A smile of satisfaction must have appeared on Abraham Kuyper’s broad face while reading the letter that he had just received. It came from distant South Africa, and communicated congratulations from the governors of the Paarl Gymnasium on the opening of the Vrije Universiteit three months previously.

‘Devoted as we are to pure Reformed doctrine’, wrote chairman S.J. du Toit, ‘even at this southern outpost of the world, it gives us reason to glorify God’s holy name for placing this doctrine on the lamp stand through your work’.

Pious and hearty words, to which Kuyper could not but say ‘amen’. Besides, S.J. du Toit was not just anybody. Despite his youthfulness – he was not yet 34 years old, ten years younger than Kuyper himself – he was an extremely influential man in South Africa: he was a clergyman and author, founder of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (1875), editor in chief of Di Patriot (1876) and founder of the Afrikaner Bond (1879). Everything pointed to the Afrikaners taking the lead in South Africa in the course of the following years, under the powerful leadership of this front man for the population of Hollandsch-Afrikanen at the Cape Colony. Moreover, Du Toit was Reformed, an opponent to liberalism in the NGK and in society in general, and an advocate for Christian schooling. In the letter of congratulation from Du Toit, therefore, Kuyper could read a declaration of support from a brother, a kindred spirit and an ally. The ‘Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam’ was opened on 20 October 1880 with a splendid speech by Dr Abraham Kuyper, who had been newly inaugurated as professor of theology and the first rector of the university. He was then nearly 43 years old, editor-in-chief of the weekly church newspaper De Heraut and daily newspaper De Standaard, and chairman of the Anti-Revolutionary Party. He was the leader and chief ideologist of Calvinist orthodoxy in the Netherlands, both in the church and in politics. Kuyper’s speech was entitled ‘Souvereiniteit in eigen kring’ (The Principle of Sphere Sovereignty): the Vrije Universiteit would practise scholarship free from influence by either the state or the church, but in accordance with Reformed principles. According to Kuyper, this was because society consisted of many ‘life spheres’ which were not equal but were of equal value, each obeying its own law of life (levenswet), each free and independent, sovereign; scholarship was just one of the many spheres – but all were subject to the sovereignty of God. With this principle of sphere-sovereignty, Kuyper check-mated the principle of the all-powerful state, and declared the independence of free civil society, thus allowing the realisation of God’s sovereignty in every area of life.

Much as it was a typically Dutch product, Kuyper saw a wider-reaching future for the VU. Because ‘just like scholarship, the Reformed faith knows no national borders.’ Du Toit’s letter seemed to confirm this: ‘Believe us, we are following you with our interest, we are supporting you with our prayers, and we trust that many of South Africa’s sons will yet continue or complete their studies at the “Vrije Universiteit” and thus also bring over to us some of the fruits of this blessed Institution’. Du Toit continued by asking more concretely about the possibilities for South Africans to study at the VU, the recognition of their South African diplomas and their in-streaming into the curriculum.

Du Toit also drew Kuyper’s attention to South Africa in a much broader sense, however. In the letter (written on 3 January 1881), Du Toit also wrote: ‘Please also take note of our affairs. A war has now broken out in Transvaal, for which there is no end in sight. We (the Hollandsche Afrikaners) have from the very beginning prayed for help with our brothers from Transvaal, because they are being oppressed and are being done injustice. […] Would you be so kind as to use your influence to stimulate the Brothers in Holland to hold a day of prayer for Transvaal?’

Du Toit’s request was not even necessary. At the time that Kuyper received his letter, he was, besides being the rector and a professor at his university, at least as active as a journalist and politician, and already very much engaged with events in South Africa.

Kinship

The Netherlands had not really been too concerned about its descendants in South Africa after the Cape Colony was handed over to the British in 1806/1814. What happened there, far from the civilised world, between Brit, Boer and Bantu during the course of the nineteenth century was little known. Very little was known about the Great Trek and the Boer states of Natal, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. People’s perceptions were largely shaped by the tales of missionaries, who were critical of the Afrikaners and their patriarchal attitude to the indigenous population. The latest news, of strong differences of opinion between the Transvaal Boers, also strengthened this negative perception. The progressive state president, Thomas Francois Burgers (a liberal and former minister who had studied in Utrecht) got nothing but uphill from his own people. No wonder that, out of desperation, he could do no more than protest verbally when England annexed the Transvaal in 1877.

This annexation was unavoidable, many Dutch thought at the time; and it was for the best for the Transvaal. After all, ‘a country that gave no rights to its non-white inhabitants [could] not possibly flourish’, was the harsh pronouncement by the Missions lecturer from Rotterdam, J.C. Neurdenburg. The annexation was ‘unfortunate and unfair, although not entirely undeserved’, in the opinion of Professor C.M. Kan, a geographer from Amsterdam. The protestation against the annexation published in 1877 by the professor of international law at Utrecht, G.W. Vreede, thus received little support or attention.

It was quite another matter, however, when, in the final weeks of 1880 and the first of the new year, the papers reported that the Transvaalers had rejected British rule and had reassumed their independence – and, having done so, had furthermore successfully defended it. Unanimously, the Dutch came out in support of that ‘little tribe, that the mighty Great Britain could purge out and chase away, but never overwhelm’. The news that ‘the Boers have stood up’ (as a local newspaper worded the general opinion) had barely arrived, when the history books were re-opened, and old memories rekindled. The enthusiasm amongst the Dutch for their kin in Africa grew by the day. Regardless of what may or may not have been true about earlier criticism, national sentiment and a sense of justice required the Dutch to firmly back their kin in the Transvaal.

The little country of the Netherlands, surrounded by the great powers of France, England and Germany, all competing with one another, had long doubted its own future. In Asia it was reminded daily that its colonies were entirely dependent on England: ‘perfidious Albion’, as school history books, full of Dutch-English sea battles from past centuries, called it. The uprising of the Transvaalers and their fearless actions caused a wave of enthusiasm in the Netherlands for these descendants of the Sea Beggars (‘Geuzen’) of the 16th century. The victories of the Boers – descendents of Oud Nederland and therefore kin – gave the Dutch self-confidence: faith in themselves and in the future. A clear nationalistic feeling arose across the full spectrum of the population. Excited dock workers in Amsterdam even spoke of boycotting English goods.

Abraham Kuyper shared the traditional, not very positive view held by the Dutch of the Boers in South Africa, and he was not motivated by any particular sympathy for the Transvaalers either, when in 1877 he wrote in De Standaard that the Netherlands should protest against the British annexation of the Transvaal, and that the Tweede Kamer (Lower House of parliament) should assume a motion ‘condemning every act of illegal occupation’. To him it was about the independence of the Netherlands, that, after all, found its highest guarantee in treaties and international law. When it comes to the Transvaal case, he wrote, ‘the other states will remember this cautiousness to our detriment’. Kuyper no longer believed in an independent Transvaal. He therefore barely paid attention to the delegations from the Transvaal that travelled to London in 1877 and 1878, and who also called at the Netherlands. South Africa would not leave Kuyper alone, however, and various articles in De Stan­daard testify to the fact that he was only provisionally finished with the country yet. The annexation meant a difficult dilemma for the Dutch, wrote De Standaard at the end of May 1877. ‘A sense of honour and national pride require the Netherlands to take steps in London on behalf of our Afrikaner brothers; but cautiousness and self-interest force the Dutch to resign themselves to the Boers’ fate’. Kuyper advised the Transvaalers not to carry out an armed revolt. Given the circumstances, this stood no chance of succeeding, and would certainly have resulted in much suffering. Simultaneously, he begged the British government to recognize that there were no valid legal grounds for the annexation. He also placed much emphasis on the rights of the Transvaalers to speak their own language, namely Dutch. Kuyper’s position clearly reflected his admiration for the liberal British opposition leader William Gladstone, who was expected to follow a more pro-Boer policy once he won the elections in 1880. The central role played by the Dutch language in all the articles further indicated that Kuyper was freely giving vent to the nationalistic sentiment that was current at the time.

During the course of 1880, Kuyper became more and more interested in South Africa. He came into contact with like-minded experts such as Frans Lion Cachet, who that year returned to the Netherlands after years of serving as a minister in South Africa and with G.J.T. Bee­laerts van Blokland, who had old family ties with South Africa. He also had two meetings with S.J. du Toit.

In the second half of 1880, De Stan­daard followed developments in South Africa very closely. Already on 2 December 1880, it reported that the people of the Transvaal were going to give up on patient resistance. Indeed, from 8 December, a people’s congress gathered at Paar­dekraal, which was to solemnly declare the Transvaal’s independence on 16 De­cem­ber 1880. Kuy­per was standing ready to support these kinsmen.

The leading article of De Standaard on New Year’s Eve of 1880 reported that Kuyper had since overcome all doubt. These kinsmen in the Transvaal had been unjustly ‘robbed of their independent national existence by the English’s lust for power and conquest’. Now they were following ‘the brave example of the heroes of ‘13 [the trio that freed the Netherlands from French rule in 1813] and, under Kruger’s rule, revolted against the invading pseudo-government’. This was no revolutionary act, wrote the anti-revolutionary leader, it was their inalienable right; they had simply done their duty. The English, after all, had ‘broken in as tyrants, and only stopped for a moment before the might of carbines and artillery’. Further, the Transvaalers had not resigned themselves to being annexed for one minute after 1876, unlike ‘the non-Transvaaler, who came from elsewhere, that modern preacher Burgers, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Dutch Lion’.

Kuyper thus placed himself firmly behind the Transvaalers, and quickly became one of the leaders of the pro-Boer movement in the Netherlands. He became co-founder and an influential committee member of the Nederlands Zuid-Afrikaanse Vereniging (NZAV, Dutch-South-African Society), which was founded on 11 May 1881.

Shortly after the founding of the NZAV, Kuyper hinted here and there that he wished to pay a visit to South Africa. A personal acquaintance with the country and the people was attractive for a number of reasons. His theological and church-political views were also much discussed in the churches of Dutch origin in South Africa. They even seemed to be gaining in support and influence. Liberal opponents sneered that Kuyper was planning to ‘make the Transvaal into a theocratic state’. Others – and not only those who were like-minded – actually asked for Kuyper’s help:

You and your [orthodox-Protestant] friends can help here. A new nation is being born here, that will resist the insufferable monotony of English civilisation, and will anyhow deliver South Africa from the Yankee type that appears to be about to flood the world; a nation that speaks Dutch, albeit with an African pronunciation.

The man who wrote this was certainly no admirer or follower of Kuyper. Dr E.J.P. Jorissen was a liberal minister who had abandoned his faith and office and had sought to build up a new existence in the Transvaal; in 1879/80, he had served as secretary to the triumvirate who led the rebellion. ‘Your Vrije Universiteit’, wrote Jorissen, ‘can become the theological seminary of Afrikaans theologians and jurists’.

Given the means of travel of the day, a visit to the Transvaal could easily require four or five months. Evidently Kuyper thought that De Standaard and the Vrije Universiteit could miss him for that long. Naturally he could regularly send copy, and in those days the academic year included a lecture-free period of several months, and began very late in the year. The daily routine as editor-in-chief and rector could be taken over by others while he was away.

Kuyper may have been the founder of the VU, its standard bearer and most important professor, but he was not the one in charge there. The Board of Governors of the VU met on 10 June 1881. The minutes noted:

The chairman wishes to inform the rector that an absence of at least four months, as such a journey would require, would be detrimental to the welfare of the university in its present state.

Kuyper was not permitted to travel to the Transvaal; and he acquiesced to the governors’ wishes, and did not travel to South Africa.

Principles

On 5 April 1882, Rev. Frans Lion Cachet wrote to Kuyper, ‘Have you read Du Toit’s programme thoroughly? […] England will lose South Africa or the Afrikaners perish for good’. Indeed there was every reason to study the ‘Program van Beginselen van den Afrikaner Bond’ (Programme of Principles for the Afrikaner Bond) very carefully.

Du Toit had recently started becoming an increasingly interesting contact to Kuyper. In a letter dated 3 August 1881, Du Toit reported to him that the Transvaal government had asked him to become superintendent of education there. He had hesitated for a long time before accepting the appointment. After all, it would imply giving up his ministry, the editorial of Di Patriot and his role in Cape society. It was only at the end of September 1881 that he finally accepted the post, because he had ‘in fact been entrusted with the youth and thus with the future of the Transvaal’, as he wrote to Kuyper. He was a convicted proponent of Christian education, and here he was being given the chance to develop an educational system in this mould. Besides, as he wrote to Kuyper at the end of November 1881, ‘Dr Jorissen was standing ready to push through a modern one’.

This selfsame Jorissen had (incidentally along with the president of the Orange Free State, J.H. Brand) also botched the negotiations at the Pretoria Convention, Du Toit told Kuyper in the same letter. With wise policy, however, he added, there was still hope of a better outcome (after all, the convention was provisional, a final treaty on the Transvaal’s independence would have to be drawn up later). It is quite clear that Du Toit had himself in mind for the role of minister of that wise policy, in full confidence that he would become the most important adviser to the Driemanschap and the intellectual leader of the young Republic of the Transvaal.

As a kind of advance on his future position (he only stepped into office on 13 March 1882), Du Toit asked for Kuyper’s cooperation in obtaining suitable school books (which Kuy­per promptly sent through the NZAV). Du Toit also promised to ‘rather address our negotiations with Holland to you, than officially to the Committee [i.e. the executive committee of the NZAV]’. This was in response to a request by Kuyper, who was attempting to channel all contact between the NZAV and the Trans­vaal via himself and a few like-minded Reformed associates – to prevent the Netherlands from exporting ‘liberal civilisation’ and ‘modern’ emigrants to the Transvaal. S.J. Du Toit had also warned against this danger: the country needed good immigrants, ‘but please no modern ones. The Boers are still real Reformed folk’. Du Toit held his farewell sermon on 22 January 1882 before the Northern-Paarl congregation, and while still on his way from the Cape to the Transvaal (and to his new job as superintendent of education for the South African Republic), he sent a political programme to Di Patriot, with a request for its publication. On 1 March, representatives of various Afrikaner organisations would meet to talk about unification and to establish a new political organisation under the banner of the Afrikaner Bond, which had been founded by Du Toit in 1879. According to Du Toit, the Afrikaner party needed to have ‘a clearly stated Programme of political principles, so that friend and foe may find out what they want to know’.

In his cover letter to Di Patriot, Du Toit freely conceded that his programme was not original. He had ‘used the Programme of the anti-revolutionary or Christian-historical party in the Netherlands, adapted to our circumstances, because it is drawn-up in such a competent manner, and the essence of our national character has much in common with the Dutch people’. In mid-1882, he also wrote to Kuyper himself, ‘I have adapted your “Ons Program” for South Africa, made it “Ours”‘. To this he added, in reference to the debate within the NZAV about the relationship between the Netherlands and South Africa: ‘My main objective is: connection between the greater part of the Dutch and the South African populations’. Also the commentary on the programme that Di Pa­triot requested (and that was only completed in February 1884), would be written ‘making use of [Kuyper’s] commentary, naturally’.

Historians have drawn far-reaching conclusions about this acknowledged fidelity of Du Toit’s Pro­gram to Abraham Kuy­per. Du Toit is said to have introduced the Afrikaners to neo-Calvinism, and that this then also became the ideological basis for Afrikaner nationalism, because ‘this neo-Calvinism was clearly tailored to fit Nationalist Afrikaner prejudices’. Also supporters of the policy of separate development later called it a result of neo-Calvinist thought, and in particular of Kuyper’s notion of sphere sovereignty. However, the decisiveness with which these conclusions were drawn was not proportional to the attention that was given to studying Kuyper and Du Toit’s political programmes. Did they actually have the same message and function? Was Du Toit actually a slavish follower of Kuyper?

Approximately half of Du Toit’s Program van Be­gin­selen (Programme of Principles) was indeed copied word-for-word from Kuy­per; firstly concerning the articles on the characteristics and foundation of Christian politics, i.e. the authority of God and His ordinances with regard to politics and obedience by the government to these ordinances; and secondly, those articles that dealt with the task and functioning of a Christian government (including how it is to be distinct from the church). Further, there were also a few articles on a number of important derived principles: on education (neutral, public education as a supplement to confession-based education), on jurisdiction, the maintaining of public decency, public health, financial policy and taxation.

More succinctly worded than in Kuyper’s Program, but identical with regard to content, were the articles explicitly forbidding the state from interfering in internal church affairs, and on the autonomy of the party. All these articles expressed the main ideas of anti-revolutionary politics, a strongly normative political philosophy. As Davenport indicates in his standard work on the history of the Afrikaner Bond, this made Du Toit’s Pro­gram unprecedented in South Africa. With regard to contents, however, Davenport shows little appreciation for Du Toit’s ‘flights of fancy’: his Program ‘dis­close[d] a theo­cra­tic view of the rela­ti­ons between Church and State, and a doctrine of divine so­ver­eignty which left no room for a sove­reign le­gis­la­ture or even a sovereign people and regarded exis­ting politi­cal authorities as divinely ordained’. Davenport clearly read the Du Toit/Kuyper text without taking Kuyper’s actual political development into account. Kuy­per did indeed recognise God’s sovereignty in the political sphere, but principles such as sphere sovereignty and ‘the church as an organism’ did not imply a ‘theocratic view of the relations between Church and State’; on the contrary, Kuyper would have understood nothing of a sentence such as that cited above. You cannot have politics without transcendence, he stated repeatedly, but this does not mean that people have no responsibility as citizens. Kuyper was a democrat.

What actually made Du Toit’s Program really startling and challenging, was that he linked this anti-revolutionary political vision to his deepest political ideal, namely the Afrikaner identity and its destiny, ‘a united South Africa, under its own flag’. From the very first article, Du Toit made clear what kind of changes his programme had in mind for South Africa:

The national party represents the essence of our national character in South Africa, as it was formed by the transplantation and development of a colonisation by Europeans, mainly Dutch and Huguenots, on African soil; and desires to develop this in accordance with the needs of our times.

This would not be by means of ‘the principle of a lawless people’s sovereignty’ – this was rejected by Du Toit as well as Kuyper, since God is the only source of sovereign authority – but, he also added, ‘[we also reject] all unlawful foreign rule’, words that did not lose their threatening tone when in the second half of the article Du Toit calls the existing division of South Africa, including ‘the British sovereignty [in the Cape Colony and Natal] that has become an historical way through divine providence’. Because

... the Republican Form of Government [too] [is] rooted in history as being under God’s guidance, developed by the Emigrant Boers, recognised by British Treaties, and confirmed as such by the Constitution of both Republics [the Orange Free State and Transvaal].

However, to all these forms of government the basic rule from article VI applied:

The national party, disapproving of the idea that only one form of state can be the only right one, and obedient to the present one, believes that the final purpose of our national development is a united South Africa, under its own flag.

The truth was out: South Africa was to be for the Afrikaners. The words are Kuyper’s, virtually article by article, but their contextual meaning and application are Du Toit’s.

Like most people in the nineteenth century, Kuy­per was a nationalist. As an organic thinker, he contrasted the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’. A nation was an organism, but the state was just a construction, said Kuy­per. Nations were not immutable, they did not exist in and of themselves, and did not even appear to be the highest form of social development: ‘Out of the family, the extended family naturally develops, and out of this again the tribe; and there is no imaginable reason not to believe that out of these a nation and the world [of nations] could have developed’. The United States of America showed that a new nation could arise from very different groups of people. In that context, not even ‘physical origins’ (race) formed a significant obstacle. Kuy­per’s worldview was based on a multitude of independent national identities, all of equal value; his political philosophy claimed universality.

