Political Theory 2014 Williams 26 57

507934
research-article2013
PTX42110.1177/0090591713507934Political TheoryWilliams and Warren
Article
A Democratic Case for

Comparative Political
Theory
Political Theory
2014, Vol. 42(1) 2657
2013 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591713507934
ptx.sagepub.com
Melissa S. Williams1 and Mark E. Warren2
Abstract
Globalization generates new structures of human interdependence and
vulnerability while also posing challenges for models of democracy rooted
in territorially bounded states. The diverse phenomena of globalization
have stimulated two relatively new branches of political theory: theoretical
accounts of the possibilities of democracy beyond the state; and comparative
political theory, which aims at bringing non-Western political thought into
conversation with the Western traditions that remain dominant in the
political theory academy. This article links these two theoretical responses
to globalization by showing how comparative political theory can contribute
to the emergence of new global publics around the common fates that
globalization forges across borders. Building on the pragmatist foundations of
deliberative democratic theory, it makes a democratic case for comparative
political theory as an architecture of translation that helps deliberative
publics grow across boundaries of culture.
Keywords
comparative political theory, democratic theory, deliberative democracy,
globalization, global democracy, pragmatism
1University
2University
of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Melissa S. Williams, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George
St., Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada.
Email: melissa.williams@utoronto.ca
Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at University of York on March 6, 2015
Williams and Warren
27
Introduction
The current epoch of globalization brings a structural transformation of
politics as radical as the changes wrought in early modern Europe by the
emergence of the territorial state. This transformation places the discipline
of political theory under tremendous pressure, since so many of our central
frameworks derive from assumptions, often in the background of our inquiries, that the boundaries of the state delineate the location of politics.
Although territorial states will remain central to organizing collective
goods essential to a good polity, political theory as a field risks losing its
relevance to emerging circumstances of politics if it rests too heavily on
Westphalian frameworks.
In this article, we link two recent developments in political theory that
are explicitly framed as responses to globalization but which, somewhat
surprisingly, have not been in conversation with each other: debates surrounding the future of democracy under conditions of globalization, and
contributions to the emerging field now styled as comparative political
theory, whose common theme is the expansion of a discipline rooted
almost exclusively in Euro-American intellectual traditions to include East
Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African, and
Indigenous (in short, though reluctantly: non-Western) thought.1 The
political theory literature on the possibility of democracy beyond or outside
of the state is virtually silent when it comes to non-Western ideas and political culture, non-Western cosmopolitanisms, or the challenges of democratic
innovation and action across cultures. And although a significant proportion of the literature in comparative political theory critically engages questions that are central to democratic theory, few connect their inquiries to the
possibility of democratic transformations of transnational or global political processes.
In bringing these two debates together, we build a specifically democratic
case for comparative political theoryand for the responsibility that political
theory, as a field, bears for furthering its development. We do so as two political theorists who are not direct practitioners of intercultural or comparative
political theory.2 We are not experts in non-Western cultures or languages;3
neither of us has done the hard work of immersive study that now characterizes the impressive scholarship of this emerging field.4 Yet we are both convinced that theorists like us, trained in Western traditions of thought and with
research foci in areas that do not necessarily compel deeply intercultural
work, should do what we can to de-parochialize political theory5that is, to
shift the field in the direction of much deeper engagement with non-Western
ideas about politics.
28
Political Theory 42(1)
The democratic case for comparative political theory is not the only case
that can be made, of course, but in developing it we hope to contribute to both
of the bodies of theoretical work we bring together here. Simply stated, the
larger claim is that among the tasks of political theory is to track the social,
economic, and political developments that have pushed across borders. More
specifically, we argue that at the same time that globalization undermines
democratic accountability within territorial states and fails to generate democratic responsiveness in supra-state institutions, it also opens up new possibilities for democratic mobilization and responsiveness through the formation
of transnational and potentially global publics. Comparative political theory,
from this perspective, provides some of the architecture of translation that
enables self-constituting publics to form across boundaries of linguistic and
cultural difference. With respect to theories of global democratization, comparative political theory provides resources for taking cultural difference
more seriously as an obstacle to democratic opinion-and will-formation.
Conversely, attentiveness to the role of the intercultural translation of politics
in contemporary democratic formations provides an avenue of response to
those who would dismiss comparative political theory as a groundless and
utopian exhortation for intercultural dialogue.
We make this case as follows. In the first section, we review the challenges of globalization. In the second, we note that globalization produces
communities of shared fatede facto constituenciesthat are produced
by the effects of globalization, and which cross boundaries of sovereign
states, peoples, and cultures. Third, for these new kinds of constituencies to
become politically productivefor them to become sites of democratic
agencythey need to be imagined and articulated as constituencies. But,
fourth, to the extent they are articulated, they become sites of communication. As such, they are incipient publics within which language can become a
force for creating spaces of democracy across borders, both reflexively in
constituting publics that exceed boundaries, as well as productively, insofar
as common responsibilities follow. Comparative political theory is one of
many kinds of global discourse that function to constitute these spaces. We
note the central role that language use as such plays in calling forth these
kinds of cross-boundary constituenciesa role that again underscores the
origins of deliberative theories of democracy in the pragmatic theories of
language use. In the fifth section, we restate these general considerations in
another way: as problem-driven democratic theory, noting that the imperatives for comparative political theory follow directly from problems that flow
across borders. We conclude with some observations about the implications
of this argument for the future direction of the field.
Williams and Warren
29
Globalization, Democracy, and Emergent Publics

It is not news that, at best, globalization and democracy stand in an ambivalent relationship to one another.6 The unprecedented economic growth that
accompanied economic globalization has been enormously important in
reducing the proportion of people who live in absolute poverty. But it has also
brought more economic inequality to most of the established democracies,
the increased influence of money in elections, shrinking middle classes in
some countries, and weakened welfare supports in many others. The global
financial crisis and the ongoing Eurozone crisis, together with climate change
and other transborder environmental consequences of growth fueled by
extractive industries, epitomize radically new, human-scale vulnerabilities to
scarcity, risk, exploitation, and inequality, without simultaneously generating
the institutional channels through which people can exert democratic controls. Many states that have enjoyed high capacities to steer their internal
affairs and to respond to the needs of the average citizen find these capacities
eroding. The institutional transformations of the global era unbundle the
sovereignty of territorial states and parcel out its powers to undemocratic
international actors and institutions.7 Globalization can and often has disempowered putatively sovereign democratic citizenries by moving choices
about their social, economic, and political futures beyond their reach. And so
far, the democratic deficits of powerful regional, transnational, and global
institutions are a long way from being rectified.
Yet these developments are only part of globalization. As the democratic
struggles of the Arab Awakening, Occupy, and the indignant citizens movements in Europe and elsewhere have brought home, learning and coalition
building across borders have intensified demands for democratic responsiveness in regional and transnational institutions, strengthened some democratic
movements, and brought down some autocrats. International NGOs have
helped to foster new forms of transparency and accountability with respect to
human rights, democratic mechanisms, environmental destruction, poverty,
and disease. The alter-globalization movementitself a manifestation of
globalizationis strengthening the capacities of activist networks to resist
the negative impact of economic globalization on Indigenous peoples, the
environment, and the global poor. In short, as empire, globalization denotes
the seemingly pervasive power of global capitalism; as cosmopolis, it signals the global spread of principles respecting the moral worth of human
individuals, including human rights and democracy, sedimenting diverse
interpretations of these ideals around the world.8
Democratic theorists have responded to globalization by mapping three
broad prospects for democracys future: cosmopolitanism, statism, and
30
polycentrism (or transnationalism).9 Cosmopolitan democrats such as David

