Political theory came to be institutionalized as a subdiscipline within political science in the course of the twentieth century, as a study of and engagement with a form of reflection purportedly stretching back more than two millennia, beginning in ancient Greece. Embodied in a series of canonical texts, this was taken to be a more or less continuous historical tradition, though one that had high points of great vitality and periods when it was in relative decline. Such identity and unity across long spans of time was thought to be a consequence of the fact that there were “abiding” or “enduring” questions of politics, and political theory was that form of reflection that identified and addressed these questions.1 As George H. Sabine explained in “What Is a Political Theory” in 1939, “Because a political theory refers to the historical occasion from which it originated, it need not be applicable to that alone. Political problems and situations are more or less alike from time to time and from place to place. . . . The greatest political theorizing is that which excels . . . in analysis of a present situation and in suggestiveness for other situations.”2 Or as the Chichele Professor for Social and Political Theory at Oxford put it, the great works of political theory, those that repaid close study, were “more original, more profound” than lesser ones, one important index of which was that they were “products of their age but are also ageless.”3 As with the histories of art, music, and science encountered in chapter 3, political theory supposed that the texts that provided its subject matter were historical and yet were not tethered to the time and context in which they were produced.
This provided an important criterion for discerning/constructing a canon of the most important works in political theory: these were works that transcended the historical circumstances of their production because they were addressed to the perennial questions of politics and thus spoke to (or could be made to speak to) the present. Sabine had constructed such a canon, one spanning twenty-five hundred years, in his monumental A History of Political Theory (1937). This work and Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey’s edited History of Political Philosophy (1963) were translated into multiple languages and reissued in successive editions, becoming a staple resource for generations of teachers and students of political theory. Whereas a historian studied the past and an anthropologist studied other cultures, the political theorist studied the texts produced by other political theorists, resuscitating what the canonical texts had to say about the perennial questions of politics, and/or using these as scaffolding for developing his own thoughts about justice, equality, political obligation, and the like. In either case, “The academic political theorist saw himself if not quite as the heir, at least as the executor of a great inheritance. He moved among the ‘classics’ of the great tradition almost as if they were contemporaneous with each other and with him. He argued with them; he elicited arguments between them; he judged their merits.”4
However, a form of intellectual inquiry and practice that was thought to have continued unbroken for more than two thousand years was suddenly found, in the 1950s and 1960s, to be in decline, under threat of extinction, or already dead. In 1956 Peter Laslett declared that—for now at least—political philosophy was dead.5 One might have thought that the publication of Sheldon Wolin’s major work of political theory, Politics and Vision (1960) put the lie to Laslett’s pronouncement; but Wolin’s was an embattled book, prefaced by the observation that “in many intellectual circles today there exists a marked hostility towards, and even contempt for, political philosophy in its traditional form,” and Wolin expressed the mournful hope that if the tradition of political philosophy was coming to an end, his book might “at least succeed in making clear what it is we have discarded.”6 In 1962 Isaiah Berlin offered a rousing defense of political theory, but his defense was necessitated precisely because many scholars were now suggesting, in Berlin’s words, that “political philosophy, whatever it might have been in the past, is to-day dead or dying”;7 his talk, tellingly, was entitled “Does Political Theory Still Exist?”
But no sooner was political theory dying or dead than it was resurrected. From the 1970s, formerly embattled political philosophers and political theorists—I will be treating the terms interchangeably—began to cautiously comment on the unexpected flourishing of their subdiscipline. Surveying “The Condition of Political Theory” in 1977, George Kateb observed with satisfaction that there was “great vitality” in the field.8 Brian Barry, who in 1961 had joined those glumly wondering, in the words of his title, “Has Political Philosophy a Future?,” returned to the topic in 1980 to write, “Who would have imagined in 1961 that one would so soon have the luxury of being able to complain about a glut of political philosophy?”9 The earlier pronouncements of the last rites of the discipline were now replaced by fulsome self-congratulation over its rebirth.10
The discipline that was “resurrected,” however, was not the same as the discipline that “died.” Below I trace how and why it was that political theory, conceived as an ongoing tradition focused on the abiding or perennial questions of politics, became untenable in the face of multiple and compelling criticisms. I then suggest that the key to understanding the discipline that was born—rather than reborn—in the 1970s is to recognize that political theory, unlike history and international relations, does not have an object it seeks to produce knowledge “of”; it is instead a knowledge “for,” a performance rather a representation. As such, it is oriented toward its audience in a manner that is very different from most other disciplines; political theory at once presumes and is directed toward the bourgeois public sphere, imagined as a domain where individuals possessed of their own values, but sharing political and moral space, engage in rational debate about what principles will govern that common space. The social imaginary that conceives of the public sphere as an aggregation of value-bearing or value-holding individuals engaged in critical-rational dialogue is a historically particular, and specifically liberal, imaginary; and I argue that its orientation toward the bourgeois public sphere renders political theory an inescapably liberal and Western form of knowledge production.
The first of what was to become a chorus of criticisms of political theory took the form of the complaint that it had become little more than an unilluminating history of political thought, disengaged from any serious effort to explain political phenomena. Hans Morgenthau, for instance, thundered that “political theory as an academic discipline has been intellectually sterile,” because “it has hardly been more than an account of what writers of the past, traditionally regarded as ‘great,’ have thought about the traditional problems of politics.” If it remained part of the academic curriculum, this was not because of its vitality or its importance to the discipline of political science, “but rather because of a vague conviction that there was something venerable and respectable in this otherwise useless exercise.”11 The most concerted and influential attack along these lines came from the behaviorist “movement” in American political science. The young Turks of behaviorism, led by David Easton, offered a sweeping indictment of the discipline of political science, which they declared had applied diverse and unsystematic methods to the study of an object that had itself remained ill-defined. The proper object of political science, Easton declared, was the “political system,” an aspect or subset of the social system, but “a separable dimension of human activity,”12 allowing or requiring political scientists to “distinguish our interests from those of economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists.”13 This object was best studied by examining political behavior, which in turn required, as Gabriel Almond put it, studying “what goes on inside the black box of the political system.”14
As with any attempt to put a discipline on a new footing, the behavioral “revolution” was deeply critical of what political science had hitherto been, and the subdiscipline of political theory was singled out for criticism. Lamenting the poverty of political theory over the preceding fifty years, Easton ascribed this poverty to its focus upon an “unrewarding historical study” of past texts, which had served “to divert the attention and energies of political theorists from building systematic theory about political behavior and the operation of political institutions.”15 According to Easton, while the great political theorists of the past had sought to develop an analytic and normative theory of politics, since about 1900 the ambition to be “a truly theoretical organ for political science”16 had been replaced by mere historical excavations. The proper task of “political theory,” in the understanding of Easton and many other behaviorist critics, was “conceptualizing the basic areas for empirical research in political science,”17 that is, providing a paradigm that would define the discipline’s object, identify the relevant questions, and provide the criteria for what is to be counted as evidence—as “theory” was thought to do in disciplines such as economics, chemistry and physics.18 This task political theory was signally failing to do; as another critic put it, “All types of inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and . . . the title ‘political theory’ has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.”19
The “scientism,” “positivism,” embrace of “value free” social science, and a consequent hostility to “normative” speculation of which the behaviorists have been accused were certainly elements in their hostility to political theory. However, their criticisms for the most part evinced not a hostility to “theory” per se—many of the leading behaviorists had completed their PhDs in political theory20—but rather a very different conception of “theory.” In this understanding, “political theory” was what the behaviorists were striving to do, and what the subdiscipline of political theory had signally failed to do; at the height of the behavioral revolution, Almond was to equate “contemporary political theory” with the concept of the “political system.”21 Political theory as it was in fact practiced was judged to be deficient because it misunderstood the nature and task of theory; it had been failing in this task since 1900, according to Easton, and from the latter nineteenth century, according to some other critics.
