Abstract
This chapter builds upon critical theory from Chap. 1 to investigate racial theory in the historical context, which is connected with colonialism and economic plundering by Spanish powers in Latin America. Social contract thinkers such as John Locke and Rousseau will be explicated in dealing with their theory of freedom, democracy, and slavery. Then I focus on social Darwinism as a cardinal principle underlying colonialism and racial development. I include a theological, ethical reflection of social contract morality, racism, and justice to develop postcolonial political theology.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 14.
- 2.
Ibid., 203.
- 3.
McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 1.
- 4.
Cited in David Chidester, Christianity: A Global History (New York: Harper San Francisco, 2000), 353.
- 5.
Ibid., 354–5.
- 6.
Cited in Chidester, Christianity, 356.
- 7.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Briffault (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 8–9.
- 8.
It is unfortunate that Hardt and Negri accused Las Casas of being not so far removed from the Inquisition. Their argument is wrongly assumed. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 116.
- 9.
Cited in Moltmann, God for a Secular Society, 8.
- 10.
Andre G. Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review, 1979), 14–7.
- 11.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam, 2003), 722, 747, 760.
- 12.
Karl Marx, Capital, I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 823.
- 13.
Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory 1, trans. Brian Pearce (New York and London: 1968), 106.
- 14.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (A Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication, 2002), 366.
- 15.
Franz Fanon, Black Skin and White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 189.
- 16.
Ibid., ix.
- 17.
Ibid., xiii.
- 18.
Ibid., 18.
- 19.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Mark Goldie (London: J.M. Dent; Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1993), xxxv.
- 20.
Ibid., xxv.
- 21.
Ibid., 117.
- 22.
Ibid., xxiii.
- 23.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 1950), 105.
- 24.
Ibid., 216.
- 25.
Giovani Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994), 209–10.
- 26.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, xI–xIi.
- 27.
Ibid., 5.
- 28.
Ibid., 126.
- 29.
Ibid., 208.
- 30.
Ibid., 213.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., 214.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid., 135.
- 35.
Ibid., 131.
- 36.
Locke in the later revision of the Constitutions did not alter the slavery article. He was a shareholder in the Royal African Company charted in 1672, which sought to monopolize the English slave trade. McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 167.
- 37.
J.J. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters and trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1964). The full title is Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, which was written for another prize competition of the Academy of Dijon.
- 38.
Book I, ch. vi. Rousseau, On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, eds. Roger D. Master, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).
- 39.
Book I, ch. vi.
- 40.
“Geneva Manuscript,” in ibid., 189.
- 41.
Ibid., 168.
- 42.
Book II, ch. vi.
- 43.
“Geneva Manuscript,” in On the Social Contract, 182. Rousseau values the great soul of the legislator as the true miracle and takes John Calvin as the great legislator, who was involved in drawing up of the edicts in the Republic of Geneva. This does Calvin as much honor as his theological masterpiece of Institutes. Book II, ch. Vii. footnote.
- 44.
“Discourse on Political Economy,” in On the Social Contract, 216.
- 45.
Ibid., 217.
- 46.
Ibid., 221.
- 47.
Ibid., 221–2.
- 48.
Ibid., 222.
- 49.
Ibid. A just and wise economy, according to Rousseau, needs to overcome the difficulty “in the cruel alternative of letting the State perish or attacking the sacred right of property which is its mainstay.” Ibid., 226.
- 50.
Ibid., 225.
- 51.
C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1979), 16.
- 52.
Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, [1762] 1979), 194.
- 53.
Robespierre finds recourse to the right of insurrection from Social Contract, but the Jacobin campaign of mass executions seems much more in line with Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). The sadistic misogyny of Revolution is based on violence and fear. “The well-being of the other never is the aim of the Sadean subject. On the contrary, he is animated by an unmitigated devotion to the propagation of evil–crimes, murders, vengeance.” Robespierre, ed. George Rude (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 135.
- 54.
Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 7.
- 55.
Book I, ch. vi–viii. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 21. 24.
- 56.
Ibid., 172.
- 57.
Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 135.
- 58.
Book I, ch. ix.
- 59.
“Geneva Manuscript,” in On the Social Contract, 167.
- 60.
