CC BY
21
■ ■ ■ Is there a promise of politics?
Mendo Castro Henriques
Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Catholic University of Portugal), Lisbon, Portugal.
Abstract. We must assess the response of politics to a world that is changing fast and in a way that is increasingly intertwined, complex and unpredictable. Our problem with neoliberalism is not the liberal economy that increased world wealth and brought unprecedented prosperity to emerging countries: our problem is the primacy of the economic markets above every other social dimension. We introduce promise as a major category of analysis that respects time unfolding particularities - contrary to abstract generalities - and helps to rescue politics from the abuses of political fundamentalisms of diverse ideological persuasions.
Keywords: promise, generality, prospective, neoliberalism, markets
For citation: Henriques M. Is There a Promise of Politics? Communicology (Russia). 2018. Vol. 6. No.3. P. 140-151. DOI 10.21453 / 2311-3065-2018-6-3-140-151.
Inf. about the author: Mendo Castro Henriques, PhD, Professor at Catholic University of Portugal, member of the CEFi Board. Address: 1649-023 Lisbon, Palma de Cima. E-mail: mendohenriques@fch.lisboa.ucp.pt.
Received: 01.06.2018. Accepted: 14.06.2018.
The Fire Warners
" You must turn off the wick before the spark activates the dynamite"1.
Our world is changing fast and in a way that is increasingly intertwined, complex and unpredictable. Information is increasingly global, instant and networked. Globalization of trade and multinational corporations challenge regulation. The media merge with each other in the global village. Ecological problems run across borders. Mobility and cultural massification grows every day. Supranational spheres of governance gain weight. Waste accumulates. Thus, the coexistence of an old world with a new one troubles our future.
We experience both surprises that enchant and uncertainties that scare. On the one hand, we receive warnings that we are discrediting democratic institutions, rendering social security unsustainable, transgressing ecological limits, fostering economic and financial crises, and unbalancing the demographic pyramid. We are told that traditional authorities are in the wane; technology and society of the spectacle fill the interstices of public life; culture is increasingly enjoyed in private worlds thus becoming less free and less communicative.
On the other hand, we listen that Science delivers secrets of the universe and creates amazing technologies that stretch our forces and senses, restore health, increase the
1 Benjamin W. (1991). Gesammelte Schriften IV 1, Suhrkamp Verlag, Francfort. P. 122.
capacity for communication and work, and introduce forms of artificial and augmented intelligence, defying the limits of human nature. Thanks to technological innovations we have the means to increase economic production in a way never seen before. New forms of mobility and new energies allow people to switch between communities and governance contexts. Civic participation and monitoring initiatives show that democracy is beginning a new phase of its millennial journey.
These contradictory tendencies show us dancing on volcanoes that threaten to erupt. The one that seems most extinct, but in the long run is the most dangerous, is that of ecosystems. The predominant elements in our culture and way of life, as Jorge Riechmann said, give us "the illusion that we have become independent of nature". We live in urban environments, disconnected from the foundations of life and biosphere. Huge towns, instead of being permeated by territories that provide resources and recycle waste, are disconnected from rural areas. Green spaces do not replace ecosystems and everything that is done to take care of our common home is not enough.
A second volcano is that of human life, burdened with birth problems, genetic manipulation, human trafficking, migration and refugees. We're playing with fire. The commodification of the person - including the availability of organs, sex, friendship and work - make it a consumable product, without restriction or accountability. There are overcrowded countries in Africa and Asia and there are countries in a demographic winter. There are no innocent regimes. If conditions for European investment on the southern shores of the Mediterranean had been created in North Africa, African migrants from south of the Sahara could settle there [Henriques].
A third volcano is money. All that economists say about the functions of money -as medium of exchange, unit of account, value reserve and means of payment - is threatened by the injection of huge sums into the world economy by Central Banks and through private banks that create more of 90% of the money in circulation. Economists may explain that the passion for money is only a preference for future consumption relative to the present, and a dose of risk aversion; common sense knows that the omnipresence of money breeds greed. It induces consumerism and disconnects us from the abysmal differences between goods of necessity and secondary goods too much money is a narcotic for human achievement, as all wisdom warns.
