independence were tangible in ways that Emerson could never have countenanced for himself; nevertheless Emerson's understanding of resistance as differently located and performed provoked in Martí a high, and consistent, degree of sympathy.

Nietzsche, irrationalism, and the cruel irony of Adorno and Horkheimer’s political quietude

Adorno and Horkheimer’s legacy is incomplete without reference to their infamous political quietism. To thinkers such as Habermas, this was the unfortunate consequence of their alleged evacuation of reason. Attending to the treatment of Nietzsche in Dialectic of Enlightenment illuminates the distinct irony of such charges. Here, in their most popular book, Nietzsche is presented as precisely that which they praised him for warning against elsewhere: an advocate of cruelty animated by a reactionary morality. I contend that this exaggeration is not accidental, but rather illustrative; the authors present a consciously hyperbolized version of Nietzsche in order to articulate how he made possible his own misappropriation, and to distinguish themselves sharply from Nietzsche given their disagreements about the necessity of reason. Ultimately, however, even though Adorno and Horkheimer performatively differentiate themselves from the nihilism they saw in Nietzsche, their alternative would ironically be subject to precisely the same charges of irrationalism and political aporia that they sought so desperately to avoid.

Political quietism in Islam: Sunni and Shi'i practice and thought

Political quietism in Islam: Sunni and Shi'i practice and thought

Beyond Quietism: Party Institutionalisation, Salafism, and the Economy

AbstractBreaking with a long tradition of political quietism, many Salafis in Tunisia and Egypt decided to found political parties and participate in competitive elections after the collapse of the regime. In doing so, they had to present a political program to voters, including policy proposals on economic issues. The article examines how Salafi parties dealt with economic policy-making and finds that they reluctantly engaged with it, offering contradictory and naïve policies meant to pander to the electorate. Policy-making preferences and positions on economic issues are employed to look at the degree of party institutionalization Salafi parties have.

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

Liberalism and Intolerance

Simpson has two aims in this book. The first is to demonstrate that ‘Protestantism is a powerfully and necessarily self-conflicted tradition’ and that, since it constantly repudiates former versions of itself, it is best described as a ‘tradition of permanent revolution’ (p. xi). By focusing on the ways in which Protestantism evolved, he seeks to explain how two different visions of the Reformation can exist. One he attributes to medievalists, in which they encounter: the Reformation’s absolutist, cruel, despair-producing, humanity-belittling, merit-denying, determinist account of salvation; it’s closely related account of an exclusivist, invisible, ahistorical Church; its stringent insistence on the inerrancy of Scripture; its destructive iconoclasm; its early political quietism – even in the face of tyranny. (p. 6) The other vision he attributes to early modernists, in which the late seventeenth-century gains of liberty, freedom of conscience, and constitutionalism justify and emerge out of the darker days of the early Reformation. Simpson makes the bold claim that, by understanding the relationship between these two visions, we can reconceive ‘the history of Liberalism; the relation of Liberalism to evangelical religion; and, by no means least, the nature of our modernity’ (p. 7). This is the second aim of the book and one to which I return below.

Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s Legal Opinions on the Fight against Bābak’s Uprising: “I don’t know of anyone who is more harmful to Islam than he, the evil wretch”

Abstract In this article, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s role in the fight against Bābak’s uprising and his legal opinions on the legitimacy and rules of this fight are presented. Normally reticent in all matters political, Ibn Ḥanbal took an uncharacteristically strong stance against Bābak, claiming he did not know of anything “more harmful to Islam” than Bābak and Khurramism. Focus in the article is on how Ibn Ḥanbal regarded Babāk’s revolt and why he took an active role against it despite what could be called his general attitude of political quietism.

Drinking coffee, rehearsing civility, making subjects

This paper explores the role of coffee shops in cultivating youth political subjectivity. It does so through examples of internationally-sponsored processes of state consolidation in South Africa and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We examine how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have sought to use coffee shops as means through which to cultivate youth citizenship. Reflecting their prominent role in the materialisation of the European public sphere, we examine the significance of civility within these caffeinated spaces, where intimate relations are used as the basis for the consolidation of new political identities. In contrast to those who may dismiss civility as a synonym for political quietism, we argue that the interactions in coffee shops constitute a form of ‘intimacy-geopolitics’, collapsing the rigid binaries between geopolitics and the interactions of individuals in everyday life. Drawing on qualitative data gathered over eighteen months in both countries we explore how coffee shops act as sites of civility where alternative ideas of political identity – and models of society – may be rehearsed.

Spaces of the political

This is a paper about the architecture of a concept: the concept of the political. Through the built environment, we come to re-imagine the concept of the political not as a set of institutions, or as an array of governmental forms, or even a series of rational choices, but in terms of affective energy flows. It is in interrogating this that I will turn to the built environment and analyse two ways of regulating the cadence of affective flows in relation to the political, through two machines: Britain's nineteenth century Crystal Palace and the Landlord Manor House Museum of Liu Wencai.If Liu Wencai's Manor House Museum turned affective energy flows into political intensities that could drive the Maoist revolution, the Crystal Palace dissipated these same energy flows by turning them into commodity desires that would drive market growth. With the Crystal Palace, our attention is focused on how the channelling of energy into dissipated market desires produced a dispersal that, in turn, contributed to a political quietism. Such political quietism appeared as, at best, a ‘side-effect’ of an economic relation but, in placing this machine next to the Maoist Manor House Museum, we realise the centrality of this ‘side-effect’ in the formation of the political. The built environment, therefore, offers a set of heuristic devices that, read alongside each other, reveal two quite distinct modes of being political.Despite their radical differences, these two machines share a ‘family resem-blance’ insofar as they exemplify how the built environment contributes to political discourse through the disciplining of social subjects. What these two sets of machinery open onto is a new understanding of the discursive field of modernity and the treatment of affective elements within any modern concept of the political.

