Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:24:01.416Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond East and West: Reorienting Political Theory through the Prism of Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Loubna El Amine
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While critiquing the dominance of the Western tradition in the discipline of political theory, recent methodological discussions in Comparative Political Theory (CPT) fail to move beyond the East-West dichotomy. More specifically, CPT does not offer the resources to deal with global convergence as embodied in the phenomenon of modernity. I focus on the emergence of the sovereign state in the modern period and argue that the universal acceptance of the state form creates a globally-shared institutional condition. This condition, in turn, necessitates a shared normative and conceptual apparatus centered on ideals like constitutionalism, rights, and democracy. Two implications follow from my argument. First, we should reconceptualize the history of political thought such that we move from an East/West division to a modern/pre-modern division. Second, alternatives to the dominant (“Western”) model are not real alternatives unless they transcend the sovereign state itself, charting a new course of multilayered local, regional, and global political arrangements.

Type
Articles
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 102 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving?. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Acharya, Amitav. 2004. “How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism.” International Organization 58(02): 239–75.Google Scholar
Angle, Stephen C. 2009. Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Al-Hibri, Azizah Y. 1992. “Islamic Constitutionalism and the Concept of Democracy.” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 24: 1.Google Scholar
Armitage, David. 2012. Foundations of Modern International Thought. Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Aydin, Cemil. 2007. The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Beitz, Charles R. 1979. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bejan, Teresa. 2011. “Quentin Skinner on Meaning and Method.” Interview in The Art of Theory (www.artoftheory.com).Google Scholar
Bell, Daniel. 2015. The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits Of Democracy. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla et al. 2006. Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Berman, Sheri. 2009. “What to Read on Modernization Theory.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2009-03-12/what-read-modernization-theory; accessed July 22, 2015.Google Scholar
Bevir, Mark. 2000. “On Tradition.” Humanitas 13(2): 28–53.Google Scholar
Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Bleiker, Roland. 2004. “Globalizing Political Theory.” In What Is Political Theory?, ed. White, Stephen K. and Donald Moon, J.. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Branch, Jordan. 2012. “‘Colonial Reflection’ and Territoriality: The Peripheral Origins of Sovereign Statehood.” European Journal of International Relations 18(2): 277–97.Google Scholar
Browers, Michaelle. 2006. Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York and Cambridge, MA: Zone Books; distributed by the MIT Press.Google Scholar
Browning, Christopher S. and Lehti, Marko. 2010. “The West: Contested, Narrated and Clustered.” In The Struggle for the West: A Divided and Contested Legacy, ed. Browning, Christopher S. and Lehti, Marko. Routledge Critical Security series, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. 2015. Grounds for Difference. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Buck-Morss, Susan. 2009. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Bukay, David. 2007. “Can There Be an Islamic Democracy?” Middle East Quarterly. http://www.meforum.org/1680/can-there-be-an-islamic-democracy, accessed July 22, 2015.Google Scholar
Bull, Hedley. 2002. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. 3d ed. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Buruma, Ian and Margalit, Avishai. 2004. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Cabrera, Luis. 2004. Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Craig J., Juergensmeyer, Mark, and VanAntwerpen, Jonathan, eds. 2011. Rethinking Secularism. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Caney, Simon. 2005. Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chan, Joseph Cho Wai. 2014. Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 2011. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2014. Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dallmayr, Fred R. 1996. Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Dallmayr, Fred R. 2004. “Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory.” Perspectives on Politics 2(2): 249–57.Google Scholar
Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dussel, Enrique. 1993. “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” boundary 2 20(3): 65–76.Google Scholar
Eisenstadt, S. N. 2000. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus 129(1): 1–29.Google Scholar
Euben, Roxanne L. 2002. “Contingent Borders, Syncretic Perspectives: Globalization, Political Theory, and Islamizing Knowledge.” International Studies Review 4(1): 23–48.Google Scholar
Feldman, Noah. 2008. The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, Chris. 2014. “The People in Chinese Political Thought.” http://cjfraser.net/2014/10/02/the-people-in-chinese-political-thought/#more-3547, accessed October 2, 2014.Google Scholar
Freeden, Michael and Vincent, Andrew, eds. 2013. Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gadamer, Hans Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. Translation revised by Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G. London and New York: Continuum. Second, Revised edition.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Getachew, Adom. 2015. “The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination: Towards a History of Anti-Colonial World-Making.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, Department of Political Science.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1985. The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gill, Graeme J. 2003. The Nature and Development of the Modern State. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Godrej, Farah. 2011. Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
GoGwilt, Christopher Lloyd. 1995. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gorski, Philip S. 2000. “Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300 to 1700.” American Sociological Review 65(1): 138–67.Google Scholar
Goto-Jones, Chris. 2005. “If the Past Is a Different Country, Are Different Countries in the Past? On the Place of the Non-European in the History of Philosophy.” Philosophy 80(311): 29–51.Google Scholar
Goto-Jones, Chris. 2011. “A Cosmos beyond Space and Area Studies: Toward Comparative Political Thought as Political Thought.” boundary 2 38(3): 87–118.Google Scholar
Gray, John. 2003. Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Gunnell, John G. 1979. Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers.Google Scholar
Han, Minzhu and Hua, Sheng, eds. 1990. Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Held, David. 1995. Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hassanpour, Navid. 2013. “Tracking the Semantics of Politics: A Case for Online Data Research in Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 46(2): 299–306.Google Scholar
Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jenco, Leigh K. 2007. “A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement.” American Political Science Review 101(4): 741–55.Google Scholar
