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Political Philosophy and Civilizational Analysis: Preliminary Reflections - (paper presented at conference on “ Global Justice and Intercultural Dialogues”, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 8-12 January 2004. Draft only)

Johann P. Arnason - La Trobe University, Melbourne

The main theme of this conference  is “global justice and intercultural dialogues.” But implicit in this substantive problematic is a more meta-theoretical one on which I would like to focus. It has to do with political philosophy and the plurality of civilizations. As is well known, the question of justice has been most central to recent debates in political philosophy; in surveys of the field, the main positions are often defined and contrasted in terms of their conceptions of and solutions to this problem. To raise the issue in a multi-civilizational context is therefore, by the same token, to pose several interrelated  questions: How does political philosophy cope with the plurality of civilizations? And what could it learn from closer contact with the work of those who have tried to develop the comparative analysis of civilizations as a distinctive branch of social-historical inquiry? How would the currently dominant framework of political philosophy have to be modified to accommodate the insights that might result from a multi-civilizational perspective? These questions are not raised in a void: they relate to existing modes of inquiry, and to possibilities of building bridges between them. It seems appropriate to begin with a brief  survey of the state of the art on both sides, and a glance at the long-term pattern of relations between them.

  The revival and  the restrictions of political philosophy

It is a commonplace that the last three decades have been marked by a revival of political philosophy. The 1971 publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice  is often seen as the beginning of this trend.  But on closer examination (and as critical commentators have noted), there are some strange aspects and major limits to this apparent rebirth of a long-neglected discipline. To begin with an elementary point, external to the agenda of the main works in question but useful for putting the whole debate in perspective: a renaissance of  political thought seems to have taken off a the very moment when there was a marked downturn in public expectations of what could or should be achieved through political action. This would seem to be another case of Minerva’s owl taking flight at dusk  - all the more so since the single most seminal text  can be read as an affirmative interpretation of the historical epoch that had reached maturity and was about to give way to more unsettled conditions.  As both sympathetic  and critical commentators on Rawls’s  Theory of Justice have suggested, it is best understood as a normative interpretation of the postwar welfare state, cast in abstract (and often abstruse) philosophical language and constructed in a way that systematically screens out the historical context. It may be useful to link this point to the model used in Peter Wagner’s Sociology of Modernity:  from that perspective, Rawls’s account of the welfare state – the philosophical reconciliation of “basic liberties” and a “social minimum”  - is a reinterpretation of organized modernity as an advanced liberal modernity  (the latter being., according to Wagner, so far only a possible historical outcome of the second crisis of modernity) – and in a language that implies an unbroken continuity of liberal principles.

This implicit streamlining of modernity reflects a more general shortcoming of  Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian political philosophy: its sociological deficit, perhaps most obvious in the abstract dichotomies that have beset the debate between liberals and communitarians (critical commentators from the sociological side, e.g. Craig Calhoun, have stressed this point). Any attempt to remedy that would – in the nature of things, and in view of current developments – have to be based on a systematic alignment with historical sociology. But the most fundamental weakness of the Rawlsian approach – too obvious to go unnoticed  by critics, but not discussed as extensively as it would merit – is the absence of reflection on the political as such. This is the other side of Rawls’s insistence on a thoroughgoing continuity of moral and political theory. It is of course true that there is a significant difference between his Theory of Justice (1971) and  Political Liberalism (1993). The shift that seems to have matured slowly over the two decades in between might be described as a partial discovery of the political. Rawls  claims – and there is no reason to doubt – that the change had more to do with growing awareness of problems in the original theory than with any objections put forward by his critics. The specificity of the political comes to the fore when the links between moral and political theory have to be loosened.  More precisely, Rawls discovers that the problem of a viable political order has to be posed at a level where solutions can no longer rely on moral integration. The keynote question of  Political Liberalism  is: “How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?” (p. XVIII). The political is, in other words, thematized form a particular angle: the task is to devise a political framework for a pluralism that cannot be overcome or neutralized on the moral level.  It should be noted that this leads Rawls to outline a historical and comparative perspective: as he sees it, political liberalism emerged against the early modern European background of religious wars and the search for a modus vivendi that would avert further disasters. The significance of this context is further underlined through comparison with the  problems which political philosophy faced in the classical world. The civilizational setting determined by the polis and its religion was very different from the early modern one.

