| AN UPDATED VERSION OF
ENLIGHTENMENT: CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTISM
In 1987, the German philosopher
Jürgen Habermas, in the midst of the Historikerstreit about conflicting
images of the German past and German identity, introduced the concept of
‘post-traditional identity’ (Habermas 1989). Building on the idea
of the ‘ethical way of life’ and the moral understanding of individual
identity described in Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Habermas spoke of
a Verfassungspatriotism (constitutional patriotism) that might serve as
the basis for a ‘post-traditional’, Western-oriented German identity that
nevertheless does not let go the possibility of working through Germany’s
troubled past.
In the Historian’s Dispute,
Habermas introduced the idea of constitutional patriotism in order to establish
a form of communal identity that is less dependent on cultural heritage,
tradition, and history than on the identity of the nation-state.
For Habermas, the ideology of the nation-state is based on a specifically
modern form of collective identity. During the second half of the
19th century, the dissolution of the traditional social order and the transformation
of cultural discourse was enacted and supported by the German Geisteswissenschaften.
And yet, says Habermas, there was a contradiction between the critical
nature of the Geisteswissenschaften stemming from their claims for truth
and the need for establishing a historically based, national identity,
in which representations of tradition and meaning production could support
the fiction of a homogeneous national population, and serve as a vehicle
for social integration. The willingness of Geisteswissenschaften
historians to put their work into public use led to “a historiography that
elevated empathy with what existed to a methodological ideal” (Habermas
1989: 254). The historians resolved the contradiction between the
‘reality’ of the historical past and the poetic nature of the narrative
form by calling for a methodology that employed “objectification to be
achieved analytically” and a “subjective appropriation and emphatic reliving
(Nachvollzug) of past achievements” (Broszat and Friedlander 1990: 104).
In Habermas’ view Hitler’s and Mussolini’s nationalisms broached this compromise
by releasing nationalist egoism from its ties to universalistic origins.
This led to an irreconcilable break in the national past: the continuous
national history and the collective identity shaped by nationalism could
not be restored by ‘narrative healing’. Thus, in order to solve the
problem of returning to historical tradition and continuity, and to re-establish
the broken compromise within the framework of modernity, Habermas proposed
to turn to the concept of constitutional patriotism.
Habermas turns to Kierkegaard
not to embrace the generally accepted reading of the Kierkegaardian self
as inward-turning individual, existing outside social discourse but to
save the communitarianism of his communicative ethics. He understands
Kierkegaard as talking about a hermeneutically embedded self that lives
as a situated, embodied, gendered, historical, and social individual.
“Kierkegaard’s individual, like the participant envisioned in moral discourse,
requires an intersubjective context,” explains Martin Matustik in his reading
of Habermas (Matusik 1993: 9). This notion of intersubjectivity emphasizes
the individually-constructed moral self in order to save her from dissolving
into the social whole; yet because of the hermeneutic nature of moral
construction, the self is not an inward-turning ‘possessive individual’,
but one taking part in the social discourse of the community. Thus,
the Kierkegaardian–Habermasian individual may avoid absolutizing a Hegelian
social ethic (the Sittlichkeit, attacked by Kierkegaard), while it saves
the Kantian autonomous moral individual (the Moralit“t, accepted by Habermas).
Habermas’ reading of Kierkegaard makes it possible to escape from dissolving
the individual into the higher-level individuality of the Hegelian nation-state
as well as from suggesting that the individual should construct her identity
as being completely detached from the social discourse of the community.
Thus, the historical tradition embedded in social discourse may be saved
without losing the self-constructing, conscious individual. In the
concept of constitutional patriotism, Kant’s individual morals can be united
with Hegel’s social ethics via the spirit of Kierkegaard’s existentialism.
For Habermas, ‘post-traditional identity’ thus means turning from narrative
collectivity to individual, hermeneutically embedded life-stories as the
basis for identity.
For Habermas, the idea of
post-traditional identity offers the possibility of returning to the unfinished
project of critical modernity with the help of a post-metaphysical, communicative
rationality. This means re-establishing continuity with a modern
understanding of historical tradition – which is more ‘invented’ than given
(cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) – without drawing the neo-Aristotelian,
neo-Hegelian conclusion that under plural and secular conditions of modernity,
embracing a particular historical ‘life-form’ as normative can be morally
justified (Matusik 1993: xix). Post-war Germany is a case in point
for elevating the individual construction of the self to a communal, post-traditional
level. Yet, how is it possible to re-construct a historically-based
social and cultural tradition without falling into the pitfalls of 19th
century historicism? It was this historicism that led to a nationalism
in which the individual was dissolved in the nation-state and Enlightenment
ideals were sacrificed for the higher morality of an imagined community.
