Where should the study of political thought in the global era go? In 2021, when the international community is increasingly mired in the globalization dilemma, an intuitive, but not necessarily perceptual, response is that the inquiry of political thought must be the same as that of political life – "globalization". However, a series of questions ensued: is "globalization" a process of diffusion of social ideas like the infiltration of water molecules, or is it a deliberate transformation project disciplined by ideology? Is it the language of the text, the time span, the geographical scope that needs to be "globalized", or the terminology used to construct the narrative, the path used to examine ideas, or the current concern and cultural horizon of the individual researcher? And does the "expectation" of globalization highlight the concreteness of the political context, or is it universal and relevant? Are historians of political thought dealing with the global human state, or are they globalization programs that operate with different rules of interest? In the context of different forms of globalization, should seemingly disparate political issues be relegated to opposing "intellectual traditions", or should they be superimposed on a broader system of understanding, social structure, and economic order? Is all this "globalization" possible, beneficial, or even necessary? Is it self-evident or the trend of the times that we must talk about the "global" wind?
Reflecting on these questions is exactly what the Association for Global Political Thought founded in the summer and fall of 2021. At the end of the year, the six studies that the Society has conducted since its inception: from the Caribbean to South Asia, from the Civil Code in the Eyes of the British King to the History of Food in Italian Libya, can show the temperature, thickness and limits of the current state of global political thought research this year.
In 2020, the southeastern Caribbean island nation of Barbados changed its constitution and declared a republic on November 30, with re-elections on 19 January 2021. I flew over the Caribbean Sea on a spiral machine in Puerto Rico, saw the islands crisscrossed, and remembered that when I was in the "contemporary developing country" of Kazakh Buddhism this year, a master's student studying sustainable development in Barbados once wrote in his assignment: "Barbados, as a Caribbean island, inevitably has an 'island mentality'..." In revising this article, I quoted the "changing, fragile, and flowing" Caribbean Sea written by the Martinique writer Douard Glissant: it is not an "American lake" , but rather , the "mouth of the river between the Americas". The "common space" of the Central and South American world has three cultural topographies: the peaks of the Andes, which perpetuate Indian culture, the highlands and plains that accelerate "Crillicization," and the Caribbean sea, where islands loom around each other. Plato's imagination of the "original societies" after the Great Flood also had these three topographies: mountains, plains, and coasts, and these ecosystems formed different political cultures, legal norms, and philosophical questions. If this geographical origin is the spatial dimension of Greek political philosophy, how can the unity and pluralism of Caribbean space be understood?
Martinique French poet, essayist and philosopher Grison (1928–2011)
At the Global Institute of Political Thought, Robbie Shilliam presents a case study of Caribbean political thought: the Rastafarianism movement in Jamaica, arguing for Rastafarianism's Rastafarianism movement, which argues for Rastafarianism's "sanity" and the idea of "social death" projected from it. Not only is the individual subordinate, but his humanity is more denied by society—an idea that is implicitly in line with the Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson, the writer Sylvia Wynter, and even the unexplained Stuart Hall in the main text. Exploring intellectual history in terms of movement, tradition, and community effectively downplays the trend of pursuing individual African-American theoretical stars. The integration of religious, social and political ideas in the Jamaican context is also pioneering. Since the 1960s, African-American political thought has become more mainstream liberal, often written by minority elites in purely European and American political vocabulary. This is a general status quo in the history of ideas in the post-imperialist era: although the political problems raised by the former colonies tend to be nation-state, the "Anglo anti-colonial ideas" are still explored within the framework of Anglo ideas. As a result, apart from emphasizing superficial differences in cultural identity and intuitive demands on material conditions, there is no independent ideological purpose to speak of, while at the same time creating the illusion of a "community of resistance", and there is a lack of transformative and alternative paradigms of political thought.
