Are the Arab Social Sciences convivial?
M. Sari HANAFI American University of Beirut | BEIRUT - Liban
Résumé : Since early 2000, Alain Caillé, Frédéric Vandenberghe, and many other anti-utilitarian scholars have proposed a manifesto on ‘convivialism’ as a way of connecting social science with moral philosophy. This manifesto seeks to be the successor to the ideologies of communism, socialism, and anarchism. In some sense, they advocate a social theory in the quest for Paul Ricoeur’s aphorism: “the good life with and for others in just institutions”. Their major message is to admit the social conflict and division, instead of Habermasian harmony, managing them and live with them, in a post-materialist vision of slow-growth. A vision that this in line with Bruno Latour call for re-connecting human with nonhuman, interests with nature, and politics with ecology, in order to establish the foundation of the democracy project: informed public deliberation about the common good. This paper is based on the content analysis of articles submitted to Idafat-The Arab Journal of Sociology. It has two research questions: first, to which extent the social theory, adopted by the Arab social scientists, goes in line with this convivialist perspective, with an emphasis on the construction of the otherness: not only who is the adversary but also how do I care about the Other? This emphasis is justified because of two sharp polarizations: secularists’ versus islamists’ elite formations, and refugee/migrant versus citizen. Second, where do the different social conceptions of religion differ from this convivialist perspective?