Using the idea of constitutional
patriotism, Habermas hopes to establish a post-traditional identity that
is not directly dependent on history. Values of constitutional patriotism
rest on the humanistic universals embedded in the post-Enlightenment discourse
of civil liberties. For Habermas, it is the constitutional tradition
of the West that serves as the content of the phrase ‘we Europeans’.
The democratic constitutions of Western states, as well as the meta-constitution
established by the Maastricht treaty of the European Community, contain
the Kantian ideas of Enlightenment humanism for the moral individual, the
Hegelian legal subject and politically legitimized social ethics, as well
as the democratic political tradition from which the German idea of the
nation-state took a ‘Sonderweg’ in the late 19th century. It is this
constitutional tradition to which post-war democratic Germany turned back
to and, following the logic of the argument, to which post-1989 democratic
states of Central and Eastern Europe may also adapt. The historical
construction of a democratic Europe can serve as a template for the imagined
unity of Europe. The narrative of a continuous, democratic history
can be the form for which a constitutional interpretation of the phrase
‘we Europeans’ should be the content. Constitutional patriotism is
indeed a compromise that rescues the social ethics of Hegel, the individual
morals of Kant, and the social, cultural, political, and moral tradition
of the Enlightenment. This tradition, however, is in need of rethinking.
Habermas’ vision of democratic
and pluralistic society, as Richard Rorty puts it, rests on an updated
version of Enlightenment ideals of universalism and rationalism (Rorty
1989: 67). Habermas is willing to accept that there are problems
with the Enlightenment tradition but believes that his suggestion for replacing
traditional universal rationality and subject-centered rationality with
“communicative rationality” will lead to the development of “domination-free
communication” and a solution for “the legitimation and cultural crisis
of late-capitalism.” For Habermas, to complete the unfinished project
of modernity would mean a return of modern culture to a tradition in which
rational argumentative practices conducted within “expert cultures” would
both save something from the “surrealist revolt” and establish a communicative
process guaranteeing the triumph of a discursive ethics making claims for
universal validity (cf. Habermas 1987).
I agree with Rorty that
the ahistorical grounding of universal validity suggests the possibility
of morally justifying the adoption of a particular life-form as normative
in pluralistic and secular societies (Rorty 1989: 67). The belief
in universal validity will always leave open the possibility of claims
for one life-form being superior to another. As others have already
pointed out, the possibility that ‘domination free communication’ results
in complete pluralism is incompatible with claims for ‘universal validity’
(cf. Walzer 1990: 188). Moreover, Habermas’ Verfassungspatriotism
is no less historical than any other ideology he challenges. It is
a different narrative of the past – that of the evolution of the liberal
and democratic ‘West’ – but nonetheless a history or even a meta-history.
It is easy to trace this meta-history back to its Hegelian origins but
we can also see that Habermas is attempting to turn the ‘public use of
history’ to his advantage: the historical truth of the constitutional
tradition is used to legitimize the ‘Westernness’ of post-war Germany.
The hermeneutic embeddedness of the Kierkegaardian–Habermasian individual
– understood as a narrative construction and reconstruction of both the
story told and the ‘conceptual network’ into which it is embedded – challenges
this very universalism since the socio-political discourse of the present,
the actual ‘territory’ on which identities are formed, also form part of
the discursive field of the political.
In an essay entitled The
Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality, Hayden White, quoting
Roland Barthes, refers to narrative as “a solution to a problem of general
human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,
the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures
of meaning that are generally human rather than culture specific” (White
1987: 1). White thus suggests that narrative is not one code among
many to endow experience with meaning, “but a meta-code, a human universal,
on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared
reality can be transmitted” (White 1987: 1). According to a structuralist
understanding, narrative is not a form of representation but a manner of
speaking about events experienced by the self. This experience, as
Barthes understands it, is the substitution of a copy of events for the
meaning of events. Thus, we would find it problematic to use the
term ‘about events’. It seems that narrative is the message of a
shared reality; but a message about itself rather than a message about
reality.2 Pace Hegel, White observes that if it is impossible to
narrativize without presupposing “a system of law in relation to which
a specifically legal subject could be constituted, then historical self-consciousness,
the kind of consciousness capable of imagining the need to represent reality
as history, is conceivable only in terms of its interest in law, legality,
legitimacy” (White 1987: 23). Historical narrative is ‘endowed with
meaning’ through the socio-political construction of community, law, legality,
and legitimacy. This construction of the community, the authority
of the present, serves as the basis for the moralizing nature of historical
narratives; and this makes them distinct from chronicles and annals.