From left to right: Sylvia Winter (1928-), Orlando Patterson (1940-), Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
Bypassing the Academy classics and directly attacking the Rastafari context is an attempt to overcome this dilemma, but it is still inevitable to be limited. For example, does insisting on "reason" in "Rastafari reason" mean that the "existential rationality" that has been excluded from the "enlightenment universalism" concept of "reason" (and thus oppressed by self-proclaimed rationalists) is to find a "existential rationality" for the voice of spontaneous resistance? Or did the colonies, in dialogue with the colonists, perceive that the political theories emanating from within the suzerainty had the potential for liberation, and decided to use them for their own use? If it is the latter, is this universal potential for emancipation also universal? If it is universal, why insist on internalizing "reason" with specific subtexts? Or is the potential for universal emancipation only implicitly lurking in deeper, more rigorous, and broadly potent theories within the metropolis, and therefore worthy of being "reappropriated" by the colonies? I suspect that this is an unavoidable problem of contemporary anti-colonial theories and intellectual history. The current popular academic shortcut is to explore how anti-colonial ideas borrow the political language of the colonizers to express their suzerainty-style political demands within the scope of mainstream Western literature. For example, Indian scholars with English as the first language study English literature in British universities and argue in English how modern Indian thinkers have used highly British political theories to express their basic demands for creating British politics. For another example, African-American scholars with English as the first language study English literature in American universities, and argue in English how African-American anti-colonial activists who have also graduated from American universities can apply Western political theory to advocate "national self-determination" and "federalism" in Africa, and even limit their language ability to take care of large non-English-speaking areas of Africa. To overcome this limitation, it is not to blindly pursue the vain "nativism", but to face up to the normative meanings that are inherent with different perspectives, inject the current extremely barren mainstream theoretical paradigm, and even configure new ideological tools to diagnose the difficult and complicated diseases of human society. Looking around, we live in a mediocre but left-right English academic community that talks about "the world" in English in order to prove its "diversity" to the politically correct university bureaucracy. In Harvard, Yale, Oxbridge, between "international" papers and "global history" monographs, there are many people who must talk about "empire" and "colonization", and there are very few people who really expand the sources, genres, and languages of literature, break through the dominance of the academic discourse of the suzerainty, and innovate the vision of political thought.
In 1966, King Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, whom Rastafari idolized, visited Jamaica
So how does the "Babylon" and "Zion" that the Rastafaris call them illuminate the flowing Caribbean, and even the history of world political thought? Like the Mediterranean, the Caribbean sea has also bred a rich political consciousness. The "History of Caribbean Thought" has yet to be written and is about to come out. The scattered Caribbean islands are both open and isolated, full of sociality, but also affected by physical conditions such as hydrogeography, ecological vegetation, especially natural disasters, and a magnificent human map. The English insular (island, isolated) contains puns and ambiguity. Although also derived from the Latin insularis (island), the French language maintains the difference between the geographical concept insulaire and the cultural concept insular. Other Romance languages, such as Spanish, use aishlado (a + isla, "made into an isolated island", corresponding to Theinisolated, Faisolé, Portuguese isolado) to form a pejorative meaning, and retain the objective adjective of "island". Therefore, the history of governance thought is also a heavy annotation of the dictionary. To study the multi-layered political space of the Caribbean Islands, it is necessary to clarify the analytical units and analytical levels, and dive into historical cause and effect to explore the cultural mechanisms buried in the seabed. Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Barbados, these "on the water side" traditions have never been isolated from each other, whether "isolated from the world", but in the midst of the intricate and fluid ideas of indigenous cultures (West Boone, Ineri, Taino, Caribbean, Sheguajos, Guanajatabes, etc.), the West Indies African diaspora, and European colonization. Historians must integrate the perspectives of indigenous, European, African, and even Caribbean Indians and Chinese, rather than taking the perspective of a single group out of context. More broadly, Central America and the Caribbean are the maritime axes of the Pacific and Atlantic worlds, just as East Africa is the gateway to the Atlantic Rim and the Indian Ocean. Once a multi-layered spatial dimension is introduced, political theory and intellectual history acquire the potential of trans-ethnic, cross-time, and cross-tradition. It can be seen that if properly approached, the intellectual history of the islands is itself an international geopolitical thought. And stuck in the "English-speaking world of African-American studies" this acre and three points, and even fell into the "in order to rationalize the West and double self-Westernization, but not recognized, not into the mainstream" this kind of self-alienation of the strange circle, even if chasing the fashion wind, investing in the good of society, it is really difficult to really achieve.
