A Conversation Between Charles Taylor and Akbar Ganji

On April 11th and 12th, 2007 in Chicago, Illinois, an Iranian journalist, political dissident and radi-cal democrat, Akbar Ganji, sat down with Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher and former politician.

Unauthorized, Samuel C. Porter, Ph.D. edited the original 74-page pdf file interview transcript for readabil-ity (http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/ganji-taylor-interview3.pdf; accessed 1/3/09). The table of contents, headings and footnotes are Porter’s. Page numbers after headings

in the body of the interview refer to original transcript.

CONTENTSReligion, pp. 1-3 Criticizing Modernity, p. 27Secularism as Separation of Religion and State, pp. 3-5 Radical Enlightenment, pp. 28-29A Self-Limiting State or Religious Legitimation, State Imple-mentation of Religious Law and a Particular Right of the Clergy to Rule, pp. 5-6

Liberalism and Rawls, pp. 29-31

Legitimation – Religious or Political, pp. 6-9 Consensus, p. 31Discerning God’s Will and the State, pp. 9-12 Human Rights, pp. 32-33William James’ Contribution to Today’s Religious Situation, pp. 12-13

The State and Civil Society, pp. 33-34

A Post-Durkheimian World, pp. 13-15 Communitarians, pp. 34-35Shallow Spirituality, p. 15 Distinguishing Communitarians from Fascists, p. 36Neo-Durkheimian Identities, pp. 16-17 The State and Criticizing Democratic States, p. 36Fundamentalism, pp. 17-18 Civil Disobedience, p. 37Religious Texts and Objective Literal Truth, pp. 18-19 Revolution, pp. 37-38Islam’s Transcendent God and Christianity’s Human Messiah, pp. 19-20

Politics of Recognition, pp. 39-43

Religious Belief and Rationality, pp. 20-21 The African American Situation, pp. 43-45Non-Rational Elements in Religion, p. 21 Tradition, p. 45How Ought We to Live?, pp. 21-22 Iran, Sittlichkeit and Articulating Background Understandings,

pp. 46-48New Religious Movements, p. 23 The Feminist Movement, pp. 48-49Authentic Intuitions and Superficial Rituals, p. 23 Individual Rights and Community Rights, pp. 50-51Interpreting Traditions with Reference to Modernity, pp. 23-24 Responsibility, p. 51Theories of Modernity, pp. 24-26 Justice and the United States, pp. 51-52What is Catholic Modernity?, p. 26 U.S. Foreign Policy and War, pp. 52-53Islamic Modernity, pp. 26-27 Israel and Palestine, pp. 53-55Modernity’s Challenge, p. 27 Politically Engaged Intellectuals, pp. 55-56

Biographical Sketches of Akbar Gangi and Charles Taylor, pp. 56-58

RELIGION (pp. 1-4)

Akbar Ganji (AG): I have many questions in several areas, including modernity, secular-ism and religion. Let’s start with religion. Your book, Varieties of Religion Today,1 com-bines two different discourses: the philosophy of religion and the sociology of religion. Do you agree and if so which one is dominant?

Charles Taylor (CT): Neither. And we have a third discourse, which is history. But in the end, only one discourse is adequate. As sociology can’t get to the important issues with-out history and if you don’t have a deep consideration of the philosophical issues, you can’t do good historical sociology.

1 Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2002.

If you want to talk about the development of religion, for example, you have to look at both the change in the position of religion in society and the degree of retreat of religious belief and practice.

Let me say parenthetically that in both Varieties of Religion Today and A Secular Age,2 I claim to be talking only about religion in the West as it has developed in the last 500 years as I try to develop a theory of secularization – which means many things, including religion’s change in position as well as retreat.

People sometimes confuse these two kinds of secularization both of which have happened in the West. The change in the position of religion in society has been general in the West. But the retreat of religion has happened differently in different contexts.

In the United States there has been virtually no retreat. But in Sweden and East Germany significant retreat has occurred. The U.S., on one hand, and Sweden and East Germany, on the other, seem to be the two poles between which a variety of degrees of retreat oc-cur.

In order to come to grips with these movements, you have to have a certain understanding of human motivation. What is the human motivation in religion? What motivates people in their religious life?

The motivations are different in different times and places. We might miss this point be-cause a lot of powerful religions today – Islam and Christianity, etc. – are close to each other in many respects in their driving motivations.

But if you look more widely – at Hinduism, Buddhism, earlier forms of religion – you re-alize there is an immense difference.

That’s why you can’t write a general history of secularization. Even writing one about the West may be too ambitious.

But the philosophical dimension is essential when considering post-war mainline secular-ization theory in sociology. In the early writings of Peter Berger and the contemporary work of Steve Bruce, for example, there is a simple story that the more modernity pro-gresses – for example, industrialization, the development of the modern state, social mo-bility, markets – the more religion declines.3

2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.3 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Double-day, 1967. See also: Peter L. Berger, “From the Crisis of Religion to the Crisis of Secularity,” in Mary Douglas and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Religion and America: Spirituality in a Secular Age. Boston: Beacon, 1983; and, Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999. Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002. Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Histo-rians Debate the Secularization Thesis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Although they never discuss it, this assumes that religious motivation is shallow and that religious life is tied to certain pre-existing sociological forms. And when modernity destabilizes these sociological forms religion disappears.

But I disagree – and that’s a philosophical point that needs to be at the core of historical and sociological study. In other words, if you have a different view of religious motiva-tion, you’ll have a different theory about the development of secularization.

I’m attacking a mainline theory that claims there’s a linear movement of secularization as modernity advances. As modernity progresses so does secularization and vice versa. It’s a simple functional relationship.

But, according to my underlying theory, we can expect something different. We can ex-pect certain developments of modernity to destabilize earlier forms of religious life. For example, the idea of monarchy embedded in the cosmos connected to God – for instance, the French monarchy – is not going to survive certain changes in society that come with modernity.

But if human religious motivation is not as shallow as mainstream social scientific theory assumes, then what would happen in many cases is religion would be recomposed in new forms that meet the new situation.

And that is, I argue, what has happened in the modern West.

This is, I think, a more adequate theoretical understanding of social and historical reality but it requires a deep understanding of the place of religion in human life.

So I would say that, in this sense, there’s a single discourse made up of elements that ap-pear to be drawn from three disciplines but, in fact, cohere together as a single discourse.The three discourses would be philosophy, history and sociology. But you can’t do soci-ology without history, or history without sociology, and you can’t do either without a proper philosophical understanding of human motivation.4 So the whole thing hangs to-gether from those three sources.

SECULARISM AS SEPARATION OF RELIGION AND STATE (pp. 4-6)

AG: Secularism has several meanings, including decline, privatization and differentia-tion. In the 1960s, Peter Berger and others – following Max Weber5 – predicted decline. Privatization means religion withdraws into the private sphere from the public sphere

4 Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964; and, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.5 German sociologist and economist Max Weber’s (1864-1920) – a founder, along with Emile Durkheim and others, of the academic discipline of sociology – most famous essay is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons (1930). London: Routledge, 1992 (1904-05).

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and becomes merely a private matter. What’s important is my relation to my God. Differ-entiation means the institutional separation of the state and religion.

You disagree with the decline thesis and debate [Jürgen] Habermas6 about whether pri-vatization is a good thing. But isn’t the separation of religion and state a pre-condition for democracy? Do you disagree?

CT: No. But it’s a different kind of concept because it’s a normative concept. The first two concepts – decline and privatization – are supposed to describe what’s been happen-ing in the world. But the third concept is a normative issue. Do we need to have, in that sense, a neutral state, or a laic state, or a secular state, in order to have a democratic soci-ety?

Certainly, certain kinds of modern democratic societies, namely, ones very diverse in people’s religious and philosophical views, function better with a state that is neutral or equidistant. So that norm fits.

But, historically, there have been other kinds of democracy. The early American Repub-lic is neutral among denominations but strongly marked by a Christian deist understand-ing of society.

The danger of this kind of democracy, which we see developing in U.S. history, occurs when different populations enter. At first, the United States is primarily Protestant. So, when Catholic populations begin to enter from Ireland, Italy and elsewhere, they are dis-criminated against severely.

What you have in America is a happy evolution in that this understanding gradually ex-tends to Catholics, Jews, all theists, and beyond. And while some struggles still go on, in general and in principle this understanding seeks to embrace everyone.

So it’s plain to see that in modern democratic societies – with increasingly mobile and di-verse populations; conditions virtually unavoidable – it’s better to have the kind of regime where the state is neutral.

But I think people make a mistake to think it is utterly impossible to have a democracy at all in a condition where this kind of neutrality isn’t met.

For example, this problem arises in many Muslim societies. Can you define the state as totally separate from Islam? It may be difficult to get a consensus for that. In that case, what is needed is a kind of understanding of the necessity of a self-limiting state in the re-ligious domain.

6 Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; and, Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Cam-bridge, UK: Policy Press, 2008 (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2005).

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There’s a precedent for this idea in the United States because when the United States was de facto a Christian state, no one considered the state to have an important role in reli-gious life. People left it to the churches to have an important role in religious life. So, al-though it was a Christian state, it was a self-limiting state.

This kind of self-limitation of the state is, I think, an essential condition for the develop-ment of democracy in the Muslim world.

Sometimes this comes easiest when you have a conflict, for example, Turkey. In this case, you have a state that is secular but not neutral under Ataturk because it is a mili-tantly secular state trying to drive religion back. Then you have the slow development of Islamic oriented political parties culminating in the present ruling AK Party, which devel-ops a notion of Islamic democracy where the government is self-limiting in that respect. The government will not try to intervene and persecute Alevis or any other minority group. By playing the rules of democracy, the AK Party forced the secular Kemalists to retreat in the sense that the secular militant party respects the right of the Islamist party to hold the highest government office.

So you get these two ideologies, we hope, to come to a kind of equilibrium of under-standing in which both accept that the state is self-limiting. The government will neither impose secularism nor any particular brand of Islam. There are, of course, important mi-norities in Turkey. There are the Alevis, for example, and it would be catastrophic if Sunni Islam was imposed on them. Thus, we arrive at the idea of a self-limiting state.

It’s easier when you have two powers grabbing for the power of the state and where there is a balance of power, as in the case of Turkey.

In the Iranian case, I imagine it would be harder because you have a very strong Shia ma-jority. But it’s not impossible that the bad experience of being ruled by an Islamic non-self-limiting state, under which you now live in Iran, might induce people to think there may be another way.

A SELF-LIMITING STATE OR RELIGIOUS LEGITIMATION, STATE IMPLEMENTATION OF RELIGIOUS LAW AND A PARTICULAR RIGHT OF THE CLERGY TO RULE (pp. 6-8)

AG: I don’t think the separation of religion and state is a hundred percent normative sim-ply because it has a normative aspect. You say we should have a historical point of view. But when we look at history we realize all historical cases of democratic states are secu-lar in that religion and state are separate. This may mean three things. First, the state does not derive its legitimacy from religion. Second, the state does not implement reli-gious law. And, third, the clergy do not have a particular right to rule. All democratic states share these attributes. I’m not saying where there is secularism there is democ-racy. I am saying the reverse: where there is democracy there is also secularism in the aforementioned three meanings.

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CT: Not quite. But we’re not that far apart because some of the things you’re describing are what I call a self-limiting state.

Take, for example, Argentina today. To be president of Argentina you have to be Roman Catholic. Although he converted, Argentineans elected Carlos Menem, a Muslim, to be president. But you’re right. In the long run, this religious provision will be eventually voided.

So you have these historic links between religion and the state. The early United States, a Christian state, carried the idea it was following the will of God as part of its self-justifi-cation. So, to your first point, democratic secular states founded in religion are not always absent. As to the state applying religious law, that also existed in the early Puritan begin-nings of the American colonies, for example, in Boston. But that has become rare. As for a special role for the clergy, I could quibble and say there are bishops in the British House of Lords, though this is one of those vestigial leftovers from history that does not affect democracy today.

But you raise a very interesting thing because, from out of a different experience, you’re forcing us to rethink the concept of the secular. In the West, a lot of these things ran to-gether and you’re splitting them up into three different categories.

One of the things I think can continue and has continued is the idea of some link between the state and religion. Until about 50 years ago, even the United Kingdom was generally understood as somehow linked to the Anglican Church – the Christian religion – and that exists vestigially today in the queen’s crowning and so on. But it becomes more and more vestigial.

So, religious legitimacy of the state lingered on a long time in Western democracy.

But the state ceasing to implement religious law and the clergy ceasing to have a particu-lar right to rule are part of what I’m calling the self-limitation of the state and go back farther because they are essential parts of the growth of Western democracy, which hap-pened in the context of tremendous conflict.

That conflict includes conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and among lay ideolo-gies in the Catholic Church, etc.

So, in all these cases, you have the legacy of a self-limiting state. Even when it remains, as it were, under the umbrella of a certain religion, it is understood that the civil power should not intervene by, for example, applying religious law, because that would lead to conflict.

LEGITIMATION – RELIGIOUS OR POLITICAL (pp. 8-9)

AG: Since you believe the first principle lingers on while the other two wane, what exam-ples can you give where a modern democratic state derives its legitimacy from religion?

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In Iran, the state says God grants the power to rule to the Supreme Islamic Jurist and that the state is legitimate because God allows the Supreme Islamic Jurist to rule. State legitimacy is not derived from a vote of people. By contrast, all democratic states say they derive their legitimacy from the peoples’ vote. Different shades of social contract theory exist in all democratic theories. From Locke to Rawls,7 all democratic theories are based on social contract theory the premise of which is human beings create government. The state is legitimate only as long as it serves the public. But religious government has nothing to do with the peoples’ vote because it de-rives its legitimacy from God. In this sense, it is not a democratic state.

CT: Yes and no. Consider, for example, John Locke who believed we should follow natu-ral law, which dictates that the only legitimate authority is created by a social contract. But from where does natural law come? He clearly believes God creates human beings in a state of nature where natural law holds. According to Locke, it is God’s will that we have a social contract.

In the Declaration of Independence, the founders of the American Republic wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

So there are two ways in which legitimate democratic rule can derive from God. One is that the actual formula of democratic rule is God-given. The other is that certain people, certain clergy, have a mandate directly from God to order society. In a sense, Western history is the struggle between these two understandings of God-derived authority.

AG: I don’t accept the second one. The one in which God creates national order and then derives democratic society from a reading of that national order is nominalism.8 You may call it divine but it is not divine.

CT: When we talk about Locke?

AG: Richard Rorty9 says religion aims at secularization; and that God ordains secular-ism and accepts that government derives its legitimacy from the people and that people

7 English philosopher John Locke’s (1632-1704) principle works include A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. American philosopher John Rawls’ (1921-2002) key works include A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. 8 A medieval theological and philosophical movement that claims only individuals are real, abstract con-cepts are not. Ideals and ideas such as justice and freedom exist in name only and do not correspond to an alleged universal essence of reality.9 American philosopher Richard Rorty’s (1931-2007) key writings concerning religion include “The Prior-ity of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughn, eds., The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History. New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1988, pp. 257-82. “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” in Common Knowledge 3:1 (Spring 1994): 1-6. And The Future of Religion co-authored with Gianni Vattimo and edited by Santiago Za-bala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Also, see his afterword, “Buds That Never Opened,” in Walter Rauschenbusch (Rorty’s maternal grandfather), Christianity and the Social Crisis. Edited by Paul B. Raushenbush. New York: HarperCollins, 2007 (1907), pp. 347-350.

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have rights. I don’t disagree with this at all. Do you know what this is like? The God of the Abrahamic religions is a personal one?

CT: Yes.

AG: The God of other religions is impersonal.

CT: Yes.