White’s ideas can also be
applied to the narrative construction of the self. Human action (understood
as being hermeneutically embedded in the ‘conceptual network’ of social
discourse) constructs the narrative of the self, while the adjustment of
‘reality’ to fit the story of the self in turn constantly ‘re-constructs’
the network which endows the narrative with meaning. The interplay
between the authority of the self and the authority of the system of law
establishes narrative as both the condition and consequence of social existence.
This is the hermeneutic circle of narrativizing the self as individual
and communal being. Thus, the territory in which individual identities
are formed can not be separated from the construction of those identities.
Not only is the individual self constantly rewriting its own history;
but by this rewriting, the ‘territory’ (the system of law and legality)
is also modified. It is not possible to step out of the hermeneutic
circle and evoke the authority of the past by pointing to the constitutional
tradition as ‘historically given’ as representing the essence of universal
morality. The authority of the past is established by the narrativizing
subject, and the past, contrary to what is believed, does not have an authority
of its own. Such authority can be established by constant reference
to the past as ‘always already there waiting to be unearthed’, but this
is an act of legitimation which falls within the realm of the political.
This is the ‘invention of the tradition’; and this invention happens
every moment a story is told about the past. Referring to the constitutional
tradition as being ahistorical introduces an authority which is metaphysical.
Challenging this authority may mean doing away with morality and then,
we are often reminded, ‘anything goes’ (White 1987: 227).
Every moment the narratives
of the self are re-told, there is a need for reinforcing the choice of
either/or. The Habermasian concept of constitutional patriotism,
however, presupposes a socio-political system which is stable and constant,
the matrix of which is clear and unchangeable. Culturally, it is
the discourse of the Enlightenment, politically, it is the discourse of
the French Revolution, and socially, it is the discourse of post-Marxist
socialism. Constitutional patriotism is more Hegelian than Kantian
or Kierkegaardian; and in line with Francis Fukuyama’s arguments,
liberal democracies are thus understood as the end of Universal History,
reaching the balance between rational desire and rational recognition on
the highest level of the liberal and democratic state.
THE POLITICAL UNDERSTANDING
OF SELF:
REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUTIONALISM
Constitutional patriotism,
however, is a problematic concept I suggest to modify. In the following,
I introduce a new term that remains open to historical change and accommodates
the process in which established discourses that form our communal and
individual identities are radically changed: the concept of revolutionary
constitutionalism. By constitutionalism, I denote those parts of
the constitutional tradition that are represented in the evolution of our
ideas of human rights. These ideas reflect a conception of the individual
that may be seen as paradigmatically modern. In calling attention
to the problem of constitutionalism, it can be shown that identities –
the meaning of selves and their actions – are informed and constituted
by already existing frames of reference or discourses. It is important
to note that none of these frames of reference lie outside the terrain
of the political. For centuries, and especially after the French
Revolution and the enactment of the American Constitution, constitutionalism
has been thought of as establishing rules of conduct that represent the
essential moral condition of ‘civilized men and women’. Because of
its slow process of evolution, we are inclined to think that the constitutional
tradition lies somehow outside the realm of the political, or instead,
that it informs and regulates political life from the outside in the development
of humankind.
While in many ways constitutionalism
is seen as a historical phenomenon, at the same time it is perceived as
being metaphysical in the sense that it reflects universal moral ideas
that guides ‘men of reason’ in their everyday lives, ‘in the world of appearances’
(see below). The conventional understanding of constitutionalism,
thus, implies a modern concept of the philosophy of history; history
as both res gestae and historia rerum gestarum, both development and the
‘discourse of the real’, void of political contingencies. Historical
discourse always contains an irreducible element of relativism, a relativism
that is the result of the “sublimation of the politics of interpretation”
(Braun 1994: 173; cf. White 1987: 58–82).
