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Culture and the Specificity of Politics: A Response to Fred Dallmayr

This article responds to the thought of Fred Dallmayr by focusing on the difference between ethical and cultural work and ethico-political work in the political domain. The difference redounds, in the context of Dallmayr’s writings at least, to one between a politics of non-violence and a politics of the lesser violence. I argue that Fred Dallmayr’s wide reflections on philosophy, religion, ethics, and politics look towards a moral politics of self-restraint and tolerance, and that these reflections are deep and critically formative, especially relative to a post-neoliberal age and to the next era of globalization, characterized by the pluralization of world power centres. I suggest, however, that this moral politics does not work enough from out of the limits that define the political domain as political, and that, consequently, it does not sufficiently anticipate a responsible politics of power. The latter constitutes, I claim, the appropriate object of international political theory. My argument is developed in three parts. The first section attempts to circumscribe the importance of Fred Dallmayr’s intellectual itinerary and his concern with ‘comparative political theory’. The second section then rehearses the lack of engagement on his part with what I will call the ‘specificity’ of the political. I take as my example Dallmayr’s own engagements with Jacques Derrida’s reflections on Europe, suggesting that despite an effective criticism of Derrida’s understanding of ethico-political responsibility, he remains himself too tied to a ‘culturalist’ a notion of political transformation.1 In the third section I argue that this notion of politics leads Dallmayr to advocate, within the ethico-spiritual legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, a politics of non-violence, whereas a politics of the lesser violence is more appropriate to the specificity of the political domain and its limits – particularly, the international political domain within which comparative political theory is set. I conclude that, despite