Recentering Political Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality

In this post-universalist era, the idea of providing guidance for culturally different communities and individuals is rightly condemned as imperialist. Yet this very recognition of cultural limitations ironically encourages further Eurocentrism: fearful of making imperialist claims about political life that apply to all, many contemporary theorists carefully qualify the reach of the problems they examine and the applicability of the normative theories they propose. How may this vicious cycle be truncated? The emerging field of comparative political theory joins postcolonial studies, feminism, and subaltern studies to suggest that more sensitively calibrated forms of inclusion may deparochialize our political thinking, without replicating the homogenizing universalism of earlier centuries. Painfully aware that they are situated within the privileged cultural frames of the modern West, comparative political theorists identify their struggle in terms of understanding differently situated others amid power disparities created by colonialism, American hegemony, and the global flow of capital.

Many of these efforts insist, however, that we cannot displace, but only “provincialize,” European thought categories (to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase), for their persistent recurrence is presumed to be an unavoidable result of global colonial domination and of the Western theorists’ own inescapable situatedness (Euben 1999, 12–13). Our task, in Fred Dallmayr’s words, becomes simply “to steer a difficult path between global uniformity and radical cultural difference,” in which mutual contestation but not a radical supplanting of categories or thought traditions can take place (1999, 3). Ironically, Eurocentrism (by which I mean the cognitive hegemony of categories rooted in Western European and to a lesser extent American intellectual and historical experience) becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on this view. As a destiny that can at best be negotiated but never fully overcome, it circumscribes our access to alternative terms of inquiry. As a result, non-Western materials are invoked by these studies merely to pique our “sense of wonder” (Euben 2006, 197), increase understanding of our own ideological positions (Dallmayr 1998, 7; March, 237), enhance our own cosmopolitan thinking (Godrej), or enlarge our canon of texts (Leslie).

In this essay I explore the consequences of engaging foreign sources of thought not by constructing a “third space” of dialogue or contrast, but by taking seriously the broader ambitions of their claims to wider-than-local significance. To do this we must reconceive the “local” not as a cultural context that permanently conditions our understanding and argumentative claims, but as a particularized site for the circulation of knowledge. Two examples from Asian experience—indigenization movements in China and Taiwan, and the historical practice of Sinology by Japanese and Euro-American scholars—demonstrate the analytic purchase of this recalibrated notion of locality, as they belie the widely held assumption that necessarily parochial starting points circumscribe subsequent attempts to pursue inquiry on alternative or foreign grounds. The result is not simply self-reflexivity about the parochialism of our own debates—producing what we may call de-centered theory, already performed admirably by comparative political theorists, feminists, and postcolonial scholars, among others. I raise the more radical possibility of re-centering the constitutive terms, audiences, and methods of theoretical discourse.

Although Eurocentrism has long been critiqued in fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology, in this essay I primarily engage the emerging discourse of deparochialization in political theory because the process poses instructive and uniquely poignant challenges for its disciplinary self-identity. The main reason for this is that the mission of political theory, an “unapologetically mongrel sub-discipline” of political science, is not primarily ethnographic, but normative and meta-analytic: otherwise diverse political theorists are “united by a commitment to theorize, critique, and diagnose the norms, practices, and organization of political action in the past and present, in our own places and elsewhere” (Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, 5, 4). Whether those commitments are centered around a series of shared questions rather than answers, a set of canonical texts, a disciplinary positioning vis-à-vis political science, or a trans-historical search for the good, the field’s systematized reflections or “theories” do not seek in the first place to document or predict, but to...