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Political Theory2014, Vol. 42(1) 26 57

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Article

A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory

Melissa S. Williams1 and Mark E. Warren2

AbstractGlobalization generates new structures of human interdependence and vulnerability while also posing challenges for models of democracy rooted in territorially bounded states. The diverse phenomena of globalization have stimulated two relatively new branches of political theory: theoretical accounts of the possibilities of democracy beyond the state; and comparative political theory, which aims at bringing non-Western political thought into conversation with the Western traditions that remain dominant in the political theory academy. This article links these two theoretical responses to globalization by showing how comparative political theory can contribute to the emergence of new global publics around the common fates that globalization forges across borders. Building on the pragmatist foundations of deliberative democratic theory, it makes a democratic case for comparative political theory as an architecture of translation that helps deliberative publics grow across boundaries of culture.

Keywordscomparative political theory, democratic theory, deliberative democracy, globalization, global democracy, pragmatism

1University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada2University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Corresponding Author:Melissa S. Williams, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George St., Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada. Email: [email protected]

507934 PTX42110.1177/0090591713507934Political TheoryWilliams and Warrenresearch-article2013

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Williams and Warren 27

Introduction

The current epoch of globalization brings a structural transformation of politics as radical as the changes wrought in early modern Europe by the emergence of the territorial state. This transformation places the discipline of political theory under tremendous pressure, since so many of our central frameworks derive from assumptions, often in the background of our inqui-ries, that the boundaries of the state delineate the location of politics. Although territorial states will remain central to organizing collective goods essential to a good polity, political theory as a field risks losing its relevance to emerging circumstances of politics if it rests too heavily on Westphalian frameworks.

In this article, we link two recent developments in political theory that are explicitly framed as responses to globalization but which, somewhat surprisingly, have not been in conversation with each other: debates sur-rounding the future of democracy under conditions of globalization, and contributions to the emerging field now styled as comparative political theory, whose common theme is the expansion of a discipline rooted almost exclusively in Euro-American intellectual traditions to include East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African, and Indigenous (in short, though reluctantly: non-Western) thought.1 The political theory literature on the possibility of democracy beyond or outside of the state is virtually silent when it comes to non-Western ideas and politi-cal culture, non-Western cosmopolitanisms, or the challenges of democratic innovation and action across cultures. And although a significant propor-tion of the literature in comparative political theory critically engages ques-tions that are central to democratic theory, few connect their inquiries to the possibility of democratic transformations of transnational or global politi-cal processes.

In bringing these two debates together, we build a specifically democratic case for comparative political theoryand for the responsibility that political theory, as a field, bears for furthering its development. We do so as two politi-cal theorists who are not direct practitioners of intercultural or comparative political theory.2 We are not experts in non-Western cultures or languages;3 neither of us has done the hard work of immersive study that now character-izes the impressive scholarship of this emerging field.4 Yet we are both con-vinced that theorists like us, trained in Western traditions of thought and with research foci in areas that do not necessarily compel deeply intercultural work, should do what we can to de-parochialize political theory5that is, to shift the field in the direction of much deeper engagement with non-Western ideas about politics.



28 Political Theory 42(1)

The democratic case for comparative political theory is not the only case that can be made, of course, but in developing it we hope to contribute to both of the bodies of theoretical work we bring together here. Simply stated, the larger claim is that among the tasks of political theory is to track the social, economic, and political developments that have pushed across borders. More specifically, we argue that at the same time that globalization undermines democratic accountability within territorial states and fails to generate demo-cratic responsiveness in supra-state institutions, it also opens up new possi-bilities for democratic mobilization and responsiveness through the formation of transnational and potentially global publics. Comparative political theory, from this perspective, provides some of the architecture of translation that enables self-constituting publics to form across boundaries of linguistic and cultural difference. With respect to theories of global democratization, com-parative political theory provides resources for taking cultural difference more seriously as an obstacle to democratic opinion-and will-formation. Conversely, attentiveness to the role of the intercultural translation of politics in contemporary democratic formations provides an avenue of response to those who would dismiss comparative political theory as a groundless and utopian exhortation for intercultural dialogue.

We make this case as follows. In the first section, we review the chal-lenges of globalization. In the second, we note that globalization produces communities of shared fatede facto constituenciesthat are produced by the effects of globalization, and which cross boundaries of sovereign states, peoples, and cultures. Third, for these new kinds of constituencies to become politically productivefor them to become sites of democratic agencythey need to be imagined and articulated as constituencies. But, fourth, to the extent they are articulated, they become sites of communica-tion. As such, they are incipient publics within which language can become a force for creating spaces of democracy across borders, both reflexively in constituting publics that exceed boundaries, as well as productively, insofar as common responsibilities follow. Comparative political theory is one of many kinds of global discourse that function to constitute these spaces. We note the central role that language use as such plays in calling forth these kinds of cross-boundary constituenciesa role that again underscores the origins of deliberative theories of democracy in the pragmatic theories of language use. In the fifth section, we restate these general considerations in another way: as problem-driven democratic theory, noting that the impera-tives for comparative political theory follow directly from problems that flow across borders. We conclude with some observations about the implications of this argument for the future direction of the field.




Globalization, Democracy, and Emergent Publics

It is not news that, at best, globalization and democracy stand in an ambiva-lent relationship to one another.6 The unprecedented economic growth that accompanied economic globalization has been enormously important in reducing the proportion of people who live in absolute poverty. But it has also brought more economic inequality to most of the established democracies, the increased influence of money in elections, shrinking middle classes in some countries, and weakened welfare supports in many others. The global financial crisis and the ongoing Eurozone crisis, together with climate change and other transborder environmental consequences of growth fueled by extractive industries, epitomize radically new, human-scale vulnerabilities to scarcity, risk, exploitation, and inequality, without simultaneously generating the institutional channels through which people can exert democratic con-trols. Many states that have enjoyed high capacities to steer their internal affairs and to respond to the needs of the average citizen find these capacities eroding. The institutional transformations of the global era unbundle the sovereignty of territorial states and parcel out its powers to undemocratic international actors and institutions.7 Globalization can and often has disem-powered putatively sovereign democratic citizenries by moving choices about their social, economic, and political futures beyond their reach. And so far, the democratic deficits of powerful regional, transnational, and global institutions are a long way from being rectified.

