Papel del profesor en la instrucción cognitiva

Introduction

In international relations (IR) as well as in political discourse in general, state, power, and sovereignty have come to assume fundamental importance. Seen as primordial concepts, which define and determine the conceptual framework of the current debates, they figure as conditions of the possibility for the life form of local and global politics as we know it, thus exerting a quasi-fundamentalist exigency on the theoretical context that defines the playing field of IR, or so it seems. If the cold war did not prove it, critics maintain that the post-Soviet world demonstrates that the state has become by now the only show in town. To be a state, to be recognized as sovereign, is what all constituencies seek to aspire to, or so the argument goes.¹ Consequently, power is in this context conceived as force, be it military, economic, or in any of its kinder versions such as diplomacy or discursive persuasion. But to view the political world this way is a relatively new phenomenon that has been contingent on a vision of modernity that claims a universal outlook, which, however, upon closer examination turns out to have only a limited purchase. Deployed as constitutive for the discourse of IR, the nor-mative claim of these concepts, even in their weakest forms, seems to pre-empt any critical examination that would delimit their universal hold.

This chapter explores an alternative line in the history of political philosophy. It is a line of theorists who not only engaged critically with classic forms of modern political thought from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Locke, and the Enlightenment, but who were studied by their contemporaries though mainly in a manner that was dis-tinguished by a mostly disowning attitude. Suspiciously eyed as outsiders, Jewish philosophers, especially Baruch de Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, would be granted admission to the discursive universe of modern thought only by way of an assimilation that would at the same time both assimilate and “other” them.

Although their reception was thus contingent on the universal features that con-temporaries sought to identify in their thought, the reception remained curiously preoccupied with at the same time retaining them as distinctly “other.” Jewish philosophers were thus subject to a sort of assimilation that denied them the very status of philosophers. Ironically, the very moment of critical independence that would otherwise have distinguished their philosophical authority was in their case

turned into proof of a betrayal of Christian sensitivities, especially during a time when they underwent a process of secularization transforming Christian values into universal ethical norms. As a consequence, the critical potential of modern Jewish thought in the Enlightenment was buried, disfigured, and sedimented by readings that remained oblivious of the challenge it would articulate. Attention to the critical dissonances that the Jewish philosophers of the Enlightenment express – but which have been disowned, if not ignored, by most of their critics – might help us rethink some of the foundational concepts at the center of IR.

In making Westphalia the standard narrative for theorizing the modern state, IR has rightly identified the age of secularization as critical for the formation of modern political arrangements.² But in singling out Westphalia as the representa-tive model, the surrounding factors that produced the constellation of Westphalia have been downplayed if not completely ignored. If Westphalia has thus become conventionally understood as the secular answer to the deadlock of political conflicts that issued from the challenge of the Reformation, addressing modern secularization in terms of inner-Christian conflicts can no longer satisfy critical explanations.³ Theories of secularization turn out to be problematic as they are often just secularized variations of a Christian perspective wherein secularization is viewed as a development internal to Christian religions. The “Jewish Question”

is just one of its products, whereas “Jewish,” and other non-Christian questions, fall outside the scope of such narratives. If traditional secularization theories are therefore limited in terms of a global compass, the problem of a limited scope applies also to the way in which the Westphalian paradigm defines the state, sovereignty, and civil society as secular entities. For colonial as well as post-national sensitivities, “secularization” no longer provides an answer but poses questions that require attention. If the secular state and current concepts of civil society no longer serve the purpose of modern political conflict resolution, it might prove helpful to recall those philosophical projects that addressed the question of secularization, civil society, the state, and power from a different perspective.

There are two ways to look at borders: one is to look beyond them at the other side and see how the excluded “outside” reflects back onto the “inside”; another way is to examine how the distinctions set up at the “center” construct a logic of self-legitimation. Distinctions continuously replicate themselves on each side of the divide (for example, Luhmann 2002, Chapter 3). With regard to the question of the place of the Jews in modernity, it may be helpful to look “the other way,”

as it were, from the “outside” in. If the view back from the periphery to the center is one that provides the opportunity to turn an apparently disadvantaged position of disenfranchisement into critical leverage, Mendelssohn gives this return of the gaze an additional critical turn. Mendelssohn’s plea for emancipation suggests more than just a call for social and political equality. It also suggests a principal critique of key concepts of modern political philosophy that resonates suggestively with current post-colonial sensibilities and highlights their critical significance.

