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Planning Modernization, Designing An Ideal Kingdom in the East , Building a Utopia. Some thoughts on the relation between Social Sciences and Social Engineering

Not for nothing Dominick LaCapra noted recently that White’s belief that historians can construct meaning ex nihilo ascribes ‘quasi-divine powers’ to humans tantamount to a ‘secular creationism’

Dirk Moses, 2005 The paper attempts to combine the interests of the oncoming Workshop in Limerick Crisis and Academia (Novermber 2015) with the pursuits of the Athens workshop Modernization, Nations, Multiple Modernities (April 2016). It revolves along the following thematic lines: Creation Ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil and Failed Modernities: this section provides a short survey of discourses about Greece’s modernization ‘ex nihilo’, the so called Greek “peculiarity’, and the concomitant arguments about Greece’s failed modernization due to the resistance stemming from the ‘object’ of reforms, the obstinate obstacles to the fulfillment of the modernization ideal. On High Modernism and the Infinite Gap between Real and Ideal: in the second unit, drawing insights from Pantelis Lekkas’s work Abstraction and Experience and his critique of ideological politics and from James C. Scott’s critique of High Modernism in his Seeing Like a State, I suggest a shift of attention from the ‘object’ of modernization (the object of governmentality) to its agents: that is, to the members of a New Class (academics, state intellectuals, legislators, lawyers, policy experts, architects, urban designers etc.) who were engaged in the politics of modernization and put their scientific and cultural capital into the service of institutional reforms in early 19th century. Critics of Radical Constructivism and Abstract Rationalism in Greek 19th century. The case of George Finlay and Friedrich Thiersch: the last part of the paper is devoted to the works of those two intellectuals-‘Philhellenes’ who occupy a rather marginal position in the canon of modern Greek studies. The utopian ideals and the intellectual traditions (legal positivism, Saint-Simonism etc) that inspired the planning of reforms towards Greece's convergence with Europe (and the civilized world) as well as the policy experts’ abstract rationalism became objects of their rigorous critique. Instead of taking for granted the beneficial role of the modern expertise, these early critics of high modernist planning expressed a certain skepticism towards abstract principles, deductive reasoning and general theories in politics as running the risk of designing humanity out and endangering the promise of modernity, self-government and equity. Maybe the ideas that inspired Greece's modernization in the early 19th century are still with us. And perhaps a critical, self-reflexive examination of the past and the explanatory paradigms through which the Greek exit to modernity is approached, could provide a critical perspective on the present as well.

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Instead of a Prologue. The Cheese, the Worms and Creation Ex Nihilo Domenico Scandella, nicknamed Menocchio, a miller from the northeastern Italian region of Friuli, was burned at the stake in 1599. An avid reader of various, heterogenous books, a literate, though not a member of the literary elite, Menocchio invented his own cosmology by blending elements from ‘high’, written and ‘low’, oral culture, that is, erudite literature and Catholic dogmas with folk knowledge and popular common sense. His heretical views and the lengthy trials before the Inquisition are recomposed by Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms. Menocchio challenged the Catholic church contending that the soul dies with the body; Joseph was the only father of Jesus; Mary was not a virgin; God was not the creator, the great Architect, of the universe. The world was formed just as cheese is made out of milk –and worms appeared in it. By rejecting Christian theology’s transcendent God, Menocchio asserted that the world was not created ex nihilo. Creation Ex Nihilo and the Problem of Evil: the story of Greek modernization A recurrent argument that characterizes the older as well as the much most recent, profoundly rich literature on Greece’s modernization is that the state, established after the 1821 revolution, was constructed ex nihilo. The creation of a state out of nothing is deemed the principal peculiarity of modern Greek history. According to the plot, the new state was the key agent of historical transformation, a tool-instrument in the hands of a handful skillful modernizers, the bearers of humanist and ‘technoscientific’ knowledge (experts, bureaucrats, politicians, statemen, architects, urban planners, legislators) who strived hard to convert a small Ottoman province into a modern society. The urgent task of the new state’s legislators was to uproot people from backwardness, to extricate them from traditional social structures, indigenous cultures, local loyalties and bonds, and to mould them according to the principles of modern subjectivity qua abstract individualism. A strong centralized bureaucratic administration was deemed the necessary means (adderessed as the neccessary cost) of the desired end, that is, the making of Greece as a “model kingdom” in the East. The centralization of powers by Kapodistrias (1828-31) and later on by the Bavarian Regency functioned as a kind of accelerator towards the urgent need to move forward and erect a brand new society out of scratch, emancipated from the burden of custom and tradition. Written in this vein, the Promethean narrative of Veremis-Koliopoulos (2010) is quite telling: “Nineteenth-century state-building and its modernist institutions aspired to unify a society of citizens under the rule of law (…). The Western principles of government and administration that inspired Greek statecraft were ushered in by an enlightened diaspora (…) modernizing statesmen, sought to curtail the divisive influence of the segmentary society”.

