Constructing Civility

The Human Good in Christian and Islamic Political Theologies

Richard S. Park

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268102760
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religioni comparate

In Constructing Civility, Richard Park bridges Christian and Islamic political theologies on the basis of an Aristotelian ethics. He argues that modern secularism entails ideological commitments that can work against the promotion of public civility in pluralistic societies. A corrective outlook on public life and the public sphere is necessary, an outlook that aligns with and recovers the notion of the human good. Park develops a framework for a universally applicable public civility in multifaith and multicultural contexts by engaging the central concepts of the "image of God" ( imago Dei ) and "human nature" ( fitra ) in Roman Catholicism and Islam.

The study begins with a critique of the social fragmentation and decline of public life found in modernity. Park's central contention is that the construction of public civility within Christian and Islamic political theologies is more promising and sustainable if it is reframed in terms of the human good rather than the common good. The book offers an illustration of the proposed framework of public civility in Mindanao, Philippines, an area that represents one of the longest-standing conflicts between Christian and Muslim communities. Park's sophisticated treatment brings together theology, philosophy, religious studies, intellectual history, and political theory, and will appeal to scholars in all of those fields.

NOTES

Chapter 1. Religious Diversity and Public Civility

1. Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in Desecularization of World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter Berger (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 2.

2. Timothy Shah, Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending an Embattled Human Right, ed. Matthew Franck (Princeton: Witherspoon Institute, 2012), 55.

3. See Monica Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: Norton, 2011), 127–28; and Monica Toft, “Getting Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War,” International Security 31, no. 4 (2007): 97–131, on 113, respectively.

4. Within political theory, see, e.g., John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, [1993] 2005); Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Religion in the Public Square (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). Within social theory, see, e.g., Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1999); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).Within legal theory, see, e.g., Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural jurisdictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ayelet Shachar, “State, Religion, and Family,” in Shariʿa in the West, ed. Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeremy Waldron, “One Law for All? The Logic of Cultural Accommodation,” Washington and Lee Law Review 59, no. 1 (2002): 3–34; Wael Hallaq, Sharīʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Shariʿah Law: An Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008); and Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).

5. Habermas, Naturalism and Religion, 3.

6. Charles Taylor, “Modes of Civil Society,” Public Culture 3, no. 1 (1990): 95–118, 98. See also Peter Berger, Facing up to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 170–73.

7. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 104–5.

8. This paragraph builds on the following works: John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999), esp. ch. 1, “Civil Society and the Classical Heritage”; Michael Edwards, Civil Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), esp. pt. 2, ch. 17; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1923), esp. bk. 1, ch. 8 (available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/638).

9. See Karl Marx, “Preface to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 362; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence and Wishart, [1846] 1965), 39; Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, ed. Mary Campbell Smith (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1903), First Suppl., 157; and Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, ed. J. V. Prichard, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), bk. 20, ch. 2, “Of the Spirit of Commerce.”

10. See Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pt. 1, sec. 6, “Of Moral Sentiment,” quotation on 35.

11. Though Hegel himself favored the state’s ultimate domination of society; see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), see esp. pt. 3, ch. 2, secs. 182–95.

12. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), viii. Cf. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1996); Michael Walzer, “The Idea of Civil Society,” in Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America, ed. E. J. Dionne (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998).

13. Edwards, Civil Society, 6.

14. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, ed. Eric Dunning et al., rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, [1939] 2000), pt. 2, ch. 1, “The History of the Concept of Civilité.”

15. Quotations in this paragraph are from Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 368–71. Cf. Desiderius Erasmus, A Lytell Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren [De civilitate morum puerilium], trans. Robert Whittington (London: Wynkyn de Worde, [1530] 1536); cf. Elias, Civilizing Process, 47.

16. Except where indicated otherwise, quotations in this paragraph are from Stephen Carter, Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 15. For the note about Aristotle, see his Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover, 2000), bk. 4, ch. 4.

17. Elias, Civilizing Process, 34.

18. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2007), xi.

19. John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62.

20. See Lederach, Moral Imagination, 5 (emphasis original); and R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 13 (emphasis original).

21. See R. Scott Appleby and John Paul Lederach, “Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview,” in Strategies of Peace: Transforming Conflict in a Violent World, ed. Daniel Philpott and Gerard Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24; and Appleby, Ambivalence of the Sacred, 18.

22. Quotations in this paragraph are from Appleby and Lederach, “Strategic Peacebuilding,” 22–23 (emphasis added).

23. Quotations in this paragraph are from Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2004), 17.

24. See, e.g., Edwards, Civil Society, ch. 3, “Civil Society as the Good Society,” esp. 40–49. Quotations in this paragraph are from Edwards, Civil Society, 72 and 112.

25. Alasdair MacIntyre famously defines “tradition” as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument” in his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, [1981] 2007), 222. It may be the case that nonreligious traditions, of which Enlightenment liberalism is a paragon example, also possess resources to ground normativity; however, given an arguably inherent moral relativism, they do so more tenuously, as I argue below. (For more on liberalism as a “tradition,” see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988], esp. chs. 13–17.)

I recognize that “liberalism” does not refer to a monolithic thesis; along with Michael Kenny, I note that “liberalism is a contestable, fluid and complex ideational terrain,” exhibiting multiple theoretical forms; see his The Politics of Identity (Oxford: Polity, 2004), ix. Yet I concur with Nicholas Wolterstorff that there is a marked resemblance among those who make up a “family of liberal positions”; see his “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues,” in Audi and Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square, 74. For a list of such scholars, see Daniel Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 307 n. 11.

Chapter 2. Modernity’s Mayhem and the Need for Moral Political Theory

1. Berger, “Desecularization of t...