Yet these developments are only part of globalization. As the democratic struggles of the Arab Awakening, Occupy, and the indignant citizens move-ments in Europe and elsewhere have brought home, learning and coalition building across borders have intensified demands for democratic responsive-ness in regional and transnational institutions, strengthened some democratic movements, and brought down some autocrats. International NGOs have helped to foster new forms of transparency and accountability with respect to human rights, democratic mechanisms, environmental destruction, poverty, and disease. The alter-globalization movementitself a manifestation of globalizationis strengthening the capacities of activist networks to resist the negative impact of economic globalization on Indigenous peoples, the environment, and the global poor. In short, as empire, globalization denotes the seemingly pervasive power of global capitalism; as cosmopolis, it sig-nals the global spread of principles respecting the moral worth of human individuals, including human rights and democracy, sedimenting diverse interpretations of these ideals around the world.8

Democratic theorists have responded to globalization by mapping three broad prospects for democracys future: cosmopolitanism, statism, and




polycentrism (or transnationalism).9 Cosmopolitan democrats such as David Held, Thomas Pogge, and Daniele Archibugi begin from Kantian universal-ism to argue for a global order of law that secures human rights and respects the moral equality of individuals.10 Democracy within states remains impor-tant to their views, but its authority derives from the same universalistic prin-ciples that ground an overarching order of international law. Because the dynamics of globalization generate the need for institutions beyond the state, their models for global democratization emphasize the development of state-like mechanisms for democratically legitimate law-making and law enforce-ment in international, transnational, and regional institutions, all bound together in an order of rights-protecting cosmopolitan law. Cosmopolitan democrats seek to parry the charge of cultural imperialism by arguing for the acceptability of human rights and other universalist principles in diverse human cultures.11 However, there is little or no engagement in this literature with the argument that their understandings of such fundamental concepts as moral individualism, economic development, political legitimacy, and secu-larism are so thoroughly rooted in Euro-American modernity that they make very uncertain contact with the self-understandings of the majority of the worlds peoples. Nor do they acknowledge the array of non-Western cosmo-politanisms that might provide alternative normative foundations for political order under conditions of globalization.12

For statists, the conditions that make effective and accountable democratic decisions possible are only available within territorial states. Although they acknowledge that the dynamics of globalization have diminished democratic agency within liberal-democratic states and transferred powers to suprastate and nonstate bodies, they argue that the most promising course for democra-cys future is to reclaim and strengthen democracy within the state, and hold states democratically accountable for the cross-border impact of their deci-sions through creative institutional design.13 These arguments respond to the fact that globalization systematically increases the mismatch between those who are affected by the decisions of collective agents and those who are empowered to hold them accountable.14 This mismatch highlights the demos problem that is endemic to democratic theory: it has proved challenging to develop nonarbitrary principles by which to set the boundaries of the people that will govern itself democratically.

Polycentrist or transnational democratic theorists focus on the democratic potentials of new forms of politics that are emerging in transnational public space. For them, globalizations challenge for democratic theory is more radical than for either cosmopolitans or statists; it requires, as Michael Goodhart argues, that we reconsider what democracy means.15 More spe-cifically, it requires that we loosen our conceptions of democracy from the




model of the territorial sovereign state.16 Thus, polycentrisms emphasis is on political formations that neither result directly from state action nor take on statelike characteristics of centralized, hierarchical, and formal law-making authority backed by coercive power.17 These theorists focus on the capacity of decentralized networks of social activists, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations, acting quasi-autonomously from states, to render decisions more responsive and accountable to those whom they affect.18

The analysis we develop below builds on the observations of these trans-national polycentrist democrats. For many of these theorists, the link between global civil society and the possibility of democratic agency on the part of new transnational actors is the emergence of new transnational and poten-tially global public spheres, that is, social spaces of free communication through which collective opinions may eventually form as a result of the exchange of arguments.19 Since responsiveness to public opinion is a key metric of democratic accountability, the conditions that make it possible for public opinion to formin other words, the existence of public spheresare vital conditions for the democratic potential of civil society formations. Two such conditions stand out. First, there must be publics, that is, collectivities whose members see themselves as engaged in an ongoing exchange of ideas with one another. Second, there must be media of communication that make the exchange of ideas possible, including symbolic media (linguistic and nonlinguistic), material media (e.g., print, audio-visual), and structural sys-tems that enable the diffusion of ideas (notably, now, the Internet). Further conditions, such as inclusiveness and actual impact on decisions, must be met for a public sphere to function democratically.20

The emergence of transnational movements around the new cross-border human vulnerabilities that arise with globalization shows that transnational public spheres are not only not impossible but in many cases are increasingly developed. New discourses of citizenship that exceed the boundaries of territorial statesglobal citizenship, transnational citizenship, dia-sporic citizenship, and environmental citizenshipexplicitly connect transnational collectivities to ideas of democratic agency, a capacity through action in concert to shape collective futures.21 As responses to the impacts of globalization, these are mobilizations of overlapping communities of fate, as David Held puts it,22 capturing the sense that globalization throws people together in such a way that they come to share a future.23 As captured by the concept of affected interests, these formations express the facticityincluding their unchosenness and inescapabilityof new structures of inter-dependence and affectedness under the conditions of globalization.24 While these structures have a fact of the matter about them, they do not by them-selves issue in political agency or even a common political space. But they




will tend to generate experiences that can underwrite the common terms of discourse necessary to political agency. As publics or constituencies that might be mobilized, they remain latent until the facticity of shared fates is argued for and demonstrated, as in the connection between human consump-tion of carbon fuels and climate change or, to borrow Iris Youngs example, the relationship that connects us to the sweatshop workers who fabricated our running shoes.25 In other words, in order for structures of affectedness to constitute sites for democratic agency, people must, through discourses, rep-resent them, imagining that they are citizens connected by common fates, and thus bring into being new publics.26

And yet genuinely inclusive transnational or global public spheres demand that we take cultural differences in social and political imaginaries more seri-ously than current theories of global democratization currently do.27 The pos-sibility of fate-responsive, action-orienting global democratic imaginaries depends, then, on two central questions. First, what would it mean to engage in nondominating political discourse in global public space, across vastly dif-ferent cultural and material conditions, and to form action-orienting political imaginaries across these differences? Second, what would generate and sus-tain agents motivation to participate in such discourses, given the combined challenges of power asymmetries, the difficulties of cross-cultural under-standing, and the competing pressures for attention from other scales of poli-tics (local, national, regional)? Comparative political theory offers a partial response to both challenges.

(Comparative) Political Theory, Dialogue, and Intercultural Publics

Globalization likewise serves as a common starting point for proponents and practitioners of comparative political theory. They cite the increasing inter-connectedness of human beings across the boundaries of states, regions, and cultures as a reason why it is important that we political theorists problema-tize the dominance of Western intellectual traditions, conceptual frameworks, and institutional forms and devote our energies to fostering a transcultural conversation28 orexplicitly rejecting the Huntingtonian clash of civiliza-tions as the correct understanding of the global agea dialogue among civilizations29

What does it mean to fashion comparative political theory in dialogical or conversational terms? For some, notably Fred Dallmayr30an early and still highly visible proponent of comparative political theorythe model of dia-logue is rooted in philosophic hermeneutics and is especially indebted to Gadamer. For Dallmayr, as for Gadamer,




Truth or insight . . . cannot be garnered by retreat into neutral spectatorship or a view from nowhere, but only through a concrete existential engagementan engagement where familiar assumptions . . . are brought to bear, and allowed to be tested, against unfamiliar perspectives and practices in a shared search for meaning.31