AG: Then we have to ask a Buddhist what is his God. Is it the whole universe’s God? If so, then God becomes just another name for the world. This is just naming something something else. It’s a God that doesn’t speak to, contact or inspire us, doesn’t send prophets or react in any way to our actions. This is just naming.

Government marked by the claim that it derives its legitimacy from God? I rule over you because God endows me with this right? In modern times, we can’t accept that God gives anyone the right to rule on this basis.

When we allow someone to rule us that person will rule. But you name this something else. You say God also accepts this. Then, you say, in this sense, government derives its legitimacy from religion. But you also say democratic systems derive their legitimacy not from religion but from peoples’ votes. If you say God also wants this I have no argument against this. In that case, God is following us.

CT: Yes, many distinctions need to be made. The first point about God being the same as the Impersonal Order is very much Spinoza,10 not Locke.

AG: I was referring to Buddhists.

CT: I know but Spinoza is a close representative. And Locke and Spinoza are very differ-ent. I mean I agree with you.

AG: This is like simply saying we give the name of God to the world but in this case we call our choice God’s acceptance.

CT: That is also a much earlier theory in the West but it’s not the same theory as Locke. In the European High Middle Ages [11th-13th centuries], the theory is we should obey the king because God, in general, blesses earthly power as necessary for our well being. So whoever is the legitimate power – it can be a king or a republican government – you ought to obey them.

10 Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). One of the most important, radical philosophers of the early modern period, Spinoza combines commitment to Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological princi-ples with elements from ancient Stoicism and medieval Jewish rationalism. His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, human nature, and knowledge ground his moral philosophy centering on control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also provide a basis for strong democratic political thought and a deep critique of scriptural and sectarian pretensions.(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/#SpiWor; accessed 1/19/09)

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But Locke is saying something very different. There is a certain regime that is the right regime willed by God. That’s what the early American Republic thought, that is, Ameri-can democracy is the only godly regime.

AG: What does God want?

CT: God wants this order in which natural right is respected.

AG: How do we know this?

CT: In Locke’s case, he derives that knowledge differently. Some theorists get it out of the Bible. But, Locke argues, if you simply look at human beings you can see God de-signs them to preserve themselves and therefore we should never take life, even our own life. There’s an interdiction on suicide and then Locke proceeds to derive it all from here.

AG: Locke doesn’t concern me.

CT: I’m not a fan of Locke’s either.

DISCERNING GOD’S WILL AND THE STATE (pp. 9-16)

AG: How do we know what God wants insofar as the state is concerned? How are we go-ing to find out what God wants?

CT: That is a much more complicated question because, first, we have a certain sense of what God wants from human beings and, second, then we have the very concrete particu-lar situations in which we find ourselves.

We somehow have to make a judgment of how the first fits into the second.

We cannot easily make general judgments without looking at a particular situation.

If you ask me directly, I’m a Christian and a Catholic Christian. I have a certain concep-tion of what God wants human beings to become and where they are now and what the next best move would be to get there.

Then I put this together with a very particular judgment of where I am now in the situa-tion, and so on.

So if you ask me should we go on in this direction or that direction, I’ll say this direction. But I have to admit that I could be wrong about this. While being right about what God wants, I could be wrong about this issue. So there is no way I could say with certainty that this is what God is telling me what to do unambiguously. I couldn’t say that. Locke thought he could. The founders of the Ameri-

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can Republic thought they could. But I don’t think anyone can. Because I think we live in specific, unrepeatable situations and we have to judge well what God wants us to do.

Nader Hashemi11: His question is about the state – the political state. How do we know what kind of political state God wants from us?

CT: You can make a general argument that, other things being equal, when it’s possible, a democratic regime is superior in terms of doing what God wants because you have in its ideal form – we never live up to this ideal but I’m referring to – minimum exploitation, violence and coercion; and maximum possibility of people developing their lives as they see fit. This political regime is where such things are most possible while not crushing some other important demand. So, this kind of democratic regime is obviously superior, in general.

Ahmad Sadri: Therefore it is superior and divine?

CT: In a certain sense, according the will of God, yes.

But unlike Locke and a lot of other people, I’m very weary of saying this is divine be-cause I realize I’m saying this not only because I share a belief in the Christian revelation but also because I have a particular judgment about how these regimes work. I mean if you show that democracy produces other terrible things that I’m not noticing at the mo-ment then I may have to change my mind – I recognize that.

So if anybody – clergy, laity, the ulama (Muslim religious authorities), the Supreme Is-lamic Jurist (vali faqih) – says, “God’s will is this,” I say to them, “You should have a lit-tle bit more humility ladies or gentlemen.” Nobody can say they know God’s will with absolute certainty. What they can say is, “As far as we can see, this seems to accord with the will of God.” Now I’m speaking as a Christian but who do these people think they are? They are just human beings like the rest of us who share revelation.

AG: A fundamentalist would respond by saying God decrees that we should rule. We have fundamentalists in all religions and some actually believe God prefers violence. How do we know whether you or the fundamentalist is right?

CT: That’s a very interesting question – how do you know?

AG: I want to discuss Rawls more later, but I’m pushing the argument in the direction of a Rawlsian solution where political liberalism separates metaphysical, religious and moral teachings from the state. Many people claim to know or intuit God’s will. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Shiites, Sunnis, and Bahais – all say God in-spires them. That creates a problem.

11 Nader Hashemi is an Assistant Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009).

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CT: Yes, Rawls has a good idea here but Rawls is not the answer to this problem.

AG: But there is, I claim, no way for us to understand what God wants. Many people claim God gives them a mission. Bush says God told me to invade Iraq. Mr. Khamenei12 attributes his actions to God and Bin Laden says the same thing. So since we’re con-fronted with different solutions the best thing is to separate religion from the state.

CT: Yes, that’s a good solution to the problem of religious pluralism. But Rawls assumes, or wants to take for granted, different religious believers – who disagree with Bin Laden, Khomeini and so on – because they see their religious life as living in a state of peace, cooperation and mutual respect with others and have strong religious grounds to be and act like that and are therefore willing to accept this kind of political regime.

So to have a Rawlsian state requires a large number of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and so on who understand their religious obligations or their religious life as met by living in this kind of condition of mutual respect. So we can’t, as it were, fi-nesse the religious problem.

Do you see what I mean?

We who believe in this idea have to convince others – I have to convince other Catholics, you have to convince other Muslims and so on – that we need to respect the same rules in order to have this kind of regime. It’s the best kind of regime we can get today because we live in a state of diversity and we have to get rules we can all accept from different perspectives.

AG: But when everyone agrees, is there one interpretation? Can we have a kind of co-ex-istence of democracy and religious interpretations? But when does the Rawlsian solution come into play? When we have different religious beliefs?

CT: Absolutely. Legal scholar Andrew Koppleman writes about a judge in 1925 in the United States called Storey.13 He repeats a kind of Rawlsian idea but with a narrower fo-cus. He says there are all sorts of Christian denominations in America so we cannot jus-tify founding a court decision on Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or some other denomina-tion. But we’re all Christian. So, he argues, we can draw on some general Christian un-derstandings to make a certain judgment in court. And he did that. There, you had a Rawlsian overlapping consensus but within a narrow limit of all being Christian.

Historically, what we’ve done is move the borders and boundaries of the overlapping consensus out to include, in fact, every possible position willing to work within such a system of overlapping consensus

12 In 1989, Ali Khamenei succeeded Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini as Iran’s Supreme Leader, that is, the highest ranking political and religious authority of the nation. Khomeini, also known as Ayatollah Khomeini, was an Iranian religious leader, scholar, and politician as well as the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew United States-backed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran.13 Andrew Koppelman, “The Fluidity of Neutrality,” 66, Review of Politics, 633, 2004.

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But that consensus cannot accommodate people who, like Ataturk, think secularism should be enforced. Nor can it accommodate people who, like certain Catholics in the Basque provinces of Spain, think Catholicism should be enforced. These people cannot be part of that consensus.

But what you have is a consensus nourished by all these different views that tell people this is how, or the way, to live. In other words, I owe it to God to live with these other people – who don’t believe in God – in a condition of mutual respect. And that’s an es-sential underpinning of this kind of regime.

WILLIAM JAMES’ CONTRIBUTION TO TODAY’S RELIGIOUS SITUATION (pp. 16-18)

AG: I’d now like to move beyond secularization to questions about your book, Varieties of Religion Today.14 There, you say James mis-describes humanity in three respects, though on everything else he is right. My question is what is James’ contribution to the religious situation today?

CT: I want to stress that James15 contributed much to the understanding of religion today in the West. He is very insightful but partly because he was living in the United States. There, already certain features of religion in other western societies are being pioneered. And the feature of religion today in the West that James understood so well is fracturing into a number of different affinity groups of quite different kinds where people strongly follow their own spiritual intuitions.

The West has gone through a massive evolution. In 1500, everybody lives in a single, big – I’m talking about Western or Latin Christendom – Catholic Church. Every society is in a Catholic society. Belonging to the state and belonging to the church are the same thing or the same two organizations growing out of the same population.

We’ve passed through a series of intermediate phases and come to an era in which reli-gious life is more and more centered on or powered by the particular spiritual search and needs of groups and individuals.

The notion that belonging to the state and belonging to the church are linked is no more. Not absolutely, but that kind of joint belonging has dwindled very much.

More and more, religious life is led in ways that don’t connect to the whole society. Rather, religious life is led in ways that connects you to other people with the same affin-ity.

14 Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2002.15 American psychologist and philosopher William James’ (1842-1910) principle work regarding religion is The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985 (1902).

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That is the major feature of religious life today in the West on which James picked up. I want to stress that qualifier.

AG: That what has changed is that individuals are no longer part of these totalities?

CT: They may belong to a large totality. They may be Catholic, as I am, which is a very large totality. But they don’t see that as connected to their belonging to the state in which they are citizens.

It’s not everywhere. People in Poland still do see the connection, or still did until very re-cently.

At a certain point in the United States, people thought Protestant Christianity was part of being American. People in Britain thought Protestant Christianity was part of being British. People in Spain thought Catholicism, etc. etc.

There are ways of living a religious life by connecting to large-scale national identities – and we have moved away from that.

My description exaggerates because a lot people still lead their religious lives in ways that make connections between, on the one hand, their participating as members of a church in a larger cosmos or totality and, on the other hand, belonging to a state by par-ticipating as citizens in the democracy in which they live.

But the West has slid from a world in which everybody belongs to a state church or a church aspiring to be a state church. Rather, churches struggle with other movements to take over the state.

The move from a connection to state power to living much of one’s spiritual life in a way that is unconnected to the larger political society marks a shift. So, it might be a large in-ternational church, as in my case, but it no longer connects to the political structure in the same way.

A POST-DURKHEIMIAN16 WORLD (pp. 18-20)

AG: In Varieties of Religion Today, you say we live in a post-Durkheimian world, which has the following attributes: 1) one’s religious affiliation has nothing to do with one’s na-tional identity; 2) the varieties of religious conviction fracture and multiple; 3) one’s reli-gious life depends on one’s own experience, not on a church or clerical order; and, 4) re-ligious convictions are not transmitted from one generation to the next; rather, each gen-eration has its own convictions that may differ from the those of their fathers and moth-

16 French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) principle work concerning religion and society is The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Les Formes élémentaires de la religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie). Translated with and Introduction by Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press, 1995 [1912].

13

ers. How are these four attributes related and what is specific about this post-Durkheimian world that James could or did not understand?

CT: James understood lots but I don’t quite agree with your formulation of the third at-tribute. Today, much of religious life is driven or determined by people’s sense of their own spiritual affinities. But spiritual affinity can be with a larger church or a clergy –that’s my case – or it can be with a small organization of friends or a meditation group.

So, in other words, people don’t say anymore – I mean people never said this but, in a sense, unconsciously – I’m a Pole so I’ve got to be a Catholic. They are spiritually moved by something. It can be the Dali Lama, Pope John Paul II, etc. Western society now com-pletely legitimates following your own religious instinct.

A big change occurs around the 1960s when large segments of whole populations begin to follow what is previously an elite ethic of authenticity17; now everyone following their own sense becomes a mass cultural phenomenon.

You can’t exaggerate this development by describing it as an almost cataclysmic cultural change.

But, again, this is something in the West. It influences a small stratum of highly educated and mobile people working in the globalized economy. Even if they come from India they are to some extent influenced by this big change. But as a mass phenomenon, it is a Western phenomenon.

AG: The question is: are these four different attributes related to one another?

CT: Yes, in a sense. The key is the importance of my own religious affinity because that’s what post-Durkheimian means, that is, I won’t be connecting myself. I won’t be connecting my religious allegiance and my political allegiance; the number of options will multiply; and the idea that I ought to follow my father and mother because they were religious doesn’t necessarily follow. So these things all hold together as facets of a single cultural shift.

AG: You say one of the attributes of what has happened is the varieties of religious belief have multiplied.

CT: Yes.

AG: Can we find among these varieties a distinction between what is good and what is better or what is bad and what is worse? And if we can make this evaluation, on what cri-teria can we make such judgments? CT: I certainly make such judgments – but based on criteria that make sense to me. But we will not agree.

17 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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For example, I am an orthodox Catholic Christian. I think we have to grow to the point of opening ourselves to God and see that we are simply made by and emanate from God.

We have to go beyond a focused sense of ourselves as totally self-sufficient.

Yet, much of the culture of authenticity tells us to liberate, assert and free ourselves and so on. But, for me, this misses an immensely important dimension of reality. But the peo-ple into that culture of authenticity will not believe me. So we have to live together and find a way to co-exist.

SHALLOW SPIRITUALITY (pp. 20-21)

AG: You believe today’s spirituality is superior to the spirituality of the past, which is as-sociated with hypocrisy, boredom, a kind of rebellion against existing religious forms, and confusion between belief and power. But you see two problems with modern spiritu-ality. You say it’s shallow and doesn’t make any demands or require asceticism. What do you mean when you say today’s spirituality is shallow and that it doesn’t make any de-mands?

CT: These formulations don’t get me quite right. Much of today’s spirituality is shallow but Mother Teresa’s spirituality isn’t shallow.

So I could put it this way: in an earlier dispensation there is the imposition of a powerful religion with a deep aspiration to spirituality. It makes a demand of great dedication and devotion. Many people make up for it by more or less conforming outwardly and not be-ing dedicated inwardly. So there is a certain amount of hypocrisy and pretending in-volved.

Now the people who would have been hypocritical in the past can practice a less demand-ing spirituality.

But I wouldn’t say the spirituality of today is superior to the spirituality of yesteryear or the other way around. There will always be people with a deeper or more devoted faith and people with less deep faith. But these manifest themselves differently.

It may belong to the religious development of humanity that we can come to an era where, in the phrase of the Qur’an, there is no compulsion in religion. That is something we had to come to. I mean, in Christian terms, I see we had to come to that.

NEO-DURKHEIMIAN IDENTITIES (pp. 21-24)

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AG: You say the post-Durkheimian identities are important in the modern world. And you give examples of Irish and Polish post-Durheimian identities.

CT: These are really neo-Durkheimian identities.

AG: What do you mean by neo-Durkheimian? Please explain and tell us why the neo-Durkheimian identities have become so important today.

CT: This term was an attempt to find an ideal typical case – a language of ideal types18 – that would capture the big evolution in Western society between an earlier understanding of society as Christendom and a later one. For example, the paradigm case of the earlier understanding is the ancient regime of the French monarchy. Here you have the idea of a king as a kind of sacred figure of the order of things – of the social order as being cosmi-cally grounded – and a number of other features of that kind.

The development of modern equality, mobility and individualism destabilized and ren-dered impossible this earlier understanding. A new way of linking society to God arose from this destabilization. Modern societies are all societies where people are mobilized around a certain idea of themselves.

A mobilized society has to have an idea around which to mobilize. Around what idea are we mobilized? For instance, a paradigm case in the modern world is the nation. We are Canadian, French, etc.

