The Way Forward in Comparative Political Thought
| Author | Antony Black |
| DOI | 10.3366/jipt.2011.0017 |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
THE WAY FORWARD IN COMPARATIVE
PO LI TI CA L THOUGHT
ANTONY BLACK
What are the aims of comparative political thought? Fred Dallmayr sees
the aim as an existential and philosophical encounter between people of
different cultural, religious and philosophical backgrounds. It is a dialogue
between persons of all walks of life in a ‘global civil society’. This would
amount to ‘globalization from below’ (2002: 7, 27–50). Dallmayr makes the
important point that such exchanges can best take place between individuals
who are themselves capable of change: a dialogue in which ‘neither partner
is . . . fully self-constituting and where participants continuously undergo a
difficult “decentering” process’ (2002: 10). Beside the dialogue between
cultures, there is an inner dialogue within the individual of whatever culture.
What this amounts to is ‘opening the mind and heart to the puzzling diversity of
human experiences and traditions’ (1999: 2).
What Dallmayr fails to note is that in the past, there have been many
such interactions between cultures. It is likely that ancient Egypt transmitted
ideas about divinity and kingship to Iran, and even more to Israel (Black
2009: 32,47,62), whence they became the stock-in-trade of political thought
in the Roman empire after Constantine, and in the European kingdoms from
their origins until the early twentieth century. Iran borrowed heavily from
Mesopotamian ideas about sacred monarchy, which in turn became a focal point
of classical Islamic political thought (Black 2011: ch. 2). Greece – or at least
parts of it, Athens in particular –transmitted ideas most obviously to Rome, but
also to Islamdom and medieval Europe. India transmitted ideas about social
status to Iran, whence once again they seeped into Islamic culture. It also
transmitted Buddhism to China.
Such dialogue and borrowing takes place usually when a culture is relatively
young and therefore fluid. Over time, authorities vest too much of their
legitimacy in an ideological status quo, and for this and various other reasons,
the lines of transmission get gummed up. Doors are shut. This tends to be
Journal of International Political Theory, 7(2) 2011, 221–228
DOI: 10.3366/jipt.2011.0017
© Edinburgh University Press 2011
www.eupjournals.com/jipt
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