Terry Nardin’s chapter grows out of an experiment in cross-cultural teaching that has flourished at the Yale-NUS College in Singapore. The program crosses the civilizational boundaries that often define the way political theory is taught and refuses the usual distinction between “Western” and “non-Western” thought. This distinction privileges European thought, throwing the rest of the world into a residual category, obscuring the fact that the rise of “the West” brought much of the world under the dominating rule of Europeans. Drawing on ancient and modern texts from India, China, and the Islamic world as well as from Europe, the course combines the close reading of both political and philosophical texts. By drawing on a wider range of texts than is usual in political theory courses, it invites students and teachers to explore a diversity of genres and their associated contexts, presuppositions, and reverberations. It addresses disputes about canons, relevance, translations, and expertise, inviting students to engage with a broad intellectual inheritance. It illustrates how faculty can educate one another as they teach all the students in a liberal arts college how to transcend parochialism by sharpening their capacities for philosophical and political reasoning.

Leigh Jenco’s chapter revisits the radical possibility, advanced in earlier work, that transcultural political thought can go beyond dialogue, enabling us to engage as full participants in forms of thought developed by political agents in contexts thoroughly different from our own. Others’ modes of knowledge and knowledge-seeking can become the platforms from which we innovate our own political thought and practice. In this chapter, Jenco argues that the most ambitious way of understanding the project of “deparochializing political theory” goes beyond “decentering” European thought traditions in the way we understand politics, thus making space for non-Western thought as constituent elements in this discipline we call political theory. A more thoroughgoing deparochialization of our discipline would recenter historically marginalized thought traditions as the starting point for critical inquiry and theoretical innovation, eventually yielding new theories that count as knowledge that is relevant to our own sense-making in the world, knowledge for us and not merely about them. Jenco elaborates this Gestalt-shifting approach to cross-cultural theorizing through a discussion of some of its best exemplars, including Stephen Angle’s work on sagehood and Ingrid Jordt’s work on Theravada Buddhism.

Youngmin Kim’s scholarly engagement with the history of Chinese political thought has led him to grapple with a problem that is central to the project of deparochializing political theory: how to delineate the boundaries of a thought tradition such that it is tractable as an object of study and deepened understanding. Rather than looking to geographic regions or broad intellectual traditions to provide the requisite boundaries for units of comparison, Kim turns to the self-identification of individuals as bearers of “a collective identity that they themselves construct.” In this chapter, Kim argues that the tradition of True Way Learning (TWL), a branch of Confucian tradition that became dominant in mid- to late imperial China, constitutes a sufficiently well-bounded community of thought and practice to serve as a useful comparator with similarly bounded traditions in other historical contexts. The chapter develops a comparison between TWL and the Kantian and Madisonian republican traditions in Euro-American thought and holds out the possibility that TWL might still serve as an ideational resource for twenty-first-century Chinese reformers, just as Enlightenment republicanism has inspired reimaginings of anti-despotic political order among American and European thinkers.