Held, Thomas Pogge, and Daniele Archibugi begin from Kantian universalism to argue for a global order of law that secures human rights and respects
the moral equality of individuals.10 Democracy within states remains important to their views, but its authority derives from the same universalistic principles that ground an overarching order of international law. Because the
dynamics of globalization generate the need for institutions beyond the state,
their models for global democratization emphasize the development of statelike mechanisms for democratically legitimate law-making and law enforcement in international, transnational, and regional institutions, all bound
together in an order of rights-protecting cosmopolitan law. Cosmopolitan
democrats seek to parry the charge of cultural imperialism by arguing for the
acceptability of human rights and other universalist principles in diverse
human cultures.11 However, there is little or no engagement in this literature
with the argument that their understandings of such fundamental concepts as
moral individualism, economic development, political legitimacy, and secularism are so thoroughly rooted in Euro-American modernity that they make
very uncertain contact with the self-understandings of the majority of the
worlds peoples. Nor do they acknowledge the array of non-Western cosmopolitanisms that might provide alternative normative foundations for political
order under conditions of globalization.12
For statists, the conditions that make effective and accountable democratic
decisions possible are only available within territorial states. Although they
acknowledge that the dynamics of globalization have diminished democratic
agency within liberal-democratic states and transferred powers to suprastate
and nonstate bodies, they argue that the most promising course for democracys future is to reclaim and strengthen democracy within the state, and hold
states democratically accountable for the cross-border impact of their decisions through creative institutional design.13 These arguments respond to the
fact that globalization systematically increases the mismatch between those
who are affected by the decisions of collective agents and those who are
empowered to hold them accountable.14 This mismatch highlights the demos
problem that is endemic to democratic theory: it has proved challenging to
develop nonarbitrary principles by which to set the boundaries of the people
that will govern itself democratically.
Polycentrist or transnational democratic theorists focus on the democratic
potentials of new forms of politics that are emerging in transnational public
space. For them, globalizations challenge for democratic theory is more
radical than for either cosmopolitans or statists; it requires, as Michael
Goodhart argues, that we reconsider what democracy means.15 More specifically, it requires that we loosen our conceptions of democracy from the
Williams and Warren
31
model of the territorial sovereign state.16 Thus, polycentrisms emphasis is on

political formations that neither result directly from state action nor take on
statelike characteristics of centralized, hierarchical, and formal law-making
authority backed by coercive power.17 These theorists focus on the capacity
of decentralized networks of social activists, NGOs, and intergovernmental
organizations, acting quasi-autonomously from states, to render decisions
more responsive and accountable to those whom they affect.18
The analysis we develop below builds on the observations of these transnational polycentrist democrats. For many of these theorists, the link between
global civil society and the possibility of democratic agency on the part of
new transnational actors is the emergence of new transnational and potentially global public spheres, that is, social spaces of free communication
through which collective opinions may eventually form as a result of the
exchange of arguments.19 Since responsiveness to public opinion is a key
metric of democratic accountability, the conditions that make it possible for
public opinion to formin other words, the existence of public spheresare
vital conditions for the democratic potential of civil society formations. Two
such conditions stand out. First, there must be publics, that is, collectivities
whose members see themselves as engaged in an ongoing exchange of ideas
with one another. Second, there must be media of communication that make
the exchange of ideas possible, including symbolic media (linguistic and
nonlinguistic), material media (e.g., print, audio-visual), and structural systems that enable the diffusion of ideas (notably, now, the Internet). Further
conditions, such as inclusiveness and actual impact on decisions, must be met
for a public sphere to function democratically.20
The emergence of transnational movements around the new cross-border
human vulnerabilities that arise with globalization shows that transnational
public spheres are not only not impossible but in many cases are increasingly
developed. New discourses of citizenship that exceed the boundaries of
territorial statesglobal citizenship, transnational citizenship, diasporic citizenship, and environmental citizenshipexplicitly connect
transnational collectivities to ideas of democratic agency, a capacity through
action in concert to shape collective futures.21 As responses to the impacts of
globalization, these are mobilizations of overlapping communities of fate,
as David Held puts it,22 capturing the sense that globalization throws people
together in such a way that they come to share a future.23 As captured by the
concept of affected interests, these formations express the facticity
including their unchosenness and inescapabilityof new structures of interdependence and affectedness under the conditions of globalization.24 While
these structures have a fact of the matter about them, they do not by themselves issue in political agency or even a common political space. But they
32
will tend to generate experiences that can underwrite the common terms of
discourse necessary to political agency. As publics or constituencies that
might be mobilized, they remain latent until the facticity of shared fates is
argued for and demonstrated, as in the connection between human consumption of carbon fuels and climate change or, to borrow Iris Youngs example,
the relationship that connects us to the sweatshop workers who fabricated our
running shoes.25 In other words, in order for structures of affectedness to
constitute sites for democratic agency, people must, through discourses, represent them, imagining that they are citizens connected by common fates,
and thus bring into being new publics.26
And yet genuinely inclusive transnational or global public spheres demand
that we take cultural differences in social and political imaginaries more seriously than current theories of global democratization currently do.27 The possibility of fate-responsive, action-orienting global democratic imaginaries
depends, then, on two central questions. First, what would it mean to engage
in nondominating political discourse in global public space, across vastly different cultural and material conditions, and to form action-orienting political
imaginaries across these differences? Second, what would generate and sustain agents motivation to participate in such discourses, given the combined
challenges of power asymmetries, the difficulties of cross-cultural understanding, and the competing pressures for attention from other scales of politics (local, national, regional)? Comparative political theory offers a partial
response to both challenges.
(Comparative) Political Theory, Dialogue, and

Intercultural Publics
Globalization likewise serves as a common starting point for proponents and
practitioners of comparative political theory. They cite the increasing interconnectedness of human beings across the boundaries of states, regions, and
cultures as a reason why it is important that we political theorists problematize the dominance of Western intellectual traditions, conceptual frameworks,
and institutional forms and devote our energies to fostering a transcultural
conversation28 orexplicitly rejecting the Huntingtonian clash of civilizations as the correct understanding of the global agea dialogue among
civilizations29
What does it mean to fashion comparative political theory in dialogical or
conversational terms? For some, notably Fred Dallmayr30an early and still
highly visible proponent of comparative political theorythe model of dialogue is rooted in philosophic hermeneutics and is especially indebted to
Gadamer. For Dallmayr, as for Gadamer,
Williams and Warren
33
Truth or insight . . . cannot be garnered by retreat into neutral spectatorship or a

view from nowhere, but only through a concrete existential engagementan
engagement where familiar assumptions . . . are brought to bear, and allowed to be
tested, against unfamiliar perspectives and practices in a shared search for
meaning.31
Dialogical encounters with the cultural other, Dallmayr argues, make it

possible to move in the direction of a more genuine universalism, and
beyond the spurious universality traditionally claimed by the West and the
Western canon. Indeed, this is precisely the point of comparative political
theory.32 As Andrew March brings out in a particularly helpful overview of
the emerging field, the celebration of a dialogue model for engagement with
non-Western thought combines several motives and justifications. These
include epistemic goals: more inclusive dialogue is likely to yield in truthclaims that have greater validity than claims rooted exclusively in a single
tradition (particularly claims that are not reflexively self-critical about their
own assertions of universal validity.33 Critical-transformative aims would
utilize the dialogue model as a resource for resisting the unjustifiable power
imbalances flow from the dominance of Western discourses in contemporary
politics, whether these are read as serving colonial or neo-imperialist domination or forms of domination endemic to capitalism.34 And comparative
political theory may also aim at social cooperation grounded in a principled
exchange of views. Indeed, March understands this function of comparative
political theory as its most important, which he states in terms that are very
close to those of deliberative democratic theory. The strongest warrant for a
comparative political theory, he writes, is that there are normative contestations of proposals for terms of social cooperation affecting adherents of the
doctrines and traditions that constitute those contestations.35
But even among those who explicitly advocate for an expansion of political theory beyond Western traditions, the dialogue model has its critics. Some
charge that attempts at intercultural dialogue aimed at moral convergence,
enhanced universalism or a Gadamerian fusion of horizons are merely utopian exercises in impossibility that overstate the possibility of agreement
across linguistic and cultural differences.36 Although Freeden and Vincent
agree with proponents of comparative political theory that it is worthwhile to
study the political ideas of non-Western contexts, they distinguish their own
agenda as one of comparative political thought, signaling their distance from
the unifying prescriptive and ethical drive that they suggest has, regrettably, overtaken most of what passes for political theory.37 Similarly, Leigh
Jenco argues that cross-cultural dialogue may not always minimize distortion . . . it may just as easily end up glossing over cultural and political
differences.38
34
The gap between imaginary and actual intercultural dialogues prompts

