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Europe’s mirror: civil society and the Other

University of British Columbia

While much has been written in recent times on the concept of civil society, the idea that it is part of an Orientalist construct of West and non-West has not been explored. This dissertation addresses this lacuna in the literature by examining Western concepts of civil society and establishing the ways in which these concepts are constructed through the deployment of a mirroring construction of non-Western Others. I examine the work of three theorists (Montesquieu, Ferguson and Hegel) who wrote on civil society during the Enlightenment or in its aftermath. These theorists are emblematic of a discursive formation which differed from prior discursive formations in two related respects: their concept of civil society and their construction of non-Western Others. During the eighteenth century both constructions of the concept of civil society and of non-Western Others were undergoing significant changes leading eventually to a concept of civil society as distinct from the state and to what might be termed a "post-Enlightenment geographical imagination". To demonstrate the disjuncture between discursive formations, the work of two seventeenth-century theorists (Hobbes and Locke) is compared and contrasted with that of these writers. The work of three late twentieth-century social scientists (Shils, Gellner and Fukuyama) is examined and their concept of civil society and use of non-Western Others is contrasted with those of the prior discursive formation. I show how their concept of civil society is informed both by the concept of civil society developed in the Enlightenment and its aftermath and by the mirroring constructions of non-Western Others of the post-Enlightenment geographical imagination. Underscoring the work of all these theorists are methods of comparison and the representational practices they authorize. These are explored through two conceptions of alterity which have operated in Western thought and their connections to questions of comparison. An analysis is made of the relationship of the ideas of comparison and comparative method to questions of translation in Western philosophy and social science. The implications of this discussion of comparison and representation for theories of civil society and their constructions of non-Western Others is analyzed.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-04-03

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6771

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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