Search

From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action – so-called practices – and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this chapter, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances, whether individual or collective, can be analogized systemically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies have become more complex. Performances are successful only insofar as they can “re-fuse” these increasingly disentangled elements. In a fused performance, audiences identify with actors, and cultural scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective mise-en-scène. Performances fail when this relinking process is incomplete: the elements of performance remain apart, and social action seems inauthentic and artificial, failing to persuade. Re-fusion, by contrast, allows actors to communicate the meanings of their actions successfully and thus to pursue their interests effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luther and his colleagues would make much play with the concept of the new evangelical sermon. We should certainly not underestimate the element of novelty, and the surprise of the new. The priest who commandeered the pulpit – often his own pulpit – to launch a bold attack on time-honoured practices and the doctrine of the community he served was bound to cause a sensation. The impact on his congregation, moved, excited, troubled or appalled, was clearly profound. But it was so precisely because the sermon was so fundamental a part of church life. It also played an important role in the wider information culture of pre-modern society. In a world where most information continued to be conveyed by word of mouth, few could doubt that preaching represented one of the primary means of communication with a wider public. This was a world the reformers instinctively understood. Few doubted that, if they were to reach their audience, it would be through the medium of the word: and that meant in the first instance the word preached, as much as their published works. Many of those who would make up the first generation of the leaders of the Reformation had made their reputation first as preachers; they owed both their local reputation and the opportunity to contribute to the new evangelical movement to their skill in the pulpit. All, without exception, regarded preaching as fundamental to their duty as pastors, and to their evangelical mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL MATTERS The Church is, however, obviously not the only collectivity to which Christians belong and owe duties. On the contrary, order is a prime moral good, and obedience is a virtue, irrespective of whether it is the civil polity, the ecclesiastical polity, the Society of Jesus, the family, the corporation, or the city that is the ordering institution and the object of obedience. The documents which have so far been cited for Jesuit insistence on obedience to the Church are no less insistent on obedience to secular rulers. Jesuit catechisms and confessors' manuals treated obedience to spiritual and temporal superiors together, normally in the context of expositions of the Fourth Commandment, as catechisms and manuals had done time out of mind. According to Gabriel Loarte, one of the Society's most celebrated spiritual writers, in his much-admired and reprinted Exercise of a Christian Life, by the Fourth Commandment ‘we are likewise commaunded to carrye the like love, obedience, and reverence to our spiritual fathers, and to al our Superiors; as be Bishops, priests, religious men, and prelates of the Church; kings, princes and secular powers … Hereby are also al parentes and superiours warned, what love and special care they are bound to carry towards their children, and to al such as be their subjects’. But while Jesuit moral theology, casuistry, and a fortiori moral exhortation inculcated dutifulness to secular and spiritual superiors alike, this was simply to skirt the possibility of a conflict of duties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Success for whom? Failure of what? Ever since there have been polities, there have been political upheavals. As soon as systematic reflection about politics began in the Western world, it was recognised that political upheavals could mean not merely an alteration in the ruling personnel of a particular polity but also a change in the form of its political regime. The core of modern ideas of revolution remains the conception of transforming political regimes by means of or as a result of political upheaval. The main difference between ancient and modern ideas of the connection between political upheaval and regime transformation lies in the directional character of modern conceptions of regime transformation. Such ancient theories of regime transformation as were directional in character at all were explicitly cyclical. Modern analysis of regime transformation need not accept a directional view of historical process; but if it accepts any view of historical process at all it can hardly, except at the most abstract level, suppose its direction to be circular. Elites may circulate, individual rulers or groups of rulers may come and go; but regimes themselves can hardly now be supposed to follow a cyclical path. Modern revolutionaries are historical actors who aspire to transform political regimes in an intended direction by promoting political upheaval. The promotion of political upheaval is a regrettable necessity for (or an invigorating prelude to) regime transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? The idea of a civil religion is not one which students of political theory pay much attention to today. In so far as it resonates at all, it suggests a dark and aberrant episode in the career of the modern state. In the 1940s and 1950s scholars were understandably concerned to discover the roots of totalitarian state worship. In constructing its intellectual ancestry, paternity seemed to lie with Hegel, Rousseau and Machiavelli. Hegel, it was held, had sanctified the Prussian state by embodying God in the unfolding of national history. Rousseau, in his chapter on ‘Civil religion’ in The Social Contract, had apparently married a religion of patriotism to his theory of an invincible democratic sovereignty. And Machiavelli, in the Discourses, had found the Christian religion inadequate in comparison with ancient Rome's ability to harness piety for the glory of the patria. Unavoidably, therefore, ‘civil religion’ came to connote a Faustian and totalitarian device to secure blind obedience to the state by the exploitation of human aspirations to spiritual fulfilment. For some commentators its aberrance lay in its violation of Augustine's Christian scepticism about temporal rule and earthly perfectibility. For others it lay in its violation of what seemed the pre-eminent achievement of modern political sensibility, the secular separation of politics and religion. It was, either way, ‘a radical departure from Western tradition’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the word politicus in early-modern Europe begins in the thirteenth century; as in other instances, the origins of modern political language have to be sought in the late Middle Ages. John of Salisbury had already used the term in the Policraticus to denote the institutions of the State; in his Didascalicon, Hugh of St Victor divides the practical science alternatively into solitary, private, and public, and into ‘ethicam, oeconomicam et politicam’; but politicus and other words with the same root definitively entered medieval political language after the middle of that century as the result of the translation of Aristotle's Politics and, to a lesser extent, of his Nicomachean Ethics. Albert the Great criticises the civilian lawyers who wrongly call themselves politici, although they are ignorant of the ars politica; and Brunetto Latini draws on a translation of the Ethics when defining, in his Trésor, the ‘gouvernment des cités’ as ‘politique’; but it was William of Moerbeke's translation of the Politics, used first by St Thomas Aquinas and then by all Aristotelian political writers until the fifteenth century, which introduced politicus, and its Latin equivalent civilis, into the language of Western political thought. In the Politics, the adjective politikos shares with the other derivatives from polis a variety of meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]