Title
Comparative political theory and the Cambridge School: An attempt at intra-disciplinary
dialogue
Author
Lorna Bracewell
Department of political science
234 Anderson Hall
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
lbracewell@ufl.edu
727.504.3344
Abstract
In this article, my primary aim is to effect a rapprochement of sorts between two political
theoretical projects that have often been figured as fundamentally at odds with one
another: Comparative Political Theory (CPT) and the Cambridge School approach to the
history of political thought. To this end, I argue that CPT and the Cambridge School are
united by similar objectives: to spur the discipline of political theory beyond the
boundaries of its traditional canon and to imbue it with a heightened awareness of the
contingency and particularity of its own concepts and concerns. I further argue that the
historical sensibilities of the Cambridge School would enhance “dialogical” approaches
to CPT, particularly those along the lines Fred Dallmayr has envisaged, by chastening
their problematic and, ultimately, self-undermining quest for universal moral consensus.
Keywords
comparative political theory, Cambridge School, Quentin Skinner, history of political
thought, cosmopolitanism, universalism
1
Comparative political theory and the Cambridge School: An attempt at intradisciplinary dialogue
In his introduction to Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory,
an edited volume published in 1999 with the ambition of inaugurating a new field, Fred
Dallmayr accuses the discipline of political theory as it is practiced in most Western
universities of amounting to little more than “the rehearsal of the ‘canon’ of Western
political thought from Plato to Marx or Nietzsche.”i “Only rarely,” Dallmayr continues,
“are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to
transgress the canon, and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe,
in the direction of genuine comparative investigations.”ii Fifteen years later, despite the
remarkable success Dallmayr and othersiii have had in garnering wider recognition for
Comparative Political Theory (hereafter, “CPT”) within the subfield of political theory,
Dallmayr’s critical observations remain apt: the discipline of political theory continues to
exhibit a peculiar and, ultimately, limiting preoccupation with its “canon.”
Despite my agreement with Dallmayr on this point concerning how political
theory is practiced by most scholars within the Western academy, in this article, I resist
Dallmayr’s dismissal of all or most theoretical engagements with the “canon” as mere
“rehearsals” of a largely static and pre-existing body of authors and texts. Some of these
engagements, I will argue, challenge (if not outright explode) traditional interpretations
of canonical texts and even the boundaries of the canon itself, opening up a space for just
the sort of comparative investigations Dallmayr and others have called for over the past
two decades. I have in mind specifically scholarship produced by practitioners of what
2
has come to be known as the “Cambridge School” approach to the history of political
thought, an approach most closely associated with Quentin Skinner.iv
In the broadest sense, my aim in this article is to initiate what might be thought of
as an intra-disciplinary dialogue between CPT and the Cambridge School. This aim will
likely strike readers familiar with CPT as improbable or even ill-advised in light of the
fact that some of CPT’s most prominent proponents and practitioners have rejected
Cambridge School historicism as incompatible with the project of CPT.v However, as I
will demonstrate, these rejections are premised on inaccurate or incomplete
understandings of the Cambridge School’s method. Therefore, I will argue, the path
remains open for a potentially fruitful and mutually beneficial alliance between CPT and
the Cambridge School.
To state my aim more specifically, in this article, I will argue that the Cambridge
School approach to the history of political thought as set forth by one of its leading
proponents, Quentin Skinner, might be understood as an ally rather than an adversary to
at least one approach to CPT. This approach, pioneered by Fred Dallmayr and embraced
widely within the field of CPT, takes the staging of “ethically transformative” encounters
or “dialogues”vi across difference as one of its principal goals.vii This goal, in my view,
presents an opportunity for conversation and collaboration between CPT and the
Cambridge School, an opportunity that, unfortunately, has been largely overlooked. For,
as I will show, just as “dialogical” approaches to CPT aim to “restore [to political theory]
the sense of ‘wonder’ (thaumazein) that the ancients extolled as pivotal to
philosophizing” viii by “opening mind and heart to the puzzling diversity of human
3
experiences and traditions – and also to the possibility of jeopardizing cherished
preconceptions or beliefs,” ix so Skinner’s version of a Cambridge School approach aims
to unsettle the regnant ideas of the present by bringing to light “the essential variety of
viable moral assumptions and political commitments.”x By highlighting this shared goal,
I hope to convince practitioners of CPT and the Cambridge School approach that their
respective scholarly enterprises are not so far removed from one another, and, in fact,
might benefit from collaborative exchanges. Additionally (and, perhaps, more
ambitiously), I hope to persuade practitioners of CPT who, like Dallmayr, engage in
cross-cultural inquiry with the further aim of deriving some set of universal moral
principles to set this aim aside. If CPT is to allow for the invigorating and transformative
encounters with and across difference that both Dallmayr and Skinner agree are the
highest good cross-cultural and historical inquiry might bring about, then, I argue, CPT
must forswear the pursuit of universal moral principles as a raison d’être.
Fred Dallmayr’s dialogical approach to CPT
Before taking up my article’s main objective – effecting a rapprochement of sorts
between CPT and the Cambridge School – I would like to provide for my reader a brief
introduction to the subfield of CPT, paying particular attention to where and how Fred
Dallmayr’s distinctive and influential “dialogical” approach to CPT fits in vis-à-vis other
leading approaches on offer in the subfield.xi
From its earliest articulations in the mid-1990s, the defining objective of CPT has
been to make political theory more global or non-Western in focus. However, while
virtually all practitioners and proponents of CPT can be said to embrace this general aim,
4
they are far from agreement on what precisely it means or how it might best be
accomplished. Roxanne Euben, for example, has argued that the best way to ensure “that
‘political theory’ is about human and not merely Western dilemmas” is “to introduce
non-Western perspectives into [political theory’s] familiar debates about the problems of
living together.” xii Because, in Euben’s view, thinkers working within non-Western
traditions have grappled with the same “dilemmas and questions” that have long supplied
the grist for political theory’s mills in the West, the task of CPT is, essentially, to treat the
works these thinkers have produced as political theory.xiii Thus, Euben’s approach to CPT
consists chiefly of bringing political theory’s fundamental questions “to bear across
cultures”; questions such as “What is the good life? What is legitimate authority? What is
the right relationship of the individual to society?”xiv “These questions,” Euben contends,
“do not only arise from Western cultural experience,”xv and the attempts of non-Western
thinkers to grapple with them merit the same consideration within the discipline of
political theory as those of Western thinkers.xvi
While largely sympathetic to Euben’s vision for CPT, Farah Godrej has attempted
to deepen and strengthen it by imbuing the subfield with a degree of methodological selfconsciousness and sophistication she believes it lacks. For Godrej, CPT’s defining project
of “articulating alternative ways of understanding the political world” in the terms
provided by “the discourse of familiar theoretical conversations”xvii (or, as Euben puts it,
bringing the questions of political theory “to bear across cultures” xviii) both more
complex and more fraught than most practitioners of CPT let on. On one side, Godrej
explains, CPT courts the danger of assimilating non-Western texts to its own inescapably
5
Western concepts and categories, and, in doing so, eliding the very “otherness” on which
CPT’s comparative aspect depends.xix On the other side, Godrej continues, CPT risks
setting up non-Western texts as so far removed from its own inescapably Western
concepts and categories that, ironically, CPT ends up consigning these texts to the
margins of the discipline where they are unable to “disturb or dislocate our familiar
understandings of politics.”xx To ward off these twin dangers, Godrej calls on
comparative political theorists to become one part anthropologist and ethnographer,
“immersing themselves in the lived experience of the text” and acquiring the capacity to
understand the text from “the perspective of adherence,” and another part “external
observer and commentator, constructing cultural accounts in order to represent the
experience of the text, and articulating how these insights may be used to illuminate our
political life.”xxi By struggling “to balance the competing demands of scholarship and
adherence” and hewing a middle-path between the assimilation and the ghettoization of
non-Western texts and concepts, Godrej believes her approach to CPT will culminate in
“a more genuinely cosmopolitan political theory” in which “complex encounters with
otherness are increasingly available to provoke, dislocate, and challenge our settled
understandings of political life.”xxii
Godrej’s pronounced concern for preserving the “otherness” of non-Western texts
and concepts in the context of cross-cultural inquiry is largely absent from the approach
to CPT Andrew March has proposed.xxiii Dissatisfied with largely “rehabilitative” and
“explanatory/interpretive” approaches to CPT such as Euben’s and Godrej’s, March calls
on CPT to do more than salvage heretofore neglected non-Western texts from obscurity
6
or to draw on such texts in an effort to trouble political theory’s traditional concepts and
categories. CPT as March envisions it will be, first and foremost, a “justificatory” project
engaged in the “first-order evaluation of the implication of the contestations of norms,
values, and principles between distinct and coherent doctrines of thought.”xxiv
“Justificatory CPT,” March explains, “inherently includes and subsumes all of what is
valuable” in other “weaker” approaches, “namely, the diagnostic element of examining
the contours of disagreement between traditions and the appreciative element of
demonstrating the diversity of other traditions.”xxv What it adds to these projects is a
quest for what March describes as “reasonable conceptions of morality and justice free
from the taint of imperialism” to which individuals immersed in radically divergent
cultural traditions might assent.xxvi In other words, March’s approach, more so than any
of the others surveyed here, takes the engendering of moral consensus and the search for
universal moral principles as its primary aim.xxvii
Turning now to Fred Dallmayr’s “dialogical” approach to CPT, the approach that
is the primary focus of this article, we can see that it shares something with each of the