A second line of criticism came from an altogether different quarter, that of intellectual historians who shared no sympathy with the behaviorists. From the latter 1960s J.G.A. Pocock, John Dunn, and especially Quentin Skinner offered a wide-ranging critique of the pretensions of the history of political thought as it was being practiced.22 Skinner’s coruscating “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” exposed many of the fallacies underlying political theory, with unsparing illustrations taken from the works of distinguished historians of political thought, all to devastating effect. Skinner showed that there were in fact no transhistorical “perennial questions” that were a focus of concern for the thinkers and the texts assembled in the canon of political theory, but rather “a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well the answers have frequently changed.”23 The fiction of perennial questions had led to an anachronistic treatment of political thought, and to the imposition of a false coherence on thoughts and texts, resulting in “a history of thoughts which no one ever actually succeeded in thinking, at a level of coherence which no one ever actually attained.”24 A properly historical study of political thought would not necessarily discover similarity but would often uncover difference; not the “relevance” of past thoughts and texts to current political concerns, but the changing languages of politics. The intellectual and even moral value of such inquiries, Skinner concluded, lay precisely in showing “the extent to which those features of our own arrangements that we may be disposed to accept as traditional or even ‘timeless truths’ may in fact be the merest contingencies of our peculiar history and social structure.”25
The third and chronologically last challenge to the self-conception and practice of political theory was focused upon disciplinary history. Historical inquiry into the subdiscipline of political theory revealed that the earliest works that assembled a tradition and a canon were no older than the second half of the nineteenth century, and that it was well into the twentieth century before the idea that there was a “tradition” of political theory stretching from ancient Greece to the present became sufficiently entrenched in the United States for political theory to become a “standard subject of college textbooks and academic research.”26 The constitution of the subdiscipline as the study of the canonical texts summarized in these textbooks was mirrored in Britain, where histories of political thought were written primarily to serve university courses.27 The subdiscipline assumed that the canonical names and texts assembled in these textbooks were “the residue of a historically specifiable activity characterized by relatively persistent and stable concerns, and . . . these works may be fruitfully understood . . . as a continuing dialogue regarding the great perennial issues of political life.”28 However, this conception of a tradition of political theory as an age-old activity that much later came to be studied and practiced in universities was a reversal of the actual historical sequence: “The enterprise known as the ‘history of political thought’ initially came into being and derived its identity from an educational practice . . . it was not the case that some previously existing activity called the ‘history of political thought’ was . . . taken into universities; rather, that notion . . . is the creation of these disciplinary practices.”29 A growing number of scholars described, and sometimes denounced, the “tradition” of political theory as “invention,” “myth,” “reification,” or “fabrication posing as fact.”30
These three distinct lines of criticism pulled in different directions. The behaviorist critique of political theory began by accepting that there was a long-standing and valuable “tradition” of political theory, but argued that it had been in decline—since about 1900 according to Easton, and from around the latter nineteenth century, according to some other critics. For the behaviorists, a revivified political theory would take the form of a paradigm for the systematic study of political behavior, rather than a subdiscipline of political science concerned with historical texts. In the event, it was behaviorism, which had taken the discipline by storm, especially in the United States, that declined, whereas political theory survived or was born again, albeit in a very different form. Drawing attention to the anachronisms characterizing the practice of political theory, Skinner, Pocock, and Dunn demonstrated that the “perennial issues” understanding of the subdiscipline was unhistorical nonsense, and brought the hitherto dominant form of the subdiscipline into crisis. Once the claim to extrahistorical status was punctured, the study of political texts ceased to plausibly belong to a distinct subdiscipline of political theory and instead became—as in the distinguished works of the aforementioned scholars—a species of intellectual history. There is a clear and striking parallel here with the history of aesthetics and science, where, as we saw in chapter 3, historicizing the object of study had corrosive effects on claims that it was possessed of an extrahistorical dimension that licensed special protocols for the study of it. The very important difference, however, is that art, music, and science are practices that long predate their academic study, whereas Gunnell and others showed that “political theory” was an academic invention, a reified “tradition” posited to enable a purely academic practice. Moreover, this was invented in the course of the latter nineteenth century and not institutionalized until well into the twentieth century, so that the widely told story of its decline or death was more or less coterminous with the history of its very emergence!
The combined effect of these criticisms was that while the earlier “perennial issues” version of political theory continues to be taught in university classrooms, and textbooks designed for these classrooms continue to be churned out, there are very few serious scholars who would defend it. The political theory that has been dominant in scholarship from the 1970s was not so much reborn as newly born, for the discontinuities between the born-again form of political theory, and its predecessor that had been the subject of so much criticism, are more striking than the continuities. The new political theory, as has commonly been noted, has flourished less as a secure part of the discipline of political science than at a tangent to it or sometimes even in active hostility to it. It is also, as a survey of it notes, “an unapologetically mongrel sub-discipline, with no dominant methodology or approach,” and “seem[s] to lack a core identity.”31 This diffuseness of themes and methods makes it exceedingly difficult to generalize about the subdiscipline. The survey of the it quoted above goes on to note, however, that notwithstanding this diffuseness, political theory is characterized by “an irreducibly normative component”32; and this provides a useful starting point for a characterization of what is specific about the discipline and distinguishes it from other disciplines.
