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In recent years, two movements have emerged which should interest to political theorists. First, “cosmopolitanism” has become the focus of much normative interest within political theory. Simultaneously, political theory has seen the emergence of a sub-field calling itself “comparative political theory,” seeking to introduce non-Western perspectives into familiar debates about human problems. This chapter suggests that each of the above movements, while generally welcome, is characterized by important gaps that deserve sustained attention: in one case, the lack of any reflection on what the recent development of cosmopolitan discourse mean for political theory and for the activity of political theorizing in particular, and in the other case, the relative scarcity of self-conscious methodological reflection within the emerging field calling itself comparative political theory. This chapter identifies the central aporiae in each of these literatures, and argues that they are not unrelated. Political theory itself can evolve toward cosmopolitanism only when explorations of “comparative” political thought occur at the center, rather than at the margins of, the discipline. The chapter articulates the necessity of this cosmopolitan intervention into the modes of political theorizing. It summarizes the various methodological claims and reflections that constitute this intervention, and follow throughout the book.

This chapter explains further the idea of an overlapping consensus and the interest in arguing for one across multiple ethical traditions, showing that this interest is primarily derived from the desire for social stability and solidarity, rather than first-order philosophical moral justification. The chapter surveys the justificatory theories of John Rawls’s political liberalism and Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, as well as the relativist critiques of Rorty and Fish, arguing that there is a basic agreement that the justification of liberal norms from within a particular religious tradition is of primarily political interest, rather than philosophical. It closes with a defense of justificatory comparative political theory primarily aimed at refuting the charge of cultural hegemony and clarifying the nature of the “liberal bias” involved. The central argument is that this inquiry is ultimately deeply respectful of Islam as an autonomous source of ethical thought and motivation, which is compatible with criticism of specific doctrines or practices.

This chapter maps out the key arguments, theoretical approaches, analytical assumptions, and methodology that shape this study. The emerging sub-discipline of comparative political theory is discussed and an argument is advanced as to why this book should be viewed as a contribution to this new discipline of political science. Furthermore, the intellectual context that has informed the academic and intellectual debate both on the relationship between religion and democracy in general and Islam and liberal democracy in particular is discussed with special attention to the post-Cold War and post-September 11, 2001 context. A definition of terms such as religion and liberal democracy is provided along a discussion of the theoretical tensions between the two. A detailed chapter overview and summary appears along with a concluding discussion about the salience of this inquiry for our world today.

Arguing that political theory is an irremediably Western and liberal enterprise, this chapter shows that it is a discipline that does not seek to accurately represent and explain an object, but is rather knowledge “for,” performance rather than representation. The discipline is directed toward the public sphere, imagined as a realm of individuals possessed of their own “values” who, however, inhabit a common world and engage in rational, critical debate about that which they hold in common. It thus “performs” the liberal conviction that differing moral and political viewpoints being ineliminable, they must contend with each other in rational argument in a public sphere not itself marked by a commitment to any moral or political view. Recognizing the parochialism and Eurocentrism of these presumptions, some scholars have recently attempted to “deprovincialize” political theory by extending its geographical and cultural remit through “comparative political theory.” The chapter evaluates the success and shortcomings of these endeavors.

In this interconnected age, political theorists have joined other scholars in reconsidering whether their discipline speaks to contemporary problems—whether the discipline of political theory is appropriately global in scope. While some scholars have championed new schools of thinking—comparative, contemporary cosmopolitan, and postcolonial—substantial resources exist in the history of Western political thought for the cultivation of a global political theory. Those resources are to be found in a travel-story tradition that has long been neglected by political theorists but which is foundational to the development of Western political theory. This tradition dates back to the ancient Greek practice of theoria, which established a mode of engaging with the world that directly speaks to the present, when politics are inescapably global, hybrid, and multicultural in scope. Traveling back in the travel-story tradition gives us one of the strongest foundations for moving forward to a truly global political theory.

Focusing on the writings of Confucius and the Confucian tradition, Joel Jay Kassiola argues that looking beyond the Western political thought makes obvious sense in an era of globalization and planetary environmental crisis; moreover, such a move enables us to escape the narrow perspectives that have contributed to our ecological predicament. Confucius and Confucianism provide a particularly valuable understanding of our times: Confucius wrote in response to a society that, like our own, was confused and bewildered by a transformative moment in history and widespread sense of perceived crisis; Confucius valued past teachings and thus offered an intergenerational perspective; and the later Confucian tradition advanced a cosmology attuned to an ecological perspective. While Western religious cosmology envisions a discrete moment of creation by a divine creator, a view that fosters a dualism of humanity and nature, Neo-Confucian thought sees nature as always existing in an endless, ongoing process of creation. Furthermore, the Confucian tradition is non-anthropocentric, as it posits a fundamental continuity and unity among humanity, Heaven, and Earth, a view that, in turn, entails respect and care for nonhuman nature.

This conclusion explains how creolizing political theory is different from the comparative political theory of Fred Dallmayr, Roxanne Euben, Michaelle Browers, Leigh Jenco, Farah Godrej, and Andrew March, on the one hand, and work on processes of disavowal by Sibylle Fischer and on moments of universal history by Susan Buck-Morss, on the other. While creating professional space to study political thought beyond the U.S. and Western Europe, focus in comparative political theory has been monopolized by East Asia, East India, and Muslim worlds to the exclusion of African, Caribbean, Latin and Native American ones. Work on disavowal and universal history has illuminated the larger historical patterns of such exclusions but often with some skepticism about the possibility of forging more viable, inclusive political collectivities. Creolization then draws on both academic developments while being far less reluctant about how we can forge new creolizing alternatives. Finally, creolized approaches are compared with problem-driven research within political science.

