Dr. Domanloo: The title of our next discussion is:
Anarchist Communitarianism:
a phenomenological
introduction to Communitarianism.
In this discussion
Dr. Malekzadeh intends to challenge
the concept of a liberal government
and challenge the idea with
a phenomenological perspective.
Hamid Malekzadeh: The title of my speech is:
a phenomenological introduction to communitarianism.
What I'm talking about today is
the more politicalized narration of
what I've been trying to talk about
under various pretexts for the past two years.
What I'm doing here is, first of all,
giving a specific account of anarchism,
then I will discuss "Constituent Power" and
 "constitution".
Next, I will talk about the possible
 relevance between communitarianism and
this conceptual distinction, and finally,
I propose my own approach as anarchist
communitarianism phenomenology.
As you might expect, my speech is about politics.
First of all, let me make it clear what I mean by
saying that "today I am talking about politics".
By saying this,
I mean that I am going to talk
 aboutthe concept of "constituent power"and
its related elemnt
Choosing anarchism as one of the conceptual
elements used here,
was not simply for my personal interest in anarchism,
but because of the conceptual function that
anarchism will have in my final narrative
of politics in this Speech.
You may know that anarchism has its political uses
for the first time during the French Revolution.
During the revolution, according to George Woodcock,
anarchism was used as a curse and a political curse.
Both when Jacques Pierre Brissot
addresses his enemies
enemies as anarchists or when the directory
uses the word to
address Jacobins.
From then on, for both ordinary people and
the more educated opposition,
and even academics who wored on  politics,
anarchism, and anarchists
have been hated and  cursed
as people with blood on their hands and sins in their nature.
The first positive usage of the term anarchism,
have been found in France.
In 1840, Pierre Joseph Proudhon
proudly declared himself an anarchist.
Proudhon declares that he is an anarchist, without hesitation,
while trying to answer the question
 of what ideology he believes.
He goes the way of answering this question:
"You may ask me what is a good government."
 To answer this question,he speculates that
he is not a Republican or Democrat,
and then declares that he is anarchist.
In the post-Proudhon world until today,
any form of a discussion of anarchism
has been associated with trying to answer
what is a desirable situation.
That is, anarchists have always been asked,
"If not the government, then what do they propose?"
The anarchists' attempt to answer this question
question has caught them in a discourse trap,
which I call the "CONSTITUTIONAL trap".
Basically, trying to answer this question
is paradoxical,unnecessary and in a sense, wrong.
No anarchist can say anything meaningful about
a desirable constituted position.
In fact, from an anarchist point of view,
there is no desirable,constituted position.
However, all the divisions between
different anarchisms
have come into existence, credited with trying
 to answer the same question.
The anarchists, despite their differences,
have one thing in common.
the common, fundamental view of all anarchists
is to recognize the necessity of defending a sort of
people-based
founding[political] against all possible forms of "constituted order".
This is what the anarchists agree on.
Whether it is a communist co-operative
 form of association,
a set of independent ego actions,
, and the various types of direct action
that we sometimes see in anarchist theories.
What makes this understanding of anarchism
linked to politics?
To give a proper answer to this question,
we must return to the Greek meaning of politics
POLITEIA in ancient Greece.
Politeia in ancient Greece has three different meanings.
One of those meanings is "to establish."
Another of them is acting as a citizen of the polis
and the third is the constitution.
Here, the constitution must be taken to mean
the foundations of the city, that is, a way of life,
and not the law, document, or statute.
This Greek meaning of politics
politics has been translated into Persian as
the politics of Medina or the politics of madanieh.
In the modern world, we are confronted with
a sort of change in the formulation of
the concept of politeia  as the constitution.
This new formulation is affected
 by the redefinitions of the concept of sovereignty.
In these reinterpretations,
the constitution is transformed from "the foundation
upon which the city is founded" to "the document,
the law, and the established status."
In the course of this transformation,
constitutional theories emerge.
These theories seek to explain
 the ultimate authority of the state.
That is why, when an anarchist person
speaks of the necessity of constitutive negation,
they are asked, "What would happen
if there was no government"
i.e. what would happen if there be no established status?
Why? Because in these theories,
, politics and being political or
the possibility of politics
are conceived as identical with
the existence of a legally established status.
In these theories, we have two distinct issues:
1. According to constitutional theories
based on the concept of sovereignty,
some form of the ultimate source of political a
uthority is recognized
which is called the people.
this term, " the people", in these theories,
has become a mere name who
the ruler Rules in the name of them;
2. The constitution is regarded as something created.
Something that was not pre-created and later created:
natural / civil status; government / pre-government.
