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Political Theory2014, Vol. 42(1) 26 57
2013 SAGE PublicationsReprints and permissions:
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10.1177/0090591713507934
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Article
A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory
Melissa S. Williams1 and Mark E. Warren2
AbstractGlobalization generates new structures of human
interdependence and vulnerability while also posing challenges for
models of democracy rooted in territorially bounded states. The
diverse phenomena of globalization have stimulated two relatively
new branches of political theory: theoretical accounts of the
possibilities of democracy beyond the state; and comparative
political theory, which aims at bringing non-Western political
thought into conversation with the Western traditions that remain
dominant in the political theory academy. This article links these
two theoretical responses to globalization by showing how
comparative political theory can contribute to the emergence of new
global publics around the common fates that globalization forges
across borders. Building on the pragmatist foundations of
deliberative democratic theory, it makes a democratic case for
comparative political theory as an architecture of translation that
helps deliberative publics grow across boundaries of culture.
Keywordscomparative political theory, democratic theory,
deliberative democracy, globalization, global democracy,
pragmatism
1University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada2University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Corresponding Author:Melissa S. Williams, Department of
Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George St.,
Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada. Email:
[email protected]
507934 PTX42110.1177/0090591713507934Political TheoryWilliams
and Warrenresearch-article2013
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Williams and Warren 27
Introduction
The current epoch of globalization brings a structural
transformation of politics as radical as the changes wrought in
early modern Europe by the emergence of the territorial state. This
transformation places the discipline of political theory under
tremendous pressure, since so many of our central frameworks derive
from assumptions, often in the background of our inqui-ries, that
the boundaries of the state delineate the location of politics.
Although territorial states will remain central to organizing
collective goods essential to a good polity, political theory as a
field risks losing its relevance to emerging circumstances of
politics if it rests too heavily on Westphalian frameworks.
In this article, we link two recent developments in political
theory that are explicitly framed as responses to globalization but
which, somewhat surprisingly, have not been in conversation with
each other: debates sur-rounding the future of democracy under
conditions of globalization, and contributions to the emerging
field now styled as comparative political theory, whose common
theme is the expansion of a discipline rooted almost exclusively in
Euro-American intellectual traditions to include East Asian, South
Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African, and Indigenous (in
short, though reluctantly: non-Western) thought.1 The political
theory literature on the possibility of democracy beyond or outside
of the state is virtually silent when it comes to non-Western ideas
and politi-cal culture, non-Western cosmopolitanisms, or the
challenges of democratic innovation and action across cultures. And
although a significant propor-tion of the literature in comparative
political theory critically engages ques-tions that are central to
democratic theory, few connect their inquiries to the possibility
of democratic transformations of transnational or global politi-cal
processes.
In bringing these two debates together, we build a specifically
democratic case for comparative political theoryand for the
responsibility that political theory, as a field, bears for
furthering its development. We do so as two politi-cal theorists
who are not direct practitioners of intercultural or comparative
political theory.2 We are not experts in non-Western cultures or
languages;3 neither of us has done the hard work of immersive study
that now character-izes the impressive scholarship of this emerging
field.4 Yet we are both con-vinced that theorists like us, trained
in Western traditions of thought and with research foci in areas
that do not necessarily compel deeply intercultural work, should do
what we can to de-parochialize political theory5that is, to shift
the field in the direction of much deeper engagement with
non-Western ideas about politics.
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28 Political Theory 42(1)
The democratic case for comparative political theory is not the
only case that can be made, of course, but in developing it we hope
to contribute to both of the bodies of theoretical work we bring
together here. Simply stated, the larger claim is that among the
tasks of political theory is to track the social, economic, and
political developments that have pushed across borders. More
specifically, we argue that at the same time that globalization
undermines democratic accountability within territorial states and
fails to generate demo-cratic responsiveness in supra-state
institutions, it also opens up new possi-bilities for democratic
mobilization and responsiveness through the formation of
transnational and potentially global publics. Comparative political
theory, from this perspective, provides some of the architecture of
translation that enables self-constituting publics to form across
boundaries of linguistic and cultural difference. With respect to
theories of global democratization, com-parative political theory
provides resources for taking cultural difference more seriously as
an obstacle to democratic opinion-and will-formation. Conversely,
attentiveness to the role of the intercultural translation of
politics in contemporary democratic formations provides an avenue
of response to those who would dismiss comparative political theory
as a groundless and utopian exhortation for intercultural
dialogue.
We make this case as follows. In the first section, we review
the chal-lenges of globalization. In the second, we note that
globalization produces communities of shared fatede facto
constituenciesthat are produced by the effects of globalization,
and which cross boundaries of sovereign states, peoples, and
cultures. Third, for these new kinds of constituencies to become
politically productivefor them to become sites of democratic
agencythey need to be imagined and articulated as constituencies.
But, fourth, to the extent they are articulated, they become sites
of communica-tion. As such, they are incipient publics within which
language can become a force for creating spaces of democracy across
borders, both reflexively in constituting publics that exceed
boundaries, as well as productively, insofar as common
responsibilities follow. Comparative political theory is one of
many kinds of global discourse that function to constitute these
spaces. We note the central role that language use as such plays in
calling forth these kinds of cross-boundary constituenciesa role
that again underscores the origins of deliberative theories of
democracy in the pragmatic theories of language use. In the fifth
section, we restate these general considerations in another way: as
problem-driven democratic theory, noting that the impera-tives for
comparative political theory follow directly from problems that
flow across borders. We conclude with some observations about the
implications of this argument for the future direction of the
field.
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Williams and Warren 29
Globalization, Democracy, and Emergent Publics
It is not news that, at best, globalization and democracy stand
in an ambiva-lent relationship to one another.6 The unprecedented
economic growth that accompanied economic globalization has been
enormously important in reducing the proportion of people who live
in absolute poverty. But it has also brought more economic
inequality to most of the established democracies, the increased
influence of money in elections, shrinking middle classes in some
countries, and weakened welfare supports in many others. The global
financial crisis and the ongoing Eurozone crisis, together with
climate change and other transborder environmental consequences of
growth fueled by extractive industries, epitomize radically new,
human-scale vulnerabilities to scarcity, risk, exploitation, and
inequality, without simultaneously generating the institutional
channels through which people can exert democratic con-trols. Many
states that have enjoyed high capacities to steer their internal
affairs and to respond to the needs of the average citizen find
these capacities eroding. The institutional transformations of the
global era unbundle the sovereignty of territorial states and
parcel out its powers to undemocratic international actors and
institutions.7 Globalization can and often has disem-powered
putatively sovereign democratic citizenries by moving choices about
their social, economic, and political futures beyond their reach.
And so far, the democratic deficits of powerful regional,
transnational, and global institutions are a long way from being
rectified.
Yet these developments are only part of globalization. As the
democratic struggles of the Arab Awakening, Occupy, and the
indignant citizens move-ments in Europe and elsewhere have brought
home, learning and coalition building across borders have
intensified demands for democratic responsive-ness in regional and
transnational institutions, strengthened some democratic movements,
and brought down some autocrats. International NGOs have helped to
foster new forms of transparency and accountability with respect to
human rights, democratic mechanisms, environmental destruction,
poverty, and disease. The alter-globalization movementitself a
manifestation of globalizationis strengthening the capacities of
activist networks to resist the negative impact of economic
globalization on Indigenous peoples, the environment, and the
global poor. In short, as empire, globalization denotes the
seemingly pervasive power of global capitalism; as cosmopolis, it
sig-nals the global spread of principles respecting the moral worth
of human individuals, including human rights and democracy,
sedimenting diverse interpretations of these ideals around the
world.8
Democratic theorists have responded to globalization by mapping
three broad prospects for democracys future: cosmopolitanism,
statism, and
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30 Political Theory 42(1)
polycentrism (or transnationalism).9 Cosmopolitan democrats such
as David Held, Thomas Pogge, and Daniele Archibugi begin from
Kantian universal-ism to argue for a global order of law that
secures human rights and respects the moral equality of
individuals.10 Democracy within states remains impor-tant to their
views, but its authority derives from the same universalistic
prin-ciples that ground an overarching order of international law.
