What is comparative political theory?

Review of Politics

Volumn 71, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 531-565

  March, Andrew F ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70450273280     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670509990672     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. Fred Dallmayr, "Toward a Comparative Political Theory," The Review of Politics 59, no.3 (1997): 421.
2. Gerald Larson and Eliot Deutsch, Interpreting across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988
3. Anthony Parel and Ronald C. Keith, eds., Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree (New Delhi and Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1992
4. Roxanne Euben, "Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism," The Journal of Politics 59, no.1 (1997): 28-58;
5. Euben, "Premodern, Antimodern or Postmodern? Islamic and Western Critiques of Modernity," The Review of Politics 49, no.3 (1997): 429-59;
6. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999
7. Euben, "Contingent Borders, Syncretic Perspectives: Globalization, Political Theory, and Islamizing Knowledge," International Studies Review 4, no.1 (2002): 23-48;
8. Euben, "Killing (for) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom, and Political Action," Political Theory 30, no.1 (2002), 4-35;
9. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006
10. Dallmayr, Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999
11. Dallmayr, "Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory," Perspectives on Politics 2, no.2 (2004): 249-57;
12. Brooke A. Ackerly, "Is Liberalism the Only Way Toward Democracy? Confucianism and Democracy," Political Theory 33, no.4 (2005): 547-57;
13. Farah Godrej, "Nonviolence and Gandhi's Truth: A Method for Moral and Political Arbitration," The Review of Politics 68, no.2 (2006), 287-317;
14. Godrej, "Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other," Polity 41 (2009): 135-65;
15. and Leigh Jenco, " 'What Does Heaven Ever Say?' A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement," American Political Science Review 101, no.4 (2007): 741-755
16. See also the special issue of The Review of Politics on comparative political theory (70, no. 1, Winter 2008) with articles by Jürgen Gebhardt, Antony Black, Anthony Parel, Richard Bernstein, and Takashi Shogimen.
17. Edited by Fred Dallmayr and published through Lexington Books. The series has to this point published 19 volumes, a number of which will be referenced below.
18. I would like to thank Margaret Kohn for raising this concern. This last category is meant as a catch-all for theorists who unmistakably defend identifiable normative orientations but do so not through analytic argumentation but through the close identification with political traditions, say the American democratic or civic tradition.
19. E.g., Fred Dallmayr and José M. Rosales, eds., Beyond Nationalism? Sovereignty and Citizenship (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001
20. Margaret Chatterjee, Hinterlands and Horizons: Excursions in Search of Amity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002
21. Jennifer S. Holmes, ed., New Approaches to Comparative Politics: Insights from Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003
22. Susan J. Henders, Democratization and Identity: Regimes and Ethnicity in East and Southeast Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004
23. Jessé Souza and Valter Sinder, eds., Imagining Brazil (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005
24. and Takashi Shogimen and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). All strike me as particularly good examples of this mode of comparative political theory.
25. Along the lines of these observations, there have been other calls recently to engage in the comparative study of political thought, one which emerges from the study of political ideologies and political thought and speech as quasi-empirical social phenomena. Oxford political theorist Michael Freeden, the founder and editor of Journal of Political Ideologies, argues that "political theory needs to reacquaint itself with the features of politics and reassert itself as a branch of social studies. In that capacity, one aspect of that reassertiveness is the need at least to think about whether we could usefully take a leaf out of the work of political comparativists in the areas of government and policy, and seek to advance the investigation of political thought through the elaboration and testing of analytical categories of comparison, both temporal and spatial"
26. Michael Freeden, "The Comparative Study of Political Thinking," Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 [2007]: 1).
27. Thus, Freeden declares clearly and coherently that the kind of political theory that he thinks can most benefit from a comparative method is a scholarly form (rather than an engaged one), one which aims at greater knowledge of certain kinds of practices and phenomena, namely, "detectable and decodable instances of talking and writing: the external expression of political thinking." Political theorists might thus study comparatively modes of direct persuasion or the use of concepts, symbols, and speech to establish hegemony over social contexts (à la Lukes's "third dimension of power" [Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974)]). Or they might study (as, of course, we already do) the variable rules of political argumentation, the place of rhetoric, the techniques for mobilizing emotion, the allocation of significance for competing political values, and the diversity of conceptions of politics in competition with other spheres of human activity.
