2 Challenging the ideality of political forms
Further study: challenging ideality of political forms
Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, Janet Roitman
In this work economic anthropologist Roitman challenges socio-political theory’s idealization of European form of statehood. Often times, scholars reproduce official administrative borders of the sovereign states in scholarly demarcation of their field of study. In their collusion with the formal documentation of social reality, scholars risks subordinating their research to the parameters of the states. These very parameters ground the legitimacy of legitimate political actors such as states or international or non-governmental bodies. Therefore the academic freedom from power structures under study, however paradoxical and impossible that might be in practice, has to be kept as an ideal to avoid confirmation bias. This work of Janet Roitman work will prove students of political sociology a timely opportunity to think political processes in far from idealization in their metastability away from politically laden and reified notions of order and disorder.
Roitman will show there are still state-effects in the absence of sovereign states/in the context of failed states. In fact, modern power operates with consistency and system often in far from ideal conditions. Existing in zones that cross administrative borders and eschewing legal sanctioning, in her work the networks of power display a whole new series of processes of politicization invisible to classical categories of sociopolitical theory. Then, truly scientific approach to political sociological phenomena require a deconstructive approach to idealized institutions. Ethnographic research with its methodological disposition towards holding space for accounting for relations of power as operating from below instead of from a supposed center lends itself to her critical political sociological project.
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Jurgen Habermas
This highly influential work by social theorist Habermas is useful for tracing European genealogy of emergence of public space in modernity. If modern political struggles are often taking the form of struggles to erect and overcome main pillars of Bourgeois society, Habermas’s work offers a historical account for one of its constitutive pillars, namely, public sphere. On the one hand, the emergence of public sphere proves to be dependent on the ability to check absolute power of the state. The center of gravity lies in the critical abilities of the increasingly well-read members of the community. Development of personal point of view allows a weakening of the ideological hold of the given paradigms. Yet often times the ability of critical publics to defend their participation into public life requires support and protection of the state. This tautology between modern subject and modern state where each presuppose one another will require introduction of new factors for their genetic analysis. Mainly, economic processes of wealth accumulation, free-market-exchange and colonization that fuel both processes will be seen as the material basis of liberal political philosophy and political sociological analysis derived from its premises.
Problems of research: Ideality, teleology and metastability
- For social scientific disciplines, the object of their study offers an essential dilemma. On the one hand, scholars in the mainstream tend to assume ideality of certain institutions and research why and how other societies are unable to reach to these normative yet naturalized goals. Scholars with critical perspectives tend to avoid essentializing socio-political phenomena. These researchers are not trying to ascertain timeless qualities of social relations but their characteristics under specific contexts. By their very ‘nature,’ socio-political processes are historical and in change. Therefore, the work doesn’t lend itself to straightforward accumulative understanding. Yet, even in critical theoretical work scholars tend to produce negative idealizations for attack which are fixated in time so that a growing critical literature can grow around this center.
- To grapple with this problem, compare and contrast the works of Roitman and Habermas with regard their strategies of contextualization, universalization and critique. What dimensions are offering diffentials to critique ideality e.g. geography/spatiality, economy/productive and market practices, legal status? How do they account for circularity of transhistorical political formations such as states and citizens? How can one compare Roitman’s work in Africa whereby global, transnational and local currents create dissonant and functional economical zones can be used to challenge to the Eurocentric account of Habermas?
Works Cited
Roitman, J. (2005). Fiscal disobedience: An anthropology of economic regulation in Central Africa. Princeton University Press.
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)
Elevation of contingent forms into definitive and desirable states of beings involving psychological processes of divorcing what's idealized from any undesirable quality.
A temporary stability conditioned upon processes which are not themselves stable. An emergent quality of matter, relations and societies.
process whereby what's changing is reduced into a thing transcending time, perceptual fallacy whereby a phenomenon is taken only in its thing-hood devoid of abstract determination.
social scientific research method whereby scholar visits the field with the goal of experiencing the object of study first hand. This work lends itself to open-ended research processes departing from given questions into themes and problematics emergent from field encounters.