A number of mobilized modern societies have a religious marker. The United States is the first good case of this. The United States mobilized around the idea that God created human beings. British nationalism mobilized around a Protestant identity against Spain and France. Poland and Ireland mobilized for independence or freeing the society from a foreign invader, around a sense of being Catholic.

I call this a Durkheimian identity because it weaves together political and religious alle-giance. But it’s neo-Durkheimian when this weaving together is done in the context of modern, mobilized societies. It is not paleo-Durkheimian as in the case of the traditional French monarchy.

This is very important today in a world where a great deal of mobilization takes place. For example, Islamism is an attempt at a mass mobilization around a certain version of Islam and to make that the foundation of political life, overthrowing an existing regime. Wherever this happens it profoundly modifies religious life.

It’s important because modern identity mobilization enters a new kind of space where considerations such as defeating or liberating yourself from a possible enemy, defending yourself from a dangerous threat of an enemy, and considerations of pride and dignity with reference to potential humiliation from another, are important.

18 An “ideal type” is a term for an intellectual tool, a classification or box as it were, used for learning or problem-solving purposes and not necessarily a category into which everything fits neatly.

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If you listen to the language of national and other mobilization in the world it is full of this.

So another set of considerations become primary – pride, power, resistance against the enemy – and this leads, I would argue, to a de-centering of religious faith from what it should be.

Take, for example, the kind of right wing Protestant Christian American identity. It’s a certain identity not shared by all Americans but a lot of Americans do share this identity.One could argue – and a number of my Protestant friends very strongly argue – that this de-centers their religious faith because it is now heavily invested in pride in America and American power. Bush is a perfect example.

So, from a Christian point of view, I would argue that this is a deviation from religion and Abdulkarim Soroush has a wonderful line when he says, “We don’t want an Islam of identity, we want an Islam of truth.” I think that says it very well.

When you get the kind of thing you hear from Ahmadinejad today, it’s all mobilized around the community and power.

And we now face the danger of a clash of civilizations,19 which is not yet here. But we’re in danger of mobilization and counter-mobilization. A mindless Islamophobia is develop-ing in the West, which feeds off the mobilization from Islamism and identifies all Mus-lims with that Islamism. This creates terrible rifts within Western societies among Mus-lim minorities in certain cases and then is reflected in international media and interna-tional relations. So this has become a very dangerous phenomenon we have to fight against strongly.

FUNDAMENTALISM (pp. 24-25)

AG: How do you account for Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalism?

CT: I suppose there are different causes. But one thing is relatively the same and it crops up again and again. In my general theory of secularization, modern developments desta-bilize early forms of religion, which then have to be recomposed or reformed.

One way of carrying out this reform is based on a sense of threat. Somebody is depriving us of our traditional religion so we have to rally. One way to rally is to try to reach back to the origins and reproduce a kind of Salafist movement. There is a terrible pathos here because they never do reproduce [the past] because you can’t.

19 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993. Samuel P. Hunting-ton, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

17

Protestant fundamentalism in the United States is an example. This movement is the first to take on the name fundamentalism. It draws strongly on the Protestant idea that the Bible is the ultimate source of truth. This Protestant movement came out of an encounter with modern science, which mounted various challenges, including challenging the bibli-cal account of creation. Protestant fundamentalists respond to these challenges by claim-ing the Bible is all literally true.

But this is something new in Christian history because it requires making a clear distinc-tion between literal, scientific truth and metaphorical truth. Fundamentalist Protestant Christians in the United States make this sharp distinction only in reaction to the arrival of modern Western science.

AG: When is the difference obliterated?

CT: Only now, in modern times, do some people make a clear distinction between literal truth, on one hand, and images, metaphors and so on, on the other. The idea is that these are two totally different kinds of discourse. In other words, the idea is that literal scien-tific discourse is very different than mythical imagistic discourse – and that one is much superior to the other. That is an idea of modern, scientific culture. And so, the defensive response is to say we are also speaking the language of literal scientific truth.

Danny Postel20: I’d like to add a little amendment with reference to when Protestant – or any – fundamentalists oppose science. When creationists say, for example – before intel-ligent design – Darwinians are wrong about the origins of life, they oppose specific claims modern science makes. But they accept, whether they realize it or not, the episte-mological validity, legitimacy and authority of the scientific way of looking at the world insofar as they insist on the literal truth, rather than backing off and simply saying this is a different kind of knowledge. When they say things like Darwinians are wrong, funda-mentalists actually reproduce, legitimize and participate in the specifically modern scien-tific episteme [knowledge].

CT: Yeah, and that’s why they taught creation science. You said it much better than me.

RELIGIOUS TEXTS AND OBJECTIVE LITERAL TRUTH (pp. 25-26)

AG: So, you do not contend that all contents of religious texts have objective, literal truth?

CT: Not if you oppose literal truth to the truth you can carry in images. If you oppose that then, of course, they don’t all have literal truth. They have another kind of truth.

20 Danny Postel is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberal-ism (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006) and is Communications Coordinator for the organization Interfaith Worker Justice.

18

AG: So, for instance, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that Jesus arose from the dead, didn’t actually happen?

CT: Yes. I mean I think He did but by that I mean something very different: He is living fully in another kind of time. So if you try to understand the resurrection without under-standing the notion of another kind of time, which can gather times together, times that are now separate from each other, if you see resurrection outside of that transformation in our whole relation to time – then you always distort [the meaning of the resurrection].To take another biblical story, for example, it’s not like Lazarus rising from the dead, which was simply coming back from the dead to be alive again and then dying later on. It’s another kind of thing. So you have to put the meaning of the resurrection in the con-text of a quite different understanding of time.

AG: So, in other words, do you believe Lazarus was actually brought back from death to life in literal truth?

CT: The story implies Lazarus was taken for dead and came out. I don’t know whether he was actually clinically dead or not.

AG: What about the virgin birth? Was it a gynecological truth or a metaphorical one?

CT: These cases are hard to judge. There are cases central to the faith – like the resurrec-tion – and other cases that are not. Who knows [with absolute certainty] about these cases? But you have to understand something like the resurrection in the Christian tradi-tion – which has varying parallels in the Muslim religion and Judaism – as central.

ISLAM’S TRANSCENDENT GOD AND CHRISTIANITY’S HUMAN MESSIAH (pp. 27-28) AG: We Muslims believe in a transcendental God. God is free from any physical at-tributes. The Qu’ran rejects the notion that Jesus is God. So we have two different con-ceptions of a phenomenon. A transcendental God, on one hand, and a God who becomes a man in the Messiah, on the other. Is this a symbolic or real event?

CT: Yeah, for Christians it’s real. We believe there are two natures in one person.

AG: Can you defend this position based on rational arguments?

CT: That sounds as though you understand clearly what the rational entailments are of God. You can understand the rational entailments of a particular conception of God, which is both Jewish and Muslim, where the rational entailments are such that this couldn’t be otherwise.

But a Christian question to you would be is your conception of God correct?

And this is where we disagree.

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For instance, you start by saying God is something beyond the physical. In a sense, God is certainly beyond being. But if you start by saying there is physical existence and some-thing beyond physical existence then you’re talking about a certain metaphysical view of different kinds of being. God can’t be identified with either of those.

So, we’re dealing with deep matters that none of us properly understand about the nature of God. Whoever speaks of rationality here already assumes certain fundamental defini-tions of rationality. But one can challenge these – and it’s not irrational to challenge them.

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND RATIONALITY (pp. 28-29)

AG: You are a religious man, some say deeply religious. How do you reconcile religious belief and rationality? Let me give you two different concepts of religion and rationality. In rationality, we say, “If a is b and b is c, therefore a is c.” This is syllogistic reasoning.

CT: That’s right.

AG: How does religion look at this? We take religiosity as a form of following a text – the Qu’ran, the Bible or the Torah – or as a form of slavishly following people such as Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and the Imams in the Islamic Shia tradition.

In the first, we have an autonomous syllogistic reason. In the second, one slavishly fol-lows texts or people. If you ask why do I say this it’s because the Qu’ran or Mohammed said this, etc. But in rationality, we are led by reason.

Do you think we can reconcile these two different modes of thinking?

CT: Reconcile? Of course. You started by defining and if you define you already lost the argument. If you define reason, semi-syllogistic reasoning, from where do the premises come? They can’t come from further syllogistic reasoning.

Understanding rationality properly requires seeing it as inclusive, but not exclusively made up, of deductive or syllogistic reasoning. In other words, it includes but is not ex-hausted by syllogistic reasoning.

So, the premises have to come from somewhere. We have insights, try to formulate in-sights, get them clear, put them into words, and then start making deductions.

So, there’s another function of reason – what I call articulating deep insights, bringing them up and putting them in words.Plato knew this because the Greek term logos21 includes this element of formulation or formulating.

21 Logos is a Greek term for reason in the sense of that through which the universe becomes intelligible.

20

So you can’t define reason as just syllogistic reasoning. It needs premises. And from where do they come? Some come from God, perhaps. So that’s not slavishly following.

AG: Can religion be completely rationalized?

CT: No, because that means we could totally articulate everything about God and that is so far beyond us. So we can only, to a minor degree, get a rational grasp of God.

NON-RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN RELIGION (p. 29):

AG: So how can we accept religion when it cannot fit entirely within rationality? I’m not saying religion is against rationality. But there are elements that are not rational. How can we accept something that has non-rational elements in it?

CT: It seems evident that if you wait around until you have a view of the world of which you understand everything before you act, you’re going to be in a state of paralysis for the rest of your life. We’re never going to understand the depths of human existence, of the cosmos, etc.

AG: Do you think Heideggar – who did not believe in God – did not understand exis-tence?

CT: I’m not sure if either of those are true. I’m not sure he didn’t believe in God. Al-though it isn’t my conception, he had a strong conception of God. But he certainly didn’t think you could totally understand God.

His whole point is there’s something radically incomplete about our understanding. We get some things clear; but in doing so we cover up, obscure or make difficult other things.

HOW OUGHT WE TO LIVE? (pp. 29-31)

AG: He has two questions about contemporary humanity. First, what has happened to contemporary men and women? What is our actual situation? What have we become? And second, what ought contemporary men and women to do? What is our ideal goal or telos?22 What should be our purpose?CT: I don’t know if I can answer the first question as it is because it seems to me that we’ve become lots of different things in the modern world. We live in a set of fixed or-ders: for example, legal, ethical and political orders; and, a sense of total order in the cos-mos. And these orders exclude – they screen out or make it hard to see – a lot of features of our reality.22 Telos is an “ancient Greek term meaning ‘end’ or ‘purpose’. Telos is a key concept not only in Greek ethics but also in Greek science. The purpose of a human being is a good life, and human activities are evaluated according to whether they lead to or manifest this telos….” Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 792.

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These socially constructed orders make it especially hard to see the potential and power of personal relations to transform the situation between human beings.

Part of what Weber means by rationalization is understanding things in terms of universal or regular rules, etc. Weber sees that the whole basis of the biblical tradition – which in-cludes Judaism, Christianity and Islam – is the idea of the primacy of a personal relation to God. For example, God’s revelation, God calling Abraham, etc.

Weber, following Harnack, a great 19th century theologian,23 picked up on this biblical idea of a personal relation to God and the Greek idea of charisma, the word for gift, the gift of grace.

So Weber sees there’s something missing when you understand everything simply in terms of legal and other orders because charisma is a power that can erupt into a situation and alter it.

The term charisma is banalized in contemporary politics, which shows how much we think in terms of regular order.

So people such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mandela surprise us. They see the po-tential for shifting the order through acts such as non-violent resistance or a truth and rec-onciliation commission.24 And that is one of the things we miss.

AG: So how does this connect to the question what are human beings and how ought we to live?

CT: In the present, we have realized to a tremendous degree one of our potentialities, which is to erect systems of rules and explanation. But we have also crushed, inhibited and made difficult the realization of another aspect of our potential, that is, the potential for transforming, and being transformed by, relations that connect: friendship, love, rec-onciliation, forgiveness, and so on. This latter potential has atrophied to a considerable degree in the modern world. To be fully human – if that is our goal – requires we open up that potential again. Today, our great spiritual – and perhaps political – leaders under-stand this.

NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS (pp. 31-32)

AG: How do you explain new religious movements? How are they founded and how do they spread and develop?

23 Adolf von Harnack (1951-1930), prominent German church historian, participated in a scholarly tradition flourishing in 19th century Germany that produced the historical-critical method for interpreting the Bible and understanding the historical Jesus. He promoted the social gospel as well.24 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report released 21 March 2003. Accessible online at the South African Government Information web site: http://www.info.gov.za/otherdocs/2003/trc/.

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CT: Very differently. One of the most important of these movements is Pentecostal Protestantism, which no one foresaw or could foresee.

Within Islam, there are various tariqats25 spreading in Africa. They have a different kind of dynamism but are still important.

In Senegal, which is a successful secular democracy that is half-Christian and half-Mus-lim; and it’s a successful secular democracy in part because of this tradition of Sufi tariqats, which are powerful in that society.

I don’t know how anyone can generalize about what is common among Chinese Falun-gong, American Pentecostal Christianity and African Muslim tariqats because, conceptu-ally, they are so different.

In addition, there are new developments in Indian Hindu bhakti religion.

In 2050, I may have figured out some kind of common thread but for the moment I’m perplexed.

AUTHENTIC INTUITIONS AND SUPERFICIAL RITUALS (p. 32)

AG: You say it’s possible our reaction to authentic intuitions can turn into formal, super-ficial rituals. What do you mean?

CT: I measure death against superficiality by a double criterion. On one hand, how much does one understand the depth of emotions and motivations in human beings? On the other, how much does one allow for openness to a profound and far reaching transforma-tion of human life? These two criteria are connected.

INTERPRETING TRADITION WITH REFERENCE TO MODERNITY (pp. 32-33)

AG: In some of your works you talk about recycling, reinterpreting and reconstructing traditions with reference to a new social imaginary and modernity. What do you mean?

CT: I don’t mean developing an alternative to modernity. Rather, what I mean is moder-nity reposes and makes necessary such reinterpretation. Reinterpretation becomes neces-sary when people are in a new situation and have to ask new questions. People scour the traditional texts but no one has quite asked that question before. The answers aren’t in the traditional texts. So you have to think again: What is the spirit of the whole tradition? And then see what it means today.

25 In Arabic, tariqa is the word for “method” or “way.” A tariqa is a brotherhood of Sufi mystics in Islam. Each tariqa developed its own characteristic methods of attaining stages and states of mystical union with God. Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, 1995, p. 1057.

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The other way of dealing with this is the fundamentalist one, which is to imagine that the answers are all there. That is problematic because fundamentalists take the texts out of their original context.

THEORIES OF MODERNITY (pp. 33-35)

AG: You say there are two possible theories of [or ways of understanding] modernity. The first takes a historical approach; the second ahistorical. You consider Habermas ahistorical.

CT: I said cultural and acultural. It may have been mistranslated.

AG: What’s the difference between the two and who are the theoreticians of this division?

CT: The acultural theory thinks that the developments of modernity – for example, eco-nomic growth and urbanization – come about independently of the culture in which they grow but they alter the culture. So, if that’s true, we could expect the process of modern-ization to be similar everywhere and to produce similar changes such as individualism and instrumental rationality.26

The cultural theory is relative in that changes come about that are similar to the changes that happened in the West, what we call modernity: changes having to do with the market economy, the modern age and so on. But those changes draw on the cultural resources within the traditions of the respective societies.

Therefore, when you get a similar development in Japan as you get in Europe it’s some-what different because it draws on Japanese Samurai traditions. What ends up happening has a lot of overlap with the European case and the same functional validity. But it devel-ops in a different way because it’s coming out of a different culture.

