Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Western liberals were widely perceived as ‘false friends’, as Conor Cruise O’Brien reported from Africa in the 1960s, and liberalism itself as an ‘ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs’. Distrust of the Western discourse of human rights was likewise constant and deep. The Indonesian thinker Soedjatmoko challenged its presumption of universal morality, pointing to the global inequalities perpetuated by the champions of human rights. Arundhati Roy spoke in 2004 of an ‘alarming shift of paradigm’: ‘Even among the well-intentioned, the expansive, magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of “human rights”’ – a minimalist request, basically, not to be killed, tortured or unjustly imprisoned. As a result, she argued ‘resistance movements in poor countries … view human rights NGOs as modern-day missionaries,’ complicit in the West’s attempt to impose an ‘unjust politica

From the history of 'liberalism' or things my American professors at university never told me The famous French political theorist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) who is known for his major work Democracy in America. "In May 1847, noting that the 'Bey of Tunisia' had already abolished the 'odious institution' [of slavery]—which in Muslim countries, by the French liberal's admission, took a 'milder' form—de Tocqueville expressed the opinion that 'we should doubtless only proceed to the abolition of slavery with care and moderation'. De Tocqueville seemed to be ready to accept a compromise even more favourable to the slaveholding South [of the U.S.]. 'As for the policy permitting slavery to develop in a whole portion of the territory where it was hitherto unknown, I will concede ... that one can do nothing but tolerate this existence in the special, current interests of the Union.' [A letter of 13 April 1857]

I like Losurdo's answers on the subject of liberalism, but also his criticism of some aspects of Marxism. An interview with Domenico Losurdo

"The horror of the twentieth century was not something that burst into a world of peaceful coexistence suddenly and from without. At the same time, being dissatisfied with the edifying picture of the habitual hagiography and situating oneself on the firm ground of reality, with its condtradictions and conflicts, does not in any way mean denying the merits and strong points of the intellectual tradition [of liberalism] under examination. But we certainly must bid farewell once and for all to the myth of the gradual, peaceful transition, on the basis of purely internal motivations and impulses, from liberalism to democracy, or from general enjoyment of negative liberty to an ever wider recognition of political rights. Moreover, has liberalism definitely left behind it the dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation, with the dangers of regression and restoration implicit in it? Or is this dialectic still alive and well, thanks to the malleability peculiar to this current of tho

What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­ litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­ tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility. Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­ cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and

Liberal Totalitarianism

This is a nice piece. The philosophical roots of rights-based liberal individualism lie in efforts to legitimate imperial expansion

In those early years, Dewey formulated three ideas that would come to define his mature vision of democracy: individualism offers a distorted vision of human freedom, genuine freedom is found in social cooperation, and true social freedom is impossible in a class society. John Dewey

This is good. What it is about capitalism that makes Keynesianism a horizon even would-be revolutionaries — including Mann himself, he admits — have trouble seeing past. It is not so much an ideological block as a strategic one. ... to the extent that Keynesianism saved capitalism, it was from barbarism rather than socialism. And leftists are pulled to Keynesianism because, deep down, they believe that too. Most have lost confidence that there is a viable political path to socialism, while threats from various shades of the Right have followed one after another. For all the antidemocratic tendencies of Keynesianism, socialists today can hardly see themselves articulating the views of the masses either. The Keynesian counter-revolution

" The essay seems to vacillate between the urge to expose the hypocrisy or mendacity of power in its use of humanitarianism as char- ter for invasion and domination, a critique that might still leave a (liberal) concept of the human intact, and a drive to expose a deeper, constitutive, and unredeemable involvement of the very concept of the human (and in particular, the suffering human) in the violence of geopolitical power. Repeatedly, though not consistently, Asad’s essay reaches for this sense of a deeper crisis of the modern concept of the human and its wider constellation rather than its (cynical, partial, and hypocritical) manipulation by power. But whether or not he subscribes to any version of the posthuman paradigm currently in vogue remains utterly unclear... Throughout the essay, as in much of Asad’s writing, one gets the sense that there are only these two sociocultural realities (and modes of thinking) in the world: the liberal-secular-modern (which is im