In the 1930's, Walter Benjamin named those who alert to the imminence of social catastrophes as Feuermelder 'Fire Warners'. It is up to them to "quench the burning wick before the spark activates the dynamite" [Benjamin: 122]. Benjamin warned against the militant optimism of those who are convinced that tomorrow will necessarily be better; progress is not a good yardstick for measuring history because it undervalues the victims of history and the forgotten by the state of exception. Societies must consider those who were left behind, frustrated in their just hopes and aspirations, the humiliated, the poor and the offended. All must be rescued through memory and utopia that makes them present again in the promise of a better world.
Karl Polanyi was another fire warner in 1944 when he said that a market economy ends up building a market society: "instead of an economy embedded in social
relations, these will become embedded in the economic system" [Polanyi]. This he called The Great Transformation: the transition from a market economy to a market society, in which community disappears before the competing individuals. Any good is tradable in markets: natural and manufactured products, water, seeds, soils, human organs. For him, the market is "a useful element, but subordinated to a democratic community" while the disembeddedness of the economic sphere "is contrary to the human and natural substance of societies".
Another fire warner was Hans Jonas in The Responsibility Principle [Jonas]. According to him, current threats to humanity are radically different from the past; weapons of mass destruction, environmental imbalances and genetic manipulation altered the character of human action and created unusual risks. Traditional moral precepts - being fair, courageous, free, honest - are valuable in the immediate sphere of life but the unprecedented changes require a new ethics. As technological revolution dissociated the human agent and his actions, Ethics must respond with a new principle of responsibility: to preserve human condition.
Giorgio Agamben is another fire warner in The Open - man and animal [Agamben]. He questions himself about what separates humanity and animality, challenging us to think about the precariousness of human being, so often manipulated by law. By taking over the health care of the population, modern state introduced biopolitics, leaving human rights dependent on the sovereign who decides. For Agamben "man has no specific identity except to be able to recognize himself'. The decisive conflict in Western culture is between the animality and humanity of man. Western politics is biopolitical.
Another fire warner was Bernard Lonergan [Lonergan]. For him, knowledge acquired the dimension of the main social question of the 20th century. If the gap between scientific knowledge and ethical values is not spanned, the meaning of human life shrinks; the will to achieve loses impetus; culture becomes a black hole [Lonergan: 99]. A community of selfish people discards those held as non-useful, creating a 'discard economy', 'idolatry of money' and 'social exclusion and inequality'. "This economy kills", - warns Francis, bishop of Rome and pontiff of the Catholic Church [Papa Francisco]. He calls for a change in global situation. Spirituality is essential to the protection of nature and sustained growth. Instead of the fascination with unlimited growth based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth's goods, we need policies that serve the common good.
Major promises
As we face not separate crises - cultural, environmental, social and economic -but a complex crisis whose solution requires an integrated approach, what promises does politics show to achieve prosperity, restore human dignity and protect nature?
Over the past fifty years, the prevailing theme of political philosophy has been the study of egalitarian social issues and which inequalities are unacceptable. In general, philosophers did not engage in such questions about the good life and the common good by addressing concrete policy measures and programs; they formulated theories
of justice, among which the most exemplary are due to John Rawls [Rawls] and Amartya Sen [Sen].
On the other side, for almost a century, authors of reference such as Bergson, Maritain, Niebuhr and Voegelin, have been saying that behind every key idea of modern politics there is a religious promise: social contract and alliance; liberation and exodus; prosperity and promised land; political leader and messiah; progress and providence; and behind justice and peace is the shalom which is also salaam and salvation. Even the stern realm of ends of Kantian ethics, and Hegel's and Marx's realm of freedom, seem to be variants of the kingdom of God.
The concept of promise is rooted in the Messianic tradition, of Jewish origin and with remote roots in Zoroastrianism. The Messianic promise is based on the idea that the structure of time is open to a future event that will free mankind from the evils of the present world. Messianisms speak of two worlds and two opposing times: one in which chaos is repelled by laws; and the world of the future, characterized by peace and justice. The covenant of Sinai signify Israel's confidence in divine intervention. In Jesus' time there were two main streams of messianic hope: the regal messianism awaiting the political liberator who would initiating the era of peace and prosperity; and an apocalyptic chain waiting for the future Israel, a work of God and not of men. the term 'Christianity' became synonymous with 'messianism', the term chrestus being the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew mashiah, the anointed [Carvalho: 29-51].