To characterize political theory as a normative endeavor certainly captures something important about it, but I suggest that a better way of framing its distinctiveness is to recognize that political theory does not have a referent: it is not knowledge “of” but rather knowledge “for,” performance rather than representation. Unlike disciplines such as history or international relations, examined in previous chapters, political theory does not represent, map, or explain an object or process external to itself. History seeks to produce knowledge about the past, and international relations about international politics; by contrast, justice and political obligation are not objects that can be represented, requiring specialist knowledge to do so, but are rather ongoing matters of common concern. One immediate consequence of this is that the relation of political theory to its audience is different from that of most other disciplines. The scholar who writes as a political theorist is presumed to have thought more deeply about issues such as justice, equality, liberty, and the like than those she addresses, but these are issues of collective concern and debate, and she is thus positioned as a partner in a dialogue or conversation; less a specialist who produces knowledge of an object or process than someone who draws upon a common stock of concerns and concepts in order to clarify and persuade. This is what leads Sheldon Wolin to describe political theory as “primarily a civic and secondarily an academic activity.”33 This does not mean that political theory has a mass audience or is engaged in a dialogue with “ordinary people”—like other academic disciplines, its audience is mostly limited to other scholars. Nonetheless, this important and insufficiently noted aspect of the subdiscipline has far-reaching implications and allows us to identify a further feature that underlies political theory and shapes the performance of it. Political theory does not simply, like all disciplines, have a readership or an audience, but is more specifically oriented toward what I shall call, following Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere. This is reflexively built into its practice and performance and thus shapes the very nature of the subdiscipline.
Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere influentially argued that while the very terms, and the normative force, of the concepts of “civil society” and of “publicness” derived from classical precedents, the public sphere of his title was “a category of bourgeois society,” enabled by the emergence in modern Europe of generalized commodity production, social labor, and an impersonal state authority. The Greek distinction between the oikos as the domain of necessity and the polis as the domain of freedom gave way in modern times to a tripartite division between the private, intimate sphere of the conjugal family; civil society, where the (male) heads of households who were forged in this private sphere engaged in commercial relations; and the bourgeois public sphere that emerged out of the salons and coffeehouses of modern Europe, and coalesced around the “the bourgeois reading public of the eighteenth century.”34 This public sphere was not simply the sum of the opinions of individuals but presupposed, in Charles Taylor’s words, a recognition of “something we hold in common.”35 The significance of this was recognized by many and was championed by Kant. In “What Is Enlightenment?,” Kant conceded that a civil/public official was obliged to discharge his office in his “private” capacity; a military officer could not argue with a superior’s command, or a clergyman preach contrary to the authorized views of his church. However, their “public” use of reason, when they spoke not in their capacity as officials but “as a scholar before the entire public of the reading world,”36 could not be restricted, for here complete freedom was the foundation of enlightenment. As Habermas writes, summarizing Kant, “Anyone who understood how to use his reason in public qualified for it. . . . The public sphere was realized not in the republic of scholars alone but in the public use of reason by all who were adept at it.”37
It is in this historically unprecedented feature of the public sphere that Habermas finds its normative potential. Habermas is well aware that the public sphere was confined to the propertied and educated—that it was not only a category of bourgeois, that is, modern, society, but was in fact limited to the bourgeoisie (also that it was limited almost exclusively to men, though this figures less prominently in Habermas’s analysis).38 Nonetheless, the idea/claim that all members of a society could legitimately exercise their reason on matters of common concern, including by commenting critically on political authority, marked a historical advance. Not only were political matters subject to public comment and deliberation, the principle upon which this was based mandated, in theory at least, that the public was composed of all those capable of rational-critical deliberation, without regard to authority or status. As Calhoun glosses Habermas, “However often the norm was breached, the idea that the best rational argument and not the identity of the speaker was supposed to carry the day was institutionalized as an available claim.”39
It will immediately be apparent that political theory presupposes, and functions as if it were addressed to, a public sphere of individuals possessed of “values,” who inhabit a common world and perforce engage in rational, critical debate about that which they “hold in common.” Political theory, in other words, has a conception of the public sphere built into its imaginary and its functioning. Other disciplines, of course, also have a relation to the public sphere. History, for example, presupposes public records and archives for the historian to do her work and for readers to verify her claims. The historian must subject her findings and narratives to a public that is not limited to other historians, and the public to which the historian’s investigations and narratives are presented is free to question and to disagree. However, the historian’s investigations have a referent—some aspect or slice of “the past”—and to count as reasonable, any criticism must also display some knowledge of that referent. By contrast, the political theorist engages in rational-critical debate over matters of common concern to collective life with others who, in principle, are positioned as equals in that dialogue, and indeed whose moral intuitions and forms of collective life the political theorist frequently seeks to explicate and elucidate. Political theory is thus imagined as a conversation or discussion in a way that the historian’s practice is not; as Michael Warner observes, “In the dominant tradition of the public sphere, address to a public is ideologized as rational-critical dialogue . . . consistently imagined, both in folk theory and sophisticated political philosophy, as dialogue or discussion.”40 Political theory is, par excellence, an instantiation and enactment of the bourgeois public sphere—one in which the political theorist does not simply, as Kant advised, act “as if” he were a scholar addressing the public, but actually is a professional scholar addressing the public. Since, as observed earlier, political theory does not in fact have a public audience, it is an enactment, in miniature, of the public sphere.
It is often noted (and sometimes bemoaned) that the subdiscipline that was reborn in the 1970s is deep-seatedly liberal in its presumptions and its prescriptions.41 Why should this be so?
In part it is because, as a dialogue or debate, rather than a representation of an object or process, political theory is always addressed to a specific body of people at a specific time, and thus appeals to the values and intuitions of this body of people As Stefan Collini notes, “Political arguments, and their attempted systematization as bodies of theory, must, if they are to have any persuasiveness, deploy, re-work, or otherwise make use of the shared evaluative language of those to whom they are addressed, and hence must appeal to the ideals and aspirations which that language represents. In this sense, political theories are parasitic upon the less explicit habits of response and evaluation that are deeply embedded in the culture.”42 There is, in other words, always a strong sense of a “we” built into political theory and its modes of address; as one political theorist describes the discipline, “Political theory is a continuing conversation or argument over what precisely we value in our social and political lives and why, how to understand the internal structures of our values, what the rival interpretations of these values are, which of these is better and why, and finally, what social and political institutions should be designed to realize these values.”43 The “we” in question, given the circumstances of the discipline—a latter twentieth-century practice largely confined to Western Europe and North America—is an unacknowledged liberal “we,” and thus what is to be valued and articulated is, by definition, liberalism. It is not any particular liberal sect—Kantian or utilitarian, rights based or communitarian—but rather liberalism in its broadest and deepest sense: the presupposing and naturalizing of the idea that the world is composed of individuals who can and should be abstracted from their particularities, who embrace certain “values,” who hold something in common with each other, and who seek through rational-critical debate to reconcile their individual values with this “something in common.”