Caribbean Islands and Countries
If circumventing classical philosophers to study religious movements is an innovative approach to the history of political thought, another report by David Armitage for the Society does the opposite, counter-intuitively grasping a traditional emperor who lives in a deep palace and does not move around, not Locke, Rousseau, Kant, nor rebels and revolutionaries, to study the "global" in the eyes of the largest establishment in the law of nations and the international order. George was a hegemon rather than an anti-hegemon, the supreme power of the Empire, not the "subaltern" that scholars flock to today. Even compared with King Carlos III of Spain, who had no philosophical talent but drastically reformed the economy, or Maria Theresia, the Archduke of Austria, who resisted some of the enlightenment ideas but also reformed education, George only left the notoriety of "losing America first, then losing reason". To be honest, the "territorial (sea) domain" of the study of global political thought was not designed by George at the beginning. Compared with the romanticized "enlightened despotism": Frederick the flute bearer of Voltaire and the Hermitage collector Catherine, George's intellectual history is also quite limited. For example, we know he hired a German librarian, but somehow his collection of German philosophies is not very rich. The study of the intellectual history of political figures is undoubtedly limited by historical data. For example, Harvard University's Horton Museum of Ancient Books contains Washington's personal Grotius's Law of War and Peace, but it is clear that Mr. Founding Father, who has no time to read it carefully, has no way of knowing. Even Frederick's Anti-Machiavelli Treatise is not known whether it is the personal opinion of the young monarch or a propositional composition under Voltaire's guidance. However, it is worth being convinced that "global microhistory" has quietly subverted the almost rigid spatial categories such as "national" and "international", coordinated the continuity and discontinuity of instantaneous and long-term, made good use of the synergy and tension of "classical thought" and "embodied thought", reorganized the theoretical application of different levels of "high", "medium" and "low", and also revised the simple polarization and crude unification of "ruling" and "argumentation" in the narrative of traditional political philosophy. Based on george III, an unpopular white monarch, it is indeed a clever way to connect Britain, slavery, and the Kingdom of Hawaii through the theoretical perspective of the "law of nations", which seems to be deeply disconnected from the "international anarchy". Whether it was King Kamehameha I of Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu asking King George of the British Isles to send troops to defend against the United States and Russia, or Jefferson accusing the British king of inciting the rebellion of native Americans and slaves, it was a long time to think. Reflecting on the complex forms of monarchy in the era of "democracy" and "republicanism" can be described as a kind of anti-current concern.
The American painter William Walcutt painted The Statue of George III At Bowling Green on July 9, 1776 (1854), James Gillray satirical painting: George taking Napoleon in his hands (1803), and The English portraitist and sculptor Henry Meyer depicted the situation in the late George period.
James Gay Sawkins paints a portrait of Kamehameha I with a feather (1850)
During a year of precarious Muslim societies in Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Society also ushered in two debates on Islamic political thought from very different perspectives. Teren Sevea turned to the vision of "Islamic socialism" in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, such as Singapore's Muslim organizations and newspapers Anjuman-i-Islam and Genuine Islam. In dialogue with Islamic thinkers such as Modudi , and in the process of reflecting on the "age of obscurantism" in the anti-colonial era, some Muslim social activists have sought to circumvent the literal friction between Islamic doctrine and left-wing beliefs in search of a reformist progressive movement. Their cross-border ideological, social and religious activities, and even their failures, are worth pondering.