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Although it revises and questions the orthodoxies informing the field of modern Greek studies, the two volumes erudite work of Dertilis makes room for the ex nihilo thesis: “As a historical case, modern Greece presents a unique feature: its statehood and economic development started from zero (...) the citizens of the new state were experiencing the material reality of a country that essentialy started from scratch (...). The Greek state created in 1828 out of nothing (Dertilis 2010)”.1 From a state-building viewpoint, 19th century Greece after a devastating yearlong War for Independence represented a tabula rasa,2 a void, an empty, abstract space without attributes that appeared to represent the ideal preconditions for transforming the vision of a national utopia into reality. The ex-nihilo modernization narratives draw evidence from historical sources written by certain 19th century’s scholars who, influenced by utilitarians and Saint Simonists, regarded Greece as an ideal labatory for the practical implementation and application of their favourite theories and utopias.

The priviledged, if not exclusive, role that modernization narratives attribute to Westernized elites in the historical process is concomitant with a special emphasis to the constructivist-design-planning skills and an overconfidence in the beneficial role of the members of a rising ‘New Class’, of the intellectuals, in politics. Narratives on the early 19th century tend to pay attention more to the political idealism of the reformers, to the abstract principles, ideas and intentions of the intellectual and political elites, rather than their actual practices and the consequences of their policies, the inconsistency between words and deeds, the discrepancies between the ends, means and the practical results of their modernizing visions and projects.

There seems to be an inclination towards an unequal treatement of intentions of professional specialists, i.e. King’s Otto advisors, to plan and guide Greece’s modernization by putting their scientific and cultural capital into the service of reforms, and of the fact that these policies did not worked as was expected. Despite however their political voluntarism (Kostis 2013), it is acknowledged that the state intellectuals and King’s advisors eventually failed to mould society according to their plans and visions and erect a modern society ex nihilo. Hence the argument about Greece’s failed modernity or ersatz modernization due to the inertia of tradition and habit, a kind of inertia resistance to modernization, that did not disappear as modern, bureaucratic rationality took over.

1 . Yet, it is worth mentioning Dertilis’s observation who, reflecting on the weirdiness of the ex-nihilo modernization story, notes that construction from scratch cannot be literally understood, zero as a concept of mathematics, it cannot be experienced.

2 “The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constanly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations (…). At its most radical, high modernism imagined wiping the slate utterly clean and beginning from zero. High-modernist ideology thus tend to devalue or banish politics. Political interests can only frustrate the social solutions devided by specialists with scientific tools adequate to their analysis. As individuals, high modernists might well hold democratic views about popular sovereignty or classical liberal views (…), but such convictions are external to, and often are war with, their high modernist convictions (Scott, 1998, 82, 94).

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A desicive, radical rupture with the past, with the social realities of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary era, the construction a new social entity through deliberate design and the engineering of the future with a view to close the actual-ideal gap were the main lines of thought that informed the reformers’ modernizing policies and dictated how their goal should be accomplished.

