The politics of translation: Civil society's travels and travails in Arab political thought

This dissertation addresses the question of what happens when concepts cross “cultures” or “languages.” To answer this question, I examine the history of the concept of civil society in Anglo-European political thought and the more recent emergence of a discourse on civil society in Arab political thought. The goal of this study is to analyze the transformations that have occurred in Arab political thought over the past decade as a the result of Arab forays into an international discourse about “civil society.” The research presented aims to demonstrate that the “translation” required to talk about “civil society” in Arabic is not so much a hindrance to understanding, as an opportunity for different understanding—that is, for political and conceptual transformation and contestation in Arab political thought.; The work identifies three competing discourses in the civil society debate taking place in Arabic. For Arab liberals “civil society” is most importantly tolerant and democratic. For Islamists, it is most important that society be Islamic and that an Islamic civil society be independent from the existing uncivil (secular) state. Finally, Arab leftists seek to construct a civil society that provides a progressive force able to contribute toward the creation of a leftist counter-hegemony.; In addition, this project and the argument it advances are intended to address two bodies of literature in political theory. The first literature studies the historical contestation of political and social concepts and includes both the German genre of Begriffsgeschichte and the Anglo-American form of “critical conceptual history.” The second literature consists of recent works in what has come to be called “comparative political theory.” While both approaches are able to produce comparative studies, they tend to give the impression that the traditions compared developed independently of each other and do not adequately account for the translation, appropriation and contestation of ideas that occur across cultures. What the more “transcultural” approach presented here reveals is the activity and efforts on the part of those Arabs who are engaged in such “transportations” and how, in the process, they leave neither the concept nor its new home unchanged.