Constitutionalism, to my
mind, is a serious obstacle to fair conduct since it is understood as existing
outside the political, and can thus be used for metaphysical claims of
legitimation. Moreover, ‘claims of legitimation’ occur in more subtle
ways than we can imagine. I would argue that any universal grounding
of constitutionalism, as Habermas would have it, is deeply problematic,
since it is inevitably tied to particular political and historical traditions.
In this respect I believe that Habermas’ attempt to ground post-traditional
identity via the concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’ in the human universals
of the Enlightenment is based on a misguided attempt to save universal
claims of validity from the contingencies of ‘history’.
I use the word political
in the broadest possible sense to denote an orientation that endows the
self with meaning. Meaning is produced through interpersonal and
intrapersonal relations constructed via social discourse. The self
is constructed in a metaphorically understood territory of the political
and the legal. This territory may be defined as the space of the
political in the broadest sense: as the whole of the ‘world of appearances’.
And this ‘world of appearances’ has a double significance for it is both
a ‘physical, objective reality’ and the space where the specificity of
human identity is constructed.3 Taking this a step further, we can
say the metaphorical nature of the ‘web of human relationships’ is the
narrative construction of reality. Selves, just like the ‘territory’
between them, are constructed in the process of meaning production, which
is narrative in nature. Thus we can speak of the narrative construction
of identity (cf. Ricoeur 1991: 71–79).
I believe that the Habermasian
concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’ as a solution for post-traditional
identity falls short of guaranteeing that, as theorists of the modern liberal
polity have claimed, we can avoid the moral justification of one particular
historical life-form as normative. ‘Revolutionary constitutionalism’,
on the other hand, offers just that possibility. By recognizing the
contingency and constant interplay of a narratively constructed ‘world
of appearances’ and narratively constructed selves, the concept of ‘revolutionary
constitutionalism’ addresses metaphysical claims for legitimation of these
narrative constructions. This formulation of ‘revolutionary’ owes
much to the work of Hannah Arendt. She claims that Thomas Jefferson’s
famous words, “We hold these truths to be self evident”, are an example
of a truly political speech act. They reflect the relative, self-referential,
performative, and foundational nature of the act of constituting:
creating a community and the identity of that community at the same time
(Arendt 1965:191–196).
Revolutionary constitutionalism
would drive the constitutional tradition back into the sphere of the political.
The revolutionary nature of constitutionalism would guarantee that the
constitutional understanding of human rights become part of the discursive
sphere of the political, and disavow any metaphysical claims for their
universal validity. Revolutionary constitutionalism retains the elements
of its historical development but, unlike in the case of constitutional
patriotism, these elements can be challenged by any group or individual
that feels excluded from the constitutional tradition. By renouncing
all universalist claims, the constitution can become more what it really
should be: a temporary agreement for democratic rules of conduct.
It would thus not float above the Arendtian ‘territory’ of political discourse
but become an integral part of its composition, inevitably renegotiated
and reconceptualized over time.
Post-Enlightenment modernity
has assumed that the key elements of the human condition are fixed.
Revolutionary constitutionalism would re-open the debate and show that
the meta-narrative of Western constitutionalism is no less problematic
than the victory of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit embodied in the nation-state.
It seems to me that initiating a discussion about such social and political
issues as euthanasia, sexual rights, and problems of the family would reveal
the pre-modern foundations of modern conceptions concerning the individual
and the self (Habermas 1987: 139). The history of modern political
thought attempts to establish the political as a meta-discourse legitimized
by ontological, historical, and moral values. The modern discourse
of the individual centers around values that are essential for the definition
of the liberal human condition. The modern human condition is defined
by such key ideas as liberty and the equality of the individual and form
the basis of communal values in a pluralistic, multicultural society.
Problems often arise, however, with attempts to legitimate claims that
stem from liberty and equality in a pluralist community. How can
one make validity claims for certain values without some metaphysical grounding,
without the belief in some kind of universal validity of its foundations?4
How, then, is it possible
to be freed from this deep metaphysical need without losing the possibility
of making validity claims? How is it possible to stand by certain
values unflinchingly within a relativistic framework? What, in the
end, will happen if freedom, the most important value grounding philosophies
of liberalism, has no primacy over other values? In constitutional
terms, these questions are dealt with under the category of basic civil
liberties. The theoretical legitimation for these problems are cast
within the political-philosophical framework of the Enlightenment, and
draw from the ideals of liberty and human dignity. The modern human
condition, however, masks the metaphysical grounding of its basic principles
by displacing these problem onto the level of the political, while leaving
the metaphysical grounding intact. The issue, then, is how to sublimate
the metaphysical grounding of these ideas and maintain the legitimacy of
the system of law and legality in a politically organized community.
