Thesis Eleven

This article explores the much neglected work of the German philosopher and cultural theorist Hans Blumenberg, a figure still relatively little known in the Anglophone world. The thesis is defended that Blumenberg's conception of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) offers valuable resources for addressing some important questions about the philosophical self-understanding of the modern social sciences in relation to theological and religious sources of thought and language. The article begins with an assessment of the contemporary relevance of Blumenberg's critique of the idea of modern scientific culture as a merely `secularized form' of theological thinking. This critique is then compared with Blumenberg's account of the relationship of theoretico-scientific inquiry to mythological consciousness in his second major philosophical monograph of 1979, Work on Myth. The article concludes with a range of reflections on ways in which Blumenberg's work helps us understand how certain explanatory constructs and devices employed in the modern social sciences can be said to incorporate, assimilate, and at the same time critically transform figures of thought and language that display a mythic, religious and theological context of historical origination, provenance or genealogy.

According to Gauchet we are living in a `society of individuals'. But a central term is missing from that formula, and not by any accident, for contemporary society has lost it from view: the term of the political. In sum, thus reads Gauchet's diagnosis, society today is haunted by a kind of individualism out of which no society can be conceived, as it obfuscates its political dimension. The aim of this article is to elaborate this diagnosis, and more specifically the idea that there is no society, and therefore no individual either, without the political. In order to do so, I will explore the meaning of the formula `society of individuals'. Within the scope of this analysis, I shall primarily pay attention to the `primacy of the political' in Gauchet. To conclude, I will assess Gauchet's diagnosis, by fathoming in what sense contemporary individualism, besides being an `eclipse of the political', is also a threat to democracy.

Contemporary Foucauldian research assimilates the political with governance. This formulation dates to Foucault's emphasis on the significance of the anti-Machiavellians in introducing the concept of governance into political theory. Returning to Machiavelli, we argue that early modern political theory was instead characterized by the simultaneous problematization of ruler and ruled, and the co-constitution of sovereignty and governance. We then outline the relation of ruler and ruled in the political structure of the democratic sovereign. Concepts of both sovereignty and governance are necessary to theorize the political in modernity, including the dangers that arise from fusing sovereignty and governance, as occurred during the Nazi period in Germany, when the distinction between the sovereign people and the governed population was conflated.

This article presents Paul Ricoeur's ideas about translation in view of giving some guidelines for the interpretation of cultures. Ricoeur's `hermeneutics of the self', which stresses the creativity of capable human being, has its source in a conviction of the superabundance of sense over the abundance of nonsense. It is the problem of the transmission of meaning from one language to another, from one culture to another that gives impetus to his preoccupation with translation. Ricoeur's radical astonishment before the plurality of languages and cultures and his deep conviction about `communication' among human beings made him realize the urgent `task of translation' that is accompanied by a `task of morning'. If translation is the paradigm of all exchanges, its practice can provide us some guidelines in the dialogue of cultures. First, one must courageously open oneself to the `test' of the Other, to welcome difference and respect it as unsurpassable. Second, one must wager on the possibility of an `equivalence without identity', to take a non-hierarchical view of cultures. Third, one must undertake the `task of mourning', to learn to narrate otherwise, to interpret otherwise.

This article explores the relationships between several notions: the `creative economy'; New Growth Theory and the primacy of ideas; academic entrepreneurship; and the new paradigm of cultural production. Broadly conceptualized, the creative economy links the primacy of ideas in both arts and sciences in a more embedded and social framework of entrepreneurship which positions education as central, since its institutions are the primary knowledge institutions that provide the conditions for the transmission and development of new ideas. Entrepreneurship develops within networks that use new information and communication technologies. The role of the arts, humanities and social sciences becomes re-profiled as crucial in the generation of new ideas within the creative economy, moving discussion and analysis away from a single focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and the hard sciences such that the redesign of institutional/academic environments is necessary in order to capitalize on ideas and move from creativity to systems of innovation.