approaches outlined above. Like Euben’s, Dallmayr’s approach to CPT seeks to
demonstrate the political theoretical significance of non-Western texts and concepts by
employing them to illuminate some of political theory’s defining dilemmas.xxviii Like
Godrej’s, Dallmayr’s approach strives to take into account the “otherness” of nonWestern texts and concepts in such a way as to ensure that they are still permitted entry
into the heart of the discipline where they might call into question (or further illuminate)
Western political theory’s principal concepts and categories.xxix And finally, like
7
March’s, Dallmayr’s approach counts among its aims the engendering of moral
consensus or the discovery of what Dallmayr calls “truly universal principles or
yardsticks of human conduct.”xxx xxxi
In fact, what marks Dallmayr’s approach off as distinct from other approaches
currently on offer in the subfield is its pluralism. In a contribution to the edited volume
Western Political Thought in Dialogue With Asia (2009), Dallmayr spells out his vision
for a pluralistic and multifaceted CPT aimed at the attainment of three hierarchically
ranked ends or “goods.”xxxiiThe lowest good at which Dallmayr’s approach to CPT aims
is a “pragmatic-utilitarian”xxxiii knowledge of diverse cultures and traditions. This type of
knowledge, Dallmayr explains, is gained by way of strategies of cross-cultural inquiry
“directed at subsuming or appropriating the ‘other’ in a unilateral fashion without
reciprocity” and is of a kind with the inter-cultural knowledge pursued by “economists,”
“business people,” and sometimes “even theorists or philosophers” who study other
cultures “not for the sake of genuine learning, but for the purpose of gaining a strategic
advantage or bolstering [their] own sense of superiority.”xxxiv “What has been termed
‘Orientalism,’” Dallmayr clarifies, “corresponded basically to such a policy of
appropriation and domination on the part of Western intellectual elites.”xxxv
In order to stave off such Orientalist possibilities and “to balance or calibrate selfinterest against the legitimate interests of others,” “comparative or cross-cultural
inquiry,” Dallmayr writes, “may be placed in the service of another end or ‘good’: the
good of finding truly universal principles of human conduct.”xxxvi In the context of
pursuing this “‘moral-universal’ good,” Dallmayr explains, “the ‘other’ is studied not
8
primarily in his or her difference, but with a view toward what is common or shared in
humanity,” such as a belief in “the so-called ‘golden rule’” or in the norms embodied in
certain articles of modern international law “recognized as binding by the vast majority
of states and peoples”xxxvii such as the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.xxxviii
By placing CPT in the service of the pursuit of “truly universal principles of
human conduct” rather than merely utilitarian or self-serving knowledge of other
cultures, Dallmayr believes that the imperialist or Orientalist potential of CPT can be
reigned in. However, if the moral universal good uncovered by way of comparative study
is ever going to be brought to bear on the real world in a manner that does not reduce it to
merely another tool of domination in the hands of already hegemonic Western powers,
then, in Dallmayr’s view, a further step is required. CPT must move “beyond moral
universalism” in the pursuit of a higher good, “an ‘ethical’ or ‘ethically transformative’
good” that culminates in “widespread ethical education and character formation.”xxxix
In the pursuit of this last and highest good, Dallmayr explains, CPT’s focus shifts
away from “what all cultures have in common” and toward “how and why they differ.”xl
This shift makes the practitioner of CPT, in Dallmayr’s words, “aware of the limits of
[her] own particular traditions” and “of the special character of [her] own customs and
preferences.”xli Such awareness, Dallmayr continues, soon blossoms into “enhanced
tolerance and a genuine recognition of others, including their traditions and aspirations”
as the CPT practitioner “come[s] to appreciate the other no longer as a mere replica of
[herself]” or as a “target of acquisition or abstract norm-regulation,” but as a richly
9
differentiated ‘persona,’ an authentic agent and perhaps friend.”xlii “It is on this level,”
Dallmayr concludes, “that ‘dialogue’ in the proper sense can happen – where the term
refers to a genuine mutual learning process proceeding through question and answer.”xliii
As Dallmayr himself emphasizes, his pluralistic and multifaceted approach to
CPT, which strives to balance the three competing goods of practical or utilitarian
knowledge, universal moral consensus, and ethical education or transformation, is rife
with tensions and paradoxes. Dallmayr captures nicely what he describes as the
“agonal”xlivnature of his approach to CPT when he describes it as “deconstructive
dialogue.” xlv Deconstructive dialogue, Dallmayr explains, struggles “to take otherness…
seriously and hence to respect differences and distances that cannot simply be wished or
talked away” xlvi while simultaneously insisting that the “recognition of difference is not
equivalent to a counsel of despair”xlviiand that dialogue can be more than “the conduct of
random chatter” without lapsing into “the enactment of a ready-made consensus (the
subsumption of particulars under a universalist umbrella).”xlviii “Wedged between
surrender and triumph,” Dallmayr writes, “dialogical exchange has an ‘agonal’ or
tensional quality which cannot be fully stabilized,”xlix and it is this tension or competition
between dialogue’s competing imperatives that, Dallmayr believes, makes the project of
CPT interesting, significant, and worth pursuing.
What we might think of as the agony of Dallmayr’s approach to CPT – its careful,
almost anxious universalism, its insistence that difference be taken seriously and
respected in the context of cross-cultural inquiry, and its faith in the ability of genuine
encounters with and across difference to bring about profound ethical and political
10
transformations – make it, I believe, a particularly congenial dialogue partner, if you will,
for the Cambridge School approach to the history of political thought. However, before I
explore these affinities more deeply, I will provide for my reader a rough and ready
summary of Quentin Skinner’s version of a Cambridge School approach. Once this
summary is complete, the path will be clear for me to take up this article’s principal task
of bringing CPT and the Cambridge School into fruitful conversation with one another.
Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School approach to the history of political
thought
Perhaps the most fitting way to introduce the Cambridge School approach to the
history of political thought is to briefly sketch the intellectual context from which it
emerged. Prior to Quentin Skinner’s transformational methodological interventions, the
study of the history of political thought was dominated by two orthodoxies over and
against which the Cambridge School would eventually come to define itself. The first of
these orthodoxies is what one might generally describe as “perennialism” and is most
famously associated with (though, as Skinner himself has persuasively shown, by no
means confined to) scholars such as Arthur Lovejoy and Leo Strauss.l Adherents to the
“perennialism” orthodoxy interpret certain historical texts deemed worthy, for various
and often dubious reasons, of the designation “great books” as though they were
contributions to a trans-historical, or, in some cases, timelessli conversation about a
readily delineable and enduring set of topics that Lovejoy called “unit ideas”lii and that
Strauss called “the political fundamentals.” liii Thus, when viewed from a “perennialist”
perspective, writers as historically and culturally distant as, say, Plato and Thomas
11
Aquinas or Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes appear as contemporaries of a sort
engaged in similar projects.liv
Since the publication of what has proven to be his most influential methodological
intervention, a bold and, at times, caustic essay originally entitled “The Unimportance of
the Great Texts” but published, in 1969, under the markedly less pugnacious title
“Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” Quentin Skinner has been a
merciless critic of “perennialism.” To interpret historical texts in a “perennialist” manner,
for example, to read Machiavelli’s Prince as though it was an effort to articulate a
position vis-à-vis the same fundamental questions engaged by Thucydides in Book V of
his History of the Peloponnesian War,lv is, in Skinner’s words, “unavoidably to run the
perpetual danger of lapsing into various kinds of historical absurdity.”lvi Chief among
these is the notion that there exists in history a select canon of writers spanning two
continents and at least as many millennia who have all, in their turn, wrestled with the
same enduring questions. This notion, Skinner insists, is a historical non-starter. “There
simply are no perennial problems in philosophy,” he notoriously declares; “there are only
individual answers to individual questions, with as many different answers as there are
questions, and as many different questions as there are questioners.” lviiBecause
“perennialists” do not concede this and are content to allow their own paradigm for the
nature of political thought to determine the direction of their historical investigations, the
interpretations they produce do not, in Skinner’s view, merit the name “histories” at all.
Rather, Skinner insists, such interpretations are more properly understood as
“mythologies” in which prolepsis (the crowding out of historical meaning by an
12
interpreter’s excessive concern with contemporary matters), parochialism (seeing
something apparently familiar in the course of studying an alien culture, argument, or
conceptual scheme and, in consequence, providing a misleadingly familiar-looking
description), and outright anachronism run rampant. Ultimately, in Skinner’s view,
interpretations produced in accord with the “perennialist” orthodoxy “can scarcely
contain any genuinely historical reports about thoughts that were actually thought in the
past” and risk reducing historical scholarship to nothing but “a pack of tricks we play on
the dead.”lviii
The second disciplinary orthodoxy over and against which the Cambridge School
approach emerged is a perspective one might call “epiphenomenalism.” According to
Skinner, “epiphenomenalists,” such as C.B. Macpherson, interpret historical texts as
though they were the products of highly deterministic social, political, or economic
structures, forces, or processes rather than mental activities bearing the mark of
individual agency. In the “epiphenomenalist” view, ideas are incidental; they are the
flotsam and jetsam adrift atop history’s surface, obscuring and distracting from the truly
significant structural phenomena churning deep below. Thus, for example, when viewed
from an “epiphenomenalist” perspective, Edmund Burke necessarily becomes, as a
consequence of his position in some version of a Marxist historical narrative concerning
the inevitable emergence of capitalism, a laissez-faire liberal and an apologist for market
society.lixlx That Burke’s intention in writing, say, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity could
not possibly have been to proffer a conservative apology for the capitalist systemlxi is of
13
no consequence to the “epiphenomenalist” for whom authorial intentions are not decisive
(or even necessarily relevant) when determining the meaning of a text.