Mendelssohn’s examination of the conceptual foundations at the very center of political theory suggests that these foundations are themselves based on distinc-tions that duplicate themselves at the moment borders are drawn. As a distinction

that cannot be limited to one side of the border but always points beyond its marks to the other side, any form of demarcation or border drawing implies some form of colonization.⁴ To better understand the fuller implications of key concepts in political philosophy and respond to the challenge of rethinking globalization in a critical key, a fresh look back at the European discourse on center and periphery, the domestic arrangement, and the problem of Europe’s internal colonies may provide firmer grasp of the internal tensions informing the particular logic that governs the discourse of political theory. This chapter explores the way in which Mendelssohn’s discussion of the Jewish situation in eighteenth-century Prussia addresses some of the more problematic implications of concepts such as sover-eignty, state, secularization, and power.

With the striking phrase of the “Jewish colonist,” Mendelssohn positions his plea for the emancipation of Jews boldly at the center of the Enlightenment debate of Empire, the modern nation-state, and the role of Europe in the age of colonialism. His intervention critically suggests that the question of colonialism is from the outset not just a foreign affair but grounded in domestic arrangements.

The conflicted dialectics of inclusion and exclusion is thus one that informs in often uncanny ways the very constitution of how the state and the sovereign are imagined. Turning the eyes from the periphery back onto the center, the periph-ery becomes in Mendelssohn’s discussion legible as the outside that is already inscribed in the very construction of the center. Mendelssohn thus exposes one of the most conflicted complexes at the heart of Western culture. There is no other tradition that played the same kind of formative and enduring role in the history of the formation of Western civilization and its cultural canon, and could thus be seen as being more at the center, than the Jewish tradition. Yet it seems at the same time peculiar that this prominent role came with the costs of a brutal fixation of the Jewish people as the total other at the very root, core, or ground of the West.

It usually takes non-Western minds to recognize the oddity of this anomaly – if it is one – but its constitutive moment poses questions concerning the kind of logic that informs a discourse that systematically disavows any forms of acknowledg-ment of “Jewish roots” at the heart of its conceptual construction of the West, a disavowal troubled by a deep-seated repression of the other within.

A gruesome illustration of how this repression has become an integral part of the architectonic fixture of the political and religious discourse is the case of the Frankfurt Jews. Site of the election of the emperor, Frankfurt and its ghetto have come to play a curiously central role in Europe’s history. Claimed as early as 1236 by frederick II as his personal property and domestics – “servi camerae nostri” – the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation became a century later pawns in Karl IV’s financing scheme for the acquisition of the imperial crown. In order to provide for the large sums of cash required for his election, Karl IV mort-gaged his tax claims on the Jews against cash advances from numerous German cities. He even went so far as to grant in advance amnesty should Jews in the pro-cess come to death. It did not take long until the cities availed themselves of this sort of quick solution to secure the outstanding debts (Breuer and Graetz 1996, pp. 28–45). But this is where the story begins. When a century later frankfurt

built its cathedral, tombstones of the fourteenth-century fatalities were used. They did become part not only of the altar’s foundation, but also of the cathedral’s gothic ceiling. Although the pieces of the altar’s foundation were retrieved in the twentieth century when they were discovered, the stones that became elements of the ceiling’s structure remain irretrievably part of the construction.⁵ This case of integration of the excluded at the heart of the construction of Western canonical architecture exemplifies the constituent role of the dynamics of the distinction between inside and outside at the ground level of the foundation of the discourse of the West.

