Theoria

This edition revisits a number of themes that have characterised Theoria as an editorial project over the past decade and points to issues that will doubtless come to shape the journal as an editorial and intellectual project in future years.

In l974, after twenty years of relatively successful struggles for the expansion of American citizenship, efforts that began with Black Americans and expanded to include other racial minorities and women, a scholar named Peter Adler (l974:369-371) concluded a widely used anthology called Intercultural Communication by offering a definition of ‘multicultural’. Emphasising the ‘psychoculturally adaptive’, Adler portrayed a protean, ever-changing, integrative actor who had the desire and ability to put himself in the shoes of the other person in a relativising, cross-over, non-judgmental way. ‘Multicultural man’, he wrote, ‘maintains no clear boundaries between himself and the varieties of personal and cultural contexts he may find himself in’. He is ‘capable of major shifts in his frame of reference and embodies the ability to disavow a permanent character … He is a person who is always in the process of becoming a part of and apart from a given cultural context. He is very much a formative being, resilient, changing, and evolutionary’ (italics added).

How should we treat the poor, hungry, and downtrodden? What are our obligations to the sick, needy, handicapped, and elderly? How should we act towards women and minorities? What are our responsibilities to developing countries, and more generally, to the world’s worst-off? These are complex questions, to which many different answers have been given. Indeed, there are as many answers to these questions as there are moral outlooks.

In his 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lecture, John Rawls attempts to respond to some of the criticisms his theory of justice has received from those concerned with the international aspects of social justice, and in particular with universal human rights. Rawls takes what he refers to as the ‘law of peoples’ as the focus for his discussion. He claims that a general liberal theory of justice may be extended internationally and form the basis for a universally recognised basic human rights minimum. Additionally, Rawls suggests that this scheme of international justice is an improvement on other liberal theories dealing with human rights because, he concludes, it would be acceptable to nonliberal, non-Western societies as well as to liberal, Western societies.

In this paper I will explore the relationship between social norms – in the sense of regularities in action which embody moral attitudes – and corruption, in contexts of transcultural interaction. There is a great deal of theoretical unclarity in relation to all the key notions involved, namely, social norms, corruption and transcultural interaction, and yet theoretical clarity is a necessary precursor to resolving the empirical and policy issues in this area, including empirical and policy issues of great importance for the future of many countries involved in the process of globalisation. Accordingly, in the first section of this paper I will spend some time on theoretical clarification.1 In the last section of the paper I will make some tentative suggestions concerning the connections between social norms and corruption in transcultural interactions, and illustrate these suggestions by use of two well-known transcultural corruption scandals, namely, Bhopal in India, and Lockheed in Japan. The informing idea here is that examination of such major scandals is likely to reveal underlying institutional conditions and processes which are conducive to corruption, but which go largely unnoticed in the normal course of events; it takes a major corruption scandal to bring these underlying conditions and processes to the surface.2

Let us begin with a generalisation: Richard Rorty’s approach to literature is consistently – to use his own opposition – ‘solidarity-related’; what he calls the ‘other side’, literary self-creation, remains programmatically and intentionally undiscussed. One gets the impression that literature, and the novel in particular, is being burdened with an (‘unbearable’) heaviness of responsibility. Does the novel in Rorty’s reflections appear as a source of multifarious metaphors, of whole worlds born out of a writer’s imagination? Is there in it another dimension, where mundane obligations no longer bind the human being and where one can give rein to usually hidden desires and passions? The answer is in the negative.

‘The history of the Zulu people is the history of myself’.1 In Africa, as elsewhere, the notion of tradition is bound up with the discourses of ethnicity and nationalism. Typically invoking pre-colonial identities as the basis of peoplehood, such narratives of common descent are imbued with a strong sense of ‘pastness’, orientating the modern self in traditional terms. Anderson explains this invocation of tradition as a feature of the inverted nature of ethnic narratives of common descent.2 More common are accounts which focus on the ‘loss of meaning’ brought about by modernisation and the psychic security offered by an idealised past. Recent theories look to supplant this sense of tradition as reaction with a sense of tradition as creation. One example is Lonsdale’s argument that the affirmation of ethnicity in post-colonial Africa, with its associated invention of tradition, must be seen in the context of internal debates over civic virtue as pre-colonial moral economies are re-structured by the state and capitalism.

How and why is it that we in the West, in our arduous and incessant search for truth, have also built into and around ourselves intricate and powerful systems intended to manage all that we know and do? This, arguably, was the key problem to which Foucault applied himself. Central to his critical, historical ontology of Western, and especially Enlightenment, reason is an investigation of the constitutive relations between the operation of power relations, the production of knowledge, and ways of relating ethically to oneself and others. This article examines Foucault’s account of the relations of power which are said to underpin contemporary thought and to regulate and subject modern individuals. Contrary to the belief that Foucault’s conception of power is dogmatic and all-encompassing, leaving no room for progressive resistance or change and flowing over into the realm of theory such that truth itself becomes questionable, it is argued here that Foucault offers us an analysis of relations of power as ‘strategies of governance’ which depend for their operation on the existence of free subjects capable not only of resistance but of positively producing effects of truth in reality.

Daniel Herwitz reviews: Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia Press, 1998).

Suzanne Berry reviews: Lötter, Hennie. Injustice, Violence and Peace. The Case of South Africa (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1997).

Roger Deacon reviews: Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks, Volume II, edited and translated by Joseph E. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Notes on the Contributors