The problem, from a Skinnerian perspective, with interpretations guided by
“epiphenomenalism” is that they fail to recognize that the intentions of the author whose
work they are interpreting are more than merely incidental to the work’s meaning.lxii In
other words, according to Skinner, “epiphenomenalists” commit a fundamental error:
they disregard what, Skinner argues, is an undeniable “fact about language,” “that anyone
issuing a serious utterance will always be doing something as well as saying something,
and doing it in virtue of what is said.”lxiii In Skinner’s view (a view deeply indebted to
Austin’s gloss on the Wittgenstenian insight that words, in addition to being words, are
also deeds), if we wish to understand any serious utterance, we must “recover what the
agent may have been doing in saying what was said,” that is, we must recover the agent’s
“illocutionary intentions.”lxiv The recovery of these “illocutionary intentions” is crucial,
Skinner believes, to answering the fundamental hermeneutic question “What does the
writer mean by what he says in this work?”lxv
However, Skinner is clear that efforts to get at these illocutionary intentions are
not tantamount to the ridiculous and impossible task of popping open a long dead
author’s head and peering inside. Nor, Skinner emphasizes, do such efforts preclude
attending to the sort of broad historical, sociological, cultural, and contextual factors that
figure so centrally in “epiphenomenalist” interpretations. This is because, in Skinner’s
view, writers are normally engaged in intended acts of communication. Therefore, to be
in a position to characterize what a writer was doing in writing a particular text,
14
interpreters must venture beyond the boundaries of the text itself and determine which
conversations, arguments, or what Skinner frequently refers to as the linguistic “contexts”
that particular text was intended by its author to intervene in or contribute to.lxvi In
Skinner’s words, to grasp the context and, thus, the meaning (in one particular sense at
least)lxvii of a given work, “we need to be prepared to take as our province nothing less
than the whole of… the social imaginary, the complete range of the inherited symbols
and representations that constitute the subjectivity of [the] age”lxviii in which the text was
produced.lxix Barring such heroiclxx efforts, Skinner argues, we will never discern what a
given text was intended to do, a crucial aspect, Skinner argues, of virtually any text’s
meaning.lxxi
The critiques Skinner proffers of both “perennialism” and “epiphenomenalism”
are rooted in what I take to be the Cambridge School’s definitional methodological
injunction: that historians of political thought treat the publication of a text and the
utterance of its argument as acts performed in history, and, specifically, in the context of
some ongoing discourse.lxxii The aim of Skinner’s method is not to pluck select past texts
from the stream of history and restore them to the timeless resplendency proper to them,
nor is it to peer behind the backs of the authors of past texts to discern what they, perhaps
in spite of themselves, really mean. Rather, as Skinner has recently stated it, “the chief
aspiration” of his proposed method is “to recover the historical identity of individual texts
in the history of thought… to see such texts as contributions to particular discourses, and
thereby to recognize the ways in which they followed or challenged or subverted the
conventional terms of those discourses themselves.”lxxiii What Skinner describes as “the
15
nerve of [his] argument” is that “if we want a history of philosophy written in a genuinely
historical spirit, we need to make it one of our principal tasks to situate the texts we study
within such intellectual contexts as enable us to make sense of what their authors were
doing in writing them.”lxxiv We must, Skinner continues, “use the ordinary techniques of
historical enquiry to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to appreciate their
beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way.”lxxv
To critics who complain that such an approach “reduces the study of the history of
thought to nothing more edifying than a conducted tour of a graveyard,”lxxvi Skinner
responds that, in fact, studies of historical texts conducted in this manner and with these
aims have the potential to impart important moral lessons.lxxvii “The classic texts,
especially in social, ethical, and political thought,” Skinner wrote in his infamous 1969
polemic, “help to reveal – if we let them – not the essential sameness, but rather the
essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments.”lxxviii They call
into question, Skinner would go on to argue several decades later, the validity of speaking
in terms of “the vocabulary of politics” and reveal that “different societies may
conceptualise [this domain] in different and possibly even incommensurable ways.”lxxix
Such revelations, Skinner argues, help us to “stand back from our own assumptions and
systems of belief, and thereby to situate ourselves in relation to other and very different
forms of life” as merely “one tribe among others”lxxx
Seeing ourselves in this way, Skinner continues, facilitates “a greater degree of
understanding, and thereby a larger tolerance for elements of cultural diversity.”lxxxilxxxiiIt
also, Skinner adds, helps us develop a certain capacity for self-criticism. Once we realize
16
that “our own society is no different from any other in having its own local beliefs and
arrangements of social and political life” and that “those features of our own
arrangements which we may be disposed to accept as traditional or even ‘timeless’ truths
may in fact be the merest of contingencies of our peculiar history and social structure,”
we can begin, Skinner explains, “to stand back from, and perhaps even to reappraise”
those arrangements and features and, most importantly, cease to wield them as the
yardstick against which we measure the world.lxxxiii
“One of the present values of the past,” Skinner remarks in the concluding chapter
of Liberty Before Liberalism, a text written (shall I dare say it?) with the intention to
demonstrate the “practical use, here and now” of Skinner’s method, “is as a repository of
values we no longer endorse, or questions we no longer ask.”lxxxiv “One corresponding
role for the intellectual historian,” Skinner continues, “is that of acting as a kind of
archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down
and enabling us to reconsider what we think of it.”lxxxv In Skinner’s view, it is not solely
or even predominantly the continuities between the past and the present that make the
past of contemporary relevance, but the discontinuities whose excavation can, Skinner
believes, “prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched” “into believing that the ways
of thinking… bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be
the ways of thinking.” lxxxvi As Skinner memorably put it in 1969, “it is the very fact that
the classic texts are concerned with their own quite alien problems, and not the
presumption that they are somehow concerned with our own problems as well, which
17
[gives] not the lie but the key to the indispensable value of studying the history of
ideas.”lxxxvii
CPT and the Cambridge School: An attempt at rapprochement
From the sketch of Skinner’s version of a Cambridge School approach to the
history of political thought that I have just provided, one can begin to sense, I hope, the
ways in which this approach might prove congenial to “dialogical” approaches to CPT
such as those Dallmayr has championed. Much like Dallmayr (as well as most other
practitioners of CPT), adherents to the Cambridge School have little patience for mere
“rehearsals” of political theory’s canon. In fact, the oeuvres of the Cambridge School’s
most prolific figures, Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock, are chock full of works that
challenge both received wisdom regarding canonical thinkers as well as the boundaries of
the canon itself. For instance, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Skinner’s
famous two-volume study of European political thought from the late thirteenth to the
late sixteenth century, does not address a procession “of so-called ‘classic texts’” and,
consequently, does not concentrate “exclusively on leading theorists.”lxxxviiiInstead,
Skinner considers “the more general social and intellectual matrix out of which [the socalled ‘classic texts’] arose” including the “more ephemeral contemporary contributions
to social and political thought,”lxxxix works that may seem insignificant from the vantage
point of the present but that figured prominently in the political thinking of canonical
figures like Machiavelli, More, Luther, or Calvin. Skinner describes this procedure as
“surround[ing]” the “classic texts” with “their appropriate ideological context” and insists
that it is only by casting their gazes beyond the “canon” that “students of political
18
thought” can hope to arrive at a “history of political theory with a genuinely historical
character.”xc Such an approach, as many critics of Skinner and the Cambridge School
have pointed out,xci undermines the very notion that there exists in history a clearly
defined canon of superlative texts from which we might draw transcendent political
wisdom, and, thus, opens up for serious political theoretical consideration whole
universes of forgotten or marginalized texts, authors, questions, and ideas. Such an
opening up of political theory’s often-narrow vista seems deeply commensurate with
Dallmayr’s expressed hopes for the practice of CPT.
Another aspect of the Cambridge School approach to intellectual history that
makes it a natural ally for comparative political theoretical projects akin to Dallmayr’s is
its insistence on the potentiality that myriad and profound differences might inhere
between the interpreter (in this case, the historian) and the interpreted (in this case, the
historical text). As Conal Condren, a sympathetic critic of the Cambridge School, has
remarked, the Cambridge School does not operate according to the maxim that, “If we
shout loudly enough, Plato will have to reply in English.”xcii Rather, as I have
demonstrated above, the maxim according to which the Cambridge School operates
might be stated thusly: If we listen attentively, we will hear Plato speaking in his own
language and, in doing so, we may come to appreciate not the essential sameness, but the
essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments. Such
revelations, such exposures to what Skinner has called “the fact of historical
difference,”xciii are, as one perceptive commentator has noted, “character forming,”xciv
and the character they form shares much with the character that Dallmayr hopes exercises
19
in CPT will inculcate: one that possesses the capacity to “move from the habitually
familiar toward the unfamiliar,”xcv and to recognize “the limits of our own particular
traditions” and “the special character of our own customs and preferences.”xcvi Such a
character is as integral to the sort of “inter-civilizational dialogue” for which Dallmayr
has called – a dialogue that “proceeds ‘by way of question and answer,’ with an accent on
the primacy of questioning” and in which “one [partner in the dialogue] does not try to
argue the other down but… genuinely weighs the other’s perspective”xcvii – as it is to the
sort of interpretive method advocated by Skinner and the Cambridge School.xcviii The
Cambridge School historian’s distinctive determination to interpret the text she is
studying in light of the context(s) in and for which it was composed and to resist the everpresent temptation to assimilate it to her own present is matched by the determination of
the participants in Dallmayr’s “genuine civilizational encounter” to proceed “modestly
and soberly… taking their departure… from their own distinct perspective… while
simultaneously guarding against any form of cultural or self-enclosure,” including facile
imputations of identity (or what Dallmayr calls “strateg[ies] of appropriation”)xcix which
obscure, silence and deny the very other one is supposed to be encountering.