Kuy­per was therefore a moderate nationalist. He always accepted the small Dutch state to be the given context in which he acted. The nation was therefore not central to his thinking. ‘Sovereign authority flows from God Almighty to all parts of His creation’, he wrote in Ons Pro­gram. In naming the various organic spheres, he skips the nation and jumps straight from societies in villages and cities to the state. The state meant far more to Kuyper than the nation – but then as a necessary evil, a makeshift measure. The state was ‘a surgical dressing made necessary by sin’, Kuyper postulated as the rebellious leader of a minority in the liberal Dutch state, thereby recognizing his greatest opponent. His principle of sphere sovereignty implied a fundamental attack on state power. In opposition to the state, he placed not the nation, but the freedom of the various sectors of the population. Central to his thought was the ‘re-Christening’ of Dutch society. Yet not the nation, but the church (the church as an organism, so the Christian organisations), i.e. the Christian sector of the population, was to bring healing.

Kuyper thus also accepted the differentiation and the pillarisation of the Netherlands. He openly acknowledged that ‘three national tendencies wrestle in the bosom of the Dutch nation’. Against the Catholic and the revolutionary (liberal), his Pro­gram represented the anti-revolutionary side. In comparison to the other two basic types, it was ‘the most richly developed, the one that has broken out the most dazzlingly, ripened into nationhood in every sense’, and thus the essence of the nation.

However, when Du Toit used these same words (‘The national party represents the essence of our national character’), they came to mean something completely different. They form the opening sentence of his programme, and they preach revolution and rebellion; in 1880, there was no such thing as an Afrikaner people, never mind an Afrikaner state. Du Toit proclaimed a new creation. It was about ‘the forming of a unique South African national identity’. After all, Afrikaners were not Dutch, French, German or English; it was not England that was their ‘home’, nor was Holland, France or Germany their native country – it was South Africa. It was simply the restatement of a line from a song from a few years previously: ‘Ider nasi het zijn land’ (‘Every nation has its country’) – the same political desire that was considered to be a universal law and a reality yet to be realised.

Naturally, there were people with a different view in South Africa too, Du Toit acknowledged. They were for instance followers of the ‘Jingo Party, that only wants to use South Africa as a conquered territory or milch cow to England, and want nothing better than the oppression and destruction of our nationhood’. Or they were in agreement with the party in the centre, ‘that does desire some political freedoms, but still head-shakingly rejects the idea of forming an own nationality as an unachievable ideal, or place it in the distant future’. All this was unacceptable to Du Toit, however. They were neither Dutch nor English, but Afrikaners, as history had proven – and history was written by God’s hand, as even the most liberal mind knew.

‘We do not allow foreign morals to be forced on us, we want to grow and develop, but then only on our own land; we want progress and we want to complete our state-building, but only in accordance with our national character.’ Hence, in Du Toit’s view, a true Afrikaner Bond would seek strengthening of national independence ‘in the recognition, preservation and use of our national language; in the education of our neglected farming population; in the promotion of knowledge of our history; in the nurturing of a sense of freedom and patriotism in our population, especially amongst the youth’.

National independence was a cherished ideal in the nineteenth century. Ensuring good care for ‘de doode en le­vende strijd­krach­ten’ (dead and living war resources – Kuy­per’s way of describing material and manpower in the army) received an adequate local translation by Du Toit with the demand for an efficient civil guard. Du Toit followed Kuyper wholeheartedly, in the knowledge that at the end of the day, independence was not dependent on the material, but on the moral strength of a nation.

Comparing this with the corresponding article in Kuyper’s Program shows how differently Du Toit and Kuyper worked this out. Kuyper sought strength for the preservation of national independence ‘in the strengthening of awareness of the law; in the promotion of knowledge of our history; in the confirmation of our people’s freedoms, in an experienced diplomacy’. Kuyper wanted the christening, the moral arming of the nation – hence also his plea for its instruction in an epic version of the country’s history that could inspire the people, offer a sense of unity and teach dependence on God.

For Du Toit it was all about the forming of an Afrikaner nation, its own language, its identity, patriotism, and sense of freedom. Promoting the history of the people was to him a question of nurturing ‘knowledge of the battle of their fathers against oppression and violence, and for justice and freedom’. Du Toit repeated here what he had written in Die ge­skie­de­nis van Ons Land in die Taal van Ons Volk (The History of Our Country in the Language of Our People). This book, published in 1877, was the first to give ‘a common background to the Afrikaners in the Republics and the Colonies’, wrote F.A. van Jaars­veld; and further:

In the ‘national’ history, Afrikaans speakers throughout South Africa are intrinsically united. The contents boils down to the battle between Boer and Brit, […] an exposure of the British way of behaving […] emotionally charged, […] nationalistic, with the aim ‘to acquaint our children from an early age with what their forefathers have already endured and suffered in this land where foreigners now wish to trample us’.

In his Program van beginselen, Du Toit continued in a similar vein. ‘A genuine national, patriotic “A History of South Africa, for use in schools” is thus also urgently needed’.

At one point in his commentary on his Program van de Nationale Partij, Du Toit conceded that ‘we are making an opposite choice to our Dutch anti-revolutionary friends’:

For the improvement of conditions and for the tempering of the existing injustice, over there they are asking (in contrast to the liberals), for a reduction in the census; and we over here, in contrast to the Phillippians and equality crowd, for a raising of the census.

Du Toit’s commitment with his proposal to limit suffrage was once again the independence of the (Afrikaner) nation, which was under threat due to social differences and discrepancies. The English, the ‘Jingoes’, were, after all, in the habit during election time of stirring up the non-white voters against the national party. The constitution of the population in the Cape voting legislature would unavoidably lead to dominance by the non-white majority, according to Du Toit. The best would be, he thought, to end equality at the ballot box completely, but in the meantime increasing suffrage could exclude ‘the lowest riff-raff and kantienvolk‘ – as well as the poor whites and immigrants (‘foreign fortune-seekers’).

It does not take much imagination to see that Du Toit shared the social and racial prejudices of his time and his environment. The second-last article in his Program also demonstrates this. Here, mention is made of ‘native tribes under their own chiefs’, incidentally to be distinguished from ‘the single [i.e. not living in tribal context] coloured workers, living dispersed among us’. In this regard Du Toit called for a consistent policy to be developed and implemented throughout South Africa, without interference from London. The point of departure was to be that: ‘For the development and prosperity of South Africa, it is essential that the more civilized and developed minority not be dominated by the greater majority of full-blooded or half-blooded barbarian natives’. No voting rights for ‘natives’ and ‘coloureds’, therefore, ‘at least due to the present immature condition in which they find themselves’.

It is clear that with this article, Du Toit was attempting to remove a very concrete stumbling block that – given the political differences in South Africa in 1882 – prevented any kind of unity. Frans Lion Cachet, who had lived in Southern Africa for many years, immediately saw it, and told Kuyper: ‘The article on equality is very carefully formulated’.

By this he would first and foremost have meant the common denominator that Du Toit had found for action concerning the whole of South Africa, both colonial and republican: rejection of the imperial factor. However, that same judgement also applied to the subordinate clause in the stipulation, which withdrew the right to vote from non-whites, i.e. ‘at least due to the present immature condition in which they find themselves’. After all, this subordinate clause expressed both sides, ideal and reality, in terms of which the West experienced its superiority at the time.

Kuyper was at least as much a product of his times and his environment as Du Toit was, and he too considered European colonialism to be a beneficial development. Much can be said about Kuyper’s prescription of a colonial policy bound to a moral obligation, and it is clear that he did not rise above the colonial mentality of his time. Yet he did mention a political and moral obligation towards those colonised and free preaching of the Gospel, while there were no such idealistic terms in Du Toit’s writings. He expected the development of black Africa, but nowhere in his Program is there a call to stimulate this development.

At its founding congress in Graaff-Reinet on the first of March 1882, the Afrikaner Bond had neither the time nor the desire to discuss Du Toit’s Program. It was distributed for private study, and nobody ever came back to it, notes Davenport in his history of the Afrikaner Bond. Kuyper’s anti-revolutionary politico-social programme never found expression within the Afrikaner Bond.

Continued cooperation

In a letter dated 6 Augustus 1883, Du Toit asked Kuyper to come to London, as the Transvaal delegation (President Kruger, General N.J. Smit and Du Toit himself) would be conducting negotiations with the British government there from the end of October. ‘Your presence, if at all possible (a week would be sufficient) would be most pleasant and a great support to us’, he wrote.

Kuyper accepted the invitation, despite all the differences in opinion that had arisen in the interim. His contribution was to consist mainly of the publication of news and commentary in De Standaard. Kuyper was only in London for two weeks at the start of the discussions, at the beginning of November 1883; he could not honour repeated calls by Du Toit to once again cross the North Sea, as he had too much work and was also ill for a time.

A part of his stay in London was spent writing an Ad­dress to the Mem­bers of the Anti-Sla­very and Aborigines Pro­tection Socie­ties, which was to form an important part of the delegation’s publicity campaign.

This was prompted by the refusal by the Lord Mayor of London (also a member of parliament), to receive the Transvaal delegation. When addressed on this refusal by the Trans­vaal Inde­pen­den­ce Co­mmit­tee, he wrote – on stationery of the Aborigines Pro­tec­tion Society! – that he did not wish to shake hands with representatives of a republic to which the words applied, ‘Its infant lips were stained with blood; its whole exis­tence has been a se­ries of rapa­ci­ty, cru­el­ty, and murder’. This image of the Boers as slave owners and cruel masters was widespread in England, and the ‘negrophiles’, as Du Toit called them, had considerable influence on public opinion and the Colonial Office. With regard to the Transvaal question, England’s imperial ambitions happened to correspond well with the philanthropic factor. Warnings were then also received from organisations such as the Lon­don Mis­sio­nary So­ciety and the Abo­rigines Protec­tion So­ciety not to forget England’s role as a protector of black Africans from the racist Boers. It is therefore quite understandable that the delegation wanted to counter this influence as much as possible. Kuyper’s Address, written on behalf of the members of the delegation and dated 12 No­vem­ber 1883, appeared in The Times on 13 November, as well as in the form of a separate publication.

The Address demonstrates Kuyper’s qualities as a writer and propagandist. It also shows that he had fully assimilated the new image of the Boers as pioneers of civilisation in black Africa, an image that had originated less than two years previously with the Transvaal uprising of December 1880 (at least in the Netherlands). According to this perception of the Boers, they were victims of a radical liberal theology of equality, and of British colonial hubris. Kuyper proved to be unmistakably influenced by the argumentation of the Dutch pro-Boer authors P.J. Veth, R. Fruin and in particular Lion Cachet’s Worstel­strijd der Trans­va­lers (The Struggle of the Transvaalers). After all, no nation, wrote Lion Cachet, has in the last few years been ‘so incorrectly judged as the Boers from the Transvaal. No heart was shown for their suffering, no eye for their future, no comprehension for their meaning […]. In religious circles they were abused as oppressors of Kaffirs and Hottentots; in the world they were mocked as some kind of white Kaffirs’- and yet they were ‘the pioneers of civilisation in South Africa’, pioneers ‘so that Africa [may be] civilised and the heathen nations won for Christendom’.

In the Address, aimed at an international public, Kuyper thus continued the dispute with the missionary friends and their prejudice in favour of the blacks and against the Boers which he had already been conducting in De Stan­daard for a number of years, based on Lion Ca­chet’s information and writings. Without for a moment abandoning the view that all men are equal, Kuyper wanted simultaneously to do justice to the differences in development between nations and races; to him, the superiority of Christendom and civilisation were unquestionable benchmarks in this connection. Kuyper’s high moral argument hinges on the sentence in which he launches into his political attack: the organisations who were being attacked – alas! – did not always succeed in realising their salutary influence in Africa either. That could make them humble and oblige them to acknowledge the undeniable fact that ‘various methods exist for civilising the natives’.

The Address began by aiming over the heads of the members of the Anti-Sla­very and Abo­ri­gi­nes Pro­tec­tion Socie­ties to ‘the Chris­tian pu­blic of Great Bri­tain in gene­ral’. After all, some people in England believed that ‘the Trans­vaal Chris­ti­ans [understood] less tho­roughly than Christi­ans in [that] coun­try the duty which they owe[d] to­wards Indians, Negroes, Kaffirs, or any other co­loured race or na­tion’.

‘We are sometimes even accused’, the members of the Boer delegation continued (in Kuyper’s words), ‘not only [of] keep[ing] the natives in a degrading positi­on, but also [of] en­croach[ing] upon their personal liberty and oppos[ing] their conver­sion to Chris­tianity, yea, even that we have made our­selves guilty of the most hor­rible atro­cities against their women and chil­dren’.

But nothing was further from the truth, wrote Kuyper in their defence, as a number of examples proved: when the Boers arrived in the Transvaal, there were just 20,000 natives, impoverished people who cowered in holes and caves and lived in constant fear of attack by neighbouring tribes, who stole their livestock and murdered their women and children. Now there were 700,000, happy with the Transvaal legislature, which in many respects was ‘exemplary’. After all, the Transvaal government had ruled against polygamy, forbidden the trade in slaves, strictly regulated the registering [‘inboeking’] of children, and had rescued a considerable number of black children who would otherwise have lived a miserable life. Assault of natives was punished, and female natives were not the victims of fleshly desires, unlike in many other colonies; all soldiers – including native auxiliaries – were to adhere to the rules of engagement as used by civilised nations; and the government was preparing measures for the extension of mission work to the natives.

At the beginning of January 1884, Du Toit wrote in a letter to Kuyper that he believed that the publication of the Address had had a positive effect. It had ‘prevented much writing in the newspapers about the Native question’. But in the same letter, he asked for Kuyper’s help in a sequel: a strong appeal to the Christian public, presented as a plea for the poor Kaffirs and against their errant advocates. Would he not like to come over again for a few days for this purpose?

Du Toit had already brought up the writing of another defence, because, ‘The Ne­grophiles continue to make mischief’ and their influence on the Colo­nial Office was noticeable. Kuyper could not come over, however, and a second Address never materialised.

Cooled fraternity

On 27 February 1884, the London Convention was signed; on the 28^th, the members of the delegation left for a visit to the Netherlands^, where they received a hero’s welcome. A ‘vast crowd’ welcomed them on arrival in Rot­terdam. They made a carriage tour of the city, the mayor gave a welcoming speech, followed by enthusiastic applause. From there, they travelled in a special train to The Hague, where the party continued, with days full of receptions, soirées and dinner engagements. Ministers, MPs, high-ranking officials, diplomats – everyone wanted to pay their respects. Prince Alexander hosted a meal and King William III and Queen Emma gave the Afrikaners a special audience. On 6 March, they left the Hotel des Indes in The Hague to go to Amsterdam. There the now familiar ritual was repeated. The delegation stayed in the Netherlands until 17 April; and wherever they went, the Dutch people cheered.

It goes without saying that Kuyper played an important role in the reception that the delegation received. He even played a leading role in Amsterdam. He booked their hotel, was on the welcoming committee, his daughter Johanna was one of the four girls who welcomed the delegation with a bouquet of flowers, and his son Herman, who was studying at the VU (and who twenty years later would act as thesis supervisor to Du Toit’s son), was appointed as their messenger boy. Kuyper too gave a soirée, followed by a dinner hosted by ‘his’ VU students.

One of the highlights of the delegation’s stay in Amsterdam was the meeting held on 11 March 1884, convened by the labour movement Patrimonium, where Kuyper was the speaker.

The great hall of the [building] Plan­cius, richly decorated with flags and greenery, with shields and trophies, was filled to the brim with men and women, their faces radiating grateful joy at the fact that they could now see the delegation in their midst: [Paul Kru­ger] the president of the South African Republic with [general Nicolaas Smit] one of the heroes of Spits­kop.

At the end of his glowing speech on behalf of Patrimonium, Kuyper handed General Smit a Transvaal flag embroidered with the words, ‘In God zullen wij kloeke daden doen!’ (In God shall we do brave deeds!). With it, Smit had to solemnly swear ‘that never, whatever the future may bring, may this flag land in the hands of the British’.

The fortunes of the kindred Boers gave Kuyper every opportunity to reinforce the self-confidence of the orthodox sector of the population, and to provoke his political opponents, the Dutch liberals. Here in the Netherlands, he cried, ‘we testifiers to the Lord Jesus Christ must sometimes endure harsh threats’, because

The ruling coterie does not grant us our rights … It could very well finally become unbearable for our freeborn Christian hearts and for the future of our children. But even then, have no fear! After all, when we are no longer tolerated as free men here, you could offer us a refuge and a place of rest. If they make it unbearable for our Christian people here, then the core of that people will travel over the sea to Transvaal.

Despite all the rhetoric and good humour, the delegation’s stay was not an unqualified success. Actual monetary support for the development of the Transvaal was difficult to realise. No money could be found for a large government loan, intended, amongst other things, for the building of railway lines, and, in short, the general pro-Boer sympathy was not translated into concrete aid projects.

The delegation’s stay also meant the end of the cooperation between Du Toit and Kuyper. They were unmistakably kindred spirits, and in many regards were similar in personality, but it was almost inevitable that, after an initial period of close cooperation, they would start getting under each other’s skin. They did share a number of convictions and ideals, but they lived under very different circumstances and each had their own agenda.

Their first difference of opinion concerned the reception of the liberal NZAV delegate, Dr H.F. Jonkman, in Pre­tori­a by Kru­ger and Du Toit in 1883, a clear signal by Kruger that he did not want to limit the contact with the Netherlands to members of the Reformed movement. The next conflict was about the Vrije Universiteit. During the delegation’s tour through the Netherlands, interest was shown by a number of universities in training students from South Africa. As superintendent of education, Du Toit responded positively to these comments. He also took up the proposal by the Leiden historian Robert Fruin to set up a South African Academy in the Netherlands. Students from the Transvaal would be free to choose where they wished to study in the Netherlands, but the Academy would examine them, and the Transvaal government would recognise their degrees.

Kuyper immediately understood what this plan meant. Incidentally, Fruin’s name alone was enough to raise his hackles. The Leiden historian had for years been a recognised opponent of anti-revolutionary thought, and had quite recently made condescending remarks about the Vrije Universiteit. To Kuyper, the acceptance of Fruin’s plan would mean ‘the total neglect of independent Christian higher education’. It led to a personal disagreement between Kuyper and Du Toit, and the two men were never reconciled. With ‘a wound in the soul’, Kuyper took leave of Du Toit on 12 June 1884, a few days before the final departure of the delegation from the Netherlands. It was the last word he ever addressed to Du Toit. The letter that Du Toit sent from England in which he responded to these words of farewell (‘I remain the same in person, aim and aspiration’), went unanswered.

Christian-National

Kuyper’s objection in 1884 to the Fruin plan was, in essence, that it could only result in a South African Academy that would ‘be an institution by the Government’, and therefore just as ‘unprincipled’ as the other, neutral universities. In 1891, when President Kruger again requested cooperation, Kuyper again placed all emphasis on the fact that so-called academic neutrality was not neutral, but in fact highly principled: it trained people ‘who, unnoticed but firmly, lead country and people away from God and His laws’.

One of the constant features in accounts of the situation around Kuyper and South Africa is that friend and foe alike credit him with being the spiritual father of Christian National Education in South Africa, and all the problems that this led to in the 20^th century, with Du Toit as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice. The reality was, however, in many respects quite different.