In other words, I think we need a historical account of Western modernity in the particu-lar cultural terms of the West. But we also need other accounts of modernity in the partic-ular terms of say Japanese culture or Chinese culture.

26 “Instrumental rationality” is concerned exclusively with means to a given end. It is not concerned with truth or reality or whether the goal, purpose or end sought is good or not. In other words, instrumental ratio-nality (“technical rationality” is another term for it) is the rationalization of means to a given end. It asks: “If I want that, what is the most efficient way to get that, whatever that may be?” Scientism idolizes this kind of reasoning. For example, a scientistic forest ecologist when asked, “What is a good forest?,” will re-spond: “You tell me what kind of forest you want and I’ll tell you the conditions you need to cultivate to get it.” Instrumental rationality treats the material environment as a mere means to ends that are given. It has a domineering, manipulative attitude to reality in the service of the subject (e.g., a person but also a cor-poration or the state) and his or her ends, which are not questioned morally. By contrast, practical reason is concerned with the aims, ends or purposes of human action and whether they are morally thought out in terms of what it means to flourish as members of a good society and as interdependent participants in an ecologically healthy natural environment.

24

As for Habermas, his theory of communicative action, which makes the key to modernity the splitting of three domains or spheres of reason, as though it were a universally appli-cable process that applies everywhere as against one particular reading of the Western process. I don’t think it’s the Western process but – correct me – one particular reading.

AG: And you use multiple modernities in the same sense?

CT: That’s right. There are many kinds.

AG: So modernity doesn’t necessarily mean Westernization?

CT: No.

AG: So there appear to be different aspects or forms of modernity. What is the modernity that takes different forms?

CT: It’s a series of changes of institutions and practices related to what allows or enables a society to participate successfully in the global economic and political scene. Today, this would include a kind of Weberian bureaucratic state, some kind of market economy and the development of successful entrepreneurship as well as the rule of law and, some would include, democracy. I don’t know if the latter is true but, in other words, what a society needs so as not to be exploited or marginalized in the world economy.

AG: Is secularism a part of modernity?

CT: I don’t see that – unless you let me define secularism. If I can define secularism by this notion of the changing position of religion then maybe it is part of what is needed. But in any other sense, secularism is not a part of modernity. In the long run, secularism is a part of modernity in the sense of the religious neutrality of the state. But secularism in the sense of religious decline, not at all.

AG: What about in the sense of the institutional separation of religion and state?

CT: Yes, if we make finer distinctions as you made earlier in our discussion. Some of these yes; some of these no. In other words, in some societies there’ll be a sense of the re-ligious definition of the society. But in the sense of an intrusive application of religious law by the state, no.

AG: In other words, a state that imposes religious laws does not belong to modernity?CT: It’s going to fare very ill, fare very badly.

AG: Would you say the same thing about a state in which clergy allocate to themselves exclusive, particular rights to rule?

CT: Such a state is going to perform very badly in the context of a modern society.

25

WHAT IS CATHOLIC MODERNITY (pp. 35-36)

AG: You talk about Catholic modernity in your writings. What is Catholic modernity?

CT: That’s really another use of the word “modernity.” It’s not that it’s a particular form of modernity. It’s how Catholics should understand their roles and position within moder-nity.

And, in a sense, it’s an attempt to relativize modernity with the fundamental notion that Christianity – and you could say this of Islam as well – is a religion that has lived in a host of different cultures, will live in more cultures and will always have to find a way of recreating an authentic version of itself within these cultures.

The idea is that we Catholics should look at our relation to modernity in this light.This is one culture among many humans have had and will have. And we have to fight the tendency to think of this [version of Catholic Christianity], or the version that’s been created in modernity, as vastly superior to everything else in history; or, also, greatly in-ferior because, as some claim, we lost the age of faith in the Middle Ages.

So, instead of looking at it as absolute, as one or the other, we look at Catholic Christian-ity as having to function and recreate the faith in a different way in this civilization but which isn’t necessarily superior to the way it operated in other parts. We have to have a sense of belonging to the transnational and transtemporal.

ISLAMIC MODERNITY (pp. 36-37)

AG: Can you imagine Islamic modernity?

CT: Of course. I can imagine several because there are very different Islamic societies. It would be one that is in real dialogue and interchange with the modernity in which it is set – in India or Europe, for example.

Unless we ruin the situation, which we are capable of doing, we will see a development in the West – a Western Islam that is working its sense of what Islam is in this Western context.

I already know several people engaged in that project, whether they define it that way or not.

We could wreck this enterprise. The terrible conflict I described earlier – where you have Muslims from outside the West dying to attack the West and Westerners [provoking] this mindless anti-Islamic thing we’ve been seeing recently – could crush the space in which this kind of European or Western Islam could grow.

26

But we hope an Islamic modernity will happen because that’s the normal development.

MODERNITY’S CHALLENGE (p. 37)

AG: In some of your works, you say modernity has three ideals: individuality, instrumen-tal reason and secularism. These ideals, you say, create three weaknesses: spiritual de-cline, alienation and social disorganization – which threaten human dignity. Is there an exit?

CT: Yes.

I don’t remember saying quite this.

I remember the first two. Certain kinds of individualism and a certain overstress on in-strumental rationality – this is a challenge that the age offers. And we may rise to the challenge and this connects to what we were talking about earlier about somehow manag-ing to release the potentiality of the transformation.

CRITICIZING MODERNITY (p. 37)

AG: Can we say that in your view the most devastating critique of modernity is that it has forgotten the human agency or the moral agency of human beings?

CT: In one sense but not in other senses. We’re strong on the idea of human agency in the sense that we now think everything is up to us. We’re wrecking the world but we can make Rawlsian changes? We’re strong in the sense of moral agency in that we think we ought to act in order to change the world.

But there are some elements of personal agency that we consistently underplay, under stress. They’re precisely the kind that aren’t programmable or controllable. So, again, the kind of agency Gandhi [and King lived] is something you cannot program. It’s something that erupts.

RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT27 (pp. 38-39)

27 In an essay, “What is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant wrote that enlightenment is a human being’s re-lease from “self-incurred tutelage,” that is, “the inability to make use of “one’s own understanding without direction from another” not because of lack of the capacity to reason “but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapre aude! [“Dare to know!”] ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ – that is the motto of the enlightenment” (Translator Lewis Beck, 1959 [1784]). Taylor is not criti-cizing this.

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AG: My next question is about your book, Sources of the Self.28 It’s a complicated ques-tion. In that book you criticize the radical Enlightenment exemplified by people such as John Locke. You contend that the radical Enlightenment transforms the human self – re-duces it to an atomized individual that follows his or her personal thoughts and appetites and confuses the true self with one’s appetites. If we put aside actions and appetites, what is left in the self, in your view?

CT: A lot – aspirations, spiritual hungers, a search for meaning, a craving to feel that you are in the right, good, and fundamentally worthy. One could go on and on.

AG: In Sources of the Self, you seem to approve of three things in modernity. First, the interiority of human beings; you trace the genealogy of this idea to three people: Saint Augustine, Montesquieu and Descartes.29 Second, the affirmation of ordinary life and the individual as an agent in his or her ordinary life; you trace this idea back to the Refor-mation. And, third, the voice of nature in one’s own being, which you trace to the roman-tics.30 Do you consider these three related in some causal fashion or do you think some of these produce others?

CT: No. They have mutually affected each other because they’ve been happening but they do have separate roots. You can imagine them arising separately from each other. In certain forms, they’ve grown apart. So they are like threads woven in and out of cloth.

AG: Would it be correct to describe you not as a critic of modernity but of the radical En-lightenment?

CT: Yes. Central to the radical Enlightenment is this idea that we can understand people simply in terms of their appetites and even their individual appetites – appetites on the in-dividual level.

It’s a bad norm but that’s not the most important thing. Nobody can live like that. No-body lives by appetite alone. We all have some sense of standard and some sense of dig-nity, and are moved by the need for meaning and so on.

28 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1989, Part IV, Chapter 19, “Radical Enlightenment,” pp. 321-354.29 Saint Augustine (354-430), a native of what is now Algeria in North Africa (then part of the Roman Em-pire) was a teacher of literature and public speaking, church father, theologian, and Bishop of Hippo (396-430). His writings include The City of God and Confessions. Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Sec-ondat (1689-1755) was a French lawyer and political philosopher whose works include Persian Letters and The Spirit of the Laws. Rene Descartes (1596-1650), was a French mathematician and philosopher whose books include Meditations on First Philosophy.30 Romanticism is a complex European and American literary, artistic, and intellectual movement originat-ing in 18th century Europe in part as a reaction against the aristocratic nature of the Enlightenment, the flat, utilitarian character of the Industrial Revolution and the scientific rationalization of nature. Romantics in-clude William Blake, Mary and Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Beethoven, Goethe, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.

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So what’s wrong with the radical Enlightenment view is it’s radically reductive and an in-adequate way of reading and explaining human life. There will always be people like Bentham31 and others who think like that but it’s a totally inadequate reading.

LIBERALISM AND RAWLS (pp. 39-42)

AG: Alasdair MacIntyre32 and Michael Sandel33 view liberalism differently from the way you do. You have discussed many aspects of liberalism and consider many erroneous. Which liberal ideas do you consider in error?

CT: I consider that what some people call liberalism, which is the kind of Rawlsian for-mulation, is, again, radically inadequate because it leaves out so much. The great liberal thinkers I admire – people like Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill,34 for example – didn’t have this terribly narrow interpretive scheme. For one thing, Rawls and other philosophi-cal liberals are just speaking on the normative level. But people such as Tocqueville and Mill have a discourse that straddles different boundaries. They’re speaking both in terms of history, sociology and the normative. They’re trying to see how to realize certain very important goods in human history in their epochs. So it’s a much richer discourse on lib-eralism.

AG: A difference between you and others such as Sandel, MacIntyre and Rawls is about the primacy of right over good. Rawls’ interpretation rejects utilitarianism, a rejection that seems to force one to accept the primacy of right over good.

But a different interpretation of political liberalism says moral, metaphysical and reli-gious pluralism is a reality and this is what forces one to accept the primacy of right over good. In other words, to reconcile all these different interpretations in civil society, and to generate the minimum of consensus necessary for a political order, we have to accept the primacy of right over good.

Rawls explains this with two ideas: public reason and overlapping consensus. He rejects comprehensive liberalism to open up space for political liberalism. Do you think he suc-ceeded? Do you still disagree with Rawls on the primacy of right over good? Is this your most important disagreement with Rawls? Or, does your most important disagreement with him have to do with the tension between individualism and communitarianism?

31 English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). In The Principles of Morals and Legisla-tion (1789), he wrote, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fas-tened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.…”32 Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd Edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: Univer-sity of Notre Dame Press, 2007 (1981). 33 Michael J. Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 (1982).34 French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) is the author of Democracy in America among other works. English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill’s (1806-1873) principal works include On Liberty, Utilitarianism and The Subjection of Women.

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CT: All of the above. There is something very right about Rawls’ political liberalism and that is we need to have an overlapping consensus on the political regime and keep other elements of our views for our own lives.

But that difference – between what we have in common and what we have for ourselves – does not map onto the difference of right and good. There are certain rules of right that are part of my particular religion and there are certain virtues and notions of the good that are part of a commonly accepted ethic.

For example, in a democracy we all believe people should participate in a kind of life dedicated to the common good and that that is against sitting home watching television and so on. It’s a better way of life. That is a conception of the good. It’s an ethical con-ception we share. We also believe it’s better to have a society in which people have a cer-tain sense of solidarity and mutual attachment and so on than a society in which people stagger off in a relationship and insist on their rightful due and so on.

So, that some things can be held in common and other things kept out, and that a modern, pluralist society requires that we negotiate this common area, doesn’t amount to the prior-itizing of right.

Rawls starts with the idea that ethics is really a matter of rules because he is so Kantian. That he ends with that is not surprising but it has nothing to do with the underlying logic of the argument.

AG: And you are a Hegelian?

CT: In relation to Kant, I’m a Hegelian.35

AG: What affinity do you find between yourself and Hegel and that led you, as a historian of philosophy, to write more than anyone else on Hegel?

CT: I think Hegel is the first great modern philosopher of history and if you want to do that kind of stuff, which I did and continue to do, you have to come to terms with Hegel first to see what you think is right and wrong. You have to work through it. It’s the proper duty. It’s like your first degree. You have to get through that before anything else.

35 German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Hegel (1770-1831) are among the two most important philosophers in the modern West. One of Kant’s major concerns is to vindicate the author-ity of reason in a way that strikes a balance between the extremes of empiricism and skepticism, on one hand, and, on the other, the extremes of tradition and dogma. His major writings include Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Foundations), Critique of Practical Reason, and Religion Within the Limits of Rea-son Alone. Kant tries to develop a rational basis for morality and, in the Foundations, develops a “categori-cal imperative”: “Act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” He also says, “every rational being exists as an end” in him or her self “and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will” (Translator Lewis Beck, 1959 [1785], pp. 39, 46). Hegel is well known in part for his philosophies of history and religion. His principle works include The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and The Philosophy of Right (1820).

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AG: One more question about Rawls. He says justice, right and a few other important concepts are not dependent on metaphysical, moral and religious assumptions and have nothing do to with our assumptions about human nature. This is what Rawls’ political liberalism is about. Is it possible to construct a political philosophy without relying on metaphysics36, morality and religion?

CT: No. Sure, you can say I’m not going to rely on religion because you are relying on another metaphysical view that is not religious. But you’re always making assumptions about human nature and metaphysics in order to arrive at a rule of right.

CONSENSUS (pp. 42-43)

AG: Given the fact of pluralism and that arguments from all sides seem to have reached a point of mutual exhaustion – that all metaphysical and religious views have put forward everything they have and none have been able to bring us to consensus – what principles do you propose that would create the possibility of reaching a consensus that could form the basis for justice?

CT: But there are no principles that can produce a consensus. Only human beings can come to a consensus. If we’re lucky, we can do that if things go well. We can’t do that because we have become attached to certain basic political values, which we justify out of our own comprehensive use. When we manage to come to a consensus we don’t derive it from principles. We come to consensus because we agree. It’s something that we man-age to come to. It’s not a priori.

AG: Through negotiation, basically?

CT: It’s negotiation. But the point is, as Rawls does see, which is very important, it’s not just a modus vivendi.37 We have to come to principles that we all feel committed to morally. But we feel committed to them morally, each one for quite different reasons. So, the area of consensus is not itself fixed by some super argument. HUMAN RIGHTS (pp. 43-45)

AG: Now we have a problem, the problem of human rights. Look at what people in the Third World are saying. Muslim countries say there is such a thing as Islamic human rights. The Chinese say there are Chinese human rights. Asians are saying there are Confucian ideas. Russians are saying there are Russian ideas. Africans are saying there are African ideas.

But then they put us in prison and torture us in the name of those particular values. In other words, when you are sitting here and have all possible imaginable freedom, at least they don’t put you in prison for your views. 36 Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that seeks to explain the nature of reality, existence or Being.37 Modus vivendi is a Latin term for “[manner of living]: (leg.) a temporary working agreement or compro-mise between two disputants pending a settlement of differences.” Jon R. Stone, Latin for the Illiterati: Ex-orcizing the Ghosts of a Dead Language. New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 60.

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But you produce theories that say human rights are not universal, which some Third World dictators use in order to torture us. They say, “Look, even postmodernists say the same thing. Look, communitarians also say human rights are not universal. We, too, have our own set of values that allow us to whip you, cut off your hand, stone you, put you in solitary confinement, and if you change your religion we will kill you as an apostate” – and many other things.

How do you view this problem of human rights?

CT: I think human rights are universal. That’s what we mean by human rights – rights that are universal. The whole point of the adjective “human” here is that they are rights people have as human beings rather than as Iranians or Americans, etc.

