Culture and the Specificity of Politics: A Response to Fred Dallmayr
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| DOI | 10.3366/jipt.2011.0019 |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
CULTURE AND THE SPECIFICITY OF POLITICS:
A RESPONSE TO FRED DALLMAYR
RICHARD BEARDSWORTH
Introductory Remarks
This article responds to the thought of Fred Dallmayr by focusing on the
difference between ethical and cultural work and ethico-political work in the
political domain. The difference redounds, in the context of Dallmayr’s writings
at least, to one between a politics of non-violence and a politics of the lesser
violence. I argue that Fred Dallmayr’s wide ref‌lections on philosophy, religion,
ethics, and politics look towards a moral politics of self-restraint and tolerance,
and that these ref‌lections are deep and critically formative, especially relative
to a post-neoliberal age and to the next era of globalization, characterized by
the pluralization of world power centres. I suggest, however, that this moral
politics does not work enough from out of the limits that def‌ine the political
domain as political, and that, consequently, it does not suff‌iciently anticipate
a responsible politics of power. The latter constitutes, I claim, the appropriate
object of international political theory.
My argument is developed in three parts. The f‌irst section attempts to
circumscribe the importance of Fred Dallmayr’s intellectual itinerary and his
concern with ‘comparative political theory’. The second section then rehearses
the lack of engagement on his part with what I will call the ‘specif‌icity’ of
the political. I take as my example Dallmayr’s own engagements with Jacques
Derrida’s ref‌lections on Europe, suggesting that despite an effective criticism
of Derrida’s understanding of ethico-political responsibility, he remains himself
too tied to a ‘culturalist’ a notion of political transformation.1In the third
section I argue that this notion of politics leads Dallmayr to advocate, within
the ethico-spiritual legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, a politics of non-violence,
whereas a politics of the lesser violence is more appropriate to the specif‌icity
of the political domain and its limits – particularly, the international political
domain within which comparative political theory is set. I conclude that, despite
Journal of International Political Theory, 7(2) 2011, 239–251
DOI: 10.3366/jipt.2011.0019
© Edinburgh University Press 2011
www.eupjournals.com/jipt
239
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