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Article
Political Theory
2014, Vol. 42(1) 2657
2013 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591713507934
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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
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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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.
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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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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.
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:
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,
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.
55
56
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),
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.