Against charity: Some preliminary considerations

Abstract Charity is often viewed as a paradigm of morality. I suggest, however, that charitable action is morally problematic – even morally wrong. Following a brief characterisation of charity, it will be suggested that it wrongly puts recipients in a position of dependency and dispensers in a self-congratulatory position of political quietism.

Political Quietism and the Sound of China Dream—The Urban Memory and Narrative of “1966 Cultural Revolution” in Shanghai in the Novel Flowers (Fan Hua)

Political Quietism and the Sound of China Dream—The Urban Memory and Narrative of “1966 Cultural Revolution” in Shanghai in the Novel Flowers (Fan Hua)

Democratizing accounting: Reflections on the politics of “old” and “new” pluralisms

Abstract Over the last 25 years, Critical Perspectives on Accounting has been at the forefront of stimulating debate about the meaning, location and scope of politics. This paper reflects on long-standing disagreements in critical and social accounting over the progressive potential of political pluralism. It examines commonalities and differences across three generations of pluralist thinkers: early twentieth-century political theorists, post-World War 2 and neo-pluralist political scientists, and post-structural pluralists. With respect to social accounting, I argue that as in other disciplinary fields post-war liberal pluralism has often been mistakenly viewed “as the whole of political pluralism” (Schlosberg, 1998, p. 583) and that while early second generation pluralism was rightly criticized for providing ideological support for the status quo, critics exaggerated the conservatism of neo-pluralism. Nonetheless, second generation pluralism provides a limited view of democratic politics. I examine the resurgence of interest in political pluralism among contemporary political theorists, highlighting how agonistic democratic theorists have addressed aspects of political quietism in “old” pluralisms and in some strands of post-structuralism. Providing examples from several politically pressing areas, I argue that theorizing, critique and engagement informed by third generation understandings of social plurality and political struggle offer a promising base for critical accounting interventions.

Orthodoxy and Dissent in Hinduism’s Meditative Traditions: A Critical Tantric Politics?

Hindu philosophy and its associated meditative traditions have historically been characterized as renunciatory and world-negating, producing an ethic of political passivity, quietism, and indifference. In contrast, I demonstrate here that both the orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy and the heterodox Tantric tradition have been enlisted in service of a variety of socio-political commitments and projects, within and outside India. The more important question is whether these traditions inspire the ossification of conventional hierarchies or the emergence of radical, emancipatory, or liberatory commitments. I argue here that Tantra, a dissident tradition of thought and practice, contains a progressive potential for critiquing and subverting the hierarchical, masculinist politics of gender, sexuality, and caste in contemporary India.

Book Review: Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures

Decreation: The Things of All Creatures. By Paul J. Griffiths. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014. xi + 396 pp. $69.95 (cloth).This remarkable book. In clarity and care of its argumentation it model of theological method. While treating questions that have sometimes been relegated to fringe of Christian theological enquiry, it sheds new light on topics across range of theological concerns: nature of time, tears, and political quietism, to name but few. While showing at almost every point deep formation in Thomistic tradition of theological reasoning, it frequently thinks beyond Aquinas in ways that are both innovative and demonstrably following trajectories of existing lines of argument. It unquestionably new reference point for any future engagement with these theological loci.Decreation begins with lexicon: three pages that would be fruitful subject of series of theological seminars by themselves. Paul J. Griffiths explains that he interested in LORD of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mary, and Jesus, and will not use god except category-word for kind of being... to which LORD does not belong (pp. 3-4). Creatures are all things brought into being by LORD, divided into inanimate and animate, incarnate and disincamate kinds. The cosmos is all there other than LORD; and it surpassingly beautiful; world what cosmos has become since double fall of angels and humans, and termed the devastation, appearing to human creatures as a charnel house, saturated in blood violently shed; an ensemble of inanimate creatures decaying toward extinction; theater of vice and cruelty (p. 4). Bodies are locations in time and space, in various kinds. Heaven, the timespace in which creatures, according to their kinds, are maximally and indefectibly intimate with LORD and with one another (p. 5). Hell, where and when creatures are maximally separate, Griffiths will argue, is utopia, timeless and placeless, where creatures who enter it therefore come to (p. 5). Finally, Last Thing a condition entered by creature without possibility of future novelty (p. 5)-also novissimum because any such final state must be creature's newest, after which nothing else can follow (p. 7). The depth, density, and power of this theological thought-world immediately striking.I was particularly struck throughout book by impact of Griffiths's continual location of phenomena in the devastation. …

The Authoritarian Resurgence: Saudi Arabia’s Anxious Autocrats

Abstract: Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been nonideological, realist, and defensive in intent, but negative in its implications for democracy. To contain Iran, quarantine the Muslim Brotherhood, and combat jihadism, Riyadh has backed local actors that are mostly authoritarian and antiliberal—and the net effect has been damaging for political pluralism and civil society. While the succession to King Salman has produced a more temperate approach to the Brotherhood, such shifts are ultimately tactical. At its core the Kingdom remains an autocratic state wedded to monarchical privilege at home and bent on enforcing political quietism abroad.