Abu Ala Modudi (1903-1979)
Another path is to re-outline the intellectual origins of classical thinkers and explore the "alien" elements of "Western" thought. Imagine if Leo Strauss, labeled a "Western philosopher," was deeply influenced by the Abrahamic tradition of "non-Western" and "anti-Western" as Islamic philosophy? Rasoul Namazi, a member of Iranian descent, has been in the archives for several years, and with the help of xueyou, he has studied the original traces of Strauss's notes (identifying Strauss's cursive writing as an art) in order to examine the Islamic material in Strauss's philosophy: Avicina (), Aveiro (), Farabi (). I brought in two old acquaintances from very different backgrounds to promote debate—David DiPasquale, who studied medieval philosophy at Boston College, and Thomas Meyer, a historian who painstakingly wrote Strauss's biography at the University of Munich. To my slight disappointment, the "Shipai" and "non-Shipai" (if not "anti-Shi") in the audience bypassed the substantive contributions of the three interlocutors and revisited the old topic of "historicist criticism". In fact, interpreting the philosophical mood through the social and family environment is beneficial but not harmful to the Straussian "denkbewegung". Strauss's sister Bettina Strauss (1901-1942) married the Arab scholar Paul Kraus, whose daughter Yanni was born in Cairo, and both died in Cairo (the German philosopher Hans Jonas also mentions when recalling the berthing of Alexandria). Strauss befriended his sister-in-law and then adopted his niece as if he were his own. Strauss's close friendship with the Iraqi-american Mahdi ( ) undoubtedly catalyzed his enthusiasm for Islamic philosophy. After going to the United States, Strauss was invited to set up a institute of Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophy with Alexander Marx and Louis Finkelstein, who had different positions, to hold seminars... But why should we outline this intellectual history? To prove to neoconservatism advocating "march into Iraq" that "Strauss cares about Islam"? Apparently not. The neoconservative "Shipai" probably wondered: What is the difference between Strauss's concern for Islam and Xenophon's concern for Persia? We can still carry an Expedition to the Middle East with an Expedition in our pockets. The point is how can "Islam" in Strauss's mind and in his mind – whether it be the boundary between "Western" and "non-Western", the relationship between the three Abrahamic traditions, or the substantive theoretical inspirations of "love", "wisdom", and "statehood"— provide another, more attractive political-philosophical orientation? This is a big issue that our workshop has not yet reached.
From left to right: the image of Farabi on Kazakh banknotes, the image of Avicina on Iranian stamps, the image of Aveiro in Raphael's Academy of Athens
From left to right: Leo Strauss (1899-1973), Paul Klaus (1904-1944), Muhin Mahdi (1926-2007)
From left to right: Alexander Marx (1878-1953) and Louis Finkelstein (1895-1991)
From the clouds of philosophical thought to the fireworks of the human world, he talks with Or Rosenboim about the "history of food thought" in Libya during the Italian colonial period, and relieves the bond between matter and thought. North Africa was the "bread cradle" of Rome and the Byzantine Empire. As the Italian "empire" expanded, arrogant public knowledge conceived a new agrarian utopia for Italian Libya. However, environmental changes, poor livelihoods, colonial tyranny, racial, ethical, and economic realities are all cruel, and utopias have finally shattered their dreams. If George III is at the top of the "Pyramid of Giving" and rastafari believers are at the bottom, then Giuseppe Bevione, Enrico Corradini and Arnaldo Fraccaroli are "middle-class" figures who have left a chauvinist ideological footprint in newspaper documents. As one of the adherents of "broadening the history of political thought," I still cannot help but ask: Is the ultimate goal of the "history of middle-level ideas" to write a history of the annotated little public knowledge, declaring that these three religions and nine streams that are not in the eyes of philosophers also have an intellectual heritage worthy of reflection and embody the universal "mentality" of an era? Or is it that once the history of ideas at the middle level is filled, it can be connected with the spiritual experience of the grass-roots masses and the theoretical concepts of classic works, and a more complete picture of the history of ideas can be spilled? By extension, is the "case study" of the history of political thought a case material in the vocational training of law and business, or a "data point" that accumulates in the statistical sense and presents the correlation of variables? Studying the Libyan utopia in the minds of the Italian chauvinists, should we return to hunger and repression in southern Italy, to the agrarian economic ideas of the French, British, and Spanish empires, or to Egypt and Ethiopia? Is it to find the diaries and account books of ordinary people, or to dig up diplomatic archives and reinterpret the college handouts? Perhaps the high degree of division of labor in academia has long since allowed us to ask these extravagant questions. But thought itself is a luxury. Without seeking much understanding and not trying to be a leopard, academic research is boring as dust; standing still at the level of processing information and data, when will the "surplus value" of ideas be produced?
