In the light of the emerging global ecumene there is an ongoing intellectual discourse that focuses on the quest for a reorientation of political theorizing. It challenges the more or less canonized approaches to the understanding of political life and thought that dominate Western mainstream political and social science. This essay critically explores the epistemological assumptions underlying the prevalent paradigm of socio-political analysis, and points out its weakness in coming to grips with the multi-civilizational cosmos of human self-understanding which makes up the historico-political world. It argues that a genuine hermeneutical science is needed in order to restate the meaningful pattern of human self-interpretation across cultures and civilizations in its historical depth and global reach. It takes as its starting point the rise of the great civilizations in the axial times and their respective visions of order which still shape modernity. These post-axial visions, various as they were in appearance and content, merged with political power to provide the meaning-creating symbolic forms of societal self-understanding, thus providing society with a logic of order. This essay defines the common ground of the intercivilizational modality of human existence in history and society as the proper subject of comparative political theorizing, insofar as it intends to bring to our attention the essence of the political in all of its historical modalities.

Karl Jaspers coined the term the “axial period” to refer to what he saw as the simultaneous development in several different and separate societies—China, India, Iran, Israel, Greece—of “a new departure within mankind.” What he meant has been characterized as “a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.” While it is true that people in each of these separate cultures began to develop new ways of talking about the cosmos, ethics, and community, Jaspers's approach and description of these phenomena were, I shall argue, highly defective. This has led to serious misunderstandings of what was involved.

This article explores Mahatma Gandhi's contributions towards the evolution of the modern Indian political canon. Beginning with the Arthasastra, classical India had a political canon of its own. It flourished for over a millennium, but it suffered near extinction with the introduction in the nineteenth century of the Western political canon by the colonial state. Gandhi in the twentieth century intervened and challenged the dominance of the Western canon. He updated the old canon by deleting what was obsolete in it, preserving what was viable, and adding to it what was new and modern.

The relevance of Arendt's reflections on evil is analyzed in three respects. She warns that the appeal to absolutes (good or evil) destroys politics; her claim that radical evil involves making human beings as human beings superfluous is relevant to contemporary concerns with the vast refugee and stateless populations; and her idea of the banality of evil focuses our attention on the evil deeds that persons commit even when they do not have evil motives or intentions.

The essay examines medical metaphors in the discourse on government from a cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor, a comparison of medical metaphors in the political writings in late medieval Europe (c. 1250–c. 1450) and Tokugawa Japan (1602–1867) demonstrates that the European notion of medical treatment as the eradication of the causes of diseases magnified the coercive and punitive aspects of government, while the Japanese notion of medical treatment as the art of daily healthcare served to accentuate the government's role of preventing conflicts and maintaining stability. These differing images of medical treatment metaphorically structured contrasting conceptions of government in the two historical worlds.