28. Indeed, Roxanne Euben argues that comparison is essential to all acts of theorizing and thus that comparative political theory is as much a return to origins as a new departure (Journeys to the Other Shore, 10, 13, and the entire argument in chap. 2.).
29. Dallmayr, "Beyond Monologue," 253.
30. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 9.
31. Dallmayr, "Beyond Monologue," 254.
32. Godrej, "Nonviolence and Gandhi's Truth."
33. Ananta Kumar Giri, Conversations and Transformations: Toward a New Ethics of Self and Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002).
34. Ackerly, "Is Liberalism the Only Way Toward Democracy?" 548. Emphasis added.
35. Dallmayr, "Beyond Monologue," 249.
36. Euben, "Contingent Borders, Syncretic Perspectives," 46-47.
37. Dallmayr, "Beyond Monologue," 249.
38. Euben, "Contingent Borders, Syncretic Perspectives," 26.
39. Ackerly, "Is Liberalism the Only Way Toward Democracy?" 548.
40. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 156.
41. Euben, "Killing (for) Politics."
42. Fred Dallmayr, ed., preface to Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction (forthcoming).
43. Parel, Comparative Political Philosophy, 12.
44. Aziza Y. al-Hibri, "Islamic Constitutionalism and the Concept of Democracy," in Dallmayr, Border Crossings, 61-88;
45. and M. A. Muqtedar Khan, ed., Islamic Democratic Discourse: Theory, Debates, and Philosophical Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006).
46. Dallmayr, "'Asian Values' and Global Human Rights," Philosophy East and West 52, no.2 (2002): 173-89;
47. Ackerly, "Is Liberalism the Only Way Toward Democracy?";
48. Russell Arben Fox, "Confucianism and Communitarianism in a Liberal Democratic World," in Dallmayr, Border Crossings, 185-212;
49. and L. H. M. Ling and Chih-yu Shih, "Confucianism with a Liberal Face: Democratic Politics in Post-Colonial Taiwan," in Dallmayr, Border Crossings, 213-236
50. Nancy Hirschmann, "Eastern Veiling, Western Freedom?" in Dallmayr, Border Crossings, 39-60.
51. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 155.
52. "The West is itself riven with disagreements and ambivalences about modernity and rationalism . . . [which] belie characterizations of a coherent West better able to cope with doubt, with a human centered universe, with radical uncertainty than others. . . . [And] Islamic fundamentalist ideas such as Qutb's and the sensibility they express are not premodern, although they often draw upon and reinterpret ideals located in a golden past. And although such Islamic fundamentalist political thought coheres around a critique of epistemological assumptions many take to be constitutive of post-Enlightenment modernity, it must be understood as modern, both in the historical sense and in the sense in which it is profoundly engaged with the processes and ideas we associate with both modernity and 'modernism.' Furthermore, as disparate Western voices continue to express similar anxieties about modernity and the costs of post-Enlightenment rationalism, it is not particularly illuminating to argue that fundamentalists such as Qutb are antimodernists, unless we are willing to call all critics of modernity antimodern" (Euben, "Premodern, Antimodern or Postmodern?" 435-36).
53. Why do we need, for example, Sayyid Qutb to know that modernity and rationality can be contested? One wonders, first, why studying, say, Arendt's versus Taylor's critiques of modernity or liberalism is not part of comparative political theory, but studying Qutb's is. Further, what is the added value of the "comparative" claim that Qutb or modern Islamic fundamentalism is more complex than the antimodern caricature of some form of the clash-of-civilizations thesis, which we know because his critique of rationality is a quintessentially modern enterprise rather than something inherent to Islam? It seems that the main purpose of the claim is merely to rehabilitate Islamic fundamentalism by saying that certain hostile labels (irrational, antimodern, utterly alien) ought not to be applied to thinkers like Qutb.
54. The excellent aforementioned book series, Global Encounters: Studies in Comparative Political Theory, displays a remarkable breadth of method, purpose, and geographical focus.