Liberalism is also often an explicit part of the self-understanding of the subdiscipline, as can be seen, for instance, in Isaiah Berlin’s elaboration and defense of political theory in 1962, when it had been declared to be dead or dying. In this essay Berlin observes that while most of the basic questions that human beings have asked have proved to be ones that can be answered in empirical or formal terms, some questions had not proved amenable to empirical or formal formulation and answer, for they belonged to a class of problems “that in their very essence involve value judgements.”44 Having made this very Kantian distinction between pure and practical reason, Berlin proceeds to ask the Kantian question, “In what kind of world is political philosophy . . . in principle possible?”45
It will be recalled that posing a similar question, Kant famously arrived at an answer, albeit a very abstract and formal one, in the shape of the categorical imperative. For Berlin—now departing from Kant—the condition of possibility of political theory is that there is not and cannot be a single answer to that question: “The only society in which political philosophy . . . is possible, is a society in which there in no total acceptance of any single end,” in other words, “a pluralist, or potentially pluralist, society.”46 According to Berlin, this is not a description of one world among many, but rather a description of the world as such. “Totalitarian” societies such as the (then) USSR are not ones where one value/end has secured general acceptance, but rather societies that have suppressed other, competing values and ends. They illustrate, not other possible worlds, but the denial, through coercive and despotic means, of the world as it really is. This, it is important to remember, is not a moral position, but rather a factual claim— Berlin’s well-known and eloquent championing of moral pluralism follows from this claim that different and sometimes irreconcilable values are an inexpungable feature of human existence. Any society or historical epoch is characterized by a diversity of moral and political outlooks, reflecting the categories through which men perceive and relate to the world, and their place and function in it. People have frequently believed that there is a single, objective human end, which overrides all others or else can incorporate and subsume them, and which should therefore be recognized and embraced by all. “Monist” doctrines, as Berlin calls them (he names Platonism and Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Thomism, positivism, and Marxism), have abounded, but the very plethora of these puts the lie to the dream of a single value or constellation of values, accepted and embraced by all. Thus while political theories may be monist, political theory as an enterprise or discipline exists because a multiplicity of political theories—or in Rawls’s formulation, “a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines”47—is part of the human condition. Political theory arises from this condition and is also an expression or performance of it—liberals and communitarians, Christians and atheists, utilitarians and Kantians, monists and pluralists contend with each other in public academic debate, such that the very practice or performance of political theory is an exemplification of liberal pluralism. The condition for existence of political theory is thus a liberal society; conversely, the very existence and performance of political theory is an affirmation that liberal presumptions about the plurality of “values” are well founded. It is the very way in which political theory as a subdiscipline is conceived and practiced that makes liberalism so hard to escape—even for those who seek to do so.
In short, it is not because political theorists are liberal that so much of political theory is liberal; it is rather because political theory is inherently a liberal enterprise that so much political theory produced is liberal. Or if you prefer, the two are mutually reinforcing. As Bruce Ackerman puts it, “There is a perfect parallelism, then, between the role of political conversation within a liberal state, and the role of conversation in defense of a liberal state.”48 What Ackerman regards as a happy “parallelism” is given a more jaundiced, and I think more apt, description by Alasdair MacIntyre. According to MacIntyre “the culture of liberalism” treats moral and political viewpoints as “values” or preferences; philosophical debate reveals that these often cannot be reconciled, or subsumed within some larger rationality, but “liberalism requires for its social embodiment continuous philosophical and quasi-philosophical debate about the principles of justice, debate which . . . is perpetually inconclusive but nonetheless socially effective.”49 This, I suggest, is a very good description of political theory as it has been practiced since its “rebirth” in the 1970s, with the debates over how to articulate and defend and develop “our” values revolving around different ways of conceiving and defending liberalism—deontological, communitarian, utilitarian, and so on.
This is not to say that such defenses of liberalism are intellectually effective. Berlin himself, of course, thought that his value pluralism entailed an embrace of liberalism. If the monist (sometimes he labels this “rationalist”) conviction that all important values must be compatible with each other and perhaps even entail each other was grievously mistaken, and the necessity of choosing between values that do not necessarily harmonize but sometimes come into conflict is “an inescapable characteristic of the human condition,”50 then for Berlin it followed that a liberal polity in which negative liberty is given priority is vindicated as the best of all possible worlds. But the rationale driving Berlin’s argument, when pushed to its logical conclusion, renders liberalism itself as one of many “values,” rather than as the “solution” to value pluralism. This can be seen, for example, in the intellectual trajectory of John Gray, his “renegade disciple.”51 Author of an intellectual biography of Berlin, heir to his pluralism, and a champion of liberalism, Gray later came to the conclusion that if value pluralism was an inexpungable feature of the world, then “This truth subverts liberal moralities which accord a unique primacy to some good such as negative liberty or personal autonomy.”52 For a period Gray continued to seek a union of value pluralism and liberalism in the form of an “agonistic liberalism,” but he found that pluralism, once acknowledged, was corrosive of any and all forms of liberalism. As he describes his intellectual itinerary, “Agonistic liberal theory . . . seeks to show that the liberal form of life has a superior claim on reason arising from its supposed tolerance of value-pluralism. This was the view I myself held, and termed post-liberal.”53 He subsequently came to see, however, that the pluralism that Berlin had rightly embraced inexorably led to the conclusion that all moralities and politics were based upon historically contingent and culturally specific values, including liberalism, and thus that “liberal forms of life enjoy no special privileges of any kind.”54
Traveling different routes, others have arrived at similar conclusions. As we saw in chapter 2, in his later work John Rawls came to argue that since “a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines” was the inevitable result of the exercise of reason, even the core values of liberalism, such as autonomy and individuality, could not be accorded any privilege, for to do so was to convert liberalism into yet another “sectarian doctrine.” Rawls continued to defend and elaborate “political liberalism,” but it was now defended as suitable for those societies that had been shaped by the Reformation and the subsequent embrace of religious toleration, and not as a universal that had a transcendental grounding, or a teleological warrant.55 As with Gray and Rawls, Richard Rorty also finds that there is no transcendental “grounding” to be found for liberalism and the practices and moralities associated with it; these are, he concedes, “parochial . . . local and culture-bound.”56 Rorty still urges their embrace, but now on the pragmatic and frankly ethnocentric grounds that “we” postmodernist bourgeois liberals of the rich North Atlantic democracies have “come up with a way of bringing people into some degree of comity, and of increasing human happiness.”57 If a large part of the discipline is taken up defending and elaborating versions of liberalism in happy ignorance of the non-Western world, the remainder consists of those who acknowledge that the liberal values being articulated are those of the West or the rich North Atlantic democracies. Some, like Rawls, conclude that these need not apply to the rest of the world; Rorty urges that these admittedly parochial values nonetheless be embraced by others; and Gray concludes that liberalism is but one possibility among many, and not necessarily best suited to places and peoples possessed of different histories.
