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Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2010

Megan C. Thomas
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Abstract

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists such as Schlegel and Müller sought to broaden narrow European scholarly horizons by comparing ancient Indian ideas with those of classical Greece and Rome and modern Europe, and thus to transform the human sciences. These aims are similar to contemporary comparative political theory's concerns to remedy the Eurocentrism of the field of political theory and to identify valuable ideas in non-Western sources. These similarities suggest that we ought to revisit our understanding of Orientalism, reconsider how and when epistemological appropriation has political consequences, and recognize the limits of text-based approaches to political theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , Fall 2010 , pp. 653 - 677
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2010

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References

1 Schlegel, C. W. F., On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, in The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, trans. Millington, E. J. (London: Bohn, 1849)Google Scholar (repr. in The European Discovery of India: Key Indological Sources of Romanticism, ed. Michael Franklin, vol. 4 [London: Ganesha, 2001]), 427.

2 Dallmayr, Fred, “Foreword,” Review of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008): 1–2Google Scholar.

3 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979)Google Scholar.

4 Most of the works cited below either implicitly or explicitly make use of Said; in addition, Fred Dallmayr has written expressly on Said's achievements in Small Wonder: Global Power and Its Discontents (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), chap. 5.

5 Schwab, Raymond, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Cohn, Bernard S., “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, ed. Collier, June Starr and Jane F. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Cohn, , “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” Subaltern Studies 4 (1985): 276–329Google Scholar.

6 My understanding of this moment derives primarily from Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, though as Tavakoli-Targhi has shown, in describing it as a “discovery” of Europeans (without acknowledging contributions of Asian scholars) one engages in what he calls Orientalism's “genesis amnesia” (Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography [New York: Palgrave, 2001]CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

7 Schlegel, Language and Wisdom, 427. Schlegel's interest in the Sanskritic literature and ancient Indians was shared with his brother, August Wilhelm, for whom Germany's first chair of Sanskrit was established (Bonn, 1818). For both brothers, Sanskrit as a language was superior to Arabic, and Arabic texts, learning, and mythology had more ancient origins in India (Irwin, Robert, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents [Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2006], 156Google Scholar). The valorization of ancient (Hindu) texts, cultures, and philosophy, as against Muslim Persianate Indian Moghul court culture and institutions, had particular significance for founding mythologies of British rule in India, and also resonated with later versions of European anti-Semitism (Kaiwar, Vasant, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance: The Politics of Identity in an Age of Revolutions, Colonialism, and Nationalism,” in Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, ed. Kaiwar, Vasant and Mazumdar, Sucheta [Durham: Duke University Press, 2003]: 13–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

8 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, 53.

9 Jones, Sir William, preface to The Institutes of Hindu Law; Or, The Ordinances of Menu, According to the Gloss of Culluca, in Sir William Jones: A Reader, ed. Pachori, Satya S. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 199Google Scholar. Here I borrow the argument of Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State.”

10 Rudolph and Rudolph emphasize the equivalence that inheres in the Orientalist approach to Indian law; Cohn, the denigration of local authority and knowledge. Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, “Occidentalism and Orientalism: Perspectives on Legal Pluralism,” in Cultures of Scholarship, ed. Humphreys, Sarah C. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 219–52Google Scholar; Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State.”

11 Schlegel, Language and Wisdom, 474–76.

12 Ibid., 477.

13 Ibid., 500, 477.

14 Ibid., 500. Emphasis mine.

15 Ibid., 520. Emphasis mine.

16 Ibid., 472. This part of Schlegel would be quoted by Gandhi in his 1909 Hind Swaraj as evidence that “the ancient Indian civilisation has little to learn from the modern” (Gandhi, M. K., Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Parel, Anthony, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 121, 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

17 Schlegel, Language and Wisdom, 518.

18 Ibid., 526.

19 Ibid., 476.

20 Ibid., 526.

21 Ibid., 522–23. This “discovery” and its significance are treated in detail by Schwab, Oriental Renaissance; its origins and some of its subsequent political applications are traced by Kaiwar, “Aryan Model of History.”

22 Schlegel, Language and Wisdom, 512–13.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 526.

25 On Müller, see Trautmann, Thomas R., Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 172–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Müller, F. Max, India: What Can it Teach Us? (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1883)Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., 24.

28 Ibid., 33.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 32.

31 Ibid., 43.

32 For reference to evolutionary theory, see ibid., 39.

33 Ibid., 33, 39.

34 Ibid., 45.

35 Ibid., 32.

36 Ibid., 49.

37 Ibid., 45.

38 Ibid., 46.

39 Ibid., 47.

40 Much scholarship has already proceeded along these lines, whether in conversation with Said's work or preceding it. See, e.g., Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge; Schwab, Oriental Renaissance; Halbfass, Wilhelm, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Rudolph and Rudolph, “Occidentalism and Orientalism.”

41 Dallmayr, Fred, “Introduction: Toward a Comparative Political Theory,” in Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory, ed. Dallmayr, Fred (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999)Google Scholar; Euben, Roxanne, “Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism,” Journal of Politics 59, no. 1 (1997): 28–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Euben, Roxanne, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 5–6Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., 10. My analysis of the tendency of comparative political theory to emphasize commonality roughly accords with Andrew March's remarks about what he calls its “rehabilitative” strand (March, Andrew, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” Review of Politics 71, no. 4 [2009]: 542–44)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Azizah Y. al-Hibri, “Islamic Constitutionalism and the Concept of Democracy,” in Border Crossings, ed. Dallmayr, 78.

