Western Intellectuals Research Articles

Rebecca Bushnell (ed.), A Companion to Tragedy.William M. Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England.

REBECCA BUSHNELL'S A Companion to Tragedy and William Hamlin's Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England are two of the latest volumes in the Blackwells Companions to Literature and Culture Series, and the Palgrave Macmillan Early Modern Literature in History series respectively. Bushnell's substantial edited collection of new essays traverses a range of methodological approaches and historical contexts in an attempt to provide an overview of what is substantially a characteristically ‘western’ art form. Only in Chapter 28 in the section on ‘Tragedy and Modernity’ is any concerted attempt made to approach the genre from a subaltern position, in Timothy Reiss's essay ‘Using Tragedy against its Makers: Some African and Caribbean Instances’; although in Christiane Sourvino-Inwood's opening chapter on ‘Greek Tragedy and Ritual’ the reader is warned against accepting the ‘rationality-privileging perceptions of (especially twentieth-century) Western intellectuals’ (10). The shadow of ‘9/11’ hovers over Bushnell's brief introduction, forcing a distinction between ‘tragedy’ ‘and the merely horrific accident or catastrophe’ in which the power of the former ‘lies in our expectation that knowledge might emerge out of the chaos of human suffering’ (1). The volume as a whole privileges the heuristic value of tragic form, oscillating uncomfortably between historical account, as in Sourvinou-Inwood's bold assertion that ‘Greek tragedies are not timeless’ (7), and a bland ‘presentism’ evident in Bushnell's bifurcated claim that tragic experience ‘has the power to evoke a culture's conceptions and questions about authority and the extent to which we determine the course of our own lives’ (4: my italics). Historical difference invariably gives way in the face of the claims of relevance, and these circle around questions such as the conservative or radically subversive potential of a form that is inherently theatrical but that also addresses more general categories of human experience. At one level Tragedy is a source of pleasure, but at another it becomes a way of locating meaning in the face of disaster, and at yet another level it becomes a mode of questioning authority.

Afterword. Tendencies of religious change in the world of the twentieth century and their implications in the Ukrainian context

How will religion develop in the 21st century? How optimistic can her outlook be on her future? What will be the meaning of global religious change in the coming decades? Despite being very advanced in the West, the answers to these questions remain problematic. In the famous work, "Returning the Sacred: Arguments for the Future of Religion," D. Bell noted that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most thinkers expected that religion would disappear in the twentieth century. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many sociologists believed that sociologists believed that "At least since the Enlightenment, most Western intellectuals have expected the death of religion as fervently as the ancient Jews of the coming of the Messiah," reminds American religious scholars R. Stark and R. Bindbridge. and the social sciences were particularly distinguished in the prediction of the inevitable triumph of rationality over “prejudice.” The most celebrated figures in sociology, anthropology, and psychology unanimously expressed the belief that their children, or indeed grandchildren, would witness a new era in which, from Freud, the infantile illusions of religion humanity will outgrow ”