As tempting as it is to conclude this article on such dulcet notes, I must concede
that all is not agreement and concord between the Cambridge School approach to the
history of political thought and CPT. In fact, several leading practitioners of CPT have
expressly dismissed the interpretive methods of the Cambridge School as inadequate for
the purposes of CPT. However, as I will demonstrate, more often than not, these
dismissals are premised on misunderstandings of the Cambridge School’s method and,
20
therefore, pose no real impediments to the rapprochement between CPT and the
Cambridge School I am proposing here.
Perhaps the most prominent of the Cambridge School’s detractors in the CPT
literature is Farah Godrej. In her well-known contribution to the ongoing methodological
discussion in CPT, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of
Interpreting the Other,” Godrej argues that the Cambridge School method does not allow
“for the sort of challenge and dislocation that the existential – and, ultimately, theoreticalencounter with alterity should bring forth” and, therefore, does not contain “the resources
for a cosmopolitan re-envisioning of the task of political theory.”c Godrej bases this
judgment on her view that, for the Cambridge School, all texts, including non-western
ones, “are interesting only as historical or cultural relics, with no relevance for our time
and place.”ci
Godrej is not the first (and likely will not be the last) critic to accuse the
Cambridge School of cordoning off the past from the present and reducing the study of
historical texts to a purely antiquarian and utterly un- (or even anti-) theoretical
endeavor.cii In fact, this accusation is nearly as old as the Cambridge School itself,ciii and,
for as long as critics have been putting it forward, the Cambridge School’s leading lights
have been taking pains to defend against it.
For example, in Liberty Before Liberalism, Quentin Skinner explicitly intervenes
in contemporary political theoretical controversies over how we might best understand
the ideas of political and individual freedom. In Godrej’s view, such an excursion into the
domain of contemporary political theoretical concerns is inconsistent with Skinner’s
21
historicist premises; however, as Skinner himself explains, this accusation hinges on a
misreading of those very premises. In fact, one of Skinner’s central concerns in Liberty
Before Liberalism is to refute “the accusation of antiquarianism” – an accusation that, he
admits, “troubles [him] deeply” - by demonstrating, through the deployment of his
method, “the practical use, here and now”civ of his historical studies. To this end, Skinner
offers a compelling argument as to why seeing “philosophical reflection as in its essence
a kind of historical activity”cv is indispensable to contemporary political theorizing.
As I have already highlighted in my discussion of Skinner’s method in the
preceding section, in Skinner’s view, attentiveness to the historical character of works of
political philosophy or theory is beneficial to political theorists in the present because it
can, in his words, “prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched” into believing that
our political present is a necessary rather than a contingent product, and can show us that
“the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about
those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible
worlds.”cvi By confronting us with the contingent character of our present values and
convictions, historical study can enable us to, in Skinner’s words, “stand back from the
intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry
what we should think of them.”cvii This makes Cambridge School historicism not inimical
to the provocative, dislocating, and challenging enterprise of CPT, as Godrej would have
it, but, rather, vital to it. And, one need look no further than the extensive literature on
the “neo-Roman” ideal of freedom as “non-domination” (understood as a possible
contemporary alternative to liberal conceptions of positive and negative liberty) to see
22
that Skinner’s historical method has inaugurated a veritable cottage industry of critical
political theoretical reflection on our contemporary understandings of political life.cviii
Of course, Godrej’s has not been the only voice in the CPT literature critical of
the Cambridge School. Chris Goto-Jones, for one, has recently accused contemporary
scholarship in the history of political thought of exhibiting a “defensive ethnocentricity”
attributable in large part, he argues, to the disciplinary ascendancy of the Cambridge
School.cix “[C]ontext,” Goto-Jones writes, “has unfortunately become a buzzword for
intellectual conservatism and ethnocentricity in the history of political thought.”cx “[O]f
all the contexts that might be of interest to historians of political philosophy,” Goto-Jones
continues, “none of them appear to be found outside the geohistorical spaces of Europe
and the United States.cxi
I find this particular criticism of the Cambridge School misdirected for two
reasons. First, at least one leading Cambridge School scholar, J.G.A Pocock, has
explicitly encouraged scholars possessing the requisite language skills and historical
expertise to employ the Cambridge School method in contexts beyond the European and
the North American.cxii In fact, in an essay originally published in 1964 and republished
as the second chapter of Politics, Language, and Time, Pocock, despite his lack of the
requisite skills and expertise, tentatively undertakes a bit of comparative political theory
himself as he examines several philosophical texts from China’s heroic age.cxiii
More recently, Skinner has echoed Pocock’s call for intellectual historians to
venture beyond Europe’s borders. In an address delivered in 1997, Skinner voiced
concern over what he described as a “form of parochialism… on the rise in Europe,”cxiv
23
brought about, he suggested, as an unintended consequence of the rise of a certain and, in
Skinner’s view, misbegotten variant of multiculturalism. European intellectuals, Skinner
told the audience, have become so absorbed with “local questions” such as “try[ing] to do
justice to the complex subcultures out of which… our so-called national identities were…
very loosely formed” that “other intellectual traditions appear less relevant, and perhaps
less interesting.”cxv If such a trend continues, Skinner warned, “I foresee a risk of our
becoming less interested in each other, and in each other’s political arrangements and
philosophies.”cxvi
Such a development would be “regret[table]” in Skinner’s view, “partly because
an exclusive interest in our own origins and identities strikes me,” Skinner explained, “as
boringly self-absorbed, but also because,” he continued, “a more demanding but more
rewarding form of multiculturalism is available to us.”cxviiThis form of multiculturalism is
exemplified by scholars such as Albert Hirschman and Clifford Geertz who, in Skinner’s
view, “continue to move between different cultures, different languages, different
continents” without “embracing the Hegelian heresy that some nations are worldhistorical while others are not” and who remain “internationalist in outlook while
dedicating themselves at the same time to the uncovering of local knowledge.”cxviiiThe
“more strenuous and inclusive form of multiculturalism”cxix informing the work of
scholars like Hirschman and Geertz is just the stuff that Skinner hopes will inform the
work of scholars in his own discipline in the years to come. These remarks, coupled with
Pocock’s repeated calls for qualified historians to explore texts and thinkers that he lacks
the linguistic and historical wherewithal to adequately explore himself, are powerful
24
evidence that the Cambridge School approach to intellectual history is capable of
traveling beyond “the West.”
The second reason I have for finding Goto-Jones’ allegations of the Cambridge
School’s “defensive ethnocentricity” somewhat wide of the mark is that Goto-Jones
himself concedes that it is not the Cambridge School’s method that is ethnocentric, but its
application. According to Goto-Jones, the Cambridge School approach has been
“incidentally rather than necessarily ethnocentric” and, in his view, “still holds promise
as an appropriate method… to construct a worldly history of political thought.”cxx
Thus, while it must be admitted that the concerns of the Cambridge School’s
leading lights have been predominantly (though, as Pocock’s 1964 essay evidences, not
exclusively) Euro-American, I believe it is mistaken to attribute this to the purported
ethnocentrism of the Cambridge School’s method. The Euro-American focus of the
Cambridge School seems to me, rather, a contingent result of the particular intellectual
interests, specializations and competencies of the scholars who developed it. Now,
indisputably, the fact that Quentin Skinner and J.G.A Pocock are interested primarily in
Euro-American texts and authors, trained specialists in early-modern and modern
European history, and competent in only Romance languages is attributable, at least in
part, to a set of cultural and disciplinary background conditions and institutions that one
might aptly describe as ethnocentric.cxxi However, acknowledging this does not
necessarily entail endorsing an indictment of the Cambridge School’s method as
ethnocentric. Despite the fact that the Cambridge School’s method was developed by
scholars who were, perhaps, constrained in various ways by the ethnocentrism of their
25
discipline, one can imagine a reformed or, to borrow Leigh Jenco’s language,
“recentered” discipline of political theory producing scholars equipped with the
inclinations, knowledge, and skill sets necessary to undertake the study of the history of,
say, Japanese political thought in accord with something along the lines of the Cambridge
School’s method.
