Jenco APSA draft 2005
2
Introduction
The rapid growth of comparative political theory (hereafter CPT), due in large part to the
admirable work of theorists like Fred Dallmayr and Roxanne Euben, has led to an increasing
willingness within the political theory community to listen to and learn from the political thoughts
and experiences of people living in non-Euro-American societies, ensuring that political theory is
about “human and not merely Western dilemmas” (Euben 1999). Perhaps not surprisingly, the
way in which a multiplicity of seemingly incommensurable entities (be they disparate cultures,
thinkers, societies, or Fred Dallmayr’s “lifeforms”) and their instantiation in texts may be
meaningfully compared has garnered almost as much attention in the field as has the actual
research into said entities. The most frequently endorsed methodology invokes a metaphor of
“conversation” or “cross-cultural dialogue” to underscore the openness to new world-views
offered by comparative theorizing and to facilitate the hermeneutic insights it promises. While the
goals and outcomes of the practice of conversation in comparative political theory vary, its
practitioners agree that its most desirable quality is that it avoids condemning the “Western self”
and “non-Western other” relationship to replicating the inequalities and biases that often
characterize their political interaction. The dialogic model, they contend, is uniquely valuable for
its built-in resistance to a single universalizing scheme, a resistance that allows for mutually
edifying common understandings to surface while at the same time preserving meaningful
differences of the concretely and inescapably situated interlocutors (Bell 2000: Ch. 1 and 1993,
21-3; Dallmayr 1996 and 1998; Euben 1999: 13-16, 36-42; the oft-cited Panikkar 1988: 127-9;
and Rudolph 2005).
However, while the dialogic model has been praised for being less susceptible to Western
or modernist influences than are, say, economic rational choice models and the gross assumptions
Convention