Because the dynamics of globalization generate the need for
institutions beyond the state, their models for global
democratization emphasize the development of state-like mechanisms
for democratically legitimate law-making and law enforce-ment in
international, transnational, and regional institutions, all bound
together in an order of rights-protecting cosmopolitan law.
Cosmopolitan democrats seek to parry the charge of cultural
imperialism by arguing for the acceptability of human rights and
other universalist principles in diverse human cultures.11 However,
there is little or no engagement in this literature with the
argument that their understandings of such fundamental concepts as
moral individualism, economic development, political legitimacy,
and secu-larism are so thoroughly rooted in Euro-American modernity
that they make very uncertain contact with the self-understandings
of the majority of the worlds peoples. Nor do they acknowledge the
array of non-Western cosmo-politanisms that might provide
alternative normative foundations for political order under
conditions of globalization.12
For statists, the conditions that make effective and accountable
democratic decisions possible are only available within territorial
states. Although they acknowledge that the dynamics of
globalization have diminished democratic agency within
liberal-democratic states and transferred powers to suprastate and
nonstate bodies, they argue that the most promising course for
democra-cys future is to reclaim and strengthen democracy within
the state, and hold states democratically accountable for the
cross-border impact of their deci-sions through creative
institutional design.13 These arguments respond to the fact that
globalization systematically increases the mismatch between those
who are affected by the decisions of collective agents and those
who are empowered to hold them accountable.14 This mismatch
highlights the demos problem that is endemic to democratic theory:
it has proved challenging to develop nonarbitrary principles by
which to set the boundaries of the people that will govern itself
democratically.
Polycentrist or transnational democratic theorists focus on the
democratic potentials of new forms of politics that are emerging in
transnational public space. For them, globalizations challenge for
democratic theory is more radical than for either cosmopolitans or
statists; it requires, as Michael Goodhart argues, that we
reconsider what democracy means.15 More spe-cifically, it requires
that we loosen our conceptions of democracy from the
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Williams and Warren 31
model of the territorial sovereign state.16 Thus, polycentrisms
emphasis is on political formations that neither result directly
from state action nor take on statelike characteristics of
centralized, hierarchical, and formal law-making authority backed
by coercive power.17 These theorists focus on the capacity of
decentralized networks of social activists, NGOs, and
intergovernmental organizations, acting quasi-autonomously from
states, to render decisions more responsive and accountable to
those whom they affect.18
The analysis we develop below builds on the observations of
these trans-national polycentrist democrats. For many of these
theorists, the link between global civil society and the
possibility of democratic agency on the part of new transnational
actors is the emergence of new transnational and poten-tially
global public spheres, that is, social spaces of free communication
through which collective opinions may eventually form as a result
of the exchange of arguments.19 Since responsiveness to public
opinion is a key metric of democratic accountability, the
conditions that make it possible for public opinion to formin other
words, the existence of public spheresare vital conditions for the
democratic potential of civil society formations. Two such
conditions stand out. First, there must be publics, that is,
collectivities whose members see themselves as engaged in an
ongoing exchange of ideas with one another. Second, there must be
media of communication that make the exchange of ideas possible,
including symbolic media (linguistic and nonlinguistic), material
media (e.g., print, audio-visual), and structural sys-tems that
enable the diffusion of ideas (notably, now, the Internet). Further
conditions, such as inclusiveness and actual impact on decisions,
must be met for a public sphere to function democratically.20
The emergence of transnational movements around the new
cross-border human vulnerabilities that arise with globalization
shows that transnational public spheres are not only not impossible
but in many cases are increasingly developed. New discourses of
citizenship that exceed the boundaries of territorial statesglobal
citizenship, transnational citizenship, dia-sporic citizenship, and
environmental citizenshipexplicitly connect transnational
collectivities to ideas of democratic agency, a capacity through
action in concert to shape collective futures.21 As responses to
the impacts of globalization, these are mobilizations of
overlapping communities of fate, as David Held puts it,22 capturing
the sense that globalization throws people together in such a way
that they come to share a future.23 As captured by the concept of
affected interests, these formations express the facticityincluding
their unchosenness and inescapabilityof new structures of
inter-dependence and affectedness under the conditions of
globalization.24 While these structures have a fact of the matter
about them, they do not by them-selves issue in political agency or
even a common political space. But they
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32 Political Theory 42(1)
will tend to generate experiences that can underwrite the common
terms of discourse necessary to political agency. As publics or
constituencies that might be mobilized, they remain latent until
the facticity of shared fates is argued for and demonstrated, as in
the connection between human consump-tion of carbon fuels and
climate change or, to borrow Iris Youngs example, the relationship
that connects us to the sweatshop workers who fabricated our
running shoes.25 In other words, in order for structures of
affectedness to constitute sites for democratic agency, people
must, through discourses, rep-resent them, imagining that they are
citizens connected by common fates, and thus bring into being new
publics.26
And yet genuinely inclusive transnational or global public
spheres demand that we take cultural differences in social and
political imaginaries more seri-ously than current theories of
global democratization currently do.27 The pos-sibility of
fate-responsive, action-orienting global democratic imaginaries
depends, then, on two central questions. First, what would it mean
to engage in nondominating political discourse in global public
space, across vastly dif-ferent cultural and material conditions,
and to form action-orienting political imaginaries across these
differences? Second, what would generate and sus-tain agents
motivation to participate in such discourses, given the combined
challenges of power asymmetries, the difficulties of cross-cultural
under-standing, and the competing pressures for attention from
other scales of poli-tics (local, national, regional)? Comparative
political theory offers a partial response to both challenges.
(Comparative) Political Theory, Dialogue, and Intercultural
Publics
Globalization likewise serves as a common starting point for
proponents and practitioners of comparative political theory. They
cite the increasing inter-connectedness of human beings across the
boundaries of states, regions, and cultures as a reason why it is
important that we political theorists problema-tize the dominance
of Western intellectual traditions, conceptual frameworks, and
institutional forms and devote our energies to fostering a
transcultural conversation28 orexplicitly rejecting the
Huntingtonian clash of civiliza-tions as the correct understanding
of the global agea dialogue among civilizations29
What does it mean to fashion comparative political theory in
dialogical or conversational terms? For some, notably Fred
Dallmayr30an early and still highly visible proponent of
comparative political theorythe model of dia-logue is rooted in
philosophic hermeneutics and is especially indebted to Gadamer. For
Dallmayr, as for Gadamer,
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Truth or insight . . . cannot be garnered by retreat into
neutral spectatorship or a view from nowhere, but only through a
concrete existential engagementan engagement where familiar
assumptions . . . are brought to bear, and allowed to be tested,
against unfamiliar perspectives and practices in a shared search
for meaning.31
Dialogical encounters with the cultural other, Dallmayr argues,
make it possible to move in the direction of a more genuine
universalism, and beyond the spurious universality traditionally
claimed by the West and the Western canon. Indeed, this is
precisely the point of comparative political theory.32 As Andrew
March brings out in a particularly helpful overview of the emerging
field, the celebration of a dialogue model for engagement with
non-Western thought combines several motives and justifications.
These include epistemic goals: more inclusive dialogue is likely to
yield in truth-claims that have greater validity than claims rooted
exclusively in a single tradition (particularly claims that are not
reflexively self-critical about their own assertions of universal
validity.33 Critical-transformative aims would utilize the dialogue
model as a resource for resisting the unjustifiable power
imbalances flow from the dominance of Western discourses in
contemporary politics, whether these are read as serving colonial
or neo-imperialist domi-nation or forms of domination endemic to
capitalism.34 And comparative political theory may also aim at
social cooperation grounded in a principled exchange of views.