This new status is always made by contract
or some form of contract.
Influenced by these two factors,
sovereignty has two distinct characteristics:
1. Personal or individual sovereignty,
which is vested in the ruler.
This ruler may be a person, a set of elites, or
or a set of established structures and institutions,
that govern in the name of the people;
2. The real sovereignty, which is the people.
If we put the two together that people
in these kinds of theories do not have the power
to govern and cannot govern;
thus, the government must either be
in the name of the people,
or the people's government
must be mediated by artificial institutions.
Then we will see how the primary constituent power
that belongs to the people is delegitimized.
In these theories, this founding power is recognized
as something unwanted.
This is equally apparent in John Locke's theory
and the rest of the theorizations of contract.
Thus, the people's founding power is defined
as a monster that must be suppressed and controlled.
It is in this process that 'people' become 'nation'.
As a result, what is happening in these theories is
ultimately the superiority of law over politics.
That is why you are told that "democracy is not
the Government of the people
the people, but the superiority of law."
Among all these different categories of
new constitutional theories, the communitarians
have made considerable efforts to preserve
the faint shadow of the Idea of “the people".
However, H-Peter Steeves has made it very clear
clear that communitarian theories generally suffer
from three specific theoretical crises.
 I will, first of all, make the basic assumptions of
communitarianism.And then I'll show how each lead
to a particular crisis.
First, for the communitarians, humanbeings are
fundamentally interconnected;
secondly, it is impossible to imagine oneself
independent of their ends and goals.
That is, for communitarians, Self is always
an existence attached to its ends and ends;
or, to put it more precisely, the roles of individuals
largely determine what they are.
Third, the story of the life of each individual as
 a member of movement, or believers in a particular
calling, always happens within the story of
the community to which they belong.
That is, no one has a story outside the community
he/she belongs to.
There are three crises or three different flaws
in these three basic assumptions:
1. Unfounded claims about the nature of the self;
2. The missing link between inter-subjectivity and
good;
3. What is a community?
As I said, it is impossible to conceive of the Self
outside his community bonds.
in fact,Self is a social artifact that is out of existence
outside the community to which it belongs.
As a result, he/she either disappears in
communitarianism,
becomes transmuted in the community
there is no self any more
or finds metaphysical characteristics.
The result of this crisis is either disappearing the Self
- as happened in postmodernism -
or it becomes a metaphysical being that we cannot
explain it experimentally
we must presuppose its being
The next issue, or the next crisis, is
the lack of a logical link between the inter-subjective
good and the individual good.
To say that one is necessarily within the community
does not necessarily mean that each one within
the community does not pursue another bad to
maximize their own good.
That is, even if it is true that each person's existence
becomes meaningful in relation
to the existence of others,
the logical conclusion is not that each one alone
does not pursue his own good at the expense of
of another's bad.
The third problem arises here is that
communitarianism cannot explain how
the very nature of the community is formed.
Given these three crises in communitarianism,
it is necessary to refer to phenomenology.
Based on Husserlian Egology, you can first explain
we can, and this is what I have done before
Using Karl Mannheim, Hegel and Max Stirner in
my First book,"I am a not-others"
Based on Husserlian Egology, you can first
explain how the ego may be Constituted in
an ontological relation with other Egoes.
and  that how  a mutual/common world will
be founded
in his/her link with other egos, in his/her
none-theoretical and inter-subjective intentional
experience,in his/her own inter-subjective
intentional sense giving actions, and produce
a 'us'/"we".
 Thus, Husserl's Egology enables the first
crisis of communitarianism to be resolved.
On the basis of this Husserlian Egology,
the constitutive, presenting inter-subjectivity,
, presents the inter-subjective good and bad
from different perspectives and it dose so
for a "us/we".
In fact, in this phenomenological view, the good/bad
essentially becomes an inter-subjective concept.
The last issue is that, given the nature of the concept
of inter-subjectivity, according to which
an inter-subjectivity can be explained in terms of the intentional,
inter-subjective experience, the theoretical basis
for clarifying what the idea of community is based on,
can be provided.
In the end, if you accept that politics is nothing
more than the constitutive action of a people putting
the world together and within the range of
intersubjective horizons they experience in a
none-theoretical way in their own history,
then you will inevitably come to terms that
an anarchist phenomenological communitarianism
can open up the impasse we have encountered
in our contemporary history in Iran.