How, then, is it possible to “stand by certain values unflinchingly” and
maintain the position that a politically organized community is made up
of persons with diverse cultural and moral ideals?
The solution may be to give
up the need for a metaphysical grounding of the political altogether.
I would like to suggest, via the concept of a post-traditional, narrative
identity, that it is possible to give up the need for a metaphysical grounding
and thus the understanding of the political as a meta-discourse.
The metaphysical grounding of the political is reflected in the claims
that the constitutional tradition is an authoritative representation of
the universal ideals of moral conduct. This grounding involves the
articulation of an ontology that can function as a foundation for the moral
self and thus offer a solution to coping with the contingencies experienced
in both individual and communal forms of life. The search for legitimation,
however, should not focus on finding its sources outside of the political.
Revolutionary constitutionalism can serve as a guarantee that validity
claims are made within the political realm, without evoking an authority
outside of the political. In the end, I would like to suggest a political
understanding of the self devoid of any metaphysical grounding, save its
hermeneutic embeddedness in social discourse. The narrative construction
of the individual and communal self, embedded in a social discourse that
is shaped by the ideas of revolutionary constitutionalism, offers this
opportunity.
CONSTITUTIONS IN TIMES
OF TRANSITION
One question still needs
to be answered. What justifies connecting the ‘real’ place and time
of transition in East-Central Europe with the possibility of arriving at
a different concept of post-traditional identity? Once again let
me refer to Hannah Arendt. As Arendt claims, the expression “We hold”
not only marked a transition from one political system to another, but
also showed a unique, albeit dim, awareness of the possibility of shifting
from “one spiritual order to another.” The performative quality of the
statement is attributed by Arendt to this dim awareness, an awareness that
it was a fallacy to believe universal laws can be the laws of a community.
Otherwise Jefferson “would not have indulged in the somewhat incongruous
phrase ‘We hold these truths to be self evident’ but would have said: These
truths are self evident, namely, they posses a power to compel which is
as irresistible as despotic power, they are not held by us, but held by
them; they stand in no need of agreement” (Arendt 1965: 194).
Times of transition may allow for such dim awareness, and it would surely
be a mistake not to take advantage of the possibility of coupling the “world
of the real” with the world of ideas (cf. Villa 1993: 100).
By accepting the idea of
revolutionary constitutionalism, the constitution would serve as another
element within the formation of the narrative of the self and not, as it
seems to be the case today, as a pre-condition for setting the rules of
narrativity. If we are inclined to accept that no life-form is more
morally justifiable than another, then no narrative of the self can be
more morally acceptable than any other.
Let me try to illustrate
this with a few examples. It seems clear that, in one form or another,
the ‘right to live’ should be part of all democratic constitutions.
This problem has come up in constitutional debates concerning capital punishment
in East-Central European countries. In these countries, opponents
of capital punishment have gained a major victory: capital punishment
is now illegal. The application of this basic right as a justification
for other legal decisions, however, becomes problematic in other cases,
such as discussions over the legalization of euthanasia. In the Hungarian
Constitution, as the decision of the Constitutional Court on capital punishment
made clear, the ‘right to live’ is inseparably connected to the idea of
‘human dignity’.5 The practice of euthanasia, which assumes that
‘human dignity’ can be understood in certain cases as separate from human
life, cannot be solved within accepted constitutional norms. It is
not hard to trace the foundations of the connection between human life
and dignity to pre-modern, religious origins. I believe that ideas
resting on these origins, valuable as they may be, are incompatible with
the notion of supporting relativistic ideals. As the foundation and
guardian of the legal system, the constitution should be morally value-free;
it should avoid justifying one life-form (a ‘web of interlocutions’ for
meaning endowment) as more morally desirable than another.
The problem is even more
explicit in the case of ‘sexual rights’ as embedded in the problem of the
constitutional defense of ‘families’. In constitutional terms, ‘the
family’, as a social nucleus, is defined in terms of biological reproduction:
it is an alliance for producing further members of society. Marriage
as an equal alliance of ‘men and women’ (as in the constitutions of Bulgaria
and Lithuania) is defined in connection with parental rights and is thus
inseparably connected to biological reproduction. Other constitutions
define the family through parenthood (as in the Charter of Basic and Human
Rights in the Czech Republic, and the Lithuanian, Slovakian and Slovenian
constitutions) or motherhood (as in the Polish Constitution). The
family may be understood as the nucleus of society: a minimal alliance
based on the mutual consent of adults to be defended by the state.