In several scholarly works and in the field of public history as well as in many TV documentaries and internet blogs, which during the ‘crisis era’ have shown a great interest for Greece’s first Governor, the policy of Kapodistrias is interpreted, appraised and often justified in terms of ex nihilo construction: “The new Governor set out to put an end to civil strife and got immediately into building a state ex nihilo, demonstrating enviable activity”. Unlike the harsh critiques to Kapodistrias’s paternalistic authoritarianism made by his contemporaries, a part of liberal scholars and philhellenes,3 including several Marxist and liberal intellectuals during the 20th century, in several recent references, articulated within or outside academia, Kapodistrias is classified in the pantheon of the grand designers, one among the Great Architects of European politics. In the same vein, his policy, even the suspension of the constitution of Trizina, is understood as part of the Governor’s ‘state building’ endeavor and his strivings to make order out of chaos. The new impressive study of Kostas Kostis (2013) devotes several pages to the labored efforts of King Otto and the Bavarian Regency (1833-1835) to construct a state ex ninhilo. Under the inventive and provocative title The Spoiled Children of History covers thematically three centuries of Greek history, from the 18th century up to the present, the year 2010. Devoted to the early 19th century, the first chapters of the study investigate and evaluate the assertive efforts of Bavarian regency, of King’s Otto advisors who took over power after Kapodistrias’s assasination. More implicitly than explicitly, the book accepts the ex nihilo thesis on the grounds of its main argument according to which a state-guided modernization, a bureaucratically imposed modernization from above, was the only viable route to Greece’s initiation to the Western civilized world. As the author argues, the establishment of absolute monarchy and "the enforcement of order, by all means, mainly by the restriction of constitutional liberties from a government that hardly had any relation to the country" was the only way out, given that the Greeks themselves had failed to "capitalize what the struggle for independence brought them"(191). The Spoiled Children of History focuses on the Bavarian’s vision of emancipating Greece from the burden of history, that is, from her Oriental, Ottoman past; it surveys the Bavarian expert’s modernizing plans and the measures taken towards their implementation; it also puts heavy emphasis to the centralizing forces of Westernized reformers and state builders (ie. the further drastic reduction of municipalities within three years, from 750 in 1833 to 250 in 1836) fighting against the centrifugal forces who opted for decentralization.

3 For instance, George Finlay, by citing Thiersch and Trikoupis, writes the following in his History of the Greek Revolution (Book V, Chap. II. 1861): “The arbitrary conduct of the president created a constitutional opposition to his administration, and he found himself obliged to convoke a national assembly, in order to give sanction to his dictatorial power (…) he adopted many violent and illegal measures to exclude every man who he deemed a Liberal”.

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In the evaluations of Bavarian policy made through the same lens can one could also add Kitromilidis’s (2000) relevant arguments who, following the spirit of the canonical work of John Petropoulos (1968/1982) as well as Keith Legg and John Roberts’s (1969) study, maintains that "the authoritarian methods of Bavarian policy in Greece were attempts to impose 'discipline' on the traditional society and, via a modernizing administration, to drive Greece from “Eastern despotism' into the European nineteenth century". Being at odds with Marxists and nationalist ideological denounciations of Bavarokratia [Bavarocracy-foreigners] and the politics of centralization, the author notes that even Korais, the “geniune liberal thinker» of 19th century”, would accept that “freedom has its price” as the “building of a modern European state in Eastern enviroment would necessarily entail large costs”.

The word troika, overladden with negative political, anti-German connotations in the current historical context, is used by Stathis Kalyvas (2015) for the Bavarian regency (the three Bavarian court officials) that governed Greece until King Otto’s adulthood (1835). As Kalyvas notes in chapter III: Building, “power was entrusted to a ‘troika’ of Bavarian regents whose charge was to create the new state from scratch”. Though the author compares the development of Greece’s political institutions with the “experience of postcolonial state-building” and adopts a rather ironic mode/trope when refering to the great expectations of Bavarians - i.e. the selection of Athens as the new state’s capital and their «ambitious city plan”- he concludes suggesting that “rather than seeing these efforts as pathetically inadequate, we should recognize them instead as the painful and messy initiation of nothing less than a formidable enterprise”. In this vein the author responds to contemporary criticisms of the Bavarian period- i.e. as “thinly distiguished colonialism”-, pointing out that “such a negative perception should not distract us from recognizing the extensive amount of groundwork that was accomplished during a very limited time. For example, the introduction of a “completely novel Western legal system altered Greece in profound ways”. The “limited success” of Bavarian experts and policy advisors to “Europeanise” Greece in the early 19th century pinpoints Dimou’s article in The Guardian (2015) commenting on the nasty Greek-German relations during the crisis era. Author of the best seller The Misfortune of Being Greek (1975), Nikos Dimou, by shifting the emphasis from political conflict to cultural differences between the two countries, speaks about the deep rooted victim mentality of the Greeks, the “long history of attributing their problems to foreign powers”, whilst he reiterates the locus classicus of academic literature about the peculiarities of the national character in terms of negativities4: “Greece is [not] a typical