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad Y. Michal Bodemann Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad, by Steven E. Aschheim. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007. 208 pp. $27.95. Steven Aschheim begins his study on German Jewish intellectuals with Hannah Arendt’s observation that the German-speaking Jews were an “altogether unique phenomenon” which calls for urgent investigation. In this richly erudite book with its nearly 500 footnotes, Aschheim has contributed to just that imperative, and while much has been written on the Weimar German Jewish intellectuals, Aschheim has approached his subject in a manner which other studies could not attempt to do. In the first of his three essays, he addresses the role of German-Jewish intellectuals in Palestine, from Martin Buber to Arthur Ruppin, and their brand of bi-nationally oriented humanist Zionism; in the second, he deals with the role of the émigré historians, mostly in the U.S. (which might explain why Eric Hobsbawm, for example, was excluded) and their role in shaping a new brand of cultural history, and in the last chapter, he asks what might have made these intellectuals (Benjamin, Arendt, Scholem, Adorno, and others) so influential and “fascinating” to younger generations of Western intellectuals today. All three of Aschheim’s intellectual incursions, then, address the rich cultural and intellectual environment we associate with the Weimar Republic, itself the culmination of developments from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Jewish emancipation, democratic patriotism of 1848, and the socialist movement later on. The formation of these German-Jewish intellectuals, their habitus and world views, cannot be explained outside this legacy. And as Jews, they did not even have the chance to become enamored of Weimar’s other strains—antisemitism and völkisch nationalism. Despite their humanist formation, then, Aschheim seems to flirt with the idea, amply contradicted by his own evidence and arguments, that the figures around the Brith Shalom in Palestine were inspired not by German/European liberalism and humanism, but by the negative experiences of European barbarities in World War I and experiences of ethno-nationalism throughout Europe. No doubt the harrowing experiences of the Great War were a catalytic element, but as the author himself points out, there were indeed workable models of ethno-national co-existence in Europe, from Switzerland and Belgium to the Danish minority in Schleswig and most of all, perhaps, Austro-Hungary with the multi-ethnic communities of Prague or Czernowitz. Austro-Marxism provided a model there, as well as the universalistic message [End Page 185] of socialism that influenced many in Brith Shalom and German-Jewish intellectuals (Benjamin, Adorno) elsewhere. These German-Jewish notions are quite distinct, then, from Jabotinsky and his East European followers, and a debate such as Lenin’s discussion of the “Bund in the Party” would have been inconceivable in the West. Moreover, the different assimilationist and universalist habitus of Western Jewry was markedly different from that of their Jewish brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. Amos Oz’s novels have portrayed that intellectual chasm very powerfully. The “crises of conscience” incurred by members of Brith Shalom in the wake of later developments in Palestine, which made a bi-national solution impossible, are hardly reconcilable with notions of Realpolitik that might have grown out of the negative experiences in Europe per se. In light of recent debates concerning a binational solution in Israel/Palestine, Aschheim makes clear that the ideas of Brith Shalom have not lost any of their power and logic. In the second part, Aschheim shows how a small number of émigré historians have created a quite original form of German cultural history, and he contrasts that to the parallel development of a politically committed social history as it developed in West Germany around the same time, from the 1960’s onwards. The émigré cultural historians, a handful including George Mosse, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern, made it their life’s work to address the question of how Nazism became possible within the cultural traditions of Germany, and they were in a position to examine that subject unencumbered by the contemporary German context and its political discourses of guilt and denial, and without the dubious advantage...

Two one-way roads: Some observations of China-West cultural exchange

In the last century there has been a huge number of Western intellectuals visiting China and their Chinese counterparts visiting the West, the Westerners coming here to teach whereas the Chinese going there to learn. The asymmetry in cultural exchange has been caused by their conception of each other’s scholarship: the Western learning has been regarded as universal whereas the Chinese specific. This imbalance has resulted in a strange situation: the Chinese specialists of the West are the cream of the Chinese intelligentsia while the Western sinologists on the margin of the Western academia, and, therefore, the Chinese understanding of the West has to be as accurate as possible while the few cases of Western receptions Chinese influence have all been based on gross misinterpretations.

The Société Européenne de Culture's Dialogue Est-Ouest 1956: Confronting the ‘European Problem’

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw.

CONSIDERING CAPITALISM IN AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT

