Looking beyond ‘imaginary’ analytics and hermeneutics in comparative politics

Introduction

Perhaps the backbone of the literature on secularism after 9 /11 is the multiple modernities approach, often referred to as multiple secularism or varieties of secularism. ¹ This approach calls for attention to different contexts, and parts with both the ‘modernity will not travel’ and ‘will definitely travel as is’ theses. This debate has been enacted between area studies and comparativists many times before. What is particular about the current claim to a hermeneutical turn under multiple modernities is the use of Charles Taylor’s ‘imaginary’ and Max Weber’s ‘verstehen’ analytics for capturing the core of each modernity. In this article I argue that these uses of the multiple modernities approach for surpassing Huntingtonian culturalism have ushered in a new form of post-Huntingtonian culturalism by disregarding crucial elements of the original multiple modernities thesis at the expense of other possible research routes.

I The multiple modernities thesis

Shmuel Eisenstadt’s ‘Multiple Modernities’ ² is cited in many works, including Taylor’s A Secular Age; ³ often, however, without an examination of the argument. The ‘idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world – indeed to explain the history of modernity – is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs’. ⁴ An ‘original western project’ is taken in various countries as ‘the crucial (and usually ambivalent) reference point’ and ‘the meaning of modernity’ is reinterpreted in various directions, as a result ‘depriving the West of its monopoly on modernity’. ⁵ The original thesis demands finding and examining the moments of (potential) reinterpretations. That is, it is not an exercise in listing bounded and non-interacting modernities, building Weberian typologies; to the contrary, the approach requires a focus on the unboundedness of each modernity in order to pin down the moments of interaction where the ‘reinterpretation’ happens (or perhaps does not happen). This is precisely the criticism of A Secular Age that Nilüfer Göle has articulated; ‘an introspective reading of Western secularity can lose sight of the cultural powers of the secular’, ⁶ and moments of interactions ⁷ and ‘interpenetrations’. ⁸ Göle’s criticism is particularly significant, because Turkey is one of the examples in Eisenstadt’s article, ⁹ which he reads from Göle’s The Forbidden Modern. ¹⁰

II Imaginary and isomorphism

Most of the time we receive a list of bounded and non-interacting modernities in the name of exercising the multiple modernities approach. In such lists the most common analytical concept for capturing the core of each modernity is Charles Taylor’s ‘imaginary’. The second most likely candidate is Max Weber’s ‘verstehen’. Taylor himself claims that the ‘multiple modernities’ thesis is most visible at the level of social imaginaries, because

…it is on this level that local particularities most clearly emerge. If we define modernity in terms of certain institutional changes…it is easy to go on nourishing the illusion that modernity is a single process…ultimately bringing convergence and uniformity to our world…we have to speak of ‘multiple modernities,’ different ways of erecting and animating the institutional forms that are becoming inescapable. ¹¹

Taylor’s intervention tempts one for a discussion on ontology and epistemology. However, the scope, terms and question formulations of such a discussion can emerge only after tackling the relation between ideas and actions – which ‘imaginary’ marries analytically – in the study of secularism and religion from the vantage point of ethnographies and histories in order to filter out simple claims, and expand our analytical map of permutations on this relation. We can start with Taylor’s own comments on events. He comments on the 2004 French law banning religious symbols in public schools as a reassertion of the French laïc social imaginary purifying public space of ‘religious difference’ in the face of new challenges of diversity. ¹⁴ Such a description, first, overlooks the fact that the contestation was endogenous, and not exogenous to laïcité. The struggle was over history, particularly the Third French Republic. ¹⁵ There were laïc subjects as well as Muslim subjects among the proponents and opponents of the law. Second, coterminous with the law there were three movements in France that aimed at putting religion institutionally in public space: ¹⁶ (1) the establishment of the French Muslim Council and the first Muslim high school; (2) a movement to reintroduce ‘factual’ teaching of religion in public schools, with some proponents emerging from the ranks of opponents of the headscarf; and (3) Nicolas Sarkozy’s mobilization of laïcité positive, ¹⁷ which had support from the Vatican. ‘Imaginary’ analytics can articulate conflict only as a conflict of imaginaries and does not have an eye for such non-isomorphic relations between ideas and actions. In fact, Clifford Geertz marks non-isomorphism as the key in accounting for change. ¹⁸ This is important to underline because in Taylor’s discussion on ideas and context with Quentin Skinner, he cites Geertz in his own defense; yet, this is a misreading of the Geertz of Java. ¹⁹