Indeed, March understands this function of comparative political
theory as its most important, which he states in terms that are
very close to those of deliberative democratic theory. The
strongest warrant for a comparative political theory, he writes, is
that there are normative contesta-tions of proposals for terms of
social cooperation affecting adherents of the doctrines and
traditions that constitute those contestations.35
But even among those who explicitly advocate for an expansion of
politi-cal theory beyond Western traditions, the dialogue model has
its critics. Some charge that attempts at intercultural dialogue
aimed at moral convergence, enhanced universalism or a Gadamerian
fusion of horizons are merely uto-pian exercises in impossibility
that overstate the possibility of agreement across linguistic and
cultural differences.36 Although Freeden and Vincent agree with
proponents of comparative political theory that it is worthwhile to
study the political ideas of non-Western contexts, they distinguish
their own agenda as one of comparative political thought, signaling
their distance from the unifying prescriptive and ethical drive
that they suggest has, regretta-bly, overtaken most of what passes
for political theory.37 Similarly, Leigh Jenco argues that
cross-cultural dialogue may not always minimize distor-tion . . .
it may just as easily end up glossing over cultural and political
differences.38
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34 Political Theory 42(1)
The gap between imaginary and actual intercultural dialogues
prompts Antony Black to sound a second note of realist skepticism
about the dialogue model. Actual dialogue requires willing
partners, and they are in short supply. A lot of people, Black
drily notes, are just not into dialogue.39 Often, this is because
their motivations follow from power and position.40
A further line of critique focuses on the dialogue models claim
to meth-odological egalitarianism that covers over more subtle
forms of western domination. A dialogue must have a subject-matter,
and the selection of subject-matter for dialogical exchange is a
choice ridden with cultural preferencesand therefore also suffused
with the power claimed by the theorist to set the terms of the
conversation.41 Finally, a dialogue model pre-supposes that the
core features of non-Western traditions of political thought and
knowledge are expressible in discursive terms, whereas in fact the
most important media for maintaining and transmitting traditions
may take the form of rituals and other embodied practices,
themselves part of alternative methodologies of knowledge
production from which political theory might gain. The privileging
of dialogue is a subspecies of the more general neglect by
political theorists of non-Western epistemologies, which comes at
the expense of learning from non-Western thought as a site of
distinct modes of theorizing, and not only the (passive) object of
(Western) theoretical analysis.42
For some, these potential pitfalls of the dialogue model of
comparative political theory should point us away from dialogue in
favor of approaches that are less ambitious in their normative
aspirations and more hard-headedly sociological and contextual in
their study of non-Western thought.43 Framed within an Austinian
philosophy of language, for example, Freeden and Vincents approach
aims at a clarification of the performative consequences of
particular concepts in particular contexts.44 Attentiveness to the
actual vocabularies of politics, and to the practices and concepts
through which the political is itself delineated within a
particular context, is of the utmost importance in disclosing the
world of political thinking and action that orients agents in that
context.45
This kind of approach to non-Western ideas in contexts bears
obvious affinities to the Cambridge school history of ideas, and
are a subcategory within what Andrew March calls scholarly
political theory (as contrasted with engaged political theory).46
Scholarly political theory, he argues, is concerned with whether we
understand well enough a given text, practice, or phenomenon.
Engaged political theory, on the other hand, aims at a judgment
whether some set of ideas are the right ideas for us.47
Unsurprisingly, Freeden and Vincent accept Marchs distinction and
identify themselves with the scholarly or investigative variant of
comparative
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political theory, and contrast it with the engaged or dialogical
model.48 Marchs distinction between scholarly and engaged political
theory sug-gests that whereas the latter is motivated by our
interest in practical reason (reaching judgments about what we
ought to do), the former is driven princi-pally by our interest in
knowledge for its own sake (whether out of sheer curiosity or from
some other motive) and abjures from seeking guidance for practical
reason in the political thought it studies.
Although we agree that engaging the political ideas of cultures
different from our own is unlikely to yield moral convergence, and
that theoretical construction of imaginary dialogues with
culturally different others risks reproducing our own intellectual
and normative biases, we want to resist the critiques of dialogue
models of comparative political theory that set up a strong
contrast between sociological and normative approaches to the study
of non-Western thought. In fact, even in its most disengaged or
scholarly forms, political theory is per se dialogical in both its
method and its purpose. This is true whether it is aimed
principally at accurately articulat-ing the political thought of
temporally, spatially, or culturally distant othersincluding those
who use non-discursive means of communicationor whether it is aimed
at enhancing the quality of our first-order judgments of practical
reason. With respect to method, political theory always entails an
imagined dialogue with the subjects of ones study, actively
searching for evidence for and against ones interpretation as a
test of its accuracy. Here, the goal is to get others thought right
on its own terms, which means repre-senting a system of ideas in a
form that we believe they could accept as valid, and responding to
imagined objections that arise from the text or context under
study. That is, the most rigorous scholarship works with criteria
that are intrinsically dialogical. Similarly, Roxanne Euben
characterizes all political theory as inherently comparative, but
also inherently dialogical in the sense that it requires acts of
translationof seeing and making seen, hearing and making heard
which both make sense of another and at the same time unavoidably
distort the other by representing them through ones own terms of
reference.49
Political theoryincluding comparative political theoryis
inherently dialogical not only in its method but in its purpose as
well. Understanding the thought of another time or culture
undoubtedly is an intrinsic good, quite apart from its salutary
consequences for our exercise of practical reason. For even the
most disengaged scholars of the history of ideas, a key motivation
for studying political thought is that it provides us with critical
distance from our own way of thinking.50
The contextual study of political ideas may not yield a shred of
guidance for our first-order normative judgments, but this is not
the only way in which
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36 Political Theory 42(1)
it is valuable for practical reason. Arguably more important
than its contribu-tion to first-order judgments is that it is among
the social conditions of pos-sibility for critical reflexivity with
respect to our first-order judgments. In other words, its greatest
relevance to our practical reason is second-order, not first-order.
The movement between the third-person (sociological or schol-arly)
activity of accurately representing the thought of another may
stand at many removes from the first-person (philosophical or
engaged) activity of making judgments that we can justify (how else
but dialogically?)but it is the movement itself that hones
practical reason as a human capacity. This capacity for critical
reflexivity is a contingent social achievement, stronger in some
moments and locations and weaker in others. But here is the
crucial, overarching point: Political theory as a discipline aims
at helping to secure this achivement as a social resource for
practical reason in our societiesin short, a resource for critical
dialogue about what we ought to do.
Thus, the difference between approaches to political theory does
not turn on whether they are investigative or dialogical,
scholarly, or engaged. All political theory aims at representing
and reconstructing the constellations of ideas that are embedded in
a given sociohistorical context, making explicit and available for
critical engagement what is otherwise implicit, hidden, or lost
from view. Comparative political theory, then, is nothing other
than the representation and reconstruction of systems of ideas that
have arisen in cul-tures or civilizations different from our own.
The intellectual challenge of accurately representing these
ideational structures is, in principle, the same in either case, a
difference in degree more than in kind. Making explicit the
embedded ideas of our own cultures or histories serves as a
resource for criti-cal reflexivity in our exercise of practical
reason within our own cultural contexts. Doing so with respect to
the ideas of different cultures or traditions can serve two
purposes. First, it can give us the sort of critical distance that
supports reflexive judgment within our own societies (knowing
ourselves through knowing the other). Second, to the extent that it
renders their thought intelligible to us in a form that is
recognizably valid for them, the practice of comparative political
theory contributes to the social conditions of possibility for the
emergence of intercultural collective subjects of practical
reasonthat is, intercultural publics. This purpose (or consequence)
is no more uto-pian (and no less aspirational) than the idea that a
reason to value political theory per se is its contribution to our
social capacity for critical reflexivity.