This, however, does not necessarily have anything to do with the sexual
orientation of those consenting adults. The alliance is to be defended
because there are legal, economical, and social advantages to such formations
for both the individuals involved and the society. People may wish
to create a ‘space’ in which they can do whatever they want. In this
‘space’, individuals may invent a discourse complementary to that of society
in general; one that produces a narrative totality for those taking
part in it. The willingness to accept the rules of ‘family relationships’
offers the basis for identification with the narrative and its meaning
created ‘on the way’. In the case of identity with the ‘family’,
the moral precondition for the narrative to possess meaning (the narrative
content members of the family identify with) is the members’ will (accepting
that there is moral authority) and ability (sharing the conceptual network)
to accept the moral authority of the narrative constructed by them.
The alliance, however, is not to be connected with the number of people
involved (the couple) or with their sexual orientation. Once again
it seems that the democratic constitutional tradition makes moral choices
between different forms of lives.
Re-working the constitutional
systems in Eastern and Central Europe may enhance the dialogues about law,
legality, and authority. Although different constitutional solutions
may be given for the problems arising in these societies, entering into
a public dialogue about the new constitutions may stimulate the political
discourse of communal identity in new ways. This, in turn, may force
public philosophers to re-think the problem of claims for universal validity
and the bases of moral justification in a plural and democratic society.
This may involve applying some of the ideas expressed by John Rawls in
his Political Liberalism about the political conception of a person.
According to Rawls, the political person, behind the veil of ignorance,
cannot presuppose a metaphysical doctrine which serves as the basis of
goodness that enabling her to enter the system of co-operation in a fair
society. Rawls’ idea is based on a concept of good understood in
Kierkegaardian terms, which involves having the moral power to possess
a conception of the good that may change over time (Rawls 1993: 29–35).
This ability of ‘having the moral power to’ may be understood as the ability
of making the choice of either-or, as a self endowed with meaning by the
moral authority of the present. Even more, claims for universal validity
may be substituted with claims for temporal political validity, understood
as claims made by parties for a conception of good that can be brought
to consensus within the given legal system. This means that the moral
justification for one life-form over another in a pluralistic society would
be substituted with the idea of overlapping consensus based on a political
conception of justice. Thus, the idea of overlapping consensus does
not require moral justification of one life form over another, but only
requires political justification within a fair system of social co-operation
(Rawls 1993: 135–172).
Connecting the ideal of
Rawlsian justice-as-fairness and the concept of overlapping consensus with
debates about identity and constitutionalism in East-Central Europe is
not to say that constitutional systems in these countries are heading in
this direction. On the contrary, when examining the new or forming
constitutions of East-Central Europe, it seems that the spirit of constitutional
patriotism as a modern alternative is stronger than the appeal for radical
change, and that nationalism and the discourse of Kultur are gaining new
ground within these societies. Debates about the new constitutions
may, however, offer a unique possibility for suggesting ways to translate
these ideals into legal practice, whether or not they are accepted by lawmakers.
REFERENCES CITED
Arendt, Hannah (1958):
The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Arendt, Hannah (1963):
On Revolution. New York: Viking Press.
Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel
Wallerstein (1991): Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.
London: Verso.
Barthes, Roland (1977):
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives. In Image,
Music, Text. Stephen Heath trans. London: Fontana.
Berlin, Isaiah (1969):
Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Braun, Róbert (1994):
The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation. In History
and Theory, 33: 135–149.
Broszat, Martin and Saul
Friedlander (1990): A Controversy about the Historicization of National
Socialism. In Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the
Historian’s Debate, P. Baldwin ed. Boston.
Elias, Norbert (1978):
The Civilizing Process I. The History of Manners. New York: Pantheon
Books.
Habermas, Jürgen (1987):
The Unfinished Project of Modernity. In The Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity. Frederick Lawrence trans. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen (1989):
Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republic’s
Orientation to the West. In The New Conservativism: Cultural Criticism
and the Historian’s Dispute, 249–267. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence
Ranger eds. (1983): The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hooks, Bell and Cornel West
(1991): Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life.
Boston: South End Press.
Kierkegaard, Síren (1987):
Either/Or. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong eds. and transl.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Matustik, Martin J. (1993):
Postnational Identity. New York: Gilford Press.