" Sabsay invokes Wendy Brown’s understanding of liberal rights as  that which we cannot not want . In her most recent book, Brown persuasively argues that neoliberalism undermines the very bases of liberal democracy, which, however, she insists, should remain the point of departure for those who oppose neoliberalism in order to bring about what liberalism promises but never delivers.  I find this an inadequate framework, let alone an ideal political agenda to resist neoliberalism. Brown is not blind to the horrific record of liberal democracy on the question of race, gender, class, and governance more generally, but she still believes that liberal democracy carries “the language and promise of shared political equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty,” to which we must strive. I have always been wary of this dominant academic and intellectual preference for the language and promise of liberalism. For example, would Brown or any American liberal ever be able to overcome their in

Keynes 2030

" If, according to Zwemer, the truth that Islam fails to grasp is that “Jesus is lord and savior,” and that he must be chosen as such, liberalism demands that the individual, in order to be an individual, must choose liberalism; this, as Massad notes, is a weaponized “choice,” for the only choice that liberalism can accept as a choice is liberalism. The new choice, then, appears as the liberal form of damnation; Muslims who do not choose liberalism, like those who do not choose Jesus, are the new forsaken, to be converted or killed. It is this structure of liberalism, as an ideology of imperial missionary work in the name of secularism, that  Islam in Liberalism  demands that we confront." — Murad Idris

I make it clear in the book (something I also made clear in my previous book  Desiring Arabs  in the context of post-1967 Arab intellectual debates) that the failure to take political economy seriously in relation to debates about “women in Islam” and the attendant privileging of the idea of cultural determinants can be historicized in terms of the end of the cold war era. Once the USSR was eliminated, the global public sphere becomes dominated by the ideas of West European and US Human Rights and other “development” NGOs, in addition to the expansion of the purview of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to encompass all of Eastern Europe and the disintegrated Soviet republics (not to mention post-Apartheid South Africa and the post-Oslo yet-still-occupied Palestinian territories). It is then that the liberal language of rights achieves something like global hegemony and questions of political economy recede, almost disappear, in the framing of the problem of “women in

" Lorna Finlayson’s book has the deceptively simple aim of showing that there is no distinction in kind to be drawn between the methodology of political philosophy and the philosophy itself.   And, she suggests, since the methodology is in turn really just a way of trying to sustain the distinction between political philosophy and politics, the collapse of this distinction also supports the claim that the political philosophy/politics distinction is itself untenable. Political philosophy—or, it turns out, mainstream analytic political philosophy—has a mistaken understanding of itself as standing outside or above the messy power-ridden realm of actual politics, Finlayson argues; this misunderstanding is ideologically motivated, and the methodology of political philosophy serves to exemplify and buttress it. Showing that the distinction between the methodology of political philosophy and political philosophy is ideological, in the pejorative sense familiar from critical theory sinc

"It should never be forgotten that joining a “school,” or associating oneself with a certain theoretical perspective, means associating oneself to an intellectual field, where there is an important struggle for access to the dominant positions. Ultimately, calling oneself a Marxist in the France of the 1960s — when the academic field was in part dominated by self-identified Marxists — did not have the same meaning as it does to be a Marxist today. Concepts and canonical authors are obviously intellectual instruments, but they also correspond to various strategies for becoming part of the field and the struggles over it. Intellectual developments are then partly determined by relations of power within the field itself. Also, it seems to me that relations of power within the academic field have changed considerably since the end of the 1970s: after the decline of Marxism, Foucault occupied a central place. In reality, he offers a comfortable position that allows a certain degr

What the American Left Doesn't Understand About Fascism

I recommend this Contradiction of Capital and Care

Turkey coup Background and context: Liberalized Islam, Post-Sufis, and the Military in Turkey   Coup Aftermath Between Neo-Fascism and Bonapartism