To Kuyper, the Dutch and the Afrikaners both belonged to a single Reformed Dutch nation; they were both ancestral and spiritual kin in one, united in a single battle, namely against anti-national liberalism. Thus the mutual unity and support had to take priority. It was precisely on one of the most central points in the common battle, namely on the matter of education, that Du Toit forsook that unity by embracing the Fruin plan. Over time, Kuyper discovered more and more actions by Du Toit that betrayed this unity, like for instance his fervour for Afrikaans and against Dutch. The emphasis on Afrikaans (according to Kuyper ‘a crude spoken language, a kind of decayed Dutch’) weakened that solidarity. Further, reports from the Transvaal stated that Du Toit was becoming more and more anti-Dutch, and was on a footing of war with the Dutch faction in Pretoria. Slowly, Kuy­per came to the conclusion that Du Toit’s main concern was not their common faith, but Afrikaner nationalism. Proof of this to Kuyper was Du Toit’s continued involvement with the Afrikaner Bond, even after it had rejected his Programme of Principles. ‘The nation has completely taken priority [with Du Toit]’, noted Kuyper. ‘The struggle on principles has fallen away. It is now only “[Afrikaans-]Dutch” against the “English” ele­ment’. In Transvaal education too, Kuyper saw the prevalence of the national over the Christian.

Christian education, also higher Christian education, required independent, private education, Kuyper had learned in the schools struggle in the Netherlands. Unlike the views of people who were supporters of public education for theocratic and nationalistic reasons (it was said that government was to protect the Protestant character of the Dutch nation), Kuyper stated that education was not the job of the government, and that education should be free from the influence of state and church, sovereign in its own sphere. But in the Transvaal another course was being followed. The university that Kruger so wanted to found was to be a state university, just as Preto­ria already had a Staats­mo­delschool (“model state school”), a Staats­gymna­sium (State Gymnasium) and a State Girls’ School: all state institutions, just as Du Toit in 1884 judged a State Academy based on Fruins’s suggestion acceptable. Du Toit’s schools act of 1882 had, incidentally, already determined that higher education would be a matter for the state. In practice, the government of the Transvaal also had tremendous influence on primary school education.

Du Toit is commonly credited with being a convicted supporter of independent, Christian education. He grew up in the circle of Rev. G.W.A. van der Lin­gen (1804-1869), who was the NGK minister in Paarl for nearly forty years: an animated, somewhat eccentric and charismatic personality. During his studies in Utrecht, he was influenced by the Reveil and he continued to closely follow developments in the Netherlands. Van der Lin­gen fought against liberalism in the church and society, and, with equal fervour, against Anglicisation. He believed them to be two sides of the same evil, the spirit of the French Revolution. Unlike the education legislation in the Cape, which referred religious education to outside of school hours and prescribed a non-confessional, neutral schooling, he advocated independent schooling that was Christian-national and church-affiliated.

Du Toit was a student at the Paarl Gymnasium, a school that had a special place in Van der Lingen’s heart, and that played a major role in the history of the development of Afrikaner culture, being a clearly Christian, Dutch-language institution that stimulated its pupils to be proud of their identity as Afrikaners. One of Du Toit’s first publications was a little book entitled De Chris­te­lijke school in haar verhouding tot kerk en staat (The Christian School in its relationship to church and state) (1876). It was a vicious attack on the Cape’s state education system – and not even so much because he called it un-Christian, sectarian, secular and humanistic: Du Toit rejected state education on principle. Christ entrusted the teaching of the youth to the church; the state had hijacked the right to education by revolutionary means – after all, the world power is by its very nature anti-Christian: just take for instance the building of the Tower of Babel, the image from Daniel 2, and the second beast from the abyss, the false prophet in the end times.

Du Toit’s views, strongly influenced by his love of prophetism and chiliasm, were supported by quotes from a whole host of international witnesses, including a number of Dutchmen, such as A.W. Bronsveld, J.J. van Toor­enen­ber­gen and J.H. Gun­ning. Du Toit’s solution was short and simple: the church should reassume responsibility for education and training. It should not only baptise the children, but also equip the parents to keep the promise that they are required to keep in accordance with the Baptismal Service formula. Each congregation should have one or more church schools, under supervision and patronage of the Church Council.

In De Christelijke school in haar verhouding tot kerk en staat, Kuy­per’s name is only mentioned once. From this work it would appear that Du Toit was not familiar with his writing. But six years later, Du Toit literally quoted word-for-word the paragraph on education from Kuyper’s Program in his Pro­gram van Be­gin­se­len for the Afri­ka­ner Bond (as described above). The rejection of all interference in education by the anti-Christian state is thus replaced by the line stating that the state has no entitlement to provide education, and that the state school should at most be an exception. Further influence by Kuyper can be seen in the primary role Du Toit assigned to parents in the education of children, not only instead of the state, but also instead of the church. During the same period, Du Toit also designed an Education Act for the Transvaal. On 11 April 1882, he wrote to Kuy­per, ‘[A]ny tips concerning the new Schools Act (entirely entrusted to me) would be most welcome’; but there is no evidence that Kuy­per complied with this request. The act was based on ‘the principle, that it is the parents’ task to ensure the education of their children’; the government would limit itself to ‘the encouragement of private initiatives with the citizens through monetary contributions’.

Rather inconsistently, the act expresses the desire ‘that the various congregations and church councils themselves, as far as possible, take the initiative in the founding of schools and the election of school boards’. The act also recognises that ‘religious education as such is the responsibility of the Church and not the state, thus the government only requires that, in all government-supported schools, civil education be given properly, in a Christian spirit’. That meant that the lessons were to be opened with prayer and a Bible reading, and church history was to form part of the curriculum, but dogmatic confessional education was forbidden. That was the churches’ responsibility.

Du Toit’s vision on education had thus undergone a number of changes since 1876. State-supported free education ‘in the Christian spirit’ was also not exactly what the Dopper Paul Kruger had in mind. Faithful to the Afgescheiden tradition, he wanted church-run confessional schools – the view held by Du Toit in 1876. Kruger gave in to the will of his superintendent of education, however.

After revision by N. Mansvelt (1892), the Transvaal schools act no longer included the encouragement to church councils to found schools at all: an omission that was a ‘significant change in front’, to quote Dr A.H. Lug­tenberg. The act incidentally also strengthened the government’s grip on the schools and school boards. In practice, therefore, the Trans­vaal schools were general Protestant-Christian Afrikaner National schools, with tuition in Dutch and with an emphasis on language and history – Du Toit himself agitated for a good history textbook. The schools were Christian-national, because they were to teach a Christian nation.

It is therefore not that simple to assign to Abraham Kuyper the role of spiritual father to this Christian-national education. On certain points it differed unmistakably from what Kuyper envisioned, looking more like the Christian-national ideal of people like Beets and Gunning, Bronsveld and Van Toorenenbergen – conservative champions of a national, Protestant, public education in the Netherlands – with whom Kuyper increasingly clashed.

—

From: Gerrit Schutte – Afrikaner Nationalism and Dutch Neo-Calvinism

Rozenberg Publishers 2010 – ISBN 978 90 3610 168 4

A Family Feud is a revised and abridged translation of De Vrije Universiteit en Zuid-Afrika 1880-2005. Prof. Em. Schutte received the 2006 Stals History Award of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns for the original book.

Translation: Annemarie van der Westhuysen

2005. First, let us consider the discipline’s demography in South Africa. Over the last ten years political studies or political science has been taught in each of the country’s 21 universities. Aspects of the discipline were also taught in public administration courses at polytechnics; several of these institutions are now being amalgamated with universities. Historically, as with other areas of social science, politics as an academic community was sharply divided, socially and intellectually between the English language universities and the Afrikaans medium institutions. Within Afrikaner departments, traditionally, the discipline was influenced quite heavily by American behaviouralist and quantitative social science models and methods and researchers tended to focus their work within the confines of the formal political system (including the structures of ethnic homeland government). At the segregated black universities, departments were often led and staffed by graduates from Afrikaans institutions as well as from UNISA.
In English speaking departments, by the 1980s, Marxist approaches had supplanted traditionally liberal ideas about politics and leading researchers concentrated their attention on popular political movements, emphasising those dimensions of their activities and ideas that corresponded most closely with expressions of class consciousness. In this context, the study of the discipline had a strong historical dimension: indeed at institutions such as Wits and Cape Town the boundaries between a ‘revisionist’ history grounded in Marxist conceptions of political economy and the discipline of politics became very blurred indeed. Today, though legacies of these differences between Afrikaans and ‘English’ institutions remain, the distinctions between Afrikaans-speakers and English language practitioners of the discipline in South African are less important, particularly since the introduction of English language courses at Afrikaans universities.

South African politics departments are small – between five and ten full time staff is normal, though Wits with its separate establishments for political studies and international relations employs more than twenty political scientists. Overall at the universities there are around 200 or so politics lecturers teaching about 10,000 students enrolled in undergraduate courses. This has been an expanding student population: in the aftermath of the ANC’s accession to government politics classes grew swiftly, contracted slightly in the late 1990s and once again grew, a reflection of trends in secondary school matriculation as well as optimistic perceptions among students about the subject’s vocational utility. Most first year politics classes (including those at former elite institutions such as Wits and Pretoria) are now recruited mainly from working class districts in African townships, though Cape Town and Stellenbosch represent exceptions to this generalization.

Traditionally, South African universities undertook very little post graduate teaching in political studies – more in Afrikaans than in English – but essentially politics departments directed their teaching at undergraduates. At Wits, for example, between the Department’s establishment in 1955 and 1990, four students completed PhDs, though a rather larger number undertook the traditional entirely research based Masters degree. This has changed: all universities offer coursework masters programmes in politics and related fields and several have succeeded in registering substantial PhD-enrolments, drawing significant numbers of their post-graduates from SADC countries and elsewhere in Africa. A growing proportion of the post-graduates are black South Africans but in most institutions this is quite a recent trend: the first black South African to obtain a doctorate in politics at Wits graduated in 2000. At the former homeland universities (which remain more or less exclusively black in their intake) their own graduates today predominate among staff in politics departments though their leadership was augmented in the 1990s by senior appointments from universities in other African countries.

Research in politics remains concentrated in the historically white universities. A rough tracery of its intellectual preoccupations and of the distribution between institutions of the most active researchers can be obtained through looking at the contents pages of Politikon, the biannual journal of the South African Political Science Association.

Between 1994 and 2004, and including the first issue this year, 100 articles appeared in Politikon. Not surprisingly, South African politics predominates within the content of these articles. The work on South Africa has three major focuses. Nineteen of the articles concern democratisation and South African progress in the consolidation or deepening of democratic institutions. A second area that has attracted vigorous research is elections: 14 articles explore various recent South African elections and the behaviour of voters, parties and officials during them. Finally, ten articles address different dimensions of foreign policy; these divide equally between those premised on conventional theoretical presumptions in international relations and advocates of ‘critical theory’ who seek a paradigmatic shift away from state centred notions of bilateral or multilateral relations in favour of more emancipatory notions of international citizenship. We will consider briefly, in a moment, some of the key debates in these three areas, democratisation, electoral behaviour, and foreign policy. We can note, now, though, certain key omissions from the topics addressed by Politikon’s authors. Not a single article addresses protest politics nor a specific instance of insurgent collective action, though one theoretically oriented discussion of social movement theory by a Swedish PhD-student appeared in 2000. We know from the longitudinal survey and press data bases compiled by the Wits/HSRC/Vrije Universiteit that popular propensities to participate in peaceful kinds of ‘direct action’ (strikes, demonstrations, land invasions, etc.) did not decline significantly, at least during the Mandela administration, though the geographic distribution of such activity became more dispersed, a consequence of the new sites of political power that were established after 1994. The Durban Centre for Civil Society has emerged as the main centre for serious research on so called new social movements, but its findings have yet to make a major impact in the discipline. Another striking silence in the Politikon research concerns the state and the social relationships surrounding it. Instrumentalist notions of the state as an agency of various combinations of class interest were a major theme in English language South African political studies through the late 1970s and 1980s though approaches that emphasised the state’s degree of social autonomy and the political predispositions of different bureaucratic factions within it (including the army) were beginning to shape political analysis by 1990: even so the completeness of the apparent abandonment by South African political science of class analysis is somewhat startling. In fact, here Politikon’s titles pages misrepresent rather the overall state of the discipline; South African critics of the government’s ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies who assign to the Mbeki administration a comprador role as agents primarily of international capital prefer to publish in Review of African Political Economy, Monthly Review, and, locally, in Dissent. Even in this work though, the local sociology of political power and wealth remains surprisingly under-explored.

Scanning ten years of Politikon suggests that research is quite unevenly distributed among universities. Twenty-one of the articles are from the University of Stellenbosch and Wits staff or students contribute another 18. Cape Town and Western Cape political scientists are also quite frequent contributors. During the period under review the journal published only one article from one of the former homeland universities, by the Nigerian head of politics at Transkei. Only three contributions are from black (African) South Africans, each of them Wits post graduates. Of course Politikon is not an altogether reliable base from which to make generalizations: several other locally edited journals attract a slightly different range of contributors and both the (Pretoria) Africa Institute and the Harare-based African Political Science Review make a point of publishing work by black South African political scientists, much of directed at understanding and promoting African regionalism and pan-African institution building. It is also the case that much of the best local scholarship is published in European and North American journals However, even if this wider range of publication was also to be taken into consideration, the trends in the discipline’s development over the last ten years would not look very different from an overview of the content of Politikon.

So, what are the key issues for South African political scientists in their evaluations of democratisation, in their analysis of elections, and in their considerations of foreign policy, especially with respect to South Africa’s role in Africa?

What claims can be made for South African democracy since 1994? Much of the academic commentary has been negative. UCT’s Bob Mattes notes the failure of the economy to expand at the rate needed to create jobs, persistent social inequalities, a constitution that reinforces executive control over the legislature and hence accentuates centralising tendencies in a one party dominant system. Within the ANC itself, Mattes perceives an ‘increasing tendency’ for ‘party bosses’ to stifle dissent. Alarming constitutional amendments and the use by ANC leaders of state agencies in investigations directed at their rivals in the party round off a prognosis of early ‘institutional decay’. Trends observable in public opinion indicate at best lukewarm support for democracy, especially among the racial minorities and declining trust in political leaders and state institutions. South Africans, pollsters suggest, have highly substantive understandings of democracy, that is they are more likely to view socio-economic benefits as essential components of democracy rather than civil liberties. Compared to citizens in neighbouring countries, South Africans are least predisposed to active forms of civic participation. Such evidence suggests that of democracy’s prospects in South Africa are fragile to the extent that its survival is a function of the popularity of its core values (Mattes 2002).

More in the same vein is widely available and there is no need to relay such arguments in detail here.[1] Among the pessimistic assessments of South African democratic performance and likely future trajectories there are different explanations for why the outcomes of political transition have been so disappointing. One line of argument is to locate the reasons for democratic shortcomings in the deficiencies of the constitutional system, and in particular in the electoral system which provides no incentives for representatives to make themselves accountable to citizens. Another quite widely held view is that neither of the two main players during the negotiations, the ANC and the National Party government, were profoundly committed to democracy and, to cite Pierre du Toit, the ANC in particular was negotiating in ‘bad faith’: assured by their own opinion polls of electoral victory, a temporary embrace by its authoritarian leaders of liberal values was merely a means to the realisation of an ultimately anti liberal transformative project (Du Toit 2001; 2003). In this reading, the ‘progressive colonization’ by the centre of ‘independent checks on executive power’ (Butler 2003: 111) offers increasing confirmation of the ruling party’s ‘hegemonic’ aspirations.

Left wing as opposed to liberal commentaries offer equally gloomy diagnosis of the ANC’s performance in office. Here the ANC’s failings are not so much the consequence of its Leninist heritage but rather the effect of the bad bargain it sealed with multinational capital in the run-up to constitutional negotiations in which leadership supposedly committed itself to accepting the constraints of a globalised market economy and to confining social reforms within the fierce restrictions of a neo-liberal growth strategy. In this view the ANC’s centralisation of power in the executive is a defensive reaction to the growing threat posed by the social movements of the very poor whose expanding constituency is responsible for the withering of the ANC’s own popular base and the general reluctance of citizens to participate in whatever consultative procedures remain within the formal political framework.[2] From this perspective, the local social group most likely in the future to exercise decisive influence on pubic policy is composed of the beneficiaries of black economic empowerment, many of them former ANC office-holders.

My own work offers rather more complicated readings of South African democratic performance. In contrast to the evaluations just cited, I find that with respect to social delivery, the government has generally met citizen expectations. In fact the expanded provision of public goods – including grants and pensions, subsidised housing, clean water in the countryside, primary health care facilities, and so on – has been on a scale that makes the characterisation of government strategy as ‘neo liberal’ fairly implausible. This is an administration that has significantly, since 1994, increased the ‘social wage’ since 1994 and in so doing has impacted significantly on inequality statistics, for state expenditure has been substantially redirected at especially the rural poor.[3] One reason for this is that in 1994, an already quite substantial base for a welfare state was in place; as Jeremy Seekings has noted, from the 1960s onwards the apartheid state provided an expanding range of entitlements to both citizens and subjects (Seekings 2002). These were racially calibrated to be sure, but on a scale that made South African rather unusual in the developing world and which may help explain the pro-active (to cite Charles Tilly) nature of the political claims that black South Africans began to assert from the mid 1970s onwards. The state has expanded, not shrunk, and successful deficit reduction (from in any case a relatively low degree of indebtedness in 1994) makes it likely that its welfare capacity will maintain itself.

Nor do I find the emphasis in some liberal as well as certain feminist analyses of the South African state as ‘patrimonial’ especially persuasive. This is despite the increasingly abundant evidence of venality and rent-seeking among officeholders and officials. In fact it is quite difficult to find conclusive signals as to whether corruption in any sphere is waning or expanding though public perceptions suggest the latter. The apartheid state as it became increasingly demoralised was progressively affected by dishonest misappropriations of public goods and certain patterns of behaviour have persisted; after all in many areas the same officials are in place. My own research suggests, though, that much of the corruption is new, and that it flourishes in precisely those areas in which the state is undertaking fresh obligations to citizens, in housing for example, and that it may be the consequence of changed systems of management rather than inherited traditions, patrimonial or otherwise (Lodge 2002b). It does not exist on a scale that is sufficient to seriously negate any claims about the state’s expanded capacity to meet basic needs: this expansion of the state is, I would maintain, one of the most important political developments since 1994. This is not a system in decay.

I think there are strong grounds for proposing a more optimistic scenario for the survival of the procedural aspects of democracy – generalising from the behaviour of parliamentarians, in opposition and otherwise, the record of the judiciary, and the general vigour of the media. My own recent research preoccupation has been with the development of the party system, surely an indispensable component of a healthy and participatory liberal democracy. So far my data collection and analysis has concentrated on the ANC. I have interviewed at length a range of senior officeholders, but more importantly, with a team of student fieldworkers we have questioned nearly 500 rank and file branch members, mainly in the Gauteng. What have been, so far, our most important findings?

This is not a movement in decline. At the time of our research, at the beginning of 2003, membership was booming at around 400,000 – and the trend continued. Our interest was in kinds of commitments that are required of members. A call by leadership for branches to undertake various kinds of community development work evidently elicited a ready response: about three quarters of the people we had interviewed had been involved in such activities as tree planting or hospital visiting, many several times. A large majority attended monthly branch meetings and about a quarter had been involved in fundraising projects. About a third said they read regularly the ANC’s newsletter. Such data suggested a relatively activated membership and a movement with quite a vigorous local life. Cross tabulating demographic data with branch positions suggested, moreover, a movement that at this level is quite egalitarian: about a third of the women we interviewed held positions on the executive as did a similar proportions of the members who were unemployed. In their responses to open-ended questions we did collect sentiments that suggest that ANC members may be motivated by a mixture of concerns – self interested as well as idealistic – but generally it does appear that the ANC has remained a mass party, and that its activist support remains enthusiastic, not just dutiful. Meanwhile, secret ballots supply a degree of opportunity for members to exercise leverage over leaders at party conferences despite strongly consensual mechanisms in which the crucial electoral dynamic is the bargaining between provincial nomination leaders and national notables. Internal conflicts within the organisation over the government’s reluctance to provide anti-retroviral medication to HIV-AIDS patients supplies one key instance in which leadership found itself compelled to defer to pressure from within (as well as outside of) the organisation. My guarded conclusion from the evidence that I collected was that so far the ANC has managed to hold back the symptoms of organisational degeneration that often characterise dominant parties that face no serious electoral challenge. In so far that strong parties can benefit democracies, my work on the ANC represents a positive finding: South Africa’s party system includes a least one robust organisation.

