Quotes from this article:
Those experiments have followed different techniques. In reflecting on the Arab revolts underway I would like to propose three basic techniques of enlightenment. 1) An authoritarian technique, in which an enlightened elite, using the state, takes it upon itself to modernize an immobile, unruly mass presumed to be governed by arcane traditions; 2) a liberal technique, in which a modern state is seen to be crucial, but its elite is neither presumed to have monopoly over enlightenment nor power to make such a claim; 3) an anarchist technique, in which enlightenment is seen to come most reliably from below, through transformations of civic traditions rather than through state power or social engineering.
The common presumption that enlightenment has generated an alliance of knowledge and power describes in fact only one of those three techniques, namely the liberal technique, in which knowledge complements the otherwise partial power of the state. Knowledge here organizes a civic link between state and society, and in the process reduces for the liberal order the costs of policing and repressive needs. The two other techniques, by contrast, tend to set power and knowledge as substitutes rather than allies. The authoritarian techniques assume that having power furnishes the best means to accomplish any good, in which case there is less compelling need for knowledge, since power alone will do. Whereas in anarchist techniques, suspicion of the merit of power as means to ends, highlights the compensatory value of knowledge alone as the best means.
From a contemporary revolutionary perspective it is easy enough to recognize the two basic failures of the now exhausted authoritarian path to enlightenment: 1) that path has more magnified the authoritarian than the enlightened aspect of the state; 2) the authoritarian path hid from view a crucial social fact being asserted now openly in Arab streets everywhere, namely that enlightenment comes from below, not from above; that society has already become far more saturated with ethos of enlightenment than has its government.
But in the case of the Arab spring, we witness a rare likelihood that revolutions are reaching precisely their intentions: even governing orders now agree openly with virtually all revolutionary demands, except moving out of the way of the revolution.
In Islamic history, for example, what would later be called "anarchism" or "liberalism" occasioned old realities in which a substantial part of the civic order either lived independently of the state or generated serious limits to the reach of the state in society.
The crumbling authoritarian enlightenment, with its vanguardist and paternalist propositions, lies in a number of dynamics: vanguardism, as we already knew from Frantz Fanon, often expressed lack of knowledge by the vanguard, who eventually become ruling elites, of their own society. In its later phase, vanguardism became pure paternalism: distance of governing elites from the people became lack of interest in knowing the people. Amidst this disinterest the old vanguardist authoritarianism is expunged of its anti-colonial, progressive, Third Worldist claims; and out of its ashes there emerges a cold, paternal authoritarianism, disinterested in any form of peoplehood, and governed openly by an avowed marriage of business and state elites.
Okay, I need to spend a lot more time with Frantz Fanon. He keeps coming up in so many things I'm reading.
Enlightenment as a goal could be approached using different techniques. In the grand revolutions of the Arab spring, the liberal interpretation of the enlightenment fights an authoritarian interpretation, with the aid of an anarchist method--that is to say, with the aid of familiar civic traditions, now discovered again to be natural venues for expressing the organic and embedded nature of the enlightenment. This is why these revolts are entirely against the authoritarian state, but not against any old cultural tradition.