This text represents the last contribution of Nadia Urbinati in her dialogue with the philosopher Michael Walzer. The dialogue stems from Urbinati’s article “Forget manichaeism: like Bobbio, I choose dialogue”, published by the magazine Reset in its September-October 2007 issue (no.103).
Dear Michael,
In the essay that became the starting point of our conversation I argued that external interference and dialogue should go hand in hand. In the end of our conversation, it seems that our disagreement pertains to the form that external interference should take, whether confrontational or not. You suggest a sort of division of labor between those who pursue a confrontational strategy and those who pursue a politics of dialogue or between warriors and intellectuals, a distinction that recalls that between Hobbes and Kant as opposite models of politics that Robert Kegan identified with USA and Europe respectively. I am not sure that this division of labor is a good solution, particularly when micro or local issues at the stake. Along with direct action of a confrontational kind you also acknowledge that “local” dialogue (for instance on whether or not a mosque should be built in our neighborhood) is “valuable and absolutely necessary”.
Yet it seems to me that issues like this is “local” in a very peculiar way since they reflect more or less directly the climate of “the larger international confrontation” within which are comprised. The acceptance of logic of confrontation at the international level is most of the time the reason why “local” dialogue is hard and sometime impossible. Until we perceive international confrontation as a useful policy rather than a necessary answer to deal with specific situations of violence, we cannot treat “local” issues as merely and only “local”. The war in Iraq, and the preemptive philosophy that justified it, was a mistake not only from a strategic point of view but also because it made the instruments of politics (dialogue and diplomacy) an exception and war and confrontation a rule. The radicalization of zealotry, “theirs” and “ours”, which “local” issues reflect so nastily, is an unpleasant consequence of that confrontation.
I would like to conclude this conversation with a general thought on the role of the intellectuals (to use an old expression) in a democratic society. It seems to me that intellectuals ought to propose and foster a critical attitude toward those who rule and those who have strong certainties on right and wrong. J.S. Mill used to say that in any wrong there is a grain of truth and the goal of a critical thinker should be that of making the latter visible so as to complicate a reality that believers tend instead to see as simple and one-dimensional (Manichean view). The conservative intellectuals who gave voice to the U.S. Administration and stressed an ideological dualism between USA and Europe, confrontation and dialogue, have done a bad service to their country and the world (but also to their role as public intellectuals). They did not contribute to build democracy in Iraq or strengthen democracy in the world. Rather, they bequeathed us with debris (in the occupied country as well as in our democratic societies) that will take us time and new energy to remove. It seems to me that our critical task should start there where their confrontational logic failed, with an “internal criticism” of the Manichean habit of the mind.
Best, Nadia
Nadia Urbinati is Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, New York. Together with Andrew Arato she co-edits the magazine Constellations. Her works include Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006). An author of essays on liberalism, individualism and Stuart Mill, she edited and published in the United States, for Princeton University Press, Carlo Roselli’s Social Liberalism. She is also co-author of Liberal-socialisti. Il futuro di una tradizione (con M. Canto-Sperber, I libri di Reset, Marsilio, 2003), and of La libertà e i suoi limiti. Antologia del pensiero liberale da Filangieri a Bobbio (with C. Ocone, Laterza, 2005).