4 On modernization narratives and negativities, see Antonis Liakos, “Greek Narratives of Crisis”,

Humaniora, Czasopismo Internetowe 3, 3 (2013), 79-86: “Another version of this narrative is that Greece is not, nor is yet, a “normal” society and that the crisis is a sign that it should be put on the track to normality. These narratives are deeply engraved by the dichotomy between the model and its deformed imitation. This idea wasn’t new, but was connected to the debate on Greek peculiarities, just after the end of the dictatorship. The idea behind Greek peculiarities is that the history of Greece is a sequence of historical absences. Greece didn’t have an aristocracy, didn’t pass through the Enlightenment, didn’t have an industrial revolution, or have a genuine working class, didn’t have liberalism, and so on. From this point of view, the crisis acquires a new meaning. It should be the last chance to end Greek exceptionalism”.

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European nation. It has not experienced all the ideological movements that formed western Europe. There has been no Renaissance, Reformation or Enlightenment. It is a border country between east and west. According to Samuel P. Huntington (…) it belongs to an entirely different civilization (…). Being insecure because of their problematic identity (east-west/ancient-modern) [the Greeks] tend to reject change and restructuring”.

Another example of how academic scholarly works about Greece’s modernization are being popularized and disseminated by old and new media is the comment made by an anonymous blogger, who, by reviewing Kostis’s study, making use of its arguments whilst seeking the present relevance of the Bavarians’ role in Greece’s state building, writes the following: "The external mediator, as Kostis says, was a necessity after all. It might have been a historical gesture of gratitude and recognition if the Prime minister (…) traveled to Munich in order to lay a wreath in the shrine of the first king of the Greeks, Otto, thus recognizing the indebtness of Greek people to him and to the Germans of that era who strived hard to set up a state ex nihilo and made Greeks descend down from the acorns [from the trees] and enter the era of civilization”.

The conflict between different fractions of Greek intellectuals (modernists, traditionalists, nationalists, Marxists, etc) who, despite their differences share a deep-seated frustration and dissatisfaction with the actual historical outcome of the early 19th century modernization project- becomes the dominant perspective through which Greek history is contested in the public field and augments the multiple references to failed reform attempts, unfulfilled potentialities, broken promises, unfinished revolutions and lost opportunities. The tendency of modernist narratives to equate resistance and reactions towards the policies of knowledge elites with civic immaturity and cultural backwardness is countered by populist, nationalist or quasi-Marxist, narratives adopted by those members of the New Class who show a qualified concern for the people or the folk buffeted by the modernizing projects of political influential intellectuals.

What matters here is not the absence of comparative studies that could shed light to the fact that neither this conflict is distinctively Greek, nor the discourses about the contruction of a state ex nihilo and the resistance to modernization are a Greek peculiarity; neither the question whether the modernist imaginary could be approached through the concepts of ‘double consciounsness’ and ‘split identity’ (Guha, 1997) or the “frog perspective”, an outlook of people looking upward from below (Wright, 1993; Gilroy, 1993) could be pursued here.5

It would suffice here just to note that Greek modernization narratives, in their main motifs, appear rather typical of the American evolutionary, teleological versions of modernization theory which were developed in the postwar years and became particularly cherished among USA’s social planners and policy makers (Latham, 2000). Within this context, the abstract, one sided constructs of social theory (modernity-tradition,

5 These concepts are appropriated by postcolonial criticism with reference to the ambivalent

attitudes (both love and hate/rejection) of subordinate identities towards an idealized object.