Non-isomorphism between ideas and actions also poses a challenge for defining religious actors. For instance, the definition offered by Daniel Philpott – ‘any individual or collectivity, local or transnational, who acts coherently and consistently to influence politics in the name of a religion’ ²⁰ – excludes empirically present moments of incoherence and inconsistencies between ideas and actions. This would have the normative consequence of categorizing all these moments as ‘abuse’ of religion; in the final analysis serving to save a ‘core’ of religion, which can conflict with the goal of providing an analysis of it. One recalls Geertz again, who once remarked: ‘Our problem is not to define religion but to find it.’ ²¹

III Finding religion

In post-Huntingtonian analytics, religion is again at the center of each modernity; not as its rigid ‘civilizational’, but its flexible ‘imaginary’ core. It is stunning that in many reports and academic works, ‘Turkey’ has become ‘Muslim Turkey’ ²² or ‘democratic Muslim Turkey’. ²³ Or a peer in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom has become a ‘Muslim Peer’ ²⁴ and postwar labour migration to Europe has become postwar Muslim-labour migration. ²⁵ The idea of a majority religion – Catholic France, Muslim Turkey – is carrying the explanatory weight at the expense of other facts. The ground normative theory is built on also makes us wonder how far we have distanced ourselves from Huntingtonianism. Take Jürgen Habermas who writes: ‘[T]he 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.’ ²⁶

Comparative institutionalist research designs, such as Alfred Stepan’s ‘twin tolerations’ ²⁷ and ‘multiple secularisms’, ²⁸ which have the empirical upper hand on Huntingtonian civilizationism, fall back on religious texts and concepts in search of local roots for democratic institutions. Stepan turns to Weber’s ‘verstehen’, in order to tackle Huntington’s univocal take on religious texts – categorizing them into either pro- or anti-democratic – and ‘explor[ing] whether these [religious] doctrines contain multivocal components that are usable, or at least compatible, with the political construction of the twin tolerations’. ²⁹ Stepan’s examples are his interviews with Islamic leaders who mobilize democracy-prone scriptural concepts. ³⁰ We have moved from univocality to multivocality, but the text is still the main aspect of the context which limits us again to ‘scriptural hermeneutics’. ³¹ The leaders’ statements are taken at face value. Frederick Engels in his Peasant War in Germany demonstrates how Luther makes different statements in different contexts. ³² Even if these leaders’ democracy-prone concepts mobilize, whether the direction is populism or democracy requires further discussion. As Saba Mahmood points out, it is as if ‘the core problem…is…interpretation…the interpretive act is regarded as the foundation of any religious subjectivity and therefore the key to its emancipation or secularization’. ³³

IV The struggle between the analytical and hermeneutical schools

This is not the first time a hermeneutical turn is claimed as a new comparative approach to modernity. This line of critique is the gist of post-colonial studies, subaltern studies, ‘post-orientalist histories’ ³⁴ and ‘alternative modernities’. ³⁵ However, current work claimed under the multiple modernities approach in the literature on secularism and religion at times reduces itself to coupling the term ‘imaginary’ with a collective subject, such as ‘French imaginary’, and this hardly qualifies as a hermeneutical turn. If ‘there is no hermeneutical science of man without a subject’, and that context matters, ‘things have meaning in a field, that is, in relation to the meaning of other things’, ³⁶ attribution of single-meaning worlds to large collectivities assumes what needs to be proven; without disregarding the non-isomorphic relations between ideas and actions. For instance, in A Secular Age, the voice of the main subject, ‘“we” who live in the West’, ³⁷ is absent. What is present instead is a history of ideas, which in the words of Judith Shklar – commenting directly on Taylor’s hermeneutics – is an ‘authoritative act of consciousness raising’ rather than a study of various consciousnesses, and Shklar opens an interesting discussion on method when she remarks that ‘between an authoritative act of consciousness-raising and an interpretation that simply relates two areas of understanding, there can really be no compromise’. ³⁸

