Jenco APSA draft 2005
3
about culture and ethics that some contend underlie them, it is far from clear that making
conversation the basis of cross-cultural interactions can somehow avoid coloring such interaction
with its own potentially distortionary influences. Indeed, for a subfield that has been so diligent in
admonishing Western political theory for its unexamined universalism, it seems odd that CPT’s
own dominant methodology has never been subject to the same kind of scrutiny to which its
advocates rightly hold the rest of the field.
Analyses about the methodology of cross-cultural
comparison have never been carried out with any mention of the possibility of a non-Western
methodology or textual hermeneutics to gain better insight into the texts or thinkers being
compared; rather, particular dilemmas of epistemology, history, and science provoked by the
intellectual and political pathologies of the post-Enlightenment West, culminating in the work of
German critics like Hans-Georg Gadamer, have been applied to cross-cultural interactions as a
way of avoiding universalist schemes and thus facilitating Western insight into non-Western
practices.
But just as comparative political theory levels a challenge to the hegemonic Western canon
on the basis of its dangerous lack of inclusiveness, the methodology of the CPT project must be
considered in the same light. Without a closer look at its own dominant methodology and the
assumptions it enforces as conditions of cross-cultural interaction and understanding, comparative
political theory may unintentionally valorize or assimilate the practices of non-Euro-American
societies that most closely approximate CPT’s own assumptions about how theorizing should be
carried out, and ignore, silence, or distort others that may nevertheless hold promise. Indeed, the
1
I do not mean to imply that the dialogic model is the only such model for CPT, only that it is the dominant one and
that critiques of it are rare. Those that exist usually derive from competing Western models, e.g., Jordan and
Nederman 2004. For other possibilities for comparative methodology, see Larson and Deutsch 1988 (though they too
privilege Western understandings of what they are looking for in philosophy and how to look for it).
2
If cited at all, the views of non-Western theorists serve as mere ornament, perhaps amplifying but never challenging
the parameters of this unilaterally initiated comparative interaction. This is not to say that their agreement is forced,
since these non-Western theorists are usually English-speaking and themselves completely immersed in Western
categories (e.g, Gandhi and Tu Weiming, both cited by Dallmayr 1998: 114, 135), but it is precisely this widespread
acquiescence to Western models that makes the search for non-Western methodologies a less salient but still no less
important an issue in comparative political theory.
Convention