الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

Yet probably “political wisdom” is only an euphemism. Were I not embarrassed to address a partly non-academic audience with references to academic fields and partitions, I should say that institutional development is the business not of “political wisdom”, but of the “political philosophy” and of the “history of political institutions”. It is in fact the province of political philosophy to investigate into the fundamentals of polities, with an analytical attitude that resists the dictatorship of the empiricist models. “History of political institutions”, on its side, teaches us that polities are the outcomes of an extreme variety and diversity of experiences, each of them being molded through trials and errors, each involving human costs, each being unique. Precisely these sorts of investigations and approaches become crucial when trans-national and trans-cultural issues need be dealt with. How can different polities accept one another, communicate, exchange material or immaterial values, in two words coexist and cooperate, without implicitly or explicitly making one another the object of a critical evaluation? And, on the other hand, how can this evaluation be entirely free from pre-judgments and of hierarchical appreciations? Under this point of view, I find interesting the reflection we are offered by John Rawls in his “The law of the people”. I do not share and I shall not repeat here the whole of his argument. But there is one point I consider useful for the purpose of our discussion. Rawls divides the peoples of the world in five categories. Let’s leave three of them alone and consider the two he terms as “liberal peoples” and “decent people”.

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