Having diffused several of the most prominent critiques of the Cambridge School
presently afoot in the CPT literature, I would now like to address what is, in my view, a
much less easily resolved tension between the Cambridge School approach to the history
of political thought and the project of CPT as some scholars have envisioned it. As I
explained in the first section of this article, one aim characteristic of Fred Dallmayr’s
influential approach to CPT is to move “beyond the spurious ‘universality’ traditionally
claimed by the Western canon and by some recent intellectual movements” and toward “a
more genuine universalism”cxxii that will enable us to discern “truly universal principles
or yardsticks of human conduct.”cxxiii As I have also already explained, many
practitioners of CPT, Dallmayr included, are keenly alert to the perils of universalism.
Specifically, Dallmayr calls attention to and criticizes the tendency of universalist
projects to efface or occlude difference through various (and often violent) strategies of
appropriation or assimilation and radical distancing or “othering.” However, rather than
compelling him to set aside the pursuit of “truly universal principles or yardsticks of
human conduct,” Dallmayr’s insight into universalism’s darker side leads him to attempt
to mitigate its harmful effects by subordinating the pursuit of universal morality to
another aim or good: the engendering of ethically transformative encounters or
26
“dialogues” with and across difference. Such dialogues, Dallmayr believes, will bring
about heightened tolerance, respect, and even friendship amongst their participants,
effectively curbing the risks associated with the universalist aspects of his approach.
Despite his attentiveness to universalism’s more troubling implications and his
attempt to counteract them, any adherent to the Cambridge School approach to
intellectual history would, I believe, look upon Dallmayr’s efforts to justify comparative
political theoretical scholarship by reference to its promise to yield “a more genuine
universalism” or “truly universal principles” with grave suspicion. To undertake
comparative scholarship, be it historical, inter-cultural, or, as is more often than not the
case, some combination of both, with even the most qualified of universalistic aspirations
in mind is, a Cambridge School adherent would insist, to risk working at cross-purposes
with oneself. Recall that, in Skinner’s view, the chief reason we have beyond “natural
curiosity”cxxiv for studying historical texts is that they help us to “stand back from our
own assumptions and systems of belief, and thereby to situate ourselves in relation to
other and very different forms of life” as merely “one tribe among others.”cxxv This is a
goal that, I have argued, the Cambridge School approach shares with those comparative
political theoretical projects which, like Dallmayr’s, count among their aims the
cultivation of “attentive[ness] to diverse traditions or life-forms,” the “valoriz[ation of]
difference and ‘otherness,’” “genuine civilizational encounter,” and “exploring others and
immersing ourselves in their distinct life-worlds.”cxxvi From a Skinnerian Cambridge
School perspective – and at times it would seem Dallmayr’s – the most edifying lessons
that can be learned from the comparative historical study of cultural “others” are to be
27
learned through the very experience of difference itself. However, what practitioners of
CPT like Dallmayr have perhaps failed to fully recognize is the extent to which their
pursuit of synthetic unity, convergence, or universality may jeopardize their simultaneous
pursuit of other vital goals and occlude what a Skinnerian would regard as most
beneficial about the comparative study of non-Western political thought, namely, that it
creates a space in which the “other” can instruct “us” by opening up worlds of questions
and answers “we” have not pondered.cxxvii
Megan C. Thomas has drawn attention to the potentially troubling implications of
Dallmayr’s aspiration to discern shared universal principles beneath the ostensibly
variegated tapestry of global religious, philosophical, and intellectual traditions by
drawing parallels between contemporary comparative political theory and Orientalist
scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not unlike many contemporary
practitioners of comparative political theory, Thomas argues, Victorian Orientalists such
as Max Müller and Friedrich Schlegel often emphasized and celebrated commonalities
between Europe and the Orient.cxxviiiResisting Edward Said’s famous description of
“Orientalism” as a strategy of imperial domination that operated primarily through
epistemological “othering,” Thomas draws attention to the fact that certain Orientalists
portrayed Europe as intimately “related to parts of the Asian world, rather than always in
contrast with or other to them” and that such epistemological appropriation proved as
potent an imperial strategy as that identified by Said.cxxix The implications of Thomas’s
observations for contemporary comparative political theory are clear: “Comparative
political theory cannot distance itself from Orientalism,” Thomas writes, “simply by
28
denouncing Eurocentrism, and recognizing value of non-Western traditions for political
theory more generally.”cxxx For Thomas “the epistemological imperialism and authority
of Orientalism was enabled by finding value in ‘the East,’ as much as from a presumption
of Western superiority.”cxxxi Thomas’ account of the history of Orientalism as an
academic and political practice raises the troublesome possibility that in endeavoring to
discover and celebrate points of agreement or overlap between “the East” and “the West”
contemporary comparative political theorists may be reenacting the infamously
imperialist gestures of the Victorian Orientalists.
My purpose in making these observations is, of course, not to discredit the project
of CPT in general or its more Dallmayrian varieties in particular. It is, in fact, just the
opposite: I hope to strengthen “dialogical” approaches to CPT by chastening their
dangerous desire for universalism. Even a circumspect and qualified quest for moral
universals such as the one Dallmayr proposes runs the risk of perpetrating reductive and
assimilative gestures that efface difference, reduce cross-cultural dialogue from the status
of an end worthy in itself to a mere means in the service of the attainment of a set of
universally agreeable moral precepts, and render the sort of genuine cross-cultural
encounter or dialogue that Dallmayr so compellingly describes unlikely, if not
impossible.cxxxii Put another way, the agon or contest between the pursuit of a universal
morality and the engendering of ethically transformative encounters with and across
difference that Dallmayr places at the heart of his approach to CPT cannot be perpetually
maintained. Difference cannot be recognized as itself or valued for itself at the same time
that it is conscripted into another project that, as Dallmayr himself recognizes, is
29
historically deleterious.cxxxiii If difference is to be given its due and the dialogical project
that, on Dallmayr’s own account, is CPT’s highest aim is to be effectively pursued, then
practitioners of CPT must chasten their universalistic ambitions and concentrate instead
on an admittedly less glamorous task: ascertaining the meaning (in a Skinnerian sense) of
the texts and traditions they are interpreting. As Dallmayr himself has wisely noted,
“genuine dialogue cannot operate on an abstractly postulated universal level or be
supervised from ‘on high’ (a ‘view from nowhere’), but can only function and take wings
through an initial attentiveness to the historical and geographical location of
participants.”cxxxiv My central aim in this article has been to suggest that the
methodological insights of the Cambridge School might prove useful to practitioners of
CPT as they strive to achieve this attentiveness to historical specificity in their own work.
For over forty years now, Skinner and other Cambridge School theorists have
insisted that “we have no a priori reason for expecting previous political thinkers to
reveal any interest in or awareness of our ‘basic’ issues.”cxxxv In a similar spirit, I would
insist that we have no a priori reason for expecting previous or present political thinkers
from other “cultures” or “civilizations,” to use Dallmayr’s language, to reveal any interest
in or awareness of what Dallmayr (or anyone) portrays as the basic issues confronting the
“global village.”cxxxvi Nor do we, it should be emphasized, have any a priori reason for
expecting previous or present political thinkers from other “cultures” or “civilizations” to
be uninterested in or unaware of “our” basic issues. While Skinner’s own work has
focused overwhelmingly on historical discontinuities,cxxxviiPocock’s work attests to the
fact that historical inquiry conducted in accord with the strictures of the Cambridge
30
School may very well uncover extensive continuities between the past and the
present.cxxxviiiI should not, therefore, be construed as suggesting that universalism’s great
desideratum is eo ipso impossible. Such a suggestion would be as ahistorical as the
opposite. Some sort of empirically derived universalism, perhaps along the lines of the
“unforced consensus”cxxxix Charles Taylor has described, is certainly possible and
discoverable by way of the method described and practiced by Skinner and the
Cambridge School. What I am suggesting is that the pursuit of universal moral principles
be set aside as a reason, motive, or justification for engaging in cross-cultural or historical
inquiry. If we fail to do so, we risk cutting ourselves off from the invigorating and
transformative encounters with and across difference that both Dallmayr and Skinner
agree are the highest goods cross-cultural and historical inquiry stand to bring about.
By way of conclusion, let me underscore the fact that, in suggesting that CPT
relinquish the universalist dimension of its project, I do not mean to cut the legs out from
under CPT. This subfield is gaining much deserved momentum and attention both within
political theory and beyond. But, just as Skinner does not believe that the admission that
there may be no perennial questions in philosophy deprives intellectual history of its
raison d’être, neither do I believe that the admission that there may be no globally
acceptable moral principles immobilizes the project of CPT. In fact, in the radical (in this
regard, at least) spirit of the Cambridge School, I would suggest that acknowledging the
possibility that there are no such principles is the only place from which genuine intercultural dialogue might begin.
31
Notes
i
Fred Dallmayr, Border Crossings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 2.