Antony Black to sound a second note of realist skepticism about the dialogue
model. Actual dialogue requires willing partners, and they are in short supply.
A lot of people, Black drily notes, are just not into dialogue.39 Often, this
is because their motivations follow from power and position.40
A further line of critique focuses on the dialogue models claim to methodological egalitarianism that covers over more subtle forms of western
domination. A dialogue must have a subject-matter, and the selection of
subject-matter for dialogical exchange is a choice ridden with cultural
preferencesand therefore also suffused with the power claimed by the
theorist to set the terms of the conversation.41 Finally, a dialogue model presupposes that the core features of non-Western traditions of political thought
and knowledge are expressible in discursive terms, whereas in fact the most
important media for maintaining and transmitting traditions may take the
form of rituals and other embodied practices, themselves part of alternative
methodologies of knowledge production from which political theory might
gain. The privileging of dialogue is a subspecies of the more general neglect
by political theorists of non-Western epistemologies, which comes at the
expense of learning from non-Western thought as a site of distinct modes of
theorizing, and not only the (passive) object of (Western) theoretical
analysis.42
For some, these potential pitfalls of the dialogue model of comparative
political theory should point us away from dialogue in favor of approaches
that are less ambitious in their normative aspirations and more hard-headedly
sociological and contextual in their study of non-Western thought.43 Framed
within an Austinian philosophy of language, for example, Freeden and
Vincents approach aims at a clarification of the performative consequences
of particular concepts in particular contexts.44 Attentiveness to the actual
vocabularies of politics, and to the practices and concepts through which the
political is itself delineated within a particular context, is of the utmost
importance in disclosing the world of political thinking and action that
orients agents in that context.45
This kind of approach to non-Western ideas in contexts bears obvious
affinities to the Cambridge school history of ideas, and are a subcategory
within what Andrew March calls scholarly political theory (as contrasted
with engaged political theory).46 Scholarly political theory, he argues, is
concerned with whether we understand well enough a given text, practice,
or phenomenon. Engaged political theory, on the other hand, aims at a
judgment whether some set of ideas are the right ideas for us.47
Unsurprisingly, Freeden and Vincent accept Marchs distinction and identify
themselves with the scholarly or investigative variant of comparative
Williams and Warren
35
political theory, and contrast it with the engaged or dialogical model.48

Marchs distinction between scholarly and engaged political theory suggests that whereas the latter is motivated by our interest in practical reason
(reaching judgments about what we ought to do), the former is driven principally by our interest in knowledge for its own sake (whether out of sheer
curiosity or from some other motive) and abjures from seeking guidance for
practical reason in the political thought it studies.
Although we agree that engaging the political ideas of cultures different
from our own is unlikely to yield moral convergence, and that theoretical
construction of imaginary dialogues with culturally different others risks
reproducing our own intellectual and normative biases, we want to resist the
critiques of dialogue models of comparative political theory that set up a
strong contrast between sociological and normative approaches to the
study of non-Western thought. In fact, even in its most disengaged or
scholarly forms, political theory is per se dialogical in both its method and
its purpose. This is true whether it is aimed principally at accurately articulating the political thought of temporally, spatially, or culturally distant others
including those who use non-discursive means of communicationor
whether it is aimed at enhancing the quality of our first-order judgments of
practical reason. With respect to method, political theory always entails an
imagined dialogue with the subjects of ones study, actively searching for
evidence for and against ones interpretation as a test of its accuracy. Here,
the goal is to get others thought right on its own terms, which means representing a system of ideas in a form that we believe they could accept as valid,
and responding to imagined objections that arise from the text or context
under study. That is, the most rigorous scholarship works with criteria that are
intrinsically dialogical. Similarly, Roxanne Euben characterizes all political
theory as inherently comparative, but also inherently dialogical in the sense
that it requires acts of translationof seeing and making seen, hearing and
making heard which both make sense of another and at the same time
unavoidably distort the other by representing them through ones own terms
of reference.49
Political theoryincluding comparative political theoryis inherently
dialogical not only in its method but in its purpose as well. Understanding the
thought of another time or culture undoubtedly is an intrinsic good, quite
apart from its salutary consequences for our exercise of practical reason. For
even the most disengaged scholars of the history of ideas, a key motivation
for studying political thought is that it provides us with critical distance from
our own way of thinking.50
The contextual study of political ideas may not yield a shred of guidance
for our first-order normative judgments, but this is not the only way in which
36
it is valuable for practical reason. Arguably more important than its contribution to first-order judgments is that it is among the social conditions of possibility for critical reflexivity with respect to our first-order judgments. In
other words, its greatest relevance to our practical reason is second-order, not
first-order. The movement between the third-person (sociological or scholarly) activity of accurately representing the thought of another may stand at
many removes from the first-person (philosophical or engaged) activity of
making judgments that we can justify (how else but dialogically?)but it is
the movement itself that hones practical reason as a human capacity. This
capacity for critical reflexivity is a contingent social achievement, stronger in
some moments and locations and weaker in others. But here is the crucial,
overarching point: Political theory as a discipline aims at helping to secure
this achivement as a social resource for practical reason in our societiesin
short, a resource for critical dialogue about what we ought to do.
Thus, the difference between approaches to political theory does not turn
on whether they are investigative or dialogical, scholarly, or engaged. All
political theory aims at representing and reconstructing the constellations of
ideas that are embedded in a given sociohistorical context, making explicit
and available for critical engagement what is otherwise implicit, hidden, or
lost from view. Comparative political theory, then, is nothing other than the
representation and reconstruction of systems of ideas that have arisen in cultures or civilizations different from our own. The intellectual challenge of
accurately representing these ideational structures is, in principle, the same in
either case, a difference in degree more than in kind. Making explicit the
embedded ideas of our own cultures or histories serves as a resource for critical reflexivity in our exercise of practical reason within our own cultural
contexts. Doing so with respect to the ideas of different cultures or traditions
can serve two purposes. First, it can give us the sort of critical distance that
supports reflexive judgment within our own societies (knowing ourselves
through knowing the other). Second, to the extent that it renders their thought
intelligible to us in a form that is recognizably valid for them, the practice of
comparative political theory contributes to the social conditions of possibility
for the emergence of intercultural collective subjects of practical reason
that is, intercultural publics. This purpose (or consequence) is no more utopian (and no less aspirational) than the idea that a reason to value political
theory per se is its contribution to our social capacity for critical reflexivity.
By contributing to the conditions for mutual intelligibility across cultural difference, then, comparative political theory provides a partial answer
to the question of how it could be possible to construct inclusive public
spheres in global, transnational, or transcultural space. What remains to be
shown is how action-orienting political imaginaries could be built up across
Williams and Warren
37
differences, and how a broad agenda of comparative political theory could

play a role in building discursive capacities for democratic political action
that responds to the consequences of globalization. From this perspective,
we can view comparative political theory as building political capacities
within communities of fate, by facilitating the mutual intelligibility of ideas
across contexts and traditions, and increasing the pool of ideational
resources available to those who share fates. As with all problem-attentive
political theory, ideas filter up from political practices and situated debates
to the level of theory, and filter down again from theory into practice when
they have resonance for people seeking to address new or newly recognized
problems of living-together.51 Locations and historical moments when
received or dominant ideas are under pressure as a consequence of shifts
in material, social, or political states of affairs (as when East Asian societies
were under pressure from the threat of European and American imperialism
in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries) are particularly rich
moments for innovations in political thought, and hence also important
sites for theoretical investigation. It follows that we should conceive of
comparative political theory as engaging a wide range of ideational
resources: formal scholarly work by non-Western scholars writing for academic audiences in their own languages, political ideas of public intellectuals, principles of law and formal institutional structures, normalized
practices and rituals of politics, the ideas of leading political actors and
opposition figures, and everyday languages and practices of politics. The
aim of comparative political theory, as with all political theory, should be to
render explicit the political imaginaries that are operating in the background
of a given context at a particular time, in order to render them intelligible to
others. If such intelligibility is possible, which is a necessary presupposition of any practice of comparative political theory, then there are few reasons to be skeptical of the dialogue model of comparative political theory.
But there is one remaining challenge, to which we devote much of the
remainder of this article. Even where there are resources for translating across
culturally embedded ideas about politics, intelligibility does not by itself
motivate discursive engagement. To the contrary, as noted by Antony Black
and discussed in detail by Roxanne Euben in her study of Sayyid Qutb,52
comprehending the other can produce the judgment that self-distancing or
active opposition are the morally required responses. Even where deep moral
disagreement is not an obstacle to engagement, the question remains what
could motivate agents to undertake the difficult work of dialogical engagement. How could comparative political theory help fill this motivational gap?
There are, of course, no general answers of a kind that political theorists
could offer. But we can make the problem more tractable by returning to the
38
account of the relationship-constituting effects of communication found in

the pragmatic roots of deliberative democratic theory.
Constitutive Powers of Intercultural