Is it likely to develop any more? The more obvious trends from a succession of elections that have resulted in ever increasing majorities for the ANC and persistently fragmented opposition might suggest not, at least not in the predictable future. Popular commentaries often echo the predominant academic evaluation of the ‘founding’ 1994 poll as a ‘racial census’ in which, for African voters particularly ‘the charismatic factor appeared the be the single most important motivation’. African voters supported the ANC then largely because of emotional considerations rather than ‘calculations of interests, benefits and costs’ (Johnson and Schlemmer 1996). As Jeremy Seekings has suggested, though, such findings were comparatively uninformed by opinion polling evidence concerning the motivations of individual voter behavior.

Traditionally South African electoral studies tended to assume that voters made their choices largely as a consequence of the collective predispositions of the communities within which they lived with ethnic and (more occasionally) class membership as the principal determinants of electoral decisions. More complicated sentiments that may have prompted voter identification with particular parties were neglected in studies of pre-1994 elections (Seekings 1997). Evaluations of the 1994 poll as a ‘uhuru’ election are reinforced by references to the International Electorate Commision (IEC)’s inefficiency as well as territorially possessive behaviour by parties whose exclusion from their home bases of rival activists apparently enjoyed general support from intolerant voters. The persistence of evident ‘political intolerance’ among citizens as documented in opinion surveys, the ANC’s willingness to use the advantages of incumbency when contesting successor elections, and its success in mobilising almost universal support amongst voters in most African neighbourhoods have helped to maintain convictions that the outcomes of South African elections are largely predetermined by the solidarities and ascriptive identities that arise from historic social conflicts, solidarities that are reinforced by the ruling party’s adroit deployment of patronage.

These sorts of assumptions are at odds with the findings that emerge from opinion polling, which suggested, for instance, sharp declines in party identification across a set of intervals between 1994 and 1998 (when identification with the ANC was down to 38 per cent). The gap between the proportions of polling respondents willing to identify themselves with parties and the persistence up to polling day of sizeable shares of the African voting population suggesting to pollsters that they had not made up their mind about who to vote for have suggested to certain analysts that South African voter behaviour is considerably conditioned by performance and campaigning. ‘Discriminate analysis’ of a range of responses concerning economic trends and political performance collected in a 1998 poll enabled a correct prediction of party preferences without knowledge of the respondents’ races, language or classes. To be sure, South African voters are influenced in their evaluations of party performance to a degree by the communal context in which they live, but this does not predetermine their choices: these are the consequence of judgement and to an increasing extent support for the ruling party is conditional (Mattes, Taylor and Africa 1999).

My own work on elections tends to confirm these suppositions, despite its intellectual base in the traditional preoccupation of South African electoral analysis with the behaviour of parties during campaigning. Both in 1999 and more recently this year, parties tended to emphasise ‘policy and performance rather than identity in their electoral appeals’ (Lodge 1999: 208) with the ANC developing especially sophisticated campaigning strategies with respect to those segments of the electorate perceived to be ‘swing’ voters, especially within the racial minorities. The ANC’s emphasis on door to door canvassing in its traditional base communities also indicate a leadership that did not take loyalty as the guaranteed outcome of ascriptive identities. And with good reason: in my research on the 2000 local elections I used more than 5,000 reports of electoral meetings compiled by a national network of election monitors. Here I found ANC candidates confronted with critical and assertive audiences even in small rural settlements: in the conduct of these meetings there was no indication whatsoever of the deferential style one might expect from the dynamics of patronage ‘big man’ politics; electoral support was quite obviously seen as contractual and conditional on performance. Indeed in these local elections historically white parties were able to make significant inroads into previous ANC strongholds, provided that is that they already had a local organisational presence (Lodge 2001). A huge expansion of welfare entitlements during the course of 2003 was one key to ANC gains in poor communities in 2004, especially in the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) heartlands of northern KwaZulu Natal. Facilitating apparent shifts in African voting choices in the 2000 local elections and in the general election this year were improvements in electoral administration (especially with respect to voter registration) and expanded electoral monitoring as well as a more relaxed local political climate. This year simultaneous canvassing of African neighbourhood by rival teams of activists, impossible in1994, was both routine and tranquil, accepted apparently by residents as legitimate. The Democratic Alliance, the runner-up in the 2004 poll, nearly doubled its support, largely due to new allegiances among Indian and Coloured voters and probably from a few hundred thousand Africans as well. No longer an overwhelmingly white supported party, it faces a formidable task in consolidating it’s very dispersed and socially heterodox electoral base. If we are correct, though, that South African voter behaviour is predicated on judgement and choice, rather than the compulsions of history and communal identity, the DA’s mission to become an African party is by no means quixotic. Much will depend, though, on the success of its efforts to establish a living presence in African communities.

As with evaluations of democratic performance, the academic community that focuses on South African foreign policy is sharply divided. Two interpretations reflect conventional approaches in international relations. In one view, South African policy shifted abruptly in 1994, and since then has been prompted generally by idealist efforts to promote new kinds of democratically-oriented institutional architecture in both continental and global governance and to further a collective search for global re-distributive justice. An opposed understanding is to view South Africa’s external relations as motivated chiefly by realist concerns arising from acknowledgement among policy makers of the instability of the international order and recognition of South Africa’s marginal status within it. From this perspective, South Africa’s priorities should be to align herself with powerful industrial countries and exploit her own status as a sub-hegemonic power on the continent.

Advocates of both realist and idealist prescriptions disagree among themselves about the degree to which an ANC governed South Africa has conformed with one other of these policy prescriptions. Generally speaking, though, the trend among analysts working with these concepts is to suggest that South Africa’s foreign affairs is governed by quite skilful exploitation of its role as a ‘middle power’. Here it joins a group of medium sized regionally dominant states that attempt to enhance their international standing by endorsing ‘multilateral solutions to international problems’ and adhering to conventions of good international citizenship. In Africa this has meant, during the Mbeki presidency, adopting a fairly self effacing position on the continent, to the despair of President Mbeki’s realist critics. The rewards for sensitivity to continental protocols are now evident in the major role South Africa has played in designing successor institutions to the OAU as well as the progress in brokering political settlements in Congo and elsewhere.[4]

This perspective of South African foreign policy as characterised by essentially benevolent principles conflicts with another set of views that stress continuities rather than ruptures with the apartheid era. This view maintains that policy remains bound up with crudely realist conceptions of national interest. In this vein, Thabo Mbeki’s claims to ‘put people first’ in his conduct of foreign policy are only rhetorical. South African democracy is barely procedural and hence to expect a foreign policy that is either formed in a consultative way or informed by people’s needs is naive.[5] The most important social influences on policy makers are conservative and historically entrenched. In a critical appraisal of ‘South Africa’s post apartheid security system’, Peter Vale has noted that too often, South Africa’s relationships with its African hinterland are still influenced by ‘old security habits’, and by its predispositions for ‘constructing southern Africa as an eschatological threat’. This is especially obvious in South Africa’s harsh treatment of African immigrants (Vale 2003). For Vale and other adherents of the ‘critical reflexive’ school in South African international relations scholarship conceptions of national interest, realist or idealist, remain undemocratic and conservative, constrained as they are by international and domestic hierarchies of power and wealth and wedded as they remain to an oppressive matrix of colonially created states and boundaries.

I am not so sure. I am not an international relations expert and have done relatively little work in this area. I have looked recently in some detail at South Africa’s constructive engagement with Zimbabwe and certainly in as much as we can make sensible judgements about its motivations these do seem to accord with a perception of its own role as a middle power that can best exercise leverage on Harare through multilateral continental institutions. However it is also likely that different and conflicting norms or values – informing for example, efforts to promote human rights – may shape policy in ways that make the definition of interests very difficult to fit comfortably into one or other of the dichotomous categories supplied by realist or idealist notions of state behaviour.[6]

My main reservations concerning the new ‘critical theory’ based approaches to South African foreign policy studies are to do with their grounding assumptions about the world we live in. As I hope I have shown, South Africa’s new democracy can make stronger claims for itself than merely conformity with its procedural formula. To a remarkable extent the South African state has retained its vigour, in defiance of prescriptions that allegedly arise from global capital movements. In general, democracy’s critics in South Africa, both conservative and radical, have been too ready to write off the prospects for the liberatory fulfilment of a politics of modernity. Certainly apartheid was a modernising project and it failed but that failure was despite a degree of societal and economic and cultural transformation undergone by very few other countries in the colonial world. We should not be so surprised if the inheritors of the state created to administer such a complex and sophisticated system of coercive modernization can continue to change people’s lives – for better and for worse. Nor should we be so eager to dismiss the likelihood that political leaders that command such formidable bureaucratic power can free themselves to an extent from the constraining compulsions of global markets and domestic sectional interest to pursue emancipatory goals.

—

Notes
1 For an especially useful review see Butler 2003.
2 See for a good example of this genre Bond 2000.
3 See Chapter Three in Lodge 2002a.
4 For a strongly argued idealist projections of South Africa’s role as a middle power see Landsberg (2000).
5 See especially Ian Taylor’s contribution to Nel and Van der Westhuizen (2004).
6 See for an intelligent development of this argument Black and Wilson (2004).

References
Black, D. and Wilson, Z. (2004) ‘Rights, region and identity: Exploring the ambiguities of South Africa’s human rights role’, Politikon 31(1).
Bond, P. (2000) Elite transformation: From Apartheid to neoliberalism in South Africa, University of Natal Press.
Butler, A. (2003) ‘South Africa’s political futures’, Government and Opposition.
Du Toit, P. (2001) South Africa’s brittle peace: The problem of post-settlement violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Du Toit, P. (2003) ‘Why post-settlement settlements?’, Journal of Democracy 14(3).
Johnson, R.W. and Schlemmer, L. (1996) Launching democracy in South Africa: The first open election, April 1994, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Landsberg, C. (2000) ‘Promoting democracy: The Mandela Mbeki doctrine’, Journal of Democracy 11(3).
Lodge, T. (2002a) Politics in South Africa. From Mandela to Mbeki, London: James Currey.
Lodge, T. (2002b) ‘Political corruption in South Africa’, in A. Heidenheimer and M. Johnson (Eds), Political corruption: Concepts and contexts, transaction books, New Jersey: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Lodge, T. (2001) ‘The South African local government elections of December 2000’, Politikon 28(1), May.
Lodge, T. (1999) Consolidating democracy: South Africa’s second popular election, University of the Witwatersrand Press and the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, Johannesburg, p. 208.
Mattes, R. (2002) ‘South Africa without the people?’, Journal of Democracy 13(2).
Mattes, R. Taylor, H. and Africa, C. (1999) ‘Judgement and choice in the 1999 South African election’, Politikon 26(2).
Nel, P. and Van der Westhuizen, J. (Eds) (2004), Democratizing foreign policy? Lessons from South Africa, Maryland: Lexington Books.
Seekings, J. (2002), ‘The broader importance of welfare reform in South Africa’, Social Dynamics 28(2).
Seekings, J. (1997) ‘From ballot box to the bookshelf: Studies of the 1994 South African general election’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 15(2).
Vale, P. (2003) Security and politics in South Africa: The regional dimension, Boulder and Cape Town: Lynne Reinner and the University of Cape Town Press.

About the author:
Tom Lodge BA, B Phil & Ph D (York), is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Dean, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Limerick. Before his arrival in Limerick in 2005 he was Professor of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has also held positions at the University of York, the Social Science Research Council in New York, and the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa.  In 1999 – 2000 he was Chair of the Africa Institute in Pretoria and between 2004 and 2005 he served on the Research Assessment Executive Evaluation Committee of the National Research Foundation in Pretoria. General research interests: African political parties, democratisation, post conflict politics, late development, political corruption.

Introduction
Land and agrarian reform is often implemented with a view to breaking with the past, particularly by transforming ownership of land and its uneven distribution. The post 1994 land and agrarian reform in South Africa began with a similar agenda. In fact land reform was launched and implemented even before Apartheid was dissolved and the new ANC-led government took control. The Apartheid government under F.W. De Klerk initiated some kind of limited land reform during the period from 1990 to 1993.

In March 1991, De Klerk’s government repealed the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts. In November of the same year it appointed an Advisory Committee on Land Allocation (later renamed as the Commission on Land Allocation). The Commission made recommendations on state land disposal and the restoration of land to those disposed of formal land rights. This happened first in Natal, where dispossessed communities in Richards Bay (van Leynseele and Hebinck, 2008), Roosboom, Charlestown and Alcockspruit got their land rights formally restored in the years 1992-93 through this process (Walker 2004). The strengths and weaknesses of the pre-1994 land reforms were replicated post-1994 in the form of a lack of ‘coherent state procedures and institutional inadequacies’ to manage the land reform process (Walker 2004; 2005).

This paper explores the institutional dynamics by pursuing the argument that contemporary land reform policy and practices are characterised by continuities, rather than by discontinuities. Given the radical policy discourse of Reconstruction and Development, political and economic transformation, one may expect more discontinuities to occur than continuities. The shift from the early emphasis on human rights to paternalism and ‘productionism’ (from LRAD to SLAG) is testimony of what we would brand as continuities. The assumption of our investigation is that during Apartheid land use on white-owned farms was production and market oriented. Discontinuities no doubt occur; towards the end of the paper we will provide a few examples that show that land once designated for white ownership and ‘commercial agriculture’ is now being redeveloped into land owned by black people who by and large use the land – quoting an informant one of us spoke to in November 2007 in the Eastern Cape – ‘the African way’.[i]

The organising notion of continuity (and discontinuity) is useful for an analysis of changes over time. Continuity refers to the state of uninterrupted flow or coherence, or the property of a continuous and connected period of time (Oxford English Dictionary). Synonyms are persistence, enduringness, durability, lastingness, strength or permanence by virtue of the power to resist stress or force. The continuities that will be explored in this paper relate to the agricultural expert system that has gradually evolved in South Africa and which plays a prominent role in the design of land reform. The persistence of continuities would then indicate the extent to which dramatic transformations of the institutional infrastructure in agriculture have occurred. Historical analysis allows us to underline the continuity of prescriptions and modes of ordering in the past and present. Distinctions between the pre-apartheid, apartheid and post-apartheid periods belie the existence of important continuities.
The setting is the Eastern Cape Province, notably the regions formerly known as Ciskei and Transkei. The case material to underline the argument of continuity rather than discontinuity are entrenched in the prescriptive policies of the state with regard to land use as well as in the multiple responses of land users. Such policies are largely informed by agricultural expert opinions with regard to land use such that they have helped to create and order South Africa’s agrarian landscapes. The Glen Grey Act of 1894 evolved into Betterment Planning practices dictating and attempting to change land use patterns. Current land reform policies aim to prescribe similarly land use by paternalistically fixing land reform subsidies to forms of land use that fit into the category of ‘commercial agriculture’. Like James (2007), we intend to pursue the provoking argument that the current Department of Land Affairs (DLA) and National and Provincial Departments of Agriculture are rather similar to their Apartheid era predecessors, the Department of Native Affairs and the Native Agricultural and Lands Branch.

Land reform experiences reveal contestations over such prescriptions because of generic solutions, sometimes casted in inflexible ways, incompatible and out of sync with the desires and needs of people. Emergent land use patterns on land reform farms vary enormously, ranging from betterment-like situations to land for settlement. Elements of betterment-like planning can be found in the proposals in the Chatha restitution settlement and Dwesa-Cwebe Development Plan for the ‘rationalization’ of land use in the communal areas outside Dwesa-Cwebe. The continuity lies in the normative role of development planners, agrarian scientists and the thinking in terms of man-land ratio (or perceived economic units).
Through examining past and present conflicts between the state and peasantry in South Africa, and the institutions and social actors that bridge this divide, the paper argues that the cores of such conflicts are knowledge contestations, particularly between the state’s bureaucrats, the experts they hire and local people.

We warn, however, against the dangers of an analysis solely focused on experts (i.e. consultants, academics, policy makers); one should not ignore the roles of other social actors. Experts may attempt to direct and prescribe the course of events (and these often occur in situations that can be understood as intervention), but they certainly do not have the power to structure (or determine) the behaviour of a range of other social actors. Agency is not simply embedded in the expert system, but is situated as well among social actors such as farmers, land users, land reform beneficiaries and extension agents (Long 2001). A range of studies have demonstrated that they contest and rework such intervention programmes. Long (ibid.) explored these processes and pointed at the continuous adaptation, struggle and meshing of cultural elements and social practices (see also van Leynseele and Hebinck 2008). Technology development and transfer necessarily involves an interface between the world of designers and experts and that of the users (Hebinck 2001). Focusing on how farmers and other social actors redesign external prescriptions and thus how adaptations take place, may enable us to explain why certain modes of utilisation proposed by experts are often contested by local people (Arce 2003; Van der Ploeg 2003; 2008; Mango and Hebinck 2004).
In a concluding note, ideas about alternative scenarios will be explored. It is imperative that such alternatives need to take into account the continuities in expert thinking within state institutions.

Agricultural expert systems and knowledge
Experts, expert knowledge and networks play a key role in contemporary agriculture. Likewise they are key to the implementation of land reform, certainly so in situations like South Africa where consultants have come to play an important role in the design of business plans for land reform project and their beneficiaries.
Giddens (1990: 27) defines an expert system as ‘a system of technical accomplish­ment [and] professional expertise that organises large areas of the material and social environments in which we live today’. Besides size, more importantly perhaps is that the agricultural expert system represents a set of practices by which the development of the agricultural sector is directed: problems are identified and solutions forged, proposed and implemented. Knowledge (and thus the control over what constitutes knowledge) plays a key role in any expert system. Van der Ploeg (2003: 229) in his analysis of Dutch agriculture adds another specific characteristic to agricultural expert knowledge. It does not concern so much ‘agriculture as it is now, let alone (recent) agricultural history. The expertise involves agriculture as it is expected to look in the future’. An expert system thus defines the trajectory and means to arrive at this future. This provides experts with the power to create ‘the rules that define and authorise participants’, and which distinguish them from those who are in their way. The expert system embodies the knowledge and expertise that imply and define agency: rules, participants and resources. Needless to say, such knowledge is neither neutral nor objective, but rather normative and regulatory; it has the power to identify (and label accordingly) winners and losers, and thus the power to order the agricultural sector in South Africa, now and in the future.

