Castles in the air an essay on political foundations

Political Theory

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 460-490

  Seery, John E ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0033246146     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591799027004003     Document Type: Review

References (124)

1. Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,'" Praxis International, 11, no. 2 (1991): 150-65. The paper was first presented in a different version at the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium in 1990.
2. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 3-21; Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, eds., with an introduction by Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 35-57; see also Stephen Eric Bronner, ed., Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader, (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 248-58. It should be noted that Butler has subsequently distanced herself from the original essay. See Butler, "For a Careful Reading," in Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions, 127-43, especially 127.
3. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 3-21; Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, eds., with an introduction by Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 35-57; see also Stephen Eric Bronner, ed., Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader, (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 248-58. It should be noted that Butler has subsequently distanced herself from the original essay. See Butler, "For a Careful Reading," in Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions, 127-43, especially 127.
4. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 3-21; Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, eds., with an introduction by Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 35-57; see also Stephen Eric Bronner, ed., Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader, (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 248-58. It should be noted that Butler has subsequently distanced herself from the original essay. See Butler, "For a Careful Reading," in Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions, 127-43, especially 127.
5. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 3-21; Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, eds., with an introduction by Linda Nicholson, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 35-57; see also Stephen Eric Bronner, ed., Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader, (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 248-58. It should be noted that Butler has subsequently distanced herself from the original essay. See Butler, "For a Careful Reading," in Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions, 127-43, especially 127.
6. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," in Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, 3.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Ibid., 16.
9. Butler later clarifies that she is not presenting a "theory of the self but is more interested in gender identities. "For a Careful Reading," 133.
10. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 7.
11. Butler, "For a Careful Reading," 131.
12. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 7, 17.
13. Butler, "For a Careful Reading," 131.
14. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 16; "For a Careful Reading," 131.
15. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 16; "For a Careful Reading," 131.
16. "To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it; rather, it is to free it up from its metaphysical lodgings in order to occupy and to serve very different political aims." Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 17.
17. Kirstie McClure, "The Issue of Foundations: Scientized Politics, Politicized Science, and Feminist Critical Practice," in Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, 341-68, especially 365.
18. See, for example, Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning: Conversations between Hermeneutics and Analysis (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Academic Printing, 1987); Stephen Crook, Modernist Radicalism and Its Aftermath: Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Radical Social Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamic of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
19. See, for example, Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning: Conversations between Hermeneutics and Analysis (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Academic Printing, 1987); Stephen Crook, Modernist Radicalism and Its Aftermath: Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Radical Social Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamic of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
20. See, for example, Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning: Conversations between Hermeneutics and Analysis (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Academic Printing, 1987); Stephen Crook, Modernist Radicalism and Its Aftermath: Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Radical Social Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamic of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
21. Stanley Fish, "Anti-Foundationalism, Theory Hope, and the Teaching of Composition," in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Duke and London: Duke University Press, 1989), 342-55; see 342.
22. Ibid., 342-43.
23. Ibid., 343.
24. Ibid., 345.
25. Ibid., 344.
26. Ibid., 345.
27. Evan Simpson, "Colloquimur, ergo sumus," in Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning, 1-2.
28. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 159.
29. Ibid., 162-63.
30. Ibid., 163.
31. Ibid., 12-13, 39 n 6, 159 n 40.
32. Ibid., 159.
33. Ibid., 161.
34. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, "Like Bridges without Piers: Beyond the Foundationalist Metaphor," in Antifoundationalism Old and New, ed. Tom Rockmore and Beth J. Singer (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 143-64.
35. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 1:1.
36. William James, The Principles of Psychology, in The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 2:656-57.
37. Seigfried, "Like Bridges without Piers," 144.
38. With some minor tweaking, I am borrowing the term political constructivism largely from Rawls. The tweaking is needed insofar as his original position still resembles an Edenic form of prepolitical theorizing. For instance, Rawls insists that "political constructivism also holds that if a conception of justice is correctly founded on correctly stated principles and conceptions of practical reason, then that conception of justice is reasonable for a constitutional regime" (p. 126). As I attempt to show from the discussions that follow of Christine de Pizan and Hannah Arendt, political construction materials can be based on poiesis, not simply phronesis. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 89-129.
39. Butler, "Contingent Foundations," 19.
40. Ibid., 17, 16.
41. Ibid., 129, 133.
42. Ibid., 12, 20 n. 1.
43. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 144.
44. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 16.
45. Margaret Brabant and Michael Brint make the point that whereas Augustine identifies spiritually with Aeneas's quest, Christine identifies with Dido as the architect and builder of a great city. Brabant and Brint, "Identity and Difference in Christine de Pizan's Cité des Dames," in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992), 209-10.
46. Giovanni Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women (De Claris Mulieribus), trans. Guido A. Guarino (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963).
47. Patricia A. Phillippy, "Establishing Authority: Boccaccio's De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pizan's Le livre de la cité des dames," in The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (New York: Norton, 1997), 329-61.
48. de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 66.
49. Phillippy, "Establishing Authority," 344.
50. John Freccero, Dante : The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
51. See Kate Langdon Forhan, "Reflecting Heroes: Christine de Pizan and the Mirror Tradition," in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmermann and Dina De Rentiis (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 189-96.
52. See Dana R. Villa, "Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Alienation, and Critique," in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 179-206.
53. Arendt also discusses Virgil and the Aeneid in connection with Herman Broch's Death of Virgil. Hannah Arendt, "No Longer and Not Yet," The Nation, September 2, 1946, 300-2; "Herman Broch: 1886-1951," trans. Richard Winston, in Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 111-51.
54. Arendt also discusses Virgil and the Aeneid in connection with Herman Broch's Death of Virgil. Hannah Arendt, "No Longer and Not Yet," The Nation, September 2, 1946, 300-2; "Herman Broch: 1886-1951," trans. Richard Winston, in Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 111-51.
55. Arendt also discusses Virgil and the Aeneid in connection with Herman Broch's Death of Virgil. Hannah Arendt, "No Longer and Not Yet," The Nation, September 2, 1946, 300-2; "Herman Broch: 1886-1951," trans. Richard Winston, in Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 111-51.
56. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Part I. Thinking (San Diego, CA: Haicourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 152. Some careful readers of Arendt might insist that I should qualify this statement to read, the purest form of Roman politics, but that historicizing slant would elide the importance of this particular passage. Especially noteworthy here is that Arendt distinguishes between early Roman philosophy, which she says is exclusively political, the purest form of which she finds in Virgil, and later, Roman philosophy, which becomes ossified, thus extinguishing the element of surprise that is apparently crucial to Arendt's sense of politicalness. Virgil's novelly creative appropriation of the Greeks is to be distinguished from later Roman, that is, quasi-scientific or sacred, appeals to Greek authority. By contrast, Virgil makes only a cameo appearance in Arendt's earlier essays on Roman authority. In focusing on Arendt's fascination with the pure politics of Virgil, I am not suggesting that she advocates some contemporary emulation of or imitative reliance on Virgil - but I do want to recover the buried idea that the past can be imaginatively embraced.
57. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 202.
58. Ibid., 202-3.
59. Ibid., 203.
60. Ibid., 204.
61. Ibid.
62. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Part 2. Willing, 200-3; Arendt, On Revolution, 204-5.
63. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Part 2. Willing, 200-3; Arendt, On Revolution, 204-5.
64. Arendt, On Revolution, 205; Willing, 203.
65. Arendt, On Revolution, 205; Willing, 203.
66. Arendt, Willing, 206.
67. Arendt, Willing, 210; On Revolution, 206.
68. Arendt, Willing, 210; On Revolution, 206.
69. Arendt, Willing, 204; On Revolution, 205.
70. Arendt, Willing, 204; On Revolution, 205.
71. Arendt, Willing, 208; On Revolution, 206.
72. Arendt, Willing, 208; On Revolution, 206.
73. Arendt, Willing, 208; On Revolution, 206.
74. Arendt, Willing, 208; On Revolution, 206.
75. Arendt, Willing, 208.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 208-9.
78. Arendt, Willing, 210; On Revolution, 206.
79. Arendt, Willing, 210; On Revolution, 206.
80. Arendt, Willing, 211; On Revolution, 209.
81. Arendt, Willing, 211; On Revolution, 209.
82. Arendt, Willing, 211.
83. Ibid., 214.
84. Ibid., 213.
85. Arendt, On Revolution, 210.
86. Arendt, Willing, 215.
87. Arendt, On Revolution, 208.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Arendt, Willing, 204; On Revolution, 209.
91. Arendt, Willing, 204; On Revolution, 209.
92. Arendt, On Revolution, 213.
93. Ibid., 211.
94. Ibid.
95. Arendt, Willing, 207; On Revolution, 212.
96. Arendt, Willing, 207; On Revolution, 212.
97. Arendt, On Revolution, 212.
98. Ibid.
99. Arendt, Willing, 216.
100. Ibid., 217; On Revolution, 211.
101. Ibid., 217; On Revolution, 211.
102. Arendt, On Revolution, 213-14.
103. Ibid., 214.
104. Arendt, Willing, 217.
105. See Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
106. Hannah Arendt, "What Is Authority?" in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1961), 140. I am aware that in her preface, Arendt denies that the subsequent essays contain any practical prescriptions. The following six essays are such exercises, and their only aim is to gain experience in how to think; they do not contain prescriptions on what to think or which truths to hold. Least of all do they intend to retie the broken thread of tradition or to invent some newfangled surrogates with which to fill the gap between past and future. (p. 14; see also p. 141)
107. Ibid., 136.
108. Ibid., 95.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.
112. Arendt ended the original version of her essay with this paragraph on shifting groundworks. Hannah Arendt, "What Was Authority?" in Authority, ed. Carl Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 81-112.
113. Hannah Arendt, "On Hannah Arendt," in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 336-37; see also 314.
114. Ibid., 336.
115. Arendt betrays her Edenic tendencies when writing about foundational walls; city walls are built in relation to nature, as a hedge against the encroachments of nature. See Between Past and Future, 286 n. 18.
116. Stan Spyros Draenos makes the important suggestion that perhaps we can emulate Arendt's example of thinking without a ground without, however, merely following in her footsteps. But that elusive exemplification still provides little political direction, whether direct or oblique. Stan Spyros Draenos, "Thinking without a Ground: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Situation of Understanding," in Hannah Arendt, ed. Hill, 209-24.
117. Richard Rorty wishes that leftist academics would stop so much claptrap theorizing and attend instead to real political concerns. While I welcome his incisive critique of a visionless academic left, his own political recommendations remain hamstrung by his inability or unwillingness to argue for his particular version of a less cruel, more egalitarian, anticommunist, pro-American style of liberal democracy. To him, such foundational requests smack of metaphysics, so he avoids explaining himself; yet he betrays and undercuts his own positive contributions when he keeps slipping back into the kind of academic infighting of which he so disapproves. My point is that there are alternative ways of establishing political foundations that may prove more effective at large than Rorty's personally passionate reliance on Dewey. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
118. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 128.
119. Most of Arendt's political "spaces" appear to be modeled on open-air, outdoor images, with the exception of the town hall, and her recurring discussions of "worldlessness" and "homelessness" only exacerbate that tendency. But Seyla Benhabib's discerning eye detects an interior design that informs the relations in Rahel Varnhagen's salon. The salon is a fascinating space: unlike an assembly hall, a town square, a conference room, or even simply the family dinner table, the salon, with its large, luxurious, and rambling space, allows for moments of intimacy; in a salon, people are with each other but must not always be next to each other. Salons are amorphous structures with no established rules of entry and exit for those who have formed intimacy; in fact, it may be a sign of good manners to foster and to allow the formation of intimacy among members of the salon. What is important here is the fluidity of the lines between the gathering as one and the gathering as many units of intimacy, and how the salons can be both public and private, both shared and intimate. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 16.
120. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
121. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 36-37, 108, 111, 129-33; "The Image of Hell," Commentary 2/3 (September 1946): 291-95; The Human Condition, 233; Men in Dark Times, 233, 245.
122. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 36-37, 108, 111, 129-33; "The Image of Hell," Commentary 2/3 (September 1946): 291-95; The Human Condition, 233; Men in Dark Times, 233, 245.
123. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 36-37, 108, 111, 129-33; "The Image of Hell," Commentary 2/3 (September 1946): 291-95; The Human Condition, 233; Men in Dark Times, 233, 245.
124. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 36-37, 108, 111, 129-33; "The Image of Hell," Commentary 2/3 (September 1946): 291-95; The Human Condition, 233; Men in Dark Times, 233, 245.