Abstract
The emergence of the field of comparative political theory suggests that the encounter with non-Western texts be considered a legitimate and necessary part of political theory, so that the field is reconstituted in a truly cosmopolitan manner. However, this also presents unique challenges to political theorists. Chief among these is the question of what hermeneutic approach would allow us to understand well the ideas contained in these texts. This essay will argue for a particular approach to the interpretation of non-Western texts and ideas, providing an account of a methodologically self-conscious approach to comparative political theory. A serious comparative political theorist will inevitably have to alternate between an internal immersion in the lived experience of the text, and an external stance of commentary and exegesis of the text. Struggling with the conflicting imperatives of these moments is precisely the task of a more nuanced approach to comparative political theory. Ultimately, however, I also argue that this particular approach has implications for the development of a genuine cosmopolitanism in the field of political theory. A cosmopolitan political theory is precisely one in which such struggles and complex encounters with the otherness of texts are increasingly made available to provoke, dislocate, and challenge our own understandings of political life. The method I offer is thus deeply implicated in the evolution of our self-understanding as political theorists.
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Notes
See Dallmayr, Border Crossings; Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch, eds., Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Euben, Enemy in the Mirror and Journeys Toward the Other Shore; Susanne Rudolph, “The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World,” APSA Presidential Address, Perspectives on Politics 3 (March 2005): 5–14; Daniel Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
One remarkable exception is Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?”
I owe my use of the term hermeneutic “moments” to Dvora Yanow, whose work emphasizes the notion of a “triple hermeneutic.” See Dvora Yanow, “Dear Author, Dear Reader: The Third Hermeneutic in Writing and Reviewing Ethnography,” in Political Ethnography: What Immersion Brings to the Study of Power, ed. Edward Shatz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2009); as well as Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Making Sense of Making Sense: Configurational Analysis and the Double Hermeneutic,” in Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, ed. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, 2006), 264–80. Although I rely on Yanow's conceptual scheme, my “three moments” differ considerably, and are geared toward the encounter with non-Western texts.
Farah Godrej, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Canon of Political Theory: A Call for Methodological Self-Consciousness,” in Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West: Toward a Comparative Political Theory (book manuscript in progress).
Such a view is also put forth by those such as Sheldon Wolin and G. H. Sabine, who argue that these works constitute a natural unit in that they are largely the product of a recognizable activity that can be traced historically and that the history of the discipline can thus be viewed in a holistic manner. Because of the continuity of preoccupations—what Sheldon Wolin terms the “reappearance of certain problem-topics”—certain activities and arrangements are designated as political, and the characteristic ways in which we think about them have over a period of time coalesced into a tradition of discourse, the terms of which each subsequent member of the tradition enters into. See Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), and G. H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York: Henry Holt, 1937).
This is a view that is most famously elaborated by John Gunnell, who argues that although certain works are nearly always considered as essential elements of the tradition, the criteria of inclusion and the distribution of emphasis tend to depend on a prior conception of the meaning and structure of the tradition as a whole. When it comes to the interpretation of particular works, they are inevitably approached and understood in terms of their assigned role in the reconstructed “tradition.” The idea of the tradition, he claims, has been consciously employed by certain historians as a persuasive device to lend authority to certain kinds of critiques of modern politics. See John Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1979). See also Richard Ashcraft, “Rethinking the Nature of Political Theory: A Single-Handed Defense of Dialogue,” Journal of Politics 4 (May 1982): 577–85.
This view can be traced back to two scholars: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Schleiermacher took the first steps toward establishing a “general” hermeneutic methodology, a programmatic understanding of hermeneutics, based on more or less formalized rules. See Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” in The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeu, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 85. As Schleiermacher sought to make hermeneutics systematically coherent, the discipline for the first time defines itself as “the study of understanding itself,” emerging from its historical roots in biblical exegesis and classical philology to be understood as the science or art of all understanding. See also Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Shleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 40. It should be noted that there are important differences between Schleiermacher and Dilthey; see Palmer, Hermeneutics, 99. Often accompanying this view was the notion of objectivity as the one “correct” verbal meaning of a passage or a text, which remains changeless, reproducible and determinate; see Palmer, Hermeneutics, 61. For E.D. Hirsch, unless one recognizes the “glass slipper” of the original verbal meaning intended by the author, there is no way of separating Cinderella from the other girls. E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 46. See also Emilio Betti, Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (HAMG) (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1962), 35. This view holds that hermeneutics is simply about the text as an object of inquiry, held in strict separation from the subject, whose own presumptions only serve to obfuscate rather than add depth to the meaning of this object.