All of the politically motivated statements about human rights being Chinese, etc. are in-credible humbug. But even they more or less implicitly confess that – because of the very bad violations they don’t admit to. They don’t say they torture, for example.

When we had this famous fight in Canada with the Iranian government about this Cana-dian citizen, Zahra Kazemi – she was killed, her skull was broken – they never admitted that. They never said we have Islamic rights. It’s not only humbug – this stuff – but they don’t even follow through on it [and claim exclusive religious or national rights]. They just challenge the claim that they are torturing. They deny all these things. They don’t say that they have a right [to torture].

Now, there are some cases where they do. Apostasy, for example, brings death in Islam. But no one claims they are not going against Islamic rights. They claim human rights end at this point. In other words, there’s a conditionality put on human rights and conditional-ity is something unacceptable for human rights, which are unconditional. Otherwise it isn’t a human right. It would be a right of properly practicing Muslims, which they would lose by stepping outside. But if it’s a human right it’s universal.

Now that doesn’t get us off the hook of a very important problem, which is the problem of trying to see how human rights can find a firm footing in different cultures.

Originally, the idea of human rights came out of a certain philosophical understanding of the human individual on his own and so on. And you can see how the same charter of hu-man rights could be grounded in a quite different way.

For instance, I had an interesting discussion in Thailand with certain Buddhists. They re-captured the whole list of human rights – but from another principle other than the princi-ple of the individual agent. They start from the principle of ahimsa38 – of nonviolence – 38 Ahimsa means noninjury, not desiring to harm; compassionate feeling toward others; and not desiring harm toward others, which requires a high degree of self-control and is often associated with renunciation. Gandhi made ahimsa a key part of his religious and political program. Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., The Harper-Collins Dictionary of Religion, 1995, p. 33.

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and they derive from that that you can’t take human life or restrict human freedom. So they have a different philosophical foundation. It’s a bit like the overlapping consensus within a society, which we have to achieve on the international scene.

THE STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY (pp. 45-48)

AG: Another thing about Hegel is the question of state and civil society. I’d like to know your view of state and civil society. What is a state? What is a civil society?

CT: In modern states I think we’ve developed a distinction between the state and civil so-ciety and what underlies the concept of civil society is the idea that society outside the state structure nevertheless operates as a kind of system.

There are two ways in which that is the case. One is to consider society as an economy and that is a big part of what civil society means to Hegel and Marx. The other is of course what we call the public sphere, which is sort of an assembly of agencies, newspa-pers, the media, associations, and so on, which discuss and exchange ideas and form pub-lic opinion.

So, in modern society we have a distinction between two ways of understanding the soci-ety as a whole – understanding it as organized under political authority and understand-ing it as systemically operating but outside of the political authority.

But that distinction makes sense only in a modern structure – not a Greek polis, medieval kingdom or traditional caliphate.

AG: Hegel talked about capitalist economy. Do you mean the same thing?

CT: Yes, that’s one of the pillars of civil society. It is independent and so is the public sphere. But I’m talking about the market economy. Yes, it is operating as a system. But if you have an economy totally controlled by the state, it’s not independent. It is part of the state operations.

AG: Are you using the term “public sphere” in the way Habermas understands this con-cept?

CT: Yes, in the sense in which he used the term in that wonderful book of his.39 That is right. The whole discussion of the public sphere in recent years has developed out of that Habermas book, which was translated very many years later into English and triggered an interesting debate. It was written much earlier in 1962 in German but translated into Eng-lish later.

39 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989.

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AG: In modern civil society the role of NGOs is very important.

CT: Yes.

AG: How do you look at NGOs?

CT: They are a very important part of democratic society and civil society. They’re a very important source of innovation of news kinds of social movements and collective action.

AG: How about social movements such as the women’s, workers’ and ecological move-ments?

CT: Yes, absolutely. These are a part of those new bourgeoning movements.

COMMUNITARIANS (pp. 46-48)

AG: So what is the role of communitarians such as yourself? Do you accept the label of communitarian?

CT: Only if we define it first. There are two meanings. One is clearly in the communitar-ian movement in the United States reflected in the work of Amitai Etzioni.40 Do you know who I mean?

AG: Yes.

CT: The idea of communitarianism is that the whole society should be more like a com-munity. As against simply rights holders, people should accept responsibility [for other members of the community as well as themselves]. I’m very sympathetic to that.

There’s another meaning of the word where it refers to sub-state communities defined by culture or religion, etc. I suppose communitarian in that sense means you’re in favor of those things or something like that. In that sense, I just don’t see the point of being for or against. It depends on what communities, where and what the structure is.

Take my country, Canada, for instance. There are three dimensions of diversity in Canada: English-French, aboriginals or original Indians and people who came afterward. Then there are different immigrant groups: Poles, etc.

And each of these requires totally different policies.

40 Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1993.

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In the case of aboriginals, we have to recognize their original right to sovereignty and ne-gotiate with them as entities, that is, if you like, a very communitarian thing. We recog-nize that.

In the case of English-French, we’ve worked it out in our constitution in terms of the fed-eral system and there’s one province that is majority French.

In the case of immigrant groups, neither of these forms of political power make any sense.

So Canadian multiculturism accepts the diversity of these different cultural streams – try-ing to get them to interact and integrate.

So, really, the word “communitarian” only applies – in the sense of favoring or treating a group as a community – to the aboriginals. I think any decent person ought to recognize that.

So, in a way, the word is very often just a red herring. I mean it doesn’t apply except in the Etzioni sense.

AG: Doesn’t it facilitate tension between civil society and state if you consider the whole society as a community?

CT: Not necessarily. It just means – in the only [proper] way to use it – that we shouldn’t define ourselves [only] as rights holders but [that] we also have responsibilities.

AG: But if civil society is defined by separate interests, desires, demands, and many other things –around which you organize women, workers, students, religious people, etc. – don’t you want to obliterate all these differences and create a community?

CT: That doesn’t mean you obliterate the differences. A civil society is defined by its au-tonomy from the state and contains individuals but also groups such as women, etc.

DISTINGUISHING COMMUNITARIANS FROM FASCISTS (p. 48)

AG: But it’s not mass society. What I’m concerned about is the massification you find among fascists. What differentiates communitarianism from fascism, that is, the oblitera-tion of all differences?

CT: This is the problem. The word has two meanings.

In its Etzioni sense, it carries no implication of cultural unity. It just means we accept [so-cial and individual] responsibilities.

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The other sense of the word talks about cultural differences and cultural groupings.

We must not confuse the two. It’s a misfortune that the same word is used for two very different ideas.

THE STATE AND CRITICIZING DEMOCRATIC STATES (pp. 48-49)

AG: Could you say something about the state? What is the state – both in the sense of ac-tual existing states but also as the state should be?

CT: I don’t know.

AG: What is your critique of actual existing states? Even democratic states are riddled with problems. What is your critique of these and then what is your ideal? How do you evaluate existing states?

CT: Well, badly but differently badly. They have different problems measured against democracy as an ideal. They all fail but they fail in different ways.

In some cases, it’s plain that there’s such a tremendous distance between the political sys-tem and the voters if money is controlling an immense amount.

In other cases, there are very deep divisions of a historical kind that prevent people from coming together to face contemporary problems.

In still other cases, there’s a very weak identification with representative institutions.

So you can go on and on. There’s just a great number.

It’s like saying what’s the ideal human being. Well, free from disease. Well, what dis-ease? Well, some people suffer in different ways. There are many, many diseases. Democracy comes in many forms with many imperfections.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (pp. 49-50)

AG: Do you believe in civil disobedience?

CT: In certain cases, yes.

AG: What is civil disobedience? What is your theory of civil disobedience?

CT: In some cases, even though it’s a democratic decision, the decision is so bad it must be resisted. A majority might decide, legally, to enter an unjust war, for instance. Then, at

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that point, if people have the courage to lie down in front of the tanks even if they roll over them – this is civil disobedience.

But it has to be exceptional circumstances because the normal understanding of democ-racy is that – when the decision is taken legitimately and legally – we obey.

AG: What do you think about civil disobedience when the government is not democratic?

CT: Then it’s an entirely different issue. At that point, it isn’t the legitimacy of the gov-ernment decision. So it becomes another set of considerations. We have to be very pru-dential here. Are we going to be able to do anything to reach other people?

But one of the of the big reasons to think twice about civil disobedience in a democratic society is because you’re sort of breaking an unspoken contract if you engage in civil dis-obedience.

AG: Do you consider non-democratic states illegitimate?

CT: I don’t feel that they deserve our support and our approbation in the way that demo-cratic states do. But to say they’re illegitimate is to almost be ready to call for rebellion against them and that may not be the best thing. It may not lead to something better. Sometimes it can just lead to the disintegration of the state altogether. So there are certain very imperfect states that are better than no states at all.

AG: What could lead to the disintegration?

CT: Rebellion sometimes leads to disintegration. Certain failed states today, like Somalia, come to mind. In a sense, there is a worse state for a population than a more or less au-thoritarian, rule-governed state. So you can make things much worse.

REVOLUTION (pp. 50-52)

AG: As a principle, do you reject revolution?

CT: No. AG: What do you think about revolutions – as defined by, say, Popper and Arendt41 as applied to revolutions such as the one in France?

They exclude the American Revolution.

But revolutions that aim to change the whole world – the whole society, to remake every-thing; therefore, since they wanted to change so much, they – haven’t led to democracy.41 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (1943); and Vol. 2, Hegel and Marx (1945). New York: Routledge, 2002. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1965. See also, Jon Gunnemann, The Moral Meaning of Revolution. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979.

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So Popper rejects such revolutions.

But he doesn’t reject revolutions in open societies as a matter of principle. If a system blocks all the peaceful ways of seeking change, the only path left is revolution. In that kind of situation, Popper considers beheading the king legitimate. But there’s one condi-tion. The only aim of revolution should be freedom and democratic reform.

The question is do you accept revolutions like the French, Chinese and Cuban revolu-tions, etc.? What are your thoughts on those types of revolutions?

CT: I think they are the kinds of cases where it’s not the revolution but the goals – and the organized telos of the revolution – which are flawed, as you suggested, so the only thing they could produce is tyranny. Sometimes this is clearer in hindsight than in fore-sight. But now we have the experiences of these kinds of historical cases to be able to foretell, before they happen, what a lot of revolutions are going to produce. I think it’s clear that these produced terrible destruction and oppression in human history.

AG: But if you reject revolutions there is nothing else left for us except peaceful resis-tance and peaceful resistance is nothing but civil disobedience.

CT: I am not saying I reject revolutions as such. But these kinds of totalizing revolutions are a problem.

AG: What kinds of peaceful resistance do you conceive for a society such as ours in Iran?

CT: It’s hard to say because it depends on the situation and what’s going to happen.

There are moments when peaceful resistance triggers a kind of implosion of the regime. I’m thinking of the Philippines in 1986, the Velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe. But the same kind of movement in Tiananmen Square had a very different result.

So there’s a very high degree of prudence involved. That is the big issue here. What to do in Iran is very difficult to say. I’m hoping at some point that some of the elements that hold the regime together will break apart. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a very sinister form of force. But if the army didn’t back the regime, the Revolutionary Guard wouldn’t be capable of keeping order alone. If there were a severe rift among the juris-consults or the ulema, things could change because there are a number of other Shia clerics who think this way of applying religion is terribly wrong, including people like Ali Sistani in Iraq and Shariatmadari in the old days, for example.

So, at some point one of these rifts or pluralities could weaken the regime and then there could easily be a civil resistance movement that could trigger an implosion.

AG: There are many, many questions left but I know you are tired.

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CT: Oh, no. It is a very, very interesting conversation.

POLITICS OF RECOGNITION (pp. 52-60)

AG: The next question has to do with the politics of recognition. What do you mean by this exactly? What are its components? How are your views of the politics of recognition different from those of Nancy Fraser and Alex Honneth?

CT: The politics of recognition42 is part of a whole theory of Western modernity, al-though it has spread beyond the West. In the last half-century, issues of recognition and non-recognition have become tremendously important politically.

So whereas before, for instance, subordinated or oppressed groups such as workers or na-tions asked for equality, independence, the vote, or liberation from an oppressive nation, now there is a demand for recognition and this goes along with the importance of iden-tity.

People have a sense that they have a certain identity and that identity has to be respected.

Sometimes, these are the same kinds of struggles. There are subordinate groups. But it’s as though the center of gravity has shifted from, say, a struggle for social and economic power and so on to a struggle for recognition.

Recognition of identity is a new factor in the political world. Before, some people who belong to the left felt this is a terrible mistake and people should really be asking about equality of income and power. Others, I’m thinking of Nancy Fraser,43 recognized that, in a way, this always has been a kind of unnoticed di-mension of many of the struggles of trade unions, subordinated nationalities and so on, and that this always has been part of such struggles but never before thematized.

So Nancy’s solution to this problem is to say both of these issues are important, that is, equality, power and so on, on one hand, and the recognition of identity on the other. We can’t scorn either of them. We have to run them both together.

Alex Honneth44 is different but interesting because he wants to explore what this demand for recognition is about and how it is somehow central to human life. So, going back to Hegel, he constructs the philosophy behind the demand for recognition. He wants to see the anthropological basis behind this demand for recognition. He looked at the philosoph-

42 Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. An essay by Charles Taylor with commentary by K. Anthony Appiah, Amy Gutman, Jürgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994 (1992).43 See, for example, Nancy Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Verso, 2003. 44 See, for example, Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1995.

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ical tradition of Hegel – one but not the only figure – and wrote a book that reconstructs the philosophical history behind this demand and looks at why it’s important for human beings and how human beings need recognition from others in order to grow.

AG: How far does he go back?

CT: He goes back to the Hegel period because that’s when philosophers begin to talk about this.

My point is that, as often happens, philosophers begin to explore and probe and then, af-ter a long period of time elapses, what they had explored earlier becomes a part of mass politics. It’s not unlike the problem of authentic identity, which was very much a theme in the Romantic period in Germany that later became a theme of mass culture in the sec-ond half of the 20th Century West. So there seems to be a lapse or time lag before things like the politics of recognition or the ethics of authenticity45 become a part of mass cul-ture.

AG: Where is the boundary of this recognition?

In Iran, we are facing a fundamentalist government characterized by boundless selfish-ness and concentrating on one’s self. The state’s desire to stay in power drives every-thing. The state believes God inspires everything the state does. The state does not recog-nize anybody else. Do you think we should recognize the state?

CT: No. The whole theory of recognition is not about something abstract like the state’s need for recognition; rather, it’s about how human beings need recognition.

Although the Iranian state now operates on an ideology that gives no place to recognition, in a sense, it is an ideology that goes back to pre-modern times and doesn’t speak of recognition.

But, in fact, the present Iranian government plays on that sense of grievance from the very lack of recognition.

So, what is behind the Ahmadinejad government saying the world won’t allow us to have our nuclear program? There is a concrete demand to have nuclear power. But, in the rhetoric, I feel, there is also a sense of grievance that great powers are not recognizing Iran – that they think of Iran as below or beneath them.

So, a lot of world politics is now played out in the register of dignity. Offended dignity and non-recognition is a very, very important theme.

AG: So this government is selfish and totalitarian and, while focusing on the politics of identity, divides people into two groups: the authentic and those who have become alien-

45 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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ated. And in the name of identity it represses people. What is your criticism of this, par-ticularly as identity is a key concept in your assessment?

CT: Absolutely. So identity can be used as a pretext and excuse to repress people, force them into line, declare some inauthentic, and mobilize others to do the most violent acts.

Although most identity struggles in actual politics are hard-line things, there is neverthe-less a real human need behind them that, as it were, these movements are hijacking.