Dialogical encounters with the cultural other, Dallmayr argues, make it possible to move in the direction of a more genuine universalism, and beyond the spurious universality traditionally claimed by the West and the Western canon. Indeed, this is precisely the point of comparative political theory.32 As Andrew March brings out in a particularly helpful overview of the emerging field, the celebration of a dialogue model for engagement with non-Western thought combines several motives and justifications. These include epistemic goals: more inclusive dialogue is likely to yield in truth-claims that have greater validity than claims rooted exclusively in a single tradition (particularly claims that are not reflexively self-critical about their own assertions of universal validity.33 Critical-transformative aims would utilize the dialogue model as a resource for resisting the unjustifiable power imbalances flow from the dominance of Western discourses in contemporary politics, whether these are read as serving colonial or neo-imperialist domi-nation or forms of domination endemic to capitalism.34 And comparative political theory may also aim at social cooperation grounded in a principled exchange of views. Indeed, March understands this function of comparative political theory as its most important, which he states in terms that are very close to those of deliberative democratic theory. The strongest warrant for a comparative political theory, he writes, is that there are normative contesta-tions of proposals for terms of social cooperation affecting adherents of the doctrines and traditions that constitute those contestations.35

But even among those who explicitly advocate for an expansion of politi-cal theory beyond Western traditions, the dialogue model has its critics. Some charge that attempts at intercultural dialogue aimed at moral convergence, enhanced universalism or a Gadamerian fusion of horizons are merely uto-pian exercises in impossibility that overstate the possibility of agreement across linguistic and cultural differences.36 Although Freeden and Vincent agree with proponents of comparative political theory that it is worthwhile to study the political ideas of non-Western contexts, they distinguish their own agenda as one of comparative political thought, signaling their distance from the unifying prescriptive and ethical drive that they suggest has, regretta-bly, overtaken most of what passes for political theory.37 Similarly, Leigh Jenco argues that cross-cultural dialogue may not always minimize distor-tion . . . it may just as easily end up glossing over cultural and political differences.38




The gap between imaginary and actual intercultural dialogues prompts Antony Black to sound a second note of realist skepticism about the dialogue model. Actual dialogue requires willing partners, and they are in short supply. A lot of people, Black drily notes, are just not into dialogue.39 Often, this is because their motivations follow from power and position.40

A further line of critique focuses on the dialogue models claim to meth-odological egalitarianism that covers over more subtle forms of western domination. A dialogue must have a subject-matter, and the selection of subject-matter for dialogical exchange is a choice ridden with cultural preferencesand therefore also suffused with the power claimed by the theorist to set the terms of the conversation.41 Finally, a dialogue model pre-supposes that the core features of non-Western traditions of political thought and knowledge are expressible in discursive terms, whereas in fact the most important media for maintaining and transmitting traditions may take the form of rituals and other embodied practices, themselves part of alternative methodologies of knowledge production from which political theory might gain. The privileging of dialogue is a subspecies of the more general neglect by political theorists of non-Western epistemologies, which comes at the expense of learning from non-Western thought as a site of distinct modes of theorizing, and not only the (passive) object of (Western) theoretical analysis.42

For some, these potential pitfalls of the dialogue model of comparative political theory should point us away from dialogue in favor of approaches that are less ambitious in their normative aspirations and more hard-headedly sociological and contextual in their study of non-Western thought.43 Framed within an Austinian philosophy of language, for example, Freeden and Vincents approach aims at a clarification of the performative consequences of particular concepts in particular contexts.44 Attentiveness to the actual vocabularies of politics, and to the practices and concepts through which the political is itself delineated within a particular context, is of the utmost importance in disclosing the world of political thinking and action that orients agents in that context.45

This kind of approach to non-Western ideas in contexts bears obvious affinities to the Cambridge school history of ideas, and are a subcategory within what Andrew March calls scholarly political theory (as contrasted with engaged political theory).46 Scholarly political theory, he argues, is concerned with whether we understand well enough a given text, practice, or phenomenon. Engaged political theory, on the other hand, aims at a judgment whether some set of ideas are the right ideas for us.47 Unsurprisingly, Freeden and Vincent accept Marchs distinction and identify themselves with the scholarly or investigative variant of comparative




political theory, and contrast it with the engaged or dialogical model.48 Marchs distinction between scholarly and engaged political theory sug-gests that whereas the latter is motivated by our interest in practical reason (reaching judgments about what we ought to do), the former is driven princi-pally by our interest in knowledge for its own sake (whether out of sheer curiosity or from some other motive) and abjures from seeking guidance for practical reason in the political thought it studies.

Although we agree that engaging the political ideas of cultures different from our own is unlikely to yield moral convergence, and that theoretical construction of imaginary dialogues with culturally different others risks reproducing our own intellectual and normative biases, we want to resist the critiques of dialogue models of comparative political theory that set up a strong contrast between sociological and normative approaches to the study of non-Western thought. In fact, even in its most disengaged or scholarly forms, political theory is per se dialogical in both its method and its purpose. This is true whether it is aimed principally at accurately articulat-ing the political thought of temporally, spatially, or culturally distant othersincluding those who use non-discursive means of communicationor whether it is aimed at enhancing the quality of our first-order judgments of practical reason. With respect to method, political theory always entails an imagined dialogue with the subjects of ones study, actively searching for evidence for and against ones interpretation as a test of its accuracy. Here, the goal is to get others thought right on its own terms, which means repre-senting a system of ideas in a form that we believe they could accept as valid, and responding to imagined objections that arise from the text or context under study. That is, the most rigorous scholarship works with criteria that are intrinsically dialogical. Similarly, Roxanne Euben characterizes all political theory as inherently comparative, but also inherently dialogical in the sense that it requires acts of translationof seeing and making seen, hearing and making heard which both make sense of another and at the same time unavoidably distort the other by representing them through ones own terms of reference.49

Political theoryincluding comparative political theoryis inherently dialogical not only in its method but in its purpose as well. Understanding the thought of another time or culture undoubtedly is an intrinsic good, quite apart from its salutary consequences for our exercise of practical reason. For even the most disengaged scholars of the history of ideas, a key motivation for studying political thought is that it provides us with critical distance from our own way of thinking.50

The contextual study of political ideas may not yield a shred of guidance for our first-order normative judgments, but this is not the only way in which




it is valuable for practical reason. Arguably more important than its contribu-tion to first-order judgments is that it is among the social conditions of pos-sibility for critical reflexivity with respect to our first-order judgments. In other words, its greatest relevance to our practical reason is second-order, not first-order. The movement between the third-person (sociological or schol-arly) activity of accurately representing the thought of another may stand at many removes from the first-person (philosophical or engaged) activity of making judgments that we can justify (how else but dialogically?)but it is the movement itself that hones practical reason as a human capacity. This capacity for critical reflexivity is a contingent social achievement, stronger in some moments and locations and weaker in others. But here is the crucial, overarching point: Political theory as a discipline aims at helping to secure this achivement as a social resource for practical reason in our societiesin short, a resource for critical dialogue about what we ought to do.

Thus, the difference between approaches to political theory does not turn on whether they are investigative or dialogical, scholarly, or engaged. All political theory aims at representing and reconstructing the constellations of ideas that are embedded in a given sociohistorical context, making explicit and available for critical engagement what is otherwise implicit, hidden, or lost from view. Comparative political theory, then, is nothing other than the representation and reconstruction of systems of ideas that have arisen in cul-tures or civilizations different from our own. The intellectual challenge of accurately representing these ideational structures is, in principle, the same in either case, a difference in degree more than in kind. Making explicit the embedded ideas of our own cultures or histories serves as a resource for criti-cal reflexivity in our exercise of practical reason within our own cultural contexts. Doing so with respect to the ideas of different cultures or traditions can serve two purposes. First, it can give us the sort of critical distance that supports reflexive judgment within our own societies (knowing ourselves through knowing the other). Second, to the extent that it renders their thought intelligible to us in a form that is recognizably valid for them, the practice of comparative political theory contributes to the social conditions of possibility for the emergence of intercultural collective subjects of practical reasonthat is, intercultural publics. This purpose (or consequence) is no more uto-pian (and no less aspirational) than the idea that a reason to value political theory per se is its contribution to our social capacity for critical reflexivity.