Communication: Mutual Intelligibility and
Relational Responsibility
Our claim is that comparative political theory is a practice of communicationa form of conversation across boundaries of differencewhich generates not only enhanced understanding but also the potential to motivate
people to take up the burden of crafting shared fates and of the moral responsibilities that go with them. By enabling concept use across borders in ways
that respond to shared fates, comparative political theory is a (potentially)
constitutive activity: it provides resources for naming and representing global
problems as shared fates, but also for building constituencies (or publics) by
creating new ways of thinking and talking across boundaries. Insofar as comparative political theory sets communication as its basic goal, it will also
build moral resources as a consequence of its activities. To cast comparative
political theory in this way is to focus on the question of what it is that ideas
accomplish in establishing social relations as a consequence of being spoken,
asserted, demonstrated, written down for an audience, and so on. That is,
because we are interested in comparative political theory as a medium of
mutual intelligibility, we are already committed to some form of pragmatism
with regard to the status of ideasforms shared, roughly, by James and
Dewey, Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle, Habermas and Brandom. This is the
family of philosophies that (roughly) asks what claims, assertions, and the
like accomplish within social life insofar as they are acts of communication.
Combining these forms of pragmatism with social theories that take practices
as the primary (ontological) units of analysis, while understanding structural
phenomena, such as culture, rules, languages, classes, and institutions, as
reproduced by practices,53 we can begin to situate comparative political theory as a form of communicative practice with constitutive effects.
To understand comparative political theory as a kind of social practice that
works across borders and aims at mutual attentiveness and adjustment is thus
to think of it as a kind of deliberative enterprisepart of the business of offering and responding to reasons for decision and action. To use this term may
invite misunderstanding, and so it should not be overinterpreted to imply specific political institutions, systems, or models. By using the term, we are highlighting again what we are imagining to be the central activity of political
theory as such: extracting claims and positions from their taken-for-granted
Williams and Warren
39
contexts and transforming them into assertions, which in turn function as justifications that could, in principle, be understood by others.
If this activity is possible, so too is it possible to view comparative political theory as responding to the globalizing demands for shared moral
resources that respond to shared fates. The pragmatic origins of deliberative
theory suggest that these moral resources are constituted just insofar as the
activity of deliberation has space to exist. These moral powers are intrinsic:
they flow, as it were, from what words accomplish as a consequence of their
use. In the (social) world of normative orders, words are a key medium
through which people assert rights and wrongs, respond to the assertions of
others, and come to common understandings about the obligations, duties,
and responsibilities they will commonly impose upon themselves. Where
cultures are unreflexive, this process is rendered invisible by tradition and
convention. Where coercive powers do the social ordering, the power of
words has no space to get going. But where these spaces open upas arguably they do to an ever-greater degree in globalizing contexts that lack both
enclosed cultures and world powersthe powers of words become more
important.54 It is within these deliberative spaces that comparative political
theory has a chance to fill out the vocabulary that might underwrite emergent
global publics. In so doingand just insofar as it does soit aids in generating the moral responses that might respond to shared fates.
The idea that words have power that is over and beyond the powers they
derive from references can be found in pragmatic understandings of language.
What is at issue are the social relationships established by speech acts. Speech
acts both perform and disclose a social world of actors who are, in principle,
solid enough that one can trust the other, in such a way that claiming and asserting can have force among those who are communicating.55 Although most contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy have stressed the cognitive work
that deliberation accomplishes, it is worth returning to the roots of deliberative
theory in philosophical pragmatism to recover the agency- and relationshipconstituting effects of deliberative exchange. Notably, Habermass theory of
communicative action emphasized the social relationships that are established
as a consequence of making claims, and upon which the cognitive content of
claims depend for their capacities to coordinate among and between social
actors.56 Following Austin, Habermas stressed the illocutionary force of speech
acts:57 by promising, claiming, expressing, and so on, the speaker establishes a
relationship with the listener, attributing to him/her the qualities (and moral
status) of agency, of the kind that can be moved by, and commit to, promises,
claims, expressions, and the like. In short, the work accomplished by deliberation is in part about what is deliberated: conflicts, claims, values, information,
and matters of substance, communicated through language. But it is in part
40
about the relationships that are established as a consequence of speaking and

listeningrelationships that constitute speakers as agents who have the kind of
solidity others can trust.
In order to grasp the powers of speech (upon which, we are suggesting, the
morally constitutive powers of comparative political theory depend), then,
we need to understand this process of social construction that is the residue,
as it were, of speech. We find even more help in Robert Brandoms philosophy of language. Brandom emphasizes the essentially normative character of
language use with the evocative image of discursive practice as deontic
scorekeeping: the significance of a speech act is how it changes what commitments and entitlements one attributes and acknowledges58 (emphasis
added). When I speak or act, I entitle you to expect from me that which is
implicit in my claim or action. I take on an obligation with respect to you. If
you respond to what I have said, you take on an obligation with respect to me,
as stated or implied in your response. In this way, scorekeepers are licensed
to infer our beliefs from our intentional actions (in context of course), as well
as from our speech acts.59
Knowing how to use language is doubly constitutive of social relationships and individual agency. On the one hand, to know how to use language
is to know how to go on from the rules, expectations, and norms expressed
in speech acts.60 On the other hand, in the practice of going on, from utterance to utterance, speakers build up a regard for one another as agents who
can be held responsible for the inferences that follow from their statements.
Language use is in this way linked intrinsically to the constitution of social
relationsand by extension, publicsof a normatively thick kind: through
communication, each individual becomes an author of claims in such a way
that others can infer from these claims agent-like capacities to commit, and to
take responsibility for commitments.61 These webs of commitments enable
individuals to move through society with a trust that others are not only nonarbitrary in their actions but that the rules of social engagement can, in principle, be figured out, negotiated through language where necessary, and then
relied upon. This is one and the same process by which ongoing social relationships are established, and common action is rendered possible:
The complete and explicit interpretive equilibrium exhibited by a community
whose members adopt the explicit discursive stance toward one another is social
self-consciousness. Such a community not only is a we, its members can in the
fullest sense say we.62
The practice of giving and asking for reasons for belief and action is in
principle the same whether communication takes place within a natural
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language community or in an interlinguistic exchange.63 In Human Rights

and Chinese Thought, Stephen Angle builds on Brandoms theory to argue
that a communicative practice of translating concepts across cultures is possible even under circumstances where few if any shared meanings have been
established.64 Consequently, he argues, even in cases of deep conceptual difference (and therefore also of normative difference) we should treat cultures
as incommensurate rather than incommensurable: whether mutual incomprehensibility yields to mutual intelligibility is primarily a function of actors
choices about whether and how to engage in practices of communication. The
choice to do so begins with a willingness to grant interlocutors the status of
normative agency in Brandoms sense, just because they seek to motivate
others through language use. To grant others this status is not the same thing
as to share concepts with them, or even to treat shared concepts, shared
understanding, or moral agreement as the goal of communication. Rather,
engaging in the practice of communication simply entails taking seriously the
claims of those with whom one shares fewer implicit understandings than
those more familiar, with the aim of grasping the intelligibility of their normative commitments, and (reflexively) those commitments in oneself they
may seek to understand and motivate. Through a rich historical analysis of
the conceptual and philosophical debates that eventually produced the
Chinese concept of quanli as a term for translating rights, for example,
Angle shows that Chinese thought discloses an abundance of conceptual
resources for a rights discourse, but one that does not simply converge with
Western rights discourses. [N]ot only is there a distinctive Chinese discourse
about rights, but also there is a distinctive American discourse, a French discourse, and so on. All interact, all are dynamic, all are internally contested.65
Nonetheless, mapping the pluralism both within and across these different
rights discourses enables them to become recognizable as coherent normative
positions, available for critical engagement from both internal and external
perspectives.
Although Angle does invoke the contemporary dynamics of globalization
as an impetus for engaging in cross-cultural normative inquiry,66 neither he
nor Brandom is focused on practices of intercultural communication as a
stepping stone to the deliberative democratization of global processes. In
general, the project of deliberative democratic theory involves understanding
how to structure societies so that language does more of the work of constituting social relationships, while relations of coercion, domination, oppression, etc., do less. But because we are used to understanding these strategies
as institutions (of rights, voting, protected speech, etc.), we do not want to
lose the important point that these constitutive features of communication
often work across boundaries just because the institutional contexts are less
42
certain. While we need to understand the risks of replicating, for example,

