Comparative Political Theory before CPT: The Case of Chinese Political Thought

• In Event: Traveling Theory

Abstract

Contemporary political theory has witnessed a rising interest in non-Western political theory, a trend often called “comparative political theory” (CPT). CPT scholars often trace the rise of CPT to the late 1990s and early 2000s, emphasizing the impact of events such as 9/11 and focusing on Fred Dallmayr’s (2004) influential essay, “Beyond Monologue,” as a methodological starting point. This paper challenges this founding narrative of CPT by taking the research of Chinese political theory as a case study. By diving into archives and scholarly publications in the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that scholars in different disciplines and subfields—including comparative politics, political theory, and political sociology—had already produced scholarship that would be considered CPT today. Nonetheless, their work was not done in the name of CPT (or sometimes not even political theory).

This finding is not of merely historical importance. By questioning the founding myth of CPT, I intend to emphasize the following points. First, instead of conceiving CPT as an outcome of the “awakening” of mainstream “Western” political theory to recognize the need to understand the “non-Western,” the real historical question for those interested in the forming of CPT as a unique scholarly interest is why scholars jettisoned the vision that the “non-Western” was a source of generating theory in the late 1980s and 1990s. Second, previous CPT scholarship presented a different outlook when compared to the new wave of CPT since the 1990s. When framed as the need to recognize the “West’s” lack of understanding of the “non-West,” recent CPT tends to treat other countries as repertoires of cultural traditions even when scholars try hard to resist this tendency. The previous CPT scholarship, on the other hand, was much more closely related to empirical social science research and took the “non-West” less as representing a different cultural doctrine but a set of different institutional answers to questions shared by modern states. Finally, this historical tracing forces us to ponder whether CPT is a useful label to capture the scholarship of theorizing the “non-West.”

Author

• Simon Sihang Luo, Stanford University