The promises of politics are born of these ideas of religious origin, as they went through a process of secularization so profound that they are almost unrecognizable, lending themselves to manipulation by political fundamentalisms, dominant ideologies and opportunist politicians. And yet, the original promises continue to shine like stars in the skies of our planet and in our flags. Let us see the major promises of politics.
Politics is a promise of justice. Such a claim comes from the prophetic tradition (Isaiah 61: 1) and the Gospel of Jesus (Luke 4:18) The promise of justice must be evaluated as procedure, situation and personal action. If justice was only an attribute of procedures, everything would be resolved with the triumph of legality. If justice was an attribute of the situation, only revolution could transform natural inequality. If justice was only the attribute of personal action, human development would solve it all. Now, justice is a relationship and not everything that is legal is lawful.
The real world of democracy presents a gap between rich and poor and such inequality allows minorities to use their dominant position to their own advantage, to the point of rendering fictitious the formal rights accepted as the foundation of the idea of justice. Legality is permitted by current legislation; morality must be enforced against domination. Money in tax havens, corporations and tycoons in third countries, abysmal wage inequalities may be legal, but they are ultimately immoral. Common good must ensure that human rights are promoted, that solidarity develops, that there is distributive justice, and that these goals are implemented in the national and international community. The existence of human rights does not dispense with the cultivation of the values of justice, which is the root of loyalty and political obligation. As Gandhi said: "The Ganges of rights descends from the Himalayas of duties".
Politics is a promise of liberation. Ancient slavery, the servants in the Middle Ages, the proletariat in the industrial revolution were overcome in the name of the promise of a decent society. We still do not know how to deal with unemployment and precariousness in our time. Redemptive freedom has a double aspect, destructive and constructive. To free ourselves from constraints, does not confer us automatically the resources to do the good thing. Liberal doctrines, freedom is the power of the individual to assert himself in the face of what is law. For collectivist doctrines, freedom is the satisfaction of human rights of peace, bread, land, health, housing and work. Power is liberating in directing citizens for the common good and not for private interests [Acemoglu, Robinson]; in an open society, members can freely criticize the structures of power; in which education is not indoctrination; in which institutions flourish without hindrance; in which there is freedom of thought, expression and assembly.
Politics is a promise of solidarity, a name that has changed over time. It was the assembly (Qahal) of the tribes of Israel. It was friendship (philia) among the Greeks of the same polis. It was concord (homonoia) between the Hellenic confederation of Alexander the Great and the Persians of the East. It was charity (agape) in the early Christian communities. It was fraternité in the French Revolution. It is ubuntu among African populations. Political relationship creates obligations of solidarity and mutuality, as happens between friends and members of a team. With a wide range of intensity, solidarity inspired theories of citizenship based on loyalty, a kind of political obligation not based on a contract and whose purpose is to adjust the parts in relation. The promise of solidarity brings society to the center of politics as a real and powerful force and not merely a sum of people or institutions. We participate in society through relationships, initiatives and responsibilities. The person remains the purpose of social activity. The duties to society are based on personal reality. Such reality that exists in each one is what everyone has in common; it is human nature; from the dynamic point of view, it is called the common good.
Politics is a promise of equality, a beacon that illuminates the history of societies, but whose scope varies according to the powers that mobilizes. St. Paul incorporated this message into his teachings, namely in the socially subversive Letter to the Galatians, 3:28, There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. The appeal of equality echoed differently in authoritarian, capitalist, feudal, and postindustrial societies; some require sharing of power, others equal sum of income, others equality before the law. Political equality refers to the right to vote and to be eligible. Economic equality means basically equality of opportunities. How to achieve economic equality? Through successive redistributions of wealth and fiscal policy? How to reconcile redistribution with respect for property rights? Under what circumstances is the abolition of private property, expropriation and nationalization compatible with minimum freedoms?
Politics is a promise of prosperity. The myth of the golden cornucopia from which all the goods necessary for a good life flow is present in all societies, from the most primitive to the present, and is the object of the most diverse cultural representations. Amartya Sen traced the profiles of prosperity [Sen] Prosperity as opulence refers to
the immediate availability and constant production of material goods. The more we have, the better we will be. Prosperity as utility focuses on satisfaction afforded by goods. The value of use of a good depends on psychological and social conditions and not on material characteristics. Prosperity as an opportunity means security, health, property, respect, a set of basic goods. The utilitarian formula seemingly solved - to achieve prosperity based on unlimited economic growth, is exhausted. As Ziauddin Sardar writes, "We must overcome the days of spending money we do not have on things we do not need to impress people who do not see" [Sardar].
