Theoria

This issue of Theoria marks a decade of democracy in South Africa. Invited to reflect on the process and challenge of building a modern liberal democracy and on progress towards social justice since 1994, the contributors have responded with detailed and in-depth analyses of a range of pertinent issues, from public institutions, national reform strategies, popular perceptions and moral responsibility to philosophical ideals, educational reforms, political participation and unrepudiated injustices. Beyond apartheid, beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and beyond party politics, greater and more inclusive social justice, if not immediately within reach, is certainly attainable: through the equalization and redistribution of access to resources, through reparations for injustices, through respect for rights and recognition of obligations, through compromise, sympathy, socialization and debate, and through making sense of change, both symbolically and practically. Most of all, justice will be served, and democracy advanced, by promoting, widening and multiplying spaces and opportunities for people to conceptualize and act upon social transformation in new and different ways.

It might be claimed that something approaching a broad consensus has emerged in political science that democracy, in any operationally viable form, entails a multi-party system. However, in recent times the notion that this view is fully captured by a narrowly instrumentalist party-political model has been challenged. It is argued that while parties are widely accepted as a democratic compromise—a necessary mechanism for representation in contemporary democracies— insufficient consideration is given to the possibility that parties may also serve to compromise democracy by alienating citizens from government.

The work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has generated a great deal of interest in the role of forgiveness in politics. More specifically, it has raised the question of whether forgiveness should be a constitutive part of reconciliation processes between groups. In this paper, I argue that it should not, and that it might be both more useful and more realistic to consider something like Adam Smith’s notion of ‘sympathy’ instead. The first part examines the arguments for and against policies promoting political forgiveness. The second part suggests sympathy as an alternative. The third part considers and rejects some objections to the employment of sympathy in this context.

As with many other genres of storytelling, fables are as much about the socialisation of political values as they are about the amusement of children. Although their timeless appearance presents their truths as absolute, the meanings of fables change as they are reinterpreted through time by particular ideologies. Thus we find that The Ant and the Grasshopper, a children’s favourite about the need for hard work and careful saving, has recently been commandeered by conservative adults who are searching for ever more coded ways of communicating in today’s anti-racist contexts. This story is attributed to Æsop, a mythical sixth century B.C. slave and storyteller (Adrados 1999). During the renaissance, Europe’s fascination with antiquity prompted renewed interest in Æsop’s fables as vehicles of commentary on the politics of the time (Hanazaki 1993-1994 & Patterson 1991). Their popularity accelerated with the industrial revolution since some of the fables, such as The Tortoise and the Hare and The Ant and the Grasshopper, were particularly suited to the socialisation of selfrestraint and a strong work ethic. The Ant and the Grasshopper tells the story of the ant that worked hard collecting food during summer, while the carefree grasshopper did not. During winter, the ant survived while the grasshopper starved. This story conveyed to children that the threat of lean times was ever present but that hard work would stave off starvation.

Narratology is the study of the ways in which narrative organises perception and experience. Narratologists understand narrative as a ‘meta-code, a human universal’ (White 1987), which is instrumental in enabling the re-organisation of time, space, character and event in the construction of meaning in texts. Narratologists draw on different epistemological traditions, and develop different approaches and practices. These approaches can be roughly categorised as belonging to textual, inter-textual, and extra-textual traditions. The textual approach is exemplified by the work of Vladimir Propp (1928/1968), Claude Levi-Strauss (1958/1963), Roland Barthes (1966/1977), Algirdas Greimas (1966/1983), Paul Ricoeur (1985), and Tzvetan Todorov (1990). Narratologists in this structuralist tradition categorize and taxonomize narrative form. Propp identified 31 ‘narratemes’ (the smallest narrative units, equivalent to morphemes at the sentence level), which occur in all narratives in unvarying sequence; Greimas developed a typology of narrative ‘actants’; and Ricoeur investigated connections between time and narrative to typify ‘configurational activities’ in narrative plots and sequences. These, and other, textual approaches to narrative, show how texts selectively draw on narrative resources (emplotment, ways of representing character, hermeneutic and proairetic codes) in the construction of narrative meaning.

The Kantian principle that persons must be treated with respect is the most widely accepted normative foundation of a constitutional democracy. Because the state must treat citizens as free and equal persons or in a way consistent with their dignity, it is obligated to abide by majority rule but to ensure that a constitution prevents a majority from violating minority rights to civil liberty and due process. My broad purpose in this article is to explore the implications of the principle of respect for criminal justice in South Africa.

In trying to come to grips with what is involved in righting the wrongs of apartheid, we begin by pointing out unique challenges posed by societies in transition. It is our position that the pursuit of justice is not the same in transitional contexts as it is in stable democracies. As we shall see, the transitional domain throws up several non-standard obstacles in the way of fulfilling the imperatives of justice. After this introduction to justice in transitions we will look more closely at the relationship between justice and law in the context of political transformation generally, and the specific relationship between justice and international human rights law in this transformative process. Thereafter we will address the pursuit of justice in respect of both apartheid’s perpetrators as well as its victims—the discussion will, however, be limited to the liability of those who fall outside the scope of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) mandate. In that regard, we will deal with violations of rights not specifically covered by the TRC: odious apartheid debt owed to international legal entities; other debt incurred by the apartheid state to private money-lending institutions; the violation of international labour standards in the apartheid state; and the unjust enrichment of foreign corporations at the expense of black South Africans.

Decline of the Public: The Hollowing-out of Citizenship, by David Marquand. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004. ISBN: 0745629105. Reviewed by Steven Michels

How to be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen. London & New York: Picador, 2004. ISBN: 0312422164. Reviewed by Derek Hook

Notes on the Contributors