Indeed, it is very possible for people working out a new definition of their historical iden-tity to be severely destabilized by reactions to that coming from outside which are very negative and depreciating.

AG: So the first part is that people have a need for recognition of their identity. Now onto the second part.

CT: Let’s take some examples. There are subordinate groups in society, for instance, African Americans. Like all such groups – every group in the world today – they’re in a standing process of redefining their identity as history moves on and changes.

What’s really important? What’s central to identity as African Americans? Do we even have one? Are there just different groups?

All these questions are always being debated.

Now if you have a subordinate group like African Americans, who are struggling to work out their identity, with some internal conflict among different versions, in the context of a very powerful group that has dominated them in the past which has a certain picture of African Americans and broadcasts it, that picture can’t just be simply set aside. The views of the minority that the majority media broadcast are often very distorted – and that destabilizes the minority’s attempt at social self-definition and can lead to very dead-end responses. For instance, the response of separatism – we don’t need you, we won’t bother with you, etc.AG: Do Blacks say that?

CT: Yes. But, of course, it’s also a pathological move on the part of the majority too. So all these very difficult relations are operating on the level of recognition or mis-recog-nition or non-recognition.

They really make a difference to the subordinate group.

I can explain it another way, too. In a sense, the only healthy way forward is something like truth and reconciliation. I mean really facing the past. But this is very hard to learn and bring off.

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There’s a real human need behind the demand for recognition. But it can also be the basis for pathological steps of a violent, separatist kind.

Every genuine human need can be taken in a very dangerous and destructive direction. Czarist Russia was, for example, a very unjust society in which peasants and workers were oppressed. But what was done in order to rectify that was, in the end, horrendous.

AG: Too much emphasis on identity is dangerous. Fundamentalist movements are an ex-ample of this overemphasis.

In the context of globalization, what definition do you have for identity?

We’re under pressure from two groups: local, domestic identity seekers and the process of globalization that takes values away from people without replacing them with new val-ues.

But what, alternatively, do you have between these two factors of globalization and do-mestic oppressors?

Now start with the definition of identity.

CT: You’re absolutely right. There are other important issues in human life other than the issues of identity. For example, justice, equality, and reaching some kind of comity so we can live together both within a society and internationally with some degree of peace.

So you can’t simply focus on the identity issue and if you do at the expense of everything else you’ll never get a world of peaceful co-existence.

And to recur to a discussion we had yesterday, in the field of religion, a great deal of modern religious movements strongly play on the identity chord and the notion we’ve been despised, rejected and so on. In my view, a religious movement can become so con-cerned with itself as a group – and its being recognized and not recognized and mobiliz-ing against those not recognizing it – that it takes faith out of what should be its main axis toward God. They bring it into some other axis, which is in some ways very alien to the faith. I mean as I was quoting Abdulkarim Soroush, “We want Islam, not Islam of iden-tity, Islam of truth.” So you’re absolutely right.

Nevertheless, if we’re trying to bring about a world in which we co-exist in equality and justice and comity, we can’t ignore the issues of identity and of non-recognition.

But they have to be placed in a larger context. That’s why I was saying about this country that the way to address these deep identity issues is, perhaps, in terms of the idea of some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. And I take South Africa as an example.46

46 See note 24 above.

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THE AFRICAN AMERICAN SITUATION (p. 58)

AG: Are you referring to the African American situation?

CT: What strikes an outsider coming into America is the degree of incredible denial about what was done to African Americans. People talk about slavery but it’s after slav-ery as well. There was ethnic cleansing in certain parts of the United States. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, blacks were forced to move out of whole counties. They were just chased out.

AG: They lynched them.

CT: Yes.

AG: Into the 1940s.

CT: I know. Even lynching was occurring at this time. Lynching is more admitted but this ethnic cleansing is just not talked about.

Why truth and reconciliation?

I’m jumping to the paradigm of Mandela and Tutu in South Africa because they were try-ing to put the relationship among the races there in another context, the context of how we can move forward together in a new society based on equality, mutual aid and so on. They were putting it in that context and not in the narrow context of this is what you did to me. And it’s only in this broader context that we can come to grips with the issues of identity. But sometimes we have to bring up very uncomfortable truths in order to do that. AG: One part of this process is to forgive and not forget.

CT: Yes, that’s right.

AG: In South Africa it is forgive and not forget. In Spain it is forgive and forget.

CT: It’s much healthier in South Africa. You remember the full truth in order to be able to put it behind you. Otherwise it festers.

AG: Do you agree with Paul Ricouer’s idea of memory in history?47

CT: Yes, I think it’s very profound.

AG: So these memories sometimes hurt very much.

CT: Yes.

47 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

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AG: We have many such horrible memories in Iran that do not allow us to get closer as a community. In the revolution we faced each other. After the revolution, we faced, killed and imprisoned each other. Many, many nasty things occurred such as war, cultural rev-olution, execution of prisoners, and terrorism. There’s a very deep lack of trust and it does not allow us to get closer to each other. My belief is that we should bring these is-sues out and discuss them.

CT: I agree.

AG: We need to have a national psychotherapy session and through the process of dis-cussing these issues repair them and ameliorate the situation. And I want you to help us move in this direction.

CT: Yes. Definitely.

I also think, in the major powers of the West, in relation to Iran, there are very deep memories that the whole Mossadegh intervention was something very shameful.48 We have to have that out.

We in the West, I’m from a small country but speaking for the big countries of America and Britain, they have to say, “We did something terrible.” And the new relationship has to proceed on the basis of being frank about what happened in the past.

But now people in the West can’t get away from remembering the things you did to them like the hostages of the American Embassy. True. It shouldn’t have happened. But this is one side. And on the other side, it’s a totally one-sided story. We have got to get beyond that.

TRADITION (pp. 60-61)

AG: What is your definition of tradition?

I want you to explain this in the context of Iran. We are facing a system in Iran that is fragmenting tradition. It is creating a montage of traditions that consists of some aspects of the past and some aspects of the modern. In the modern sector, it’s very interested in technology, particularly military technology. And it’s also manifesting itself in a sort of

48 Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967), Iran’s prime minister from 1951 to 1953, designed the nationaliza-tion of the Iranian oil industry and opposed foreign intervention in Iran, among other things. The British and American governments funded and supported a coup d’état that removed him from office in 1953. He was subsequently imprisoned for three years and put under house arrest until his death. In addition to the role of the British and U.S., scholars and historians cite, as a factor in his ouster, the reaction of Shia clerics and the traditional middle class to his increasingly radical, secular policies and fear of communist takeover. See James Rise, “Secrets of History: The CIA in Iran,” The New York Times, April 16, 2000 (http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html; accessed 1/19/09).

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aggrandizement that you can see in the nuclear issue. I call it supremacy-seeking based on nuclear imperialism, I guess. I think it would be wrong to call this traditionalist.

CT: Oh, yes, absolutely.

But tradition49 is not as simple as people assume. Every tradition, in the literal sense of the Latin word, has been handed on from generation to generation. That’s what it means. It’s complex and many stranded and the consequence of multiple interpretations each time it’s passed on.

Some people say, “Our version is the real one that goes way back.” But that’s ridiculous. There’s no single version that is authentic. There’s always been – is the Arabic word Ijte-had [independent reasoning based on changing context]? – interpretation going on the whole time. And there are today un-admitted reinterpretations going on.

I don’t know much about Shia Islam but what Khomeini started appears to be in many re-spects a new turn. So there’s a kind of imposture in this stance, that is, you want to have all the authority that comes from the very beginning without admitting you’re adding your own spin and interpretation.

IRAN, SITTLICHKEIT AND ARTICULATING BACKGROUND UNDERSTANDINGS (pp. 61-63)

AG: You have a Hegelian conception of morality or ethics. So, in your definition, ethics means conventional ethics which, in German, is this word –

CT: You mean sittlichkeit.50

AG: Yes. Is it spelled correctly?

CT: Yes, sittlichkeit is spelled correctly. I’m going to put my glasses on. It means “the ethical life of an established community.”49 See Edward Shils, Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Here, Shils explores the role of tradition in human societies with a concern for conserving humanity’s richest cultural resources and achievements that matter most. He “tries to see the common ground and elements of tradition” and to ana-lyze “what difference tradition makes in human life.”50 Sittlichkeit is the concrete, institutionalized pattern of ethical and social obligations of a people compara-ble to Alexis de Tocqueville’s use of the term, “mores,” in Democracy in America (1835-50). By mores, he means not only the original, strict meaning of the Latin word, moeurs, what he called “habits of the heart.” Mores also mean the different notions, various opinions, the sum of ideas shaping mental habits, that is, the whole moral and intellectual state of a people. But his focus is – practical, not abstract – on the elements in mores that help support political institutions. In a descriptive sense, mores are a people’s way of life – their culture – that is, patterns of meaning any group or society uses to interpret and evaluate itself and its situa-tion. In a normative sense, mores include the notions of duty, obligation, or moral rightness, and refers par-ticularly to social obligations. In this sense, “mores” is close to the German sittlichkeit, that is, the conven-tional, institutionalized pattern of social obligations – the actual ethical life – of a people. Such obligations are so taken for granted we don’t have to think about them, which contrasts with a post-conventional, criti-cal and reflective morality based on abstract universal principles.

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AG: This is an ethics that gradually takes shape throughout history.

But in Iran we have reached the conclusion that we have to critique this based on Kan-tian reasoning. Conventional ethics [in Iran] doesn’t stand for freedom. It doesn’t recog-nize women’s freedoms. It is patriarchal.

What do you think?

CT: I’m not as Hegelian as you think. I’m really much more an Aristotelian in that, of course, one has to make a critique of what went before.

But where I probably disagree with you is that I don’t think a critique simply from a Kan-tian standpoint is adequate.

It’s like trying to run on one leg instead of two legs because there are certain issues in ethics which have to do with what we owe each other and how we should treat other peo-ple and so on. And Kant certainly is a very good philosopher to deal with but he is not the only one.

There are other issues to deal with such as what is a good human life? What is a meaning-ful human life? What is a noble human life?

So the most important ethical judgments involve drawing from these two kinds of consid-erations, weaving them together – the issue of what we owe each other and what is just to do to each other, on one hand, and the issue of what’s a good human life, on the other.

For instance, the issue of freedom. I should acknowledge your freedom. I should not re-strict your freedom and vice versa. That is Kant. He is very strong about it.

What is it, though, to restrict your freedom? You can’t walk this way through my room at the moment. Is that a restriction on your freedom? Well, no. It’s trivial.

But if I say to you that you can’t believe in a certain religion, preach it, or say what you really think, then that’s a significant restriction.

So any principle of respecting freedom really operates with a background understanding of what’s important and what’s unimportant in human life. And if you operate on a pure Kantian basis you take for granted a certain background picture of human life without ever being able to discuss it.

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So I go back to Aristotle51 as well – a mixture of Kant and Aristotle. These are the two legs on which we have to walk.

Women are severely restricted. Perhaps in some small way they might be restricted in the house. But when somebody says they can’t educate themselves we see right away this is serious. Why? Because human beings need this kind of freedom.

AG: So you are saying that the first part is small?

CT: No, not at home. That would also be very important because you can’t do a whole lot of things.

There could be very minor restrictions. They can’t go into the men’s room or something. I mean there are restrictions of a kind that exist in every society that can be purely trivial.

But we look at the restrictions where we get a sense that we need to critique when terribly important human activities are at stake.

Yes, and we’re operating with sittlichkeit. It’s not necessarily articulated but we have a strong sense of what it is. That could be critiqued as well. Have we got the right back-ground of understanding? But in order to do that we have to bring it up. What are the ends of life? What’s important in life?

AG: So you’re saying that the background [understanding] should always be articu-lated? CT: Well, you can’t ever articulate a background totally. I’m saying that if we’re going to critique it we have to articulate bits of it in order to do that.

So we have to stop talking Kant talk only and talk, if you like, Aristotle talk. But Aristo-tle talks about the different goods of human life. It’s a shorthand I have for saying….

THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT (pp. 63-65)

51An ancient Greek philosopher and teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s (384-322 B.C.) main works include Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he focuses on “happiness” and “flourishing” and examines the nature of “virtue” and “excellence” and charac-ter traits human beings need to live life at its best. He starts by observing the differences of opinion about what is best for human beings and asks – What is the good? – not to come up with a list of goods (e.g., friendship, pleasure, health, honor, etc.) but to address the tougher, more controversial question: Which goods are more desirable than others? To resolve this issue, Aristotle asks what is the function, task or work of a human being and argues a human being’s purpose consists in rational activity in accord with virtue. What distinguishes human beings from other species is the capacity to guide ourselves by using rea-son, which gives us the potential to live a better life. Using reason well in accord with virtue over a lifetime is living well – is happiness. But happiness isn’t virtue; it’s virtuous activity. To some extent, living well requires good luck (e.g., good parents and fellow citizens who help us become virtuous) but individuals share much of the responsibility for acquiring and exercising the virtues (e.g., moderation, courage). (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/; accessed 2/7/09)

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AG: Since you are an Aristotelian, what is your take on the feminist movement?

CT: I have a very positive take on the feminist movement.

But I’m not buying the actual detail of Aristotle’s theory, which reflects his situation as a 4th Century BC Greek. It’s impossible to agree with much of this.

I’m just talking about a way of reflecting on ethics, which is trying to establish what Aristotle does in the very beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, that is, to try to establish what you could call the ends of life or the important human goods. It’s that kind of reflec-tion.

AG: Is there a difference between men and women?

CT: There’re lots of differences between men and women.

But ought that to make a difference in whom we educate and who votes and who gets what kinds of jobs? I think not.

But it should make a difference when it comes to maternity leaves. I think that in very many cases, not all cases, but in very many cases the woman is in a way more viscerally attached to the child. I have a strong critique of many of the regimes of maternity leave or, even worse, absence of maternity leave, that we have in the West. They’re far too short. They don’t take into account the rhythm of the growth of a child and bonding with the parent. We need a much more radical change where we take account of and make it possible for people to interrupt their careers for several years and still not be completely excluded. That is something very, very important. And it takes account of the reality of human life but also of female human life.

AG: Feminists say that the attachments of men and women are different and the identity of men and women are different. Some have moved onto more radical claims and say to-day’s sciences are a result of a patriarchal outlook [and that with a] female, or a woman’s outlook, a different philosophy would come about, a different human science would arrive, including in the natural sciences as well.

CT: I think that’s very different.

This is partly true, perhaps everywhere, but it’s vanishingly true in, for example, physics. The difference is almost zero in physics.

But of course it can be very big in history and sociology. We’ve seen the proof of that be-cause there’ve been female historians and sociologists who have brought up a lot of ne-glected points of views.

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It stands to reason, in a way, that what we call the human [or social] sciences would be much more affected by being seen from both standpoints than in the sciences of physics and astronomy.

AG: In the human sciences we sometimes say women have not been recognized because they were not recognized. Another point of view says men are incapable of this kind of recognition. There are certain things men can see and women cannot.

CT: I don’t put very much credence in that kind of position. Human beings are dialogical creatures. They’re made to talk to and learn from each other. It may be more difficult in some cases than in others but there’s no limit in principle. We can learn from each other. What’s true is that if you silence all the women or silence all the men, there will be cer-tain points of view that’ll be never entered into the discussion. That’s very true. But once they’re in the discussion there isn’t a limit in principle on the degree to which they can be understood.

AG: Is there any difference between female identity and male identity?

CT: Probably, but you’ll never be able to define it because cultures vary so much that within each culture you can always find different ways of acting, of humor and so on be-tween men and women. But you can’t take those differences and go to another culture that is totally different. Men and women will always play off each other and produce cer-tain differences. But they’ll be different differences. That’s the interesting thing.

