How Meaning Travels: The Hermeneutics of Comparative Political Theory

Over the last two decades, the emergence of comparative political theory (CPT) as a distinct subfield of political science has been received as a welcome development, one that promises to correct political theory’s parochialism by urging scholars to attend to, and engage with, non-Western perspectives and traditions of political thought. From its very inception, CPT’s efforts to broaden the scope of political theory beyond the Western canon have been accompanied by an awareness of the unique methodological challenges posed by such a task. Chief amongst these is the challenge of interpreting texts from radically different traditions: is there a hermeneutic approach that can allow us to understand well the concepts and ideas contained in such texts? More broadly, is it possible to understand non-Western ideas and experiences, to have a true dialogue with such traditions, without subsuming them within Western categories and patterns of thought? How might we include historically marginalized non-Western perspectives into the discipline of political theory in ways that critically challenge and not merely enrich (in an additive way) what we are already doing? This paper attempts to provide and answer to these questions by turning to the work of CPT’s intellectual precursors: J.L. Mehta, Raimon Panikkar, and Wilhelm Halbfass. All three thinkers believed that the encounter between Western and non-Western thought is deeply asymmetrical and that it takes place in a world-historical situation in which the European mode of thinking has attained planetary proportions. Concerned about the possibility of forging a more equal dialogue between Western and non-Western thought, all three thinkers turned to the continental tradition of philosophical hermeneutics (specifically the writings of Heidegger and Gadamer) as a the most suitable approach to cross-cultural interpretation. While Gadamerian hermeneutics has been widely influential on recent attempts to think about how historically marginalized perspectives might be productively incorporated into ongoing discussions of political life, this approach has not been without its critics. In her recent work Leigh Jenco suggests that, contrary to its claims, the process of understanding cultural otherness that dialogical hermeneutics enables reproduces the very ethnocentric terms it seeks to critique. Rather than open the space for critical self-transformation, on Jenco’s view Gadamer’s hermeneutics emerges as an approach that merely chastens the interpreter’s “will to master.” To correct for these shortcomings, Jenco examines Chinese debates over “Western learning” and offers this as an exemplary method more suitable to the project of de-parochialising Western political thought. By turning to the work of Mehta, Halbfass, and Panikkar, in this paper I hope to show that their distinctive engagement with philosophical hermeneutics not only addresses Jenco’s concerns, it also points the way towards an alternative approach to cross-cultural theorizing and cross-cultural learning.