55. This recalls much of the debate over whether all contested or contestable concepts are philosophically essentially contested concepts. To the extent that there is affinity, we might pose a version of John Gray's challenge: "To characterize a concept as 'essentially contested' may be (and in all relevant contexts must be) to do more than to report its cultural and historical variability and to record the fact that its correct application has long been a matter of dispute-at least if such a characterization is to be nontruistic and if it is to succeed at once in capturing and in going some distance toward explaining the intractability of disputes about its use. That is, it cannot be the criterion of a concept's essential contestability that its users are culturally and historically variant if the fact of its variability (often cited as evidence of its contestability) is to be accounted for at all satisfactorily. All interesting and important contestability theses go far beyond this weak version in which the fact of a concept's contestability can be established by empirical means alone, and in which a concept's contestability is, indeed, constituted by its 'contestedness.' It is necessary to distinguish clearly between this weak, empirical version and the stronger version that a given application of a concept is 'contest-able'" (John Gray, "On the Contestability of Social and Political Concepts," Political Theory 5, no. 3 [1977]: 338).
56. Let us pause here. A possible rejoinder at this point is to say, "The purpose of the comparative political project is actually to create the demand or the intellectual cover within the broader discipline for research on non-Western thought. The word 'comparative' is not central here intellectually, but if it catches on then it will be easier for scholars to publish on neglected writers and traditions and to be taken seriously by other academics." That may be true, and it may indeed be great if scholars writing on neglected topics have their path smoothed. But such a don't-throw-the-baby-out-with-the- bathwater rejoinder would confirm much of my critique in this paper.
57. See also Jenco, "What Does Heaven Ever Say?" These authors, in my opinion, go a step further than Euben as they are not satisfied merely to argue that non-Western authors are part of some conversation but are also not afraid to take sides in that conversation and show how it might be enhanced, resolved, or altered. That is, they go beyond the mere rehabilitative or appreciative function of political theory.
58. To cite one example, a popular non-Western political and social thinker is the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century North African Ibn Khaldun, whose "Prolegomena" (al-Muqaddima) is often invoked for its sociological insights (e.g., Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988], 239).
59. However, the case has been put forcefully by Aziz al-Azmeh that Western Orientalists profoundly misunderstood Ibn Khaldun by seeing him as a protosociologist whereas he is to be better understood as a sophisticated chronicler of North African tribal-dynastic states, and nothing else (al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun: An Essay in Reinterpretation [New York: Routledge, 1990]). Al-Azmeh, of course, may be wrong about this, or have gone too far in a desire to correct a dominant Orientalist reading (albeit one profoundly admiring of a non-Western thinker), but this debate shows that excessive zeal to demonstrate that we have something useful to learn from writers with a non-Western provenance may involve a (well-motivated) unscholarly, unrigorous misreading of the texts we are trying to save.
60. Parel, Comparative Political Philosophy, 12.
61. E.g., Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), but also some of the contributions to Khan, Islamic Democratic Discourse.
62. See Naz K. Modirzadeh, "Taking Islamic Law Seriously: INGOs and the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds," Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006): 191-233, for a critique of Western NGO human rights activism in the Islamic world.
63. Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction.
64. Euben's book Journeys to the Other Shore and Anthony Parel's essay, "Gandhi and the Emergence of the Modern Indian Political Canon" (The Review of Politics 70, no. 1 [2008]: 40-63) strike me as excellent examples. In the latter case, a good history of the evolution of Gandhi's thought and the "emergence of the modern Indian political canon" will invariably involve the study of borrowing, dialogue, and hybridity. However, I would suggest that this makes Gandhi an excellent comparative political theorist. But what is comparative per se about the political theorist's or intellectual historian's exposition of this story? If this is comparative, then what good, nuanced cultural, social, or intellectual history wouldn't be comparative political theory?
65. Although in the case of the latter two their works may contribute to a genuinely comparative scholarly study of how philosophers in monotheistic religions have sought to reconcile reason and revelation. Also, the crucial qualification must be made for when Averroës (Ibn Rushd) was writing in his capacity as a legal scholar. In that capacity he was largely bracketing his philosophical commitments and selfconsciously contributing to a public discourse on Islamic normativity. Here, we may turn to him as a representative of mainstream Islamic commitments and, helpfully, his well-known legal manual has even been translated into English (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, The Distinguished Jurist's Primer: A Translation of Bidayat al-mujtahid, trans. Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee [Reading, UK: The Centre for Muslim Contribution to Civilisation, 1994]).