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND COMMUNITY RIGHTS (pp. 65-67)

AG: In Iran, we defend freedom by defending the rights of the individual against the rights of the community. This is how we define liberalism. We think if individuals have freedom the freedom of the community follows; or, in other words, the rights of the com-munity are unnecessary if individuals have rights. We can’t say women are free on one hand and then on the other allow religious communities to treat women the way they want to. So, in Iran, we think individual rights precede community rights.

CT: The rights of individuals supercede the rights of communities insofar as these com-munities want to crush the rights of individuals.

But you haven’t got rid of the problem of the rights of communities by saying that. Again, take an example from my own country, Canada. We recognize the collective rights of aboriginal societies to a certain degree of self-government. One of the limits is, for instance, male-female equality, which is enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. There are limits on self-government rights but there are still self-government rights. So, we have to operate with both recognition of community and the defense of individual rights and we somehow have to make these two work together.

AG: What if the rights of community step on the rights of the individual?

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CT: In this case, we have a hierarchy. That is why the Charter of Rights in Canada is fun-damental and can’t be violated.

In other words, let’s imagine a free Iran – free from the present regime. A question will arise about the potential self-government rights of the Kurdish minority and maybe the Azeri-speaking minority, just to give two examples. One can’t ignore the issue these two minorities raise. Iran is a profoundly diverse society. I would say it’s even a multinational society. There’s a hegemonic, linguistic group – the Farsi-speaking one – but there are also many others. So if you want to work something out that would result in a genuinely liberal regime in Iran you have to face this issue.

AG: If Iran became a democracy we could have a federalist government.

CT: Exactly. But that is a recognition of community.

AG: What if the community’s rights violate the rights of the individual or the rights of women? This is the same problem in Canada where Muslims want Sharia52to operate in their communities. In your opinion, they should be given that right. But a liberal would say, “No, you cannot use your Sharia because you will then violate the rights of the indi-vidual.”

CT: No, actually the proposal in Ontario called for arbitration by imams53 about marriage questions. But, in the end, the legislation was withdrawn. The proposal was that, yes, imams could mediate but agreements they mediated had to pass the test of the fundamen-tal rights in the Charter. So if one of these agreements did not accord equalities to the woman it was immediately declared void.

AG: So you believe, then, that we cannot allow communities to disregard human rights?

CT: Basic rights. Basic individual rights. Exactly. If you like, that’s the kind of Canadian solution. There is a hierarchy of these fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter. It can-not be violated – period.

RESPONSIBILITY (pp. 67)

AG: You believe in ethics and responsibility. What do you mean by responsibility? Is this not one of your critiques of modernity?

52 Sharia is an Arabic word for “path.” Sharia is the religious law of Islam embracing “the entire body of rules and moral directives God ordains. In essence, a moral law by which human beings are to be judged in the hereafter, the Sharia may become part of the actual judicial apparatus of an Islamic state.” Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, 1995, p. 982.53 Imam is an Arabic word for “leader” and refers to Muslim community and ritual leaders. Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, 1995, pp. 480-481.

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CT: Well, it’s a critique of a certain kind of modernity. It’s a critique that says you can’t have a liberal constitution that simply identifies individual rights. Citizenship carries cer-tain responsibilities. You may not be able to enforce these responsibilities in the courts but in a democratic society citizenship carries a certain responsibility. This has to do with things like participation, voting, and, if necessary, going to war. It also has to do with – and this is harder to pin down – solidarity. As citizens, we owe things to each other, for example, redistributing wealth to our fellow citizens who are badly off. A liberal society that doesn’t respect or recognize that is, I think, severely defective.

JUSTICE AND THE UNITED STATES (pp. 67-68)

AG: How do you look at justice, then, in this country?CT: I think it’s much more complex than Rawls admits. There is no single principle of justice. We make judgments that our society is, in certain ways, not just. We have to modify it to make it just. That’s what we’re always arguing about and trying to do. AG: There’s no single principle of justice?

CT: You can’t get a single principle and derive all the issues you’re going to deal with from justice. That’s another kind of Kantian chimera or dream.

AG: What do you do with justice then?

CT: There are many issues in justice and many ways in which we can discuss or come to agree about the ways in which our society is off or not and then correct for them or not.

But think, for instance, about health care, and about the different kinds of workers in the health care services and how they relate to the actual health of the patient. Taking account of this – in relation to the level at which doctors are paid and the level at which nurses are paid – it is very unfair to nurses. We would move toward greater justice if we could raise nurses to a higher level of pay.

But I’m not looking for some huge principle up here from which I could deduce this. I’m looking contextually. Here, you have an important human need – health. There are ways of meeting this need and we remunerate people for meeting it. So, does the remuneration of different contributions correspond to the importance that these have for the health of the people concerned? This, in the end, is what it is all about.

AG: As a result, the American system is less just than the European or Canadian?

CT: I think so [laughter].

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND WAR (pp. 68-70)

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AG: Are you critical of the U.S. government’s foreign policy in war? If so, what is your criticism?

CT: I think the present government is the worst government that has ever existed in U.S. history. I mean a very stupid man unfortunately leads it and really very bad, unfortunate people are advising this stupid man.

On one hand, people who are very narrow in their outlook are advising him. They’re for business. They’re for controlling oil. They’re for doing whatever corporations want them to do and that’s why they refuse Kyoto.

On the other hand, there are really almost insane crusaders who think they can remake the world on the model of American freedom.

Both these groups are incredibly narrow. They understand this much about the world: the area around Washington, D.C. and major cities in the states. They understand nothing about the outside world. They don’t even understand us [Canadians] and we’re not cultur-ally very far away from them. They understand nothing about Iraq or Iran. They just are extremely narrow.

Americans can do better than this. In the State Department there are a number of people who do understand Iraqi, Iranian and European societies. The tragedy is that those people were deliberately shut out.

They all said you can’t do this invasion in Iraq and they just were deliberately shut out. So a very stupid man is being advised by very narrow minds and the rest are just shut out. Any input into intelligence and knowledge was just not allowed. These last six or seven years have been a real nightmare.

AG: How is it possible in a democratic society that a situation like this develops? Our country – if the government does something like this – it’s normal because it’s non-democratic and a fundamentalist regime.

To hear claims that it’s a democratic society, how could you, in this politically demo-cratic structure, evolve this form of government?

CT: Alas, it’s not impossible. This is my interpretation. It’s identity politics, again, going wrong and awry. Even in 2004, Bush managed to get a majority because he appealed to a certain U.S. identity – we are strong, powerful, pure, and good. We’re fighting evil peo-ple. This mood was so strong that for a long time people who stood up against Bush were shouted down: “You are not really American!” That can happen in a democratic society.

AG: American society seems to be very apolitical.

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CT: Yes and no. I’m bucked up after the 2006 elections because, finally, a lot of people woke up. It took many deaths in Iraq but with time you can hope to rectify this in a demo-cratic society. But there were six years totally wasted – wasted in a catastrophic direction.

AG: Iranians are still worried that the American government may attack us.

CT: After 2006, I hope it’s less likely because they’re beginning to feel that they don’t have the population behind them. What worries me is a kind of dynamic between Bush and Ahmadinejad. They’re similar kinds of demagogues, in a way. And they’re both whipping up their populations by pointing to the dangerous enemy and they both play into each other’s hands. And that worries me.

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE (pp. 70-73)

AG: My last question has to do with Israel and, in particular, Palestine. It’s a historical issue that has remained without a solution. It’s not the destruction of Israel. That’s not what we mean. It’s the Palestinians who are being destroyed. How do we solve this issue with justice? Who is at fault?

CT: There is so much wrong on both sides it really doesn’t help to look back into the past and say, “Who did what?” It only helps to look forward.

The oddity about this issue is every kid can draw you a picture of a peace solution now. We know pretty well exactly what it will look like – withdrawal to 1967 borders; maybe a few swaps of territory – everybody knows this.

But the problem is that, principally, Israel cannot accept what it would need to do now to make that credible, which means withdrawing certain of the settlements.

Only the United States could really coerce them. The United States is actually funding them now. At the very minimum, they would have to say, “If you don’t do X, Y and Z we cut the funds.”

The tragedy is that the American public is appallingly badly informed about Israel and Palestine. They look at it in simple terms: good people and bad people, honest innocent people and terrible enemy people. They look at it in that simple framework. It’s like Ah-madinejad reversed. That’s been the biggest disaster for the Middle East for the last – it’s not quite true because Clinton did see that he had to make a move and he tried to move in that direction. But the present American government has no idea and the American peo-ple have not been prepared.

AG: How do you prepare the American public for this?

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CT: It’s very hard. Somebody has to get up and say, “You’ve had a totally distorted view.” They’ll be totally attacked. A major figure with political ambition cannot say this. They immediately retreat. There’s a terrible cowardice about this.

AG: The influence of the Israeli lobby here is, I’m told, very strong.

CT: It is. But I’m not sure that’s the whole explanation. There are also strong fundamen-talist Christians who have their own complex reasons for supporting Israel. In addition, there are the consequences of 50 years of distorted reporting. I mean the average Ameri-can has no idea what it’s like in the West Bank now. This is a tragedy. Only America has the clout to force Israel to move towards what everybody knows is the solution.

AG: You are a religious person and know in all religions there are certain beliefs that [don’t] fit today’s time. Of all of the major books – the Qur’an, the Bible, etc. – you can’t claim that there are more [or less] of these points in the Qur’an than in the Bible. Yet, to-day, all of the attacks are focused on Islam and the Qur’an. And there doesn’t seem to be any question about the Bible. Why do you think that is? Why so much Islamophobia?

CT: I think this is a very complex sickness of the West and I don’t know if I fully under-stand it.

It’s partly that there’s a deep history behind this. Christendom and Islam, the Crusades, Ottoman Empire, Balkans – all these things go back. It’s partly this that I think plays a role. Even people ignorant of history have this sense.

It’s partly 9/11. Various kinds of jihadis54 and al qaeda attacking us: blowing up towers, the London tube, the Madrid train attacks, etc.

So all this awakens those historical memories.

Then very secular-minded people target Islam. But you’re right. They target only Islam. They throw their whole weight toward pointing out what’s terrible about Islam.

I have a great fear because there is a very simple-minded Islamophobia being preached in the West and it’s very hard to fight because people just assume a lot. You have to talk to them and work on them and say, “This is ridiculous, ignorant.” But it’s an uphill struggle because that other picture is demagogically designed and it’s so perfectly simple. It has a target. It has certain examples it picks out.

54 Jihad (ji-had; best known of many words formed from Arabic root j-h-d; “struggle” or “effort”), “in Is-lam, struggle ‘in the path of God or to make God’s cause succeed’ (Qu’ran 9:40). In the Qu’ran, jihad is connected with the imperative to command good and forbid evil (3:104, 110), especially with reference to the struggle of believers against persecution and idolatry. When this struggle takes the form of warfare, the Qu’ran speaks not simply of jihad, but of qital (killing). Jihad is, therefore, not simply equivalent to ‘holy war,’ though the struggle of believers may include war under certain conditions.” Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, 1995, p. 573.

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POLITICALLY ENGAGED INTELLECTUALS (pp. 73-74)

AG: You were politically involved in Quebec. What experiences do you have that you can share that would help us – as one who was involved in political struggle? As Habermas says, most intellectuals are in ivory towers; but he praises intellectuals who are involved in the public sphere.

CT: Yes, it was very admirable what Habermas said. I absolutely support this view.

AG: What can intellectuals do?

CT: It’s very hard to speak from my experience and then have something to say about this totally different scene in Iran. I’ve taken on this Quebec government commission on the issue of accommodating religious difference precisely because I saw that there is a danger of Islamophobia here, too.

AG: This is a commission of the Canadian government?

CT: The Quebec government.

AG: What is it about intellectuals who seem to not get involved in the public sphere and who play around with abstract concepts instead of being actively involved in politics? And then they say that when we get involved in public sphere affairs we are turning too political?

CT: To be fair to them, some find this more difficult than others and it depends on the country. It’s harder in the States. It’s much easier in Canada. I’m not quite sure why. I’ve moved between the academy and the political and people understand me so I can speak as an intellectual and to some extent be heard. But it’s something to do perhaps with the po-litical system here in the U.S. It’s dependent so heavily on money. That makes it very dif-ficult for intellectuals to have a role.

AG: So you must admire people like Vaclav Havel?

CT: Yes, I admire him tremendously – yes.

AG: Thank you very much.

CT: Well, thank you. I’ve enjoyed this tremendously and, really, I admire you very, very much, and I wish you the best of success.

AG: It was a privilege for me to meet with you.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

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Akbar Ganji, born in Tehran, Iran in 1960, is a journalist, writer and political dissident. A radical democrat, Ganji often crosses the “red lines” of press censorship and provokes almost daily death threats from government-affiliated henchmen. As a youth, he sup-ported the Islamic revolution but became disenchanted in the mid-1990s. He served time in Tehran’s Evin Prison from 2001 to 2006 after publishing a series of stories on the mur-der of dissident authors, known as the Chain Murders of Iran. In prison, he wrote a mani-festo – not only as a dissident but also as a believing Muslim and former revolutionary – that calls for replacing Iran’s theocratic system with “a secular democracy.”

Ganji has received international recognition for his work, including the World Associa-tion of Newspapers’ Golden Pen of Freedom Award, the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression International Press Freedom Award, the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, and the John Humphrey Freedom Award.

Charles M. Taylor, C.C., Ph.D., born in Montreal, Canada in 1931, is Northwestern University Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy. He is also McGill Uni-versity Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy. He earned a B.A. in his-tory from McGill (1952) and as a Rhodes Scholar pursued studies in political science, philosophy and economics at Oxford University where he obtained a B.A. (1955), M.A. (1960) and Ph.D. (1961). Noted political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin supervised his dis-sertation, which was published as, The Explanation of Behavior (1964).

He is known for his viewpoints on morality and modern Western identity of individuals and groups. He is a practicing Roman Catholic. Many of his students have gone on to be important philosophers and political theorists.

Professor Taylor has taught in numerous institutions, including Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Frankfurt University in Germany, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University (1976-81). His re-search focuses, in particular, on modernity, pluralism, multiculturalism, the question of identity, and secularism. He has written 20 books, including Hegel (1975), Philosophical Papers (2 vols., Cam-bridge University Press, 1985), Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1992), Varieties of Religion Today (Harvard University Press, 2002) Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004), and A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007).In the 1960s, Taylor ran for election to high office in Canada four times as candidate for the social democratic New Democratic Party in Mount Royal. In the 1962 federal elec-tion, he placed third behind Liberal Alan MacNaughton. In 1963, he placed second in federal parliamentary elections. Most famously, in the 1965 election, he lost to newcomer and future prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. This campaign garnered nation-wide attention since both Taylor and Trudeau were considered intellectuals and “star candidates.” In 1968, in his fourth and final effort to win a seat in the Canadian House of Commons, Taylor came in second as an NDP candidate in the riding of Dollard.

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In 2007, Canadian Premier Jean-Charest appointed Taylor and Gérard Bouchard to Co-Chair a one-year Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodements re-liées aux différences culturelles, to study and explore the widespread, highly charged de-bate centering on the social accommodation of religious and cultural minorities in Québec. In May 2008, the commission presented its 300-page report. Taylor is also a member of the Social Science Research Council (New York City) working group on reli-gion, secularism, and international affairs.

In 1992, the Quebec provincial government awarded Taylor the Prix Léon-Gérin, the highest honor given for contribution to Quebec intellectual life. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2000, he was named a grand officer de l‚ Ordre national du Quebec. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2007, Taylor, a practicing Catholic, won the Templeton Prize ($1.5 million) for exceptional contribution to the affirmation of life’s spiritual dimension; and, in 2008, won the Kyoto Prize ($460,000) for lifetime achievement in arts and philosophy.