Dallmayr, Border Crossings, 2.
iii
Of course, Fred Dallmayr has not been alone in his quest to press political
theory beyond its traditional Euro-American boundaries and establish CPT as a subfield
within political theory. See, for instance, Brooke Ackerly (2005) “Is Liberalism the Only
Way Toward Democracy?: Confucianism and Democracy,” Political Theory 33: 547576; Roxanne Euben (1997) “Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist
Critique of Rationalism,” The Journal of Politics 59: 28-55; Roxanne Euben (1999)
Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Roxanne Euben (2002); Roxanne Euben
(2006) Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of
Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Michael Freeden and Andrew
Vincent eds. (2013) Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices. New York,
NY: Routledge; Farah Godrej (2009) “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The
Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other,” Polity 41: 135-165; Leigh Jenco (2007) “‘What
Does Heaven Ever Say?’ A Methods-centered Approach to Cross-cultural Engagement,”
American Political Science Review 101: 741-755; Leigh Jenco, (2010) Making the
Political. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Leigh Jenco (2011)
“Recentering Political Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality,” Cultural Critique 79:
27-59; Andrew March (2009) “What is Comparative Political Theory?”, The Review of
Politics 71: 531-565. See also The Review of Politics 70, (Winter 2008), a special issue
devoted entirely to CPT with articles by Jürgen Gebhardt, Anthony Black, Anthony
Parel, Richard Bernstein and Takashi Shogimen.
iv
John Dunn and J.G.A. Pocock are also frequently identified as pioneers and
leading practitioners of the Cambridge School approach. Nevertheless, in this essay, I
focus exclusively on Skinner for two reasons: First, while both Pocock and Dunn have
reflected considerably on questions concerning method, neither scholar has published as
extensively on these matters as Skinner, and, second, the methodological writings of
Pocock and Dunn, despite their originality and depth, have not served as flashpoints for
scholarly controversy to the degree that Skinner’s methodological writings have. Despite
the fact that Dunn, Pocock, and Skinner all share, in Pocock’s words, “an understanding
of ‘political thought’ as a multiplicity of language acts performed by language users in
historical contexts,” Pocock notes that it is Skinner who has borne the brunt of the
criticism this particular understanding has elicited from historians, philosophers, and
political theorists alike (Pocock, 2009, viii). One might also add that while many scholars
lump Cambridge School approaches into a monolithic whole, there are quite significant
differences among these approaches as well. For those interested in exploring these
differences, Pocock’s most significant methodological essays have now been published
together in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also his Politics, Language, and Time (Chicago:
ii
32
University of Chicago Press, 1989). Many of Dunn’s most significant methodological
reflections have been included in The History of Political Theory and Other Essays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
v
I survey the criticisms various CPT scholars have offered of the Cambridge
School in this article’s final section.
vi Fred Dallmayr, “Comparative Political Theory: What is it Good For?” in
Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia, eds. Takashi Shogimen and Cary J.
Nederman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 18-19.
vii
The widespread influence of Dallmayr and his “dialogical” approach in the field
of CPT is often noted. See, for instance, Leigh Jenco (2007) “‘What Does Heaven Ever
Say?’ A Methods-centered Approach to Cross-cultural Engagement,” American Political
Science Review 101: 741-755; Andrew March (2009) “What is Comparative Political
Theory?,” The Review of Politics 71: 531-565. Melissa S. Williams and Mark E. Warren
(2013) “A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory,” Political Theory 42(1):
26-57.
viii
Fred Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue: Toward A Comparative Political
Theory,” Perspectives on Politics 2, (June 2004): 249-257.
ix
Dallmayr, Border Crossings, 2.
x Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History
and Theory 8 (No. 1, 1969), 52.
xi
The brief introduction to the subfield of CPT I offer here is meant to be just
that. For a more comprehensive overview of this flourishing and diverse subfield, see
Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent eds. (2013) Comparative Political Thought:
Theorizing Practices. New York: Routledge, 2013.
xii
Roxanne Euben, “Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist
Critique of Rationalism,” The Journal of Politics 59, (February 1997): 28-55, 32.
xiii
Euben, “Comparative Political Theory,” 32.
xiv
Euben, “Comparative Political Theory,” 32.
xv
Euben, “Comparative Political Theory,” 32.
xvi
Euben articulates a similar conception of CPT in her path breaking book,
Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism
(1999) where she writes that there “is a tension between, on the one hand, political
theorists’ aspirations to engage questions about the nature and value of politics that, if not
universal, are at least pressing to a broad range of peoples and cultures and, on the other,
a political theory canon almost exclusively devoted to Western texts” (Euben, 1999, xi)
“My central argument,” Euben continues, “is that this tension can recall students of
politics to the promise contained in an older, yet never quite lost, understanding of theory
as inherently comparative, one defined by certain questions about living together, rather
than particular answers” (Euben, 1999, xi). In her more recent work, particularly
Journeys to the other Shore: Muslim and Western Travellers in Search of Knowledge
(2006), Euben does not explicitly break with this conception of CPT, but she does
broaden it. In this work, Euben stresses the capacity of comparative political theorizing,
33
to, in her phrasing, “enact dislocating mediations between the familiar and the
unfamiliar,” thereby “enabling imagination of and reflection on modes of life other than
[one’s] own” (Euben, 2006, 18). Here, CPT is not so much concerned with “enlarg[ing]
the domain of political theory to include a range of human, and not merely Western
thought, practice, and experience” as it is with drawing political theory beyond its
“domain” through transformative encounters with “the strange and estranging” akin to
those experienced by individuals during physical travel (Euben, 1999, 158; Euben, 2006,
12). This latter approach to CPT, which seeks to blur rather than bolster political theory’s
traditional boundaries, shares much with what I find admirable in Dallmayr’s approach.
xvii
Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,” 159.
xviii
Euben, “Comparative Political Theory,” 32.
xix
Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,” 160.
xx
Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,” 138.
xxi
Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,”164; 148
xxii
Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,” 160, 164.
xxiii
Godrej notes this important difference between her approach and that proposed
by March in Godrej (2009) “Response to ‘What Is Comparative Political Theory?’” The
Review of Politics 71: 567-582.
xxiv
Andrew March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?”, The Review of
Politics 71 (September 2009), 560-562.
xxv
March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?,” 561.
xxvi
March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?,” 561.
xxvii
Readers well versed in the literature of CPT will realize that I have omitted
Leigh Jenco’s approach to cross-cultural inquiry from my summary of the various
approaches currently on offer in the field of CPT. I have made this omission for two
reasons. First, Jenco herself has explicitly resisted the label of CPT to describe her work.
(See Leigh Jenco, Making the Political:Founding and Action in the Political Theory of
Zhang Shizhao. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Second, in my view,
Jenco’s project differs so fundamentally from those of the other theorists I have discussed
here that it can fairly be said to exceed the framework of CPT. For Jenco, the goal of
cross-cultural inquiry is expressly not to make political theory more global or nonWestern in focus or, in her words, to merely add “culturally diverse voices to established
parochial debates” (Jenco, 2007, 741-742). Rather, Jenco’s aim is “to ask new questions
through alternative frames of reference” (Jenco, 2007, 741-742). Moreover, in Jenco’s
view, the “fundamental question of cross-cultural theorization” is not “how to overcome
intersubjective barriers to cultural understanding,” but how to trade “dominant Western
scholarly practices” for “alternative modes of inquiry that produce and are informed by
particular concerns and texts” (Jenco, 2007, 741-742). In other words, Jenco is not
interested in how political theorists might best approach and study non-Western texts as
political theorists, but how political theory itself might be, in her words, “recentered,”
that is, how “alternative sites of knowledge” might “come to replace the academic
conventions and commitments that originally marked the identity of both political theory,
34
and, perhaps, ‘theory’ as such” (Jenco, 2011, 28-29). By arguing for a rapprochement
between CPT and the Cambridge School, I hope to urge both CPT and the Camrbridge
School in the direction indicated by Jenco’s work.
xxviii
This is evident, for example, in a chapter from Dallmayr’s Dialogue Among
Civilizations entitled “Freedom East and West.” Here, Dallmayr draws on classical
Indian and Buddhist conceptions of freedom to, first, counter-act the trope of “Oriental
despotism” long employed to denigrate non-Western cultures and justify imperialist and
colonialist projects in the West, and, second, underscore the limited nature of a freedom
conceived in “cognitive-propositional terms,” an insight, Dallmayr argues, that can also
be found in the Western tradition in the works of Heidegger and Gadamer (Dallmayr,
2002, 201; 210-211).
xxix
Dallmayr describes the delicate balancing of difference and similarity that he
believes CPT must effect in the following manner: “‘[C]onversation of human kind,’”
Dallmayr writes, “has to steer a difficult path between a hegemonically imposed
universalism, governed by one idiom or voice, and an array of self-enclosed, ethnocentric
particularisms where no voice would be willing or able to listen to others” (Dallmayr,
2002, 32). “Civilizational dialogue,” Dallmayr notes elsewhere, “has to take otherness…
seriously and hence to respect differences and distances that cannot simply be wished or
talked away,” but it must do this without eliciting from its participants “gesture[s] of selfabandonment [that would] cancel the pre-judgments stimulating dialogue” (Dallmayr,
2002, 4; 28).
xxx
Fred Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?”, 13-24.
xxxi
“The point of comparative political theory,” Dallmayr has written, “… is… to
move toward a more genuine universalism, and beyond the spurious ‘universality’
traditionally claimed by the Western canon and by some recent intellectual movements”
(Dallmayr, 2004, 253).
xxxii
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 13.
xxxiii
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 18.
xxxiv
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 18.
xxxv
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 18.
xxxvi
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 18.
xxxvii
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 18-19.
xxxviii
It is important to note that the variety of moral universalism Dallmayr
believes might be attainable via CPT, a variety that he, at one point, describes as “lateral
universalism,” is not “a facile consensualism,” “a bland assimilationism or a melting-pot
cosmopolitanism” that minimizes or entirely neglects cultural differences or “prevailing
global inequalities” (Dallmayr, 1996, xxii, 203; Dallmayr, 2002, 6). “Despite a
complacent sense of moral ‘superiority’ in the West,” Dallmayr reminds us, “universalist
ambitions are far from blameless, having often entailed violent or destructive
consequences – a fact amply documented by the Spanish conquest [of the Americas]”
(Dallmayr, 1996, 203). While Dallmayr is keenly aware of universalism’s perilous
history, he holds out hope that a “lateral universalism… where universal principles are no
35
longer found beyond concrete differences but in the heart of the local or particular itself,
that is, in the distinct topography of the world” will avoid these pitfalls (Dallmayr, 1996,
222).
xxxix
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 19.
xl
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,”19-20.
xli
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 20.
xlii
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 20.
xliii
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 20.
xliv
Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, (Albany, NY: University of New York
Press, 1996), xi.
xlv
Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, xviii.
xlvi
Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations (New York, NY: PalgraveMacMillan, 2002), 28.
xlvii
Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, 42.
xlviii
Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, xviii.
xlix
Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism, xviii; 134
l
. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 5. Leo Strauss, “What Is Political
Philosophy?” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hilail Gildin.