colonial or neocolonial outlooks, neither should we overlook the potentials
that come, humbly enough, with simple acts of responsive communication.
By highlighting the moral powers of communication and illuminating the
potential of cross-cultural communication to enable the mutual intelligibility
of conceptual frames, Brandom and Angle give us resources for seeing comparative political theory as a discursive project. This project makes sense
philosophically as (potentially) generative of mutual intelligibility at the
level of normative concepts, and it makes sense sociologically as (potentially) generative of new communicative communities, new spaces of weness. It makes sense politically and democratically if these communities
support emergent global publics, and if these publics transform shared affectednessshared fatesinto new, post-Westphalian constituencies. The discursive construction of these publics does not depend on a fusion of
horizons or the emergence of more genuine universals with respect to
normative claims. It proceeds more modestly, stepwise, each time acts of
translation provide the media of communication that make it possible for
interlocutors to go on in a conversation.
The pragmatist view of the socially constitutive dynamics of communication, then, supplements and reinforces a problem-centered view of agents
motivation to participate in emergent global publics. Motivation is generated
by two distinct dynamics: first, the recognition of forms of human vulnerability that exceed national boundaries and require a political response; and second, once a practical discourse aimed at responsiveness gets going, it can
generate its own motivational force. To be sure, communication can break
down and actors can defect to other agendas. But in principle neither the barriers to mutual comprehensibility nor those to sustained motivation to engage
in cross-cultural discourse are insuperable.
The Logic of Problem-Driven Comparative

Political Theory: A Brief Sketch
We have argued that although multilinguistic, multicultural, and multiexperiential contexts may pose different kinds and levels of challenge for understanding, they are not essentially different from everyday uses in their
pragmatic characteristics. Nor is there a necessary difference in the discursive spacesthe publicsthat are constituted as a consequence of people
seeking to represent problems and influence others through language. The
challenges of working across cultural contexts, however, suggest a self-conscious approach, even a method, for the construction of action-guiding
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understanding. Everyday communication typically brings with it the need to

thematize a few areas of disagreement against implicit, usually unspoken,
background understandings that accomplish much of the work of communication (and which, of course, can also hide injustices). In cross-cultural contexts, it will often be the case that little is sharedor seen to be sharedwithout
very conscious attentiveness to translation, broadly understood. A pragmatist
reconstruction of the work of comparative political theory suggests a logic of
inquiry that proceeds through a progressive series of questions. Although
scholarly work could be focused on any one of these stages, it is the implicit
linkages between them that bind the broad endeavor of comparative political
theory to the morally generative and discursively constructed character of
global publics and the democratic possibilities that can follow from them. We
can identify (and stylize) five distinct stages of this progress:
Empathy
The process of the cross-cultural translation of human vulnerabilities into
frames for political action begins, first, with basic empathetic recognition.
Empathy responds to problems that are, as it were, recognizably human, in
that they count as problems in any context: war and insecurity, deprivation,
oppression, dislocation, rapid social change of the kinds that disorders future
planning, despoiled commons, and so on. Of course, without the perspective
that follows from representing problems as problems, many of these features
and conditions of human collectivities will count as nature rather than
problems that might elicit recognition of common experiences. But that is
what globalization brings: as we suggested above, it is productive of problematics in this very basic sense, in part because imageries and experiences
now travel, often instantaneously, with the help of technology. A pragmatic
approach to comparative political theory will begin, then, by looking for
problems that are recognized as such across contexts.
Representation
However powerful empathetic recognitions might prove to be, empathy is not
sufficient to generate common problem definitions. Every context is already
framed with received cultures, ideologies, justifications, and other normative
resources. So the real work of cross-cultural comparison begins by articulating the linguistic and conceptual frames through which human vulnerabilities
are represented as problems to which human agents should respondespecially those with shared fates that denote potential communities or constituencies. What are the words (and images) used to depict the problem? What
44
rules, conceptions, and theories of justification or legitimacy are implied in

these usages? Finding out will mean, often, not just cross-cultural translation
and comparison, but also intracultural comparison, as people situated differently with respect to class, caste, status, occupation, gender, religion, ethnicity, neighborhood, region, and other divisions and locations within the same
societies and discourses will have different experiences and problems.
Sometimes similarly situated subgroups across societies share more by way
of common problem frames than do agents within the same societies, as in
the case of transnational movements for the rights of Indigenous peoples, for
example. We should never read in internal cultural consensus, which not only
risks using comparative political theory to uncritically affirm the practices of
others (and to commit the theoretical and ideological sin of essentialism),
but also risks viewing the other as depoliticized, unengaged in practices of
internal criticism. Critique of a problem frame does not need to rely on norms
external to the context. Even in relatively stable caste systems, James Scott
has shown us, those who are disadvantaged use the rules of the upper castes
for normative leverage.67 Peasants in China are not afraid to use Confucian
norms to justify their resistance to corrupt or underperforming officials.68 In
other words, comparative political theory should attend not only to the constellations of ideas at work in the legitimation of power but also the terms
through which power is resisted within a given context. Both perspectives are
pertinent to the reconstruction and representation of problems as problems
within a given context.
Translation
Third, we should ask how the construction of problems fits within the larger
constellation of locally embedded norms of responsibility and relationship, a
process that enables the mapping and translation of problem frames across
contexts. Much of the work of comparative political theory is (and should be)
focused here: on language use and contexts of usage that make terms of political discourse accessible and intelligible across languages, historical
moments, and cultures. Clearly, the selection of contexts and concepts for
translation across discourses is far from a neutral practice: it is always-already
laden with the cognitive and political commitments of the agent who is
undertaking the translation. But the larger task of comparative political theory is to select for translation those constellations of concepts that are most
revealing of the background political imaginary that orients agents in a particular context. A problem-centered approach to translation posits a shared
problem experiences as an object of concern in two or more linguistic or
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cultural contexts and works to render their orientations toward common

problems mutually intelligible.
Discourse
As understandings are compared and calibrated across languages and cultures, problematics can be framed as discourses, composed of linked claims
and assertions. At this point, comparative political theory converges with the
possibilities and ethos of deliberative democracy, in the generic sense that
individuals coming from different perspectives can explain, share, compare,
argue, and deliberate. Ideally, comparative political theory is generative of
new discourses that attend to globalized relationships of fate, and contribute
to emergent publics. That such generation is possible is one of the lessons
from pragmatic theories of language. That it is probable is clear from the
rapid development of human rights and democracy discourses, in virtually
every political context around the globe.
Action
Finally, though common discourses are not always action-guiding, they are a
condition of possibility for action-in-concert: mobilization, institutional
change, legitimation of practices or institutions. When discourses are political in the sense that they orient action, they recursively (re)define the topics
of comparative political theory. To the extent that comparative political theory participates in developing these discourses, it fulfills its role of a problem-driven discourse of mutual justification, and responds to shared fates for
which there are common responsibilities.
Histories of the Future: Directions for