Outlaw, Lucius (1992):
Against the Grain of Modernity: The Politics of Difference and the Conservation
of ‘Race’. In Man and the World, 25(3–4): 443–468.
Rawls, John (1993):
Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Riceour, Paul (1991):
Narrative Identity. In Philosophy Today, 35: 71–79.
Rorty, Richard (1989):
Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sandel, Michael (1984):
Introduction. In Liberalism and Its Critics. Michael Sandel
ed., 1–21. New York: New York University Press.
Stürmer, Michael (1986):
Mitten in Europa: Versuchung und Verdammung der Deutschen, Dissonanten
des Fortschritts Essays Über Geschichte und Politik in Deutschland. München.
Szûcs, Jenõ (1983):
Európa három történeti régiója (Three Historical Regions of Europe).
Budapest: Gondolat.
Villa, Dana R. (1993):
Political Theory and the Politics of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Walzer, Michael (1990):
A Critique of Philosophical Conversation. In Hermeneutics and Critical
Theory. Michael Kelly ed., 182–196. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wessely, Anna (1996):
The Cognitive Chance of Central European Sociology. In Colonization
or Partnership? Eastern Europe and Western Social Sciences, Miklós Hadas
and Miklós Vörös eds., 11–20. Budapest: Replika Special Issues.
White, Hayden (1987):
The Content of the Form. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
* I would like to thank the
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar for giving me the
peace of mind needed for scholarly work while rewriting this paper for
publication.
1 In Hungary, this is evident
in the revival of the so-called urbanist-populist debate: the Kulturkampf
between cosmopolitan intellectuals, who turn toward the West for bourgeois
and civic values, and populist intellectuals, who emphasize the uniqueness
and importance of national cultural heritage. There are similar attempts
in other post-communist societies as well.
2 Basic problems of historical
discourse are revealed when one differentiates between the plot and the
story elements of narratives. According to White, historical doxa
claims that the plot of a narrative imposes a meaning on events that make
up its story level by revealing a structure that was imminent in the events
all along. But, says White, events of the past qualify as historical
only if they are susceptible to at least two narrations of their occurrence;
this is why the historian takes upon himself the authority of giving the
true account of what really happened. “The authority of the historical
narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows
this reality with a form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition
upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess” (White
1987: 20–21). As opposed to those forms of historical representation
that contain only the plot of the past, annals and chronicles, historical
narrative ‘speaks itself’, it reveals to us a world that is putatively
finished but not yet dissolved. In this world, reality wears the
mask of meaning, it presents a completeness and fullness that we can only
imagine but never experience. “Insofar as historical stories can
be completed, can be given narrative closure, can be shown to have had
a plot all along, they give reality the odor of the ideal” (White 1987:
23).
3 “Action and speech go
on between men, as they are directed toward them, and they retain an agent-revealing
capacity even if their content is exclusively ‘objective’, concerned with
the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically
lies between them and out of which arise their specific, objective, worldly
interests. These interests constitute, in the word’s most literal
significance, something inter-est, which lies between people and therefore
can relate and bring them together. Most action and speech is concerned
with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most
words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to
being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent […] But for all its
intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things
we visibly have in common. We call this reality the ‘web’ of human
relationships, indicating by the metaphore its somewhat intangible quality”
(Arendt 1958: 182–183).
4 The same problem arises
in Michael Sandel’s criticism of Isaiah Berlin’s view as presented in his
Four Essays on Liberty. Berlin claims that the wish to ground the
eternity and certainty of our values in an objective heaven results in
a deep and incurable metaphysical need, and quotes Joseph Schumpeter for
support (Berlin 1969, cf. Sandel 1984: 8). Schumpeter’s opinion that
“to realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand by
them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian”
is translated by Rorty into the “claim that the liberal societies of our
century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the
contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes –
the contingency of their own contingencies – and yet remained faithful
to those contingencies” (Rorty 1989: 46). In Sandel’s opinion Berlin,
by supporting Schumpeter, “comes perilously close to foundering on the
relativist predicament” (Sandel 1984: 9).
5 For two judges of the
Hungarian Constitutional Court, Judge Lábady and Judge Tersztyánszky, “human
being and human dignity are inseparable. Both are inalienable, immanent,
essential parts thereof. […] Human life and human dignity cannot
be dealt with separately.”
previous
page
|