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.

The Code of History

Showing that history writing is not the simple application of a method to sources bequeathed to us from the past, but rather a code that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this chapter explicates the elements of the code. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose, while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times; this time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. In outlining these core elements of the code of history, it engages with those forms of history writing—the history of art, music, and science—that do not always share all the elements of the code, but for that very reason illuminate all the more clearly what the discipline presupposes.

The Anachronism of History

Modern historiography is a modern and European invention, yet is thought to yield knowledge of all human pasts, giving rise to a paradox explored in this chapter. It is a cardinal sin for history writing to fall prey to anachronism, and yet applying the code of history to times and places where the presumptions that define it were/are not shared is itself anachronistic. What does it mean to write histories of premodern and non-Western pasts that were not disenchanted, where gods had not been deprived of agency, where the past constantly bled into the present, and where texts were not seen as the congealed remains of the purposes and meanings of their human authors? Modern histories of non-Western pasts must, this chapter concludes, be written in recognition that such histories are translations, not better or truer representations; and with acknowledgment of and due attention to the fact that much gets lost in translation.

International Relations

This chapter offers a postcolonial critique of the discipline of international relations, which constitutes itself as a discipline by defining a unique and distinct object: the “anarchy” that prevails in the international realm, where unlike the “domestic” realm, there is no sovereign power. In defining its object thus, it also assumes that the international order is composed of sovereign states. But until a few decades ago empires covered the larger surface of the globe and included the majority of its people. The discipline manages the extraordinary feat of either forgetting this altogether or accounting for it by dismissing it as a “survival” of an earlier era, destined to be surpassed in the inexorable teleological march toward state sovereignty that is thought to have begun with the Peace of Westphalia. The “amnesia” regarding empire that characterizes the discipline is disabling, because the imperial past shadows and shapes the contemporary international order.

Epilogue

The epilogue assesses the ethical and political, as well as the intellectual, implications of the arguments advanced in a book that has sought to show that the rise of an initially European knowledge to global dominance was not a story of the forward march of intellectual progress, but rather the story of an initially Western European emic knowledge that became globally hegemonic. The charges of relativism and irrationalism leveled against those who question the status of this knowledge are in significant measure animated by the fear that the grounds upon which our moral and political aspirations rest are thereby undermined. The epilogue dissents both from those who see in contemporary challenges to knowledge the slippery slope of epistemological and moral anarchy, and from those who denounce modern, Western knowledge and call for an “epistemology of the South.”

Unsettling the Modern Knowledge Settlement

This chapter outlines the core presuppositions that underlie and define the social sciences: that knowledge is a relation between a subject who represents and explains an object or process; that nature and the social/cultural are two different domains, authorizing the distinction between the natural and the social sciences; and that knowledge is necessarily secular. These presuppositions, novel when first advanced in early modern Europe, later hardened into unquestioned axioms and came to be seen not as the presuppositions of a particular conception and practice of knowledge, but as the premises of knowledge tout court. This chapter proceeds to show that these presumptions have been challenged and are coming undone, and does so by focusing on recent disciplinary debates in science studies, social history, and social and cultural anthropology. It concludes that taken together, these challenges indicate that modern Western knowledge, the superiority and universality of which was once taken for granted, now has to be defended.

Defending Reason

This chapter provides a postcolonial critique of those defenders of a universal and singular Reason who, forced to acknowledge that modern knowledge has been shaped by its historical and cultural contexts, nonetheless seek to provide reasons why the presuppositions undergirding the social sciences have a claim to transhistorical and transcultural validity. Engaging in detail with the defenses of Reason mounted by Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and John Rawls, it argues that these are not persuasive because they presuppose that which they seek to validate or “ground.” It concludes that modern knowledge is a historically and culturally specific way of knowing and being in the world, that there are good reasons to doubt that it transcends these particularities, and that while modern Western knowledge has become global, that does not validate the claim that it is universal.

Introduction

This is the introduction to a book that challenges the assumption that the knowledge dominant in the world, although born in Europe in the modern period, is nonetheless “universal” and true for all times and places. The introduction sets out why the book defines our knowledge as “modern” and as Western,” and proceeds to outline the three intellectual currents it will draw upon—postcolonialism being the most important of these—to demonstrate that the knowledge disseminated in universities and utilized to govern peoples throughout the world is in fact parochial rather than universal.