Here  we have at least the first step towards a comparative civilizational perspective on the political, the reflexive approaches to it, and the constructive strategies that grow out of reflexive thematization. As I will argue, this approach should be developed on a much broader basis.  But an attempt to do  so must begin with a brief historical stocktaking. The search for points of contact between political philosophy and civilizational analysis can still draw inspiration from classical sources. If we go back to Greek beginnings, it seems clear that the first theoretical reflections on political order (not to be equated with the beginnings of  political thought as such) are closely linked to perceptions and interpretations of the cultural differences between the Greeks and their neighbours (including the older civilizations of the Near East as well as the more unequivocally inferior barbarians).  This applies not only to the systematic work done by Aristotle, but also Herodotus’s combination of historical and cultural-anthropological inquiry. Early modern thought is still – at least in exemplary cases – characterized by close contact between comparative perspectives on political institutions and on broader civilizational patterns (Montesquieu’s  Spirit of the Laws  is perhaps the most representative work of that kind). Changes in the cultural and intellectual atmosphere at the end of eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century moved the two fields of inquiry further apart and gave rise to specific obstacles on each side. It can be argued that the main reasons for the problematic status of political philosophy for a century and a half – between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the revival after 1970  -  are, with obvious variations in  relative weight and contextual meaning,  the same as those which led to the oblivion or marginalization of civilizational perspectives. They include several interconnected trends: the markedly Eurocentric turn taken by  Western thought around 1800 (for closer analysis of this, see Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens); the ascendancy of utilitarianism as a “kind  of tacit background  against which other theories have to assert and defend themselves” (W. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, p. 10); and the spread of a diffuse evolutionism that influenced projects of the social sciences in decisive ways, even when the authors in question did not subscribe to full-fledged evolutionary theories).

The twentieth-century record of civilizational analysis – revived in more or less explicit opposition  to dominant currents of social thought – is a markedly fragmentary and discontinuous one. The first landmark to be noted is the discovery  of civilizations by the sociological classics; this occurs in different and mutually independent ways in the French and the German branches of the tradition, but in both cases civilizational themes are overshadowed by other concerns in the following phase of development. A second wave of civilizational studies and theorizing, exemplified by the work of S. N. Eisenstadt, began around 1970 and is perhaps best understood as a critical alternative to the openly evolutionistic turn then taken by a part of the functionalist mainstream. Finally, the metahistorical projects exemplified by the works of Spengler and Toynbee should at least be mentioned: they represent a tradition that has proved less easy to accommodate within the intellectual division of labour, and is widely seen as lacking academic legitimacy. The question whether we can still learn something from it will not be discussed here; for my present purposes, the most important part of the abovementioned cluster of traditions is the work of Max Weber. His comparative studies were the most substantial result of the first wave and the most significant source rediscovered in the course of the second.

One of the most striking aspects of Weber’s comparative framework is the underdevelopment of its political dimension; this may, in the present context, be seen as a counterpart to the absence or near-absence of comparative civilizational perspectives in the current mainstream of political philosophy. More specifically, the main analytical focus of  Weber’s studies is on interrelations between the religious and the economic sphere; although it is true that more careful reading of his work has put paid to the idea that the detailed  analyses of China and India were nothing more than a kind of counter-experiment to the Protestant  Ethic, there is no doubt that the problematic of that work cast a disproportionate shadow over the whole sequel. The most culture-specific and meaning-sensitive interpretations to be found in Weber’s work – however much they leave to be desired when judged from the perspective of more demanding inter-cultural hermeneutics -  have to do with the world-perspectives of  different religious traditions.  They are linked to analyses  and tentative explanations of developments or developmental blockages in the economic sphere, but here the attention to specifics is less evenly focused. Weber admits the diversity of premodern capitalisms (in that limited sense, he pioneered the typology of capitalisms); but when it comes to the modern transformation and the unprecedentedly dynamic form of capitalism that appears as the “most fateful force” involved in this process, the emphasis is clearly on a uniform pattern that transcends civilizational boundaries – even if its original breakthrough was facilitated by successive “concatenations of circumstances” within one specific civilizational complex.