The agricultural expert system in South Africa consists of an extremely condensed set of networks linking together state structures at national, provincial and municipal level, various professional organisations and individuals. Most experts have in common that their past training has been in Faculties of Agriculture (notably of the Universities of Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal and Fort Hare), and that they gained experience in state-funded institutions such as the Agricultural Research Council. In addition, most experts have a background in either commercial, large scale agriculture or in so-called home-land agriculture.
To pursue a critical analysis of knowledge and experts, the analysis has to take into account two ingredients that are situational One of analytical ingredients is the positioning of expert knowledge within the political project of the state and society. The second is the particular way in which agrarian science has evolved.
The development of an expert system cannot be separated from political and economic relations and broader questions of political economy. State interventions in agriculture in South Africa, for example, have often related to attempts to address scarcities of labour and land. A substantial body of literature has addressed this dimension of the agrarian question (of capital and labour) in South Africa (Bernstein 1998; 2007; Ntsebesa and Hall 2007; Atkins 2007; James 2007). This literature, however, does not really address the political economy of knowledge and has ignored the key role agricultural knowledge plays in development. A relatively recent body of STS literature (Science, Technology and Society studies) has engaged with the relationship between politics, knowledge and power. Scientists, because of their position as network builders, play a key role in the strategic positioning of science in society and politics. Latour’s (1983) treatment of the production of knowledge by Pasteur and his group is interesting in that he shows that experts like Pasteur often succeed in deriving political positions and influence from their scientific breakthroughs. The Green Revolution would not have been there without the political and scientific prestige of Norman Borlaugh (Hebinck 2001). Nor would Agroforestry have been what it is now without Pablo Sanchez, the founding father of the World Centre for Agroforestry (ICRAF). Beinart (2003: 336) calls the development of the expert system in South Africa ‘unilateral [state] interventions and centralised planning’. Beinart argues that, particularly during the early years of the 20^th century and after that time, the agricultural expert system became associated in rhetoric and policy with attempts to forge a unified and modern white nation. Heinrich Sebastian Du Toit, a highly committed senior official in the Department of Agriculture, played a key role in the construction of an agricultural expert discourse and practice. Du Toit had travelled worldwide and his experiences convinced him that the advances of science should be incorporated in farming, which would both stimulate production and secure conditions for a proper reproduction and till the land in difficult and marginal environments. These advances needed to spread not just to white farmers but specifically to the mass of white, Afrikaner landowners. Du Toit felt that many of them were bypassed by the current department’s research and publicity (Beinart 2003: 237). Agricultural development, experts and expertise, Afrikaner nationalism and modernisation became intertwined. The frame of reference for most agricultural experts thus became the white settler farm whose social and cultural environment was familiar to them. Black farming or peasant agriculture was virtually absent or unknown to agricultural experts, despite the fact that in the early years of interventions some experts drew on peasant farming techniques.

The positioning of expert knowledge vis-à-vis the state has allowed experts, whether academics, retired academics acting as consultants or former officials of Departments of Agriculture to give directions to pre-apartheid, apartheid and post-apartheid agrarian policies and simultaneously shape the domain of agrarian sciences. The importance of this is that such knowledge generation and institutional culture has produced the current crop of experts but continues to train the next crop of experts, thereby reproducing expert practice and knowledge.

The South African expert system participates in this way in a political project that needs participants (in this case land reform beneficiaries and willing sellers) and supporters (political organisations, the broader public, key state apparatuses such as the Ministry of Finance) and which has as its main objective to connect the many different projects of the landless, the poor, the upcoming black entrepreneurs, corporate agribusiness groups, banks, merchants, consumers and last but not least the polity.

The second ingredient for a situational analysis of expert knowledge is that agrarian sciences and knowledge over time have moved from a local perspective and localised practice to a particular institutional practice. During the early years of agronomy, for instance, its practice was clearly embedded in the context of and in close relationship with the everyday practices of farming. However, it became more and more disconnected from that daily practice and gradually moved from the field to experimental farms, research stations and university farms and laboratories. Van der Ploeg (2003) understands such a transformation as the processes of ‘scientification of agriculture’ which drives many of the current externalisation and commoditisation processes in agriculture. Latour (1983) singles out an essential element of that process in Louis Pasteur’s approach to find a medical solution to anthrax in France: decontextualisation. This signifies that solutions for problems such as animal diseases, pests, and low crop yields and so on are produced in environments that can be controlled for influencing factors. Beinart (2003) pointed at the networked nature of the development of South African science regarding farming, conservation, soils, plants, animals, etc. Networking – travelling abroad and inviting peers from the UK and USA to South Africa – has played a major role in separating expert knowledge from local environments, allowing the decontextualised importing of concepts and notions of farming that had developed in very different conditions.

Decontextualisation and scientification together have led to a scientific practice that is largely (perhaps totally in certain situations) alienated from the local cultural, social, economic and political situation. Van der Ploeg (2003), while pointing at the tight relationship between such sciences and policy environments, argues that empirical realities are reduced to virtual, non-existing realities, often expressed in aggregate terms such as averages.

Prescriptions and continuities: From the Glen Grey Act to land reform
Contemporary expert recommendations on African agriculture echo 19th century policies. The Glen Grey Act (Cape Act No. 25 of 1894) is generally known as a piece of legislation aimed at limiting the amount of land Africans could hold. It introduced the ‘one man one plot’ principle and most of its measures were extended to the former Ciskei and Transkei areas.[ii] The Act is one of the first examples of regulating land use by fixing size (about 3 morgen in the former Ciskei and about 5 and larger in the former Transkei). Limiting the size of plots ensured that landholders had to seek additional income off-farm and making the plots indivisible destined all but the eldest son of the landowner to find off-farm livelihoods (Yawitch 1982; Beinart 2003). Land surveyors and agricultural officers subdivided the land into three land use categories, each with specific tenure arrangements: 1) land allotted for crops, 2) land intended for residential purposes and 3) commonage. The first two categories were allocated in combination under a quitrent arrangement. Title deeds were issued and access was secured through annual payments.[iii] The remaining land was designated as ‘commonage’ for cattle to graze, for people to collect firewood and other services the environment provided. All this was specified on the title deeds. This neat, explicit and sometimes exclusionary distinction provided in the eyes of the colonial expert system an opportunity for the viable cultivation of crops and livestock. The quitrent and payments served the purpose of securing notions of property as individually-owned, as well as drawing people into the monetary economy. Raising taxes also increased rural Africans’ need for cash, further pressing them to seek paid employment (Lewis 1984; Bundy 1988; Switzer 1993). This pattern of land use and institutional arrangements contrasted starkly with peoples’ previously existing patterns of settlement and use of the landscape (Bundy 1998, Schapera 1937). The aspect of individual land tenure in the Grey Act cannot be generalised, however.

Until the early 20^th century, the state had only actively intervened to address access to land and labour. In the early decades of the 20^th century, however, the state began to aggressively support white-dominated agriculture: ‘Between 1910 and 1935, there were 87 Acts passed … rendering permanent assistance to farmers’ (Mbongwa et al. 1996: 48). These policies institutionalised a marketing policy aimed at raising agricultural prices well above competition level, assisted poorer whites in their attempt to rationalise their enterprises economically, and provided agricultural credit. As part of this support, the state began to develop an agricultural expert system through the establishment of a National Department of Agriculture in 1924 as well as a network of agricultural colleges and research stations in the country (Wilson 1975; Beinart 2003). Experimental farms and training colleges were established at Elsenburg (in 1917) in the Western Cape, Cedara in Natal, Fort Cox Agricultural College (early 1930s) in the Ciskei and Tsolo Agricultural College in the Transkei. The Tomlinson Report (1955: 74) narrated that the ‘first Bantu agricultural school was only founded in 1905 (in the Transkei) and a special technical agricultural service in the Native Affairs department – the Native Agricultural and Lands Branch – was only brought into being in 1929’. Previously, the report mentions, various commissions had reported on destructive agricultural methods and their recommendations to teach the natives to use their land efficiently. The Faculty of Agriculture of University of Fort Hare played – and still does – a role in the implementation of these programmes by training students to advice people living in communal areas about modern farming (Morrow 2007).

This expert system began to turn its eyes on the ‘Native Areas’ where land degradation in the form of soil erosion, denudation, and drying-up of springs began to receive governmental attention of the South African Government. The 1932 Native Economic Commission called for a development programme to teach Africans how to use their land more economically, and to halt resource degradation (Yawitch 1981). The 1936 Native Trust and Land Act No 18 provided the legal framework for the government interventions known as Betterment planning, involving the reclamation and rehabilitation of the ‘Native Areas’. The ostensible key concern of early (1936 to 1950) betterment planning was to protect and rehabilitate the natural resource. Government introduced policies aimed at limiting and culling livestock numbers to address perceived denudation of the rangeland, and engaged in the construction of contour banks in an attempt to prevent soil erosion. Areas were designated as residential, arable and grazing land, and rural Africans were instructed (and often forced) to move into the designated residential areas. Implementation of the planning started in the late 1930s but was subject to much resistance, thus proceeding rather slowly (Switzer 1993; McAllister 1989; de Wet 1987; 1989; Beinart 2003; Hendricks 1989). While resistance was widespread, there are also examples of villages accommodating betterment ideas (i.e. rotational grazing) and embracing some other aspects (i.e. provision of schools, roads and other facilities).

While a certain variant of a Malthusian view may underlay the conception of betterment planning as a check on environmental degradation (Trollope 1985; Laker et al. 1975; Tomlinson Commission 1955), population dynamics (rather than population growth per se: Switzer 1993) were the context for environmental problems. Labour migration and land tenure had pushed rural people off the land rather than facilitating their continued presence on the land, which would allow them to care for the land and monitor degradation (see Hebinck and Monde 2007).

Experts like Trollope (1985) maintained that soil erosion is the outcome of the interplay between a series of factors such as tenure, population pressure, lack of education and skills, and a ‘complete lack of sound scientific background’. Together these factors are seen to limit the understanding, acceptance and implementation of new and improved farming methods. The Laker Report (Laker et al. 1975) explains soil erosion repeatedly as incorrect land use and overstocking. Together with poor soils and inadequate moisture, yields are poor and can only be low. Stocking rates should be brought in line with prevailing veld conditions.[iv] Contestation of the restrictions placed on livestock numbers may be explained by contrasting views about carrying capacity and the significance of cattle. Limiting stock numbers and subsequent measures to cull were instigated by agricultural experts’ view that overstocking ruined the land and weakened cattle. The widely used system of kraaling among both white and black farmers was seen as the prime example of ignorant farming causing overgrazing as well as selective grazing. These views emerged during the great drought at the beginning of the 20^th century, which brought environmental concerns to the fore within state circles and the general public (Wilson 1975; Beinart 2003). Beinart (1984) situates the contradicting views of local people and experts in the often contradictory nature of the relations between the state and the peasantry. Beinart (1984: 53) also points at the confrontation of ideas, knowledge and practices leading to ‘a preoccupation amongst officials with soil erosion, the necessity of combating it, and the preservation of natural resources. The welfare of the soil often emerges as the cutting edge of justification for intervention in peasant agriculture’.

Such views were also sustained by the idea that communal (that is, homeland or black) farming (in contrast to private farming) entailed an inadequate exploitation of cattle as an economic resource. For government officials and experts, the very nature of peasant agriculture seemed destined to trigger environmental or ecological collapse. These views came to dominate expert thinking and fed betterment planning some twenty to thirty years later. Culling contradicted a ‘peasant’ logic that focused on maintaining as many stock as possible. For black farmers sheep and wool stood for means to pay their taxes. Social science researchers have shown that the ‘peasant’ principle of cattle rearing is embedded in the multiple meanings of cattle. Cattle represents both consumptive (lobola, milk, meat, status) and productive (draught power, manure, savings) values (Cousins 1996; Lahiff 2000; Shackleton et al. 2005; Ainslie 2005).

In summary, from the Glen Grey Act to Betterment Planning period, emerged a trend of interface and collaboration between knowledge and power, between the experts and the political elite whilst on the contrary, traditions of opposition, contestation and resistance by communities for whom solutions were prescribed were on the ascendance.

Land reform and knowledge networks in South Africa: Continuity or change?
The critical question now is whether current land reform practices have managed to escape from the expert system that emerged from a white settler frame of reference, which has ideologically favoured farming by Afrikaner landholders and that departed from normative and institutionalised views about how, and in what direction, agricultural development should proceed. Can we indeed identify continuities, and if so, how do these look?

Continuities, as we set out to argue, are embedded in practices of state institutions with regard to planning, personnel, relationships and policy languages. Clear conti­nuities can be identified if one examines the state bureaucracy involved in land and agrarian reforms. During the period 1994-1999 the institutions of the new democratic state were predominantly manned by Apartheid era policymakers and planners. This situation continued despite the enrolling of NGO staff and other anti-apartheid organisations in the state’s institutions. Moreover, during this period a predominantly white consultancy industry[v] played a key role in the planning and implementation of agrarian reforms. Each land reform project (redistribution and restitution) was assigned to consultants (i.e. experts) who compiled feasibility studies and prepared management and business plans. The consultants assessed the economic feasibility of the ‘project’ and drafted a plan for knowledge transfer (implicitly assuming an absence of knowledge among the beneficiaries). In many instances, the sophistication of business plans is not synchronised to the needs and wishes of beneficiaries, hence the implementation of a business plan often does not correlate with the plan. A recent study done on behalf of the Department of Land Affairs by the Sustainable Development Consortium indicated that the work of consultants, especially in the development of business plans, does not always cohere with community practices and aspirations (SDC 2007). Expert know­ledge played and still plays a role par excellence in the ordering of the future of agriculture, and is an embodiment of the continuities that shape land and agrarian reforms in South Africa.

Land reform, scale and experts
The experiences of current land reform projects can be grouped into two categories, each with their own specific but contrasting patterns of continuity. The first category deals with farms that have been handed over to new owners without changes made to the farm enterprise. Size and scale of operation, production and business plans, input and output relations have remained virtually unaltered. In many cases, notably in the Western Cape, farms that are undercapitalised because of neglect and lack of investment are turned over to new owners who lack capital. Most of these now called land reform projects, are at the verge of bankruptcy. Continuity in such cases is also facilitated by the so-called mentors (often the previous owners) whose experience is firmly grounded in large-scale, capital-intensive farming. Interviews held by one of us in November 2005 with some of these mentors made this awfully clear. In some cases, new owners have appointed a farm manager to oversee the continuity of their farm (see de Wet 1998). The farm that is transferred is typically a farm that has evolved from a settler farm into a highly mechanised and capitalised farm run by an owner (or a company), assisted by a manager responsible for the workforce and daily operations.

Current land reform experiences point to two closely related issues which have as much to do with the expert system as a continuing factor in the land reform process, as with the complex relationships between actor and structure alluded to earlier. First, the current expert system strongly believes in the received wisdom that the future is fixed by the past. This becomes manifest in two simultaneously operating discourses that are best described as ‘Leave existing land use intact’ and ‘Do not subdivide the farm into numerous smaller farms’. It is only the driver who has to change but not the car (to paraphrase Van der Brink 2003), which is a good characterisation of what has happened so far. Current land use, in this view, has proven its use and efficiency (and is well embedded in local and global networks of power) while small farms by and large are perceived as inherently inefficient. This is in contrast to experiences elsewhere that are well documented in the literature. [vi] Lipton and Lipton (1993) translate these and other experiences to the South African context. A smallholder model is preferred because of the relative efficiency of resource use on small farms. The Department of Land Affairs seems to favour this form of agriculture (DLA 1996; van der Brink et. al 2007), but it is unclear whether this is done out of genuine involvement or only to speed up the land redistribution process and/or to hide the failures so far. Only time will tell.

The pro-small farm argument has been heavily critiqued. Sender and Johnston (2004) – James (2007) as well as Bernstein (1998, 2007) support their views – are particularly critical of a smallholder model because of the lack of changes in the political economy (e.g. the nature of relations between production and consumption, between small scale producers and agribusiness and other market institutions).The counter critique of this position is not just an academic exercise but forms an essential element in our critique of the agricultural expert system in South Africa and the many received wisdoms and orthodoxies.

1. Sender and Johnston (2004) explore the state of agriculture as it currently is; their analysis ignores the opportunities and potential for change or alternative trajectories.
2. range of classic studies (referred to in footnote 6) point at past dynamics of African and small scale agriculture, both now and in the past (see Bundy 1988). It is extremely important to analyse the reason for its decline rather than to assume it is inherent to agriculture and a structural character of agricultural development.
3. The argument of inefficiency and problems of small-scale or other forms of production are associated with distorted and missing markets. This is also explored by Ellis (1993) and such reasoning ignores the possibility that the nature of market-induced relations may be part of the problem. That markets can be redesigned and/or that one could debate the issue of what constitutes ‘good’ markets, is not taken into account in their analysis.
4. Similar to the South African experts and policy makers, Sender and Johnston apparently simply assume that ‘commercial’ or entrepreneurial (and preferably Black Economic Empowerment (i.e. commercial)) forms of production are productive, profitable and create employment. This is assumed and hardly tested through empirical and comparative research. The South African example shows the opposite: commercial farms are expulsing labour rather than creating rural employment (Atkinson 2007).

It is important to point out that Sender and Johnston c.s. and South African experts assume large-scale and extensive farming to be profitable compared to agriculture practiced intensively and on a smaller scale. South Africa’s expert system basically has only experience with large-scale extensive agriculture. Thus, they are either ignoring or lacking the imagination to figure what small-scale agriculture would look like in a different agrarian structure or denying the capacity of smallholders to redesign and resists existing market and technology structures. The attraction of land- and labour-intensive agriculture, as Boserup (1981), Lipton and Lipton (1993) and van der Ploeg (2000; 2008) have pointed out, is that it is intrinsically driven by increasing the value added to the farm or field and in this way using as well as increasing the use of labour on the farm and in the local agrarian economy. A similar argument has been explored by Hebinck and Van Averbeke (2007) and Moyo (2007).

Scale is not to be mixed up with size only but should include aspects of quantity and quality of labour (e.g. knowledge), the nature of the labour process and the positioning vis-à-vis markets and technology. An important orthodoxy within land reform projects and among experts largely concerns scale and the associated worker-land ratio. A recent study clearly bears the permutations and continuities. The study was outsourced by the Department of Agriculture in Pretoria to a group of consultants (Agri-Africa). The research was called a ‘Minimum Viable Farm Size Study’ and the report of the study was initially submitted in January 2007. The study was intended to provide the Department with guidelines so as to be able to decide what constitutes a minimum viable farm in South Africa, in order to inform government policy on agrarian reforms. The terms of reference clearly indicated government intentions, which included de-concentrating land ownership and encouraging (more) intensive utilisation of land as well as the freeing of underutilised portions of land in large-scale farming operations for redistribution purposes. Instead of exploring the labour process in relation to size and livelihoods, the research focused on how to reduce farm sizes for land reform bene­ficiaries in order to create small farms. Furthermore, size was considered as only related to agro-ecological conditions and not to the livelihood needs of the beneficiaries. The report proposes small-scale farms as a policy solution to meet the needs for land of potential black farmers/beneficiaries of land reform. The study is silent about large-scale farms owned by white commercial farmers.

The reasons for proposing small-scale farms as a solution are premised on (i) the failure of farming settlements made under the Settlement and Land acquisition Grants during the initial phase of land and agrarian reforms in South Africa, and (ii) the history of successful African small-scale farmers at the end of the 18^th century, implicitly suggesting that these successes can be repeated in our time. As the experts put it, South African agricultural history has evidence that small-scale farming has played a major role in the livelihood of the rural populace. History shows that small-scale farming played a significant role in the development of South African diamond and gold mining industries by supplying food to these industries during the latter part of the 19^th century. Productivity and innovation displayed by these farmers is widely acclaimed (Agri-Africa: 11).

The problem with such a view is partly that by invoking the past and adjusting profit margins to present market dynamics, the reasoning is that South Africa will have addressed policy questions around what constitutes the minimum viable farm size. Given that the intention of government (which contracted experts to do the research), was to check whether existing farms, owned by white commercial farmers, were the viable minimum for farming, and if not, how much land in excess of the minimum can be expropriated for land reform purposes, via an intended policy on the land ceilings, the study seems to have gone off the tangent to focus on the size of farms for land reform beneficiaries.

Policy language and classifications schemes
Other orthodoxies that embody continuity are the dichotomised classification schemes experts use to order South Africa’s agricultural sector. [vii] Subsistence farming versus commercial farming with the ‘emergent farmer’ as the bridging notion between the two extremes are continuously used in policy documents, peer reviewed articles in journals such as Agrekon and Development Southern Africa and reading material for students. This set of virtual categories not only reflects the (way the expert sees the) future but are based on assumptions that are seldom empirically tested. Modernisation of agriculture is the trajectory according to which agriculture should unfold. [viii] Many experts (continue to) view agricultural development as best realised in entrepreneurial or commercial farming, highly commoditised forms of agriculture thus seen as superior to and more advanced than forms of production hinging on substantially lower degrees of commo­ditisation. Peasant farming is often (wrongly) equated with subsistence farming and is marginally linked to markets and thus holds no future. Within current land reform practices in South Africa the received wisdom is that the market is uncontested and continues to be the ideal domain for access to key agricultural resources (knowledge, technology, land and labour).

Creative and imaginative ideas of small-scale agriculture and its dynamics in terms of use of endogenous resources and the creation of value added, employment and social security is virtually absent. Expert knowledge ignores in this way a history of relatively vibrant forms of peasant production in South Africa and elsewhere (Lewis 1984; Bundy 1988; van Onselen 1996). Such experiences are, however, seen as irrelevant and unable to provide a trajectory to the future. Of course we need to realise that it is difficult to generalise: historical and comparative studies have shown that in certain conditions and circumstance small-scale or peasant agriculture may flourish while in others it may not. It is imperative for any expert system to identify such conditions. However, there is also a need to realise that more productive or more efficient does not necessarily translate into wealth (as opposed to poverty) and equality (as opposed to differentiation). Rich and poor are characteristics of both entrepreneurial and peasant forms of production.

Land reform experiences: Betterment-like responses
Another category of continuities in land reform consists of farm operations and land use resembling betterment planning. For example, the land use on a former commercial and white-owned farm visited in February 2006 was an almost perfect copy of Betterment Planning land use designs of the 1950s. The previous large maize field was subdivided into smaller units and individually managed (similar to the arable land allocations) while the pastures were designated as common grazing land with some form of grazing rotation scheme applied. Most of the new land owners cum land beneficiaries live elsewhere in the country (James 2007) and continue to straddle as in the past farming with labour migration and/or remittances, pensions and social grants. There are numerous LRAD farms in the country that reflect rather similar betterment-like continuities in terms of land use and/or situations where the land reform beneficiaries are not living or working on their newly acquired farm. On these farms there is substantial evidence of land reform beneficiaries actively redesigning the previously large farm. Below two cases will be explored in some detail with the view to examine the role of experts. The cases underline that neither the expert system, nor the responses by land beneficiaries are homogeneous.

Chatha, Keiskamahoek
The story of the Chatha community restitution claim is well documented and widely publicised. Chatha community was forcibly removed from land previously occupied by them or their ancestors through the implementation of the policy of betterment planning from the early 1960s onwards. The policy was implemented under the provisions of sections of the Native Administration Act 38 of 1927 and the Native Trust and Land Act 18 of 1936, and the various proclamations made under these statutes. The implement­ation of the betterment policy resulted in the community being dispossessed of their rights in land. The right to manage and allocate the land was taken over by the State and resulted in families being moved from one piece of land to another, reduction in sizes of residential sites and arable fields as well as demarcation of residential sites from arable fields. The community also lost the right of control of the communal rangelands (see for more details De Wet 1995).

The community lodged a claim for compensation which was approved and the agree­ment was signed in 2000 (Minkley and Westaway 2006; De Wet and Mgujulwa 2006). The resolution and settlement of the claim between the community and the State contained three interesting elements.

1. Monetary compensation for losses incurred as a result of the dispossession to the 344 claimant families (which is half the total payment of R31 697);
2. A development plan for the community (utilising the remaining portion of the monetary compensation);
3. Transfer of ownership and control of communal rangelands back to the community.

The development plan included an agricultural plan for both stock farming and crop production for domestic and commercial purposes, a forest plan and one for eco-tourism and a multi-purpose community centre. Consultants were hired and paid to develop the plan and a project steering committee which included municipality, the commission, beneficiaries and the project managing NGO, the Border Rural Committee (BRC), was set up. Most interestingly, the transfer of the rangeland to the community was not based on any new stipulations regarding usage. The plots of land presently utilised by families for residential and arable purposes were preserved as they were in the past. The forestry project is underway despite problems with coordination and adherence to time lines among stakeholders. The community hall has been constructed out of the restitution development funds. The old irrigation scheme has since 2000 been revitalised and is now producing food. Roads are being upgraded. All in all development work triggered off by restitution in Chatha provided employment for some 60 people ranging between R 40 to R 60 per day. However, from the beginning of the restitution process, political cleavages emerged, threatening the political sustainability of developments after restitution. De Wet and Mgululwa (2006) argue that these political cleavages are linked to the headmanship being contested already since the 1880s. Furthermore, the role of the BRC was such that it virtually managed the restitution process. All that this demon­strates, is how the continuities with the past weigh like a nightmare as a burden of the present. When development is caught by such continuities, restitution produces ambiguities.

Dwesa-Cwebe
Dwesa-Cwebe provides another dimension of continuity which points more at the expert systems’ role. Even in a document compiled through a long participatory process, biases associated with the agricultural expert system and reflecting the legacies of Glen Grey and betterment are evident. Our analysis here focuses on the August 2003 draft of the Dwesa-Cwebe development plan.[ix]

In the Executive Summary, the plan repeatedly affirms the value of expert knowledge against local practices: ‘the environment is not managed properly’, ‘there is a need for proper settlement planning’ and ‘proper land use management’ (DCDP: 2). There are ‘proper’ ways to manage land and the environment, which are seen as lacking in the Dwesa-Cwebe communities. Indeed, the discussion of agriculture reads like a catalogue of community deficiencies, implying that the communities are not sufficiently dependent on the market: ‘lack of insect and disease control, lack of input capital, lack of traction equipment … lands not fenced’ (35). To this is added ‘lack of knowledge’ (35). The list of ‘key issues’ links this lack of knowledge to the absence of contact with agricultural experts: ‘lack of agricultural education and training [;] lack of support from Agricultural Government Departments’ (36). It then makes its assumptions explicit: ‘Communal system does not provide opportunities for commercial agriculture’ (36).

Likewise, the quantitative terms in which the plan evaluates local agriculture and livestock-keeping practices do not take into account farmers’ objectives. Their methodology was based on simply asking farmers how many bags they harvested, an approach which has been proven to be prone to severe underestimation in the rural Transkei (see McAllister 2000). The plan’s authors conclude that maize yields ‘a R500 income per hectare, which is not profitable for the producer’ (38) – without explaining the input costs that lead to the characterization as ‘not profitable’. This characterization also neglects to consider that even R500 would be more than five percent of the annual income of a pension-dependent household, or that most purchased maize is bought on credit, effectively doubling its price (Fay 2003: 287-9). [x] This yield might not satisfy a commercial farmer producing for the market, but for a cash-strapped rural household, it is an important way of setting aside money for other needs.

The report also reflects the biases of the agricultural expert system in its discussion of livestock. Based on a classification of local veld types and estimates of ‘carrying capacity’ from the Department of Agriculture, the plan concludes that the area can support 1.7 large stock units per household, adding the patronizing comment that ‘it will benefit the farmers in the long term if they adhere to this recommendation’ (27). While no mention is made of culling, other recommendations echo those proposed for the communal areas for decades: ‘The Department of Agriculture will have to educate the farmers on the long-term benefits to reduce their stock. … The excess stock and unproductive animals will have to be sold and a breeding programme to breed animals with higher economic value should be introduced’ (28). Again, the (faulty) assumption is that local farmers aim to maximize the economic value of individual animals in order to sell them. Likewise, the ‘communal system of grazing’ (36) is blamed for creating an ‘inability to adapt stock numbers to grazing capacity’ (36). Local practices are seen as failing by comparison to commercial farming practices: ‘rotational grazing cannot be practised as there are no camp fences’ (36).

Finally, the plan takes up a favourite topic of agricultural experts, individual land titling, ignoring the many known adverse consequences of incomplete tenure reforms in Africa. The budget allocates R3.4 million – nearly a quarter of the total funds the communities are receiving in their land restitution claim – to land use planning and surveying. It calls for determination of property boundaries and registration of individual ownership, although the details of the procedures to be followed are not specified. Given that there are 2,270 homesteads in the Dwesa-Cwebe communities, most of which have more than one discrete land parcel, this seems like a recipe for an incomplete tenure reform, likely to create ambiguity and conflict.

The current drama is that land reform beneficiaries are seldom aware of alternatives, nor do they have easy access to such knowledge. Not all land beneficiaries have experienced agriculture nor has knowledge been transferred from generation to generation. Secondly, current land reform farms are incompatible with the experience of most beneficiaries. Hence the attempts to apply Betterment-like solutions to recently acquired farms. Most of their experience is related to some kind of compound or homestead agriculture in the former homelands, driven by women and older people while men are absent, based on irregular cropping and produce for the local market (where market production exists), a form of agriculture supported by off-farm income (remittances, pensions). The compound or homestead fulfils the role of the central and coordinating social and spatial unit, rather than only the market and new technologies.

Conclusions
This paper has drawn attention to dimensions of knowledge that embody key continuities. These continuities and the social relationships behind them may explain why less than 4.2% of the target 30% of land is redistributed, why land reform farms do not perform as planned, and why land reform farms have been transferred to new owners, not all of them land reform beneficiaries. This is evidence of expert knowledge not being applicable to the immediate land reform beneficiaries. Guided by orthodoxies rather than curiosity, there have been few attempts to redesign the size of the farm (e.g. by subdivision) and to go beyond collectively owned farms. Land reform beneficiaries in their turn are not always aware of alternative scenarios, nor do they have easy access to information on alternatives. Experiences in South and Southern Africa and elsewhere (e.g. Europe) with the dynamics of relatively small family farms have been ignored (willingly or unwillingly). This has certainly limited the windows of opportunity for alternative scenarios. Farms that have been transferred have in most cases remained under the model of a settler farm, transformed into a highly mechanised and capitalised farm run by an owner (or a company) assisted by a manager responsible for the workforce and daily operations. In this sense, the expert system has evolved largely disconnected from the majority of African smallholders and potential land reform beneficiaries. As a result, current land reform farms are often incompatible with beneficiaries’ experience, leading in some cases to attempts to apply betterment-like solutions to recently acquired farms.

The current expert system requires realignment to the variety of social and natural conditions in the country. This should include more attention to small scale agriculture, revisiting current curricula at schools, colleges and universities and redesigning agricultural research programs. More experience is required on the conditions which may have favoured small scale production in the past and their implications for the present and future. In the domain of conservation this requires more serious commitments to joint management of protected areas, a better understanding of the long-term human roles in shaping and managing ecosystems, a willingness to collaborate in practice as well as on paper and an acknowledgment of local rights, and attention to the potential for local biodiversity monitoring. Adopting and applying theoretical notions like co-evolution (or co-production) and non-equilibrium thinking opens new ways for exploring the complex interactions between the social and the natural. It may help agrarian sciences and scientists to go beyond some of the orthodoxies discussed in this paper.

Certain components in the expert system (such as the Sustainable Livelihood Division of the Agricultural Research Council) have found support in a livelihood approach to development to identify a new modus operandi. With substantial inter­national support a process of institutional transformation is taking place, but has so far remained rather rigid, mechanistic and bureaucratic with old tendencies still in place (i.e. top down, and rather prescriptive and normative) despite the discourse of participation. Key to a livelihood approach would be to begin with a focus on the skills and resources that rural people possess, and their existing activities, rather than a largely preconceived set of expert prescriptions about what they should be doing. A good application is Timmermans (2004). At Dwesa-Cwebe, for instance, Timmermans identified eight other locally-significant purposes for maize cultivation besides sales on the market (which would be considered important by experts): production of food for home consumption, income stretching, bartering, brewing of maize beer, supplementary animal feed, status building, reinforcing an entitlement to arable land (Timmermans 2004: 96) and the cultural imperative to ‘build the homestead’ (cf. McAllister 2001).

While arguing for a reconfigured expert system we should thus neither ignore the capacity of experts to revisit their approaches and practices, nor should we perceive land reform beneficiaries to be simply passive recipients of knowledge. Experts may attempt to direct and prescribe the course of events, but they certainly do not have the power to structure (or determine) the behaviour of a range of social actors in the agricultural and related sectors. The potential for action is situated in many locations in society, not merely embedded in the expert system, which is evident for example from the productivity and dynamism of agriculture in the coastal Transkei (McAllister 2001). Examining the agency of social actors irrespective of their level of operation (‘micro’, or ‘macro’; local or global) we may be able to understand the gaps between expert and local knowledge(s) and practices. These aspects of land reform have slowly begun to be documented (e.g. James 2007; van Leynseele and Hebinck 2008); more work is required to better understand land reform and the potential for future change, as it provides a window for a processes of re-contextualisation (as opposed to de-contextualisation) for the expert system to be able to re-connect with rural actors. Perhaps then we can say that the transformation of the Department of ‘Native Affairs’ and the associated expert system has been achieved.

NOTES
* This is a reworked and elaborated version of Hebinck, P. and Fay, D. (2006) Land reform in South Africa: Caught by continuities, Paper presented at the Conference ‘Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: Perspectives on Land Restitution in South Africa, Houw Hoek, 13-15 September.
i. Wolmer (2007) explored a similar entry point in the land reform debate in Zimbabwe.
ii. Expanding private tenure ‘fell away as a central administrative objective. Even in those districts where [the Glen Grey Act] was introduced, the principles of primogeniture and the non-divisibility of plots were largely sacrificed to older practices. The original Act clearly stipulated that individual tenure would become operative in every district where the Glen Grey terms applied; but by 1903 its adoption became optional, and surveys for individual title were carried out in only a handful of Transkeian districts’ (Beinart and Bundy 1987: 141).
iii.  All title deeds are stored in the Deeds Registry at King Williams Town. In the Victoria East District, most land was allocated to individuals by the late 1890s (Hebinck and Lent 2007).
iv.  Such views have led to policy interventions in the ‘reserves’ based on equilibrium think dominant at the time in ecology and biology. This paradigm is now challenged by a non-equilibrium interpretation of ecological change and environmental transformation (Scoones 1999; Baker 2000).
v. It appears that most consultants were former employees of the various Department of Agriculture. They resigned after 1994 and became private knowledge brokers. James (2007) points at similar continuities This is an aspect of the expert system that has not received sufficient critical attention; it is a key aspect of the knowledge continuities explored here.
vi. Feder (1973) summarised a range of studies of the Central and Latin American experiences. Classical studies by Hill (1963) about Nigeria’s cacao farmers, by Boserup (1981) about the relationship between demographic growth and agricultural expansion, as well as Richards’ (1985) account of small-scale farming as performance are prime examples of studies showing the dynamic nature of small-scale or peasant forms of agriculture. The smallholder experience in Kenya and Zimbabwe in particular is well documented.
vii. See van Averbeke and Mohammed (2006) for a critique and alternative analysis.
viii.  During a Workshop ‘Post Apartheid Agrarian Policies’ held in Wageningen in 1989, the modern­isation perspective as the future for agriculture became extremely clear and particularly voiced by the ‘exiles’ among the participants. The ‘non-exile’ participants expressed more locally based views. In the Mandlazini land restitution case experts’ advice from Cedara showed similar views (van Leynseele and Hebinck 2008).
ix. We have not been able to observe the effects (if any) of planning at Dwesa-Cwebe. The draft plan called for land use planning to be completed by 2005, but the Amatola District Council had only appointed a consultancy to oversee the plan’s implementation in October 2005.
x.  In 1998, when pensions were R490 / month, Fay estimated maize output in the Cwebe community of Hobeni based on stores on hand and concluded that an average household would save R733-R1466 / year (depending on their use of credit) by cultivating maize and beans, an amount comparable to two months’ pension (R980) or the average monthly wage reported by homesteads who had members employed (R926).

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About the Authors
Paul Hebinck is associate professor in the Rural Development Sociology Group at Wageningen University (1992-present). He is also adjunct Professor at the University of Fort Hare, Faculty of Science and Agriculture, Alice, South Africa. He obtained his PhD in Social Sciences from Nijmegen University, The Netherlands. Previously (1984-1992), he was a lecturer at the Third World Centre at Nijmegen University.
Hebinck has specialized in agrarian transformation processes in Africa and has done substantive fieldwork on the various socio-technical dimensions of rural development, researching issues of maize and soil fertility (re)production in Kenya, irrigation and livelihoods in Zimbabwe and land reform in South Africa. Theoretically he combines actor perspectives with broader questions related to political economy.

Derick Fay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. He co-authored the book The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: Restoring What Was Ours with Deborah James. Fay received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Boston University in 2003. His research, based in South Africa, focuses on the relationships between the end of apartheid and post-apartheid transformations and rural Xhosa peoples’ access to land and natural resources. Some of his topical interests are resettlement, land tenure, community relations with protected areas, and ethnoecology. He is the co-editor of two books: The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution: ‘Restoring What Was Ours’ (2008), with Deborah James, and From Conflict to Negotiation: Nature-Based Development on South Africa’s Wild Coast (2003), with Robin Palmer and Herman Timmermans.

Kwandiwe Kondlo is executive director of the Democracy and Governance programme of the Human Science and Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa. He obtained a DLitt et Phil (PhD) in Historical Studies from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2003. His publication record includes the following recently published books: “In the Twilight of the Revolution’ The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa), 1959-1960 and ‘Zuma Administration: Critical Challenges. He is associated with Wits University School of Public and Development Management where he is a visiting professor. His wide-ranging areas of research interest include a strong focus on rural land reform and development, the history of systems of thought in the development of policies, as well as politics of liberation movements in exile.

The Seventh Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), held in Amsterdam from 29 June to 2 July 2010, drew again more submissions for presentations than any ISSA Conference before. After a strict selection procedure, exactly 300 scholars were invited to present their papers at the Conference. In addition, the Conference attracted some 200 interested colleagues and students who just wanted to attend the presentations and take part in the discussions. All in all, 500 people interested in argumentation assembled in Amsterdam to present papers and exchange views.

The 2010 ISSA Conference was, like previous ones, an international meeting place for argumentation scholars from a great variety of academic backgrounds and traditions, representing a wide range of academic disciplines and approaches: (speech) communication, logic (formal and informal), rhetoric (classical and modern), philosophy, linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, law, political science, psychology, education, religious studies, and artificial intelligence. Besides papers on argument schemes, classical argumentation theory, critical responses to argumentation, deep disagreement, ethos and pathos, fallacies, the history of argumentation theory, interpersonal argumentation, logic and reason, practical argumentation, premise acceptability, rationality and reasonableness, topoi, the Toulmin model, visual argumentation, and argumentation in a cross-cultural perspective, papers were presented on argumentation in controversy, debate, education, science and the media, on argumentation in a financial, historical, legal, literary, medical, political and religious context, and on argumentation and computation, definition, epistemology, ethics, linguistics, persuasion, political philosophy, pragmatics, social psychology, stylistics, and the Internet. In the opinion of the editors, the Proceedings of the Seventh ISSA Conference reflect the current richness of the discipline.

Two thirds of the papers presented at the Conference are included in these Proceedings. Some of the papers presented at the Conference were not offered for publication in the Proceedings, some of the papers were not accepted after a meticulous review procedure while others were withdrawn. The editors decided to publish only those papers that met their standards of quality. Some papers have been considerably revised on the basis of the reviewers’ comments.

The Proceedings of the Conference are again published by Sic Sat, this time only in a CD ROM version. For the reader’s convenience, in the Proceedings the papers are arranged in the alphabetical order of the authors’ surnames.

The four ISSA board members, Frans H. van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, David Godden and Gordon Mitchell served as editors of the Proceedings. The editors were greatly helped by the systematic peer reviewing of all papers by other participants in the ISSA conference (at least two reviewers for each paper). Their evaluations and constructive suggestions have enhanced the quality of the Proceedings, and the editors are grateful to all of them. In addition, we received invaluable assistance in preparing the Proceedings from our research assistants and research master’s students Lester van der Pluijm and Jacky Visser. We thank both of them very much for their help in getting the manuscripts ready for publication. Last but not least, we would like to thank our publisher Auke van der Berg for the production of these Proceedings.

