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Quaestiones Infinitae Quaestiones Infinitae DECLARATION I declare that all ideas in this thesis, except for the reference to works which have been duly cited and acknowledged, are a product of my own intellectual effort and that it contains material that has been read and considered as adequately satisfying the requirements for the award of the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Philosophy. Copyright © Nancy Myles All rights reserved ISBN 978-94-6103-081-8 Cover design: Quaestiones Infinitae series / [ProefschriftMaken] Communality, Individuality and Democracy: A defense of personism Gemeenschappelijkheid, individualiteit en democratie: Een verdediging van personisme (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift Ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. H.R.B.M. Kummeling, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 28 augustus 2020 des middags te 12:45 uur door Nancy Ama Myles geboren op 12 februari 1983 te Accra, Ghana Promotor: Prof. dr. H.H.A. van den Brink Copromotor: Dr. H. M. Majeed Assessment committee: Prof. dr. R. Claassen (Utrecht University) Prof. dr. K. Flikschuh (London School of Economics) Prof. dr. M. Frederiks (Utrecht University) Dr. D. Gädeke (Utrecht University) Prof. dr. B. Meyer (Utrecht University) DEDICATION To the memory of my invaluable mother – Araba, and to Bright, Micky, Emmani, Ella and Gaby The same Hand that started it shall complete it! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My initial interest in the debate between ‘communitarians’ and ‘individualists’ was stimulated by Emeritus Professor Kwame Gyekye during one of the sessions of my MPhil studies under his supervision. I have been hooked to the problem of that disagreement ever since. As supervisor of this thesis until his passing, the interesting discussions we had over the subject contributed immensely to the laying of the foundations of this thesis. I remain heavily indebted to him. I cannot even begin to express my gratitude to Prof. dr. Bert van den Brink for taking me on as a PhD student and inspiring me to critically reflect outside my familiar grounds and stay critical. His dedication, meticulous correction work, patience and unfailing enthusiasm have been indispensable to the successful completion of this thesis. Keen on structure and the formulation of ideas, Prof. van den Brink has been frank when necessary but sympathetic through the whole process. I feel privileged to have worked so closely with such a great mentor and an understanding social and political Mind. The encouragement and candid contributions of Dr. Hasskei Mohammed Majeed, co-supervisor of this thesis, cannot be over-emphasized. The arguments have been improved considerably by his detailed and constructive responses to a number of drafts. I would like to thank Dr. Majeed for his critical, constructive and very helpful comments. This thesis has been supervised by professors of both University of Utrecht and University of Ghana, and I have been fortunate enough to be able to travel between these two countries for my short stays through the generous support of the Faculty of Humanities and The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the University of Utrecht. I should also like to thank the Office of Research, Innovation and Development of the University of Ghana for the award of the Faculty Development Grant at the onset of this study. It gave me a boost financially to start the project. Also, I wish to express my gratitude to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for the award of small grants for graduate support. During my short stays at the Netherlands I was generously welcomed by members of the Department especially the Ethics Institute of the University of Utrecht. I want to specially thank Suzanne van Vliet for helping me out with many of the day-to-day issues surrounding my stay while in Utrecht and away. Thank you for your patience and all the help. I am truly grateful for the unfailing support of my entire family both emotionally and logistically. Thank you, Mum, Peggy and Josephine, for helping with ‘precious four’ while I had to be away. This has been greatly appreciated. Thank you, Micky, for sacrificing a good part of your growing years to be a big brother. Thank you Emmani, Ella and Gaby for holding up and giving me reason to continue; you were all born during the writing of this thesis and you collectively served as an inspiration. Without the support of Bright, I would not have made it here. You bore the brunt of my thesis- stress and you managed it well. Thank you for being such a good companion. Finally, thank you Almighty God. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Contents 1 Introductory chapter 3 Chapters: 1. Communitarianism and individualism: Africa and the West 12 1.1 Introduction 12 1.2 The community and the individual from the standard African perspective 12 1.3 The individual and the community from the standard Western perspective 23 1.4 Communitarianism in political philosophy 29 1.5 Individualism in political philosophy 37 1.6 Democracy: individualistic/liberal or communitarian/social? 44 1.7 Conclusion 50 2. ‘The Individual’: Individuality and communality 52 2.1 Introduction 52 2.2 From ‘the individual’ to individuality 53 2.3 From ‘the community’ to communality (and from ‘the individual’ to ‘the person’) 58 2.3.1 Examining the communitarian argument 58 2.3.2 Examining the communitarian critique 64 2.4 Consequences for individualism and communitarianism 68 2.5 The person: between individuality and communality 71 2.5.1 Individuality of the person 75 2.5.2 Communality of the person 75 2.5.3 A comparison with Mead’s ‘I’ and ‘me’ 78 2.6 The debate in the light of personism 80 2.7 Conclusion 84 3. Understanding ‘self-rule’, change and progress 87 3.1 Introduction 87 3.2 Self-rule: from my rule of my ‘self’ to our rule of our ‘self’ 88 3.2.1 My rule of my ‘self’ 88 3.2.2 Democracy: our rule of our ‘self’ 92 3.3 Reconciling the tensions ‘within’ and ‘without’ 95 3.4 Dialogue and deliberation in self-rule: a case for wholeness not oneness 102 3.5 Change and social-political progress 110 3.6 Conclusion 116 1 4. Democracy by and for the people 118 4.1 Introduction 118 4.2 Democracy as centered on the people 119 4.2.1 Introduction 119 4.2.2 The People in democracy: individual or collective? 119 4.2.3 “We the people”: a democratic preamble 123 4.2.4 The problem of representation and majoritarianism 125 4.3 Confronting the inherent challenges of democracy: inclusion and consensus pursuit 128 4.3.1 The politics of inclusion 129 4.3.2 Pursuing consensual politics 131 4.3.3 The way forward 136 4.4 The compelled state and democratic self-rule 142 4.4.1 Examining the state as an encorporated ‘self’ and its interests 143 4.4.2 The parallelism in the defense of empire and the encorporated state 147 4.4.3 Towards genuine self-rule in an encorporated state 151 4.5 Conclusion 154 5. African traditional democracy and the colonial legacy: the need for a critical return to the past 156 5.1 Introduction 156 5.2 Democracy(self-rule) in traditional Africa: Communal, consensual and humanistic 157 5.3 The urgent need for re-conceptualizing post-colonial African democracies 172 5.4 A call for a critical ‘sankↄfaism’ 184 5.4.1 A return to a humanistic ethic and a consensual democracy 186 5.5 Conclusion 191 Concluding chapter 192 Bibliography 200 Index of names 217 Summary in Dutch 223 Curriculum Vitae 226 Quaestiones Infinitae 227 2 INTRODUCTION Background In the latter part of the previous century, social and political thinkers in the West1 raised worrying concerns about the prevailing unbridled individualism characterizing Western society, and the attendant emphases on the primacy of rights, autonomy and the self which featured prominently in socio-political theory, system and practice. Under the label of ‘communitarians’, and with various renditions of critiques, authors sought to correct this thought error of extreme individualism by either reversing the order of ontological and/or moral primacy of the individual over community, or subsuming individuality into community. This anxiety finds expression in what has now become widely known labels such as Sandel’s notion of the individualist ‘unencumbered self,’ MacIntyre’s postulation of individuals as actors within a ‘narrative,’ and Charles Taylor’s rejection of ‘atomism,’ among others (Avineri & De-Shalit, 1992; MacIntyre, 1984; Sandel, 1982; Taylor, 1985a). Around the same period, some African authors, Kwame Gyekye for instance, rather bemoaned the extreme collectivist thought, couched in community-centered terms, which dominated the writings of certain African thinkers 2 as the alleged outstanding, defining feature of African ontology and normative philosophy. Kwesi Dickson (1977), for instance, as cited by Gyekye (1997), writes of community as a “characteristic of African life to which attention has been drawn again and again by both African and non-African writers on Africa. Indeed, to many this characteristic defines Africanness” (p. 4). Kenyatta (1965) also writes, “Individualism and self-seeking were ruled out…. The personal pronoun ‘I’ was used very rarely in public assemblies. 1 I refer to Anglo-American and European writings. 2 Mostly political thinkers but also socio-political theorists some of whom I discuss shortly. 3 The spirit of collectivism was (so) much ingrained in the mind of the people” (p. 188). Elsewhere he writes regarding the traditional life in Kenya, “According to Gikuyu ways of thinking, nobody is an isolated individual. Or rather, his uniqueness is a secondary fact about him; first and fore- most he is several people’s relative and several people’s contemporary” (p.
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