No wonder, then, that the discipline of political theory has not flourished, indeed, barely exists, outside the West. Many parts of the non-Western world are characterized by impassioned political arguments about collective concerns, including social justice, rights, and equality; but it is striking that the subdiscipline of political theory not only makes no contribution to these debates (something that is arguably also the case in North America and Europe), but that it barely has any existence even in universities. Non-Western political theorists—a few do exist—have recognized and lamented this parochialism. Rajeev Bhargava complains that “existing, mainly western political theory is excessively ethnocentric,”58 and Bhikhu Parekh similarly observes that “Western political theory is ethnocentric and does not speak to the concerns of non-Western societies.”59 Issuing as they do from political theorists who believe that their discipline is capable of addressing non-Western societies, such criticisms are accompanied by the injunction that political theory—conceived as a universal “form”—be practiced with an appropriately non-ethnocentric “content.” This call has recently been answered.
Beginning in the 1990s, some scholars began to engage in what they termed “comparative political theory.”60 The term is something of a misnomer, for comparison is not a necessary feature of all work that goes under this name,61 which is characterized above all by the inclusion of non-Western voices and texts in political theory in an effort to make it “genuinely global in character”62 and “about human and not merely Western dilemmas.”63 Introducing an edited collection on comparative political philosophy, Anthony Parel writes that “each culture has its own basic insights about what constitutes the good life and the good regime”64 out of which a political philosophy emerges, embodied in “texts which are recognizably political, that is, texts that consciously attempt to develop a philosophic understanding of the theory and practice of governance.”65 In a similar vein, Antony Black, introducing a study of Islamic political thought, writes, “Political thought is the study of the exercise of power, of who should exercise it, and how much power they should have; it is about justice in relationships between people, especially between those in power and those whom they rule, and the just distribution of goods in society.”66 Given these assumptions—that all times and places have “regimes” or “power” or “governance,” and reflect upon “justice” and “distribution” in systematic ways—it follows that all societies and cultures “have” or “do” political theory. The practice of political theory, it would appear, is universal, even though its products, in the form of texts, ideas, and ideals, are always culturally specific. And if that is so, it is unjustifiable, indeed, outrageous, that the subdiscipline of political theory should have confined itself to the study of only European thinkers and texts. The justification and need for “comparative political theory” would appear to be self-evident.
There are two disabling objections to comparative political theory (CPT) if it is formulated in such a fashion. First, it simply assumes that the practice of political theory is a universal activity, even as a great deal of contemporary scholarship has challenged the presumption that the modern disciplines are inquiries into objects and practices that have existed everywhere at all times. Second, such a defense and elaboration of CPT is premised on the idea that there are certain “constants” or “perennial questions,” which formed the stuff of political theorizing across the ages in Europe and—it is now claimed—in non-Western traditions as well. But if, as shown earlier in this chapter, the idea that an activity or practice called “political theory” has been cultivated for centuries in “the West” is an unhelpful and misleading fiction, to extend it to include the non-West is doubly so. If this were all there is to CPT, one could without further ado conclude that this is an unhistorical and thus intellectually indefensible project.
There are, however, more sophisticated elaborations of CPT. These avoid—if not always consistently—the unwarranted and unhistorical assumption that there are constants or “perennial questions” in politics, which form the subject matter of political theory. They are furthermore keenly aware of the danger of “assimilating” the texts and traditions they are engaging with, to modern and/or Western categories and understandings. Farah Godrej, for example, urges that any engagement with non-Western texts needs to be alert to the danger that “CPT may be vulnerable to reinscribing much of the Eurocentrism it wishes to avoid, unless it engages the radically different motivating queries of non-Western traditions.”67 She suggests that we can avoid this danger by recognizing that political theory is always and unavoidably a hermeneutical enterprise—of how to interpret texts from within a tradition—and that the crucial difference that distinguishes CPT from Eurocentric political theory is that in the former case the texts being interpreted belong to a different cultural and intellectual tradition. This being so, according to Godrej, the Gadamerian insight that “immersion in a tradition . . . allows our prejudices to be a creative force” does not apply here: “Because our prejudices operate in relation to those things that are familiar to us, using them as the lens through which we encounter otherness suggests that we may try to understand the unfamiliar by assimilating it into our own categories.”68 Comparative political theory seeks to interpret texts that do not come to us always-already interpreted, as earlier phases in the living tradition of which they are part. How then can the comparative political theorist avoid the ever-present danger of making these texts more familiar than is warranted, and engage with and interpret them while recognizing their difference?
The question as posed by Godrej and others is one of how to interpret across cultures/traditions. The details of the answer(s) need not concern us here, as this is to ask the wrong question. For it is not the abstract hermeneutical problem of interpreting texts across cultures and traditions that is at issue, but the more specific and concrete problem of interpreting non-Western texts from within a Western tradition that has become globally hegemonic. What is at issue, in other words, is not “cross-cultural” interpretation or communication, but engaging with traditions that are not Western from within a modern Western knowledge tradition that conquest, colonialism, and empire have made globally dominant. Just as the Neuer do not undertake anthropological studies of the white man, so too Hindu pandits do not ask themselves how to engage with Western thought and how to do so without “assimilating” it into Indic/Hindu traditions of thought. That is why the project of CPT is one of how to include and engage with non-Western traditions. It is also why the attendant problems that CPT seeks to address—such as that of not assimilating the thoughts and texts of others to “our” categories—is one in which the “our” is by definition modern and Western, irrespective of the ethnicity of the enquirer.