Triumphant capitalism seems nowadays to be a fact of nature, requiring no name and admitting, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, of “no alternative.” Neither American Capitalism nor Transcending Capitalism shrinks from “naming the system,” as perplexed New Leftists once struggled to do when trying to articulate their own alternative. But having named it, neither book takes as its primary task to define or fully describe that economic and sociocultural system. Rather, both are concerned principally with how twentieth-century American intellectuals, broadly construed, oriented and addressed themselves to the idea of capitalism in light of their respective historical moments’ shifting economic and social realities. Some reformist thinkers came to deny the efficacy of “capitalism” for describing a political–economic order which they believed to be rapidly passing away; their rivals to the right, meanwhile, mounted a reinvigorated defense of the term and its classical implications. While Daniel Bell announced in his 1960 essay on “The End of Ideology in the West” that post-World War II intellectuals had achieved a “rough consensus” on the desirability of the welfare state and political pluralism, the essays in American Capitalism suggest a more complicated picture. The “age of consensus,” that favorite punching bag of recent historians of the United States, takes a few more ritual knocks in the Lichtenstein volume. But the book's essays, in conjunction with Howard Brick's monograph, do establish that the lively discourse on the future of American society which proceeded in the aftermath of World War II was also part of a continuous debate that ran across most of the century's course. Bell suggested one theme of that debate when he argued that Western intellectuals must turn their attention away from political economy in order to address “the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture,” which could not be adequately framed in traditional right-versus-left terms. If Bell's generation, along with the younger New Left thinkers who were soon to appear, found the contradictions of capitalism to be decreasingly pressing, they would find sufficient challenge when they engaged instead with the knotty social and cultural issues of modern America.

A Topography of Confucian Discourse: Politco-philosophical Reflections on Confucian Discourse since Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: A Topography of Confucian Discourse: Politco-philosophical Reflections on Confucian Discourse since Modernity John Berthrong (bio) Lee Seung-hwan. A Topography of Confucian Discourse: Politco-philosophical Reflections on Confucian Discourse since Modernity. Translated by Jaeyoon Song and Lee Seung-hwan. Paramus, NJ: Homa and Sekey Books, 2006. xii + 256 pp. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN 1-931907-27-7. Paperback $29.95. ISBN 1-931907-34-X. What to do with Confucianism? This is a question that engages many contemporary Chinese, Korean, and Japanese intellectuals. Simply deciding what we mean when we use the term “Confucian” or “Confucianism” is not entirely clear and has become a hotly contested issue in East Asia and among the East Asian diaspora. This is especially fascinating for a tradition that not long ago had been given up for dead. In the 1920s, many of the best and brightest young Chinese intellectuals mounted and sustained philosophical and historical attacks on what they considered the incubus of a dead Confucian tradition on the current Chinese situation. At its most simple and pragmatic level, the argument was crystal clear: Confucians were in charge of the Chinese ship of state when it ran aground, with disastrous consequences, when it encountered the unknown shoals of Western imperialism. It did not really matter that no other country could actually stand against the tide of Western imperial might; the fact still held that Confucians were in charge and were held responsible for the catastrophe. A recounting of the general historical interpretation of the role Confucianism played in the demise of the various traditional East Asian cultures is critical to understanding the task that Professor Lee set for himself in collecting this set of stimulating essays on Confucian discourse. In short, Lee explores the various contexts and pretexts of the assorted ways that missionaries, historians, philosophers, and public intellectuals sought to define Confucianism. His basic argument is that all of these parties have interpreted the Confucian Way in order to fit their own agendas. The Jesuits had one agenda, the European Enlightenment audience for the Jesuits back home had another agenda in which the Confucians were to play a role, Western imperial policy makers had yet another interpretation, and, of course, various Asian intellectuals responded to these interpretations as part of the Western imperial and colonial assault on the peoples and cultures of what the Westerners called “East Asia.” Lee argues that this kind of construction of alternative discourses about the history and nature of Confucianism continues today and includes the various theories of postmodernism that are now so popular in Europe and North America. Even these new postmodern theories, alas, are often just the last in a long string of Western interpretations of Confucianism as a perfect example of the culturally different other, an exotic and distant mirror in which the Western eye finds itself endlessly refracted and distorted through its interaction with other cultures and traditions. [End Page 120] The condemnation of the role that Confucianism played in the demise of traditional China was sustained and broadly conceived by both Asian and Western intellectuals. In the first place, the modern reformers pointed out that the Confucians were such an insular, self-satisfied, and petrified group of civil servants that they did not have the sense to realize that they were in trouble. Moreover, young Chinese (and Korean) intellectuals in the 1920s would also have a perfectly good counterexample of what needed to be done to resist the degradation of what the Chinese called the “semi-colonial status” of China in the first part of the twentieth century. This would, of course, be the rise of modern Japan. The lesson drawn from the Japanese case is that there was no reason for an East Asian country to fall prey to Western colonial status if it modernized, and a distinct part of the modernization package was the condemnation of the Confucian past, save for its preservation in the museum of cultural history. The Korean case was even more poignant. If China had slipped into semicolonial bondage by the early 1920s, Korea had fallen prey to the one successful case of East Asian modernization and nation building and had become incorporated into...

Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920-1940: From Red Square to the Left Bank. By Ludmila Stern. BASEES/Roudedge Series on Russian and East European Studies, no. 31. New York: Routledge, 2007. xi, 269 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $125.00, hard bound.

Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920-1940: From Red Square to the Left Bank. By Ludmila Stern. BASEES/Roudedge Series on Russian and East European Studies, no. 31. New York: Routledge, 2007. xi, 269 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $125.00, hard bound.

Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920-40

Ludmila Stern se propose dans cet ouvrage de revisiter la question de l’attraction des intellectuels occidentaux pour l’URSS dans l’entre-deux-guerres, en exploitant les archives des organisations culturelles sovietiques chargees des contacts avec les democraties bourgeoises. Un premier chapitre presente un panorama des succes du mythe sovietique, a partir essentiellement du paysage intellectuel francais, compare aux cas britannique, allemand et americain. Posant le paradoxe d’une conversion ...

"The Solzhenitsyn Effect": East European Dissidents and the Demise of the Revolutionary Privilege

For much of the modern era, revolution served as a justification for gross violations of human rights. The sources of this "revolutionary privilege" are to be found in the historical experience of the Western world. Both the Jacobin tradition and Marxism contributed to the readiness of many Western intellectuals concerned with human rights to turn a blind eye to the atrocities of the Bolshevik revolution, its Stalinist aftermath, and a variety of Third World regimes. During the 1970s, East European dissidents, citizens of revolutionary societies, challenged this double-standard. The ensuing "Solzhenitsyn Effect" contributed not merely to the "human rights boom" of the era, but also to the emergence of a new, radical humanitarianism.

Clandestine Agent: The Real Agnes Smedley

This essay reviews a new biography of Agnes Smedley, a radical American writer and journalist who secretly worked for the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party on various endeavors, including espionage. When Smedley was accused in the late 1940s of having been a Soviet spy, she staunchly denied the allegations and depicted herself as an innocent victim of a McCarthyite smear. Ruth Price, the author of the new biography, initially expected to find that Smedley had indeed been unjustly accused of spying for the Soviet Union. But as Price sifted through newly available materials from Russia and China, she made the disconcerting discovery that Smedley had in fact eagerly served as an agent of influence and spy for the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists. This case illustrates some of the complexities that arise when assessing why certain Western intellectuals and government officials decided to become spies for the Soviet Union.

LUDMILA STERN. Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920-40: From Red Square to the Left Bank. (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies.) New York: Routledge. 2007. Pp. 269. $127.78

LUDMILA STERN. Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920-40: From Red Square to the Left Bank. (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies.) New York: Routledge. 2007. Pp. 269. $127.78

The end of commitment: intellectuals, revolutionaries, and political morality

The seduction of some of the twentieth century's great thinkers by Communist ideology and ideals is one of the most intriguing stories in the history of that ill-fated century. How was it that these distinguished intellectuals, public figures, and revolutionaries could enlist in the service of ideas which, when put in practice, proved repressive? Much has been written about the durable attraction of communism; we know far less about the disillusionment it spawned. In The End of Commitment, the distinguished sociologist Paul Hollander investigates how and why those individuals who were attracted to communism finally abandoned the cause that moved them. His is the first book to take a comprehensive, historically comparative view of disillusionment with Communist ideologies and systems, both in the countries where they were introduced and in the West. Relying chiefly on the autobiographies and memoirs of defectors, exiles, and dissidents from Communist states (the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, and in the Third World) as well as similar writings of major Western figures, Mr. Hollander examines and compares the sources and expressions of this political disenchantment. Concentrating on the moral conflicts created by the clash of unrealized ideals and actual practice, The End of Commitment sheds new light on the failings and malfunctions of these systems that were fully grasped only by those who lived under them. In a final, provocative section, Mr. Hollander explores the attitudes of some distinguished Western intellectuals who resisted disillusionment and clung to their commitment in the face of a welter of discrediting information. In all, his book offers a new insight into the patterns and processes of political attitude formation, persistence, and change in different social and historical settings.