Of course, we also need to bring into question the adequacy of Western approaches generally to the cross-cultural hermeneutic encounter. In the conclusion, I will investigate why other Western approaches such as Straussianism or the Cambridge school are also inadequate for the purposes of this sort of encounter. Most importantly, I will argue that they are inappropriate because of the implications about the task and purpose of political theorizing that emerge from their interpretive claims, implications that are ultimately antithetical to the sort of cosmopolitan political thought I will argue for.
Both Martin Heidegger (who was deeply influenced by Dilthey) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (a student of Heidegger) sought to emphasize the role that the subjectivity of the interpreter plays in the process of interpretation. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 78–95, 191–92; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 270, 276, 295.
Prejudice, according to Gadamer, is a “judgment that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 270. By this he means that rather than understanding ourselves through conscious self-reflection, we understand ourselves through the lenses of the “family, society and state in which we live.” See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276. See also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 295: “A person seeking to understand something has a bond to the subject matter…and has, or acquires, a connection with the tradition from which the text speaks.”
See, for instance, Hans Herbert Kögler, The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics After Gadamer and Foucault, trans. Paul Hendrickson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 127, 144: The other is “tacitly understood, strengthened and judged, but only on the basis of one's own implicit background assumptions, such that the other appears here only as the double of oneself.” What gets lost, Kogler reminds us, “is the equally important task of exposing the difference between the other and oneself.”
See Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, trans., The Bhagavadgita (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 1993); Barbara Stoller Miller, trans., The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna's Counsel in Time of War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 2–3; and R.C. Zaehner, ed., The Bhagavad-Gita (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 136–37.
It is, as stated in the Kathopanisad: “exceedingly deep, difficult to see, beyond logic…it is difficult to be known by [those] who have different views, who follow different faiths, who embrace different interests, who practice differently, and who act differently.” Kathopanisad 1.21, as cited in Hajime Nakamura, “The Meaning of the Terms ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Religion’ in Various Traditions,” in Larson and Deutsch, ed., Interpreting Across Boundaries, 147.
M.K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols. (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1958–1994), 16: 490–91. See also Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Srimad Bhagavadgita Rahasya or Karma-Yoga-Sastra (Poona: Tilak Bros., 1935); Parel, Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 26–27, 182–83.
M.K. Gandhi, “Anasaktiyoga,” in Anasaktiyoga or the Gospel of Selfless Action: the Gita According to Gandhi, ed. Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1956), 132.
This view may not be Gandhian in the strictest sense: Gandhi himself did not self-consciously address the question of hermeneutics, nor did he address the methodological pitfalls of comparative political theory. Nonetheless, I suggest that we may draw on his hermeneutic views in order to grapple with this matter.
In fact, we will see later how an implementation of Gandhi's own methodological insights may result in substantive understandings of the Bhagavad Gita that contradict his own. I also owe this point to Leigh Jenco, who reminds us that non-Western texts may be sources of methodological as well as substantive insights into political thought, providing not only insights into the nature of the political world, but also ways of reading such insights. See Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?” 742.
Gandhi, Collected Works, 28: 316, as cited in Parel, Gandhi's Philosophy, 106. See also Gandhi, “Anasaktiyoga,” 126–27: “It has been my endeavour, as also that of some companions, to reduce to practice the teaching of the Gita as I have understood it…. The accompanying rendering contains the meaning of the Gita message which this little band is trying to enforce in its daily conduct…this desire does not mean any disrespect to the other renderings. They have their own place. But I am not aware of the claim made by the translators enforcing the meaning of the Gita in their own lives.” See also M.K. Gandhi, “The Meaning of the Gita,” in Gita the Mother, ed. Jag Parvesh Chander (Lahore: Indian Printing Works, 1947), 133: “A man who would…interpret the scriptures must have the spiritual discipline. He must practice the…eternal guides of conduct.”
Gandhi, Collected Works, 28: 316, 21: 246, and 63: 153, all cited in Parel, Gandhi's Philosophy, 106.
Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), 13, 17.