Our main concern is, however, the leveling and uniformitarian logic built into Weber’s conceptualization of the political sphere. This begins with the systematic focusing of  political sociology on the problem of legitimation, defined with tacit reference to Western historical experiences that brought the problem of the justification of authority to the fore, but with an explicit claim to universal validity. The problematic of legitimacy is then reduced to the well-known three types: traditional, legal-rational and charismatic; the traditional type is defined in a markedly reductionistic way that disregards the specific features of civilizational traditions. Weber’s insistence on subsuming all relevant  cases under these three – and only three – types is as striking as his failure to give any compelling reasons for the tripartite division. Finally, the analysis of the forms of domination in terms of their administrative structures (as Weber puts it, “in everyday life  domination means  administration”) focuses on two extremely general ideal types, patrimonialism and bureaucracy (there is no distinctive pattern of administration that would correspond to charismatic domination as such). Both these concepts are less historical and less sensitive to cultural context than the ideal types central to Weber’s sociology of religion. Bureaucracy is defined in a way that makes all historical developments of that kind appear as approximations to a rationalizing projection of modern patterns; patrimonialism becomes a common denominator of premodern regimes. A closer examination of Weber’s work on China (which cannot be undertaken here) would, in my opinion, show how the combination of these two concepts obscures the specific characteristics  - and the specific historicity – of the Chinese imperial order. In particular, the Chinese case illustrates better than any other the  astonishing absence of sacred kingship, its metamorphoses and its enduring constitutive symbolism, from Weber’s frame of reference. It may be suggested in passing  that the problematic of sacred kingship – as the crucial link between  religion and politics – would have been the appropriate counterpart to the “religious rejection of the world” that became the key theme of Weber’s sociology of religion. But more generally speaking, Weber’s political sociology  is constructed in a way that minimizes and marginalizes the question of cultural definitions of power and – more comprehensively – of the political domain and its place in the social world.

This question is – in the present context – a useful starting-point for comparison with the second generation of  civilizational analysis. Eisenstadt’s work is indisputably the most important post-Weberian project in the field, and it represents a major step forward in regard to the point at issue here. Eisenstadt thematizes the relationship between cultural tradition and political dynamics in a way that Weber never did; in so doing, he opens up new perspectives for the comparative study of cultural frameworks of political power, organization and conflict, and draws contrasts and parallels between the patterns of ideological politics in different civilizational contexts (“Cultural traditions and ideological dynamics: the origins and modes of  ideological politics”, in ). On the other hand, his focus on the common core structures of “axial civilizations” sets limits to diversity in the relationship between culture and politics. To cut a long story short,  the “axial” turn – supposedly taken by the major Eurasian civilizations during a formative period around the middle of the last millennium BC, and further developed through the subsequent rise and diffusion of world religions – gives rise to a new cultural ontology: a cultural interpretation of the world as divided into a transcendental and a mundane realm. This interpretive framework affects the self-understanding of society, the definition and justification of social power, and the articulation of social conflicts in fundamental ways. Solutions to the problems posed by the axial turn vary from one civilization to another, and some of them involve a more central role for politics than others. As Eisenstadt sees it, different traditions with a strong emphasis on the political sphere – and correspondingly different definitions of its meaning and functions – developed in China and Ancient Greece. But however divergent the resultant political cultures may be, the axial frame of reference is taken to imply some invariant principles. The whole problematic of axial – or Axial Age – civilizations is now undergoing a new round of debates, and for a wide range of reasons, it seems likely that a reformulation will tone down the initial presuppositions about a common underlying pattern. In view of that, it would –  for present purposes – seem advisable to bracket the issue of axial civilizations and assume that more detailed comparative analysis of civilizational variations in political culture is one of the prerequisites for a reassessment of the axial model.