The standard hermeneutical critique of analytical-modernist schools is that they describe as anomalies institutional deviations in one context (usually non-western) from a modern ideal-type that the researcher has developed from another context (usually the West). There are various articulations of this discussion which usually takes place between comparativists and area studies; I find Andrew Davison’s formulation constructive: ‘[W]ithout offering an interpretation of these [subjective and intersubjective, shared and contested] meanings in all of the natural hermeneutic limits that I have described, we cannot be sure that we are explaining others’ political lives or our own.’ ³⁹ Taylor’s comments on Gadamer have a significant difference from Davison’s articulation. He refers to ‘irreducible cultural variation’: ⁴⁰

It is not simply knowledge of our own past that needs to be understood on the ‘conversation’ model, but knowledge of the other as such, including disciplines like anthropology, where student and studied often belong to quite different civilizations. ⁴¹

V Practical routes to and from the new meaning thesis

In the literature on secularism and religion the struggle between the analytical and hermeneutical schools has boiled down to the former treating non-western institutional deviations as anomalies of an ideal-type western separation to be understood by socio-cultural variables, and the latter documenting how political actors comprehend institutions and articulating how these institutional differences make sense from the point of view of the actors who are their architects. Both positions pre-empt the possibility of investigating political fields of secularism and religion common to Europe and its outside: the former by displacing anomalies to outside Europe, the latter by encapsulating the anomalies in a specific understanding of secularism and religion. Usually it is the analytical approach that is viewed as having a potential for orientalism; however, the hermeneutical is not free from this potential, because its narratives render the place and the subjects inhabiting it exotic, peculiar and exceptional; e.g. an Indian meaning of secularism.

One practical reason for concluding with a new meaning thesis in the non-western world is that area specialists’ research by definition is limited to certain areas. Dipesh Chakrabarty remarks:

Provincializing Europe is not a book about the region of the world we call ‘Europe.’ That Europe…has already been provincialized by history itself…The Europe I seek to provincialize or decenter is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of political modernity in South Asia. ⁴³

In this regard Ahmet Kuru’s comparative analysis ⁴⁵ is important because he traces a similar political field of secularism in the United States, France and Turkey, rather than advocating a separate worlds or new meaning in the non-western world thesis. However, following Weber, he reduces this political field to a struggle over meanings (of secularism), an argument that requires isomorphism as a precondition; that is, the set of ideas has a one-to-one corresponding set of actions: one idea cannot lead to an action that another idea leads to. Such relation between ideas and actions does not hold in at least two of Kuru’s cases. Kuru argues that different ‘policies toward religion’ in all the three countries are the result of historically rooted ideological struggles between assertive and passive secularists. ‘Assertive secularism is a “comprehensive doctrine,” whereas passive secularism mainly prioritizes state neutrality toward such doctrines.’ ⁴⁶ Kuru’s different ideas of secularism cannot account for the convergences on policy and institutions between the two sides. Kemalists’ inclusion of required courses on religion in the 1982 constitution contradicts his argument that ‘the Kemalists have defended assertive secularism, which aims to eliminate Islam, in particular, and religion, in general, from the public sphere’. ⁴⁷ He explains this fact away by stating that these are ‘inconsistent policies toward Islam’. ⁴⁸ AKP’s [passive secularists’] defense of the Kemalist institution of state-salaried imams also undermines the distinction between passive and assertive. In France, ‘assertive secularism’, according to Kuru, has among its ranks contemporary public intellectuals like Régis Debray and Henri Peña-Ruiz as well as the Third Republic prime minister Émile Combes. ‘Passive secularism’ has among its ranks contemporary public intellectuals Jean Baubérot and Jean-Paul Willaime, and Third Republic parliamentarians Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand. Kuru’s assertive secularist Debray defended the teaching of religious facts in laïque schools in a report he was commissioned to write in 2002, ⁴⁹ and Kuru’s passive secularist Willaime presented the Debray report as ‘a significant and major advance’. ⁵⁰ Kuru’s passive secularists Baubérot and Willaime completely disagree on article 4 of the 1905 separation law. According to Baubérot, this law was the end of a civil religion tradition at the institutional level. ⁵¹ Willaime contests, and places the emphasis on what he interprets as the social recognition of religions in article 4 of the law. ⁵² Moreover, Willaime and Baubérot both opposed the headscarf ban, but Willaime argued that wearing the scarf can be an ‘an affirmation of liberty and to demonstrate their personal autonomy’, ⁵³ whereas Baubérot took a more laïc institutionalist line and opposed the ban because it was discouraging students from the public education system, historically the main pillar of laïcité. ⁵⁴ And in comparative perspective we have Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand as passive secularists. French socialism of the Third Republic and contemporary Islamist Turkish conservatives are presented as sharing an understanding of secularism. Talking about hermeneutics, I suspect that the first to disagree with this grouping would be Erdoğan himself.