The terms for “experience” in Indian philosophy are anubhava (experience), darsana (vision), and sakshatkar (realization). The commentarial literature on interpretative strategies within the ancient Vedic tradition is extensive and immensely varied, characterized by complexity and dissent. See, for instance, K. Satchidananda Murty, Vedic Hermeneutics (New Delhi: Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, 1993); and P. C. Muraleemadhavan, ed., Indian Theories of Hermeneutics (New Delhi: New Bharatiya Book Corporation, 2002). Some strands of interpretation such as the Mimamsa school recall the classical Western view of the text as autonomous “object” of study with a single, irreducible and changeless meaning, emphasizing the importance of purely linguistic and scholarly textual mastery. See Nellickal Muraleedharan, “General Tenets of Hermeneutics,” in Muraleemadhavan, ed., Indian Theories of Hermeneutics, 198–202. Others, such as Durgacharya, acknowledge the possible multiplicity of textual meanings driven by the individual subjectivities of different readers. Murty, Vedic Hermeneutics, 30. An important strand of these hermeneutics debates values a praxis-oriented hermeneutic in which the shastras or ancient texts were expected to be supplemented by and read in the light of righteous conduct. For instance, Parekh, quoting the Mahabharata says: “Dharmajnahpandito jneyo: not a learned but a virtuous man is the true pandit; and chaturvedopidurvrittah sa shudratatirichyate: if he is not of good conduct, a man learned in the four Vedas is worse than a shudra,” Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 16. The Taittiriya Upanishad claims that teachers should exhort students to study texts by speaking truth and practicing virtue: “Speak the truth. Practise virtue. Neglect not study of the Veda.” Taittirya Upanishad, I, 11.1, cited in Murty, Vedic Hermeneutics, 26. The Nirukta and the Taittiriya Aranyaka claim that sakshatkara or realization was the result of the performance of righteous acts (tapas) and the subsequent development of sage-like qualities, which bestowed interpretive authority. Those who had the sakshatkara (realization) of dharma became rsis…to these performing tapas the self-manifesting Veda vouchsafed itself, and that made these rsis…that is known as the rsitva (sageness) of rsis (sages). Murty, Vedic Hermeneutics, 5, 28.
Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 218. See also Parel, Gandhi's Philosophy, 177–78.
“Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it. It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentaries of the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide and be an inspiration for ages to come.” Gandhi, Collected Works, 63: 153. Meanwhile, as the orthodox textual interpreters of the Hindu scriptural canon made clear their disdain for Gandhi's lack of scholarly, linguistic and exegetical mastery of the texts, Gandhi never sought to deny that “His Sanskrit was poor, he had not mastered the shastras, and he had no interest in undertaking a close study of them.” Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 22; see also 218–19. Finally, see also Mahadev Desai, “My Submission,” in The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1946), 3–4: “Not only was his [Gandhi's] scope limited [in reading the Gita], but he disowns all claim to scholarship, and thinks that some of the subjects over which keen controversy has raged have no intimate bearing on the message of the Gita.”
Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 24; see also 218: “I do most emphatically repudiate the claim (if they advance any) of the present shankaracharya and shastris to give a correct interpretation of the Hindu scriptures.” See also Parel, Gandhi's Philosophy, 181.
Thus the existential hermeneutic also has the advantage of resonating with the methodological insights of many non-Western thinkers. See Jenco: “For both Kang and Wang as well as most Confucian classicists, the extra-textual practices and intense exegetical exercises that characterized their participation in this tradition were necessitated by the very nature of the classical Chinese language in which the texts were written… in performing a commentarial exercise, the exegete is in fact forging an identity with the received text that…comes to constitute the internalized standard of his moral system.” Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?” 751–52. However, I want to distinguish the sort of argument that Gandhi and the Chinese classicists make from Roxanne Euben's arguments about the authority of travel as a hermeneutic method in Journeys to the Other Shore. Here, Euben suggests that the project of comparative political theory should see travelling as a means to knowledge of otherness. Euben uncovers the emphasis on talab al-ilm (travel in pursuit of knowledge) in Islam, as seen in the travel writings of thinkers such as al-Tahtawi, Ibn Battuta, and Salme, comparing them to similar impulses in Western thinkers such as Herodotus, Tocqueville, and Montesquieu. The hermeneutics of travel relies on the authority of autopsy (seeing for onself), iyan (direct observation), and shahida (to see with one's own eyes, witness, certify, and confirm). But the sort of existential hermeneutic I outline here parts company with Euben's interlocutors, for it moves beyond simply the imperative of wonder at other-discovery. Travel suggests an impermanence, and a wandering-about or -among otherness, a survey of novelty and wonder without necessarily the deeper understandings that come with long-term familiarity. An existential hermeneutic suggests we deepen the trope of travel by turning to a method which offer us the metaphor of dwelling-in, residing-in, and existence with otherness, which moves beyond simple witnessing and observation of spectacles and novelty from the outside, to the experience of the these ways of life from the internal perspective of the adherent.