The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 18, November 22, 2007

The US and the Plight of the Iranians

By Akbar Ganji

The following is a summary version of the letter sent to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in September by the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji.

OPEN LETTER TO THE UN SECRETARY-GENERAL

To His Excellency Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations:

The people of Iran are experiencing difficult times both internationally and domestically. Internationally, they face the threat of a military attack from the US. Domestically, a despotic state has—through constant and organized repression—imprisoned them in a life-and-death situation.

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Far from helping the development of democracy, US policy over the past fifty years has consistently been to the detriment of the advocates of freedom in Iran. The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadeq and the unwavering support for the despotic regime of the Shah are just two examples of these flawed policies. More recently the confrontation be-tween various US administrations and the Iranian state over the past three decades has made internal conditions very difficult for the proponents of freedom and human rights in Iran.

Exploiting the danger posed by the US, the Iranian regime has put military-security forces in charge of the government. It has shut down all independent domestic media and is imprisoning human rights activists on the pretext that they are all agents of a foreign enemy. The Bush administration, for its part, has approved a fund for democracy assis-tance in Iran. That this fund is, in fact, being largely spent on official US institutions and media affiliated with the US government has made it easy for the Iranian authorities to describe the regime’s opponents as mercenaries of the US and to crush them with im-punity. At the same time, even speaking about “the possibility” of a military attack on Iran makes things extremely difficult for human rights and pro-democracy activists in Iran. No Iranian wants to see what happened to Iraq or Afghanistan repeated in Iran.

Iran’s dangerous international situation and the consequences of Iran’s dispute with the West have totally deflected the world’s attention and especially the attention of the United Nations from the intolerable conditions that the Iranian regime has created for the Iranian people. The dispute over the enrichment of uranium should not make the world forget that, although the 1979 Revolution of Iran was a popular revolution, it did not lead to the formation of a democratic system that protects human rights. The Islamic Republic is a fundamentalist state that does not afford official recognition to the private sphere. It represses civil society and violates human rights.

Are you aware that in Iran political dissidents, human rights activists, and pro-democracy campaigners are legally deprived of “the right to life”? On the basis of Article 226 of the Islamic Penal Law and Note 2 of Paragraph E of Section B of Article 295 of the same law, any person can unilaterally decide that another human being has forfeited the right to life and kill them in the name of performing one’s religious duty to rid society of vice. Over the past few decades, many dissidents and activists have been killed on the basis of this article and the killers have been acquitted in court. In such circumstances, no dissi-dent or activist has a right to life in Iran, because, on the basis of Islamic jurisprudence and the laws of the Islamic Republic, the definition of those who have forfeited the right to life (mahduroldam) is very broad.

Are you aware that in Iran, many writers are lawfully banned from writing? On the basis of Note 2 of Paragraph 8 of Article 9 of the Press Law, writers who are convicted of “propaganda against the ruling system” are deprived for life of “the right to all press ac-tivity.” In recent years, many writers and journalists have been convicted of propaganda against the ruling system. The court’s verdicts make it clear that any criticism of state bodies is deemed to be propaganda against the ruling system.

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The people of Iran are experiencing difficult days. They need the moral support of the proponents of freedom throughout the world and effective intervention by the United Na-tions. We categorically reject a military attack on Iran. At the same time, we ask you and all of the world’s intellectuals and proponents of liberty and democracy to condemn the human rights violations of the Iranian state.

Above all, we hope all of Iran’s political prisoners, who are facing more deplorable con-ditions with every passing day, will soon be released. The people of Iran are asking them-selves whether the UN Security Council is only decisive and effective when it comes to calling for the suspension of the enrichment of uranium, and whether the lives of the Ira-nian people are unimportant as far as the Security Council is concerned. The people of Iran are entitled to freedom, democracy, and human rights. We Iranians hope that the United Nations and all the forums that defend democracy and human rights will be un-flinching in their support for Iran’s quest for freedom and democracy.

Akbar Ganji

Endorsed by:Jürgen Habermas (J.W. Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt)Charles Taylor (McGill University)Noam Chomsky (MIT)Ronald Dworkin (New York University)Robert Bellah (University of California, Berkeley)Alasdair MacIntyre (University of Notre Dame)Orhan Pamuk (Recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature)J.M. Coetzee (Recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature)Seamus Heaney (Recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature)Nadine Gordimer (Recipient of 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature)Mairead Corrigan-Maguire (Recipient of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize)Umberto Eco (novelist, Italy)Mario Vargas Llosa (novelist, Peru)Isabel Allende (novelist, Chile)Robert Dahl (Yale University)Michael Walzer (Princeton University)Seyla Benhabib (Yale University)Cornel West (Princeton University)Michael Sandel (Harvard University)Eric Hobsbawm (Birbeck College, University of London)Stanley Hoffman (Harvard University)Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research)Philip Pettit (Princeton University)Slavoj Zizek (University of Ljubljana)Daniel A. Bell (Tsinghua University)Nikki Keddie (UCLA)Marshall Berman (City College of New York)Hilary Putnam (Harvard University)

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Robert Putnam (Harvard University)Alan Ryan (Oxford University)Zygmunt Bauman (University of Leeds)Richard J. Bernstein (New School University)Nicholas Wolterstorff (Yale University)Talal Asad (City University of New York Graduate Center)Joshua Cohen (Stanford University and Boston Review Magazine)Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame)Richard Falk (Princeton University)Harvey Cox (Harvard University)Stephen Holmes (New York University)Andrew Arato (New School for Social Research and University of Frankfurt)Jose Casanova (New School for Social Research)Charles Tilly (Columbia University)David Held (London School of Economics)Joseph Raz (Oxford and Columbia University)Steven Lukes (New York University)Claus Offe (Humboldt University, Berlin)Axel Honneth (J.W. Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt)Khaled Abou El Fadl (UCLA)Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd (University of Humanistics)Abdullahi An Na’im (Emory University)Saad Eddin Ibrahim (American University of Cairo)Abdulkader Tayob (University of Capetown)Zakia Salime (Michigan State University)Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Harvard University)Charles S. Maier (Harvard University)Sara Roy (Harvard University)William A. Graham (Harvard University)Elaine Bernard (Harvard University)Alexander Keyssar (Harvard University)Farid Esack (Harvard University)Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University)Alexander Nehamas (Princeton University)Anne-Marie Slaughter (Princeton University)Jeffrey Stout (Princeton University)Mirjam Kunkler (Princeton University)Partha Chatterjee (Columbia University)Todd Gitlin (Columbia University)Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia University)Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University)Arthur Danto (Columbia University)Claudio Lomnitz (Columbia University)Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University)Gauri Viswanathan (Columbia University)

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William R. Roff (Columbia University and University of Edinburgh)Alfred Stepan (Columbia University)Timothy Mitchell (New York University)Tony Judt (New York University)Zachary Lockman (New York University)Adam Przeworski(New York University)Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)Fred Donner (University of Chicago)Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (University of Chicago)Avi Shlaim (Oxford University)Richard Caplan (Oxford University)Alan Macfarlane (University of Cambridge)Mary Kaldor (London School of Economics)Paul Gilroy (London School of Economics)Richard Sennett (London School of Economics)Leslie Sklair (London School of Economics and Political Science)Sami Zubaida (Birbeck College, University of London)Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University)William Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)Richard Wolin (City University of New York Graduate Center)Stanley Aronowitz (City University of New York Graduate Center)Adam Hochschild (writer, USA)Rabbi Michael Lerner (Editor, Tikkun Magazine)Cherif Bassiouni (DePaul University)Benjamin Barber (University of Maryland)Ashis Nandy (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi)Ariel Dorfman (Duke University)Ziauddin Sardar (City University, London)W.J.T. Mitchell (Editor, Critical Inquiry)Howard Zinn (Boston University)Stephen Lewis (McMaster University)Michael Bérubé (Penn State University)Steven Nadler (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Ernesto Laclau (University of Essex)Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster)Eduardo Galeano (Writer, Uruguay)Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand)Robert Boyers (Editor, Salmagundi)Joe Sacco (Graphic Novelist)Adam Shatz (The Nation Magazine)Arjun Appadurai (New School for Social Research)Dick Howard (Stony Brook University)John Esposito (Georgetown University)Ian Williams (The Guardian, online columnist)Ronald Aronson (Wayne State University)Mark Kingwell (University of Toronto)

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Azyumardi Azra (Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta)Norman Finkelstein (American Jewish Dissident Intellectual)David Schweickart (Loyola University)Marcus Raskin (Institute for Policy Studies)Juan Cole (University of Michigan)Carlos Forment (Centro de Investigación y Documentación de la Vida Pública)Ronald Beiner (University of Toronto)David E. Stannard (University of Hawaii)Jonathan Rosenbaum (Film Critic, Chicago Reader)Stephen Eric Bronner (Rutgers University)Katha Pollitt (The Nation Magazine)Charles Glass (freelance writer, Paris)John Keane (University of Westminster)Matthew Rothschild (The Progressive)Anthony Barnett (openDemocracy Magazine)Murat Belge (Bilgi University, Istanbul)Michael Tomasky (Editor, Guardian America)Thomas McCarthy (Yale University)Daniel Born (Editor, The Common Review)Dusan Velickovic (Editor, Biblioteka Alexandria, Belgrade)Chris Toensing (Middle East Research and Information Project)Frank Barnaby (Editor, The International Journal of Human Rights)Douglass Cassel (University of Notre Dame)Nelofer Pazira (President, PEN Canada)Martín Espada (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)Douglas Kellner (UCLA)William Shepard (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)David Ingram (Loyola University Chicago)Enrique Krauze (Editor, Letras Libres Magazine, Mexico City)Gavin Kitching (University of New South Wales, Australia)Joel Rogers (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Martin Shaw (University of Sussex)Carl Boggs (National University, Los Angeles)Ahmed Rashid (Journalist, Lahore)Thomas Keenan (Bard College)Rafia Zakaria (Indiana University)Michael Thompson (Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture)Shadia Drury (University of Regina)Courtney Jung (New School for Social Research)Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research)Hussein Ibish (Hala Salaam Maksoud Foundation)Christopher Norris (Cardiff University)Vinay Lal (UCLA)Chris Hedges (The Nation Institute)Simon Tormey (University of Nottingham)Melissa Williams (University of Toronto)

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Sandra Bartky (University of Illinois at Chicago)Thomas Sheehan (Stanford University)James Tully (University of Victoria)Asma Afsaruddin (University of Notre Dame)Pankaj Mishra (writer, India)Martin Beck Matustík (Purdue University)Stephen Zunes (University of San Francisco)Stephen Kinzer (Northwestern University)Rick Salutin (Columnist, The Globe and MailJames Reilly (University of Toronto)Ayesha Jalal (Tufts University)Ismail Poonawala (UCLA)Elizabeth Hurd (Northwestern University)Michael Mann (UCLA)Patricia Springborg (Free University of Bolzano, Italy)Henry Munson (University of Maine)Charles Kurzman (University of North Carolina)Rohan Jayasekera (Associate Editor, Index on Censorship)Stathis N. Kalyvas (Yale University)Mary Ann Tetreault (Trinity University)Robert Jensen (University of Texas at Austin)Rashid Begg (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)Roxanne L. Euben (Wellesley College)Peter Mandaville (George Mason University)Edward Friedman (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Ingrid Mattson (Hartford Seminary)Muqtedar Khan (University of Delaware)Duncan Ivison (University of Sydney)Danny Postel (author, USA)Mariam C. SaidMichaelle Browers (Wake Forest University)Tariq Modood (University of Bristol)Ronald J. Hill (University of Dublin)Gregory Baum (McGill University)Tamara Sonn (College of William and Mary)Saba Mahmood (University of California, Berkeley)Mark Juergensmeyer (University of California, Santa Barbara)Lucas Swaine (Dartmouth College)Charles Butterworth (University of Maryland)Carole Pateman (Cardiff University)Amrita Basu (Amherst College)Fawaz Gerges (Sarah Lawrence College)Yong-Bock Kim (Asia Pacific Graduate School for Integral Study of Life)Ann Norton (University of Pennsylvania)Cecelia Lynch (University of California, Irvine)Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell University)

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Aristide Zolberg (New School University)Craig Calhoun (President, Social Science Research Council)Hagit Borer (University of Southern California)Dennis J. Schmidt (Penn State University)John Ralston Saul (author, Canada)Corey Brettschneider (Brown University)Timur Kuran (Duke University)Paul Chambers (University of Glamgoran)Robert R. Williams (University of Illinois at Chicago)Nicholas Xenos (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)W.D. Hart (University of Illinois at Chicago)Louise Antony (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)Rama Mantena (University of Illinois at Chicago)Judith Tucker (Georgetown University)Sam Black (Simon Fraser University)Genevieve Fuji Johnson (Simon Fraser University)Shelley Deane (Bowdoin College)Craig Campbell (St. Edward’s University)Samer Shehata (Georgetown University)Mona El-Ghobashy (Barnard College)Jacque Steubbel (University of the South School of Theology)David Mednicoff (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)Zeynep Arikanli (Institute of Political Studies, Aix-en-Provence, France)R.E. Jennings (Simon Fraser University)Walid Moubarak (Lebanese American University)Nicola Pratt (University of East Anglia, UK)Ulrika Mårtensson (The Norwegian University of Science & Technology)Jillian Schwedler (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)Robert D. Lee (Colorado College)Alice Amsden (MIT)Stephen Van Evera (MIT)Joanne Rappaport (Georgetown University)Douglas Allen (University of Maine)Sharon Stanton Russell (MIT)Matthew Gutmann (Brown University)Louis Cantori (University of Maryland)Catherine Lutz (Brown University)Azzedine Layachi (St. John’s University)Katarzyna Jarecka (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland)H.C. Erik Midelfort (University of Virginia)Edmund Burke, III (University of California, Santa Cruz)Michael Urban (University of California, Santa Cruz)Susan Moeller (University of Maryland)Laurie J. Sears (University of Washington)Margaret Levi (University of Washington)Ebrahim Moosa (Duke University)

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Robert Ware (University of Calgary)John Entelis (Fordham University)Juan Linz (Yale University)Malise Ruthven (writer, Scotland)Charles Derber (Boston College)Matthew Evangelista (Cornell University)Adam Michnik (writer, Poland)Norman Birbaum (Georgetown University)Hamza Yusuf (Zaytuna Institute)Carol Gould (Temple University)Nubar Hovsepian (Chapman University)Colin Rowat (University of Birmingham)Bettina Aotheker (University of California, Santa Cruz)Jan Nederveen Pieterse (University of Illinois)Udo Schuklenk (Queen’s University)Alistair M. Macleod (Queen’s University)Nancy Gallagher (University of California, Santa Barbara)Jamie Mayerfeld (University of Washington)William A. Gamson (Boston College)Michael Goldman (University of Minnesota)Jan Aart Scholte (University of Warwick)Koen Koch (Leiden University, the Netherlands)Morton Winston (College of New Jersey)Michael Perry (Emory University)Tony Smith (Tufts University)W. Richard Bond (Brock University)Adrie Kusserow (St. Michael’s College)Nissim Mannathukkaren (Dalhousie University)Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University)Ásta Sveinsdóttir (San Francisco State University)Feyzi Baban (Trent University)Elzbieta Matynia (New School University)Beverley Milton-Edwards (Queens University Belfast)Awad Halabi (Wright State University)Arthur Goldschmidt (Penn State University)Peter Railton (University of Michigan)Naomi Klein (author, Canada)Paul Aarts (University of Amsterdam)Thomas Mertes (UCLA)Samuel C. Rickless (University of California, San Diego)Emran Qureshi (Harvard University)Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego)Terry Eagleton (University of Manchester)Mujeeb Khan (University of California, Berkeley)Jesse Lemisch (City University of New York)Joanne Landy (Campaign for Peace and Democracy)

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