  Towards an agenda for comparative analysis

To sum up, the divergent cultural interpretations of the political have emerged as a  theme that might serve  to re-connect civilizational analysis with political philosophy. But to make proper sense of this suggestion, it must be linked to internal problems of  the latter discipline. As we have seen, the post-1970 mainstream has been characterized by a strong tendency to construct normative projects without any correspondingly extensive reflection on the constitution or the problematic of the political.  For a corrective to that trend, we may turn to Leo Strauss’s definition of political philosophy as “the attempt to know both  the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political order.”  But the two key elements of this definition  -nature and order - must be reformulated in a way  that will disconnect them form Strauss’s more specific political positions: questions about the political as such are not necessarily formulated in terms of a given nature, and visions of political alternatives do not necessarily translate into full-fledged models of order.  This adaptation of the Straussian definition lends itself to a civilizational turn: the varying cultural orientations that enter into the constitution of the political sphere and the aspirations to political order call for comparative analysis. A focus on cultural contexts does not ipso facto rule out normative concerns or claims to universal validity. There is, in other words, no compelling reason why the combined internal and interactive dynamics of civilizations should not give rise to projects that transcend their boundaries. But no adequate understanding of such projects will be possible without  an interpretive reconstruction of their cultural background. In that sense, we are in the realm of  “lateral universality”, as Merleau-Ponty put it:  the universality that can only be articulated through encounters between different but not mutually inaccessible universes of meaning.

A comparative civilizational approach would thus begin with inbuilt cultural definitions of the political (this would seem to be the best key to the understanding of “political cultures”, often thematized by political scientists without any sustained interest in conceptual underpinnings and ramifications). But the reflexive dimension, i.e. political thought in the broadest sense, articulated  on various levels and in multiple genres, must also be included. Finally, it seems useful to distinguish political philosophy in the strict sense, i.e. reasoned theorizing of the political as such, from the broader context of political thought. This distinction has recently been emphasized by classical scholars; as they see it, the exclusive emphasis on political philosophy – the tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle – had obscured the significance of an exceptionally broad spectrum of political thought, expressed in poetry, history and tragedy. Among other things, this enlarged perspective has led to a better grasp of democratic thought: the estrangement of classical political philosophy from democracy is misleading if seen in isolation. Tensions and dissonances between the different levels may also have to be taken into account. The introduction to the recent Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought  argues that philosophical theorizing distorted the practical notions of the political that were built into both Greek and Roman versions of the citizen-state, and that more work on other forms of political thought is needed to redress the balance.

On all three levels, the Chinese tradition is a particularly promising field for comparison with the West. With regard to political philosophy, it seems appropriate to begin with a reference to B.-A. Scharfstein’s thesis about the “three philosophical civilizations”, Greece, India and China: these were the only cultures that produced mutually independent philosophical tradition (in the two Christian worlds – Western and Byzantine – as well as in the Islamic one, the ascendancy of monotheism transformed the Greek legacy in different ways, none of which has any parallels in India or China, but this did not amount to the creation of autonomous traditions). In the case of India, the scope for comparative studies of political philosophy seems rather limited: as far as I can judge, the Arthasastra is virtually the only subject of debate, and controversy centres on the question whether it represents an Indian counterpart to Machiavelli (Max Weber took that view) or an offshoot of a fundamentally different tradition, unintelligible in isolation ( K.J. Shah, “Of Artha and the Arthasastra”, in A.J. Parel and R.C. Keith, Comparative Political Philosophy, New Delhi 1992, 141-62). That leaves China as the only separate major tradition to be compared with the Western one. On the level of political thought, it is a commonplace that political concerns are almost all-pervasive in the Chinese tradition; the diversity of genres may not be comparable to the Greek case, but the omnipresence of political themes would seem more pronounced. Finally, the comparative analysis of cultural definitions of power must take particular interest in sacred kingship, as well as in its patterns of transformation, fragmentation and mutation into different models of sovereignty. In this context, the uniquely prolonged and complex Chinese experience of sacred kingship is bound to be of major importance.