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Gesellshaft-Gemeinshaft, etc) were turned into reified, essentialized categories, instruments for large-scale social engineering and policy reform/intervention in the ‘Third World’ and thus, were used for the justification of various civilizing missions/development projects (Watt & Mann, 2011; Scott 1999).

The attempt herein is just to bring into reflection a subject that seems to go rather unnoticed in contemporary literature and has not attracted the attention of scholarship yet: in what ways modernization narratives address modern expertise, evaluate the relations of lay and expert knowledge, and approach rationality -perhaps “as a Geist-like, disembodied wraith”? (Gouldner, 1976). In this regard, it is worth noting that, centering on an opposition between an indigenous, stagnant, resistant tradition and an imported from the West benign modernity, the modernist master narrative revolves around the drama of Western-educated reformers, an avant-garde, modernizing elite that appears to have been caught in a previous, lower stage of social evolution, trapped inside a backward society resistant to change, progress and reforms.

The feelings of profound disappointment, discontement and frustration afflicting Greek modernizers/intellectuals are often imprinted on the titles of some relevant works.

After reading Dimou’s best seller, the reader is able to appreciate the sublte irony, sarcasm and bitting descriptions of the Greek character given by the author, and mostly to make sense and reconstruct along with the writer’s position, the full title of the book: not The Misfortune, or the Misery, or the Unhappiness of Being Greek, but rather The Misfortune, Misery and Unhappiness of Being a Greek Intellectual. Similar feelings, worries and anxieties are accomodated in a collective volume’s title edited by Othon Anastasakis and Doriah Singh, (2012), Reforming Greece: Sisyphean Task or Herculian Challenge? As noted in the introduction of the volume, “A core underlying theme is that the reform process in Greece can be understood as a series of missed opportunities or at best the adoption of half-baked, temporary measures. Much like the struggles of Sisyphus, the task must be repeated again and again”.6 Although shifting the attention from the object of reform, to the “technology of reform”, the problem of resistance occupies the interest of Monastiriotis and Antoniades’s (2009) paper, “Reform That! Greece’s failing reform technology”. Though sharing the feelings and concerns of the frustrated reformer, the paper, “seeking to understand the specific pathologies that lead to the production of inefficient reforms that do not allow concerned actors to accept them”, pinpoints to the need for reforming “the reform technology of the country” and aspires or at least, alludes to a flawless, rational design: “We claim that a significant number of reforms in Greece have failed (…) because they were ill-thought, ill-prepared and poorly substantiated and designed. In these cases the problem was not to

6 Whilst Sisyphus becomes the tragic hero of the failed reforms, the rebellious heroes of the Caul

village, the battles of Asterix and Obelix against Caesar, represent a counter-perspective: “These Romans are crazy”, the “Greek Gauls” will be shouting today in Brussels hoping Caesar backs off, Come to Greece and meet the Rebellious Heroes of the Village of Asterix” (The European Sting, July 7, 2015).

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be found in the stages of reform communication, negotiation or implementation, but in the stage of their conception and design”. Departing from Sisyphus’s pessimism and prospectless plight and moving towards Prometheus’s optimism, the concluding remarks of Reform That! are summarized as follows: “despite the relatively large number of think-tanks and policy/research institutes (…) there is ample evidence that Greece’s policy-making technology (…) suffers from an almost complete lack of engagement with scientific expertise and the relevant knowledge-base (...)”. The engagement with the above contemporary literature and the arguments about Greece’s modernization seems to provide a fertile ground for future scholarly investigation.

