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CRITICAL NOTICE: ORIENTALISM, WESTERNREPUBLICANISM, AND THE ANCIENT
POLIS
:PATRICIA SPRINGBORG’S
WESTERN REPUBLICANISM  AND THE ORIENTAL PRINCE 
AND THE CANON OFPOLITICAL THOUGHT
1
AARON KAMUGISHA
Patricia Springborg takes as the centre of her history of Western politics kingship instead of thecity-state; Egypt and Mesopotamia instead of Greece and Rome, and obliges us to look at theGreco-Roman West in a Hellenistic and Nilotic perspective. The result is a brilliant inversion of what she considers to be a perversion of history, and may well become a classic of post-liberal orneo-liberal thinking.J. G. A. Pocock, John Hopkins University
2
It may be fair to say that in the last 40 years—a period encompassing the civilrights movements in the U.S. and the advent of African studies at Britishuniversities—one of the major questions in humanities and social sciences disci-plines at Western universities has been the question of the canon and its content.Consistently under attack by the left and subject to vigorous defenses from theright, traditional canons are often the subject of intense and legitimate critiques, asthe argument that they were constructed to validate the experiences of a few—notably white, bourgeois, heterosexual males—is well-known. While disciplineslike anthropology and comparative literature have been subjected to an intensedegree of scrutiny, political philosophy has generally escaped unscathed in thesedebates, and it is still commonplace for survey courses to begin with the ancientGreeks and end with either Marx, Freud, or Rawls, with little acknowledgment of the battles over the canon that have shaken the rest of the academy. I commence
1
An earlier version of this paper was presented at a seminar organized by the Centre for CaribbeanThought, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. I would like to thank Brian Meeks forinviting me to deliver this paper. The comments of George Belle, Charles Mills, David McNally, andEsteve Morera have been useful in making revisions, but all responsibility for errors and omissionslie with the author.
2
Blurb on back cover of Patricia Springborg,
Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).© 2007 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.
173
 
the following review essay with a critical analysis of one recent attempt to discussthe canon of political thought, Siep Stuurman’s essay “The Canon of the Historyof Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative.”
3
I follow this witha long appraisal of Patricia Springborg’s
Western Republicanism and the OrientalPrince
, and locate it within renewed debates about the nature of the ancient
polis
,and the “birth” of political theorizing. I conclude this article with a reflection onthe importance of the intervention that this work and allied studies make to theconceptualization of any canon of political thought.Stuurman begins his analysis by pointing out, uncontroversially, that “thecanonical story of political thought is at the very center of European, and moregenerally, Western identity.”
4
Its very nature has been under attack for sometime,andithas “lostits sereneauraoffinality,”butis unfortunately“easilycriticizedbutnot so easily dismissed.”
5
Stuurman proposes two lines of critique, which he termsthe “democratic critique,” and the “methodological critique.” The democraticcritique suggests that the canon is “selective and incomplete” and is representativeof only European males. Stuurman is sympathetic to this argument, particularlythose that emanate from gendered critiques of the canon, and he strongly criticizesthe “textbooks fail[ure] to discuss the gender bias and the patriarchal assumptionswithin the classical texts of the canon, brought to light by the feminist critique of male political thought.”
6
His discussion of Eurocentrism is, however, problematic.Anti-colonial thought, and the critique of the canon’s “complacent silence aboutimperialism and racism” enters Stuurman’s essay via Edward Said’s
Orientalism
.There is a total absence of any major prior anti-colonial thinkers in Stuurman’sessayorfootnotes—notMahatmaGandhi,C.L.R.James,GeorgePadmore,FrantzFanon, Amilcar Cabral, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis, toname just a few. What Sylvia Wynter in a recent interview has termed theextraordinary way in which the memory of the anti-colonial struggle has beenexcised from the consciousness of the world is fully evident in this essay.
7
Nevertheless, Stuurman correctly suggests that the importance of the demo-cratic critique, is that it could result in a salutary “alter[ation] [of] the social andintellectual context of 
all
discourses about liberty, and therewith the range of 
3
Siep Stuurman, “The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a ProposedAlternative,”
History and Theory
39 (2000): 147–66.
4
Ibid: 147.
5
Ibid: 148. The difficult status of political theory might well arise, according to Stuurman, from inter-and intra-disciplinary perspectives on its utility: “empiricist political scientists tend to see it, at best,as a prelude to real, ‘hard,’ political science, philosophers often dismiss it as ‘too historical’ andtherefore superficial, while historians frequently question its validity as ‘history.’” Stuurman (2000):152.
6
Ibid: 153.
7
David Scott, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,”
Small Axe
8(2000): 119–207.AARON KAMUGISHA
174
 
meanings of the concept of liberty itself—and indeed, the very notion of whatliberty and individuality
are
.”
8
In a noteworthy passage on the possible objectionsto the democratic critique, Stuurman states the following:
However, one is well advised to observe that the universalistic notion of the autonomous andrational individual has not disappeared from the story but has rather been displaced and, so to speak,put into operation at one remove. One might well maintain that all three critiques mentioned abovestart from a rigorous abstract idea of universal liberty, and deploy it
in their critique
of mainstreampolitical thought and its historiography.The question of how to write a history of “contested liberty”is thus not yet resolved. An unsympathetic critic might object that all these socialist, feminist andanti-imperialist critiques start from twentieth-century political realities and assumptions whichought to have no place in a
rigorously
historical account of the development of political thought.
9
To his credit, Stuurman does not fall into this trap that he suggests lies open forthose who advocate the democratic critique of the canon. He counters this byshowing the importance of marginal writers, who show that anti-imperialist per-spectives were present throughout history, and thus Locke, Hume, and Mill et al.look even more like the spokesmen for the class interests that they were. I wouldadd that it also ignores the presence of cultures with concepts of freedom outsidethe European epistemological horizon of the times. To think less is to conflate the“local culture” of theWest to a universal one, or suggest, as Hegel did, that peopleof African descent had no conception of “freedom” before their contact withEuropeans.
10
Stuurman’s methodological critique is not as important for my purposes here,though J. G. A. Pocock’s invitation to look at “political languages, modes of discourse available to people discussing political affairs in particular times andplaces” rather than individual theorists and established philosophies represents awell-established and significant event in political theorizing.
11
It is rather moreimportant to note that this approach, often called the “Cambridge school” after itstwo most famous proponents, Quentin Skinner and J. G.A. Pocock, does not rejectthe canon, but rather deconstructs the status of certain key figures within it. Thisseems to bring the methodological approach close to certain postmodern andpoststructuralist arguments, which Stuurman rejects as the “postmodern subter-fuge of total contingency,” arguing instead that they are possible guidelines onwhich a revised canon can be established.
12
One central aspect of Stuurman’s
8
Stuurman (2000): 156, original italics.
9
Ibid: original emphasis.
10
The idea of the West as a “local culture,” like all others, I borrow, of course from Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
(New York: Basic Books, 1973).
11
Here Stuurman cites the work of J. G.A. Pocock. See J. G.A. Pocock,
Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History
(New York: Atheneum, 1971).
12
Stuurman (2000): 161.THE CANON OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
175
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