Introduction to Symposium on The Humble Cosmopolitan by Luis Cabrera

This piece introduces a symposium on Luis Cabrera’s The Humble Cosmopolitan (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a comparative political theory text in three senses. First, it expands conventional conversation partners to include authors who are engaged in constructing their nation out of a colonial context, principally, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is a scholar, politician, Chairman of the Constitutional Drafting Committee for the newly independent India, and Dalit activist (“Dalit” being the self-applied term for those outside of the Hindu caste hierarchy) and Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar, the historical thought leader of Hindu nationalism. Second, Cabrera reaches across the colonized-colonizer divide, engaging with intra-nation difference, enabling cross-time comparisons, broadening the moral and political meanings of, contributions to, and criticisms of cosmopolitan thinking. Third, using grounded normative theory, it is methodologically comparative, utilizing the author’s own empirical research through over 150 interviews of activists and politicians from both Indian and European cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan struggles.

Ancient Chinese Political Thought

“Ancient Chinese political thought” refers to the reflections and discussions about politics during the period before the First Emperor established the Qin dynasty in 221 bce. Although one could also infer some political thought of that period from the other archeological evidence, the main sources of such reflections and discussions are texts believed to date back to that period, some of which became the foundation of Chinese education that began in the Han dynasty (210 bce–220 ce) and lasted till the beginning of the 20th century. Although disrupted by the turbulent history of China’s encounter with modernity in the early 20th century, the study of ancient Chinese texts has become the center of what is known as “national studies (guoxue国学)” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, with institutes devoted to it in many Chinese universities, supporting researchers from various disciplines. In the revival of Confucianism coupled with the rise of cultural nationalism in mainland China, many Chinese scholars have turned to ancient Chinese political thought for inspiration in their search for distinctively Chinese perspectives on politics, both local and global, and they advocate Chinese alternatives or models to address contemporary challenges. With limited space, the publications selected for this article make up only a small fraction of the works in English and even fewer in Mandarin that discuss ancient Chinese political thought. (The focus on English works is due to the consideration that not all readers of this article would be able to read Mandarin.) In addition to being studied as part of early Chinese civilization that has influenced Chinese society through subsequent centuries, political theorists and philosophers engage ancient Chinese political thought to address perennial or contemporary political problems, contributing significantly to the growth of comparative political theory and comparative political philosophy.

Political Theory and the Bourgeois Public Sphere

Arguing that political theory is an irremediably Western and liberal enterprise, this chapter shows that it is a discipline that does not seek to accurately represent and explain an object, but is rather knowledge “for,” performance rather than representation. The discipline is directed toward the public sphere, imagined as a realm of individuals possessed of their own “values” who, however, inhabit a common world and engage in rational, critical debate about that which they hold in common. It thus “performs” the liberal conviction that differing moral and political viewpoints being ineliminable, they must contend with each other in rational argument in a public sphere not itself marked by a commitment to any moral or political view. Recognizing the parochialism and Eurocentrism of these presumptions, some scholars have recently attempted to “deprovincialize” political theory by extending its geographical and cultural remit through “comparative political theory.” The chapter evaluates the success and shortcomings of these endeavors.

Palavras lusófonas na Comparative Political Theory

The discipline of comparative political theory (CPT) rose within the Anglo-Saxon context in the 1990s; rejecting the existing epistemological hegemony, it aims to integrate non-western theories and thought in political theory. Following a brief overview of CPT, this paper intends to report that CPT in nigh existent in the scholarship of political theory available in Portuguese. The overall scarcity of CPT in Portuguese scholarship texts epitomizes not only the lack of response to comprehensive, globalized or cosmopolitan canons of political theory, as referred in anglophone literature, but also a failure in providing space and representation for authors, texts, ideas and concepts beyond the canons. Among the areas of interests of CPT, political theorizations endogenous of Africa are the least considered ones. In the Portuguese literature of political theory, sub-Saharan and Luso-African political thought and theory are underrepresented. Keywords: comparative political theory; comparative political thought; PALOP; political theory in Africa; Portuguese literature in political theory

Challenges in conceptualizing and measuring meanings and understandings of democracy

Research on meanings and understandings of democracy is growing. But besides useful theoretical and empirical insights, this research produces open questions concerning the conceptualization and the measurement of meanings of democracy. This special section—and especially this introductory paper and the different contributions—reflect on several key challenges and thereby go beyond the debate about advantages and disadvantages of open and closed questions measuring meanings of democracy in surveys. Both conceptualization and measurement have different challenges which researchers should take into account when developing research designs, specifically by doing cross-cultural comparisons. Other challenges are connected to the debate on universalism versus relativism and the usage of various terms, which are often not clearly defined. This paper offers an analytical framework to distinguish between meanings and understandings of democracy, thereby integrating comparative political theory and empirical democracy research through inductive and deductive approaches. And it gives an overview of the contributions of this special section. In sum, research on meanings and understandings of democracy is needed to gain a better picture of political cultures around the world.

Comparative Democratic Theory

This article sketches a theoretical framework and research agenda for what is labeled as “Comparative Democratic Theory.” It is introduced as an approach to democratic theory which is informed by conceptual and methodological debates from “Comparative Political Theory” (CPT) as well as from insights from a global history of democratic thought. The inclusion of CPT perspectives into democratic theory is motivated by what is diagnosed as a conceptual blindness in Western democratic theory. When following this approach, however, the two extremes of unjustified universalism and normatively problematic relativism both must be avoided. To do so, a mode of sound abstraction is proposed, using the term “constellation,” and a discussion of aims and benefits of Comparative Democratic Theory is presented.