Jenco, Leigh K. 2010. Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jenco, Leigh K. 2011. “Recentering Political Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality.” Cultural Critique 79: 27–59.Google Scholar
Jenco, Leigh K. 2014. “Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory: The Curious Thesis of ‘Chinese Origins for Western Knowledge,’ 1860–1895.” Political Theory 42(6): 658–81.Google Scholar
Jiang, Qing, Bell, Daniel, Fan, Ruiping, and Ryden, Edmund. 2012. A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Jordt, Ingrid. 2007. Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement : Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Karl, Rebecca E. 2002. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Katzenstein, Peter J. 2015. A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. Cornell Studies in Political Economy. Kindle ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Keene, Edward. 2002. Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kim, Sungmoon. 2014. Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kirby, William C. 2005. “When Did China Become China? Thoughts on the Twentieth Century.”; In The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State: Japan and China, ed. Fogel, Joshua A.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Liu, Xiaobo, Perry Link, E., Martin-Liao, Tienchi, and Liu, Xia. 2012. No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Malik, Shiv. “The Isis Papers: Behind ‘Death Cult’ Image Lies a Methodical Bureaucracy.” The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/07/isis-papers-guardian-syria-iraq-bureaucracy (accessed December 14, 2015).Google Scholar
Mantena, Karuna. 2012. “Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence.” American Political Science Review 106:2: 455–470.Google Scholar
March, Andrew F. 2009a. “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” The Review of Politics 71(4): 531–65.Google Scholar
March, Andrew F. 2009b. Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
March, Andrew and Revkin, Mara. 2015. “Caliphate of Law.” Foreign Affairs, April 15. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/syria/2015-04-15/caliphate-law, accessed October 31, 2015.Google Scholar
Markell, Patchen. 2003. Bound by Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Marshal, Kai. 2014. “Where Are All the Confucians in Hong Kong Tonight?” Warp, Weft, and Way. http://warpweftandway.com/where-confucians-tonight/, accessed October 1, 2014.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Thomas. 2009. Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McDonald, Kevin. 2014. “Isis Jihadis Aren’t Medieval—They Are Shaped by Modern Western Philosophy.” The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/09/isis-jihadi-shaped-by-modern-western-philosophy, accessed September 10, 2014.Google Scholar
Morris, Ian. 2010. Why the West Rules–for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Moyn, Samuel. 2015. “Fantasies of Federalism.” Dissent. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/fantasies-of-federalism, accessed October 1, 2015.Google Scholar
Na‘īm, ‘Abd Allāh Aḥmad. 2008. Islam and the Secular State : Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Park, Peter K.J. 2013. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Patten, Alan. 2014. Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Philpott, Daniel. 2001. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Pogge, Thomas W. 1992. “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty.” Ethics 103(1): 48–75.Google Scholar
Poggi, Gianfranco. 1990. The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects. Oxford: Polity.Google Scholar
Ravina, Mark. 2005. “State-Making in Global Context: Japan in a World of Nation-States.” In The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State, ed. Fogel, Joshua A.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Ricœur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Chicago, IL:: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Risse, Mathias. 2012. On Global Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rudolph, Susanne. 2005. “The Imperialism of Categories: Situated Knowledge in a Globalizing World.” Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association. Perspectives on Politics 3(1): 5–14.Google Scholar
Salkever, Stephen. 2015. “Teaching Comparative Political Thought: Joys, Pitfalls, Strategies, Significance.” Sino-American Journal of Comparative Literature 1(1): 165–191.Google Scholar
Sassen, Saskia. 2008. Territory, Authority, Rights : From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya. 2000. “East and West: The Reach of Reason.” New York Review of Books 47(12): 33–38, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/jul/20/east-and-west-the-reach-of-reason/, accessed October 30, 2015.Google Scholar
Simon, Joshua. 2014. “The Americas’ More Perfect Unions: New Institutional Insights from Comparative Political Theory.” Perspectives on Politics 12(4): 808–28.Google Scholar
Skinner, Quentin. 2002. Visions of Politics, Volume 2: Renaissance Virtues. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Mick. 2011. Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Strauss, Leo. 1968. Liberalism, Ancient and Modern. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Shogo. 2009. Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with European International Society. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1984. “Philosophy and Its History.” In Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, Ideas in context, ed. Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J. B., and Skinner, Quentin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1995. “Two Theories of Modernity.” Hastings Center Report 25(2): 24–33.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 2002. “The Other and Ourselves: Is Multi-Culturalism Inherently Relativist?” Project Syndicate. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-other-and-ourselves–is-multi-culturalism-inherently-relativist-, accessed February 16, 2015.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 2011. “Western Secularity.” In Rethinking Secularism, ed. Calhoun, Craig J., Juergensmeyer, Mark, and VanAntwerpen, Jonathan. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles. 1975. “Reflections on the History of European State-Making.” In The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Studies in political development, ed. Tilly, Charles. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 3–83.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
von Vacano, Diego A. 2012. The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
von Vacano, Diego A. 2015. “The Scope of Comparative Political Theory.” Annual Review of Political Science 18(1): 465–480.Google Scholar
Wang, Hui. 2007. “The Politics of Imagining Asia: A Genealogical Analysis.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8(1): 1–33.Google Scholar
Wilder, Gary. 2015. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Melissa S. 2007. “Nonterritorial Boundaries of Citizenship.” In Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, ed. Benhabib, Seyla, Shapiro, Ian, and Petranovich, . New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Melissa S. and Warren, Mark E.. 2014. “A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory.” Political Theory 42(1): 26–57.Google Scholar
Yack, Bernard. 1997. The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Young, Crawford. 1994. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Have, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Zubaida, Sami. 2010. Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East. London; New York: I.B. Tauris.Google Scholar