Iring Fetscher clarifies Rousseau’s idea of legislature in contrast to a notion of totalitarianism. Iring Fetscher, Rousseaus politische Philosophie: Zur Geschichte des demokratischen Freiheitsbegriffs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 147.
- 61.
“Geneva Manuscript,” in ibid., 191. The Latin phrase suum cuique relates to an old Greek principle of justice in Plato’s Republic . Justice becomes possible when everyone minds his/her own business, according to his/her abilities and capabilities. It should refrain from meddling in others’ affairs (4. 433a). Also, everyone should receive his/her own (rights), not be deprived of his/her own (property). This concept implies distributive justice which can be developed toward justice as fairness.
- 62.
Book III, iv.
- 63.
For Rousseau, however, “Athens was not in fact a democracy, but a highly tyrannical aristocracy, governed by learned men and orators.” “Political Economy,” in On the Social Contract, 213.
- 64.
“Geneva Manuscript,” in On the Social Contract, 167.
- 65.
Ibid., 176.
- 66.
Book I, ch. IV. 49.
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid., 50.
- 70.
Book I, ch. iv.
- 71.
Book IV, ch. iii.
- 72.
Book I, ch. iv.
- 73.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Neville H. Smith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 151.
- 74.
Ibid.
- 75.
Ibid., 153.
- 76.
Ibid., 153–4.
- 77.
John Rawls’ (1921–2002) theory of justice stands in accord with the tradition of social contract in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Drawing upon the veil of ignorance, he suggests that this original position explains his definition of ‘justice as fairness,’ which is to be founded in constitutional democracy. The social conditions are essential for the adequate development of their two moral powers: justice and the good. The principle of justice is applied to the basic structure of society in the exercise of citizens’ sense of justice. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), xii. 11. 118–23.
- 78.
Darwin adopted this term in the fifth edition of Origin (1869). Despite his rejection of teleological readings of evolution, Darwin is accused of joining the mainstream of social Darwinism. McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 77.
- 79.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 29.
- 80.
The term laissez-faire, the product of the Enlightenment, refers to the way to unleash human potential through the restoration of a natural system without the restrictions of government. It would come along with the invisible hand by Adam Smith (1723–1790), who sees economy as a natural system and the market as an organic part of that system. But Smith never used the term.
- 81.
Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750 (Letchworth: The Garden City Press, 1968), 21.
- 82.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 137.
- 83.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1958), 178.
- 84.
Ibid., 180. In this respect, Arendt maintains that Carlyle’s ideas on the genius and hero worship emphasize the innate greatness of the individual character independent of his social environment. It became really more effective weapons of a ‘social reformer’ than the doctrines of the British Imperialism.
- 85.
John Edwards Richards, The Historical Birth of the Presbyterian Church in America (Liberty Press, Liberty Hill, South Carolina, 1987). This book is a history of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which includes many churches which were members of the PCCSA.
- 86.
Eleven Southern states in which slavery was legal wanted to leave the United States, and they formed the Confederate States of America. It is called the Confederacy against the Union which refers to the US government, and the states where slavery was illegal are sometimes called the North supporting the Union of the Government.
- 87.
McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 107.
- 88.
Cited in David Snoke, “The Southern Presbyterian Church and Racism,” 3. https://www.cityreformed.org/uploads/4/4/0/9/44096805/racism.pdf.
- 89.
McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 107.
- 90.
Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2005), 50–1.
- 91.
The poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ was widely reprinted in American Newspapers, calling for arms. Hannah Arendt writes against the imperialist character of Kipling. “The fact that the ‘White Man’s burden’ is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism.” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 209.
- 92.
Moltmann, God for a Secular Society, 10–11.
- 93.
Ibid., 13.
- 94.
West, Democracy Matters, 15.
- 95.
Ibid., 16, 20.
- 96.
Helmut Gollwitzer, “Why Black Theology?,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 31, no. 1 (1975), 42.
- 97.
Ibid., 44.
- 98.
Golliwtzer, Befreiung zur Solidarität. Einführung in die Evangelische Theologie (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1984), 197.
- 99.
Ibid., 199.
- 100.
Ibid., 200.
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Chung, P.S. (2019). Race, Social Contract Theory, and Social Darwinism. In: Critical Theory and Political Theology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17172-8_2
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