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 the European form of statehood. Oftentimes, scholars reproduce the official administrative contours of the sovereign states when defining their fields of study. By aligning their research with the formal documentation of social reality, scholars risks subordinating their work to the parameters of the states. These very parameters ground the legitimacy of politically recognized political actors such as states, international organizations, or non-governmental bodies. Therefore, maintaining academic freedom from the 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 provides students of political sociology a timely opportunity to think political processes apart from idealization, and in their metastability, thereby site-stepping the politically laden and reified notions of order and disorder that are implicit in such idealizations.

Roitman shows that even in the absence of sovereign states or in the context of failed states, there still exist observable state-effects. Indeed, modern power operates with consistency and systematicity often in conditions far from ideal. Existing in zones that cross administrative borders and eschewing legal sanctioning, Roitman shows how the networks of power display a whole new series of processes of politicization invisible to classical categories of sociopolitical theory. Therefore, a truly scientific examination of political sociological phenomena requires a deconstructive approach to idealized institutions. Ethnographic research with its methodological tendency to account for relations of power as operating from below (instead of from a presupposed 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, Jurgen Habermas, is useful for tracing the European genealogy of the emergence of public space in modernity. If modern political struggles are often take the form of efforts to erect and/or overcome the principal pillars of bourgeois society, Habermas’s work offers a historical account for one of its constitutive pillars, namely, the public sphere. The emergence of the public sphere depends on the ability to check the absolute power of the state which is made possible by the critical capacities of the increasingly well-read members of the community. The development of personal points of view allows a weakening of the ideological hold of the constituted paradigms. Yet, oftentimes the ability of critical publics to defend their entry into public life requires the support and protection of the state. This tautology between the modern subject and the modern state wherein each presuppose one another requires the introduction of new factors for their genetic analysis. Mainly, economic processes of wealth accumulation, free-market-exchange and colonization that fuel the simultaneous emergence of the modern subject and the modern state will be grasped as the material basis of liberal political philosophy and political sociological analysis derived from the former’s premises.

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)