By contributing to the conditions for mutual intelligibility across cul-tural difference, then, comparative political theory provides a partial answer to the question of how it could be possible to construct inclusive public spheres in global, transnational, or transcultural space. What remains to be shown is how action-orienting political imaginaries could be built up across




differences, and how a broad agenda of comparative political theory could play a role in building discursive capacities for democratic political action that responds to the consequences of globalization. From this perspective, we can view comparative political theory as building political capacities within communities of fate, by facilitating the mutual intelligibility of ideas across contexts and traditions, and increasing the pool of ideational resources available to those who share fates. As with all problem-attentive political theory, ideas filter up from political practices and situated debates to the level of theory, and filter down again from theory into practice when they have resonance for people seeking to address new or newly recognized problems of living-together.51 Locations and historical moments when received or dominant ideas are under pressure as a consequence of shifts in material, social, or political states of affairs (as when East Asian societies were under pressure from the threat of European and American imperialism in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries) are particularly rich moments for innovations in political thought, and hence also important sites for theoretical investigation. It follows that we should conceive of comparative political theory as engaging a wide range of ideational resources: formal scholarly work by non-Western scholars writing for aca-demic audiences in their own languages, political ideas of public intellectu-als, principles of law and formal institutional structures, normalized practices and rituals of politics, the ideas of leading political actors and opposition figures, and everyday languages and practices of politics. The aim of comparative political theory, as with all political theory, should be to render explicit the political imaginaries that are operating in the background of a given context at a particular time, in order to render them intelligible to others. If such intelligibility is possible, which is a necessary presupposi-tion of any practice of comparative political theory, then there are few rea-sons to be skeptical of the dialogue model of comparative political theory.

But there is one remaining challenge, to which we devote much of the remainder of this article. Even where there are resources for translating across culturally embedded ideas about politics, intelligibility does not by itself motivate discursive engagement. To the contrary, as noted by Antony Black and discussed in detail by Roxanne Euben in her study of Sayyid Qutb,52 comprehending the other can produce the judgment that self-distancing or active opposition are the morally required responses. Even where deep moral disagreement is not an obstacle to engagement, the question remains what could motivate agents to undertake the difficult work of dialogical engage-ment. How could comparative political theory help fill this motivational gap? There are, of course, no general answers of a kind that political theorists could offer. But we can make the problem more tractable by returning to the




account of the relationship-constituting effects of communication found in the pragmatic roots of deliberative democratic theory.

Constitutive Powers of Intercultural Communication: Mutual Intelligibility and Relational Responsibility

Our claim is that comparative political theory is a practice of communica-tiona form of conversation across boundaries of differencewhich gener-ates not only enhanced understanding but also the potential to motivate people to take up the burden of crafting shared fates and of the moral respon-sibilities that go with them. By enabling concept use across borders in ways that respond to shared fates, comparative political theory is a (potentially) constitutive activity: it provides resources for naming and representing global problems as shared fates, but also for building constituencies (or publics) by creating new ways of thinking and talking across boundaries. Insofar as com-parative political theory sets communication as its basic goal, it will also build moral resources as a consequence of its activities. To cast comparative political theory in this way is to focus on the question of what it is that ideas accomplish in establishing social relations as a consequence of being spoken, asserted, demonstrated, written down for an audience, and so on. That is, because we are interested in comparative political theory as a medium of mutual intelligibility, we are already committed to some form of pragmatism with regard to the status of ideasforms shared, roughly, by James and Dewey, Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle, Habermas and Brandom. This is the family of philosophies that (roughly) asks what claims, assertions, and the like accomplish within social life insofar as they are acts of communication. Combining these forms of pragmatism with social theories that take practices as the primary (ontological) units of analysis, while understanding structural phenomena, such as culture, rules, languages, classes, and institutions, as reproduced by practices,53 we can begin to situate comparative political the-ory as a form of communicative practice with constitutive effects.

To understand comparative political theory as a kind of social practice that works across borders and aims at mutual attentiveness and adjustment is thus to think of it as a kind of deliberative enterprisepart of the business of offer-ing and responding to reasons for decision and action. To use this term may invite misunderstanding, and so it should not be overinterpreted to imply spe-cific political institutions, systems, or models. By using the term, we are high-lighting again what we are imagining to be the central activity of political theory as such: extracting claims and positions from their taken-for-granted




contexts and transforming them into assertions, which in turn function as jus-tifications that could, in principle, be understood by others.

If this activity is possible, so too is it possible to view comparative politi-cal theory as responding to the globalizing demands for shared moral resources that respond to shared fates. The pragmatic origins of deliberative theory suggest that these moral resources are constituted just insofar as the activity of deliberation has space to exist. These moral powers are intrinsic: they flow, as it were, from what words accomplish as a consequence of their use. In the (social) world of normative orders, words are a key medium through which people assert rights and wrongs, respond to the assertions of others, and come to common understandings about the obligations, duties, and responsibilities they will commonly impose upon themselves. Where cultures are unreflexive, this process is rendered invisible by tradition and convention. Where coercive powers do the social ordering, the power of words has no space to get going. But where these spaces open upas argu-ably they do to an ever-greater degree in globalizing contexts that lack both enclosed cultures and world powersthe powers of words become more important.54 It is within these deliberative spaces that comparative political theory has a chance to fill out the vocabulary that might underwrite emergent global publics. In so doingand just insofar as it does soit aids in generat-ing the moral responses that might respond to shared fates.

The idea that words have power that is over and beyond the powers they derive from references can be found in pragmatic understandings of language. What is at issue are the social relationships established by speech acts. Speech acts both perform and disclose a social world of actors who are, in principle, solid enough that one can trust the other, in such a way that claiming and assert-ing can have force among those who are communicating.55 Although most con-temporary theorists of deliberative democracy have stressed the cognitive work that deliberation accomplishes, it is worth returning to the roots of deliberative theory in philosophical pragmatism to recover the agency- and relationship-constituting effects of deliberative exchange. Notably, Habermass theory of communicative action emphasized the social relationships that are established as a consequence of making claims, and upon which the cognitive content of claims depend for their capacities to coordinate among and between social actors.56 Following Austin, Habermas stressed the illocutionary force of speech acts:57 by promising, claiming, expressing, and so on, the speaker establishes a relationship with the listener, attributing to him/her the qualities (and moral status) of agency, of the kind that can be moved by, and commit to, promises, claims, expressions, and the like. In short, the work accomplished by delibera-tion is in part about what is deliberated: conflicts, claims, values, information, and matters of substance, communicated through language. But it is in part




about the relationships that are established as a consequence of speaking and listeningrelationships that constitute speakers as agents who have the kind of solidity others can trust.

