While interest in Democracy in America has been centered in the West, James T. Schleifer describes in this chapter how Japanese interest in Democracy in America began as early as the late nineteenth century during the period of the Meiji Restoration. By way of contrast, Chinese interest in Tocqueville’s writings emerged only in the past few decades and has focused more on his Old Regime and the Revolution. These two case studies are exemplary of growing international interest in Tocqueville’s writings as thinkers outside the West wrestle with his lessons about the future possibilities of equality, political rights, and democratic liberty.

Democracy in America focuses mainly on the history of the United State and the prospects for Anglo-American democracy. However, it is important to remember that Tocqueville’s celebrated thoughts on the unique qualities of American democracy did not go unnoticed by Spanish American thinkers in the nineteenth century. Like Tocqueville’s France, Latin American nations struggled with similar questions of how to secure the institutional and cultural prerequisites for self-government. As José Antonio Aguilar Rivera reveals in this chapter, there is an important tradition of reading and applying the lessons of Democracy in America in the “other America.” Latin American countries sought to emulate the United States’ success with constitutionalism and representative government, and leading political thinkers turned to Tocqueville for guidance. Despite widespread interest in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, however, these applications of Democracy in America diverged widely from one national context to another. Aguilar Rivera shows how interpreters drew on different arguments, often selectively ignoring others, depending on the unique circumstances and political debates of each country.

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.

In this chapter, Melissa Williams begins from the challenge that most contemporary democratic theory is rooted exclusively in Euro-American thought traditions. This is problematic not only for understanding democracy in non-Western contexts but also for crafting democratic theory that can be responsive to globalization. How can a theory of democracy claim global validity if it draws exclusively on Western political experience? The chapter adopts an experimental and playful approach to mapping a strategy of inquiry for deparochializing democratic theory in a global age. It identifies points of contact between contemporary debates over global democracy and forms of contemporary politics that draw on non-Western understandings of the political, focusing on the scales of politics that are most salient for democratic political action: global, state, transnational, and local. The chapter considers three case studies of non-Western conceptions of democracy at these different scales: contemporary Chinese cosmopolitanism (tianxia theory), state-led local democratization in China, and the transnational peasants’ movement, La Vía Campesina. Drawing connections between these cases and the literature on democracy in the global era, the chapter argues that the cases press us toward a transcultural, trans-scalar, translocal, and systemic understanding of democracy’s global potential.

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.

In this chapter, James Tully takes us deep into the phenomenology of the kind of dialogue across traditions that is capable of disrupting the unjust power structures that currently connect diverse traditions in the modern global order. He contrasts “genuine dialogue,” in which traditions have equal status as forms of human understanding, with the many kinds of “false dialogue” that are likely to emerge under circumstances of unequal power and power-knowledge. As beings that make sense of the world through our received traditions, we tend to project onto others the terms that make the world meaningful to us. Deparochializing our political thought must begin by “reparochializing” it, recognizing that the truths we hold to be self-evident have arisen within a sociohistorically specific context. The “deep listening” required for genuine dialogue requires practices of the self that must be cultivated over time before dialogue can generate reciprocal elucidation and transformation. When we succeed, participants in this dialogue can achieve not only mutual understanding but also the possibility of bringing to light ways of “thinking, judging, deliberating, and acting together in response to the situation they share that were unimaginable and unthinkable prior to the dialogue.”

This chapter builds on Stephen Salkever’s experience as one of the first political theorists to teach comparatively in a serious and sustained way. This work began in the 1980s with a co-taught course comparing ancient Greek and ancient Chinese texts. For Salkever, comparative teaching is a practice of what he calls liberal education, which aims to foster the habits of mind that sustain curiosity and critical self-reflection. Texts are chosen not as representative of a particular culture or tradition but as exemplars of original thinking that unsettled the self-understandings of their authors’ contemporaries as much as they might unsettle ours. In this chapter, Salkever reflects on the contributions of comparative political theory to “deparochializing” and “provincializing” Western political theory and even liberal education as such. Both ways of construing the tasks of comparative political theory see it as a form of “constructive escape” from our received opinions, which can limit our capacity for political judgment if they are left unexamined. Salkever draws out the implications of this way of understanding comparative political theory as an educational practice, highlighting the importance of juxtaposing contradictory texts within a given tradition (to resist cultural essentialism) as well as finding continuities across traditions.

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.

This introductory chapter articulates the unifying vision for the volume: that comparative political theory is a transformative and intergenerational practice for the discipline as a whole, in our teaching as well as our research. It is not a niche subfield of political theory, of interest only to specialized experts in particular thought traditions around the world, but is salient to all political theorists, regardless of their methodological or theoretical commitments, who seek modes of political inquiry and analysis that are salient for the twenty-first-century challenges of a now-globalized modernity. The chapter canvasses the structural obstacles to the transformation of the discipline, explores its tendencies to reproduce itself in the image of “the Western canon,” and situates the task of comparative political theory within the larger frame of the tasks of political theory simpliciter. It also addresses the fact that the practice of deparochializing political theory may vary depending on a particular scholar’s location in the world and position in the global academy. Finally, it provides an overview of the contributors’ past contributions to “deparochializing political theory” and a summary of their chapters’ arguments.

This chapter is written from Duncan Ivison’s dual perspective as a political theorist and as a senior administrator at the University of Sydney, which requires him to translate vision statements about the importance of “globalizing the curriculum” into practical reality. Ivison sets out three arguments for a globalized curriculum: the civilizational rationale, the global citizenship rationale, and the rationale of taking moral disagreement seriously. Only the last provides a strong underpinning for deparochializing a curriculum by decentering Western traditions in its core design. Like the “culture wars” of the 1990s, the civilizational rationale is an argument against decentering the West very much. Its purpose is to underscore the claim that ideas of toleration and respect for cultural diversity have their origins in Western thought traditions. The global citizenship rationale, which focuses on the kinds of knowledge students need to adapt and contribute to a globalized world, may not actually generate a strong commitment to going beyond Western traditions of cosmopolitan humanism. The best alternative is based on the reality of deep and persistent moral disagreements: if only we could learn how to hear them, we might find that sometimes cultural others have persuasive arguments against views we take for granted.

Instead of beginning from intellectual traditions or bodies of thought as the units of analysis in comparative political theory, in this chapter Ken Tsutsumibayashi focuses on the ways in which the meaning of concepts derives from their practical use in particular historical moments. The distinction between “East” and “West,” which still frames so many debates in comparative political theory, dissolves under this contextualizing gaze: from the perspective of Japan as the “far eastern province,” “the West” signified China before it signified Europe. Yet the flow of ideas between Japan and other societies has not always been from West to East. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese thinkers engaged European ideas, and their innovative use of these ideas shaped, in turn, the terms of political discourse in China and Korea, shifting them toward institutions and subjectivities that could be rendered congruent with modernity. The chapter traces the remarkable efflorescence in Japan of innovative constructions of Min (“the people”) in Meiji-period thought, which played a key role in the production of new and “multiple modernities.” Tsutsumibayashi argues that we should relinquish cultural “ownership claims” over ideas; the history of ideas can serve as a common pool resource that can enrich practical reason.