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 3-57.
li
Leo Strauss, for instance, defines political philosophy as “the attempt to truly
know both the nature of political things and the right or the good political order” and
insists that political philosophy’s “meaning and meaningful character is evident today as
it always has been since the time when political philosophy came to light in Athens”
(Strauss, 1988, 6; 3).
lii
Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press,1936), 3.
liii
Leo Strauss , Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1988), 6.
liv
I am alluding to the argument about the birth and subsequent decline of the
doctrine of natural law laid out by Leo Strauss in Strauss (1953) Natural Right and
History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
lv
I refer here to the interpretation of Machiavelli’s writings proffered by Leo
Strauss in Strauss (1978) Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
lvi
Skinner, Meaning and Understanding, 7.
lvii
Skinner, Meaning and Understanding, 50.
lviii
Skinner, Meaning and Understanding, 22; 14.
lix
C.B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980).
lx
While the assumptions underlying Namierite historiography are obviously very
different from those held by Marxists, Skinner and other members of the Cambridge School have
been equally critical of the Namierite dismissal of the historical relevance of ideas.
36
This could not have been Burke’s intention because these terms and concepts
were simply not available, or, at the very least, did not bear the resonances and meanings
that they bear today, in the late-eighteenth-century European context in which Burke
lived and wrote. On this point, see, for instance, Donald Winch (1996) Riches and
Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain (1750-1834).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
lxii
John Dunn provides a pithy statement of the problematic aspects of the
“epiphenomenalism” orthodoxy from the perspective of the Cambridge School.
Adherents to this orthodoxy, Dunn writes, “[pay] only the most perfunctory (or insincere)
attention to the concerns of the author, and [stress] instead the aspects of the historical
society in which the text was composed, of which its author might well have been
imperfectly aware but which, nevertheless, prompted him or her to think and express
themselves as they did” (Dunn, 1996, 19).
lxiii
Skinner, Visions, 106.
lxiv
Skinner, Visions, 99.
lxv
Skinner, Visions, 100; 113.
lxvi
Skinner, Visions, 114-116.
lxvii
Skinner delineates three distinctive types of “meaning” that an interpreter
might pursue via various methods and stipulates that his method is intended to get at only
one of these types, “Meaning3” (Skinner, 1972, 93). “Meaning3,” Skinner explains, is the
meaning one is after when one asks, “What does the writer mean by what he says in this
work?” or, phrased in the idiom of Austin’s analysis, “What was the agent doing in
issuing that particular utterance?” or “What were the agent’s primary intentions in issuing
that particular utterance?” (Skinner, 1972, 93). Meaning3 is not, in Skinner’s view, the
only meaning a text can rightly be said to have. “Any text will normally include an
intended meaning,” Skinner writes, “and the recovery of that meaning certainly
constitutes a precondition of understanding what its author may have meant” (Skinner,
2002, 113). ”But,” Skinner continues, “any text of any complexity will always contain far
more in the way of meaning than even the most vigilant and imaginative author could
possibly have intended to put into it” (Skinner, 2002, 113).
lxviii
Skinner, Visions, 105; 100; 98; 102.
lxix
In “Meaning and Understanding,” Skinner makes a similar injunction. “[W]e
must study all the various situations,” Skinner writes, “which may change in complex
ways, in which the given form of words can logically be used – all the functions they can
serve, all the various things that can be done with them” (Skinner, 1969, 37). J.G.A.
Pocock similarly insists that the historian of ideas practice a sort of archaeology,
“uncovering the presence of various language contexts in which discourse has from time
to time been conducted” (Pocock, 1987, 23).
lxx
Skinner admits that there are limits to what an interpreter of historical texts can
hope to accomplish. “Some utterances,” Skinner writes as a concession to a criticism of
his method made by Jacques Derrida, “are completely lacking in the sorts of context from
which we can hope to infer the intentions with which they were uttered. We may well be
lxi
37
obliged to concede in such cases that we can never hope to arrive at even a plausible
hypothesis about how the utterance in question should be understood” (Skinner, 2002,
121). Moreover, Skinner continues, due to the nature of “the hermeneutic enterprise,” its
“outcome… can never be anything resembling the attainment of a final, self-evident or
indubitable set of truths about any text or other utterance whatsoever” (Skinner, 2002,
121). “To look for complete intelligibility,” Skinner suggests elsewhere, “is to adopt an
unduly optimistic view of what we can hope to bring back from the foreign lands of the
past” (Skinner, 2002, 56).
lxxi
It must be emphasized that Skinner does not identify the meanings of texts with
the intentions of their authors. “Where a text says something other than what its author
intended to say,” Skinner writes, “we are bound to concede that this is nevertheless what
the text says, and thus that it bears a meaning other than the one intended by its author”
(Skinner, 2002, 110). What Skinner identifies with authorial intentions are not the
meanings of texts per se but “only what their authors meant by them” (Skinner, 2002,
113-114). Of course, this question of what an author meant by a particular work, phrase,
or even word is one that detains a great many readers and on which a great many
interpretive controversies hinge. As Richard Ashcraft has noted, scholarly disputes about
the infamous “turfs passage” in John Locke’s Second Treatise are a case in point of this
(Ashcraft, 1992, 716-723).
lxxii
J.G.A. Pocock phrases the bedrock methodological principle underlying the
Cambridge School approach in this way: “What we have all been doing is insisting that a
certain branch of the study of politics be perceived as a history of activity and be
conducted within the discipline of history” (Pocock, 2004, 538).
lxxiii
Skinner, Visions, 125.
lxxiv
Skinner, Visions, 3.
lxxv
Skinner, Visions, 3; emphasis added.
lxxvi
See, for instance, John Gunnell (1982) “Interpretation and the History of
Political Theory: Apology and Epistemology,” The American Political Science Review,
76: 317-327; Charles Tarlton (1973) “Historicity, Meaning, and Revisionism in the Study
of Political Thought,” History and Theory, 12: 307-328.
lxxvii
See, for instance, John Gunnell’s 1982 article “Interpretation and the History
of Political Theory: Apology and Epistemology” or Charles Tarlton’s 1973 article
“Historicity, Meaning, and Revisionism in the Study of Political Thought.”
lxxviii
Skinner, Meaning and Understanding, 52.
lxxix
Skinner, Visions, 175-176.
lxxx
Skinner, Visions, 125.
lxxxi
Skinner, Visions, 125.
lxxxii
In a lecture delivered in 1997, Skinner argues that his proposed interpretive
method entails a commitment to a “most wholehearted multiculturalism, to the fullest
attempt to deconstruct hegemonal ideologies and make it possible for those with different
cognitive as well as social allegiances to be heard with equal respect” (quoted in Scott
and Kates, 2001, 22).
38
lxxxiii
Skinner, Meaning and Understanding, 52-53. Quentin Skinner, Liberty
Before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112.
lxxxiv
Skinner, Liberty, 107; 112.
lxxxv
Skinner, Liberty, 112.
lxxxvi
Skinner, Liberty, 111; 116.
lxxxvii
Skinner, Meaning and Understanding, 52.
lxxxviii
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1
(Cambridge, UK: Camrbridge University Press, 1978), x.
lxxxix
Skinner, Foundations, x-xi.
xc
Skinner, Foundations, xi.
xci
In an early (1973) critique of Skinner’s method, Bhikhu Parekh and R.N. Berki
accuse Skinner of conflating what they characterize as three distinct levels of abstraction,
generality, and seriousness “at which thinkers concerned with political problems can be
said to have been operating” (Parekh and Berki, 1973, 172). In effect, Parekh and Berki
argue, Skinner’s method “reduces everything to [the lowest] level” of “mere political
pamphleteering,” a level that, Parekh and Berki imply, is best ignored by those
possessing “a genuine feeling for political thought” and an interest in what they
characterize as the perennial questions of political life (Parekh and Berki, 1973, 173; 174175; 179).
xcii
Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1985), 50.
xciii
Skinner, Meaning and Understanding, 52.
xciv
David Runciman, “History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline,”
British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (April 2001): 84-104.
xcv
Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue,” 254.
xcvi
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 20.
xcvii
Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations, 27. It should be noted that
Dallmayr’s notion of dialogue owes much to Gadamer’s, especially as it was developed
and refined after the publication of Truth and Method. For more on the relationship
between Dallmayr’s and Gadamer’s understandings of dialogue, see Dallmayr’s Beyond
Orientalism, especially the second chapter entitled “Gadamer, Derrida, and the
Hermeneutics of Difference.”