To round off  this discussion, let us note some academically marginal but intrinsically significant currents that tend to be ignored in the most widely read surveys of contemporary political philosophy. They are, in crucial ways, more attuned to comparative reflection than the mainstream. On the conservative side (to use a conventional but not very insightful term), the approaches represented by Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and their disciples cannot be amalgamated into a single tradition, but they share at least a strong interest in broadening  the perspectives of political thought beyond the internal horizons of modernity. In particular, the intercivilizational frame of reference became increasingly important in Voegelin’s work. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet may now be said to  add up to a school of thought that took off from the radical left but has (most evidently in Gauchet’s work)  moved towards a critical engagement with liberalism and disavowed revolutionary  illusions. In this case, the strong interest in the cultural dimension of politics – even if the authors in question tend to prefer other concepts – opens the way for comparative inquiry. Finally, Hannah Arendt should perhaps be mentioned – as a link between the two otherwise separate universes of discourse  which I have just mentioned, and as a somewhat more familiar figure to students of contemporary political thought. She was to some extent engaged in dialogue with Strauss and Voegelin; she influenced  - in different ways – the thought   of Castoriadis, Lefort and Gauchet; and when classical republicanism is recognized as a distinctive current within twentieth century political thought (as for example in Kymlicka’s survey, quoted above), she is usually listed among its representatives.

  Reflections on democracy

It seems best to conclude these preliminary reflections with a few remarks on democracy as a shared theme of political philosophy and civilizational analysis. Democracy has, in a sense, imposed itself  as a central theme of political philosophy. It was not, as such, the main concern of Rawls’s seminal work: the focus was on justice as “the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought”; this virtue had to be cultivated under the conditions of democratic equality. But the shift that culminated in Political Liberalism led to a much stronger emphasis on democratic principles as such. Alternative approaches exemplify the same trend. Kymlicka divides contemporary political philosophers into two camps: those who defend liberal democracy (in a variety of sometimes incompatible ways), and those who criticize its existing institutional forms, even if the critique is to some extent based on its principles and expressed in demands  for more adequate translation into practice. There is no doubt that this growing centrality of democracy reflects the mood of the times: the new liberal-democratic triumphalism that gained ground in the 1980s and took off in the 1990s. Those who did not take it to the extremes of an “end of history” had to consider the difficulties encountered in various places and contexts, and this could easily lead to questions about civilizational backgrounds. Samuel Huntington’s Third Wave, published at the beginning of the 1990s and summarizing the lessons form an apparent worldwide breakthrough of democracy, is perhaps the best-known example. Huntington cautioned against premature optimism about the chances of democratic transformation and consolidation in non-Western settings. His view at the time was that a “Confucian democracy” would be a contradiction in terms; the only potentially democratic element in the Confucian legacy was, as he saw it, the examination system (hardly an idea that historians of China would now support); but a thoroughgoing democratic transformation would in any case entail a thoroughgoing demolition of traditions. As for Islamic democracy, Huntington thought the evidence was less conclusive, and time would tell. The ideas first formulated in the book later developed into the famous/notorious thesis about the “clash of civilizations”; but despite the emphatic invocation of civilizational theory. Huntington’s actual use of scholarly work in that field was extremely arbitrary and perfunctory. As for a connection to contemporary political philosophy, it is almost non-existent.

Comparative views have been articulated in other contexts, with les massive ideological connotations; and once again (for obvious reasons), the Chinese case seems particularly relevant. Although the question of democratic trends and potentials in the Chinese tradition has remained marginal to the two universes of discourse mentioned above, enough has been said to enable us to draw up a tentative typology of positions. It seems to me that four different views can be distinguished. The first stresses the presence of democratic thought in the Chinese tradition, while acknowledging the existence of specific obstacles and a pattern of slower growth in comparison to the West; but this is a difference in degree rather than in kind,  and the same general principles are supposed to be at work on both sides.  A good example can be found in Kung-chun Hsiao’s History of Chinese Political Thought ; he compares Mencius’s  “theory of the importance of the people” to Western thought.  Democracy is summed up in the three principles of  “for the people”, “of the people” and “by the people”;  Hsiao argues  that Mencius  began with the idea of “for the people” and proceeded towards “of the people”, but did not (and could not) grasp  the idea of “by the people”, nor the problematic of institutions needed to  put it into practice (p. 161). He does not seem to think that any decisive breakthrough  in this regard can be found  in the later history of Chinese thought. But by the same token, Mencius  was – as a fourth-century BC thinker, and in comparison to the overall western pattern of development  - anything but backward.