66. For example, the contemporary Egyptian-Qatari Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi is not regarded as a thinker of great personal genius. However, he is extraordinarily prolific and widely influential in contemporary Muslim Brotherhood circles. A fatwa or treatise by Qaradawi would be a good place to begin for a comparative political theorist seeking to study the present-day Islamist critique (and/or affirmation) of this or that non-Islamic value. Similar things could be said about the works of Sayyid Qutb or many standard premodern texts of Islamic law: they are known to represent part of the orthodox tradition of thought on ethical questions. A comparative political theorist would easily be able to account for why she is using such a text to give texture to a given moral disagreement.
67. This raises the question of whether comparative political theory is always communitarian. Clearly, the arguments in this article lead to that conclusion. I would like to thank Russell Arben Fox for pressing this point.
68. Although not self-described or advertised as a work of comparative political theory, Saba Mahmood's well-known book, The Politics of Piety, provides a handy example and cautionary tale. In an effort to correct hostile leftist and liberal-secular perceptions of the religious revival, especially among Muslim masses, Mahmood writes that "we can no longer arrogantly assume that secular forms of life and secularism's progressive formulations necessarily exhaust ways of living meaningfully and richly in this world" (Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], xi-xii). It is hard to imagine Isaiah Berlin or John Rawls disagreeing with that. It seems to me that, the framing in terms of the inadequacy and harm of secular liberal conceptions of agency and autonomy notwithstanding, Mahmood is herself not really transgressing the boundaries of liberalism, insofar as she mostly vindicates veiling and public displays of piety, none of which seems to call into question genuinely core liberal commitments surrounding the harm principle and moral pluralism. Wouldn't a genuinely critical approach be willing to take on not only mildly other practices like veiling and habits of bodily self-discipline that make no claims on the freedom and autonomy of others, but also the most controversial practices that enjoy a full religious rationale? The countless studies on veiling strike me as revealing a desire to be seen as questioning liberalism or secularism but from an ideologically and morally safe space with one foot still within modern liberal sensibilities.
69. See Larry Krasnoff, "Consensus, Stability, and Normativity in Rawls's Political Liberalism," Journal of Philosophy 95, no.6 (1998): 271-276, for the argument that all normative argumentation at some level aims at consensus. Thus, to the extent that it aims at persuasion, even a more radical form of deconstructionist critical theory shares this feature.
70. Dallmayr insists that "there are cultural differences that, though understandable, may still be unacceptable. Nearly every culture contains features repugnant to a critical outside observer, even a sympathetic one. In non-Western societies, traditions such as untouchability, female infanticide, and female circumcision are typically viewed by Westerners as particularly obnoxious and horrifying. And it seems to methat practices of this kind are indeed horrible and unacceptable" (Dallmayr, "Beyond Monologue," 254)
71. From the Global Encounters book series, see Ramin Jahanbegloo, ed., Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2004)
72. and E. Fuat Keyman, ed., Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
73. Indeed, I would rank as justificatory comparative political theory many studies and texts whose authors themselves might never use the term. From among the literature reviewed here, Ackerly's and Godrej's articles both seem to justify arguments in this way. I also have in mind some of the writings of anthropologist Talal Asad on secularism and Islam, in particular his recent "Reflections on Blasphemy and Social Criticism," in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 580-609, as well as those of his students, such as Saba Mahmood. More obviously, Sen's and Nussbaum's capabilities approach seems to invite something like this as well in its explicit recognition of the normative significance of culture (which might include normative doctrines) on assessing the priority of certain capabilities and the requirements of attaining them.
74. Stephen Angle's Human Rights in Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) also displays the engaged, even justificatory, qualities I am arguing for in this paper insofar as it is not only concerned with presenting the features of Chinese thought that make it distinct and distinguished but also with the question of how non-Chinese Western philosophers should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts.