Singapore: Why so formally rational?

Guest lecture with Geoffrey Benjamin, Senior Associate, Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), Nanyang Technological University

Monday, September 17, 2012 - 15:00 to 16:30

In this lecture, Geoffrey Benjamin highlights some themes concerning the various sources of the Singaporean ‘national character’ – if one dare speak of such a thing – and tries to answer the question: Why are Singaporeans predisposed to find formal rationality meaningful?

The factors that make Singapore what it is are many, and historically layered. The Singapore national character has been formed out of the interplay of several different historical factors, in particular:

 

  • The island’s lack of a peasantry, even in the past

  • The population’s mostly ‘exogenous’ socio-cultural make-up

  • Contemporary Singapore’s shape as a city made up of new towns

  • The Republic’s status as a ‘secondary’ nation-state; and

  • Singapore’s relative lack of ‘civil society’

 

Together, these factors have acted to generate a Singaporean culture that prioritizes formal rationality (in Max Weber’s sense), to the near-exclusion of all other forms.

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