To argue as I have above is not tantamount, as CPT scholars sometimes suggest, to argue for “incommensurability”;69 it is not to throw up one’s hands in despair and say that there is no way of engaging with texts from other traditions. Cultures and traditions are always palimpsests; the questions engaged in one tradition may also be engaged in another.70 But a recognition that all scholarship today issues out of modern, Western knowledge, and that encounters with otherness may require (conceptual and other) translation, allows us to be attentive to that which does not translate, or does not translate easily. To become attentive to this is also potentially to become self-aware that we are working from within a tradition, and that encounters with otherness can stretch our categories beyond their limits. At its best, as in Roxanne Euben’s Enemy in the Mirror—one of the first works that self-consciously (and successfully) sought to introduce the term “comparative political theory” and inaugurate its practice—CPT can achieve precisely this. Euben productively reads Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) as drawing upon aspects of the Islamic tradition(s) to offer “a rebuttal of and an antidote to the perceived impoverishment of post-Enlightenment rationalist discourse.”71 Qutb, Euben points out, is not “alien” to us, for his context is also our context: “In a postcolonial world, the context is no longer peculiarly Western—although it may be Western in origin—but has come to frame the projects of the non-Western as well as the Western critics of modernity.”72 Hence why, as Euben illuminatingly shows, Qutb’s themes, concerns, and anxieties have counterparts in the modern West, including anxieties and concerns that have been articulated by figures such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Bell, and Robert Bellah. Such a reading is productive because it does not assume the universality of modern Western categories and norms and “assimilate” Qutb to them. It rather discomfits them, showing us that the distinctions that we often assume to be axioms for thinking—such as the distinction between the religious and the political—are in fact the presumptions of our thinking: “Qutb’s perspective on the intimacy between religious and political concerns implicitly contests and enlarges the boundaries that . . . have defined political theory as a primarily Western and secular enterprise at least since the Enlightenment.”73
These arguments, and others that cannot be discussed here, are important and insightful. But the importance and interest of Euben’s engagement with Qutb lies not in any “work” that is being done by political theory, much less in treating Qutb as if he were a political theorist, but rather because Euben takes Qutb’s ideas seriously, rather than treating “fundamentalism” as something irrational that is to be “explained” with reference to its sociological causes. What is at work here is good intellectual history, enabled by the fact that Qutb belongs to our temporal moment, one where debates about modernity, religion, disenchantment, and the like have achieved a global currency: the work of commensuration has already been done, by history as it were, “by the facts of Western colonialism and imperialism,” in Euben’s words.74 But this very fact of Qutb’s historical and intellectual contemporaneity with “us,” who inhabit a globalized world—the same would be true for Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen, for instance—also ensures that this example could not license a similar retrieval of Confucius or Kautilya for CPT.
The undoubted contribution made by Euben is thus despite, rather than because, of her rather strained efforts to cast Qutb as a political theorist, and despite her claim that “the questions and categories of political theory are useful heuristic tools through which non-Western thinkers concerned with the moral foundations of political life may best be heard.”75 Given Euben is a political theorist, it is not surprising that this is her starting point. My criticism is not with her starting point—for in engaging with what is different we have no choice but to start with what is familiar, including our disciplinary affiliations—but rather with her desire to substantialize this “heuristic device” by treating political theory as something that “others” also engage with. When Euben concludes that an engagement with Qutb helps us to “see what is distinctive about our own values, institutions and practices” and to “avoid seeing our own cultural conventions as universal truths, thereby making possible a certain kind of distance toward what we know, or what we think we know,”76 she is making a very important point, one that this book also seeks to make. However, the conventions that we should not see as universal practices include, it seems to me, the recently invented Western subdiscipline and practice known as political theory. If it has value as a heuristic device, its use, as with many heuristic devices, lies in providing a means by which we might eventually come to see its inappropriateness or redundancy—the ladder one kicks away.77
Some of the works written under the banner of CPT are valuable in illuminating aspects of non-Western intellectual traditions, but what they do not succeed in doing is “de-parochializing” political theory. They run the risk, instead, of treating as a universal practice what might just be a local Western custom. What CPT has successfully done, and this is all to the good, is something more “practical”—it has opened up a space where those classified or self-identifying as political theorists, and who have an interest in the non-Western world, can do serious work without having to relocate to another subdiscipline (e.g., comparative politics) or relocate disciplines altogether.
In 1886 Nietzsche complained that moral philosophers knew only “the morality of their environment, their class, their church, the spirit of their time, their climate and part of the world,” and were “poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages.”78 Almost a hundred years later little had changed: referring to the “problems of fiendish intricacy” that arose as utilitarians and Kantians “confront[ed] each other with their ingenious casuistical exercises,” the anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that for all their disagreements, the participants in these debates had one thing in common, namely, “They do not want to know about the cultural formation of moral ideas.”79 More recently John Gray has characterized the liberal political philosophers whose works dominate the subdiscipline as “struggling to confer the imprimatur of universal authority on the local practices they have inherited.”80
The analytical and normative categories of political theory are so deeply embedded in a social imaginary that is a product of modern European (mostly West European) and North American history, in the forms and ways detailed in this chapter, that it has no purchase beyond scholars who have naturalized the idea that political philosophy is a rational-critical discussion addressed to a bourgeois public sphere on how best to reconcile and integrate the values of Atlantic liberalism. Those unwilling to add marginalia to these debates on justice, equality, liberty, and the like have—to be schematic—followed one of two options, both designed to broaden the scope of political theory. One, as seen previously, has been to expand the geographical and cultural range of political theory, in the form of CPT.