In order to grasp the powers of speech (upon which, we are suggesting, the morally constitutive powers of comparative political theory depend), then, we need to understand this process of social construction that is the residue, as it were, of speech. We find even more help in Robert Brandoms philoso-phy of language. Brandom emphasizes the essentially normative character of language use with the evocative image of discursive practice as deontic scorekeeping: the significance of a speech act is how it changes what com-mitments and entitlements one attributes and acknowledges58 (emphasis added). When I speak or act, I entitle you to expect from me that which is implicit in my claim or action. I take on an obligation with respect to you. If you respond to what I have said, you take on an obligation with respect to me, as stated or implied in your response. In this way, scorekeepers are licensed to infer our beliefs from our intentional actions (in context of course), as well as from our speech acts.59

Knowing how to use language is doubly constitutive of social relation-ships and individual agency. On the one hand, to know how to use language is to know how to go on from the rules, expectations, and norms expressed in speech acts.60 On the other hand, in the practice of going on, from utter-ance to utterance, speakers build up a regard for one another as agents who can be held responsible for the inferences that follow from their statements. Language use is in this way linked intrinsically to the constitution of social relationsand by extension, publicsof a normatively thick kind: through communication, each individual becomes an author of claims in such a way that others can infer from these claims agent-like capacities to commit, and to take responsibility for commitments.61 These webs of commitments enable individuals to move through society with a trust that others are not only non-arbitrary in their actions but that the rules of social engagement can, in prin-ciple, be figured out, negotiated through language where necessary, and then relied upon. This is one and the same process by which ongoing social rela-tionships are established, and common action is rendered possible:

The complete and explicit interpretive equilibrium exhibited by a community whose members adopt the explicit discursive stance toward one another is social self-consciousness. Such a community not only is a we, its members can in the fullest sense say we.62

The practice of giving and asking for reasons for belief and action is in principle the same whether communication takes place within a natural




language community or in an interlinguistic exchange.63 In Human Rights and Chinese Thought, Stephen Angle builds on Brandoms theory to argue that a communicative practice of translating concepts across cultures is pos-sible even under circumstances where few if any shared meanings have been established.64 Consequently, he argues, even in cases of deep conceptual dif-ference (and therefore also of normative difference) we should treat cultures as incommensurate rather than incommensurable: whether mutual incompre-hensibility yields to mutual intelligibility is primarily a function of actors choices about whether and how to engage in practices of communication. The choice to do so begins with a willingness to grant interlocutors the status of normative agency in Brandoms sense, just because they seek to motivate others through language use. To grant others this status is not the same thing as to share concepts with them, or even to treat shared concepts, shared understanding, or moral agreement as the goal of communication. Rather, engaging in the practice of communication simply entails taking seriously the claims of those with whom one shares fewer implicit understandings than those more familiar, with the aim of grasping the intelligibility of their nor-mative commitments, and (reflexively) those commitments in oneself they may seek to understand and motivate. Through a rich historical analysis of the conceptual and philosophical debates that eventually produced the Chinese concept of quanli as a term for translating rights, for example, Angle shows that Chinese thought discloses an abundance of conceptual resources for a rights discourse, but one that does not simply converge with Western rights discourses. [N]ot only is there a distinctive Chinese discourse about rights, but also there is a distinctive American discourse, a French dis-course, and so on. All interact, all are dynamic, all are internally contested.65 Nonetheless, mapping the pluralism both within and across these different rights discourses enables them to become recognizable as coherent normative positions, available for critical engagement from both internal and external perspectives.

Although Angle does invoke the contemporary dynamics of globalization as an impetus for engaging in cross-cultural normative inquiry,66 neither he nor Brandom is focused on practices of intercultural communication as a stepping stone to the deliberative democratization of global processes. In general, the project of deliberative democratic theory involves understanding how to structure societies so that language does more of the work of consti-tuting social relationships, while relations of coercion, domination, oppres-sion, etc., do less. But because we are used to understanding these strategies as institutions (of rights, voting, protected speech, etc.), we do not want to lose the important point that these constitutive features of communication often work across boundaries just because the institutional contexts are less




certain. While we need to understand the risks of replicating, for example, colonial or neocolonial outlooks, neither should we overlook the potentials that come, humbly enough, with simple acts of responsive communication. By highlighting the moral powers of communication and illuminating the potential of cross-cultural communication to enable the mutual intelligibility of conceptual frames, Brandom and Angle give us resources for seeing com-parative political theory as a discursive project. This project makes sense philosophically as (potentially) generative of mutual intelligibility at the level of normative concepts, and it makes sense sociologically as (poten-tially) generative of new communicative communities, new spaces of we-ness. It makes sense politically and democratically if these communities support emergent global publics, and if these publics transform shared affect-ednessshared fatesinto new, post-Westphalian constituencies. The dis-cursive construction of these publics does not depend on a fusion of horizons or the emergence of more genuine universals with respect to normative claims. It proceeds more modestly, stepwise, each time acts of translation provide the media of communication that make it possible for interlocutors to go on in a conversation.

The pragmatist view of the socially constitutive dynamics of communica-tion, then, supplements and reinforces a problem-centered view of agents motivation to participate in emergent global publics. Motivation is generated by two distinct dynamics: first, the recognition of forms of human vulnerabil-ity that exceed national boundaries and require a political response; and sec-ond, once a practical discourse aimed at responsiveness gets going, it can generate its own motivational force. To be sure, communication can break down and actors can defect to other agendas. But in principle neither the bar-riers to mutual comprehensibility nor those to sustained motivation to engage in cross-cultural discourse are insuperable.

The Logic of Problem-Driven Comparative Political Theory: A Brief Sketch

We have argued that although multilinguistic, multicultural, and multiexperi-ential contexts may pose different kinds and levels of challenge for under-standing, they are not essentially different from everyday uses in their pragmatic characteristics. Nor is there a necessary difference in the discur-sive spacesthe publicsthat are constituted as a consequence of people seeking to represent problems and influence others through language. The challenges of working across cultural contexts, however, suggest a self-con-scious approach, even a method, for the construction of action-guiding




understanding. Everyday communication typically brings with it the need to thematize a few areas of disagreement against implicit, usually unspoken, background understandings that accomplish much of the work of communi-cation (and which, of course, can also hide injustices). In cross-cultural con-texts, it will often be the case that little is sharedor seen to be sharedwithout very conscious attentiveness to translation, broadly understood. A pragmatist reconstruction of the work of comparative political theory suggests a logic of inquiry that proceeds through a progressive series of questions. Although scholarly work could be focused on any one of these stages, it is the implicit linkages between them that bind the broad endeavor of comparative political theory to the morally generative and discursively constructed character of global publics and the democratic possibilities that can follow from them. We can identify (and stylize) five distinct stages of this progress:

Empathy

The process of the cross-cultural translation of human vulnerabilities into frames for political action begins, first, with basic empathetic recognition. Empathy responds to problems that are, as it were, recognizably human, in that they count as problems in any context: war and insecurity, deprivation, oppression, dislocation, rapid social change of the kinds that disorders future planning, despoiled commons, and so on. Of course, without the perspective that follows from representing problems as problems, many of these features and conditions of human collectivities will count as nature rather than problems that might elicit recognition of common experiences. But that is what globalization brings: as we suggested above, it is productive of prob-lematics in this very basic sense, in part because imageries and experiences now travel, often instantaneously, with the help of technology. A pragmatic approach to comparative political theory will begin, then, by looking for problems that are recognized as such across contexts.

