Jean Lassègue reviews Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt’s The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, now available in English translation from Telos Press.
The subject of Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt’s book is the concept of multiculturalism and how it relates to organized religions conceived as purveyors of norms in the public sphere. If, in order to justify this approach, one were to draw a comparison with the famous analytical framework conceived by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, which demonstrated that as from the second half of the 19th century, the economy had striven to absorb society instead of being governed by it, one might ask oneself if the question today is not whether religions are attempting the same endeavor, beyond the secular episode which slowly took shape in Europe until it prevailed in the 20th century, by trying to reverse society’s independence from any kind of external metaphysical foundation seeking to encompass it. From this standpoint, the examination of the relationships between Islam and multiculturalism takes up a significant part of the book, precisely because Islam is the only religion that to this day views its sphere of action as encompassing society and as including a proselytic component, an outlook which Christianity and Buddhism would (maybe temporarily) seem to have renounced. One can therefore readily understand the author’s chosen angle of approach, which bears for the most part on the place that should be afforded to organized religions, and especially to Islam, in the public sphere of liberal democracies at the highly specific point in their history where collective debate has progressively crystallized around the question of multiculturalism.
This article argues that Marx’s economic cosmopolitanism was formulated, in part, as a response to the exiled radical poet Heinrich Heine’s satirical attacks on German nationalism. In Paris in 1844, the young journalist Marx collaborated with the revered Heine on the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which was meant to join German metaphysics and poetry with French socialist politics. Like Heine, Marx was a secular Jew from the border region of the Rhineland who saw French revolutionary politics as Germany’s inevitable destiny. While Heine wrestles with nostalgia for a backwards Prussia in Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (published in Vorwärts! in 1844), Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” argues that Germany must accomplish a difficult backwards somersault (“salto mortale“) over the dialectical boundary of the Rhine to transcend the impasses of French politics and British industrialism. Both Heine and Marx transformed their critique of Prussian autocracy into a more generalized cosmopolitan radicalism, though Heine’s aestheticism is sometimes confounding to Marxist critics. Meanwhile Marx’s engagement with the German tradition of Nationalökonomie is complex: while he critiques the Prussian nationalist use of free trade theories, the internationalism of his economic vision brings him closer to the British classical tradition of Smith and Ricardo than to German romantic protectionists like Friedrich List. 
“Democracy,” writes Jacques Rancière in Hatred of Democracy, “first of all means this: ‘anarchic government,’ one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern.” He adds: “Democracy is . . . the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body.” While Rancière’s suggestion that democracy is ‘anarchic government’ indeed seems paradoxical, and by all means requires careful unpacking, one thing that can be taken from it is that democracy is to be seen. That is to say, a political regime that requires active citizen-participation in which the body politic is self-governing requires political activity to therefore be made public. 
With the departure of the last American troops from Iraq, we can shift our perspective on the war from current event to one of history. Jim Vernon’s 2008 article “American Antigone: Hegelian Reflections on the Sheehan-Bush Conflict” was written in the midst of the war and just as Cindy Sheehan was moving herself out of the public eye. Now is an interesting time to revisit the dramatic conflict that ensued between Sheehan and George W. Bush and the ideological camps that formed around them. 