If Frankfurt Cathedral and the history of its construction are a stark reminder of the Jewish experience in Europe, its staggering image represents also an architectonic model of the conflicted grounds on which Europe built power and sovereignty. Read this way, frankfurt Cathedral takes on paradigmatic signifi-cance for understanding a discourse of silence and repression that, if only for a moment, surfaces with critical force in Mendelssohn’s call for emancipation as one that is not just self-interested but carries wider significance for the universal emancipation of humanity in any kinds of colonies as well as domestically.

I shall first examine Mendelssohn’s strikingly unusual discussion of the Jews as “indigenous colonists” and the critique of key political concepts that this expression suggests, especially sovereignty, the state, and civil society. But to fully understand the implications of Mendelssohn’s political thought requires attention to Spinoza, whose sophisticated philosophical framework offers a lib-erating alternative to the normative theories of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others.

Reading Mendelssohn with Spinoza will highlight the critical implications that Mendelssohn’s political theory has for the conception of secularization. Turning then to Heine, the critical force of the trajectory in Spinoza and Mendelssohn assumes further illumination in the way Heine stages the problem of the concept itself. The chapter concludes with heine’s critical use of the word “modernity,”

which, rather submitting to a discourse of hegemonic assumptions, opens up the possibilities for defining modernity as the site of critical renegotiation of contend-ing claims.

“Indigenous colonists”

When in 1782 Moses Mendelssohn published the German translation of Manasseh ben Israel’s Vindication of the Jews – the seventeenth-century Amsterdam rabbi’s call for the legal recognition of the rights of the Jews in England – he added a preface that marked his first explicit and public political intervention in print, i.e.

in the forum of the republic of letters. At that time, Mendelssohn was already 52 years old and internationally renowned for his eloquent and authoritative Jewish representation in cases of imminent expulsion, persecution, and disenfranchise-ment. A seasoned and experienced spokesperson on Jewish affairs, Mendelssohn had assumed the stature of Europe’s elder statesman of the Jewish nation. His steadfast diplomatic service gave him probably a more intimate experience with the ropes of power than he possibly would have cared for. But the exposure to

the world of politics also provided a more intimate familiarity with regard to how power worked in the corridors of the state and its institutions than most political theorists of the period could claim. Mendelssohn’s preface thus reflects the rare combination in eighteenth-century Germany of the voice of a critically commit-ted Enlightenment philosopher and an expert public spokesman in finely tuned political intervention.

In Prussia, and German lands in general, Jews were at that time “tolerated”

under specific laws that defined their rights and privileges. The communities were treated as corporative entities that negotiated with the authorities and were responsible for their constituency as a whole. Any privileges granted to individu-als were attached to their specific status as Jews. Often described as a “nation,”

the Jews remained until their emancipation in the nineteenth century and often longer still distinguished as a distinct group isolated from the “Germans.” When Mendelssohn, for instance, arrived in Berlin from Dessau as a young student he, like other Jews, had to proceed to the gate next to the Jewish quarters and pay the toll imposed on Jews and cattle. “The Jew of Berlin,” as Mendelssohn was soon to be called, or, alternatively, the “German Socrates” because of the stunning literary success of his updated version of Plato’s Phaidon, quickly assumed prominent stature as one of the most distinguished champions of the German Enlightenment.

With the preface, Mendelssohn initiated the political discourse of Jewish eman-cipation on his own terms. Circumspectly announced as an appendix to Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, Manasseh ben Israel’s Vindication of the Jews and Mendelssohn’s preface were, however, published separately. flagging them as an “appendix” to Dohm, Mendelssohn thus marked his intervention in a telling manner as a second, yet at the same time autonomous, step in the discourse of Jewish emancipation had been effectively inaugurated by Dohm’s bold and enlightened plea for “civic improvement.” In a way the appen-dix was designed as an amendment that was as much an endorsement, as it was a critical commentary. The historic Jewish voice of one of the most enlightened rabbi of the most advanced and enlightened European city in the previous cen-tury – seventeenth-cencen-tury Amsterdam – thus framed, but also resonated with, Mendelssohn’s own voice. The full force of the significance of Mendelssohn’s argument becomes clear only if we notice the critical dynamics of this excep-tionally pointed and self-conscious move of political self-positioning. Situating himself as advocate and mediator of Manasseh ben Israel, Mendelssohn’s own voice signals, rather than just claiming to speak for himself, the Berlin Jews, the German Jews, or the European Jews for that matter, that he is articulating the concerns, both past and present, of Jewry as a whole.