By contributing to the conditions for mutual intelligibility
across cul-tural difference, then, comparative political theory
provides a partial answer to the question of how it could be
possible to construct inclusive public spheres in global,
transnational, or transcultural space. What remains to be shown is
how action-orienting political imaginaries could be built up
across
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Williams and Warren 37
differences, and how a broad agenda of comparative political
theory could play a role in building discursive capacities for
democratic political action that responds to the consequences of
globalization. From this perspective, we can view comparative
political theory as building political capacities within
communities of fate, by facilitating the mutual intelligibility of
ideas across contexts and traditions, and increasing the pool of
ideational resources available to those who share fates. As with
all problem-attentive political theory, ideas filter up from
political practices and situated debates to the level of theory,
and filter down again from theory into practice when they have
resonance for people seeking to address new or newly recognized
problems of living-together.51 Locations and historical moments
when received or dominant ideas are under pressure as a consequence
of shifts in material, social, or political states of affairs (as
when East Asian societies were under pressure from the threat of
European and American imperialism in the mid-nineteenth to early
twentieth centuries) are particularly rich moments for innovations
in political thought, and hence also important sites for
theoretical investigation. It follows that we should conceive of
comparative political theory as engaging a wide range of ideational
resources: formal scholarly work by non-Western scholars writing
for aca-demic audiences in their own languages, political ideas of
public intellectu-als, principles of law and formal institutional
structures, normalized practices and rituals of politics, the ideas
of leading political actors and opposition figures, and everyday
languages and practices of politics. The aim of comparative
political theory, as with all political theory, should be to render
explicit the political imaginaries that are operating in the
background of a given context at a particular time, in order to
render them intelligible to others. If such intelligibility is
possible, which is a necessary presupposi-tion of any practice of
comparative political theory, then there are few rea-sons to be
skeptical of the dialogue model of comparative political
theory.
But there is one remaining challenge, to which we devote much of
the remainder of this article. Even where there are resources for
translating across culturally embedded ideas about politics,
intelligibility does not by itself motivate discursive engagement.
To the contrary, as noted by Antony Black and discussed in detail
by Roxanne Euben in her study of Sayyid Qutb,52 comprehending the
other can produce the judgment that self-distancing or active
opposition are the morally required responses. Even where deep
moral disagreement is not an obstacle to engagement, the question
remains what could motivate agents to undertake the difficult work
of dialogical engage-ment. How could comparative political theory
help fill this motivational gap? There are, of course, no general
answers of a kind that political theorists could offer. But we can
make the problem more tractable by returning to the
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38 Political Theory 42(1)
account of the relationship-constituting effects of
communication found in the pragmatic roots of deliberative
democratic theory.
Constitutive Powers of Intercultural Communication: Mutual
Intelligibility and Relational Responsibility
Our claim is that comparative political theory is a practice of
communica-tiona form of conversation across boundaries of
differencewhich gener-ates not only enhanced understanding but also
the potential to motivate people to take up the burden of crafting
shared fates and of the moral respon-sibilities that go with them.
By enabling concept use across borders in ways that respond to
shared fates, comparative political theory is a (potentially)
constitutive activity: it provides resources for naming and
representing global problems as shared fates, but also for building
constituencies (or publics) by creating new ways of thinking and
talking across boundaries. Insofar as com-parative political theory
sets communication as its basic goal, it will also build moral
resources as a consequence of its activities. To cast comparative
political theory in this way is to focus on the question of what it
is that ideas accomplish in establishing social relations as a
consequence of being spoken, asserted, demonstrated, written down
for an audience, and so on. That is, because we are interested in
comparative political theory as a medium of mutual intelligibility,
we are already committed to some form of pragmatism with regard to
the status of ideasforms shared, roughly, by James and Dewey,
Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle, Habermas and Brandom. This is the
family of philosophies that (roughly) asks what claims, assertions,
and the like accomplish within social life insofar as they are acts
of communication. Combining these forms of pragmatism with social
theories that take practices as the primary (ontological) units of
analysis, while understanding structural phenomena, such as
culture, rules, languages, classes, and institutions, as reproduced
by practices,53 we can begin to situate comparative political
the-ory as a form of communicative practice with constitutive
effects.
To understand comparative political theory as a kind of social
practice that works across borders and aims at mutual attentiveness
and adjustment is thus to think of it as a kind of deliberative
enterprisepart of the business of offer-ing and responding to
reasons for decision and action. To use this term may invite
misunderstanding, and so it should not be overinterpreted to imply
spe-cific political institutions, systems, or models. By using the
term, we are high-lighting again what we are imagining to be the
central activity of political theory as such: extracting claims and
positions from their taken-for-granted
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contexts and transforming them into assertions, which in turn
function as jus-tifications that could, in principle, be understood
by others.
If this activity is possible, so too is it possible to view
comparative politi-cal theory as responding to the globalizing
demands for shared moral resources that respond to shared fates.
The pragmatic origins of deliberative theory suggest that these
moral resources are constituted just insofar as the activity of
deliberation has space to exist. These moral powers are intrinsic:
they flow, as it were, from what words accomplish as a consequence
of their use. In the (social) world of normative orders, words are
a key medium through which people assert rights and wrongs, respond
to the assertions of others, and come to common understandings
about the obligations, duties, and responsibilities they will
commonly impose upon themselves. Where cultures are unreflexive,
this process is rendered invisible by tradition and convention.
Where coercive powers do the social ordering, the power of words
has no space to get going. But where these spaces open upas
argu-ably they do to an ever-greater degree in globalizing contexts
that lack both enclosed cultures and world powersthe powers of
words become more important.54 It is within these deliberative
spaces that comparative political theory has a chance to fill out
the vocabulary that might underwrite emergent global publics. In so
doingand just insofar as it does soit aids in generat-ing the moral
responses that might respond to shared fates.
The idea that words have power that is over and beyond the
powers they derive from references can be found in pragmatic
understandings of language. What is at issue are the social
relationships established by speech acts. Speech acts both perform
and disclose a social world of actors who are, in principle, solid
enough that one can trust the other, in such a way that claiming
and assert-ing can have force among those who are communicating.55
Although most con-temporary theorists of deliberative democracy
have stressed the cognitive work that deliberation accomplishes, it
is worth returning to the roots of deliberative theory in
philosophical pragmatism to recover the agency- and
relationship-constituting effects of deliberative exchange.
Notably, Habermass theory of communicative action emphasized the
social relationships that are established as a consequence of
making claims, and upon which the cognitive content of claims
depend for their capacities to coordinate among and between social
actors.56 Following Austin, Habermas stressed the illocutionary
force of speech acts:57 by promising, claiming, expressing, and so
on, the speaker establishes a relationship with the listener,
attributing to him/her the qualities (and moral status) of agency,
of the kind that can be moved by, and commit to, promises, claims,
expressions, and the like. In short, the work accomplished by
delibera-tion is in part about what is deliberated: conflicts,
claims, values, information, and matters of substance, communicated
through language. But it is in part
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about the relationships that are established as a consequence of
speaking and listeningrelationships that constitute speakers as
agents who have the kind of solidity others can trust.
In order to grasp the powers of speech (upon which, we are
suggesting, the morally constitutive powers of comparative
political theory depend), then, we need to understand this process
of social construction that is the residue, as it were, of speech.
We find even more help in Robert Brandoms philoso-phy of language.