xcviii
It should be noted that Dallmayr’s notion of dialogue owes much to
Gadamer’s, especially as it was developed and refined after the publication of Truth and
Method. For more on the relationship between Dallmayr’s and Gadamer’s
understandings of dialogue, see Dallmayr’s Beyond Orientalism, especially the second
chapter entitled “Gadamer, Derrida, and the Hermeneutics of Difference.”
xcix
Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations, 17; 4.
c
Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,” 162.
ci
Godrej, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought,” 162.
cii
For instance, Andrew March has written of the Cambridge School that “it is
hard to imagine a less engaged approach to the history of political thought, one which
39
risks reducing political theory to [‘a banal and trivial] wisdom literature,’ as [Judith]
Shklar warned” (March, 2009, 549). I would be remiss to fail to point out here that the
Judith Shklar quote March employs here to buttress his critique of the Cambridge School
comes from Shklar’s overwhelmingly positive review of one of the most well-known
pieces of scholarship the Cambridge School has ever produced, Quentin Skinner’s
Foundations of Modern Political Thought. In this review, Shklar praises Skinner’s
method for doing precisely what March accuses it of not doing, namely, putting the
politics back into political theory by striving to restore canonical works of political theory
to their original political contexts. “One can easily sympathize with this aim,” Shklar
writes, adding the observation that March would later tear from its original context and
contort into a critique of the Cambridge School: “Political theories wholly removed from
the controversies of their world become a banal and trivial ‘wisdom’ literature” (Shklar,
549).
ciii
See, for instance, Margaret Leslie (1970) “In Defense of Anachronism,”
Political Studies 18: 433-447 and Bikhu Parekh and R.N. Berki (1973) “The History of
Political Ideas: A Critique of Q. Skinner’s Methodology,” Journal of the History of Ideas
34: 163-184.
civ
Skinner, Liberty, 106-108.
cv
Richard Tuck, “History” in A Companion to Contemporary Political
Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge (Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 80.
cvi
Skinner, Liberty, 116-117.
cvii
Skinner, Liberty, 117.
cviii
I have focused here on an example taken from Skinner’s work because he is
the representative Cambridge School theorist I have chosen to focus on in this article.
However, since Godrej does not aim her critique at Skinner alone but at the Cambridge
School more generally, it is worth noting that the accusation that a Cambridge School
theorist such as J.G.A. Pocock is somehow unconcerned with the relationship between
past and present is even less convincing than in the case of Skinner. Whereas Skinner,
much like Michel Foucault, has tended to focus on conceptual ruptures and breaks
between political discourses, Pocock has focused on the long continuity and influence of
certain ideas (as well as the institutions they help create) in historical time. Indeed, it
would be virtually impossible to think about contemporary “republican” institutions, let
alone about how to act with political efficacy in the present either to support or overturn
them, without grappling with their history. For that understanding, we are indebted more
to Pocock than any other single scholar.
cix
Chris Goto-Jones, “The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History
of Political Philosphy in Wartime Japan,” Positions 17 (Spring 2009): 14.
cx
Goto-Jones, “The Kyoto School,” 14.
cxi
Goto-Jones, “The Kyoto School,” 14.
cxii
Pocock’s 1964 essay “Ritual, Language and Power: An Essay on the Apparent
Meanings of Ancient Chinese Philosophy,” proposes what Pocock later describes as “an
40
enterprise that I still wish scholars better equipped than I would take up: the writing of
histories of East Asian political thought comparable with those which we have for the
classical and postclassical West” (Pocock, 1989, x). “To have history written with an
Eastern and a Western face,” Pocock remarked in a reflection on this 1964 essay written
in 1989, “will be very important and necessary in times to come” (Pocock, 1989, x).
cxiii
“This essay,” in Pocock’s words, “records the attempts of a historian and
political theorist who is no Oriental scholar, and knows no Chinese, to discover a pattern
of meanings in the ideas about government and society expressed in the heroic age of
Chinese thought… and to present them in such a way as to aid his understanding both of
political society and of the character and problems of thought about it” (Pocock, 1989,
42). Pocock is clear that, in the essay, he is “framing hypotheses about a realm of
meaning which may have been present and operative” rather than describing a realm of
meaning that, as a matter of historical fact, was. Such hypotheses, Pocock believes, can
form an invaluable part of historical study because they provide historians, if they need
them, places to begin their empirical investigations. For a detailed discussion of this
relationship, see Pocock (1989) Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political
Thought and History. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
cxiv
Joan Scott and Debra Kates, eds. Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of
Interpretive Social Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 23.
cxv
Scott and Kates, Schools of Thought, 23-24.
cxvi
Scott and Kates, Schools of Thought, 23.
cxvii
Scott and Kates, Schools of Thought, 24.
cxviii
Scott and Kates, Schools of Thought, 24.
cxix
Scott and Kates, Schools of Thought, 24.
cxx
Goto-Jones, “The Kyoto School,” 38.
cxxi
Leigh Jenco makes this point, though not specifically in relation to the
Cambridge School. In sounding her call for a “recentering” of political theory, Jenco
points to the obvious but often neglected fact that “knowledge production is tied more
closely to contingent structures of power, inclination, and commitment than to inevitably
overpowering cultural background conditions” (Jenco, 2011, 44). In light of this fact,
Jenco challenges political theory as a discipline to reform and reorganize itself in order to
“facilitate access, by way of linguistic and other forms of training, to diverse fields of
interconnected knowledge and schools of thought abiding in particular locales” (Jenco,
2011, 44-45). Absent such reforms, Jenco rightly notes, virtually all political theorists,
well-intentioned historians of political thought and practitioners of CPT alike, will
continue to be shunted into Eurocentric topics and traditions of inquiry.
cxxii
Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue,” 253.
cxxiii
Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 18.
cxxiv
Skinner, Liberty, 107.
cxxv
Skinner, Visions, 125.
cxxvi
Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue,” 253-254; Dallmayr, Dialogue Among
Civilizations, 17; Dallmayr, “What is it Good For?,” 20.
41
William Connolly has registered similar concerns regarding Dallmayr’s
pursuit of universality or “convergence” through dialogue (Connolly, 2001, 351). In
Connolly’s view, Dallmayr’s tendency to link difference to fragmentation belies his
“residual commitment to a concentric image of political culture” in which “progressively
enlarged circles of family, neighborhood, community, nation, civilization, and universal
norms resonate with each other” and “minorities in each of these domains are… defined
as satellites ranged around the national center, either to be tolerated or persecuted”
(Connolly, 2001, 350-351). For Connolly, such an ideal ought not be the primary or
exclusive desideratum of dialogue across difference. “A political culture of
multidimensional diversity,” Connolly explains, “will also be one in which the quest for
convergence often gives ground to the pursuit of multiple connections of respect across
persisting differences, issuing in what might be called a political culture of positive
connections through relations of agonistic respect” (Connolly, 2001, 351). Dallmayr’s
conflation of difference with fragmentation prevents him from envisioning such an
alternative dialogical outcome, in Connolly’s view.
cxxviii
Megan C. Thomas, “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory,” The
Review of Politics 72 (Fall 2010): 656.
cxxix
“The significant revelation of Orientalism,” Thomas writes, “was… that
modern Europe… derived most fundamentally from India, rather than Greece or Rome”
(Thomas, 2010, 668). “Just as the Greek and Roman patrimony was thought to ‘belong’
to nineteenth-century (northern) Europe (rather than contemporary Greeks and Romans),”
Thomas continues, “so ancient India, too, ‘belonged’ to contemporary European men of
letters” (Thomas, 2010, 668). “In this respect,” Thomas shrewdly notes, “’Orientalism’
[as a strategy of colonial domination] was largely about identifying value in its subject,
rather than denigrating or dismissing it,” a fact that “while suggested by Said, is stifled by
his own emphasis on how Orientalist views denigrated the East” (Thomas, 2010, 668669).
cxxx
Thomas, “Orientalism,” 674.
cxxxi
Thomas, “Orientalism,” 674.
cxxxii
In Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices (2013), Michael
Freeden and Andrew Vincent sound a similar note of caution regarding the universalist
aspirations of many variants of CPT. “Attempts to draw different cultures together and to
forge a common normative discourse and a universal register are not merely utopian
exercises in impossibility,” Freeden and Vincent write, “but underplay the desirable
diversity of the human mind, its languages and practices.”
cxxxiii
See, for instance, the first chapter of Dallmayr’s Beyond Orientalism, in
which Dallmayr details “the ‘conquest’ of the Americas by European powers,” paying
special attention to the role played by a specifically Christian variant of moral
universalism in the “domination, exploitation, and extermination” of the native peoples of
south, central, and north America.
cxxvii
42
cxxxiv
Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations, 2.
. Condren, Status and Appraisal, 49.
cxxxvi
. Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue,” 249.
cxxxvii
. Skinner, Liberty, 111.
cxxxviii
. J.G.A. Pocock, “Languages and their Implications: The Transformation of
the Study of Political Thought” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political
Thought and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 3-41.
cxxxix
. Charles Taylor, “A World Consensus on Human Rights?,” Dissent 43
(Summer 1996), 15-21.
cxxxv
43