Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
14 - The domain of civil society and its politics
from Part 2 - Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the world.
–Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1972One must be neither on one side nor on the other; that is the difficulty. The whole problem is to refuse to accept the choice that is imposed upon us: either tradition or modernity, either tradition or the market. A situation must be created which escapes from these alternatives. Even if things in the world conform to it, we must not allow ourselves to be regulated by this antagonism. The crisis of emancipatory politics, the crisis of the Idea, consists precisely in being captive to this opposition and to believe that there is no alternative between an apologia of the contemporary democratic world and the identitarian tension of tradition.
–Alain Badiou, La Philosophie et l’événement, 2010 (my translation)HUMAN RIGHTS AND TRADITION IN AFRICA
The core argument of this chapter and the next is that human rights discourse and traditional discourse, or what Mamdani (2000) calls ‘culture talk’, are expressions of two different modes of rule which operate within (and largely structure) two distinct domains of state politics: the first within a domain of civil society and the second within a domain of traditional society. In each specific domain expressive state politics differ, requiring somewhat different modes of thought in order to enable an alternative excessive politics. The argument deployed here is a conscious attempt to move away from considering tradition and modernity, citizenship rights and traditional entitlements, as in opposition to each other. Both suggest a distinct ‘culture’ in which political idioms are expressed as well as regulating and constraining the development of excessive thought, but in fundamentally different ways. Neither is more ‘democratic’ than the other, if by ‘democratic’ we mean its popular rather than its state manifestation.
Throughout this chapter, human rights discourse is considered as a mode of thought that demarcates a civil society of citizens; it is precisely through a discourse of human rights that the state can exercise its hegemony and hence its rule in civil society, with only marginal recourse to coercion.
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- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 447 - 472Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016