Brandom emphasizes the essentially normative character of language
use with the evocative image of discursive practice as deontic
scorekeeping: the significance of a speech act is how it changes
what com-mitments and entitlements one attributes and
acknowledges58 (emphasis added). When I speak or act, I entitle you
to expect from me that which is implicit in my claim or action. I
take on an obligation with respect to you. If you respond to what I
have said, you take on an obligation with respect to me, as stated
or implied in your response. In this way, scorekeepers are licensed
to infer our beliefs from our intentional actions (in context of
course), as well as from our speech acts.59
Knowing how to use language is doubly constitutive of social
relation-ships and individual agency. On the one hand, to know how
to use language is to know how to go on from the rules,
expectations, and norms expressed in speech acts.60 On the other
hand, in the practice of going on, from utter-ance to utterance,
speakers build up a regard for one another as agents who can be
held responsible for the inferences that follow from their
statements. Language use is in this way linked intrinsically to the
constitution of social relationsand by extension, publicsof a
normatively thick kind: through communication, each individual
becomes an author of claims in such a way that others can infer
from these claims agent-like capacities to commit, and to take
responsibility for commitments.61 These webs of commitments enable
individuals to move through society with a trust that others are
not only non-arbitrary in their actions but that the rules of
social engagement can, in prin-ciple, be figured out, negotiated
through language where necessary, and then relied upon. This is one
and the same process by which ongoing social rela-tionships are
established, and common action is rendered possible:
The complete and explicit interpretive equilibrium exhibited by
a community whose members adopt the explicit discursive stance
toward one another is social self-consciousness. Such a community
not only is a we, its members can in the fullest sense say
we.62
The practice of giving and asking for reasons for belief and
action is in principle the same whether communication takes place
within a natural
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language community or in an interlinguistic exchange.63 In Human
Rights and Chinese Thought, Stephen Angle builds on Brandoms theory
to argue that a communicative practice of translating concepts
across cultures is pos-sible even under circumstances where few if
any shared meanings have been established.64 Consequently, he
argues, even in cases of deep conceptual dif-ference (and therefore
also of normative difference) we should treat cultures as
incommensurate rather than incommensurable: whether mutual
incompre-hensibility yields to mutual intelligibility is primarily
a function of actors choices about whether and how to engage in
practices of communication. The choice to do so begins with a
willingness to grant interlocutors the status of normative agency
in Brandoms sense, just because they seek to motivate others
through language use. To grant others this status is not the same
thing as to share concepts with them, or even to treat shared
concepts, shared understanding, or moral agreement as the goal of
communication. Rather, engaging in the practice of communication
simply entails taking seriously the claims of those with whom one
shares fewer implicit understandings than those more familiar, with
the aim of grasping the intelligibility of their nor-mative
commitments, and (reflexively) those commitments in oneself they
may seek to understand and motivate. Through a rich historical
analysis of the conceptual and philosophical debates that
eventually produced the Chinese concept of quanli as a term for
translating rights, for example, Angle shows that Chinese thought
discloses an abundance of conceptual resources for a rights
discourse, but one that does not simply converge with Western
rights discourses. [N]ot only is there a distinctive Chinese
discourse about rights, but also there is a distinctive American
discourse, a French dis-course, and so on. All interact, all are
dynamic, all are internally contested.65 Nonetheless, mapping the
pluralism both within and across these different rights discourses
enables them to become recognizable as coherent normative
positions, available for critical engagement from both internal and
external perspectives.
Although Angle does invoke the contemporary dynamics of
globalization as an impetus for engaging in cross-cultural
normative inquiry,66 neither he nor Brandom is focused on practices
of intercultural communication as a stepping stone to the
deliberative democratization of global processes. In general, the
project of deliberative democratic theory involves understanding
how to structure societies so that language does more of the work
of consti-tuting social relationships, while relations of coercion,
domination, oppres-sion, etc., do less. But because we are used to
understanding these strategies as institutions (of rights, voting,
protected speech, etc.), we do not want to lose the important point
that these constitutive features of communication often work across
boundaries just because the institutional contexts are less
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42 Political Theory 42(1)
certain. While we need to understand the risks of replicating,
for example, colonial or neocolonial outlooks, neither should we
overlook the potentials that come, humbly enough, with simple acts
of responsive communication. By highlighting the moral powers of
communication and illuminating the potential of cross-cultural
communication to enable the mutual intelligibility of conceptual
frames, Brandom and Angle give us resources for seeing com-parative
political theory as a discursive project. This project makes sense
philosophically as (potentially) generative of mutual
intelligibility at the level of normative concepts, and it makes
sense sociologically as (poten-tially) generative of new
communicative communities, new spaces of we-ness. It makes sense
politically and democratically if these communities support
emergent global publics, and if these publics transform shared
affect-ednessshared fatesinto new, post-Westphalian constituencies.
The dis-cursive construction of these publics does not depend on a
fusion of horizons or the emergence of more genuine universals with
respect to normative claims. It proceeds more modestly, stepwise,
each time acts of translation provide the media of communication
that make it possible for interlocutors to go on in a
conversation.
The pragmatist view of the socially constitutive dynamics of
communica-tion, then, supplements and reinforces a problem-centered
view of agents motivation to participate in emergent global
publics. Motivation is generated by two distinct dynamics: first,
the recognition of forms of human vulnerabil-ity that exceed
national boundaries and require a political response; and sec-ond,
once a practical discourse aimed at responsiveness gets going, it
can generate its own motivational force. To be sure, communication
can break down and actors can defect to other agendas. But in
principle neither the bar-riers to mutual comprehensibility nor
those to sustained motivation to engage in cross-cultural discourse
are insuperable.
The Logic of Problem-Driven Comparative Political Theory: A
Brief Sketch
We have argued that although multilinguistic, multicultural, and
multiexperi-ential contexts may pose different kinds and levels of
challenge for under-standing, they are not essentially different
from everyday uses in their pragmatic characteristics. Nor is there
a necessary difference in the discur-sive spacesthe publicsthat are
constituted as a consequence of people seeking to represent
problems and influence others through language. The challenges of
working across cultural contexts, however, suggest a
self-con-scious approach, even a method, for the construction of
action-guiding
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understanding. Everyday communication typically brings with it
the need to thematize a few areas of disagreement against implicit,
usually unspoken, background understandings that accomplish much of
the work of communi-cation (and which, of course, can also hide
injustices). In cross-cultural con-texts, it will often be the case
that little is sharedor seen to be sharedwithout very conscious
attentiveness to translation, broadly understood. A pragmatist
reconstruction of the work of comparative political theory suggests
a logic of inquiry that proceeds through a progressive series of
questions. Although scholarly work could be focused on any one of
these stages, it is the implicit linkages between them that bind
the broad endeavor of comparative political theory to the morally
generative and discursively constructed character of global publics
and the democratic possibilities that can follow from them. We can
identify (and stylize) five distinct stages of this progress:
Empathy
The process of the cross-cultural translation of human
vulnerabilities into frames for political action begins, first,
with basic empathetic recognition. Empathy responds to problems
that are, as it were, recognizably human, in that they count as
problems in any context: war and insecurity, deprivation,
oppression, dislocation, rapid social change of the kinds that
disorders future planning, despoiled commons, and so on. Of course,
without the perspective that follows from representing problems as
problems, many of these features and conditions of human
collectivities will count as nature rather than problems that might
elicit recognition of common experiences. But that is what
globalization brings: as we suggested above, it is productive of
prob-lematics in this very basic sense, in part because imageries
and experiences now travel, often instantaneously, with the help of
technology. A pragmatic approach to comparative political theory
will begin, then, by looking for problems that are recognized as
such across contexts.
Representation
However powerful empathetic recognitions might prove to be,
empathy is not sufficient to generate common problem definitions.
Every context is already framed with received cultures, ideologies,
justifications, and other normative resources. So the real work of
cross-cultural comparison begins by articulat-ing the linguistic
and conceptual frames through which human vulnerabilities are
represented as problems to which human agents should
respondespe-cially those with shared fates that denote potential
communities or constitu-encies. What are the words (and images)
used to depict the problem? What
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44 Political Theory 42(1)
rules, conceptions, and theories of justification or legitimacy
are implied in these usages? Finding out will mean, often, not just
cross-cultural translation and comparison, but also intracultural
comparison, as people situated differ-ently with respect to class,
caste, status, occupation, gender, religion, ethnic-ity,
neighborhood, region, and other divisions and locations within the
same societies and discourses will have different experiences and
problems. Sometimes similarly situated subgroups across societies
share more by way of common problem frames than do agents within
the same societies, as in the case of transnational movements for
the rights of Indigenous peoples, for example. We should never read
in internal cultural consensus, which not only risks using
comparative political theory to uncritically affirm the practices
of others (and to commit the theoretical and ideological sin of
essentialism), but also risks viewing the other as depoliticized,
unengaged in practices of internal criticism. Critique of a problem
frame does not need to rely on norms external to the context. Even
in relatively stable caste systems, James Scott has shown us, those
who are disadvantaged use the rules of the upper castes for
normative leverage.67 Peasants in China are not afraid to use
Confucian norms to justify their resistance to corrupt or
underperforming officials.68 In other words, comparative political
theory should attend not only to the con-stellations of ideas at
work in the legitimation of power but also the terms through which
power is resisted within a given context. Both perspectives are
pertinent to the reconstruction and representation of problems as
problems within a given context.