How Serious Is Our Divergence?: A Reply to Thomas A. Metzger

This book is based on the premise that thinking about how to improve politi cal life cannot be the product of either a closed cultural system or of reason as a uniform cognitive faculty with which all persons try to apprehend and reflect on objective realities or universal principles. Insisting that both dimensions are paradoxically combined in everyone's thinking, I take issues with two groups— the Western scholars fascinated just with culture, and the many Western and Chinese intellectuals who today still largely ignore how reflexivity is shaped by disparate cultural patterns. (Metzger 2005,13-14)

Sex og orientalisme - med Gustave Flaubert i hamam

Mehmet Ümit Necef: Sex and Orientalism – with Gustave Flaubert in Hamam In his influential study “Orientalism“ Edward Said almost demonises the intimate and sexual relations between Orientals and Western intellectuals and authors, who in the 1800’s and early 1900’s visited the Orient. His main target among these travellers is Gustave Flaubert. This article discusses the question as to why Said silences Flaubert’s homoerotical interests. I posit the thesis that this is because Flaubert’s multifaceted sexuality does not fit nicely into Said’s theoretical ideas about the hierarchies and dichotomies of Western “Orientalist“ thought. I also argue that Said’s theoretical frame of reference makes it impossible for him to fully acknowledge sexual cultural differences between Northwest Europe and the Turkish/Arabic countries. Finally, I argue that Said’s theories obstruct a full appreciation of Flaubert’s pleasure of meeting the other and his openness to self-development through such meetings.

Reading Tariq Ramadan: Political Liberalism, Islam, and “Overlapping Consensus”

T he interest of Western intellectuals in Islamic political and ethical traditions (predominantly its traditions of warfare, but also of governance, social order, and gender relations) is now almost matched by our fascination with ‘‘Islam in the West.’’ This interest quite naturally manifests itself in a focus on certain key public figures in European Islam, the single most prominent of which by far is Tariq Ramadan. The fascination with Ramadan is understandable. He is, on the one hand, a scion of political Islam—the grandson of Hasan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (the wellspring of many of Islamism’s twentiethcentury tendencies); and the son of Sa‘id Ramadan, one of the most prominent mid-century figures in the ‘‘Islamist International,’’ comprised of exiles from Muslim countries, local grassroots movements (from the Brotherhood to more radical ‘‘Salafi’’ groups), and the conservative oil monarchies. On the other hand, he is an outspoken advocate of the notion that European Muslims can be both European and Muslim in equal measure. He calls on Muslims to be active and engaged citizens of European countries, faithful to their constitutional systems, yet insists that this can be done without adopting a diluted, ‘‘liberal Islam’’ in matters of social and personal morality. On top of this, Ramadan is telegenic, articulate, multilingual, and charismatic. For a Western audience he is a unique Muslim media figure: neither a radical bogeyman a la bin Laden or Khomeini (or one of their myriad imitators, such as Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri or even, significantly, Ramadan’s own brother, Hani), nor an outright secular liberal (ex-)Muslim a la Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, or Salman Rushdie. Given the current historical and political moment, Ramadan is an exciting and controversial figure; and it was perhaps inevitable that there should emerge a small journalistic and political industry dedicated to speculation on his ultimate views or intentions. 1 Underlying the scrutiny of Ramadan’s career and