Representation

However powerful empathetic recognitions might prove to be, empathy is not sufficient to generate common problem definitions. Every context is already framed with received cultures, ideologies, justifications, and other normative resources. So the real work of cross-cultural comparison begins by articulat-ing the linguistic and conceptual frames through which human vulnerabilities are represented as problems to which human agents should respondespe-cially those with shared fates that denote potential communities or constitu-encies. What are the words (and images) used to depict the problem? What




rules, conceptions, and theories of justification or legitimacy are implied in these usages? Finding out will mean, often, not just cross-cultural translation and comparison, but also intracultural comparison, as people situated differ-ently with respect to class, caste, status, occupation, gender, religion, ethnic-ity, neighborhood, region, and other divisions and locations within the same societies and discourses will have different experiences and problems. Sometimes similarly situated subgroups across societies share more by way of common problem frames than do agents within the same societies, as in the case of transnational movements for the rights of Indigenous peoples, for example. We should never read in internal cultural consensus, which not only risks using comparative political theory to uncritically affirm the practices of others (and to commit the theoretical and ideological sin of essentialism), but also risks viewing the other as depoliticized, unengaged in practices of internal criticism. Critique of a problem frame does not need to rely on norms external to the context. Even in relatively stable caste systems, James Scott has shown us, those who are disadvantaged use the rules of the upper castes for normative leverage.67 Peasants in China are not afraid to use Confucian norms to justify their resistance to corrupt or underperforming officials.68 In other words, comparative political theory should attend not only to the con-stellations of ideas at work in the legitimation of power but also the terms through which power is resisted within a given context. Both perspectives are pertinent to the reconstruction and representation of problems as problems within a given context.

Translation

Third, we should ask how the construction of problems fits within the larger constellation of locally embedded norms of responsibility and relationship, a process that enables the mapping and translation of problem frames across contexts. Much of the work of comparative political theory is (and should be) focused here: on language use and contexts of usage that make terms of polit-ical discourse accessible and intelligible across languages, historical moments, and cultures. Clearly, the selection of contexts and concepts for translation across discourses is far from a neutral practice: it is always-already laden with the cognitive and political commitments of the agent who is undertaking the translation. But the larger task of comparative political the-ory is to select for translation those constellations of concepts that are most revealing of the background political imaginary that orients agents in a par-ticular context. A problem-centered approach to translation posits a shared problem experiences as an object of concern in two or more linguistic or




cultural contexts and works to render their orientations toward common problems mutually intelligible.

Discourse

As understandings are compared and calibrated across languages and cul-tures, problematics can be framed as discourses, composed of linked claims and assertions. At this point, comparative political theory converges with the possibilities and ethos of deliberative democracy, in the generic sense that individuals coming from different perspectives can explain, share, compare, argue, and deliberate. Ideally, comparative political theory is generative of new discourses that attend to globalized relationships of fate, and contribute to emergent publics. That such generation is possible is one of the lessons from pragmatic theories of language. That it is probable is clear from the rapid development of human rights and democracy discourses, in virtually every political context around the globe.

Action

Finally, though common discourses are not always action-guiding, they are a condition of possibility for action-in-concert: mobilization, institutional change, legitimation of practices or institutions. When discourses are politi-cal in the sense that they orient action, they recursively (re)define the topics of comparative political theory. To the extent that comparative political the-ory participates in developing these discourses, it fulfills its role of a prob-lem-driven discourse of mutual justification, and responds to shared fates for which there are common responsibilities.

Histories of the Future: Directions for Comparative Political Theory

Our argument for comparative political theory has focused on its potential contributions to global democracy, just insofar as it furthers critical reflex-ivity across cultural and linguistic boundariesa condition for fashioning collective futures. The value of these contributions consists in rendering accessible the background social imaginaries that orient political action in different linguistic and cultural contexts, including the deep conceptual structures of space, time, and causality that underwrite understandings of the spatiotemporal boundaries of community, membership, and moral obli-gation in every culture. Because social imaginaries are deeply rooted in




language, history, and culture, a comparative political theory capable of offering translations across imaginaries must be informed by advanced lin-guistic knowledge and astute empirical analysis of the contexts within which political ideas do their work of orienting action and structuring rela-tions of power. In this sense, the pragmatic foundations of both their argu-ment and ours lead us to agree wholeheartedly with Freeden and Vincent when they suggest that the task of comparative political theory begins by articulating the constructions of the political that operate in the back-ground of particular cultural and historical contexts.69

This work of reconstructing political imaginaries should proceed both at the most abstract levels of ontology and at the minute level of the phenome-nology of political action. At one end of this spectrum, Youngmin Kims Cosmogony as Political Philosophy delves into a close reading of canoni-cal debates over a Song Dynasty Confucian classic on the origins and nature of the world, showing that they provide a unique window onto changes in Confucian political philosophy in late Imperial China.70 At the other end, Lam Wai-Mans meticulous study of hybrid conceptions of political legiti-macy in contemporary Hong Kong traces popular views of legitimacy to both Chinese cultural roots (specifically, Confucian ideas of minben or people-centered rule) and to Western ones.71 Sudipta Kaviraj traverses the entire spectrum between ontology and phenomenology in his study of the evolution of the Sanskritic concept of rajanitithe principles or precepts (niti) appro-priate to rulers (raja)from premodern India to the present.72 In this brilliant study, Kaviraj argues that contemporary shortfalls in an ethos of democratic accountability among political leaders can be traced to older meanings of rajaniti as a transcendentally ordained caste-specific morality, read into mod-ern politics as a para-royal attitude on the part of officials and a corre-sponding stance of abject supplication on the part of citizens. This interpretation of the power of political language to shape social relations offers a novel perspective on what otherwise tends to be figured simply as corruption in contemporary Indian politics.

Kavirajs study exemplifies a form of comparative political theory as a history of the present (to borrow Foucaults apt phrase) that is particularly promising for the agenda we advocate here. As Roxanne Euben argues, this kind of approach is no longer of interest only to scholarly specialists, for the imperatives of geopolitics have lent a new sense of urgency to attempts to bring these pasts into an often presentist social science.73 The logic of this mode of inquiry is to begin from contemporary problem frames (such as political corruption in India) and, through careful attention to the terms of political discourse actually deployed by contemporary actors, conduct a his-tory (or genealogy) of ideas in order to disclose the political imaginary within




which they are sense-making, action-orienting concepts. Beginning from the terms that circulate in contemporary political discourse is important for the case we are making, as this is the strategy that will enable us to reconstruct, and therefore translate across and reflexively engage, the political imaginar-ies that orient agents in the present historical momentincluding ourselves. Tracing the different pathways by which we have arrived at the present, then, is invaluable groundwork for the task of crafting possible futures in which we can imagine ourselves as equal agents.