Translation
Third, we should ask how the construction of problems fits
within the larger constellation of locally embedded norms of
responsibility and relationship, a process that enables the mapping
and translation of problem frames across contexts. Much of the work
of comparative political theory is (and should be) focused here: on
language use and contexts of usage that make terms of polit-ical
discourse accessible and intelligible across languages, historical
moments, and cultures. Clearly, the selection of contexts and
concepts for translation across discourses is far from a neutral
practice: it is always-already laden with the cognitive and
political commitments of the agent who is undertaking the
translation. But the larger task of comparative political the-ory
is to select for translation those constellations of concepts that
are most revealing of the background political imaginary that
orients agents in a par-ticular context. A problem-centered
approach to translation posits a shared problem experiences as an
object of concern in two or more linguistic or
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cultural contexts and works to render their orientations toward
common problems mutually intelligible.
Discourse
As understandings are compared and calibrated across languages
and cul-tures, problematics can be framed as discourses, composed
of linked claims and assertions. At this point, comparative
political theory converges with the possibilities and ethos of
deliberative democracy, in the generic sense that individuals
coming from different perspectives can explain, share, compare,
argue, and deliberate. Ideally, comparative political theory is
generative of new discourses that attend to globalized
relationships of fate, and contribute to emergent publics. That
such generation is possible is one of the lessons from pragmatic
theories of language. That it is probable is clear from the rapid
development of human rights and democracy discourses, in virtually
every political context around the globe.
Action
Finally, though common discourses are not always action-guiding,
they are a condition of possibility for action-in-concert:
mobilization, institutional change, legitimation of practices or
institutions. When discourses are politi-cal in the sense that they
orient action, they recursively (re)define the topics of
comparative political theory. To the extent that comparative
political the-ory participates in developing these discourses, it
fulfills its role of a prob-lem-driven discourse of mutual
justification, and responds to shared fates for which there are
common responsibilities.
Histories of the Future: Directions for Comparative Political
Theory
Our argument for comparative political theory has focused on its
potential contributions to global democracy, just insofar as it
furthers critical reflex-ivity across cultural and linguistic
boundariesa condition for fashioning collective futures. The value
of these contributions consists in rendering accessible the
background social imaginaries that orient political action in
different linguistic and cultural contexts, including the deep
conceptual structures of space, time, and causality that underwrite
understandings of the spatiotemporal boundaries of community,
membership, and moral obli-gation in every culture. Because social
imaginaries are deeply rooted in
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46 Political Theory 42(1)
language, history, and culture, a comparative political theory
capable of offering translations across imaginaries must be
informed by advanced lin-guistic knowledge and astute empirical
analysis of the contexts within which political ideas do their work
of orienting action and structuring rela-tions of power. In this
sense, the pragmatic foundations of both their argu-ment and ours
lead us to agree wholeheartedly with Freeden and Vincent when they
suggest that the task of comparative political theory begins by
articulating the constructions of the political that operate in the
back-ground of particular cultural and historical contexts.69
This work of reconstructing political imaginaries should proceed
both at the most abstract levels of ontology and at the minute
level of the phenome-nology of political action. At one end of this
spectrum, Youngmin Kims Cosmogony as Political Philosophy delves
into a close reading of canoni-cal debates over a Song Dynasty
Confucian classic on the origins and nature of the world, showing
that they provide a unique window onto changes in Confucian
political philosophy in late Imperial China.70 At the other end,
Lam Wai-Mans meticulous study of hybrid conceptions of political
legiti-macy in contemporary Hong Kong traces popular views of
legitimacy to both Chinese cultural roots (specifically, Confucian
ideas of minben or people-centered rule) and to Western ones.71
Sudipta Kaviraj traverses the entire spectrum between ontology and
phenomenology in his study of the evolution of the Sanskritic
concept of rajanitithe principles or precepts (niti) appro-priate
to rulers (raja)from premodern India to the present.72 In this
brilliant study, Kaviraj argues that contemporary shortfalls in an
ethos of democratic accountability among political leaders can be
traced to older meanings of rajaniti as a transcendentally ordained
caste-specific morality, read into mod-ern politics as a para-royal
attitude on the part of officials and a corre-sponding stance of
abject supplication on the part of citizens. This interpretation of
the power of political language to shape social relations offers a
novel perspective on what otherwise tends to be figured simply as
corruption in contemporary Indian politics.
Kavirajs study exemplifies a form of comparative political
theory as a history of the present (to borrow Foucaults apt phrase)
that is particularly promising for the agenda we advocate here. As
Roxanne Euben argues, this kind of approach is no longer of
interest only to scholarly specialists, for the imperatives of
geopolitics have lent a new sense of urgency to attempts to bring
these pasts into an often presentist social science.73 The logic of
this mode of inquiry is to begin from contemporary problem frames
(such as political corruption in India) and, through careful
attention to the terms of political discourse actually deployed by
contemporary actors, conduct a his-tory (or genealogy) of ideas in
order to disclose the political imaginary within
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Williams and Warren 47
which they are sense-making, action-orienting concepts.
Beginning from the terms that circulate in contemporary political
discourse is important for the case we are making, as this is the
strategy that will enable us to reconstruct, and therefore
translate across and reflexively engage, the political imaginar-ies
that orient agents in the present historical momentincluding
ourselves. Tracing the different pathways by which we have arrived
at the present, then, is invaluable groundwork for the task of
crafting possible futures in which we can imagine ourselves as
equal agents.
As Kaviraj and others suggest, the advent of modernity in
different global locations is a critically important juncture for
these histories of the present. The odd case of people armed with
one set of conceptual tools fac-ing and having to deal with
institutions and practices based on concepts of a different
culture, he writes, has become a constant, repetitive fact of
mod-ern life.74 Focusing our attention on the moments when
modernity intrudes into long-established modes of life, whether
through colonialism, violence, or more subtle pathways, is
especially promising for political theory because these moments are
often crucibles for both new forms of thought and innova-tive
practices. Kaviraj again sums up the point nicely: one might ask
[of such moments] what new types of practices were being made
possible by these conceptual changes.75
In East Asia, a pivotal moment was the Meiji revolution in
Japan, a pro-gram of astonishingly rapid self-imposed modernization
understood as the only course for resisting Euro-American
imperialism. A particularly fascinat-ing object of study is the
proliferation during this period of compounds based on the word
min, or people, a Chinese character that is also used in both
Japanese and Korean. Following an early period of terminological
innovation in Japan, which was closely followed in China and
influenced intellectuals both there and in Korea, political
discourse crystallized around variations of these terms that linked
to modern ideological programs of ethnonationalism, liberalism, and
socialism.76 Understanding the history of these discourses is
crucial to making sense of political imaginaries in contemporary
Asia, as Chinese intellectual historian Wang Hui argues:
The commonality of Asian imaginaries partly derives from
subordinate status under European colonialism, during the Cold War,
as well as in the current global order, and also arises out of
Asian movements for national self-determination, socialism, and
colonial liberation. If we fail to acknowledge these historical
conditions and movements we will not be able to understand the
implications of modernity for Asia. . . . If it can be said that
the socialist and national liberation movements of the twentieth
century have drawn to a close, their fragmentary remains can still
be a vital source for stimulating new ways of imagining Asia.77
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48 Political Theory 42(1)
Wangs account of the relationship between past, present, and
future polit-ical imaginaries aligns well with the potential of
comparative political theory to contribute to the formation of new
political imaginaries in a global future. Since we are, all of us,
now moderns, in that our lives are inescapably struc-tured by such
institutions such as states, markets, hybrid cultures,
ever-changing technologies, and global interaction, the diverse
histories of the present for the peoples of the world cannot avoid
becoming a study of mul-tiple modernities,78 alternative
modernities,79 or modernity at large.80 To this degree, political
theory has a great deal of catching up to do with cultural studies,
subaltern studies, and comparative religion, among other fields.