See Jeffery Timm, “Introduction,” in his Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 3.
That is, ideas typically represent certain experiences the author (and his intended audience) have had, and they can only be understood well with some appreciation of the experience(s) in question. See, for instance, Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4, in Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974) and “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol., 12, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have referred to a “kind of experienced connectedness that would enable [us] to feel and respond to, as well as intellectually apprehend, the values with which [we are] confronted.” Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, “Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions,” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 316.
See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly I (October 1964).
Gandhi, “On Ahimsa: Reply to Lala Lajpat Rai,” Modern Review, October 1916.
Gandhi, “On Ahimsa.”
For Gandhi's own insistence on the relationship between ahimsa and dharma, see “Ahimsa or Love,” in Gita the Mother, 129–30.
See Farah Godrej, “Nonviolence and Gandhi's Truth: A Method for Moral and Political Arbitration,” Review of Politics 68 (2006): 291–94.
Anil Mundra, “Mahatma Gandhi's Legacy of Religious Tolerance in India,” Interfaith Voices radio broadcast, 30 August, 2007, www.interfaithradio.org.
Marjorie Sykes, trans., Moved By Love: the Memoirs of Vinoba Bhave (Wardha, India: Paramdhan Prakashan, 1994).
Gandhi, Gita the Mother, 145. See also 135–36, 144–47, 150–52. See also Gandhi, “Anasaktiyoga,” 133.
Barbara Stoler Miller, trans., The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna's Counsel in time of War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 13.
Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?”744, 745.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Edward Said, Orientalis (New York, Vintage Books, 1979).
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak;” “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993).
As the critical historian Joan W. Scott observes, the epistemological status of experience is complex, because, rather than being an autonomous sphere which provides explanation for other forces and variables, experience is itself often subject to production and distortion by historical forces, and requires explanation as the object of such forces. See Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), and “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 22–40. It should be noted that the existential hermeneutic is complicated in its reliance on two kinds of experience, each of which may be problematic in its own way: the experience of the “native exegete,” and the experience of the researcher, which is itself implicated in attempts to reproduce or represent the experience of the “native.”
James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). The ideology “claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience” has crumbled. Clifford “draws attention to the historical predicament of ethnography, the fact that it is always caught up in the invention, not representation, of cultures,” 599. This awareness, Clifford reminds us, is all the more keen when combined with the acknowledgement that such invention is inevitably power-laden and necessarily partial. That is, the investigating subject is significantly involved in the object of critical scrutiny, and the practice of good readings of otherness depends upon the self-reflexive awareness of one's own positionality as researcher, and an acknowledgement of the relationship of ethnography to power. See Samer Shehata, “Ethnography, Identity and the Production of Knowledge,” in Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn., ed. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, NY and London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 2006); Peregrine Shwartz-Shea, “Judging Quality: Evaluate Criteria and Epistemic Communities,” in Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, ed., Interpretation and Method, 103; Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Piya Chatterjee, “Taking Blood: Gender, Race and Imagining Public Anthropology in India,” India Review 5 (July/October 2006): 551–71.
Representations which pay attention to contestation, dissent, and plurality are more complex, and subtle. Thus, postcolonial thought reminds us that this analysis should embody “a persistent recognition of heterogeneity” in respect of the cultures of postcolonialism. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 211. See also Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 200. For views on how such heterogeneity may be captured in empirical methods, see Schwartz-Shea, “Judging Quality,” 103: “‘Triangulation’ implies a multidimensionality to the research process…methodological discussions of triangulation emphasize this richness by noting not only the extent to which data from multiple sources…present possibilities for corroboration, but also that they are likely to bring to light inconsistent and even conflicting findings…[compelling] researchers…to grapple with, rather than discount, inconsistent findings.” See also Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography: Principles in Practice (London: Tavistock, 1983).
See Meera Nanda, Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays (New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2002).
“The ideologues of Hindu nationalism….claimed that the bomb was foretold in…the Bhagwat Gita, in which God declares himself to be ‘the radiance of a thousand suns, the splendor of the Mighty One…I have become Death, the destroyer of the worlds.’” Nanda, Breaking the Spell, 6.
Josiane Viramma and Jean Luc Racine, Viramma: Life of an Untouchable (London: Verso, 1997), 148, 165–67, as cited in Nanda, Breaking the Spell, 153.
See Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” 567.
See Dvora Yanow, “Neither Rigorous nor Objective?: Interrogating Criteria for Knowledge Claims in Interpretive Science,” in Yanow and Schwarz, ed., Interpretation and Method, 76.