As Kaviraj and others suggest, the advent of modernity in different global locations is a critically important juncture for these histories of the present. The odd case of people armed with one set of conceptual tools fac-ing and having to deal with institutions and practices based on concepts of a different culture, he writes, has become a constant, repetitive fact of mod-ern life.74 Focusing our attention on the moments when modernity intrudes into long-established modes of life, whether through colonialism, violence, or more subtle pathways, is especially promising for political theory because these moments are often crucibles for both new forms of thought and innova-tive practices. Kaviraj again sums up the point nicely: one might ask [of such moments] what new types of practices were being made possible by these conceptual changes.75

In East Asia, a pivotal moment was the Meiji revolution in Japan, a pro-gram of astonishingly rapid self-imposed modernization understood as the only course for resisting Euro-American imperialism. A particularly fascinat-ing object of study is the proliferation during this period of compounds based on the word min, or people, a Chinese character that is also used in both Japanese and Korean. Following an early period of terminological innovation in Japan, which was closely followed in China and influenced intellectuals both there and in Korea, political discourse crystallized around variations of these terms that linked to modern ideological programs of ethnonationalism, liberalism, and socialism.76 Understanding the history of these discourses is crucial to making sense of political imaginaries in contemporary Asia, as Chinese intellectual historian Wang Hui argues:

The commonality of Asian imaginaries partly derives from subordinate status under European colonialism, during the Cold War, as well as in the current global order, and also arises out of Asian movements for national self-determination, socialism, and colonial liberation. If we fail to acknowledge these historical conditions and movements we will not be able to understand the implications of modernity for Asia. . . . If it can be said that the socialist and national liberation movements of the twentieth century have drawn to a close, their fragmentary remains can still be a vital source for stimulating new ways of imagining Asia.77




Wangs account of the relationship between past, present, and future polit-ical imaginaries aligns well with the potential of comparative political theory to contribute to the formation of new political imaginaries in a global future. Since we are, all of us, now moderns, in that our lives are inescapably struc-tured by such institutions such as states, markets, hybrid cultures, ever-changing technologies, and global interaction, the diverse histories of the present for the peoples of the world cannot avoid becoming a study of mul-tiple modernities,78 alternative modernities,79 or modernity at large.80 To this degree, political theory has a great deal of catching up to do with cultural studies, subaltern studies, and comparative religion, among other fields. What distinguishes the project of comparative political theory from these approaches is, again, its orientation to the study of ideas as a resource for practical reason in the present, guiding action toward a future we might want to inhabit. By reconstructing the political imaginaries that already oper-ate in the background of our words and deeds, comparative political theory reveals those often forgotten resources and influences that make us who we are as well as what we might become.

We have argued that there is a conceptual and practical link between glo-balization, deliberative democratic theory, and the academic field of com-parative political theory. These themes are connected by the idea that the human-scale problems characteristic of intensive processes of globalization can be addressed in a democratic form only under conditions where it is pos-sible for citizens around the world to form, mostly through discourse, shared political imaginaries: to see themselves not only as connected to one another but also as possessing the ethical responsibility and the agent-capacity to render these processes responsive to those whom they affect. Since the for-mation of imagined communities of shared fate is linguistically mediated, people who seek to assert democratic agency in response to shared problems need ideational resources that resonate with locally embedded understand-ings of ethics and politics in order for mutual interdependence and affected-ness to generate newly imagined common futures. We have highlighted the contributions of comparative political theory to the common pool of ide-ational resources from which political actors can draw in discovering the languages through which to construct new, democracy-enabling, political imaginaries. Drawing on theoretical accounts of the pragmatics of language use, we have suggested that comparative political theory can help to render articulate and explicit an array of ideas about politics that, when taken up by political actors, can help to motivate citizens to take responsibility for render-ing the processes of globalization in ways that provide the spaces, practices, and emergent institutions of democracy across borders.




Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous research support of the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Versions of this article were presented at the American Political Science Association, the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, the Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, and the Department of Political Science, Waseda University, and we wish to thank audiences for helpful feedback. We also wish to thank colleagues who provided us with generous comments on the paper: Brooke Ackerly, Kiran Banerjee, Joseph Carens, Burke Hendrix, David Laycock, and Jade Schiff. Particular thanks go to Rmi Lger for suggesting a new title for the piece.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. The prevailing terms denoting the study of non-Western political thought by scholars located within the Western academy are comparative politi-cal theory (e.g., Roxanne Euben, Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism, The Journal of Politics 59, no. 1 [1997]: 28-55), comparative political philosophy (e.g., Anthony J. Parel and Ronald C. Keith, eds., Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1992]; Stephen C. Angle, Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]), and comparative political thought (e.g., Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent, Introduction: The Study of Comparative Political Thought, in Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices, ed. Michael Freeden and Andrew Vincent [London: Routledge, 2013], 123). Yet as Andrew March stresses, not all work engaging non-Western ideas about politics is methodologi-cally comparative (Andrew March, What Is Comparative Political Theory? The Review of Politics 71 [2009]: 53165). Leigh Jencos study of the politi-cal theory of the early twentieth-century Chinese thinker Zhang Shizhao explic-itly resists the label of comparative political theory to describe her endeavor (Leigh K. Jenco, Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 9). Wendy Brown has a point when she suggests that it is rather offensive to use the term comparative to denote non-Western (as in empirical political science




comparative too often denotes non-American): the terminology simply rein-scribes the privilege it purports to resist (Wendy Brown, Political Theory is Not a Luxury: A Response to Timothy Kaufman-Osborns Political Theory as a Profession, Political Research Quarterly 63, no. 3 [2010]: 684). For these rea-sons, we would prefer to use the terms intercultural or transcultural to denote the sort of political theory we have in mind, but reluctantly follow prevailing usage in this article. As Farah Godrej notes, the name has stuck, and compara-tive political theory continues to be associated with a general inclusivity, open-ness toward and a deep curiosity about otherness. Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7.

2. Though we have both made interventions around its edges. See, e.g., Baogang He and Mark E. Warren, Authoritarian Deliberation: The Deliberative Turn in Chinese Politics, Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 2 (2011): 26989; Melissa S. Williams, Criminal Justice, Democratic Fairness, and Cultural Pluralism: The Case of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, Buffalo Criminal Law Journal 5, no. 2 (2002): 45195; Melissa S. Williams, Sharing the River: Aboriginal Representation in Canadian Political Institutions, in Representation and Democratic Theory, ed. David Laycock (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 93118.

3. Fred Dallmayr, who has done exemplary work in fostering the development of comparative political theory, cites bi- or multilingualism as a qualifying criterion for comparative political theorists. Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 2 (2004): 24957.

4. E.g., Michaelle L. Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006); Joseph Chan, A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights for Contemporary China, in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21237; Joseph Chan, Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties, and Confucianism, Philosophy East and West 52, no. 3 (2002): 281310; Joseph Chan, Democracy and Meritocracy: Toward a Confucian Perspetive, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2007): 17993; Fred Dallmayr, ed., Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought; Leigh K. Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say? A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement, American Political Science Review 101, no. 4 (2007): 74155; Jenco, Making the Political; Youngmin Kim, Cosmogony as Political Philosophy, Philosophy East and West 58, no. 1 (2008): 108125; Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?; Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Paradoxes of Popular Sovereignty:




A View from Spanish America, Journal of Politics 74, no. 4 (2012): 105365; Diego A. von Vacano, The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Hiroshi Watanabe, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 16001901 (Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2012).