The neoliberal promise
There is nothing more irrational than conspiracy theories in politics. It is irrational to argue that our future depends upon secret confabulations of Foreigners, Jews, Arabs, Bankers, Freemasons, or Racists who are discussing the future of the world around a fireplace among some snow-capped mountains of a winter resort. The world is too complex to be governed by a group of conspirators; politics pivots mostly around compromises. However, there are lobbies and institutions with global governance plans. The reports of the Brookings Institution, the Trilateral Commission and the Council of Foreign Relations are at a very different level from the fantasies of Nostradamus or the Protocol of the Sages of Zion. Anyone can follow what the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization do.
More to the point, the Western global elites in the 1960's began to criticize the models of national economic development and proposed a new market age on a planetary scale. They considered that state planning generated inefficient management and limited growth and innovation. This was the origin of the neoliberal promise that deregulation of markets would allow growth in the core countries that would later pour into peripheral countries. Those elites advised policies of privatization and liberalization that would accelerate globalization; There is no alternative, was Margaret Thatcher's motto in the 1980's. As Spaniards say: I don't believe in witches, but they surely exist!
Our problem with neoliberalism is not liberal economy. Economic liberalism helped to overthrow the statist China Wall, increased world wealth, and brought unprecedented prosperity to emerging countries; our problem is the primacy of the markets above every other social dimension. Fifty years ago, the predominant view was that the capitalist countries of the West were stabilizing production and consumption and future problems would be about the democratic redistribution, as stated in J.K. Galbraith's The Society of Abundance. At the same time, in America and in Europe, protests emerged against abundance and technology. A decade later, the happiness announced by the counterculture was verified as illusory. Wealthier societies became more consumeristic as investment in desires increase. Significantly, the American hippie singer Cher became a millionaire movie star.
A beacon of neoliberal globalization and a forerunner of G-7, the Trilateral Commission was created in 1971 as a shadow government of globalization by bankers like David Rockefeller, politicians like Brzezinski and Kissinger, theorists like
Huntington and economists like Hayek and Friedman. In 1975, Samuel Huntington's, Michel Crozier's and Jori Watanuki's report on The crisis of Democracy [Huntington, Croizier, Watanuki], attacked the social democratic and protectionist policies of national states and recommended a supranational governance in order to make global trade more competitive. According to such model, democracies suffered from several dysfunctions: loss of legitimacy in national authority and confidence in leaders; a too big burden on national states of social cohesion; fragmentation of political parties; the shortsightedness of nations on global issues.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the USSR blessed this neoliberal promise as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the West began to play with fire, its economic malaises were tested by anti-globalization protests and populist movements. These protests did not bring about change but they highlighted unsustainable practices and helped society to structure problems: "ideologies are always right in the problems they raise and wrong in the solutions they propose" [Voegelin].
Until the 2008 crisis, the neoliberal vulgate seemed unstoppable. The world economy grew. Radical political parties were insignificant. Democracy looked steady. Then, the future arrived. The neoliberal promise that markets would replace governments became as harmful as the Marxist promise that communism would result in the demise of the state. Instead of compensating for the loss of authority from states and churches, the neoliberal promise allowed the populist reaction underway. Opportunist leaders and citizens disillusioned with politics have begun to disdain it. Partisan systems that seemed mummified began to stir. Voters demonstrating against governments began to speak out against democracy itself. Another world on the march.
The future is knocking at our door and, like the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, it triggers both fear and hope. Fear warns us about the scarcity of goods to distribute, about conflicts of values and lifestyles, about the failure of institutions, about perverse or morose national systems of justice, and the absence of a world jurisdiction. Hope tells us that people keep creating networks, devising resources, knowledge and potential. "Humanity only poses the problems that it is capable of solving" Karl Marx wrote, and Bergson said that a well-posed problem was a problem solved.