Comparative Political Theory
Our argument for comparative political theory has focused on its potential
contributions to global democracy, just insofar as it furthers critical reflexivity across cultural and linguistic boundariesa condition for fashioning
collective futures. The value of these contributions consists in rendering
accessible the background social imaginaries that orient political action in
different linguistic and cultural contexts, including the deep conceptual
structures of space, time, and causality that underwrite understandings of
the spatiotemporal boundaries of community, membership, and moral obligation in every culture. Because social imaginaries are deeply rooted in
46
language, history, and culture, a comparative political theory capable of

offering translations across imaginaries must be informed by advanced linguistic knowledge and astute empirical analysis of the contexts within
which political ideas do their work of orienting action and structuring relations of power. In this sense, the pragmatic foundations of both their argument and ours lead us to agree wholeheartedly with Freeden and Vincent
when they suggest that the task of comparative political theory begins by
articulating the constructions of the political that operate in the background of particular cultural and historical contexts.69
This work of reconstructing political imaginaries should proceed both at
the most abstract levels of ontology and at the minute level of the phenomenology of political action. At one end of this spectrum, Youngmin Kims
Cosmogony as Political Philosophy delves into a close reading of canonical debates over a Song Dynasty Confucian classic on the origins and nature
of the world, showing that they provide a unique window onto changes in
Confucian political philosophy in late Imperial China.70 At the other end,
Lam Wai-Mans meticulous study of hybrid conceptions of political legitimacy in contemporary Hong Kong traces popular views of legitimacy to both
Chinese cultural roots (specifically, Confucian ideas of minben or peoplecentered rule) and to Western ones.71 Sudipta Kaviraj traverses the entire
spectrum between ontology and phenomenology in his study of the evolution
of the Sanskritic concept of rajanitithe principles or precepts (niti) appropriate to rulers (raja)from premodern India to the present.72 In this brilliant
study, Kaviraj argues that contemporary shortfalls in an ethos of democratic
accountability among political leaders can be traced to older meanings of
rajaniti as a transcendentally ordained caste-specific morality, read into modern politics as a para-royal attitude on the part of officials and a corresponding stance of abject supplication on the part of citizens. This
interpretation of the power of political language to shape social relations
offers a novel perspective on what otherwise tends to be figured simply as
corruption in contemporary Indian politics.
Kavirajs study exemplifies a form of comparative political theory as a
history of the present (to borrow Foucaults apt phrase) that is particularly
promising for the agenda we advocate here. As Roxanne Euben argues, this
kind of approach is no longer of interest only to scholarly specialists, for the
imperatives of geopolitics have lent a new sense of urgency to attempts to
bring these pasts into an often presentist social science.73 The logic of this
mode of inquiry is to begin from contemporary problem frames (such as
political corruption in India) and, through careful attention to the terms of
political discourse actually deployed by contemporary actors, conduct a history (or genealogy) of ideas in order to disclose the political imaginary within
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which they are sense-making, action-orienting concepts. Beginning from the