45 Dallmayr, “Foreword,” 3–4.

46 Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 10.

47 Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Eastern Veiling, Western Freedom?” in Border Crossings, ed. Dallmayr, 43. See also the contributions in the same volume by al-Hibri, Thomas Pantham, and Robert C. Johansen.

48 Manochehr Dorraj, “Symbolic and Utilitarian Value of a Tradition: Martyrdom in the Iranian Political Culture,” in Border Crossings, 119–44.

49 Dallmayr, “Foreword,” 3–4; Dallmayr, “Introduction,” 2. See also al-Hibri, “Islamic Constitutionalism and the Concept of Democracy”; Hirschmann, “Eastern Veiling, Western Freedom?”; Russell Arben Fox, “Confucianism and Communitarianism in a Liberal Democratic World,” in Border Crossings, 185–212; Johansen, “Radical Islam and Nonviolence: A Case Study of Religious Empowerment and Constraint,” in Border Crossings, 145–72; and Ackerly, Brooke, “Is Liberalism the Only Way toward Democracy? Confucianism and Democracy,” Political Theory 33, no. 4 (2005): 547–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Müller, India, 32.

51 Dallmayr, “Introduction,” 2.

52 Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 10. Jenco makes a point that is similar to Euben's qualification in Jenco, Leigh Kathryn, “‘What Does Heaven Ever Say?’ A Methods-Centered Approach to Cross-Cultural Engagement,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 4 (2007): 742–45, 753–54Google Scholar.

53 March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” 544–51.

54 Müller, India, 32.

55 It may come as some surprise, given Müller's words, that his appointment to an important chair at Cambridge was initially resisted because he was thought to be hostile to missionary work, and too wedded to the Humboldtian model of the university, and of science as proceeding without taint of mundane political instrumentalism. See Veer, Peter van der, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 108–10Google Scholar.

56 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Said, Orientalism. I thank Bob Meister, and members of the audience at the 2009 WPSA meeting at which I presented an earlier draft of this paper, for pointing out this direction for my argument.

57 March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” 544–51.

58 Godrej, Farah, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the Other,” Polity 41, no. 2 (2009): 135–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?”

59 March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” 532–33.

60 Godrej, “Cosmopolitan Political Thought,” 162.

61 Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?” 741.

62 Ibid. See also Godrej, “Cosmopolitan Political Thought.”

63 See Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State.” Rudolph and Rudolph, “Occidentalism and Orientalism,” are more sympathetic to Jones's and Hastings's distrust of local authorities.

64 Rudolph and Rudolph, “Occidentalism and Orientalism,” 225–27, 232.

65 Rudolph and Rudolph (ibid.) have noted that this emphasis on textual authority and great civilizations characterized both Brahmanic and British law in colonial India, and was promoted by more centralized authorities against more “particular” forms of local law that were not based in a grand civilization or textual tradition. See also Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State.” A fascinating comparative case with ties to this one is treated in Robinson, Geoffrey, “Colonial Policy and Political Relations in Bali,” in The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

66 This latter point is made critically by Katherine Gordy, “The Practice of Comparison in Political Theory: A Tentative Response to a Call for a Method” (paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Vancouver, 2009). It is also made by John J. Clarke, who defends the practice, in “Taoist Politics: An Other Way?” in Border Crossings, 253–76.

67 Rudolph and Rudolph, “Occidentalism and Orientalism,” 225.

68 See, e.g., the textual traditions emphasized in Antony Black, “The ‘Axial Period’: What Was it and What Does it Signify?” and Gebhardt, Jürgen, “Political Thought in an Intercivilizational Perspective: A Critical Reflection,” both in Review of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 For a much more thorough and nuanced treatment of the issues that comparison as a method raises for political theory, see Gordy, “Practice of Comparison,” which responds to and builds on some of the issues raised by March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?”

70 Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?”

71 Godrej, “Cosmopolitan Political Thought.” Cf. Dallmayr's account of Halbass's hermeneutical method in Dallmayr, Fred, “Exit from Orientalism,” in Beyond Orientalism: Essays in Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

72 Trautmann, Thomas R., “Constructing the Racial Theory of Indian Civilization,” in The Aryan Debate, ed. Trautmann, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

73 Kaiwar, “Aryan Model of History.”

74 Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 10.

75 See, e.g., Whelan, Frederick, “Oriental Despotism: Anquetil-Duperron's Response to Montesquieu,” History of Political Thought 22, no. 4 (2001): 619–47Google Scholar. Sankar Muthu has done similar work on “Enlightenment” thought in Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

76 Cf. March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” 552–58.

77 The Subaltern Studies project stands out as a model of this kind of work.

78 See Gordy, “Practice of Comparison”; Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?” Michael Freeden has developed this more systematically in “The Comparative Study of Political Thinking,” Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 (2007): 1–9. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting I consult his work.

79 Cf. March, “What Is Comparative Political Theory?” 547–48, 559–60.

80 This may look more like intellectual history than political theory to some, as March describes the difference; I am untroubled by the move.

81 Rudolph and Rudolph, “Occidentalism and Orientalism,” 200–21, suggest that Parsonian social science is at least in part to blame for a flattening out of social scientific investigation, which their earlier work (Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967]) contested. What would be a comparable moment for political theory?

82 Dallmayr, “Introduction,” 2.

83 This mostly exclusive relationship is one drawn by March (“What Is Comparative Political Theory?” 547–48, 559–60), with which Gordy critically engages (“Practice of Comparison”).