Universalization

Abstract: In recent years, postcolonial theory has emerged as the most influential scholarly explanation for the historical trajectory and social anatomy of the Global South. Its leading proponents - many of whom have become academic superstars - not only reject Enlightenment political and economic theories, especially Marxism, but accuse them of complicity in Europe's imperial project. In this devastating critique, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber carefully examines this project's core arguments about the specificity of the Global South and the deficiencies of Western thought. He shows that their foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical errors, chief among which is a flawed understanding of capitalism's "universalizing" tendency. Once the real history of capital's universalization is reconstructed, aspects of modernity that appear to be unique to the South turn out to be shared with the North - - and the history of the Global South can be explained by the very theories that postcolonial theorists urge us to reject. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a turning point in contemporary social theory.

Abstract: The title of this paper is restricted to "Englishes,"1 but the phenomenon I propose to discuss applies to most languages of wider communication (e.g., Spanish, Portuguese, Tamil, Hindi-Urdu, French, Chinese) and also to languages of not-so-wide communication (e.g., Dutch, Swedish, Korean, and Serbo-Croatian). All these languages are in varying degrees "pluricentric";2 they have multilinguistic identities, multiplicity of norms, both endocentric and exocentric, and distinct sociolinguistic histories. However, the pluricentricity of English is overwhelming, and unprecedented in linguistic history. It raises issues of diversification, codification, identity, creativity, crosscultural intelligibility, and of power and ideology.3 The universalization of English and the power of this language have come at a price; for some, the implications are agonizing, while for others they are a matter for ecstasy. In my discussion of these two reactions to the spread and functions of English, I would like to discuss ecstasy first and then come to the other part, the agony. But before I do this, my choice of the term 'Englishes' calls for an explanation: Why "world Englishes" and not "world English"?4 The answer to this question involves linguistic, attitudinal, ontological, and pragmatic explanations. The term 'Englishes' is indicative of distinct identities of the language and literature. "Englishes" symbolizes variation in form and function, use in linguistically and culturally distinct contexts, and a range of variety in literary creativity. And, above all, the term stresses the WE-ness among the users of English, as opposed to us vs. them (native and nonnative). I believe that the traditional concept of us vs. them used in describing

Abstract: Central to the discourse ethics advanced by Jurgen Habermas is a principle of universalization (U) amounting to a dialogical equivalent of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Habermas has proposed that ‘U’ follows by material implication from two premises: (1) what it means to discuss whether a moral norm ought to be . adopted and (2) what those involved in argumentation must suppose of themselves if they are to consider a consensus they reach as rationally motivated. To date, no satisfactory derivation of ‘U’ from these two premises has been presented. Thus the present study attempts to show how one can, without begging the question, arrive at ‘U’ by assuming a suitable explication of these two premises, supplemented with a fairly innocuous assumption about the context of discourse. If the argument is sound, then ‘U’ brings both deontological and consequentialist intuitions together with a notion of solidarity that requires an intersubjective account of insight.