[movimenti.bicocca] on arab spring

Giro da altra mailing list (sociology of islam) articolo che mi pare possa
interessare anche qui.
Ciao
Annalisa

Greetings,
I thought that some members of the list might be interested in this short
piece on the current revolutionary wave in the Arab world, a German version
of which is scheduled for a special issue on "enlightenment in the 21st
century" in *Kulturaustausch* magazine in September.
Mohammed

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Anarchist, Liberal and Authoritarian Enlightenments:
*

*Notes From the Arab Spring*

*
*

Mohammed A. Bamyeh


The Arab spring, as far as we can see, appears to require no guardian
intellectual authority, no political leadership, no organized parties. In
fact even after revolutionary success, those elements still fail to
materialize: there is no party of the revolution anywhere, no leader emerges
to embody its historical spirit, and intellectuals still ponder the meaning
of revolutions that most of them endorsed but none expected. Furthermore,
these apparent absences—political, organizational, intellectual--were not
due to any unfamiliarity with parties, leaders, ideologues or ideologies of
revolt, for all of those have been tried before.


A revolution is an experiment in enlightenment. Experiments, as we know, may
succeed, fail, or suggest revisions in their method, sometimes a
reconsideration of what they are supposed to discover. 19th century
revolutionary thought in Europe is often traced to the Enlightenment
critique of the arbitrariness of absolute power, and to the Enlightenment's
elaboration of the creative capacity of human will, reason, and freedom.
Since these philosophical propositions were social in their implications,
they could only be verified (or amended, or abandoned) only with the aid of
grand experiments in the political, cultural and economic realms.


Those experiments have followed different techniques. In reflecting on the
Arab revolts underway I would like to propose three basic techniques of
enlightenment. 1) An authoritarian technique, in which an enlightened elite,
using the state, takes it upon itself to modernize an immobile, unruly mass
presumed to be governed by arcane traditions; 2) a liberal technique, in
which a modern state is seen to be crucial, but its elite is neither
presumed to have monopoly over enlightenment nor power to make such a claim;
3) an anarchist technique, in which enlightenment is seen to come most
reliably from below, through transformations of civic traditions rather than
through state power or social engineering.


The common presumption that enlightenment has generated an alliance of
knowledge and power describes in fact only one of those three techniques,
namely the liberal technique, in which knowledge complements the otherwise
partial power of the state. Knowledge here organizes a civic link between
state and society, and in the process reduces for the liberal order the
costs of policing and repressive needs. The two other techniques, by
contrast, tend to set power and knowledge as substitutes rather than allies.
The more authoritarian techniques are premised on the presumption that power
is the best means to accomplish any goal, the less need there is for
knowledge, since power alone will do. Whereas in anarchist techniques,
suspicion of the merit of power as means to ends, highlights the
compensatory value of knowledge alone as the best means.


In the current Arab context, revolutions are the means of testing, again,
the philosophical propositions of the Enlightenment. As such, these
revolutions constitute part of the Enlightenment's ongoing global history.
They are certainly not the first encounter by the Arabs of Enlightenment
propositions; the story of such propositions themselves is indeed very old,
and much of their underlying bases can in fact be found in indigenous
philosophical and social traditions, rather than simply as recent
importations from Europe. As critiques of despotism, as enactments of
popular will, as acts of liberation, as progressive demolitions of frozen
reality, these revolutions express the failure of an earlier, authoritarian
experiment. From a contemporary revolutionary perspective it is easy enough
to recognize the two basic failures of the now exhausted authoritarian path
to enlightenment: 1) that path has more magnified the authoritarian than the
enlightened aspect of the state; 2) the authoritarian path hid from view a
crucial social fact being asserted now openly in Arab streets everywhere,
namely that enlightenment comes from below, not from above; that society has
already become far more saturated with ethos of enlightenment than has its
government.


The Arab revolutionary experiments seem to be based on the newly shared
presumption that ordinary individuals are capable of enlightenment without
leadership or guardianship, without even organizations in the common sense
of the word; that their enlightenment entitles them to undo the tyrannies
under which they have languished in recent decades; and that acts of
enlightenment are practical and not simply contemplative, world
transformative rather than narrowly pragmatic. The agent of this
revolutionary enlightenment is the little person, not the historical figure,
the hero or the savior.


It is in this sense that the current Arab revolutionary wave is closest to
anarchist ideals, which highlight spontaneous order and posit the principle
of unimposed order as the highest form of a rational society, and which like
all revolutionary currents in 19th century Europe had clear roots in
Enlightenment thought. Obviously, few of the current Arab revolutionaries
call them "anarchists." And in any case, none of the revolutions so far
intend to replace the state itself with a self-governed civic order, only to
modernize the state so that it respects citizen's rights and becomes more
accountable.