What distinguishes the project of comparative political theory from
these approaches is, again, its orientation to the study of ideas
as a resource for practical reason in the present, guiding action
toward a future we might want to inhabit. By reconstructing the
political imaginaries that already oper-ate in the background of
our words and deeds, comparative political theory reveals those
often forgotten resources and influences that make us who we are as
well as what we might become.
We have argued that there is a conceptual and practical link
between glo-balization, deliberative democratic theory, and the
academic field of com-parative political theory. These themes are
connected by the idea that the human-scale problems characteristic
of intensive processes of globalization can be addressed in a
democratic form only under conditions where it is pos-sible for
citizens around the world to form, mostly through discourse, shared
political imaginaries: to see themselves not only as connected to
one another but also as possessing the ethical responsibility and
the agent-capacity to render these processes responsive to those
whom they affect. Since the for-mation of imagined communities of
shared fate is linguistically mediated, people who seek to assert
democratic agency in response to shared problems need ideational
resources that resonate with locally embedded understand-ings of
ethics and politics in order for mutual interdependence and
affected-ness to generate newly imagined common futures. We have
highlighted the contributions of comparative political theory to
the common pool of ide-ational resources from which political
actors can draw in discovering the languages through which to
construct new, democracy-enabling, political imaginaries. Drawing
on theoretical accounts of the pragmatics of language use, we have
suggested that comparative political theory can help to render
articulate and explicit an array of ideas about politics that, when
taken up by political actors, can help to motivate citizens to take
responsibility for render-ing the processes of globalization in
ways that provide the spaces, practices, and emergent institutions
of democracy across borders.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous research support
of the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation and the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Versions of this article
were presented at the American Political Science Association, the
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, the Department of
Political Science, Simon Fraser University, and the Department of
Political Science, Waseda University, and we wish to thank
audiences for helpful feedback. We also wish to thank colleagues
who provided us with generous comments on the paper: Brooke
Ackerly, Kiran Banerjee, Joseph Carens, Burke Hendrix, David
Laycock, and Jade Schiff. Particular thanks go to Rmi Lger for
suggesting a new title for the piece.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:
This research was supported by the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial
Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada.
Notes
1. The prevailing terms denoting the study of non-Western
political thought by scholars located within the Western academy
are comparative politi-cal theory (e.g., Roxanne Euben, Comparative
Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist Critique of
Rationalism, The Journal of Politics 59, no. 1 [1997]: 28-55),
comparative political philosophy (e.g., Anthony J. Parel and Ronald
C. Keith, eds., Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the
Upas Tree [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1992]; Stephen C. Angle,
Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]), and comparative
political thought (e.g., Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent,
Introduction: The Study of Comparative Political Thought, in
Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices, ed. Michael
Freeden and Andrew Vincent [London: Routledge, 2013], 123). Yet as
Andrew March stresses, not all work engaging non-Western ideas
about politics is methodologi-cally comparative (Andrew March, What
Is Comparative Political Theory? The Review of Politics 71 [2009]:
53165). Leigh Jencos study of the politi-cal theory of the early
twentieth-century Chinese thinker Zhang Shizhao explic-itly resists
the label of comparative political theory to describe her endeavor
(Leigh K. Jenco, Making the Political: Founding and Action in the
Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009], 9). Wendy Brown has a point when she suggests that it
is rather offensive to use the term comparative to denote
non-Western (as in empirical political science
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50 Political Theory 42(1)
comparative too often denotes non-American): the terminology
simply rein-scribes the privilege it purports to resist (Wendy
Brown, Political Theory is Not a Luxury: A Response to Timothy
Kaufman-Osborns Political Theory as a Profession, Political
Research Quarterly 63, no. 3 [2010]: 684). For these rea-sons, we
would prefer to use the terms intercultural or transcultural to
denote the sort of political theory we have in mind, but
reluctantly follow prevailing usage in this article. As Farah
Godrej notes, the name has stuck, and compara-tive political theory
continues to be associated with a general inclusivity, open-ness
toward and a deep curiosity about otherness. Farah Godrej,
Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7.
2. Though we have both made interventions around its edges. See,
e.g., Baogang He and Mark E. Warren, Authoritarian Deliberation:
The Deliberative Turn in Chinese Politics, Perspectives on Politics
9, no. 2 (2011): 26989; Melissa S. Williams, Criminal Justice,
Democratic Fairness, and Cultural Pluralism: The Case of Aboriginal
Peoples in Canada, Buffalo Criminal Law Journal 5, no. 2 (2002):
45195; Melissa S. Williams, Sharing the River: Aboriginal
Representation in Canadian Political Institutions, in
Representation and Democratic Theory, ed. David Laycock (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 93118.
3. Fred Dallmayr, who has done exemplary work in fostering the
development of comparative political theory, cites bi- or
multilingualism as a qualifying criterion for comparative political
theorists. Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative
Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 2 (2004):
24957.
4. E.g., Michaelle L. Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in
Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2006); Joseph Chan, A Confucian
Perspective on Human Rights for Contemporary China, in The East
Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A.
Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21237; Joseph
Chan, Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties, and Confucianism, Philosophy
East and West 52, no. 3 (2002): 281310; Joseph Chan, Democracy and
Meritocracy: Toward a Confucian Perspetive, Journal of Chinese
Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2007): 17993; Fred Dallmayr, ed., Comparative
Political Theory: An Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010); Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999); Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Godrej, Cosmopolitan
Political Thought; Leigh K. Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say? A
Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement, American
Political Science Review 101, no. 4 (2007): 74155; Jenco, Making
the Political; Youngmin Kim, Cosmogony as Political Philosophy,
Philosophy East and West 58, no. 1 (2008): 108125; Andrew March,
Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping
Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); March, What Is
Comparative Political Theory?; Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Paradoxes of
Popular Sovereignty:
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Williams and Warren 51
A View from Spanish America, Journal of Politics 74, no. 4
(2012): 105365; Diego A. von Vacano, The Color of Citizenship:
Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Hiroshi Watanabe, A History
of Japanese Political Thought, 16001901 (Tokyo: International House
of Japan, 2012).
5. Or, alternatively, to provincialize Western political
thought, i.e., to demar-cate it as a culturally, historically, and
geographically specific human tradi-tion. This construction leans
on the felicitous coinage of Dipesh Chakrabartys Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
6. See, e.g., David Held, Democracy and Globalization, Global
Governance 3, no. 3 (1997): 25167.
7. John Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing
Modernity in International Relations, International Organization
47, no. 1 (1993): 13974.
8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001); Barry Gills, Empire versus Cosmopolis: The
Clash of Globalizations, Globalizations 2, no. 1 (2005): 513; Nisha
Shah, Cosmopolis or Empire? Metaphors of Globalization and the
Description of Legitimate Political Communities, in Unsettled
Legitimacy: Political Community, Power, and Authority in a Global
Era, ed. Steven Bernstein and William D. Coleman (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 7494; Margaret E. Keck
and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in
International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1998); Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); Donatella della Porta,
Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and Herbert Reiter,
Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest
Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Sally
Engle Merry, Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping
the Middle, American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 3851; Mark
Goodale, The Power of Right(s): Tracking Empires of Law and New
Modes of Social Resistance in Bolivia (and Elsewhere), in The
Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the
Local, ed. Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
9. We follow Archibugi et al. (Daniele Archibugi, Mathias
Koenig-Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti, Introduction: Mapping
Global Democracy, in Global Democracy: Normative and Empirical
Perspectives, ed. Daniele Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi and
Raffaele Marchetti [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012],
8.) in the usage of democratic polycentrism.