Fear and hope unleash distinct promises. Fear invokes violation of territories, isolationism, and traditionalism in political and religious circles. It sees the future as a threat to the present. It cuts bridges, builds walls, and forbids alterity; it does not recommend neither tolerate dialogue. On the contrary, hope requires a language and an ability to imagine the future. Hope needs dialogue. Hope symbolically mocks death by assuming the elements of permanence that accompany the dialogical ideas of truth, beauty and goodness, the ethical aspirations of life. For some, these are a fairy tales: for others they are promises that call us to deeds greater than ourselves as we share them. Let us see better what these fears and hopes are about.
Ulrich Beck called 'reflexive modernization' the awareness of the unsustainability of current consumption and production systems about environmental impact, economic equity and social justice. Societies feel threatened by negative externalities [Beck, 1994]. Herman E. Daly in Steady-State Economics took up Karl Polanyi's message
about the economic subsystem as a predator of ecosystems [Polany]. Tim Jackson in Prosperity without Growth said the same.
As Western and Westernized countries have completed the cycle of individual emancipation, mass education, and less inequality between men and women, new social problems arose as the state seems too large for small tasks and too small for big tasks. There is the democratic deficit [Habermas]. There is the financial undermining of pension funds, unemployment benefits and pro-labor policies. Institutions that provided stability - unions, churches, and political parties - lost support According to John M. Greer, we entered an economic cycle that turns most capital into waste [Greer], be it material waste or 'human waste' of people disabled by precariousness, unemployment and retirement. Globalization enabled hundreds of millions of people to get a decent life buy it lay in unemployment tens of millions of workers. Dominique Schnapper in Against the End of Work [Schnapper], Sygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity [Bauman] and Guy Standing, The Precariat [Standing] warned about a new class of people in the West, without careers, who accept temporary jobs with no sense of belonging and personal fulfillment. New social imbalances arise, in some countries enslaving men, women and children, in others forcing migration.
Throughout the world, people are awakening to the absurdity of becoming precarious, expendable, or impoverished, by adhering to utopian neo-liberal promises of well-being supported by fossil energies, administrative centralization, and inequality policies. Where economic conditions are better, they feel threatened by the indignity of not participating in the processes of democracy. A New Transformation is coming: Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest [Hawken] identified more than one million civil society organizations that care about environmental and social issues, the world's largest unanticipated movement: urban gardens, energy-producing buildings, credit cooperatives, collective health insurance and social banking have prompted community values against i ndividualism. More and more citizens, consumers, entrepreneurs, employees, researchers and activists are using their own resources, knowledge and skills to gain autonomy. The growth of the network society creates a new citizenship in the 21th century, just as emancipation did two hundred years ago. It is a movement without a labeled leadership, as Carne Ross says in Revolution Without A Leader [Ross].
In the European Union, many initiatives show an increasingly active civil society. There is a growing number of people developing alternative currencies, producing their energy, generating their food, organizing collective care and pension funds, working in cooperatives. These networks shook the centrality of states, markets, legislation and culture, and help to foster a more open society. Modern technologies of communication and mobility, allow increasing access to resources. The awakening of consciousness moved people from protest to resistance against global elites and oligarchies who control resources, money, and power.
Social innovations are transforming control over fossil resources, neutralizing dominant financial models and challenging core controls. An economy with direct links - Internet, social banking, rental services, car transport, resource and energy sharing - confronts central services, whether they are power plants, central television,
central banks, central administrations, central health organizations, even central taxis. Social inclusion programs attack inequalities, deprivation and exploitation. There are new political channels through latest information and communications technologies and internet. Such participatory revolution [Kaase] combines citizen empowerment and engagement with local and national government initiatives to listen.
Four decades after her groundbreaking work on Participation and Democratic Theory [Pateman 1970], Carole Pateman testifies now that "we are in a favorable moment for participatory democracy" [Pateman 2012: 7]. In the European Union the emergence of citizen's Legislative initiatives, Petitions, Participatory Budgets, committees of transparency and integrity, peace judges, minority parliaments, litigation committees, citizens' assemblies, fostering regional, human rights and environment causes.