It stimulates an interest for the past which, taking into account the fallacies of presentism, could be fruitful for a history of the present and relevant to present day phenomena and problems, such as, the increasing socio-political influence of certified experts in social policy in spite of the generalized skepticism towards the massive centralizing forces within modern society and the wariness regarding the overconfidence about their beneficial role; the lack of self-awareness regarding the non-absolute, empirical and always tentative nature of scientific knowledge; the contested status of professionals after the postmodern challenge to claims of their superiority; the managerial pressures to produce knowledge with practical results, that is, the trend to value knowledge only in terms of its instrumentality; and last but not least, the discussions about the non-professional nature of political action and the tensions between epistemic elitism and democracy (Latour 1999; Pels, 2000).

The potential value of engagement with contemporary scholarly and public discussions about Greek history is, among others, that it could generate new questions that might shed light to some aspects of the past that have gone unnoticed so far –such as, the role of Westernized experts in the modernization process, especially in countries which are located by development studies in the “periphery” or the “semi-periphery”.

The aforementioned scholarly pursuits, policy concerns and contemporary public debates motivated the interest for early 19th century with a view to recover from the dust of the archive the critiques of Fr. Thiersch and G. Finlay. Their work, and mostly the spirit that underpins many of their commentaries, the frame of mind that directs their critical gaze on early modern Greece (the Bavarian Regency and King Otto’s advisors and counselors) does not draw its poetry neither from the myths of Prometheus nor Sisyphus, but rather from the stories of Mr Frankenstein (in Mary Shelley’s novel) and Captain Ahab (in Melville’s Moby-Dick).

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Where does the Cameraman Fit in?7

When disillusion set in, the recipients were blamed, never the plan

A. G. Hopkins, cited in Carey Watt, Michael Mann, 2003

Even if some architects see themselves as God, none would be foolish enough to believe they create ex nihilo (…). Show me one single artist who would denigrate the complex material he is shaping into form to the low point of ‘infinitely plastic’ clay —certainly not potters. Show me one single programmer who would think in full command of the software she is writing. Have you ever seen a cook who could account for a cheese soufflé by defining its delicate and crusty substance with the simple notions of ‘plasticity’, ‘resistance’ and ‘pure obedience to the forces of nature’?

Bruno Latour, 2003

One rather commonly shared belief, a background assumption that seems to bind the discrourses on 19th century Greece’s modernization is that when a planning agenda of reforms failed, the failure is always due to the ‘object’ of reform.

Whenever the desired transformations (the remodeling of social life, the ‘building’ of modern institutions, military, economic, political, or the importation of foreign, western legal systems) ran into adversity and impending difficulties arose, those difficulties were never blamed on the social planner and the rational design itself, but on the ‘object’s’ passive reactionary resistant character. i.e. on the autochthonous’s incorrigible nature.

Thus, there seems to be a tendency to not question the expert, the scientific knowledge of the state’s advisors; to spare the irrationalities produced by grand utopian visions and the top-down driven modernization project from querries and investigation; to avoid to probe or scrutinize factors such as the cognitive style, the context-sensitive, practical rationality of the expert’s design. The proclivity to problematize solely the ‘object’ rather than the subject, the agent of reforms, that is, the reformer’s plans, knowledge, vision and projects, has a long history in the development of social sciences. A disinclination to self-reflexivity and self-critique –namely, the tendency toward the equation of sociological knowledge with absolute certainty, a discomfort with ambivalence, ambiguity and uncertainty (especially in periods understood and experienced in terms of crisis), a reluctance to take into consideration the limits of expert knowledge and advise- is part of our theoretical traditions. This disclination has marked the history of human sciences at least since their beginnings, since the era of professionalization, when their perspective was shaped by the framework of positivism and utopian socialism.

7 The question is formulated by Alvin Gouldner in The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1982) where, instead of objectifying the Other, he opts to objectify the Self, and thus, sets Marxist intellectuals, “an invisible class in historical process”, as the object of Marxist analysis.