terms that circulate in contemporary political discourse is important for the
case we are making, as this is the strategy that will enable us to reconstruct,
and therefore translate across and reflexively engage, the political imaginaries that orient agents in the present historical momentincluding ourselves.
Tracing the different pathways by which we have arrived at the present, then,
is invaluable groundwork for the task of crafting possible futures in which we
can imagine ourselves as equal agents.
As Kaviraj and others suggest, the advent of modernity in different
global locations is a critically important juncture for these histories of the
present. The odd case of people armed with one set of conceptual tools facing and having to deal with institutions and practices based on concepts of a
different culture, he writes, has become a constant, repetitive fact of modern life.74 Focusing our attention on the moments when modernity intrudes
into long-established modes of life, whether through colonialism, violence,
or more subtle pathways, is especially promising for political theory because
these moments are often crucibles for both new forms of thought and innovative practices. Kaviraj again sums up the point nicely: one might ask [of
such moments] what new types of practices were being made possible by
these conceptual changes.75
In East Asia, a pivotal moment was the Meiji revolution in Japan, a program of astonishingly rapid self-imposed modernization understood as the
only course for resisting Euro-American imperialism. A particularly fascinating object of study is the proliferation during this period of compounds based
on the word min, or people, a Chinese character that is also used in both
Japanese and Korean. Following an early period of terminological innovation
in Japan, which was closely followed in China and influenced intellectuals
both there and in Korea, political discourse crystallized around variations of
these terms that linked to modern ideological programs of ethnonationalism,
liberalism, and socialism.76 Understanding the history of these discourses is
crucial to making sense of political imaginaries in contemporary Asia, as
Chinese intellectual historian Wang Hui argues:
The commonality of Asian imaginaries partly derives from subordinate status
under European colonialism, during the Cold War, as well as in the current global
order, and also arises out of Asian movements for national self-determination,
socialism, and colonial liberation. If we fail to acknowledge these historical
conditions and movements we will not be able to understand the implications of
modernity for Asia. . . . If it can be said that the socialist and national liberation
movements of the twentieth century have drawn to a close, their fragmentary
remains can still be a vital source for stimulating new ways of imagining Asia.77
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Wangs account of the relationship between past, present, and future political imaginaries aligns well with the potential of comparative political theory
to contribute to the formation of new political imaginaries in a global future.
Since we are, all of us, now moderns, in that our lives are inescapably structured by such institutions such as states, markets, hybrid cultures, everchanging technologies, and global interaction, the diverse histories of the
present for the peoples of the world cannot avoid becoming a study of multiple modernities,78 alternative modernities,79 or modernity at large.80
To this degree, political theory has a great deal of catching up to do with
cultural studies, subaltern studies, and comparative religion, among other
fields. What distinguishes the project of comparative political theory from
these approaches is, again, its orientation to the study of ideas as a resource
for practical reason in the present, guiding action toward a future we might
want to inhabit. By reconstructing the political imaginaries that already operate in the background of our words and deeds, comparative political theory
reveals those often forgotten resources and influences that make us who we
are as well as what we might become.
We have argued that there is a conceptual and practical link between globalization, deliberative democratic theory, and the academic field of comparative political theory. These themes are connected by the idea that the
human-scale problems characteristic of intensive processes of globalization
can be addressed in a democratic form only under conditions where it is possible for citizens around the world to form, mostly through discourse, shared
political imaginaries: to see themselves not only as connected to one another
but also as possessing the ethical responsibility and the agent-capacity to
render these processes responsive to those whom they affect. Since the formation of imagined communities of shared fate is linguistically mediated,
people who seek to assert democratic agency in response to shared problems
need ideational resources that resonate with locally embedded understandings of ethics and politics in order for mutual interdependence and affectedness to generate newly imagined common futures. We have highlighted the
contributions of comparative political theory to the common pool of ideational resources from which political actors can draw in discovering the
languages through which to construct new, democracy-enabling, political
imaginaries. Drawing on theoretical accounts of the pragmatics of language
use, we have suggested that comparative political theory can help to render
articulate and explicit an array of ideas about politics that, when taken up by
political actors, can help to motivate citizens to take responsibility for rendering the processes of globalization in ways that provide the spaces, practices,
and emergent institutions of democracy across borders.
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49
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous research support of the Shibusawa
Eiichi Memorial Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada. Versions of this article were presented at the American Political
Science Association, the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, the Department of
Political Science, Simon Fraser University, and the Department of Political Science,
Waseda University, and we wish to thank audiences for helpful feedback. We also
wish to thank colleagues who provided us with generous comments on the paper:
Brooke Ackerly, Kiran Banerjee, Joseph Carens, Burke Hendrix, David Laycock, and
Jade Schiff. Particular thanks go to Rmi Lger for suggesting a new title for the
piece.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the
Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
Notes
1. The prevailing terms denoting the study of non-Western political thought
by scholars located within the Western academy are comparative political theory (e.g., Roxanne Euben, Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic
Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism, The Journal of Politics 59, no. 1 [1997]:
28-55), comparative political philosophy (e.g., Anthony J. Parel and Ronald
C. Keith, eds., Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree
[Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1992]; Stephen C. Angle, Human Rights and
Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002]), and comparative political thought (e.g., Michael Freeden and
Andrew Vincent, Introduction: The Study of Comparative Political Thought,
in Comparative Political Thought: Theorizing Practices, ed. Michael Freeden
and Andrew Vincent [London: Routledge, 2013], 123). Yet as Andrew March
stresses, not all work engaging non-Western ideas about politics is methodologically comparative (Andrew March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?
The Review of Politics 71 [2009]: 53165). Leigh Jencos study of the political theory of the early twentieth-century Chinese thinker Zhang Shizhao explicitly resists the label of comparative political theory to describe her endeavor
(Leigh K. Jenco, Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political
Theory of Zhang Shizhao [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 9).
Wendy Brown has a point when she suggests that it is rather offensive to use the
term comparative to denote non-Western (as in empirical political science
50
comparative too often denotes non-American): the terminology simply reinscribes the privilege it purports to resist (Wendy Brown, Political Theory is
Not a Luxury: A Response to Timothy Kaufman-Osborns Political Theory as a
Profession, Political Research Quarterly 63, no. 3 [2010]: 684). For these reasons, we would prefer to use the terms intercultural or transcultural to denote
the sort of political theory we have in mind, but reluctantly follow prevailing
usage in this article. As Farah Godrej notes, the name has stuck, and comparative political theory continues to be associated with a general inclusivity, openness toward and a deep curiosity about otherness. Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan
Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 7.
2. Though we have both made interventions around its edges. See, e.g., Baogang
He and Mark E. Warren, Authoritarian Deliberation: The Deliberative Turn
in Chinese Politics, Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 2 (2011): 26989; Melissa
S. Williams, Criminal Justice, Democratic Fairness, and Cultural Pluralism:
The Case of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, Buffalo Criminal Law Journal
5, no. 2 (2002): 45195; Melissa S. Williams, Sharing the River: Aboriginal
Representation in Canadian Political Institutions, in Representation and
Democratic Theory, ed. David Laycock (Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2004), 93118.
3. Fred Dallmayr, who has done exemplary work in fostering the development of
comparative political theory, cites bi- or multilingualism as a qualifying criterion
for comparative political theorists. Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Monologue: For a
Comparative Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 2 (2004): 24957.
4. E.g., Michaelle L. Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political
Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 2006); Joseph Chan, A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights for
Contemporary China, in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed.
Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 21237; Joseph Chan, Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties, and
Confucianism, Philosophy East and West 52, no. 3 (2002): 281310; Joseph
Chan, Democracy and Meritocracy: Toward a Confucian Perspetive,
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2007): 17993; Fred Dallmayr, ed.,
Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010); Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999); Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006); Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought; Leigh K.
Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say? A Methods-Centered Approach to CrossCultural Engagement, American Political Science Review 101, no. 4 (2007):
74155; Jenco, Making the Political; Youngmin Kim, Cosmogony as Political
Philosophy, Philosophy East and West 58, no. 1 (2008): 108125; Andrew
March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); March, What Is Comparative
Political Theory?; Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Paradoxes of Popular Sovereignty:
Williams and Warren
51
A View from Spanish America, Journal of Politics 74, no. 4 (2012): 105365;
Diego A. von Vacano, The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin
American/Hispanic Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012); Hiroshi Watanabe, A History of Japanese Political Thought, 16001901
(Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2012).
5. Or, alternatively, to provincialize Western political thought, i.e., to demarcate it as a culturally, historically, and geographically specific human tradition. This construction leans on the felicitous coinage of Dipesh Chakrabartys
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
6. See, e.g., David Held, Democracy and Globalization, Global Governance 3,
no. 3 (1997): 25167.
7. John Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in
International Relations, International Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 13974.
8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2001); Barry Gills, Empire versus Cosmopolis: The Clash of
Globalizations, Globalizations 2, no. 1 (2005): 513; Nisha Shah, Cosmopolis
or Empire? Metaphors of Globalization and the Description of Legitimate
Political Communities, in Unsettled Legitimacy: Political Community, Power,
and Authority in a Global Era, ed. Steven Bernstein and William D. Coleman
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 7494; Margaret E.
Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in
International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Sidney
Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005); Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and
Herbert Reiter, Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest
Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Sally Engle
Merry, Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle,
American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 3851; Mark Goodale, The Power
of Right(s): Tracking Empires of Law and New Modes of Social Resistance
in Bolivia (and Elsewhere), in The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law
between the Global and the Local, ed. Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
9. We follow Archibugi et al. (Daniele Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi and
Raffaele Marchetti, Introduction: Mapping Global Democracy, in Global
Democracy: Normative and Empirical Perspectives, ed. Daniele Archibugi,
Mathias Koenig-Archibugi and Raffaele Marchetti [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012], 8.) in the usage of democratic polycentrism.
10. Thomas Pogge, Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty, Ethics 103, no. 1 (1992):
4875; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern
State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995);
Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan
Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
11. See, e.g., Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 3.
52
12. Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, chap. 1; Euben, Journeys to the Other
Shore, chap. 6; see also Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge,
and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Cosmopolitanisms, Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000):
57789; Carole Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New
Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jos Casanova,
Cosmopolitanism, the Clash of Civilizations, and Multiple Modernities,
Current Sociology 59, no. 2 (2011): 25267.
13. E.g., Will Kymlicka, Citizenship in an Era of Globalization: Commentary on
Held, in Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
Dennis F. Thompson, Democratic Theory and Global Society, Journal of
Political Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 11125; Robert Goodin, Enfranchising All
Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives, Philosophy and Public Affairs 35, no. 1
(2007): 4068.
14. Even before the latest round of globalization, and still more after, it has simply
ceased to be the case that the effects of our actions and choices stop at the territorial boundaries of our own countries. Democratically, we really ought to reconstitute our demos to reflect that fact: ideally including within it everyone whose
interests are affected by our actions and choices, or at the very least adapting
democratic practice within our unjustifiably restricted demos to reflect its democratic shortcomings in that respect (Robert E. Goodin, Innovating Democracy:
Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008], 5-6; for a similar point, see James Bohman, Democracy
across Borders: From Dmos to Dmois [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007],
45.)
15. Michael Goodhart, Europes Democratic Deficits through the Looking Glass,
Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (2007): 56784, 579.
16. John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006),
158; Bohman, Democracy across Borders, 21.
17. From this standpoint, it is a weakness of List and Koenig-Archibugis agency
model of a global demos that a collectivity be able to exercise statelike powers in order to be counted as a demos: The key condition for functioning as a
demos is . . . [that] [t]he collection of individuals in question has the capacity (not
necessarily actualized) to be organized, in a democratic manner, in such a way
as to function as a state-like group agent. Christian List and Mathias KoenigArchibugi, Can There Be a Global Demos? An Agency-Based Approach,
Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010): 76110, 89.
18. E.g., Joshua Cohen and Charles F. Sabel, Global Democracy? International
Law and Politics 37 (2005):76397; Bohman, Democracy across Borders;
Benedict Kingsbury, International Law as Inter-Public Law, in NOMOS XLIX:
Moral Universalism and Pluralism, ed. Henry S. Richardson and Melissa S.
Williams (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 167204; Dryzek,
Deliberative Global Politics; Tully, Public Philosophy; Boaventura de Sousa
Santos, The Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation,
Williams and Warren
53
Development 48, no. 2 (2005): 1522; List and Koenig-Archibugi, Can There
Be a Global Demos?; Robert E. Goodin, Global Democracy: In the Beginning,
International Theory 2, no. 2 (2010): 175209.
19. Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts
and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public
Sphere, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992); Nancy Fraser, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On
the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World,
in Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro,
and Danilo Petranovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4566;
Bohman, Democracy across Borders, 6061; John S. Dryzek, Foundations and
Frontiers of Deliberative Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
chap. 9.
20. Fraser, Transnationalizing the Public Sphere; Dryzek, Foundations and
Frontiers, 185.
21. Melissa S. Williams, Citizenship as Agency within Communities of Shared
Fate, in Unsettled Legitimacy: Political Community, Power, and Authority
in a Global Era, ed. Steven Bernstein and William D. Coleman (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2009).
22. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global
Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 81; David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2006), 309.
23. Gould, Globalizing Democracy, 170.
24. E.g., Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and
Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Goodin, Enfranchising
All Affected Interests; Bohman, Democracy across Borders; cf. Sofia Nsstrm,
The Challenge of the All-Affected Principle, Political Studies 59, no. 1 (2011):
11634.
25. Iris Marion Young, Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination and
Responsibility for Justice (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Iris Marion Young,
Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
26. Michael Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010); Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, The Concept of Representation
in Contemporary Democratic Theory, Annual Review of Political Science 11
(2008):387412.
27. See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), 19596; Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 180; Eiko Ikegami,
Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese
Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Browers, Democracy
and Civil Society; Jeong-Woo Koo, The Origins of the Public Sphere and Civil
Society: Private Academies and Petitions in Korea, 15061800, Social Science
54
History 31, no. 3 (2007): 381409; Miriam Hoexter, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and
Nehemia Levtzion, eds., The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies (Albany: State
University of New York, 2002).
28. Roxanne Euben, Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist
Critique of Rationalism, Journal of Politics 29, no. 1 (1997): 2855, 33.
29. It is worth noting, however, that one of the earliest contributions to the agenda
of comparative political philosophy was framed not in terms of globalization
but in terms of debates over multiculturalism and particularly the canon wars
in academia. (Stephen G. Salkever and Michael Nylan, Comparative Political
Philosophy and Liberal Education: Looking for Friends in History, PS:
Political Science and Politics 27, no. 2 [1994]: 23847.) As we note below, there
is a deep continuity between debates over the politics of difference or the politics of recognition in the 1990s and contemporary contributions to intercultural
and postcolonial political theory. The link is that both are part of an ongoing
critique of the excessive or false universalisms characteristic of Western political
thought, many of which were brought out in the 1980s in feminist contributions
to political theory.
30. Dallmayr (Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary
Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Dallmayr, Beyond Monologue.
31. Dallmayr, Comparative Political Theory, 10.
32. Ibid., 15.
33. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 540.
34. Ibid., 54041; see also Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 42; Daniel A. Bell, East
Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 11.
35. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 565; see also Dallmayr,
Comparative Political Theory, 15; March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 6364,
27374.
36. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 7; see also Hassan Bashir, Europe and the
Eastern Other (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 31.
37. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction, 8.
38. Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say? 745; see also Freeden and Vincent,
Introduction, 7.
39. Antony Black, The Way Forward in Comparative Political Thought, Journal of
International Political Theory 7, no. 2 (2011): 22128, 224.
40. Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other.
41. Black, The Way Forward, 225; see also Ken Tsutsumibayashi, Fusion of
Horizons or Confusion of Horizons? Intercultural Dialogue and Its Risks,
Global Governance 11, no. 1 (2005): 10314; Leigh Jenco, Recentering
Political Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality, Cultural Critique 79 (2011):
2759, 30; Bashir, Europe and the Eastern Other, 21.
42. Jenco, What Does Heaven Ever Say?; Jenco, Recentering Political Theory;
Jenco, On the Possibility of Chinese Thought as Global Theory, in Chinese
Thought as Global Social Theory, ed. Leigh Jenco (forthcoming). We are also
indebted to Tobold Rollo for conversations around these points.
Williams and Warren
55
43. E.g., Black, The Way Forward.

