The Disclosure of Politics
Term:
Spring 2010
Subject Code:
GPHI
Course Number:
6626
The argument of my course is that
religion and politics have always been interrelated in the Western world,
albeit in different ways. Politics has
used religious concepts and stories because of the need to ground arguments
about political authority. I claim that this quest to find a notion of
authority is what has linked inextricably religion to politics. However, one
can still recognize the need for the autonomy of politics since there are few
conceptual exceptions based on the disclosure of social practices that have
nothing to do with religious’ legacies. The coining of new concepts for the
political allows me to develop the conclusion that those concepts were the ones
that permitted the real disclosure of the political. This step—I would like to explain-- is
related to a shift in focus: modern
politics appeared when theorists moved from the problem of grounding authority
into the question of how to define the new territory of social interactions
with self-created rules of legitimacy. I exemplify these developments through
the examination of three theoretical models of secularization. My aim is to
show how these models interpret the interdependency of religion to
politics in the Western World. But only
one model solves the problem of the autonomy of politics. It is the last model—the
creative model-- which I called the disclosive one, where we can find the
chance to explain why certain categories are disclosive of specific social
practices. They attest to the goal of developing legitimacy with political
deliberations about how to choose rules and defined them. At stake is the
possibility of conceiving a new way to think about power and an inclusionary,
open, concept of justice (that differs from the ones found in religion). The
social practices are politically disclosive because of innovative exercises of
social interactions (such as publicity, political deliberation, and political
representation). Those social practices enable political communities to
establish the rules of a shared form of power and to find a new concept of
political agency.
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