The other has been to seek analytical tools and inspiration from beyond the borders of mainstream political theory: feminism in many of its varieties, Frankfurt school-inspired critical theory, and Foucauldian genealogy have been especially prominent and productive outside sources. Such work has been premised upon and resulted in a much more capacious understanding of politics and of power than that displayed by the dominant, liberal forms of political theory. As Wendy Brown observes, political theory has always taken “its bearings from a tacit presumption of the relative autonomy and boundedness of the political. . . defining the political as distinguishable. . . from the economic, the social, the cultural, the natural, and the private/domestic/familial.”81 But if the personal is political, and if power is present in and circulates through the disciplining of bodies and knowledges, through images, and much else besides, then “politics” cannot be conceived of as a bounded space. One effect of such an enlarged conception of politics, however, is that the object of inquiry becomes too dispersed for “theorizing” it to be plausibly seen as the preserve of any particular discipline, such as political theory. That is why, even as important work continues to be produced by political theorists who draw upon “critical theory, postcolonial theory, comparative political theory, hermeneutics, normative theory, deconstruction, cultural criticism, political ethics, genealogy [and] psychoanalytic inquiry,”82 among other currents, much of this does not recognizably or plausibly fit under the rubric of “political theory”—except inasmuch as its authors are the “political theorists” of their political science departments. In short, if CPT runs the risk of unwarrantedly universalizing the practice of political theory, a broadened conception of politics and a correspondingly more capacious practice of theorizing has the opposite effect of dissolving the specificity of the subdiscipline. As Brown asks of her practice as a political theorist, “If a scholar of English literature writes brilliantly on Hobbes’ Leviathan, if cultural anthropologists are currently the most incisive theorists of nationalism, if scholars of gender and race have developed genuinely new perspectives on social contract theory . . . then who am I and who is my constituency or reading audience?”83 And if this rethinking of what we mean by power and politics is taken seriously—as Brown rightly insists it must be—then a difficult question arises for political theorists. As Brown formulates it, “What obscurity lies in wait for us in a world much vaster than a small cadre of colleagues whose card of entry to the order is the modest mastery of approximately two dozen great books and fluency with a small number of watchwords: justice, liberty, obligation, constitutions, equality, citizenship, action, government, rule, polity?”84
As Brown’s question indicates, the subdiscipline is in crisis, on multiple fronts. In institutional terms, it has been marginalized within a political science discipline that has become increasingly quantitative, and where the label “theory” is being annexed by public/rational choice theory, particularly in the United States. Intellectually, its original avatar as a commentary on and continuation of an unbroken “tradition” stretching back to the Greeks has been comprehensively debunked and shown to be an uninspired and unproductive fiction. The dominant mainstream of the discipline since the 1970s, this chapter has argued, is premised upon and oriented toward a bourgeois public sphere, and as a result is irremediably liberal, and unwilling and incapable of mitigating its deep-rooted Eurocentrism. Those political theorists who recognize these problems—and they are many—have responded in a number of ways, most notably by seeking to expand the repertoire of political theory by including and engaging with non-Western texts, or by widening their understanding of politics, and by drawing upon other disciplines and intellectual currents. However, the first has the effect of universalizing a local practice, and the second has the effect of dissolving whatever unity the subdiscipline might possess. Lest I be misunderstood, let me make it clear that in my view these efforts have been all to the good, and that political theorists have made significant contributions to important intellectual debates; but they have done so in their individual capacities, not qua political theory. The subdiscipline itself is a minor and declining presence on the intellectual scene, and those, like Brown, who recognize this but still seek to defend it, do so on the largely strategic grounds that it is “the last outpost of nonscience in an ever more scientized field,” and that it serves a crucial function as “the main portal” for the entry of the humanities into political science.85
Since the discipline of political science or politics is not an intellectually coherent discipline but rather a collection of subdisciplines, the two chapters on political science in this book have been concerned with examining the presuppositions that inform and enable the production of knowledge in international relations and political theory. Political theory, I have sought to show, does not have a referent or object that it seeks to produce knowledge of, but is instead a normative enterprise addressed to a public. However, the normative and the representational/analytical are not easily separated in any field of study, and the categories and presuppositions informing political theory are not only about what “should” be the case, but are also, as in political science more generally, presumptions about what “is” in fact the case in political life. Concepts such as those of “civil society” and the “public sphere,” which I have argued are part of normative architecture of political theory, are also deployed in studies of politics that are not principally engaged in a normative endeavor but rather seek to represent and understand an object or process. Such analyses naturalize civil society and the public sphere, presuming that the objects denoted by these concepts exist everywhere, and thus that these concepts easily translate across cultures and histories. In fact, any serious student of politics in the non-Western world finds this not to be so: as one such student observes, the study of non-Western politics using the analytical vocabulary of political science continually finds that there is “a serious mismatch between the language which describes this world, and the objects which inhabit it.”86 Those seeking to understand political processes in the non-West have usually dealt with this problem by making ad hoc adjustments, bending their analytical tools to make them as fit for purpose as possible. In recent times however, there have been some sustained efforts to reflect upon this mismatch, and to develop alternative modes of analysis that do not “adapt” or “translate” in a rough-and-ready fashion. I end this chapter by briefly examining some of these: specifically, those that deploy but also problematize the concepts of “public sphere” and “civil society” that have been central to this chapter.
We saw that while Habermas treats the public sphere as a historical product, he also regards abstracted individuals engaged in rational-critical discourse as the normative rightness or “truth” contained within what are otherwise the historical and bourgeois “limitations” of this public sphere. In Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner argues that such individuals, and rational-critical discourse, are also historically produced and culturally shaped forms of selfhood and interaction, part of the “habitus” that defines and makes possible the public sphere. “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public,” Warner writes, “is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”87
Drawing upon Warner’s work in his study of the da’wa movement in contemporary Egypt, Charles Hirschkind elaborates:
The idea of public privileged within the modern social imaginary tends to exclude any recognition of the institutional and disciplinary conditions that enable it. . . . this conception of a public builds in a structural blindness to the material conditions of the discourses it produces and circulates, as well as to the pragmatics of its speech forms: the genres, stylistic elements, citational resources, gestural codes, and so on that makes a discourse intelligible to specific people inhabiting certain conditions of knowledge and learning. Such material conditions of discourse are obscured through a language ideology that circumscribes meaning to propositional content and construes the speech situation as one of rational-critical dialogue, a universal speech form unhindered by conventions of affect and expressivity or by the pragmatics of particular speech communities.88
In the accounts of Warner and Hirschkind, critical-rational discourse or “argument” is not the normative universality and truth contained, in potentia, within the otherwise historically particular bourgeois carapace of the public sphere. On the contrary, such critical-rational discourse has its historical source in the private readings of texts, a source that is then naturalized, illegitimately equating “the faculties of the private reader as the essential (rational-critical) faculties of man.”89 Hirschkind goes on to show that the Islamic counterpublic he studies is not a space for the formation of political opinion through intersubjective reason, but rather “is geared to the deployment of the disciplining power of ethical speech.”90 As a consequence, “The efficacy of an argument here devolves not solely on its power to gain cognitive assent on the basis of superior reasoning, as would be the case in some versions of a liberal public sphere, but also on the ability of ethical language and exemplary behavior to move human beings toward correct modes of being and acting.”91 This is why the “paradigmatic speech genre” of this counterpublic is not the text but rather the sermon, including the widely circulating cassette sermons that play a central role in Hirschkind’s analysis. The difference is not simply one of “medium” or “technology,” for the social importance of cassette sermons derives from the fact that “as opposed to the private reader, whose stillness and solitude became privileged icons of a distinct kind of critical reasoning within the imaginary of the bourgeois public, it is the figure of the ethical listener . . . that founds and inhabits the [Islamic] counterpublic.”92 If the bourgeois public sphere presupposes and naturalizes a historically produced language ideology, this counterpublic presupposes and enacts poetic, affective, and sensory modes of understanding.93
Those who are part of this counterpublic, adds Saba Mahmood in her study of women in the da’wa movement, are not liberal selves who experience authorized models of behavior and external imposition as “heteronomy,” but rather subjects who view “socially prescribed forms of conduct as the potentialities, the ‘scaffolding’ if you will, through which the self is realized.”94 This is not a sign that they have failed to fully become selves, nor that Egyptian publics and counterpublics are deficient in some way—that they are “backward” or “underdeveloped”—but rather that they are, simply, different. The evaluative and normative judgments that are built into concepts of the rational individual, of autonomy and heteronomy, and of the public sphere come in the way of understanding this difference, by seeing in it only a lack, a deviation from the norm.
