Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

Theoria

Vol. 49, No. 2, Issue 100 (December 2002)

Articles

• Technology, Human Capital, Growth and Institutional Development: Lessons from Endogenous Growth Theory?
  Johannes Fedderke

  Introduction
  The resurgence of interest in the determinants of economic growth through the vehicle of endogenous growth theory has brought with it new understanding of what underlies long term economic prosperity. In particular, the role of human capital as an important driver of technological change, and hence development, has emerged as a key factor. While endogenous growth theory has had a considerable impact on economics, the impact of the insights to emerge from this work in other social sciences is presently somewhat more limited. One reason for this is that the debate amongst economists has often been technically arcane. Such a lack of interaction between endogenous growth theory and other social sciences, perhaps particularly political science, is unfortunate since the areas of potentially fruitful interaction are of importance to our understanding of the long-term developmental prospects of social systems. Indeed, economic and political theory have already evidenced a very fruitful if controversial interaction in the form of modernization theory, which posits the possibility of a link between economic and political development.1 Given the new insights to emerge from endogenous growth theory it would seem that the possibility for a renewal of interaction between political and economic theory presents itself. Traditional growth theory relied on exogenous technological advance. Political institutions can therefore dynamically interact only with the level of output of the economy - and indeed this is precisely what is to be found in "traditional" approaches to modernization theory. Allowing political dynamics to interact with either the level of output or with the nature of the technology of production leads to the potential of a richer depiction of the process of development.

• The Art of Re-Interpretation: Michel de Certeau
  Peter Burke

  After a certain time-lag, the Jesuit Michel de Certeau (1925-86) has come to be recognized as one of the most creative cultural theorists of the late twentieth century, in the same class as his more celebrated contemporaries Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. The secondary literature on Certeau is increasing at a remarkable rate. A Certeau reader was published in 2000 and an intellectual biography in 2002.[2] A remarkable polymath, Certeau practised at least nine disciplines (history, theology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, literature, geography and psychoanalysis), and he has been discussed from many points of view. All the same, as this article will attempt to show, one of the various contexts in which his thought developed has been relatively neglected.

  Certeau became widely known in France in 1968 thanks to his comments on the famous "events" of that year. However, he had been writing steadily for a number of years before this. His publications on mysticism and ecclesiastical history go back to the end of the fifties.[3] Although his writings on theology and mysticism have not gone unappreciated, relatively little attention has been paid to the relation between these writings and his more famous sociological and anthropological theories.4 Even more neglected are his articles on the problems of the Church and on Latin America, five of which were published in 1967, before the famous events of the following year.

• Remarks on Emmanuel Levinas's Contribution to Classical and "Situated" Justice
  Bettina Bergo

  In 1968, at the height of political unrest in Europe and North Amer-ica, in the heyday of French existentialism, Marxism, and psycho-analysis, Emmanuel Levinas published an essay curiously opposed to the emerging "canon" of the time, in defence of humanism. Both with and against psychoanalysis' and structuralism's decentring of the subject and the Marxist critiques of bourgeois humanism, Levinas called for a different conception of humanism. He suggested that humanism had never been truly humanist because metaphysics (and ethics) had given priority to a conception of subjectivity characterized exclusively by activity and rationality. But Levinas did not toll the death knell of reason; rather he suggested that the rationalist subjectivity of humanism and idealism covered over depths of our intersubjective life. Against these, he proposed a humanism whose beginning would not be the self-positing of the ego, but rather would lie in the peculiar character of our sensuous vulnerability to other human beings. This vulnerability - whose ethical implications can be elucidated by an inquiry into the possibility of the sentiments of responsibility and obligation - belongs to a philosophical anthropology characterized by a certain optimism. Such an optimism is envisionable for Levinas even in the wake of skepticism over the meaning and coherence of ethical judgement. Thus, in the following passage Levinas summarizes his conception of the subject and the starting point of his humanism, using the Fichtean ego (inter alia) as its foil.

• "Small Acts": The Perspective, Location and Agency of Theory in South African Cultural Studies
  Ashraf Jamal

  In an interview with David Attwell, recorded in 1993 at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College New Hampshire, Homi Bhabha turns his liminal gaze to the fate of South Africa. His position, that of "an outsider … a bystander and consumer of the media" (Attwell 1993: 109), invokes a reading of the state of the nation and its cultural predicament which, nine years hence, remains compelling. What is particularly striking about the conversation, conducted at a geographical remove during a charged historical time when South Africa forges what will prove to be an on-going process of disinterring itself from a legacy of oppression, is Bhabha's eschewal of a saving telos and his insistence on turning and returning to "the semiosis of the moment of transition" (1993: 104). For Bhabha this moment is not the Gramscian interregnum between two distinct states of governance. Rather, his conception subsumes the notion of two distinct states as well as Antonio Gramsci's conception of the moment between as the emergent locus for a symptomatic morbidity. Here Bhabha diverges from the perception of those within South Africa for whom the interregnum has served as a prevailing trope, most notably Nadine Gordimer in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988: 262) and Michael Chapman in Southern African Literatures (1996: 327-331). Rather, between the renunciation of a past and the proleptic fulfilment of a future, Bhabha proffers a more enabling conception of the moment of transition; one which, having "overcome the given grounds of opposition … opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectation, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics" (Bhabha 1994: 25).

• The Idea of an African University
  Anthony Holiday

  Introduction
  John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University speaks to the concerns of African educationalists, not despite, but because of the circumstance that his fidelity to the ideal of a university as a seat of universal knowledge is tied to his argument for the inclusion of theology as an indispensable part of any university syllabus. It is not the case, moreover, that his idealism resonates with us purely because it is carried by a magnificent prose style. Rather, Newman's thoughts about the universality of higher learning touch us across a consider-able culturo-temporal divide, because Africans in their quest for a form of university education which will harmonize with their African-ness are driven by an innate conviction, too seldom made explicit, that such education would have to be inseparable from their own spirituality and religious commitments. If the conviction remains largely unspoken, this has much to do with the global climate of scientism and secularism in which humanity's aspirations - religious and educational - must seek expression. It is, perhaps, because we are denizens of this climate that we can scarcely suppress a smile at Newman's claim that theology is a factual science much as, say, physics is a factual science and why his assertion in the Fourth Discourse that "the preservation of our race in Noah's Ark is an historical fact which history never would arrive at without revelation"1 strikes us (quite rightly) as being something of a howler.

• Review Article: Into the Light? Critical Theory and Social Change in South Africa
  Ben Parker

  Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture and Agency, by Elliot L. Jurist. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000.

  The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, by Jürgen Habermas. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

  Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory. Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy, edited by William Rehg and James Bohman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001.

  Introduction
  This article reviews three recent publications that have a common commitment to critical theory and reflects on the relevance of critical theory to political and social practices in a developing African nation-state. South Africa provides a rich context for the exploration of critical theory. After its first democratic elections in 1994, South Africa has begun changing its apartheid inheritance, constructing the laws and institutions of a constitutional democratic society based on a strong Bill of Rights and structured processes of participation in political, cultural and economic decision-making. Ideally, in policy, South Africa comes close to the constitutional democratic societies favoured by Habermas and McCarthy (and by Rawls and Rorty). There is a certain irony in this exemplariness as the term "global Apartheid" emerges in the media as an appropriate description of the violence, inequalities, discriminations and oppressions of the latest global forms of capitalism and modernization.