For their financial support of the conference, the editors would like to express their gratitude to the Dutch-Belgian Speech Communication Association (VIOT), the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the City of Amsterdam, Springer Academic Publishers, John Benjamins Publishers, the International Learned Institute for Argumentation Studies (ILIAS), and the Sciential International Centre for Scholarship in Argumentation Theory (Sic Sat).

19 January 2011

Frans H. van Eemeren, ILIAS & University of Amsterdam
Bart Garssen, ILIAS & University of Amsterdam
David Godden, Old Dominion University
Gordon Mitchell, University of Pittsburgh

In The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) I. A. Richards proposed to revive “an old subject” that had “sunk so low” that it perhaps should be simply dismissed to “limbo” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 3). In Richards’ view rhetoric’s sorry condition was a result of the flaws of the “old rhetoric” which he says began with Aristotle and ended with Richard Whately in the nineteenth century (Richards 1936/1965, p. 4). The “old rhetoric” was “an offspring of dispute” that “developed as the rationale of pleadings and persuadings; it was the theory of the battle of words and has always been itself dominated by the combative impulse” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 24). Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric (1828) represents the inadequacies of the old rhetoric because it offers nothing more than a “collection of prudential Rules about the best sorts of things to say in various argumentative situations” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 8).
Richards’ rejection of traditional rhetoric and his promise to revive the subject made The Philosophy of Rhetoric one of the foundational documents of the “New Rhetoric” of the twentieth century. Thus it is important to examine the assumptions of Richards’ indictment of rhetoric and consider if he is correct that it is no more than a “war with words” (Richards, 1955, p. 52). And even if Richards’ historical analysis is accurate, it does not necessarily follow that a disputational model must be abandoned if rhetoric is to prosper in our own times. Richards’ identification of argumentation as rhetoric’s chief disability has had significant implications for the direction of both rhetoric and argumentation. I will argue that Richards’ program to remove argument from rhetoric would, if followed fully, eviscerate rhetoric by stripping away stripping away much of the most fully developed and articulated aspects of rhetorical theory and practice. Moreover, Richards’ self-proclaimed “microscopic” view of rhetoric means that The Philosophy of Rhetoric has little to contribute to the development of rhetoric, or argumentation, in the twenty-first century.

1. Richards’ Indictment of the Old Rhetoric
Richards finds very little in the old rhetoric that is agreeable. From its very beginnings in antiquity, “from Gorgias onward too much in the literature of rhetoric has been sales-talk selling-sales talk; and for good reasons we are more interested today in defensives against than in aids to eloquent persuasion” (1955, p. 166). Persuasion is suspect, primarily because persuasion proceeds by argumentation and Richards genuinely abhors augmentative and disputative situations. “A controversy,” claims Richards, “is normally an exploitation of a systematic set of misunderstandings for war-like purposes” (1936/1965, p. 39). Again and again when discussing disputation and debate, Richards resorts to martial metaphors: disputation is a “battle,” rhetoric is “combat,” argument is “ordonnance” (1936/1965, p. 8). Richards is correct that rhetoricians, especially the ancients, often describe rhetoric as a combative activity. Thus in De inventione Cicero says that “the man who equips himself with the weapons of eloquence, not to be able to attack the welfare of his country but to defend it, he, I think, will be a citizen most helpful and most devoted both to his own interests and those of his community” (p. 5). Cicero sees rhetoric as a conflict but one born, not from confusion or querulousness, but rather from civic responsibility. Richards, in contrast, does not recognize that in some disputes the disputants might understand each other very well and nevertheless be compelled to argue about matters of principle and policy. Thus Richards almost invariably describes traditional rhetoric in terms of bellicosity and never of rationality. Indeed, rhetoric has been “narrowed” and “blinded” by “that preoccupation, that debaters’ interest” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 24).

Perhaps no treatise reflects “that debaters’ interest” more than Richard Whately’s, Elements of Rhetoric, which Richards identifies as the last of the “old rhetorics.” A glance at the full title of this book may help explain why Richards chose it to exemplify the rhetorical system he would replace: The Elements of Rhetoric: Comprising an Analysis of the Laws of Moral Evidence and of Persuasion, with Rules for Argumentative Composition and Elocution. Whately proposes “to treat of ‘Argumentative Composition,’ generally and exclusively; considering Rhetoric (in conformity with the very just and philosophical view of Aristotle) as an offshoot of Logic” (1828/1963, p. 4). Therefore, “the finding of suitable ARGUMENTS to prove a given point, and the skilful arrangement of them, may be considered as the immediate and proper province of Rhetoric, and of that alone” (p. 39).
In emphasizing the discovery and disposition of arguments as the only exclusive duty of rhetoric Whately is atypical, if not unique, among early nineteenth century rhetorics. And I believe it is this emphasis on argument that led Richards to identify The Elements of Rhetoric as the final chapter in the history of rhetoric. Richards has an obvious aversion to argument and, not surprisingly, he has an equally low regard for logic. In Speculative Instruments Richards complains about “the innumerable cogwheels of logic” (1955, p. 147). And logic, like rhetoric, was a product of “scholastic drudgery” (1955, p. 169). Thus Whately, who also wrote Elements of Logic as a companion to his Elements of Rhetoric, is doubly damned.

Yet Richards’ analysis that the preoccupation with argumentation, most apparent in Whately, caused the collapse of traditional rhetoric differs dramatically from many other observers who interpret the history of rhetoric quite differently. As I have demonstrated in “Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and the End of Rhetoric,” critics writing from a semiotic perspective argue that rhetoric’s demise results from an obsession, not with argument, but rather with style. Thus writers like Barthes, Genette, Todorov, and Ricoeur see rhetoric’s neglect of argument and invention in favor of the elocution and the figures the cause of its decline (2006, pp. 305-11). In other words, these semioticians interpret rhetoric’s history in a way that is virtually the opposite of Richards’ analysis. Historical accuracy almost certainly is to be found between these two opposing positions. From its inception rhetoric has been dominated by a tension between argument and invention, on the one hand, and style and elocution, on the other. At various times in rhetoric’s long history, one or the other, invention or elocution, may have seemingly achieved dominance, but the achievement has inevitably been transient at best. Thus Richards’ account of the old rhetoric is a result of a highly selective reading of historical texts.

But even if Richards’ analysis of the causes of rhetoric’s demise is flawed, does this mean that his conclusion, that Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric really represents the end of the “old rhetoric,” is equally mistaken? Richards implies that nothing of note had happened in rhetoric from Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric in 1828 until the publication of his own Philosophy of Rhetoric in 1936. But here too Richards’ view of rhetoric’s history does not quite tell the whole story. A great deal did happen in rhetoric in the 100 years between Whately and Richards. A key term search for books about rhetoric published between 1828 and 1936 in the “Worldcat” online library catalog returns 2,579 titles. Forest Houlette’s Nineteenth Century Rhetoric: An Enumerative Bibliography, covering a slightly different period, the years 1800 to 1920, catalogues 2,546 entries. While bibliographic records do not tell the complete story, the publication of some 2500 books suggests that the “old rhetoric” was not quite as moribund as Richards claims. Richards’ dismissal of nineteenth-century rhetoric was shared by many early twentieth-century writers on the subject. As Linda Ferreira-Buckley notes, “historians of rhetoric once claimed there was little ‘rhetoric’ in the nineteenth century worth studying, but our understanding of nineteenth-century theory and practice has benefitted recently from scholarly attention demonstrating that the period boasts many different ‘rhetorics’” (p. 468). A recent survey of research confirms Ferreira-Buckley’s conclusion that that contemporary scholars increasingly find the nineteenth century a rich period in the history of rhetoric (Gaillet, 2010). While Richards’ account of the “old rhetoric” is myopic, he probably is correct to claim that in the preceding 100 years no one had proposed a role for rhetoric quite like the one he had in mind.

2. Richards’ Proposal for a New Rhetoric
In the beginning of The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards proposes that rhetoric “should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (1936/1965, p. 3). “A revived Rhetoric or study of verbal understanding and misunderstanding,” he says, “must itself undertake its own inquiry into the modes of meaning – not only, as with the old Rhetoric, on a macroscopic scale, discussing the effects of different disposals of large parts of a discourse – but also on a microscopic scale by using theorems about the structure of the fundamental conjectural units of meaning…” (1936/1965, p. 23). Those “units of meaning,” we are quickly informed, are simply words. Therefore, “a persistent, systematic, detailed inquiry into how words work that will take the place of the discredited subject which goes by the name of Rhetoric” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 23). Rhetoric, then, is no longer a study of persuasion, nor of argument, nor perhaps even of style, but a study of the meaning of words.
Meaning, says Richards, is determined almost entirely by context. “Most generally,” he says, context “is a name for a whole cluster of events that recur together” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 34). The meaning of individual words derive from what he calls their “delegated efficacy:” from a particular context “one item – typically a word – takes over the duties of parts which can then be omitted from the recurrence…. When this abridgement happens, what the sign or word – the item with these delegated powers – means is the missing part of the context” (Richards 1936/1965, p.34). Understanding this “context theory of meaning,” Richards claims, will help humans avoid misunderstandings (1936/1965, p. 38).
In Richards’ estimation the “old rhetoric” failed to recognize the “context theory of meaning.” Rather, it perpetuated “a chief cause of misunderstanding” that Richards labels the “Proper Meaning Superstition”: the assumption that each individual word has only one acceptable meaning (1936/1965, p. 11). Thus he also calls this misconception the “One and Only One True Meaning Superstition.” Richards sees this “superstition” as rampant in the rhetorics that preceded his. As a major offender he cites George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). This is a surprising choice because Richards generally praises Campbell and he takes Campbell’s title for his own Philosophy of Rhetoric 160 years later. Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, says Richards, “is otherwise an excellent book in many respects” (1936/1965, p. 51). His identification of Campbell as a chief proponent of the “proper meaning superstition” becomes even more surprising when you begin to look for evidence of this belief in Campbell’s work. I can find nothing in Campbell that suggests he believes every word possesses one and only one meaning. Campbell does discuss usage in detail, but he is certainly not dogmatic about proper use. Indeed, when Richards cites an example of this “superstition” he quotes, not from Campbell, but rather from a book he identifies as a Manual of Rhetoric (1936/1965, p. 54). Richards is referring to a Manual of Rhetoric and Composition, an introductory textbook published in 1907 and thus a work very different from Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric. Even Richards seems to recognize that he has perhaps overstated the perniciousness of this superstition. He concedes that the doctrine of proper usage “can be interpreted in several ways which make it true and innocuous” (1936/1965, p. 54).

3. Metaphor and the Figures
For Richards, nothing illustrates the difficulties of proper meanings and the contextual interdependence or “interinanimation” of words more than metaphor. He devotes the final one third of The Philosophy of Rhetoric to an analysis of metaphor and it is this analysis for which the book is best known. His goal is to “put the theory of metaphor in a more important place than it has enjoyed in traditional Rhetoric” (1936/1965, p. 95). “Throughout the history of Rhetoric,” he argues, “metaphor has been treated as a sort of happy extra trick with words…. In brief, a grace or ornament or added power of language, not its constitutive form” (1936/1965, p. 90). Metaphor, says Richards, “is the omnipresent principle of language” (1936/1965, p. 92). Metaphor illustrates his “context theory of meaning” because “fundamentally it is a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts. Thought is metaphoric…” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 94 [italics original]).

With his treatment of metaphor Richards is addressing a concern that had occupied rhetoric from its very beginnings. And Richards is correct that rhetoricians had often treated metaphor and other tropes and figures of speech as something that could be added to non-figurative language in order to enhance a writer’s style. However, simply because metaphor could be employed as a stylistic device does not necessarily mean that rhetoricians regarded metaphor as exclusively additive. Campbell, in the other Philosophy of Rhetoric, observes that certain tropes “have a closer connection with the thought than with the expression” and thus should not be viewed as an aspect of style (p. 293). Metaphor, however, has an “intimate” connection with both style and thought and may “therefore be considered under either head” (p. 294).

Metaphor, of course, was only one of many figures of speech that occupied traditional rhetoric. Richards is aware of this but seems ambivalent about figures other than metaphor. In Speculative Instruments he admits that “some sort of systematic study of at least some of the devices of language so painstakingly labeled and arranged by these logicians, rhetoricians, and figurists may still be what education chiefly lacks” (Richards, 1955, p. 163). Yet a few pages later in the same book, referring to the multiplicity of figures often found in traditional rhetorics, he confesses “we fear codification in these matters and with good reason” (p. 165). In the end, Richards is content to focus on metaphor as the fundamental figure of thought and language.

4. Poetry
Although The Philosophy of Rhetoric is about prose, Richards’ interest seems to be as much about poetry as it is prose. Richards had been led to a study of meaning by observing the difficulty his students had with interpreting poetry. And poetry, far more than rhetoric, would remain an interest throughout his life. Richards defines poetry as discourse in which words “are free to move as they please” (1955, p. 150). Richards favors poetry in part because the fluidity of meaning makes argument almost impossible: “If the meanings of words are free to move about, then there can be no pinning an opponent down, no convicting him of self-contradiction, no catching him out shifting his ground; indeed none of the rules of that amusing old game will hold. The comedy of argument and its practical purposes alike depend upon a convention of constancy in meaning” (1955, p.149).
While Richards is discussing poetry in this passage, he believes that meaning in prose is also highly unstable: “in most prose, and more than we ordinarily suppose, the opening words have to wait for those that follow to settle what they shall mean – if indeed that ever gets settled” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 50). Ultimately, says Richards, “the world of poetry has in no sense any different reality from the rest of the world and it has no special laws and no other-worldly peculiarities. It is made up of experiences of exactly the same kind as those that come down to us in other ways” (1929, p. 78). For Richards, then, the inconstancy of meaning makes traditional approaches to argument futile. Yet he offers no real alternative to the disputation he so despises. He seems to believe that if meanings are communicated and interpreted as effectively as possible fundamental differences can somehow be resolved.

5. Richards’ “Design”
While The Philosophy of Rhetoric examines meaning and metaphor it does not, with any specificity, explain how his “new rhetoric” will remedy misunderstanding. He recognizes this limitation when he admits early in the book that “what follows is unavoidably abstract and general in the extreme” (Richards 1936/1965, p. 26). While he does not regard The Philosophy of Rhetoric as the proper place to present a pragmatic program, Richards would devote much of his career to offer what he believed to be practical solutions to the problems of misunderstanding. This approach is evident, for example, in one of his last books, Design for Escape (1968). This book offers a “design” to “escape” from many of the problems of the modern world. But Richards had been offerings such designs for decades.
Of these various “designs for escape” probably none occupied Richards more than “Basic English.” Richards was convinced that understandings among peoples could never fully be achieved without a universal language and that the language most suitable to this role was English. However, to become a medium of international understanding would require a language that could be learned readily by anyone. Thus Basic English, a simplified version of English, was developed by Richards and his colleagues. As he explains in Basic English and its Uses (1943) “Basic English is English made simply by limiting the number of its words to 850, and by cutting down the rules for using them to the smallest number necessary for the clear statement of ideas” (p. 23). Richards and others promoted “Basic” and “translated” various works into that language. Yet despite Richards’ efforts over several decades Basic English never became the international medium of communication that he had intended.

A rather different, and less grandiose, effort to minimize misunderstanding was Richards’ development of “specialized quotation marks.” Like conventional quotation marks, these consist of words or phrases surrounded by superscripted symbols. These “quotation marks” (later labeled “metasemantic markers”) are intended to give the reader additional information about the text they surround. These were introduced in How to Read a Page: A Course in Efficient Reading with an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words (1942) which includes a key to the seven marks used in that book. The following are examples, together with Richards’ explanations, of the marks presented in that work (see: illustration):

 “w……w indicates the word – merely as the word in general – is being talked about. The marks are equivalent to ‘the word.’ E. g., wtablew may mean an article of furniture or a list.
!……! indicates surprise or derision, a Good Heavens! What-a-way-to-talk! attitude. It should be read !shriek! if we have occasion to read it aloud.
nb……nb indicates that how the word is understood is a turning point in the discussion, and usually that it may easily be read in more than one way or with an inadequate perception of its importance. The sign is short for Nota Bene (p.68).”

Richards would continue to use these marks in most of the books he wrote after How to Read a Page. Whether the marks minimized misunderstanding in the way Richards hoped is debatable. Although the specialized quotation marks may give a more precise understanding of how Richards is using a word, the marks also may require the reader to turn to the key to recall the meaning of each mark. Richards seems to believe that the establishment of “designs” like a universal language and an improved system of quotation marks misunderstandings would be minimized sufficiently that the unpleasantness of argument might be avoided altogether.

6. Conclusion
What, then, has been the legacy of Richards’ “new rhetoric” in the nearly seventy five years since the publication of The Philosophy of Rhetoric? Although Richards’ has influenced the development of literary criticism, his direct influence on rhetoric, I believe, has been neither considerable nor constructive. Certainly very few have heeded Richards’ call to make rhetoric a study of “how words work” on a microscopic level. But Richards’ concern that rhetoric is too divisive, too confrontational, and too argumentative to be beneficial surely appealed to those already suspicious of the art of persuasion. As I have observed in “Modern Rhetoric and the End of Argument” the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw efforts to separate argumentation from its traditional place within rhetoric. Richards’ attack on the “old rhetoric” would have reinforced the movement already underway to divorce argumentation from rhetoric.
Following Richards the twentieth century saw attempt to formulate a view of rhetoric that was less combative, less agonistic. But these efforts, like those of Richards, have proven difficult to achieve. No one can oppose efforts to find better ways to resolve conflicts. But what has happened, I believe, is that much rhetoric has simply abandoned the study of argumentation altogether, rather than confront the messiness of debate. This has had the effect of restricting rhetoric’s traditional scope in much late twentieth-century writing about rhetoric. But the ancient Protagorean model has proven remarkably persistent, because the need to make decisions between two competing views of the world in courts, legislatures, elections, and all manner of human affairs has not abated. Even Richards recognizes the difficulty of abandoning the study of argument altogether: “In the old Rhetoric, of course, there is much that a new rhetoric finds useful – and much besides which may be advantageous until man changes his nature, debates and disputes, incites, tricks, bullies, and cajoles his fellows less” (1936/1965,p. 24). Despite I. A. Richards very considerably efforts, we human beings have not much changed our nature and so we continue to debate and dispute with considerable enthusiasm.

REFERENCES
Abbott, D. P. (2006). “Splendor and Misery: Semiotics and the End of Rhetoric.” Rhetorica 303-323.
Abbott, D. P. (2007). “Modern Rhetoric and the End of Argument.” In F. H. Van Eemeren, J. A. Blair, C. A. Willard & B. Garssen (Eds.). Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (pp. 9-13). Amsterdam: SicSat.
Campbell, G. (1963). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1776).
Cicero, M. T. (1968). De inventione. Trans. H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ferreira-Buckley, L (1996). “Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric.” In T. Enos (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. New York: Garland.
Gaillet, L. L. (2010). “The Nineteenth Century.” In L. L. Gaillet (Ed.). The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twentieth-Century Guide. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Gardiner, J. H., Kittredge, G. L., & Arnold, S. L. (1907). Manual of Composition and Rhetoric. Boston: Ginn.
Houlette, F. (1989). Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: An Enumerative Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Richards, I. A. (1943). Basic English and its Uses. New York: W.W. Norton.
Richards, I. A. (1968). Design for Escape: World Education through Modern Media. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.
Richards, I. A. (1965). How to Read a Page: A Course in Efficient reading with an Introduction to 100 Great Words. Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1942).
Richards, I. A. (1929). Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.
Richards, I. A. (1955). Speculative Instruments. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Richards, I. A. (1965). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1936).
Whately, R. (1963). The Elements of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1828).