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The methodological dualism between subject and ‘object’ can be traced back to the works of Auguste Comte and Saint Simon whose schemes of utopian social engineering promoted the idea of scientific based politics that would make society “governable”, in terms of Foucault, or “legible”, in James Scott’s words. To put abstract theory into practice, to remodel society according to an ideal vision, a preconceived goal or a geometrical plan informed by “a general theory of the arts of construction”, as Comte envisioned, became the particular destination of a new class of social engineers whose task has been identified with the power-knowledge syndrome. 8

8 In contrast to natural sciences engaged in a relation of subject to object, Giddens maintains

(1984) that social sciences are more engaged in a relation of subject to subject. On these grounds he argues that expert theoretical knowledge, the formation of concepts and theories in the humanities and social sciences, are dependent on lay knowledge, and thus, are not isolated from common sense and everyday contextual practices. The role of the observer, the expert in social sciences, is dinstictive insofar “social phenomena can be changed intrinsically by learning and adjusting to the subject’s understanding”; so, what Giddens identifies as “boudle hermeneutic’ requires “a mutual interpretative interplay between social sciences and those activities compose its subject matter”. On the critique of managerial sociology, liberal technologies and Methodological Dualism that “focuses on the differences between the social scientist and those whom he observes, see also Gouldner (1970): A Reflexive Sociology (…) warns that it is not only forces external to the intellectual life, but also those internal to its own social organization and embedded in its distinctive subculture, that are leading it to betray its own commitments. It is based upon an awareness that the academician and university are not simply put upon by the larger world, but are themselves active and willing agents in dehumanizing of this larger world”.

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Both Outsiders and Insiders: 9 To make something Out of Nothing or To make Out of Something? Before proceeding to the next sections, and as a provisional ending to this part, it might be worth quoting a short comment from George Finlay’s writings10 that bear witness of the intellectual affinities of the British scholar with a particular strand of Enlightenment, that which Dennis C. Rasmussen (2013) addresses as The Pragmatic Enlightement when referring to the liberalism of Montesquieu, Hume, Smith and Voltaire. Not only in “Greece Again” published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1850), but also in A History of Greece (1877), Finlay makes some critical comments about the Constitution of 1844 granted by Otto after the 3 September 1843 Revolution. His observations deserve special attention given that modernization narratives regard “early parliamentarism”, commonly found in industrialized societies, as a problem in Greek history, as one of the sources of Greece’s failed or ersatz modernity. Finlay’s arguments, however, seem to put into test the binary between the “mature West” and the “immature East”. His arguments thus run contrary to modernization narratives according to which the peculiarity of Greek history consists in a “discrepancy between “constitutional texts and reality”, in the “building” of “a liberal constitutional democracy” onto an “essentially premodern society” and in tensions “between state and society” attributed to factors such as, the “Ottoman legacy” or the “lack of maturity of the civil society”. 11 Responding to similar arguments adopted by the intellectual and political elites of his age, the Scottish scholar and historian notes: “What were the actual means of government in the country, and the nature of the parochial, communal, borough, provincial and central administrative institutions, which had enabled Greeks to maintain a war against Sultan Mahmoud and Mahommed Ali for seven years? Enthusiasm and patriotism are good words in a debate (…); but common sense tells every one that a people must possess some administrative institutions, in order to persist in a desperate struggle for many successive years. If Greece had (…)

9 Merton (1972), writing about a polemic within academia redarding the priviledged access to

knowledge by the Insider (whose priviledged access is justified in terms of experiential knowledge, as being a member of the group under study), or the Outsider (whose priviledged position is due to cultural distance and detachment), challenged the extreme positions of both doctrines.

10 For a recent, innovative, historically informed and context sensitive approach of Finlay’s work,

see Christopher Szabla, George Finlay’s Greece: Between East and West, Senior Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Columbia University, (Professor Susan Pedersen), Spring 2007.

11 George Katrougalos, The Constitutional History of Greece, in the Balkan Context,

http://www.cecl.gr/RigasNetwork/databank/REPORTS/r1/GR_1_Katrougalos.htm. See also Thanos Veremis (1983), as well as his own relevant comments in Skai Channel’s documentary “1821”, 4th episode: The tail coat and the fustanella: 18.42-17.48 min: “If one chose to study Greek institutional history, s/he would be tempted to consider Greece as the most advanced country in the world. However, what (…) is not visible and yet should be recognized, is the prevailing mentality of a society which is very far from all this (...)”.