Thus in these revolutionary experiments we encounter a rare combination of
an anarchist method and a liberal intention: the revolutionary style is
anarchist, in the sense that it requires little organization, leadership, or
even coordination; tends to be suspicious of parties and hierarchies even
after revolutionary success; and relies on spontaneity, minimal planning,
local initiative, and individual will much more than on any other factors.
On the other hand, the explicit goal of all Arab revolutions is the
establishment of a liberal state—explicitly, a *civic* state--not an
anarchist society.


It is not unusual in revolutionary histories for revolutions to produce an
unintended result. Max Weber already suggested that such disjuncture between
the intention and result of revolutions was inevitable, when in the midst of
the 1919 revolution he gave his famous lecture *Politik als Beruf*. But in
the case of the Arab spring, we witness a rare likelihood that revolutions
are reaching precisely their intentions: even governing orders now agree
openly with virtually all revolutionary demands, *except* moving out of the
way of the revolution. The intention is so widely shared in society, and so
simple, that no organization at all is required to express it. A revolution
here is an expression of social consensus: consensus on *both* method and
intention. The liberal outcome is promised precisely by the anarchist
method. Neither is a product of any party plan, but both are the foundation
of the social consensus out of which the revolutions are emerging. So here
the entire revolution is rational, from beginning to end, since intention
and result seem to cohere, even though method (anarchy) and theory (liberal)
appear to have no connection at all.


Yet they are connected, in the sense that both anarchism and liberalism are
part of the heritage of the enlightenment and describe different dimensions
of it. They do so not because they had been described as such in
enlightenment thought, but because their communion expresses older social
realities, which we would not suspect if we confine our perspective to
European history. In Islamic history, for example, what would later be
called "anarchism" or "liberalism" occasioned old realities in which a
substantial part of the civic order either lived independently of the state
or generated serious limits to the reach of the state in society.


Elements of that old civic order appear to have sustained themselves even
after, in the name of the enlightenment, modern, authoritarian states
devoted all their resources to magnifying state power over society. Yet, the
persistence of elements of the old civic ethics can be evidenced in
revolutionary styles themselves: spontaneity of the revolutions is an
extension of the already familiar spontaneity of everyday life;
revolutionary solidarity, out of which emerges the will to sacrifice and
combat, is an extension of common, convivial solidarity in neighborhoods and
towns; distrust of distant authorities is part of an old, rational and
enlightened common attitude, based on the simple thesis that a claim to help
or guide is unverifiable in proportion to the power and distance of the
authority that makes it; and finally, non-violence as a strategy is not
learned out of manual written at Harvard, but out of *familiar* and old
habits of protest. In recent years, we were made to forget the ordinary
salience of those habits, as our attention was galvanized by spectacles of
"terror" and "counter-terror" (a game with no political result other than
feeding the power hunger of the authoritarian order and serving as its last
raison d'etre).


The crumbling authoritarian enlightenment, with its vanguardist and
paternalist propositions, lies in a number of dynamics: vanguardism, as we
already knew from Frantz Fanon, often expressed lack of knowledge by the
vanguard, who eventually become ruling elites, of their own society. In its
later phase, vangardism became pure paternalism: distance of governing
elites from the people became *lack of interest* in knowing the people.
Amidst this disinterest the old vanguardist authoritarianism is expunged of
its anti-colonial, progressive, Third Worldist claims; and out of its ashes
there emerges a cold, paternal authoritarianism, disinterested in any form
of peoplehood, and governed openly by an avowed marriage of business and
state elites.


Enlightenment as a goal could be approached using different techniques. In
the grand revolutions of the Arab spring, the liberal interpretation of the
enlightenment fights an authoritarian interpretation, with the aid of an
anarchist method--that is to say, with the aid of familiar civic traditions,
now discovered again to be natural venues for expressing the organic and
embedded nature of the enlightenment. This is why these revolts are entirely
against the authoritarian state, but not against any old cultural tradition.



The liberal state that is now on the horizon is not the end of the story.
Revolutions themselves establish new traditions. They provide a grand
reservoir of memory of what is possible, and that memory tends to be
employed in future contests. In the final analysis, the state itself is
neither the most rational vehicle of any enlightenment nor even its
necessary goal. But now that the authoritarian enlightenment is being
demolished, enlightenment becomes everyone's project. The expectation from a
liberal political order is that the citizen has enough breathing room
outside the tutelage of the state, so as to overcome one's own "self-imposed
immaturity," as Kant famously defined the condition of enlightenment.


But in the revolutionary processes themselves one demonstrates an
accomplishment that required only a revolution to be experimentally
verified: in overcoming not one's own but state-imposed immaturity, one
demonstrates that the overcoming of a self-imposed immaturity has already
taken place, inaudibly, and long before any revolution. The method of the
revolution itself verifies the propositions of the enlightenment, now taken
to earth and entrusted to ordinary mortals, directly.

---------------------------------
Mohammed A. Bamyeh,
Professor of Sociology
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA