It is difficult to imagine a society or a civilisation without political thought and even political theory . Living in an organised society, human beings cannot avoid asking questions about its objectives, the basis of its authority, its relation to other societies and its right and duties. In the course of answering them they generate a body of ideas or political thought which shapes their beliefs and conduct and forms an integral part of their collective life. Their political thought is never entirely consistent or coherent. It is not the product of a single mind and includes ideas developed in response to different situations and contexts. They also conflict and their meanings and implications are not always clear either. These incoherences and inconsistencies need to be removed not only for theoretical reasons but also to render the daily life coherent, stable and manageable. This requires the society to reflect on these ideas and produce some kind of political theory . Like political thought, political theory too is an inseparable dimension of collective life. To imagine a society or a civilization without some kind of political theory is to imagine a people happy to muddle through life with a bunch of heterogeneous and conflicting ideas and lacking the capacity for reflective thinking.
While no society is wholly devoid of political theory , the type and quality of the latter varies a great deal. In some societies it is systematic, comprehensive, deeply thought out, conscious of its assumptions, and sufficiently probing; in others it is far less rigorous and systematic. In some societies it is articulated in a body of clearly stated and logically interrelated propositions; in others it is expressed in stories, myths and aphorisms and needs to be skilfully teased out and made explicit. In some societies political theory prizes philosophical sophistication above everything else and aims to develop an intellectual framework based on carefully defined and related concepts. In others it has a normative thrust and places high value on practical recommendations. Since political theory can take different forms, it is a mistake to take one of them as the model and dismiss the rest as not really political theory or declare them defective to the extent that they depart from the model. As long as an attempt is made to analyse, order and relate diverse ideas and offer a general perspective on political life, we have a political theory . What defines political theory is its orientation and level of reflection, not the particular form it takes.
Political theory took a particular form in classical Athens, the birthplace of Western political theory . Almost from the very beginning, it was three dimensional in nature. It was analytical in the sense that it interpreted and organized political life in terms of a clearly defined body of concepts. Concepts were its tools of analysis, and the novelty of a theory was judged by the novelty of its concepts or its interpretations of them. Secondly, it was explanatory in the sense that it related its concepts to the structure of political life, showed how its different parts were related, and explained its institutions and practices accordingly. Thirdly, political theory was normative in the sense of articulating a vision of the good society and providing principles and values to guide choices and actions. All three were important, and they were all closely related. Conceptual analysis, for example, was by itself highly formal and even pointless unless it was part of an explanatory framework, and the normative dimension was little different from sermonizing that others need not take seriously unless it was embedded in the analytical and explanatory concerns. The classical Greek view of the nature and task of political theory formed the basis of an impressive, what for convenience is called the Western, tradition that has grown up over the past two and a half millennia. Given its origins and self-understanding the tradition has certain distinguishing features, such as that it is argumentative, centred on individual thinkers, focused on the Polis, aware of the continuity of its concerns, and given to claiming periodic real or imaginary breaks or discontinuities.
The Western tradition of political theory has predictably exercised considerable influence on the rest of the world, and that influence has been overwhelming during the past three centuries. Three factors have been largely responsible for this. First, since it had the unique advantage of being practised almost continuously for over two and a half millennia by some of the most talented men, it has developed great analytical rigour, addressed a wide range of questions, and acquired methodological self-consciousness not to be found in most other traditions of political theory .
Second, for almost the past three centuries the West has politically, economically and culturally dominated the rest of the world and used its economic, military and political power to propagate its ways of life and thought. Its ideas travelled with its goods, were sometimes supported by its military power, and acquired enormous prestige and respectability. Almost every non-Western country was a supplicant at the Western court, and its spokesmen could hardly expect to be heard, let alone taken seriously, unless they spoke its standard language in an approved accent.
Third, since the West substantially recreated much of the non-Western world in its own image, its political ideas were inscribed in and formed an integral part of the latter’s institutional structure and practices. Although they were sometimes crossed with the indigenous ways of thinking and underwent changes, they remained a dominant presence in the political life of the non-Western world whose political practices and institutions could not be fully understood without reference to the Western categories of thought.
All three factors were important. No amount of political and economic power would have given Western political theory such influence if it had not possessed considerable intellectual strength and vitality. During the colonial struggle for independence it was subjected to a searching critique by some of the ablest minds of the non-Western world, and would have been rejected or at least vigorously resisted if it had been found incapable of defending itself. And neither the intellectual strength of its political theory nor its enormous political and economic power would have given the West this degree of influence if its conceptual framework had been wholly irrelevant to the experiences of the non-Western world. Indeed the latter would have found it totally unintelligible.
The hegemonic position of Western political theory has had two unfortunate consequences. First, many a writer in the non-Western world either imported the readymade Western conceptual packages without examining their relevance, or ‘indigenised’ them without asking how the ideas conceived and systematised in one context could be nativised and adapted to another quite different. Like the trade in material goods, the terms of intellectual exchange have largely remained one-sided. The non-Western world exports the raw material of experiences and imports the finished theoretical products from the West. As a result its indigenous traditions of thought largely remain unfertilised by its novel political experiences. What is more, its past and present either remain disconnected or are misconnected by the mediation of a relatively alien mode of thought, leading in one case to historical amnesia and in the other to ideological schizophrenia.
Second, even as individuals fail to develop their powers of imagination and critical rigour without constant interaction with their equals, a tradition of thought lacks vitality and capacity for self-criticism without the probing presence of an independent ‘other’. In the absence of a critical dialogue with other traditions, Western political theory , despite its great intellectual achievements, has remained parochial, narrow, Western not only in its provenance but also its assumptions and concerns. Since it has enjoyed for the past three centuries the almost divine privilege of shaping the rest of the world in its own image and universalising its forms of thought without being seriously challenged, it remains unable and unwilling to allow non-Western experiences to speak to it in their native tongues and deepen its insights into the range and variety of human experiences and possibilities. Marxists, feminists, animal rights champions and others have highlighted its economic, sexist, anthropocentric and other biases. It is just as important to uncover its deep-seated ethnocentric biases as well.
The term ‘ethnocentric’ does not quite capture what I have in mind, but it comes nearest to it and should do in the absence of a better alternative. 1 It is centred on the ethnos, an ethnocultural community. I use it widely to refer to any kind of community, be it religious. political or cultural as well as to a body of thought. The term ‘ethnocentrism ’, as used in this book, refers to uncritical generalization of the experiences and modes of thought of a particular ethnos in my extended sense of the term, and looking at other communities, cultures , traditions of thought through their prism. The form of a mode of thought is general but its content is parochial. No ethnocentrism is involved if no universal claims are made, or if one is able to show in a noncircular manner that one’s modes and categories of thought do have universal applicability. Ethnocentrism occurs when the particular is illegitimately or uncritically generalized and appears in a universal form, that is, when the concepts, questions, modes of inquiry suited to understanding one’s own or metropolitan societies are deployed as a grid with which to understand the rest of the world. For example, to say or to proceed on the assumption that a religion properly so called must have a deity, a text revealing his will and a prophet, and that one that does not is not a religion in the ‘true sense’ of the term, is to universalise a view of religion derived from the three Abrahamic faiths and to ignore a very different view of it informing Hinduism, Buddhism , Jainism and other dharmic faiths. No noncircular argument is advanced to justify this view of religion , and those that are advanced are unconvincing. It is not necessary to belong to a particular ethnos, culture or religion to universalise its modes of thought as one might genuinely think them self-evident or have been conditioned into taking such a view by professional pressure and disciplinary induction.
Ethnocentrism is a common danger in inquiries aiming to make universally valid statements, political theory being one of them. Political theory often claims to offer an universally valid understanding of its subject matter and is articulated in terms of abstract statements from which all marks of their local provenance are erased. It assumes that the less a theory refers to anything local and the less time and space bound it is, the less parochial it is, and conversely that the more it is locally embedded, the more parochial it is. The assumption is false because simply erasing local references does not make a statement or a theory universal. In fact it conceals its particularity and does not overcome it. It lulls the theorist and his readers into thinking that a formally universal statement or theory is also universal in its content, and that clearly is not the case. Since much of the past and present political theory does not examine its ethnocentric biases, it is an uneasy blend of parochial content and universal form, and is debilitated by their tension.
The limitations and even the dangers of ethnocentrism are too obvious to need elaboration. It ignores the contingency and particularity of what it universalises, and in so doing de-historicises and absolutises it. It makes unsubstantiated universalist claims on behalf of the latter and turns it into a model all should emulate. Rendered blind to its own limitations, it is unable to take a radically critical view of itself and forecloses the possibility of a mutually beneficial dialogue with others. As for other societies and cultures , it assimilates them to its own modes of thought and shows no respect for their differences and identity . It subjects them to an alien and often inappropriate conceptual framework, judges them by irrelevant standards, asks them questions that often make little sense to them, and wholly misunderstands them. Indeed when it has the power to do so, the ethnocentric tendency seeks to mould other societies and cultures in its own image and reveals its violent streak. When that is not so, it involves resorting to subtle or crude forms of intellectual bullying, and put...