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institutions in 1832 (…), if the foundations of political government already existed [then the duty was] to see that these foundations or local institutions were improved, and not destroyed, by the new Government (…).

[Instead of restoring and reforming the existing institutions], the establishment of what is called the constitutional form of government was implemented, [namely],“one of those compilations of political common-place which the lawgivers of our age are ready, at a week’s notice, to prepare either for Greenland or China, was translplanted from French pamphlets, and entitled the Constitution of Greece” (…). The section of the constitution which determines the public rights of the Greek citizen, omits all reference to those rights in his position as an inhabitat of a parish, and as a member of a municipality and provincial district. Indeed, the interests of the citizen in so far as they were directly connected with his locality and his property, were completely neglected, and only his relations with (…) the central government were determined (…). The constitution (…) declares that all Greeks are equal in the eye of the law (…). To render all the citizens equal before the law, something more is necessary that to say that they are so [underline mine].”

Navigating into a constellation of similar criticisms made in the early 19th century with regards to the modernization project, whilst trying to approach them from a perspective not dictated by the strifes between nationalists and anti-nationalists, between Pro-Europeanists and Anti-Europeanists, between locals and cosmopolitans or traditionalists and modernizers, we could rethink the ex nihilo modernization thesis along the following lines:

• The questioning of the dualism between a stagnant, passive, backward tradition and a benign modernity;

• An approach of the attempt to “build’ political institutions ex nihilo as a constructive-destructive task that resulted in one of the most cited ambivalences of modernity -- the tension between a mass of uprooted individuals, detached from the fabric of social life on the one hand, and a centralized state-bureaucracy, on the other hand; in other words, the works of Finlay and Thiersch could shed light on how an authoritarian modernization set off the colonization of lifewolrd, the destruction of mediating structures, the demolition of those available forms of social association that could provide the basis for “civil society” and the idea of “self-government”;

• The redefinition of the so called reactions to modernization, not as stemming from

a previous stage of historical development as Greece’s modernization narratives assume, but as a modern active response, not to Westernism in general, as many scholars inspired from Marxism or postcolonial criticism might argue, but rather to the statism, utopianism and elitism of “high modernist planning” as approached in James C. Scott’s, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed;

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• The challenge to abstract rationalism and radical constructivism, and more specifically, to the two complementary intellectual traditions, German romanticism and French positivism, whose fusion inspired the intellectual and political elites who set as their mission the formation of the Greek state and the planning of Greece’s modernization;

• A critique of modern abstractions and the questioning of a top down approach to

freedom, equality and civil rights as the product of an intellectual expert design, as disembodied ideas stemming out of the head, the will or command of a Legislator, who brings them to the people with a view to liberate them from darkeness;

• A systematic and detailed historical investigation of long duree institutions, an

interest for a bottom up approach to freedom and civic ideals, as grounded on concrete experience, embedded in actual social practices and fabricated via human interaction and social exchanges during the revolutionary war (1821-28) when social mobility, the emergence of new rising social strata, undermined the traditional social hierarchy as self-evident and given, as not amenable to change;

• A critique of the tabula rasa illusion of modern expertise, a skepticism towards

the beneficial role of abstract, generalized knowledge in politics, a preference for historized contextual approaches along with a respect for tradition as metis (Scott), for the local, practical, unreflexive, lay knowledges capable of being adapted to particular circumstances of time and place. 12

“They know nothing of the interior, nothing of the language, nothing of the peasantry; nor have they an idea (…) of the acquired knowledge of the mass of the people”.

Challenging the elitism and scientism of social planners and reformers, Samuel Gridley Howe, in his preface to George Finlay’s The Hellenic Kingdom, underscored the gap between theoretical and practical knowledge from which he believed Bavarian policy suffered.

12 I am referring here to tradition as metis, in contrast to both -the anti-traditionalist, elitistic,

modernizing approaches as well as their antithesis, the anti-modernizing populist, idealized, essentialized abstract constructions of nationalism. Metis is a term used by James C. Scott with reference to Aristotle’s phronesis (craft or art), a kind of response to Platonic utopian constructivism.