From left to right: Italian journalist and politician Bevione (1879-1976), Italian writer, journalist and nationalist activist Corardini (1865-1931), Italian journalist and politician Flacari (1882-1956)
Bevione: Come siamo andati Tripoli (1912) and a map of Italian Libya in 1938
Kucania, a food-rich township in the Middle Ages and early modern times (Latin: Cucaniensis, Middle English: Cokaygne, Middle French: pays de cocaigne, Italian, pictured above: Paese della Cuccagna)
However, at the Society's first seminar, Shruti Kapila questioned the meaning of the concept of "global" in the context of the history of political thought in South Asia. According to a revisionist reading, Yin Kebar , while observing Turkey , felt how helpless the South Asian Muslims were between nation-states and international strife. Therefore, he devoted himself to promoting the figurativeness of Indian Muslims and taming the universality of religion. He criticized pan-Islamism, rejected the Kirafat movement, advocated the maintenance of civic life in the global age, and turned to republicanism. The idea of opposing "global" and "civil" put republicanism back at the center of political thought. I have a problem with this, because the helplessness of minorities cannot be reduced to disenfranchisement in the narrow sense of citizenship. For many political groups, the structure, concepts, and boundaries of the modern nation-state 'citizenship' are not only unfamiliar and unfair, but also contradictory. So there's more to fighting one kind of exclusive citizenship than just "building another kind of exclusive citizenship" – isn't that a lesson from India's political history? Since the early modern period, a broader public realm has gradually emerged, which is not only a serendipitous encounter in international travel and a partial exchange in global trade, but is based on the collective consciousness of common production, common life, and common distribution. Individuals and groups engage in a wider range of interpersonal and international activities through a myriad of channels to achieve their natural sociability. Closing down sovereignty and pursuing republicanism is a path, but it is not the only one, let alone logical coherence and vision. Within the narrow framework of republicanism, Franternité in Indian constitutional thought is also attached to its literal meaning: brotherhood, rather than its broader meaning: fraternity. Among the brothers, the weaker party is destined to split up for the inheritance, monopolize the "citizenship rights" in the newly enclosed land, and get away with it. But if this is the case from generation to generation, and everyone is separated from family to enjoy "a little more citizenship", then this "republicanism" becomes an eternal hotbed of exclusivist politics and a painkiller for self-paralysis when there is no hope of world change.
Group photo of Iqbal (1877-1938) with Muslim political activists including Chaudhry Rahmat Ali (1897-1951), an advocate of Pakistani statehood
"Global" is both a definite existence and a metaphor. "Global" is undoubtedly a more three-dimensional category than the more flat "international", but because of this, it must be formed by a multi-dimensional planar action, rather than rejecting the two-dimensionality of the concepts of "national" and "international". The "global" that is prevalent today comes from the French loan word global(e) in English, which is geometrically synonymous with globeaire. With the advent of the age of navigation, "spherical" acquired the meaning of mondial (world). Middle school students who are introductory to Latin should recite Cicero's Anti-Catiline to the immortal gods, angrily denouncing Catilin for "plotting to destroy our city-states, and even the rings of the world" (de huius urbis atque adeo de orbis terrarum exitio cogitent). It can be seen that even at the source of republicanism, civic life is placed in the global context, and even theoretical implications are drawn from it. If the study of the history of political thought is only an illuminating hermeneutics, and at present, this kind of enlightening hermeneutics is only an imaginary political intervention, then why put on the shackles of imagination? The history of political thought does not ask about the "three thousand worlds" in the Buddhist scriptures, only about the "small world." Sanskrit has another word, meaning "the world in which human beings live together." From the Greek "universe" (κ σμο), "human" (ο κουμ νη) to the Latin "ring of the lands", to the undefined. From carthage to the Serbs roaming Central Asia, and even the Indians and "Silk People" in the East, the term "Ring of Lands" went through the Middle Ages and entered the "World Stage" of the early modern period with the advent of the Age of Navigation. What does the world stage look like? How does the world we live together work? We know better than our predecessors at any time, but we seem to be more afraid of imagination than our predecessors at any time. If the Global Society for the History of Political Thought can strengthen the courage of scholars, restore this ability of political imagination, and expand the imagination space of predecessors while picking up the wisdom of predecessors, then it will fully realize its mission and even exceed our expectations.