1. Introductory remarks 
1.1. Questioning the axiomatic principles is no more a contradiction in terms.
Modern philosophers of science, Albert Einstein among them, established the relative status of foundational propositions of any paradigm. In spite of paradigmatic relativity, axiomatic principles do not lose their constitutive role[i].
The progressive axiomatization of sciences and the constitution of theoretical paradigms in many fields of research entitle us to adopt this method for the analysis of doxa – the domain we are interested in. “Doxa, though it is the general word for ‘belief’, tends to carry with it the hidden, but sometimes operative implication, that the belief in question is an assessment of something”, says Crombie (1963, pp. 33-34).

1.2. The intention of speaking about paradigmatic structure of doxa was explicitly manifested by Gianni Vattimo (1993, pp. 90-108)[ii] and probably by many other philosophers. Consequently, it is not necessary to supply more proofs in supporting our theoretical position. It is important to emphasize that, from our point of view, the paradigmatic analysis of doxa is rather a method than a theory, part of the interlocutors’ critical device. The formal criteria of a theoretical paradigm – coherence, concision, and exhaustiveness, as expressed by Thomas Kuhn (1976), represent the points where the cooperative and rational principles of doxastic argumentation can be critically examined, intuitively by interlocutors, explicitly by theoreticians.
Being an “assessment of something”, doxa is dominated by axiology.
We define an axiological paradigm the multitude of empirically axiological propositions (judgments of value, practical decisions, norms, orders, etc.) that can be reduced to a doxa concept. The basic meaning is crystallized in the form of a general definition which grounds the respective ensemble of propositions in a coherent, concise, and exhaustive way. Paradigmatic analysis of doxa refers to traditionally formulated doxastic categories.

2. Premises
Before developing our commentary about the axiomatic principle of doxastic paradigms, some aspects should be clarified:
2.1. Any argumentative process is placed in the horizon of an interrogation.
Going back to Aristotle, we shall find in his Topica, the first support of the thesis enunciated above: “Une prémisse dialectique est la mise sous forme interrogative d’une idée admise par tous les hommes” (I, 10; 1932, p.14).[iii] The deliberative attitude and the controversial scenario of logoi and antilogoi have their roots in interrogation. “Denn Zweifel kann nur bestehen, wo eine Frage besteht; eine Frage, nur wo eine Antwort besteht, und diese nur, wo etwas gesagt werden kann“ says L.Wittgenstein (1960, p. 82). Interrogative logic[iv] supplies the explanation of the intrinsic relationship between question and answer. The main target of the interrogative logic is to transfer the conditions of truth pertinent to the question, to the respective answer, making from both members – the question & reply – a unique issue.

2.2. Doxastic dialectics is the exclusive procedure that can establish the fundaments of axiology.
Doxastic dialectics controls the logic of belief. It is generally accepted, though in not sufficiently rigorous terms, that doxastic dialectics can be defined as being an exchange of opinions. Given the Principle of Uncertainty[v] that governs the subjectively inflected soft rationality of doxa – says the traditional doctrine – the cognitive autonomy of doxa is limited. Instead of minimizing the heuristic power of doxastic dialectics, unfavorably considered a preliminary step to episteme, we have tried – in another of our studies (Amel, 1999), to prove the cognitive autonomy of the doxa in the field of axiology: judgments of value, cultural judgments, practical judgments, etc. Certainly we cannot speak about axiological episteme, but we can affirm the reflective target of axiology. Doxastic thinking can be referred to what Kant defines as reflecting judgment: “Ist aber nur das Besondere gegeben, wozu sie das Allgemeine finden soll, so ist die Urteilskraft bloß reflektierend.” (Kant, 1924 Einl & IV, p. 15 XXVI).

2.3. Doxastic dialectics belongs to the cognitive field of probable.
Aristotle, who has a double approach to logic, opposed to the logic of science the logic of contingent, which in our days can be equated with the modal logic: “Le discours selon la science appartient à l’enseignement, et il est impossible de l’employer ici, où les preuves et les discours doivent nécessairement en passer par les notions communes.” (1932, p. 74/1355a). Médéric Dufour, translator of Aristotle’s book, makes an explicit commentary of Aristotle’s double approach of logic: “Quant il eut découvert le syllogisme, Aristote comprit qu’à côté du syllogisme scientifique dont prémisses et, par suite, conclusions sont nécessaires, il fallait admettre, pour la Dialectique et la Rhétorique, un syllogisme plus contingent et plus souple, à prémisses et à conclusion probables.” (1932, pp. 13-14).
The logic of belief was defined by Hintikka as follows: “There is no reason why what is believed should be true.” (1962, p. 5). Hintikka’s definition consolidates the conclusions regarding the probable character of doxa.
Even if we acknowledge for the doxastic field contingent roots of rationality, and, consequently, even if doxastic dialectics intermingles dialectical with rhetorical arguments[vi], the axiological target of beliefs cannot be reached without criteria of decidability.

2.4. Doxastic dialectics (axiologically oriented) opens conditions for an alternative truth, semantically constituted, and not analytically proved.
Trying to define the nature of ‘doxastic truth’, called by us (1999) the persuasive truth, the thing we discovered was that such a truth is more profoundly uncertain than can be proved with analytical logic. ‘The alternative truth’, subjectively and rhetorically involved, actually represents the axiological meaning of the disputed issue. While truth is matched to things by adequatio intellectus ad rem, as Plato-Socrates required, meaning represents a noetic content developed in consciousness through sense-giving acts. Due to the subjective ‘reality’ of meaning, the thesis of reasonableness of contrary statements can be judged in Protagoras’ terms: man is the measure of all things.

3. Doxastic dialectics and loci communes
Given the considerations presented above and the known fact concerning doxastic instability due to its ‘probable’ nature, in this study we shall focus our attention on the mechanism of decidability in the axiologically oriented doxastic field.
The task is procedural: We find it profitable to follow dialectical steps, in order to establish to what extent axiological arguments claim a justification principle. At the first step of our analysis, we shall pass the test of adaequatio intellectus (argumentum) ad locos communes, particularly, we shall question the relevance of ‘common notions’, those definitions of doxa which are taken for granted in axiological argumentation. Aristotle, in two of his books, Topica and Rhetoric, interested in finding methods for practical judgments, emphasized the cognitive function of loci communes. For him, loci communes represent patterns of a specific type of syllogism, a shortened syllogism, named enthymema, which is based on probable premises (Topica, I, 1). The premises on which practical judgment is based are part of a fund of common notions, and, consequently, enthymema refers to that shared knowledge in an implicit way. Aristotle was the first who uncovered the mechanism of pragmatic rationality. From our point of view, adaequatio intellectus (argumentum) ad locos communes supplies a normative test, deprived of basic evidence. Hoping to reach a higher degree of rationality in the same field, we shall pass to a second step and begin to question the axiomatic power of ‘common notions’[vii].
Collective mentality is expressed in an ensemble of ‘common notions’ which compose the doxastic code. Frequently, people, in their judgments of value, ignore the common code, and make judgments following rather personal codes. And even if in every day practice people proceed spontaneously in conformity with the natural need of having clear codes of communication, it is less known that doxastic dialectics is a procedure by which men establish the ‘measure’ for doxa.
In which terms can we actually speak about the measure of doxa? Can we find justification principles in virtue of which a doxastic proposition could be considered suitable to ground a certain axiological paradigm? From dialectical point of view, questioning the axiomatic power of ‘common notions’ means to raise a problem-type question. Given the subjective involvement of doxa, the dialectical process of establishing the measure of doxa extends in consciousness the reason of meaning inquiries.
By “justification principle” we do not understand a reasonable proof of relevance, but the transcendental reason for which an axiological definition could be taken for granted.

4. Doxastic dialectics and the cognitive process
A specification is necessary. In our opinion, doxastic dialectics represents in itself the mechanism of decidability. The interlocutors, by their argumentations, judge the rationality of their beliefs critically. The mechanism of decidability is activated by each intervention. The theoretical role we assume is to emphasize whether the doxastic mechanism of decidability reveals a justification principle, and to name it. While questioning both the subjective and rhetorical involvement of doxa, we have in view the meaning- oriented feature of doxa.
The analysis of doxastic argumentation is usually reduced to the examination of pro & con opinions, with respect to a ‘probable’ axiological truth. However, it is impossible to imagine a specific argumentation without acknowledging the cognitive fundaments of argumentation in general. In an extended sense, in an implicit or explicit way, doxastic argumentation is a procedure of reasonable justification, but placed within a hermeneutical frame. During a true doxastic debate, the heuristic gain is obtained by each arguer by meaning inquiry. Instead of being reductive, meaning stages compose a creative process, at the end of which the intelligible object of doxa is deepened in the arguers’ consciousness.

4.1. A comprehensive view of doxa presents many possibilities of arranging meaningful relationships.
The probable nature of the doxastic field engenders paradigmatic conflicts and disputes, by means of which human culture extends its dynamic image.
In conflicts and disputes, the interrogative spirit notifies paradigmatic anomalies or paradigmatic irrelevances, manifested in several ways. Because of many reasons, the irrelevance is due to the difficulty to refer a particular case to an axiomatic basis. In these cases, the critical position questions the relevance of the axiomatic principle: whether its definition is sufficiently coherent, concise or comprehensive. Problems inside a paradigm lead to a problem-type question.
A problem-type question engenders a problematic judgment. Problematic judgments are reflections within the field of the probable[viii]. Here we present some examples:

4.1.1. Paradigmatic anomaly: The riddle of Judaism.
‘The problem’ was exposed by the Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel (1998, pp. 21; 24). In order to avoid any misunderstanding, we shall quote a passage from the text where the ‘riddle’ is explained in terms of a paradigmatic anomaly:  “ said his early biographer, Karl Rosenkranz, one . Hegel was a Christian thinker, but very heterodox. He placed Lutheran Christianity at the height of the world Spirit, yet as a philosopher, he negated it dialectically. … In Christian eyes, which Hegel secularized but never abandoned, Judaism’s transformation into Christianity is one of the major events in the history of salvation. This is the moment when the redeemer appears on the historical stage and is rejected by his own people. Thereby the Jews depose themselves from their divine mission in favor of Christianity, which absorbs their message while negating its flaws and raising it to a higher, more universal level. Hegel internalized the pattern of this Christian metaphor. He even made it a model of his concept of Aufhebung, a concept which means that something is negated but not annihilated; rather, its essential content is preserved and raised to a higher level of expression. For the mature Hegel, this is a basic pattern of reality and history. Every cultural form makes some genuine contribution to the world Spirit, after which it is sublated (aufgehoben) and disappears from the historical scene. Yet the Jews continued to survive long after their raison d’être had disappeared – indeed, after they no longer had a genuine history in Hegel’s sense, but existed merely as the corpse of their extinguished essence. But how could it be that Judaism evaded the fate (and defied the model) of which it was itself the prime example?”

In the last sentence, Y.Yovel resumes Hegel’s philosophical paradigm with respect to which Judaism appears as an anomaly, an “enigma”. We call the question raised by Israeli philosopher: “But how could it be that Judaism evaded the fate (and defied the model) of which it was itself the prime example?” a problem-type question.

4.1.2. Paradigmatic break (paradigm refutation): New premises of reception.
(2) “Reality should be applied not penetrated” (Klaus Honnef, 1988, p. 76).
When contemporary aesthetics theorizes the abolition of the prejudice ‘art in itself’, the intention is to reduce the metaphysical dimension of art. The classical paradigm of contemplative art is refuted. The artist does no more say that the whole reality is invested with revealing power, but reality should be applied not penetrated. By mixing art with reality the real change which is at stake is the ‘distance’ the receiver does no more take vis-à-vis the object of art. The idea of artistic convention is extended in such a way that it implies a performative premise. The receiver becomes an active participation to a ‘possible world’, where the points of reference are no more those of usual life. Modern exhibitions are rather like an imaginary itinerary or like a scenario that should be performed while entering it.

4.1.3. Paradigmatic crisis: Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?
In feeble times, when Gods are dead, what should a poet do? Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? That’s the question, raised by Friedrich Hölderlin in the Elegy Brod und Wein. Disconcerted, unable to synchronize his poetic credo with the weakness of the time he lives in:
(3) Aber Freund! Wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter,
Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt.

Hölderlin feels that a change of poetical vision is necessary:
(4) Aber sie (die Dichter) sind, sagst du, wie des Weingotts heilige Priester,
Welche von Land zu Land zogen in heiliger Nacht.

Heidegger, in one of his philosophical essays, the title of which was inspired by Hölderlin’s question: Wozu Dichter? displays a large commentary about the moment of poetical turn, announced by Hölderlin. It is easy to translate Heidegger’s remarks into our terms: die dürftige Zeit is the moment of a new poetic perception of sacredness, the moment of transfer from one paradigm into another: the poetry of sublimity, illuminated by the presence of Gods, becomes anachronistic in dürftiger Zeit; visionary poets, finding themselves in deep night, going after die Spur der entflohenen Götter, discover the mysterious force which comes from the Abgrund (abyss) up: Die Dichter zogen in heiliger Nacht. In Heidegger’s opinion, who dedicated this essay to Rilke’s death anniversary, this is the new poetic paradigm, the poetry of Being. Rilke is the best representative of the new poetic vision, he, the poet of Being, took further Hölderlin’s message.

There are an infinite number of similar examples of various kinds explicitly or implicitly questioning the foundation of value definition.
The grounding thesis of arguments is interrogated. The problem-type question opens an argumentative debate on grounding level, and the meaning of the grounding proposition is reevaluated. That is the reason we call the problem-type question a heuristic question.

4.2. Generally speaking, in every day life the most difficult problem is to include correctly a particular case into a paradigm.
Such an enterprise requires fine meaning analysis and power of discernment. Irrelevance of particular cases, with respect to a general proposition, demands explanation regarding the common sense. The rationality of the problem-raising process is judged with hermeneutical means. The process of finding meaning pertinence reshapes the entire cognitive scenario dominated by a specific doxa and consolidates the beliefs, in each interlocutor’s understanding, by sense-giving acts. The three paradigmatic criteria – coherence, concision, and exhaustiveness – become stages of the meaning synthesis inside the subjective consciousness. As meaning is assumed in a differentiated way by each one, doxastic pluralism is a legitimate doxastic premise.
The premise of doxastic pluralism can induce a wrong conclusion, namely that doxastic indecidability is inherent and, consequently, doxastic dialectics never reaches an end. G.H.Gadamer was the supporter of the philosophy of an unlimited dialogue, but, like us, on hermeneutical reasons, and not due to logical shortcomings. For each arguer it is extremely difficult to coordinate the justification procedure with semantic tools, because the process of meaning assimilation is endless. During doxastic dialectics, the role of the arguer who questions the axiomatic principle is actually not to contradict, but to notice possible associative links within conceptual meanings. By raising a certain problem, both interlocutors cooperate in increasing the meaning of basic concepts.

The dialectical procedure of doxa has constitutive finality. The fundamental question of our study, namely the question regarding criteria of decidability within doxastic dialectics, directs the inquiry towards the problem of an original synthesis which represents the subjects’ transcendental constitution. That means: when the axiomatic relevance of a particular concept is proved, its meaning is ‘objectified’ in consciousness under the form of a MORAL OBJECT. The moral object becomes the posteriori referent of doxa[ix]. A moral object points to a criteria of Transcendence by which the Subjective Dimension of doxa reaches categorical justification.
By ‘moral objects’, man gives the measure of things, but he simultaneously establishes for himself a moral measure.

5. Conclusion
While in truth-oriented dialectics the justification principle is expressed by the law of tertium not datur, in meaning-oriented dialectics the justification principle has subjective dimension. Heidegger empasizes the grounding role of subjectivity: “Die Subjektivität ist die wesenhafte Gesetzlichkeit der Gründe, welche die Möglichkeit eines Gegenstandes zu reichen kann.” (1957, p.137) Given the premise that doxastic dialectics is meaning-oriented, the referent of doxa has a semantic nature. Its axiomatic power is established by self-reflective proof. Doxastic thinking discovers its own ratio (= measure) in an original synthesis.
The cognitive force of the dilemmatic moment challenges the interlocutors’ understanding, by giving them the chance to justify the meaning relevance of their inquiry. Doxastic dialectics engenders cognitive intervals between belief, doxa and opinion – respectively, between belief a noetic act, through which the idea of value is posited in consciousness, doxa the conceptual representation of the idea of value in reason, and opinion the discursive form of belief. When the justification inquiry is settled, the unity of the three levels is reconstituted under the dominance of a MORAL OBJECT.
The rational procedure of questioning axiological axioms cannot ignore pragmatic criteria: normative and situational. From the normative point of view, a problem-type question becomes relevant in confrontation with the common mentality. The normative test is relative, because common mentality is dependent upon a historically given moment (upon Zeitgeist). In spite of the heuristic target of a problem-type question, its opportunity is measured by rhetorical pertinence. There are moments when certain debates are fresh and hot, and moments when they remain irrelevant, in spite of their rational motivation.
In an interview, Gerard Philipe was asked about the reason he was chosen to play a certain type of character (which means the recognition, from the part of the player, of his belonging to a certain paradigm).

(5) “This is a pertinent question”, was Gerard Philipe’s answer, “but an impertinent one”, he added.

NOTES
i In modern mathematical and logical theories, an axiom ceased to be defined as a proposition the truth of which is evident; instead, an axiom is defined in virtue of a paradigmatic condition. We call an axiom a concept, a proposition or a general definition which are able to impose laws of coherence within a system.
ii Gianni Vattimo, in one of his essays, The Structure of Artistic Revolutions (a chapter in Vattimo`s book, 1993), asks himself a similar question to ours: To what extent is it possible to build a discourse, about arts development, analogous to that proposed by Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Vattimo admits that, with respect to arts, such a task is more difficult, but at the same time, much easier (see p.91).
iii See further: “Une problème dialectique est une question dont l’enjeu peut être soit l’alternative pratique d’un choix et d’un rejet, soit l’acquisition d’une vérité et d’une connaissance, une question qui soit telle, soit en elle-même, soit à titre d’instrument permettant de résoudre une question distincte d’elle-même, dans l’un et l’autre de ce genre.” (T, I,11; 1967, p. 16).
iv See details about erothetic logic – another name for the interrogative logic (gr. erothema means ‘question’) – in G. Grecu (ed.), 1982.
v M. Billig (1982) develops the theory of soft rationality (fluid thinking, as he calls it) in argumentation. Well trained in Judaic hermeneutics and antique rhetoric, M. Billig, who is a socio-linguist, emphasizes the role of rhetoric in thinking and appeals to Quintilianus’ Principle of Uncertainty, in this sense: “we can never capture the infinite variants of human affair in a finite system of psychological laws” (1989, p. 62).
vi We refer to Aristotle’s definition of dialectic and peirastic arguments (1932, 1940). Dialectic argument – the argument the premises of which are probable and shared by everybody, invoked with the intention to prove its validity. Peirastic argument – the argument the premises of which are probable, invoked with the intention of persuading the interlocutor to accept it.
vii During the history of rhetoric, the concept of loci communes was mistaken for the common notions on which practical judgment is based. Later, loci communes, translated by common places, acquired a depreciative connotation, that of cliché, banality. A better equivalent of what Aristotle calls common notion is the concept of common sense, which preserves the idea that practical judgments have rational basis. New Rhetoric emphasizes the importance to rehabilitate the original meaning of loci communes, in order to rehabilitate Rhetoric itself. See, in Ch. Perelman & L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1968), remarks concerning the definition of loci communes as store of arguments.
viii Aristotle’s definitions of both dialectic and rhetorical arguments (1932, 1940) match the way we define the problematic judgment: problematic judgment refers to what is possible, neither to what is necessary (apodictic judgment), nor to something what is real (assertorical judgment).
ix For more explanation, see R. Amel, 1999 and 2009.

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