Just as Hirschkind and Mahmood find that the concepts of social and political theory are inadequate to understanding the Islamic revival movement in Egypt, Partha Chatterjee similarly argues that these concepts are inadequate to explaining the politics of India, and indeed, of the non-Western world more generally. In recent decades a seeming paradox has been widely noted in India. On the one hand, many marginalized subaltern classes and groups are no longer content to be “represented,” but have mobilized and now have their own organizations, political parties, and “voice” in public affairs; to that degree, Indian democracy can be said to be more vibrant and more truly democratic than before. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a coarsening of public life, as the norms that once underpinned public and political affairs are now routinely flouted, and politics is treated purely instrumentally rather than as the clash of values and norms. A common way of explaining this “paradox” has been to suggest that in India formal equality and the right of suffrage preceded, rather than followed, the structural transformations that produced civil society and the public sphere. The enfranchisement of the adult population was meant to be accompanied by the efforts of a developmental state that would create the conditions for rational-critical discourse; but the advent of unscrupulous politicians willing to appeal to an unreformed popular culture, abjuring the niceties of rational public debate and, indeed, even civic decency or probity, has resulted in the entry of the unwashed masses into public and political life before their transformation into rational citizens, bringing into “the hallways and corridors of power some of the squalor, ugliness and violence of popular life.”95
In this explanation it is recognized that there is mismatch “between the language which describes this world, and the objects which inhabit it,” but this mismatch is taken as evidence of Indian “lack” or “incompleteness”—an insufficiently developed civil society, an overdeveloped state, a weak public sphere, and so on. This explanation accords with the inherited categories of our political language and retains the normativity built into these analytic categories. This is the explanation that Chatterjee rejects, suggesting that the mismatch lies not in the failure of Indian reality to match up to the norms implicit in this theoretical language, but rather in the fact that we lack the theoretical tools with which to talk about a domain of popular political discourse that is “far removed from the conceptual terms of liberal political theory.”96 Chatterjee is not suggesting that civil society does not exist in India; the early forms of Indian nationalism were nurtured in a newly emergent colonial civil society, and a civil society of national citizens was central to the imaginary of most currents of Indian nationalism. Furthermore, according to the Indian constitution adopted by the new nation-state in 1950, all of society is civil society, populated by rights-bearing free and equal citizens. However, as Chatterjee points out, while “Civil society as an ideal continues to energize an interventionist political project,” as an actually existing form it is demographically limited to a relatively small number of culturally equipped citizens, and “most of the inhabitants of India are only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution.”97
This larger part of the population is not, however, untouched by the state and modern politics. They have been objects of state intervention since the nineteenth century, when “governmentality”—Chatterjee borrows and amends a Foucauldian concept—became an important mode of colonial government. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the colonial state classified and enumerated population groups (divided into castes, tribes, religions, and so on) for the purposes of land settlement and revenue, public health, recruitment to the army, and more generally, as targets of economic, developmental, administrative, and other policies. The postcolonial developmental state continued and greatly expanded these technologies, seeking now also to mitigate poverty and institute social reform and thereby affecting almost all the population, while civil institutions encompassed only a minority.
There are then, Chatterjee concludes, two aspects to the relation between the state and the people it governs. “One is the line connecting civil society to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty and granting equal rights to citizens. The other is the line connecting populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare. The first line points to a domain of politics described in great detail in democratic political theory”; the second line, Chatterjee argues, requires a theoretical innovation, namely a recognition of the existence of what he calls “political society.”98 This is the domain of those who have a political relationship to the state and who have a claim on it, including claims to welfare and benefits. Such groups include, for example, residents of the numerous illegal squatter settlements in India, who (often illegally) have access to water and electricity, and who in many cases have set up residents’ associations to press their demands. These are anything but “traditional” or “primordial” groups, survivals of a premodern past; but nor are they fully part of civil society.99 This is the domain of political society, a large and important element of everyday politics in India, but one that is too often overlooked or else dismissed and decried as a deviation from the norm.
Hirschkind, Mahmood, and Chatterjee are all at pains to insist that the theoretical deficiencies that they draw attention to are not a consequence of a “category mistake,” namely, of applying concepts developed to explain modern societies to premodern or nonmodern ones. This kind of explanation has for too long been a way of accounting for why there is a mismatch between what our analytical concepts lead us to expect and what we in fact find. It accounts for the explanatory shortcomings of these concepts by attributing these shortcomings to deficiencies in their objects and thereby salvages these concepts: since premodern societies are in transition to becoming modern ones, when they reach their destination, they will become adequate to their concepts. But this “salvaging” comes at a high cost: one consequence, as Achille Mbembe forcefully observes, is that African politics and economics always appear as signs of a “lack,” and “The upshot is that while we feel we now know nearly everything that African states, societies and economies are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are.”100
Mbembe, Chatterjee, Mahmood, and Hirschkind all insist that they are studying “modern” societies, integrated into the circuits of global capitalism, where the movements and phenomena they study are always obliged to forge relations of complementarity or opposition to the modern state. Chatterjee, for example, explicitly insists that the importance of political society in India and many other parts of the non-Western world is not “some pathological condition of retarded modernity, but rather part of the very process of the historical constitution of modernity in most of the world.”101 Such analyses are important, and have been briefly discussed here, precisely because they draw attention to the limitations of the categories of political science when these are pressed into service to explain the politics of the non-Western world. But because they do so while insisting that the global South is part and parcel of a globalized modernity, the import of these arguments, and the import of the critique of international relations and political theory offered in this book, is not to make a claim for non-Western “exceptionalism”: it is rather to draw attention to the parochialism and the inadequacies of political science.