44. Michael Freeden, Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking,
Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 (2007): 19, 7.
46. March writes: Certainly, intellectual historians (whether Cambridge School or
other) do not all assume that their thinkers and texts are potential sources for
first-order normative commitments on our part; in fact, it is hard to imagine
a less engaged approach to the history of political thought (March, What Is
Comparative Political Theory?, 549).
47. March, What Is Comparative Political Theory?, 53435.
49. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 43.
50. See Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,
History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1968): 353, 53.
51. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap.
1; Ian Shapiro, Problems, Methods, and Theories: Or What Is Wrong with
Political Science and What to Do about It, Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002):
596619; Jane Mansbridge, Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System, in
Deliberative Politics, ed. Stephen Macedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 21139.
52. Black, The Way Forward; Euben, Enemy in the Mirror.
53. E.g., Young, Inclusion and Democracy; Anthony Giddens, The Constitution
of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Jrgen Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of
Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1984).
54. Dryzek, Foundations and Frontiers, chap. 9.
55. Mark E. Warren, Deliberative Democracy and the Corruption of Speech (presented to Le Colloque sur le Tournant Dlibratif, Lcole des hautes tudes en
sciences sociales, Paris, June 1617, 2011).
56. Jrgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas
McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979), chap. 1; Habermas, Theory of
Communicative Action, chap. 3; Habermas, Structural Transformation; see also
Thomas McCarthy and David Couzens Hoy, Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994), chap. 3.
57. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 28889.
58. Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 81.
59. Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 93.
60. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, [1953] 2001): secs. 151, 17980).
61. Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 165.
62. Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive
Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 643.
56
63. Ibid., 64566.

64. Angle, Human Rights, chap. 2.
65. Ibid., 254.
66. Ibid., 11.
67. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
68. Kevin OBrien and Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
69. Freeden and Vincent, Introduction.
70. Kim, Cosmogony as Political Philosophy.
71. Wai-Man Lam, Political Legitimacy in Hong Kong: A Hybrid Notion, in East
Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy, ed. Joseph Chan and Doh Chull Shin
(forthcoming).
72. Sudipta Kaviraj, On the Historicity of the Political: Rajaniti and Politics
in Modern Indian Thought, in Comparative Political Thought, ed. Michael
Freeden and Andrew Vincent, 2439.
73. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 2.
74. Kaviraj, On the Historicity of the Political, 25.
75. Ibid., 26.
76. Michael Burtscher, Notes Toward a Conceptual History of the Terms Minzoku
and Kokumin in Early Meiji Japan, Journal of Political Science and Sociology
16 (2012): 47106; Jin Y. Park, ed., Comparative Political Theory and CrossCultural Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Hwa Yol Jung (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2009); Robert Culp, Theorizing Citizenship in Modern China, Journal
of Political Science and Sociology 16 (2012): 12348).
77. Hui Wang, The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011), 62.
78. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities, in Multiple Modernities, ed.
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 129.
79. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001).
80. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996).
Author Biography
Melissa S. Williams teaches political theory at the University of Toronto. Her work
is focused in contemporary democratic theory with a focus on questions of pluralism,
justice and equality. Her published work includes Voice, Trust, and Memory:
Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton
University Press, 1998) and articles on topics in the history of political thought, multiculturalism, toleration, deliberative democracy, and the rights of Indigenous peoples. She was recently Editor of NOMOS, the Yearbook of the American Society for
Political and Legal Philosophy (published by New York University Press); recent
volumes she has edited include Toleration and Its Limits (2008, with Jeremy Waldron),
Williams and Warren
57
Moral Universalism and Pluralism (2008, with Henry Richardson), and Transitional
Justice (2012, with Rosemary Nagy and Jon Elster). She serves as Project Team
Leader for the collaborative research project, East Asian Perspectives on Politics,
aimed at advancing the field of comparative political theory. Her current research
interests focus on the future of democracy under conditions of globalization, and comparative political theory.
Mark E. Warren holds the Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair for the Study of
Democracy at the University of British Columbia. He is especially interested in democratic innovations, civil society and democratic governance, and political corruption.
Warren is author of Democracy and Association (Princeton University Press, 2001),
which won the Elaine and David Spitz Book Prize awarded by the Conference for the
Study of Political Thought, as well as the 2003 Outstanding Book Award from the
Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. He is
editor of Democracy and Trust (Cambridge University Press 1999), and co-editor of
Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens Assembly
(Cambridge University Press 2008). Warrens work has appeared in journals such as
the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science,
and Political Theory. He is currently working with an international team on a project
entitled Participedia (www.participedia.net), which uses a web-based platform to collect data about democratic innovation and participatory governance around the world.

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PTX42110.1177/0090591713507934Political TheoryWilliams and Warren

A Democratic Case for

Melissa S. Williams1 and Mark E. Warren2

of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Williams and Warren

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Political Theory 42(1)

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Globalization, Democracy, and Emergent Publics

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Political Theory 42(1)

polycentrism (or transnationalism).9 Cosmopolitan democrats such as David

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model of the territorial sovereign state.16 Thus, polycentrisms emphasis is on

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Political Theory 42(1)

(Comparative) Political Theory, Dialogue, and

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Truth or insight . . . cannot be garnered by retreat into neutral spectatorship or a

Dialogical encounters with the cultural other, Dallmayr argues, make it

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The gap between imaginary and actual intercultural dialogues prompts

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political theory, and contrast it with the engaged or dialogical model.48

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Political Theory 42(1)

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differences, and how a broad agenda of comparative political theory could

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account of the relationship-constituting effects of communication found in

Constitutive Powers of Intercultural

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Williams and Warren

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about the relationships that are established as a consequence of speaking and

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language community or in an interlinguistic exchange.63 In Human Rights

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certain. While we need to understand the risks of replicating, for example,

The Logic of Problem-Driven Comparative

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understanding. Everyday communication typically brings with it the need to

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rules, conceptions, and theories of justification or legitimacy are implied in

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cultural contexts and works to render their orientations toward common

Histories of the Future: Directions for

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