The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother

Everyone has had one's own Orient, pertaining to space and time, most often of (Todorova 1997:12). Revisited Orientalism as critical category was instituted by Edward Said in 1978. For him orientalism is, first of all, set of discursive practices through which West structured imagined East politically, socially, military, ideologically, scientifically and artistically. is also a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and...'the Occident' (Said 1978: 2) The Orient as such exists and real people live in region concerned, but European representation of these people is typical cultural creation that enables those powerful to legitimize their domination over those subjugated and conquered. The oriental constitutes alter ego of West and perpetuation of this dichotomy proves that powerful cultural hegemony is still at work. Discursive hardening permits politically stronger groups to define weaker groups. has been received both approvingly and critically. The most important critiques refer to fact that Said's work frequently relapses into essentializing modes it attacks and is ambivalently enmeshed in totalizing habits of western humanism (Clifford 1988:271). Critique notwithstanding, book inspired sequel of works, some of them directly addressing Eastern Europe (Wolff 1994) and Balkans (Todorova 1997; Bakii-Hayden 1995; Bakic-Hayden and Hayden 1992; Hayden 2000). Wolff wrote about invention of Eastern Europe in period of Enlightenment by Western intellectuals, travelers and writers in style similar to Said's. Todorova is more specific. She focuses on Balkans and asserts that in Western eyes this region appears, so to speak, as neither fish, nor fowl, semi-oriental, not fully European, semi-developed, and semi-civilized. Unlike orientalism, which is discourse about imputed opposition, balkanism is discourse about an imputed (Todorova 1997: 17). An ambiguity that raises anxiety. The Balkans emerge as product of attempted Europeanization (westernization, democratization), region that permanently has to shed the last residue of imperial [i.e. Ottoman] legacy (p. 13) by implementing rationalism, secularism, commercial activities and industry. The work in imagology, term she borrows from Milan Kundera, despite being narrowed and redefined, also focuses on way West has created its quasi-colony which has to be dominated and subordinated both politically and intellectually. While discussing orientalism, Said, Wolff and Todorova touch upon several issues vital for today's anthropology that I will partly, although at times only indirectly, address later. All of these revolve around issue of alterity and epistemological validity of concept of Other. Thus, one can recognize that they are concerned with (1) modes by which is created. In anthropology, as well as in works cited, often assumes status of (2) universal cognitive category in factory of social and individual identity that divides universe into us and them. However, it also figures as (3) an analytical concept that enables authors to construct narration and at same time, somehow paradoxically, and in most subtle approaches, to (4) deconstruct category itself. In social life, process of making assumes various forms. Shifts in collective identities and meaning of the Other have become part of transformations in Europe after 1989. There are several factors influencing these alterations, but one among them seems especially salient: restructuring of perception of social inequalities by hegemonic liberal ideology. The degree to which various countries, authorities, social groups and individuals have embraced free market and democracy-always evaluated by those powerful who set rules of game-has become yardstick for classifying different regions, countries and groups as fining more or less into category of us, i. …

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: gender and the seductions of Islamism

In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and Le Monde. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker.

Religion in the Public Sphere

Religious traditions and communities of faith have gained a new, hitherto unexpected political importance since the epochmaking change of 1989–90. Needless to say, what initially spring to mind are the variants of religious fundamentalism that we face not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Southeast Asia, and in the Indian subcontinent. They often lock into national and ethnic conflicts, and today also form the seedbed for the decentralized form of terrorism that operates globally and is directed against the perceived insults and injuries caused by a superior Western civilization. There are other symptoms, too. For example, in Iran the protest against a corrupt regime set in place and supported by the West has given rise to a veritable rule of priests that serves other movements as a model to follow. In several Muslim countries, and in Israel as well, religious family law is either an alternative or a substitute for secular civil law. And in Afghanistan (and soon in Iraq), the application of a more or less liberal constitution must be limited by its compatibility with the Sharia. Likewise, religious conflicts are squeezing their way into the international arena. The hopes associated with the political agenda of multiple modernities are fueled by the cultural self-confidence of those world religions that to this very day unmistakably shape the physiognomy of the major civilizations. And on the Western side of the fence, the perception of international relations has changed in light of the fears of a ‘clash of civilizations’—‘the axis of evil’ is merely one prominent example of this. Even Western intellectuals, to date self-critical in this regard, are starting to go on the offensive in their response to the image of Occidentalism that the others have of the West. Fundamentalism in other corners of the earth can be construed, among other things, in terms of the long-term impact of violent colonization and failures in decolonization. Under unfavorable circumstances, capitalist modernization penetrating these societies from the outside then triggers social uncertainty and cultural upheavals. On this reading, religious movements process the radical changes in social structure and cultural dissynchronies, which under conditions of an accelerated or failing modernization the individual may experience as a sense of being uprooted. What is more surprising is the political revitalization of religion at the heart of the United States, where the dynamism of modernization unfolds most successfully. Certainly, in Europe ever since the days of the French Revolution we have been aware of the power of a religious form of traditionalism that saw itself as counter-revolutionary. However, this evocation of religion as the