Generalities and promises
Let us compare the main promises with the generalities, which are often called isms. Saying I want peace, it is not the same as I want pacifism. I am in favor of equality is not to say I am in favor of egalitarianism. I defend freedom is not the same as saying I defend liberalism. In each first case I defend the promise, in another the generality. In one case I want to fulfill an end, in the other I defend an end that justifies the means. If I promote equality as an absolute purpose, without discernment neither exception, without exception, I am putting justice against itself. If I am a radical pacifist, maybe I should let everybody around me be killed.
The -isms reveal that political ideas without particularization are empty and political realities without ideals are blind. If political formulas like equality, freedom and prosperity are based on the illusion that the march to the future is guaranteed, and that we reached the end of history, they become empty of meaning. On the other hand, if the political realities of governance, economy, law and culture are not mobilized by promises, and if we have the illusion that they follow laws, they become blind. Statesmen are those who surprise us by keeping promises and not by applying a generality.
How to eradicate positivist blindness and historicist emptiness? Rejecting the abstract ideas that raise ideologies to the pedestal and reduce the other to insignificance. The totalitarian conception of history is about a homogeneous time in which all the past is inheritance and whole future is program. The winner has behind him the legitimacy of past successes. For traditionalists, the present is the fruit of history whose heritage is offered as an inheritance. For the progressive, the future reflects the present and violence will be justified if it accelerates its advent. We must relearn how to be human after Auschwitz and Nagasaki. We must relearn hope, despite darkness with sun in the zenith. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promotes a formal respect but it does not generate duties.
We need the messianic promise to eradicate technocratic blindness and religious fundamentalism. We need protest injustices and corruption; we need to work for dignified human aspirations; we need social innovation that brings opportunities for achievement; we need social inclusion. We must struggle against perverse promises.
Nationalists place the nationalist idea above national reality and despise other's nations. Religious fanatics do not accept the religion of others. Neoliberals do not respect the other, without whom there is no individual fulfillment. Socialists forget about individual freedom. How can I forget that I need freedom to do everything I should?
By manipulating generalities, politicians turn promises into lies. How can we say that we are equal when we are not yet? Why saying that we should be just and free, if we do not care enough about bringing it? Why to promise prosperity if we do not define it? Why saying that democracy brings equality if we passively see inequalities growing? When populations discover that the promises of politics have become a lie, they begin the cycle of fear and revolutions. Scapegoats are created. Humanity learnt in the 20th century that metaphysical exclusions translate into physical acts: totalitarian doctrines are followed by exile, persecution, murder, war and genocides.
Even in democracies, the electoral scenario may become pathetic. There is a deep connection between physical violence on the streets and cultural violence hidden in the promotion of identity, and in contempt for the concrete, the private, and the other. If what counts is my race, class, gender, nation, the other does not matter. Generality, or ideological thought goes all along from innocent abstraction to the cult of violence. Politicians promise abstractions, and these are subject to conflict. The temptation to impose generalities ideologically arises. When ideological construction falls into sectarian hands, violence begins; the enlightened are silenced and the unwary are manipulated. A lie repeated a thousand times, becomes true.
The essence of politics
The essence of politics is promise, and the most just promise is the common good. A promise is a value to be realized and all societies seek to apply this ideal to the fact of existence. The application is necessarily conflicting because antagonistic values collide and because there are disappointments with the results achieved. Still, in the harsh soil of existence, societies continue to dig the grooves where they plant the seeds of their election and whose fruits they hope to reap in the future.
We hear promises for a better world, communicated between lies and hopes through the thousand and one voices of public discourse. The promises are numerous and disparate. They range from the great utopias who dream of a different world, to the restrained partisan programs, evaluated in elections. They range from Islamic fundamentalism to the neoliberal discourse that silences the question of the common good. They range from the lies created by ideologues and rulers who seduce the electorate, to the hope that moves mountains and, in the human heart, calls for a more just, dignified, free and solidary life and thus struggles to change rulers and regimes that do not fulfill these promises.
There are good and bad promises, true and inauthentic, but between truths and lies there is an asymmetry. The original promise of politics is about the promised land, the good life, the common good, the just society we want to achieve. In political philosophy we cannot be neutral; we betray science if we are objective; we betray ethics if we pretend to be neutral. Objectivity results from an informed subjectivity. We must recognize reality;
we must feel the responsibility to fight for equity and for social justice. If we consider the structure of reality, if we are authentic, and it will be possible to envision the promise of a better world and create a narrative about the Promise of Politics. Thus, we can critically use this category introduced as a formula of action and an instrument of cultural, social and economic change, and rescue it from the abuses of political messianisms.