Providing the legitimacy for Mendelssohn’s voice, the appendix’s positional arrangement reflects with mimetic precision the narrow margin of the title conceded to the colonist who seeks to address the motherland and its central discourse. highlighting the predicament of the situation in which Jews find themselves under the regime of European rule, Mendelssohn exposes at the same time the logic of rule in general. The question of the emancipation of Jews is the challenge of the state to turn, as Mendelssohn puts it, “these indigenous colonists

into its citizens.”⁶ In framing the question of the legal status of Jews in the terms of colonial discourse – and more precisely a colonial project within the borders and territories of the motherland – Mendelssohn presents the issue as one that is directly linked to the problem of the conception of the modern state. At the heart of the problem, Mendelssohn’s line of argument suggests, thus stands not the issue of how to fit the Jews into the scheme of the modern nation-state but, on the contrary, the question of the problematic assumptions of a political philosophy whose notion of the nation-state remains informed by concepts of power, sov-ereignty, and legitimacy that warrant critical examination in the first place. As Mendelssohn invokes Jewish emancipation as the project of turning “indigenous colonists into [a modern nation-state’s] citizens,” he highlights that the entangle-ment of the colonial and domestic issues is one that represents a constituent link that political discourse has yet to address.

With Mendelssohn, the problem of colonies comes into view as not just one existing abroad, but one residing at the very heart of the political foundation of the modern European nation. The critical impetus of Mendelssohn’s approach to couch the Jewish experience in terms of a colonialist experience exposes the deeply problematic implications of notions of statehood, government, sovereignty, and legitimacy that rely on a homogeneous conception of civil society and its citizens. In addressing the state’s functions and limits in terms of its relation to its domestic colonies, Mendelssohn’s argument sheds light on the inner conflicts and tension that define the logic of the modern nation-state. for the problem of this logic is that it claims sovereignty and legitimacy on the grounds of a dialectic of self-determination that is contingent on the distinction of self and other, but which hinges paradoxically at the same time on the suppression of perceived “others” at home and abroad. The case of the colonist becomes, in Mendelssohn’s return of the gaze, the colonialist case of the state, i.e. the case of the problematic nexus of colonialist discourse and the foundation of the modern nation-state.

Dohm, in his call for the emancipation of the Jews, argues that the state’s willingness to offer generous economic incentives for the colonists it welcomes contrasts curiously with the treatment of domestic Jews who, unlike the foreign colonists, have a different loyalty to the state in whose lands they have resided in since times immemorial, a fact that suggests that the Jews deserve at least the same consideration foreign colonists such as the Huguenots were given (Dohm 1973, pp. 89, 113–15, 133). Mendelssohn, in a critical move, reminds Dohm and his readers that the legal status of the Jews was that of a domestic colony. In taking up this issue critically, Mendelssohn shows how the particular role that the concept of the domestic colony plays for theorizing the legal status of the Jews poses ques-tions of principal importance with regard to the way in which the concepts of state

Dohm, in his call for the emancipation of the Jews, argues that the state’s willingness to offer generous economic incentives for the colonists it welcomes contrasts curiously with the treatment of domestic Jews who, unlike the foreign colonists, have a different loyalty to the state in whose lands they have resided in since times immemorial, a fact that suggests that the Jews deserve at least the same consideration foreign colonists such as the Huguenots were given (Dohm 1973, pp. 89, 113–15, 133). Mendelssohn, in a critical move, reminds Dohm and his readers that the legal status of the Jews was that of a domestic colony. In taking up this issue critically, Mendelssohn shows how the particular role that the concept of the domestic colony plays for theorizing the legal status of the Jews poses ques-tions of principal importance with regard to the way in which the concepts of state