5. Or, alternatively, to provincialize Western political thought, i.e., to demar-cate it as a culturally, historically, and geographically specific human tradi-tion. This construction leans on the felicitous coinage of Dipesh Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

6. See, e.g., David Held, Democracy and Globalization, Global Governance 3, no. 3 (1997): 25167.

7. John Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations, International Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 13974.

8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Barry Gills, Empire versus Cosmopolis: The Clash of Globalizations, Globalizations 2, no. 1 (2005): 513; Nisha Shah, Cosmopolis or Empire? Metaphors of Globalization and the Description of Legitimate Political Communities, in Unsettled Legitimacy: Political Community, Power, and Authority in a Global Era, ed. Steven Bernstein and William D. Coleman (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 7494; Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and Herbert Reiter, Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Sally Engle Merry, Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle, American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 3851; Mark Goodale, The Power of Right(s): Tracking Empires of Law and New Modes of Social Resistance in Bolivia (and Elsewhere), in The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, ed. Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

9. We follow Archibugi et al. (Daniele Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti, Introduction: Mapping Global Democracy, in Global Democracy: Normative and Empirical Perspectives, ed. Daniele Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 8.) in the usage of democratic polycentrism.

10. Thomas Pogge, Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty, Ethics 103, no. 1 (1992): 4875; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

11. See, e.g., Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 3.




12. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, chap. 1; Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, chap. 6; see also Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Cosmopolitanisms, Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 57789; Carole Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jos Casanova, Cosmopolitanism, the Clash of Civilizations, and Multiple Modernities, Current Sociology 59, no. 2 (2011): 25267.

13. E.g., Will Kymlicka, Citizenship in an Era of Globalization: Commentary on Held, in Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Dennis F. Thompson, Democratic Theory and Global Society, Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 11125; Robert Goodin, Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives, Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 4068.

14. Even before the latest round of globalization, and still more after, it has simply ceased to be the case that the effects of our actions and choices stop at the territo-rial boundaries of our own countries. Democratically, we really ought to recon-stitute our demos to reflect that fact: ideally including within it everyone whose interests are affected by our actions and choices, or at the very least adapting democratic practice within our unjustifiably restricted demos to reflect its demo-cratic shortcomings in that respect (Robert E. Goodin, Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 5-6; for a similar point, see James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Dmos to Dmois [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007], 45.)

15. Michael Goodhart, Europes Democratic Deficits through the Looking Glass, Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (2007): 56784, 579.

16. John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 158; Bohman, Democracy across Borders, 21.

17. From this standpoint, it is a weakness of List and Koenig-Archibugis agency model of a global demos that a collectivity be able to exercise statelike pow-ers in order to be counted as a demos: The key condition for functioning as a demos is . . . [that] [t]he collection of individuals in question has the capacity (not necessarily actualized) to be organized, in a democratic manner, in such a way as to function as a state-like group agent. Christian List and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Can There Be a Global Demos? An Agency-Based Approach, Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010): 76110, 89.

18. E.g., Joshua Cohen and Charles F. Sabel, Global Democracy? International Law and Politics 37 (2005):76397; Bohman, Democracy across Borders; Benedict Kingsbury, International Law as Inter-Public Law, in NOMOS XLIX: Moral Universalism and Pluralism, ed. Henry S. Richardson and Melissa S. Williams (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 167204; Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics; Tully, Public Philosophy; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation,




Development 48, no. 2 (2005): 1522; List and Koenig-Archibugi, Can There Be a Global Demos?; Robert E. Goodin, Global Democracy: In the Beginning, International Theory 2, no. 2 (2010): 175209.

19. Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Nancy Fraser, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World, in Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4566; Bohman, Democracy across Borders, 6061; John S. Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 9.

20. Fraser, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere; Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers, 185.

21. Melissa S. Williams, Citizenship as Agency within Communities of Shared Fate, in Unsettled Legitimacy: Political Community, Power, and Authority in a Global Era, ed. Steven Bernstein and William D. Coleman (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009).

22. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 81; David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 309.

23. Gould, Globalizing Democracy, 170.24. E.g., Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Goodin, Enfranchising All Affected Interests; Bohman, Democracy across Borders; cf. Sofia Nsstrm, The Challenge of the All-Affected Principle, Political Studies 59, no. 1 (2011): 11634.

25. Iris Marion Young, Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination and Responsibility for Justice (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

26. Michael Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory, Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008):387412.

27. See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19596; Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 180; Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Browers, Democracy and Civil Society; Jeong-Woo Koo, The Origins of the Public Sphere and Civil Society: Private Academies and Petitions in Korea, 15061800, Social Science




History 31, no. 3 (2007): 381409; Miriam Hoexter, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Nehemia Levtzion, eds., The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies (Albany: State University of New York, 2002).

28. Roxanne Euben, Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism, Journal of Politics 29, no. 1 (1997): 2855, 33.

29. It is worth noting, however, that one of the earliest contributions to the agenda of comparative political philosophy was framed not in terms of globalization but in terms of debates over multiculturalism and particularly the canon wars in academia. (Stephen G. Salkever and Michael Nylan, Comparative Political Philosophy and Liberal Education: Looking for Friends in History, PS: Political Science and Politics 27, no. 2 [1994]: 23847.) As we note below, there is a deep continuity between debates over the politics of difference or the pol-itics of recognition in the 1990s and contemporary contributions to intercultural and postcolonial political theory. The link is that both are part of an ongoing critique of the excessive or false universalisms characteristic of Western political thought, many of which were brought out in the 1980s in feminist contributions to political theory.

30. Dallmayr (Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Dallmayr, Beyond Monologue.

31. Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory, 10.32. Ibid., 15.33. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 540.34. Ibid., 54041; see also Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 42; Daniel A. Bell, East

Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11.

35. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 565; see also Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory, 15; March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 6364, 27374.

36. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 7; see also Hassan Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 31.

37. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 8.38. Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say? 745; see also Freeden and Vincent,

Introduction, 7.39. Antony Black, The Way Forward in Comparative Political Thought, Journal of

International Political Theory 7, no. 2 (2011): 22128, 224.40. Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other.41. Black, The Way Forward, 225; see also Ken Tsutsumibayashi, Fusion of

Horizons or Confusion of Horizons? Intercultural Dialogue and Its Risks, Global Governance 11, no. 1 (2005): 10314; Leigh Jenco, Recentering Political Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality, Cultural Critique 79 (2011): 2759, 30; Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other, 21.

42. Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say?; Jenco, Recentering Political Theory; Jenco, On the Possibility of Chinese Thought as Global Theory, in Chinese Thought as Global Social Theory, ed. Leigh Jenco (forthcoming). We are also indebted to Tobold Rollo for conversations around these points.




43. E.g., Black, The Way Forward.44. Michael Freeden, Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking,

Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 (2007): 19, 7.45. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 21.46. March writes: Certainly, intellectual historians (whether Cambridge School or

other) do not all assume that their thinkers and texts are potential sources for first-order normative commitments on our part; in fact, it is hard to imagine a less engaged approach to the history of political thought (March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 549).

47. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 53435.48. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 67.49. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 43.50. See Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,

History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1968): 353, 53.51. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western

Political Thought, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 1; Ian Shapiro, Problems, Methods, and Theories: Or What Is Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It, Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 596619; Jane Mansbridge, Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System, in Deliberative Politics, ed. Stephen Macedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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