Session 4: The Boundaries
of Political and Cultural Change
Chair: Isabel Sendlak
Patrick Spero
- The Legacy of the Paxton Boys: The Restructuring of Colonial Pennsylvania’s
Political Landscape
University of Pennsylvania, USA
This paper examines a little known rebellion that occurred
in the winter of 1763 on the frontier counties of Western Pennsylvania.
The revolt began in Lancaster County with the massacre of a small Indian
camp, but this small, singular act eventually transformed itself into
a colony-wide political movement. By January 1764, a group of frontiersmen,
calling themselves the Paxton Boys, began a march on Philadelphia hoping
to have their grievances redressed. The march quickly disbanded when
the rebels submitted an outline of their grievances to a small diplomatic
consortium of prominent Philadelphians, led by Benjamin Franklin, sent
by the Pennsylvania legislature to appease the marchers.
The return of the rebels did not end the turmoil within Pennsylvania;
instead, the revolt supplied a platform for many throughout the colony
to attack the Quaker-led legislative body. Within months over sixty
pamphlets discussing the revolt, its causes and ultimately, the political
structure of the colony were published, making the Philadelphia presses
the most active in the British colonies. The revolt, by itself, accomplished
little, but its aftermath, embodied in the pamphlets, demonstrates the
long-term impact on the minds and actions of Pennsylvanians. Pennsylvanians
quickly developed a new political party, an awareness of the legislative
tyranny, and a call for royal assumption of the colony’s government.
The legacy of the movement, therefore, does not lie in the frontier
rebellion, the march of the discontented west, or the support it received;
instead the true legacy of the Paxton Boys’ Rebellion lies in
the ability to harness and unify the discontent into a new political
landscape through a widespread and vast pamphlet war that maintained
the spirit aroused with the rebellion and culminated with a major political
revolution in the election of 1764. The results of this election, which
crossed cultural and ethnic boundaries, served to legitimize and consummate
the political bonds formed by the pamphlet war.
Sergey Govorukha
- Political Cultural Models of Ukranian Student Youth: Shifts and
Constants
Sociology Department, Central European University, Warsaw
The youth of any society is perhaps one of the most significant and influential actors of socio-political process. Probably peculiar interest arises in case of the student youth as the incarnation of everything that relates to the productive innovations, changes for good and fulfillment of previous generations’ aspirations. Political culture of Ukrainian student youth undergoes through dynamic changes on the length of last ten years period. The vehicles of changes are forming institutional framework of society and something that can be referred as influence of immensely absorbed cultural pressure of those countries that serve as reference point (particularly some Western European countries and partially United States). Cultural interpretation of youth behaviour and world outlook can shed a light on further national socio-political development because it is exactly the youth that would construct political reality of tomorrow Therefore, the paper examines essential elements of Ukrainian student youth political culture and provides contours of prognosis how political culture will transform under the influence of institutional environment and what implications it will bring vice versa.
Theophilus Ogbhemhe - A Reconstruction is Immanent: A Critique of Paulin Hountondji’s Contribution to the Search for an African Identity Debate
One of the major problems confronting Africa today
is that of the identity of the African people, and indeed, the Black
people all over the world, that is including those in the Diaspora.
This loss of identity can be attributed to certain factors. Essentially
however, the fact of the colonial experience of the African cannot be
overemphasized here.
One of the consequences of this is that the African today has, in the
words of Olusegun Oladipo, lost confidence in himself. Or to put it
in the words of the great African novelist, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o,
Africans are a people who have lost confidence in themselves.
This paper is an attempt to see how African philosophers have contributed
to this debate on what Chris Uroh calls cultural dislocation of Africans;
it examines specifically the contribution of one of the leading African
philosophers, Professor Paulin J. Hountondji.
In line with the above, the paper will examine Hountondji’s conceptualization
of the problem as well as his solutions to it.
This paper is divided into four sections. The first section shall attempt
to clarify concepts and to locate the problem of the identity of the
African people. The second section shall focus on the attempts made
by some African philosophers to find solution to the crisis of identity
the African has found himself. For most of those philosophers, the crisis
of identity in which we are is because we have lost our roots and by
retracing our steps to discover where and why things went wrong, it
will be possible to build a viable and secure African social, political
and philosophical life.
In the third section, the contributions of Paulin Hountondji shall be
examined. The objective will be to analyze Hountondji’s conceptualization
of the problem of the African identity, and to examine what he calls
a way out of the crisis, which for him is a sort of reconnection to
the West instead of a disconnection. Since philosophical arguments are
not proofs, they do not usually suffice to silence everyone or anyone
who holds views contrary to that which is being urged. Based on the
above, the fourth and last section, which will be a critical exposition
of Hountondji’s views on the search for an African identity, will
examine the flood of criticisms that have been proffered against Hountondji’s
contribution to the crisis of identity debate. A conclusion that will
make reference to the views discussed in the previous sections will
bring the paper to an end.