Marxism without Revolution: Towards a History of Discouragement

Marxism without Revolution: Towads a History of Discouragement David R. Shumway Carnegie Mellon University Any comparison of Marxism with religion is a two-way street, in which the former is not necessarily discredited by its association with the later. —Fredric Jameson (1981) Fredric Jameson has asserted the need for a theory of discour-agement. I will leave the theorizing to him and follow instead another Jamesonian command, the one that says, "always historicize." I will argue, however, that our present discouragement is not rooted especially in any current conjuncture—though I do not wish to deny that recent events have been especially discouraging—but rather in something like the "longue durée" of the intellectual and Marxism. In other words, my basic argument is that discouragement is built into both the politics and social position that we have inherited. By "we," I mean practitioners of cultural studies and other left-wing or liberal intellectuals—not just Marxists—who I will claim continue to understand their political role much as Marxism has defined it. There are two conditions that have come to define the critical intellectual as always already discouraged. One of these involves the role of critic or interpreter that intellectuals have historically defined for themselves and the countervailing desire to have an impact on politics, or what has come to be called in recent theory, agency. The other involves the failure of history to conform to the Marxist prediction of revolution or even to the liberal faith in progress. Here a broader concept of historical agency is thrown into question, as the working class failed to achieve its world-historical mission. I will suggest that these two conditions are related, and that they combine to produce a sort of paralysis, a pessimism of the will despite Gramsci's formula. As Zygmunt Bauman has shown, Western intellectuals have constituted themselves in the space between two opposing identities, the interpreter and the legislator. The interpreters are the more numerous [End Page 30] party, and when we speak of intellectuals, we normally mean this group. As interpreters, intellectuals have placed themselves outside of the political process except as producers of critical discourse. This has allowed them to remain independent of government and often even parties or interest groups, save their own. The legislators, on the other hand, sought to enact their ideas by joining the government. Those who did so successfully found themselves facing the need to compromise the critical positions that they developed before becoming part of the state. As a result, their identity as intellectuals came into question, while their actual activities seldom resulted in what seemed to them significant change. While the interpreters refused to engage in actual governance, they like the legislators nevertheless characteristically expressed a class identification. Bauman argues that The world of the intellectuals was politically divided. They threw in their lot with one or the other of the class opponents engaged in a bitter conflict for the power resources of the state. Each choice, however, was argued and legitimized in terms of the hope that the selected class would desire, and be able, to create or sustain a society comfortable for intellectual pursuits; a society that admits in practice the centrality of specifically intellectual domains (like culture and education) and the crucial role of ideas in the reproduction of communal life. (147) This puts intellectuals in the position of facing predictable failure regardless of which class they embraced. The bourgeoisie consistently refused to create a society that regarded intellectual life as anything other than marginal, while the working class could at best offer a promise to change that state of affairs. As result, we can say that intellectuals have constantly experienced the discouragement that comes from not only the failure of their critique to bring about social change, but also from the from the sense that society regarded them, not as dangerous, but irrelevant. But why did intellectuals come to believe that they could change the world? While a complete answer would take...