References
Agamben G. (2005). The Open. Man and Animal. Stanford University Press: California. Acemoglu D., Robinson J. (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. Profile Books.
Bauman Z. (1998). Work, consumerism and the new poor. Buckingham: Open University Press. Beck U. (1994). The reinvention of politics: towards a theory of reflexive modernization. In: Beck U., Giddens A., Lash S. (ed.) Reflexive modernization: politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Benjamin W. (1991). Gesammelte Schriften IV 1, Suhrkamp Verlag, Francfort. Carvalho F. (2000). Origem e evoluçao do Messianismo em Israel. Didaskalia, XXX. P. 29-51. Greer J.M. (2005). How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. Retirado de www. ecoshock.orgitranscripts/greer_ on_collapse.pdf.
Habermas J. (2001). The postnational constellation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hawken P. (2007). Blessed unrest: How the largest movement in the world came into being, and why no one saw it coming. Penguin.
Henriques M. (2006). Panorama de la Citoyenneté. Paris. Centre de Recherche de la Fédération Internationale des Universités Chrétiennes.
Henriques M., Khachani M. (2006). Security in the Mediterranean: Playing with fire. Amsterdam. IOS Press.
Huntington S., Crozier M. Watanuki J. (1976). The crisis of democracy: On the Governability of Democracies on the governability of democracies. NY: New York University Press.
Jonas H. (1995). El principio de responsabilidad: ensayo de una ética para a civilización tecnológica. Barcelona: Herder Editorial.
Kaase M. (1984). The Challenge of the "Participatory Revolution" in Pluralist Democracies. International Political Science Review 5: 299-318
Lonergan B. ( 1972). Method in theology. NY: Simon & Schuster. Papa Francisco (2015). Lodato Sí, Lisboa: Paulinas.
Pateman C. (1970). Participation and democratic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pateman C. (2012). Participatory Democracy Revisited. APSA Presidential Address. Perspectives on Politics, No. 10.
Pedreira J., Henriques M., Barros N. (2016) O dinheiro das nossas dividas. Lisboa: Penguin Random House - Objectiva.
Polanyi K. (1968). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
Rawls J. (2000). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ross C. (2012). A Revoluçao sem Líder. Lisboa: Bertrand.
Sardar Z. (2007). Prosperity: a transmodern analysis [el. source]: http://www.sd-comission.org.uk.
Schnapper D. (1998). Contra o fim do Trabalho. Lisboa: Terramar.
Sen A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Standing G. ( 2011). The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury: London.
Talmon J. (1952). The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Vol.1. London: Secker & Warburg.
Voegelin E. (1951). The New Science of Politics. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
■ ■ ■ Есть ли у политики перспектива? (о политической перспективе как категории анализа)
Энрикес Мендо Кастро
Католический университет Португалии, Лиссабон, Португалия.
Аннотация. Сегодня мир изменяется, становится все более сложным и непредсказуемым. В этих условиях необходимо ясно понимать и предвидеть политическую реакцию на возможные изменения. Проблема неолиберализма - не либеральная экономика, которая увеличила мировое богатство и принесла беспрецедентное процветание развивающимся странам; проблема - в приоритете рыночной экономики над иными социальными аспектами. Мы видим политическую перспективу в качестве основной категории анализа, которая вопреки абстрактным обобщениям учитывает время, разоблачающее детали происходящего, и тем самым помогает избавиться от политического фундаментализма какого бы то ни было идеологического толка в политике.
Ключевые слова: политическая перспектива, общность, потенциал, неолиберализм, рыночная экономика
Для цитирования: Энрикес М. Есть ли у политики перспектива? (о политической перспективе как категории анализа) // Коммуникология. 2018. Том 6. №3. С. 140-151. DOI 10.21453/2311-3065-2018-6-3-140-151.
Сведения об авторе: Мендо Кастро Энрикес, доктор философии, профессор Католического университета Португалии, член Совета CEFi. Адрес: 1649-023 Лиссабон, Пальма-де-Чима. E-mail: mendohenriques@fch.lisboa.ucp.pt.
Статья поступила в редакцию: 01.06.2018. Принята к печати: 14.06.2018.