Yanow, “Neither Rigorous nor Objective?,” 79.
See Shwartz-Shea, “Judging Quality,” 103–08.
In keeping with Breckenridge et al.'s contention that cosmopolitanism “is a project whose conceptual and pragmatic character as yet unspecified…it awaits detailed description at the hands of scholarship. We are not yet exactly certain what it is [for it] is awaiting realization,” I speak therefore of cosmopolitanisms rather than cosmopolitanism in the singular. See Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmpolitanism (Duke University Press, 2002), 1.
I owe this succinct formulation to an anonymous reviewer for Polity.
Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 5.1, (1997): 7.
See Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism”, 12–18.
See Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Kok-Chor Tan, Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Brian Barry, “Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Petit (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).
Garrett Wallace Brown, “Kantian Cosmopolitan Law and the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution,” History of Political Thought 27 (2006): 661–84; and “Theory and Practice: Moving Cosmopolitan Legal Theory to Legal Practice,” Legal Studies 28 (2008): 430–51. See also Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995).
Kok-Chor Tan, Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jeremy Waldron, “What is Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 227–43; Jürgen Habermas, “Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, With the Benefit of Two Hundred Years Hindsight,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2007).
Cosmopolitanism as a set of moral commitments that justifies the sorts of institutions we may impose on individuals is to be distinguished from cosmopolitanism as a specific set of global institutions and organization representing a world state. See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 287. Meanwhile, cosmopolitanism as a claim about the irrelevance of cultural membership for personal identity formation and autonomy is to be distinguished from cosmopolitanism as a claim about the irrelevance of boundaries for the scope of justice. See Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112–13.
For the most obvious examples, see Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 227; Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 4; Tan, Justice Without Borders, 40; Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism”; Waldron, “What is Cosmopolitan?”
Nussbaum does refer to Tagore, but paints his cosmopolitanism as comporting conveniently with Kant and the Stoics, leaving unaddressed the question of Tagore's alterity. Simon Caney similarly makes an all-too-brief allusion to Mo Tsu, claiming that he defends “recognizably cosmopolitan ideals.” But the question of what these ideals are, and how, if at all, they may challenge Western understandings of cosmopolitanism remains unaddressed.
Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 196.
Certainly, many others have called for engagement with radical alterity and the discomforts it arouses. See Fred Dallmayr, “Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political,” Political Theory 31 (2003): 438: “To be properly cosmopolitan, this civic culture needs to be as inclusive as possible, that is, to embrace not only people similar to ‘us,’ but precisely those who are different or ‘other,’—potentially even those who are now categorized (rashly) as ‘enemies.’” See also Roxanne Euben, “Journeys to ‘the Other Shore,’” Political Theory 28 (June 2000): 405. My claim, however, is that this engagement with discomfort needs to be both existential and theoretical, and that such engagement in turn has methodological as well as substantive implications.
See Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?” 744.
Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: The Free Press, 1959); City of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
See Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969) 3–53; James Tully, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
Andrew Vincent, The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 41–51; John G. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1979), 96–126.
See, for instance, Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Pratap Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason,” 628, cited in Euben, 197. See also Euben, Journey to the Other Shore, 196.
Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?” 742.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4.
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The author would like to thank Gerald M. Mara, R. Bruce Douglass, Mark Warren, Fred Dallmayr, Anthony Parel, Joshua Mitchell, and two anonymous Polity reviewers for providing valuable commentary on previous drafts of this essay. Special thanks are due to the participants of political theory colloquia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California-Los Angeles, where versions of this essay were presented. Thanks are due also to Richard Avramenko, Sara Rouhi, Dvora Yanow, and Leigh Jenco for generosity with their time and comments. Parts of the argument were also presented at the 2004 American Political Science Association (APSA) meeting in Chicago, as well as the 2007 Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP) meeting in Monterey, CA.
For various descriptions of the project of comparative political theory, see Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism; A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), and Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travellers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006); Scott Morris, “Whispering Amid the Canon Roar: The Condition of Comparative Political Theory,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, 29 August–2 September, 2001; Anthony J. Parel and Ronald C. Keith, eds., Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies Under the Upas Tree (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992); Fred Dallmayr, ed., Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999); Leigh Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say? A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement,” American Political Science Review 101 (November 2007): 741–55. See also the Symposium on Non-Western Political Thought, a special issue of Review of Politics 59 (Summer 1997).
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Godrej, F. Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other. Polity 41, 135–165 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2008.28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2008.28