The Introduction lays out the book’s historical-comparative approach, explaining how combining the history of political ideas and comparative political theory (CPT) enhances the rigor of both areas of study. It outlines the major analytic challenges facing this approach, including cultural reductionism, authorial intention, and chronological precision. To address these challenges, it then explains how one must locate inter-cultural categories and concepts as well as specific intra-cultural concepts and terminology to reconstruct and compare differences and similarities of meaning across cultural boundaries. Subsequently, the chapter explains how such historical-comparative analysis builds upon existing positions in comparative and environmental political theory by attending to premodern traditions, including a concept (rule) that has been generally neglected. Finally, it explains how poetry and kingship supply important hinges for comparing Greek and Indian thought, further addressing conceptual and terminological issues that follow from this analytic pairing.

This is an introduction to the volume as a whole. The editors, Peter F. Cannavò and Joseph H. Lane Jr., summarize the origins and history of environmental political theory and discuss the need for a volume like Engaging Nature and how this book goes beyond past studies of environmental perspectives in the political theory canon. The editors present their scholarly approach in choosing the particular theorists to profile, discuss the intended audience for the book, and summarize the individual essays. They also highlight the need for academics to go beyond the Western political theory tradition and develop more scholarship in comparative environmental political theory.

Both Chinese thinkers of a century ago and contemporary scholars struggle with the realization that their received modes of viewing the world derive not from universally accessible and transparent foundations but from local, historically situated traditions of thought. These parallels suggest that the Western Learning conversations examined in this book can be read as more than simply the instrumental rhetoric of self-colonization or the mark of the inevitable demise of “Confucian China” in the face of Western modernity. Rather, these conversations offer more general methodological lessons about how individuals and societies might confront their own ethnocentrism by learning from cultural others in radically self-transformative ways, contributing to debates in comparative political theory and postcolonial studies.

The introduction explains the hemispheric geographic and conceptual frame developed in the book in order to map the intellectual connections and political genealogies of two subaltern traditions of racial thought: Latin American and US African American political thought. It lays out the book’s methodological approach, which is one of juxtaposition, in order to avoid some of the pitfalls of comparison. It also traces the common discursive field within which Frederick Douglass, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos were operating, which was the scientific racism that dominated US and European intellectual circles from the second half of the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century.

The introduction argues that Western political theory has overlooked the political philosophy of Buddhism, and that it would benefit from engaging with Buddhism as a political theory. The Buddhist political philosophy rests on three ideas, which are both similar to and different from the concerns of Western scholars: that human beings are not selves; that politics is necessary but not very important; and that moral norms are advice for wise living rather than categorical obligations. The introduction summarizes the author’s understandings of political theory and Buddhism generally, and argues that Western political theorists stand to benefit from learning more about Buddhism.

This chapter examines the political theory found in the primary texts of early Buddhism and related contemporary scholarship. It argues that the early texts contain both a theory of government, which endorses enlightened monarchy based on a primitive social contract, and a political theory, which rests on the ideas that human beings are not selves, that politics is necessary but not very important, and that moral norms are advice rather than absolute duties. This reading directly contradicts the long Western tradition of seeing Buddhism as anti-political. It also argues that modern readings of the Buddhist political tradition as republican are mistaken.

The conclusion develops the implications of hemispheric juxtaposition for comparative political theory, and for African American studies, Latin American studies, and Latino studies. It explains how a hemispheric intellectual genealogy of racial thought in the Americas transforms our understanding of each of these thinkers: Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos. It also highlights two key theoretical concepts constitutive of racial thought in the Americas that emerge from the hemispheric analysis in this book: an expanded notion of democratic fugitivity informed by black fugitivity, and the concept of mestizo futurism.

This study asks, “How does democratic governance and economic development differ when founded on Eastern, Buddhist principles, rather than dominant Western, liberal, and Enlightenment values and beliefs?” The small, remote country of Bhutan, the only democratic, market-based state in the world rooted constitutionally and culturally in Mahayana Buddhist principles and ethics, provides a heuristic case study for comparing two distinct approaches to democracy and development. Because the two approaches—Eastern and Western—are based on distinctive philosophical traditions that differ on important, first-order principles, comparison can bring to light new questions, frames of inquiry, and alternative approaches to contemporary democratic theory and practice and broaden our conceptualization of, and policies directed toward, human development.

Because Buddhists view political and economic systems as an instrument to a higher end not an end in themselves, Buddhist teachings do not offer a systematic prescription for social organization that one might expect from a Western treatise. Instead, Buddhist social theory can be distilled from a collection of axioms, instructions, and observations that guide possible forms of political and economic organization and practice that can provide conditions conducive to the transcendence of suffering—the uniquely Buddhist dimension of “happiness.” Buddhist political and economic thinking parallels Western thought in many ways, but differs in its emphasis on virtuous government, the duty of care owed to others (not just individual freedoms), and its environmental sustainability ethos. This chapter identifies the points of congruence and departure between Western and Buddhist notions of the good polity and economy.

This chapter introduces the theme and intellectual challenges the book sets out to address. It first explains the basic concepts and principles of the liberal model of secularism and toleration. Next, it briefly characterizes three problems: (a) Even though the liberal model succeeded in bringing European societies from an era of religious conflict to one of relatively peaceful diversity, it failed to reproduce this success in non-Western societies like India. (b) In Europe also, the modus vivendi that came into being in the framework of liberal secularism is beginning to show cracks, after the arrival of new religions and traditions. (c) The liberal model suffers from the conceptual obscurity of the religious–secular distinction. Finally, the introduction characterizes the cultural asymmetry that prevents us from taking the forms of co-existence in Asian societies seriously as resources for a comparative political theory.