The second view is best seen as an inversion of the same picture: the specific obstacles become defining features of the Chinese tradition, and the prevalent “unquestioning acceptance of the emperor’s total authority” (Derk Bodde,  Chinese Thought, Society and Science, p. 189) is seen as a decisive factor. This view can then be backed up by an analysis of the Chinese imperial order as an enduring model of sacred kingship, and an embodiment  of civilizational continuity back to the Bronze Age. Some version of this thesis  can perhaps be glimpsed in  the  background of Huntington’s pronouncements on the Confucian tradition.

The two other positions are based on more specific arguments and may be seen as more promising starting-points   for debate. In his history of ancient Chinese thought, Benjamin  Schwartz  suggests that the traditional Chinese  - and more specifically Confucian – acceptance of hierarchy and authority needs to be placed in a historical context where it might appear as a complement and corrective to the western  - originally Greek – conceptions of democracy, especially if we admit that “really existing democracy” is an uneasy compromise between visions going back to a very peculiar version of the city-state and the realities of complex large-scale societies: “We must  candidly note that despite the widespread triumph of modern ideologies which posit the notion that hierarchy and authority are transient vestiges of an evil past about to be eliminated from the human scene, it remains unproven that complex civilizations can dispense with them even though there have been some successes in creating methods for confining their scope and rendering them accountable. Confucius’s problem of how one humanizes the exercise of authority and inequalities of social power remains with us whatever we may think of this solutions” (The World of Thought in Ancient China, p. 70).

Finally, there is the position most forcefully argued by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames in The Democracy of the Dead.  As they see it,  certain aspects of and currents within the Chinese – and more specifically Confucian -  tradition can be linked to the contemporary search for a communitarian model of democracy. They go on to argue that John Dewey’s theory of democracy provides the most suitable philosophical foundation for  such a synthesis. A “commonality” of  pragmatism and Confucianism – not complete, but significant enough for a “real alliance” (p. 162) to be possible – thus appears as a plausible basis for mutually instructive developments of democracy in China and the West. Here I cannot discuss the details of Hall and Ames’s analysis; suffice it to add that the whole argument involves a critique of individualistic and rights-based liberalism, and a plea for “freedom-in-context” as the proper starting-point.

In view of these alternative positions and the unfolding but underdeveloped debate between them, it seems advisable to reconsider the question of the cultural definitions that enter into the operative ideas of democracy and open up the possibility of  rival interpretations. It is widely accepted that democracy is an essentially contested concept, but mainstream political philosophers often note this fact without pausing to reflect on its meaning. In Political Liberalism,  John Rawls refers to a “conflict within the tradition of democratic thought itself” (p. 4), having to do with the problem of reconciling the values of liberty and equality; but he has little to say  on specific reasons for the tradition bifurcating in this way. On that point, some sociological interpretations of modernity – especially Eisenstadt’s Paradoxes of Democracy – seem to have advanced further Eisenstadt links the conflicting interpretations of democracy (centred on the tension between constitutional and participatory models) to a broader account of the antinomies inherent in the cultural premises of modernity.  But here it may also be useful to refer to the abovementioned writings of Castoriadis, Lefort and Gauchet.  One of their common themes – most extensively developed by Gauchet – is the understanding of democracy as a reflexive articulation and appropriation of the self-constitutive capacity of society. But this reflexive turn never occurs in a vacuum: it is always  anchored in distinctive traditions. Moreover, in the specific Western context, it is accompanied by alternative models of autonomy and sovereignty. The democratic transformation unfolds against the background of the early modern absolutist state, whose self-legitimation in terms of the divine right of kings was only part of a process that at the same time led to the rationalization of state structures and the emergence of the state as a separate agency of societal self-organization. On the other hand (and, as Durkheim had already suggested, in close connection with the progress of state formation), the image of the sovereign individual as the ultimate claimant to autonomy  crystallized  as a strong and sometimes dominant but never uncontested  meat-model of democratic order. Closer analysis of this civilizational-historical context might help to clarify the tasks of comparative study.