10. Thomas Pogge, Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty, Ethics 103,
no. 1 (1992): 4875; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order:
From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995); Daniele Archibugi, The Global
Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008).
11. See, e.g., Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global
Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap.
3.
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52 Political Theory 42(1)
12. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, chap. 1; Euben,
Journeys to the Other Shore, chap. 6; see also Sheldon Pollock,
Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Cosmopolitanisms, Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 57789; Carole
Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004); James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New
Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jos
Casanova, Cosmopolitanism, the Clash of Civilizations, and Multiple
Modernities, Current Sociology 59, no. 2 (2011): 25267.
13. E.g., Will Kymlicka, Citizenship in an Era of Globalization:
Commentary on Held, in Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001); Dennis F. Thompson, Democratic Theory and
Global Society, Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999):
11125; Robert Goodin, Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its
Alternatives, Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007):
4068.
14. Even before the latest round of globalization, and still
more after, it has simply ceased to be the case that the effects of
our actions and choices stop at the territo-rial boundaries of our
own countries. Democratically, we really ought to recon-stitute our
demos to reflect that fact: ideally including within it everyone
whose interests are affected by our actions and choices, or at the
very least adapting democratic practice within our unjustifiably
restricted demos to reflect its demo-cratic shortcomings in that
respect (Robert E. Goodin, Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory
and Practice After the Deliberative Turn [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008], 5-6; for a similar point, see James Bohman, Democracy
across Borders: From Dmos to Dmois [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007], 45.)
15. Michael Goodhart, Europes Democratic Deficits through the
Looking Glass, Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (2007): 56784,
579.
16. John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2006), 158; Bohman, Democracy across Borders, 21.
17. From this standpoint, it is a weakness of List and
Koenig-Archibugis agency model of a global demos that a
collectivity be able to exercise statelike pow-ers in order to be
counted as a demos: The key condition for functioning as a demos is
. . . [that] [t]he collection of individuals in question has the
capacity (not necessarily actualized) to be organized, in a
democratic manner, in such a way as to function as a state-like
group agent. Christian List and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Can There
Be a Global Demos? An Agency-Based Approach, Philosophy &
Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010): 76110, 89.
18. E.g., Joshua Cohen and Charles F. Sabel, Global Democracy?
International Law and Politics 37 (2005):76397; Bohman, Democracy
across Borders; Benedict Kingsbury, International Law as
Inter-Public Law, in NOMOS XLIX: Moral Universalism and Pluralism,
ed. Henry S. Richardson and Melissa S. Williams (New York: New York
University Press, 2009), 167204; Dryzek, Deliberative Global
Politics; Tully, Public Philosophy; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The
Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation,
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Williams and Warren 53
Development 48, no. 2 (2005): 1522; List and Koenig-Archibugi,
Can There Be a Global Demos?; Robert E. Goodin, Global Democracy:
In the Beginning, International Theory 2, no. 2 (2010): 175209.
19. Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Jrgen Habermas, Between
Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Nancy Fraser,
Rethinking the Public Sphere, in Habermas and the Public Sphere,
ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Nancy Fraser,
Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and
Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World, in
Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Ian
Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 4566; Bohman, Democracy across Borders, 6061; John S.
Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 9.
20. Fraser, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere; Dryzek,
Foundations and Frontiers, 185.
21. Melissa S. Williams, Citizenship as Agency within
Communities of Shared Fate, in Unsettled Legitimacy: Political
Community, Power, and Authority in a Global Era, ed. Steven
Bernstein and William D. Coleman (Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2009).
22. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan
Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 81; David Held, Models
of Democracy, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 309.
23. Gould, Globalizing Democracy, 170.24. E.g., Habermas,
Between Facts and Norms; Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Iris Marion Young,
Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Goodin, Enfranchising All Affected Interests; Bohman, Democracy
across Borders; cf. Sofia Nsstrm, The Challenge of the All-Affected
Principle, Political Studies 59, no. 1 (2011): 11634.
25. Iris Marion Young, Global Challenges: War,
Self-Determination and Responsibility for Justice (Cambridge:
Polity, 2007); Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
26. Michael Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010); Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, The
Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory, Annual
Review of Political Science 11 (2008):387412.
27. See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19596; Euben, Journeys to
the Other Shore, 180; Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic
Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); Browers, Democracy and Civil
Society; Jeong-Woo Koo, The Origins of the Public Sphere and Civil
Society: Private Academies and Petitions in Korea, 15061800, Social
Science
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54 Political Theory 42(1)
History 31, no. 3 (2007): 381409; Miriam Hoexter, Shmuel N.
Eisenstadt, and Nehemia Levtzion, eds., The Public Sphere in Muslim
Societies (Albany: State University of New York, 2002).
28. Roxanne Euben, Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic
Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism, Journal of Politics 29, no.
1 (1997): 2855, 33.
29. It is worth noting, however, that one of the earliest
contributions to the agenda of comparative political philosophy was
framed not in terms of globalization but in terms of debates over
multiculturalism and particularly the canon wars in academia.
(Stephen G. Salkever and Michael Nylan, Comparative Political
Philosophy and Liberal Education: Looking for Friends in History,
PS: Political Science and Politics 27, no. 2 [1994]: 23847.) As we
note below, there is a deep continuity between debates over the
politics of difference or the pol-itics of recognition in the 1990s
and contemporary contributions to intercultural and postcolonial
political theory. The link is that both are part of an ongoing
critique of the excessive or false universalisms characteristic of
Western political thought, many of which were brought out in the
1980s in feminist contributions to political theory.
30. Dallmayr (Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some
Exemplary Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Dallmayr,
Beyond Monologue.
31. Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory, 10.32. Ibid., 15.33.
March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 540.34. Ibid., 54041;
see also Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 42; Daniel A. Bell, East
Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 11.
35. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 565; see also
Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory, 15; March, Islam and
Liberal Citizenship, 6364, 27374.
36. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 7; see also Hassan
Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2013), 31.
37. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 8.38. Jenco, What Does
Heaven Ever Say? 745; see also Freeden and Vincent,
Introduction, 7.39. Antony Black, The Way Forward in Comparative
Political Thought, Journal of
International Political Theory 7, no. 2 (2011): 22128, 224.40.
Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other.41. Black, The Way Forward,
225; see also Ken Tsutsumibayashi, Fusion of
Horizons or Confusion of Horizons? Intercultural Dialogue and
Its Risks, Global Governance 11, no. 1 (2005): 10314; Leigh Jenco,
Recentering Political Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality,
Cultural Critique 79 (2011): 2759, 30; Bashir, Europe and the
Eastern Other, 21.
42. Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say?; Jenco, Recentering
Political Theory; Jenco, On the Possibility of Chinese Thought as
Global Theory, in Chinese Thought as Global Social Theory, ed.
Leigh Jenco (forthcoming). We are also indebted to Tobold Rollo for
conversations around these points.
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43. E.g., Black, The Way Forward.44. Michael Freeden, Editorial:
The Comparative Study of Political Thinking,
Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 (2007): 19, 7.45.
Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 21.46. March writes: Certainly,
intellectual historians (whether Cambridge School or
other) do not all assume that their thinkers and texts are
potential sources for first-order normative commitments on our
part; in fact, it is hard to imagine a less engaged approach to the
history of political thought (March, What Is Comparative Political
Theory?, 549).
47. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 53435.48.
Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 67.49. Euben, Journeys to the
Other Shore, 43.50. See Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding
in the History of Ideas,
History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1968): 353, 53.51. Sheldon Wolin,
Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006), chap. 1; Ian Shapiro, Problems, Methods, and
Theories: Or What Is Wrong with Political Science and What to Do
about It, Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 596619; Jane
Mansbridge, Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System, in
Deliberative Politics, ed. Stephen Macedo (Oxford: Oxford
University Press,