This kind of Weberian work calls for a defense of Weber. Weber is cautious in pushing forward the role of ideas. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where he correlates ideas (as read from the texts of elites) and capitalist development, he drops a note for further research:

Now it is quite true that this [the influence of the religious ethics of the classes which were the culture-bearers of their respective countries] can only be completely known in all its details when the facts from ethnography and folklore have been compared with it. ⁵⁵

Conclusion

The ‘meanings-of-politics’ line of research without ‘facts from ethnography’ or history assumes a sovereignty for ideas they do not necessarily have. Even Taylor, who holds the position of irreducibility of meanings, states a limitation in his response to Quentin Skinner. Taylor argues that Skinner’s non-hermeneutical thesis would be granted: ‘[O]nly if we could show that the relations of domination, and the strategies which create and sustain them, have totally invaded the world of everyday self-understanding could we…make all dominant ideas the outcome of conflicts which centre on war and the struggle for power.’ ⁵⁶ Maybe power has not invaded all spheres of life; however, the political field of making policy and institutions definitely has been invaded, and reverting to self-understandings of actors who inhabit this field for an explanation or understanding of outcomes can only sustain a coherence by highlighting sets of isomorphic relations between ideas and actions, whereas, in fact, non-isomorphism in this field is rampant. The relations between ideas and actions in this political field, and their comparison with the relations of ideas and actions in the ‘un-invaded’ fields of life, is better posed as an open-ended question without assuming a similarity in their dynamics.

The meanings-of-politics line shows itself in crude sweeping statements frequently enough in the name of the multiple modernities approach. It often attributes a single-meaning world to large collectivities, or articulates their internal struggles in the language of meanings. It can perhaps serve to debunk Huntingtonian hierarchies of religion vis-à-vis secularism and democracy, but it still serves another culturalism because it guards his category of ‘religious tradition’ in the name of a hermeneutical turn. However, this hermeneutical turn remains an analytical turn if research does not document with histories or ethnographies the subjects and the contexts of meaning. The far-reaching links drawn between local or stated meanings and political action also hamper attempts to produce a convincing response to the long-time struggle between analytical and hermeneutical schools constituting the backbone of the modernity or modernities discussions; whereas ‘the politics of generating new meanings’ as a field of research is easily within reach. Many examples come to mind. I will mention two for a conclusion, because they underscore the comparative dimensions of this field. Sarkozy’s new meaning of laïcité, namely, laïcité positive, obviously has as a political end to mobilize state infrastructure for a more religious society and it corresponds to some movements in the French Third Republic and to some movements in the 1961 Turkish Constituent Assembly, although these movements do not name themselves laïc positive. ⁵⁷ A different kind of example, one that engages further with Chakrabarty’s distinction between Europe as ‘region’ and as ‘imaginary figure’, is how digging out the politics of comparative meanings in specific contexts even responds constructively to Talal Asad’s critique of the argument for multiplicity in western modernity:

Many critics have now taken the position that ‘modernity’ (in which secularism is centrally located) is not a verifiable project. They argue that contemporary societies are heterogeneous and overlapping, that they contain disparate, even discordant, circumstances, origins, values, and so forth. My response is that these critics are right…but that what we have here is not a simple cognitive error. Assumptions about the integrated character of ‘modernity’ are themselves part of practical and political reality. They direct the way in which people committed to it act in critical situations. These people aim at ‘modernity’…This fact doesn’t disappear when we simply point out that the ‘West’ isn’t an integrated totality… ⁵⁸