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Introduction: Toward a Comparative Political Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Fred Dallmayr
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Extract

This Special Issue is meant to inaugurate or help launch a field of inquiry which is either nonexistent or at most fledgling and embryonic in contemporary academia: the field of “comparative political theory” or “comparative political philosophy.” What is meant by these titles is an inquiry which, in a sustained fashion, reflects upon the status and meaning of political life no longer in a restricted geographical setting but in the global arena. The motivation behind this initiative is a transformation which profoundly shapes our waning century: the emergence of the “global village” involving the steadily intensifying interaction among previously (more or less) segregated civilizations or cultural zones. Although human lives everywhere are deeply affected today by the global forces of the market, technology, and the media, the implications of these changes have not yet fully penetrated into Western intellectual discourse. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory or political philosophy revolves basically around the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx or Nietzsche—with occasional recent concessions to strands of feminism and multiculturalism as found in Western societies.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , Summer 1997 , pp. 421 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1997

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References

1 See Panikkar, Raimundo, “What is Comparative Philosophy Comparing?” in Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, ed. Larson, Gerald J. and Deutsch, Eliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 116– 36, esp. pp. 127–29Google Scholar. The same essay proposes the method of “diatopical hermeneutics” defined in these terms: “Diatopical hermeneutics is the required method of interpretation when the distance to overcome, needed for any understanding, is not just a distance within one single culture…or a temporal one…but rather a distance between two (or more) cultures, which have independently developed in different spaces (topoi) their own methods of philosophizing and ways of reaching intelligibility along with their proper categories” (p.130). For a similar proposal, under the label “hermeneutics of difference,” see Dallmayr, Fred, Bevond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 39–62Google Scholar. For the interlacing of universal truth and contextually situated dialogue see Schmitz, Kenneth L., “The Unity of Human Nature and the Diversity of Cultures” in Relations Between Cultures, ed. McLean, George F. and Kromkowski, John (Washington, D. C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1991), pp. 305–322.Google Scholar

2 Presently, there are virtually no general texts in this field. For exceptions see Parel, Anthony J. and Keith, Ronald C., eds., Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992)Google Scholar; and Parekh, Bhikhu and Pantham, Thomas, eds., Political Discourse: Explorations in Indian and Western Political Thought (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987).Google Scholar