The subfield of comparative political theory (CPT) has blossomed in the past two decades. This relatively young area is possibly best characterized by its intense reflexivity and self-criticism; methodological debates abound, as do discussions of its “comparative” nature, alongside questioning of what it means for a text or thinker to be labeled “non-Western.” Yet, despite rigorous internal discussions that ground attempts to think beyond the Western canon, scholarship in CPT remains unbalanced, with the majority of works focusing on either Islamic or Chinese (specifically, Confucian) political thought. Given that context, a new study of Buddhist political thought—especially focusing on Bhutan, a particularly understudied country—should be a welcome occurrence. And William Long’s book does indeed provide useful analysis of Bhutan’s constitution, as well as its democratic transition, examined in the light of Buddhist principles. However, its broader approach is representative of a position that most CPT scholars have rejected (perhaps because he engages only minimally with this work): it is light on direct references to what Bhutanese Buddhist political thinkers have actually said or written and heavy on vague statements of generalized “Buddhist values” abstracted from particular contexts.

The book begins with two theoretical chapters on Buddhist political thought before turning to three empirical chapters on Bhutan’s democratic development, its famous development paradigm of Gross National Happiness (GNH), and the “challenges” the country faces. The final chapter considers the applicability of lessons from Bhutan’s approach to democracy and development globally.

One challenge facing comparative political theorists is maintaining transparency regarding their interpretive role. Attribution of ideas—citing texts or interviews and making clear what might be the author’s distillation of a discussion as opposed to an argument made by another thinker—is one way to maintain transparency. Because Long’s book is very short on citations (with particularly limited or vague reference to Bhutanese texts or writings by Bhutanese scholars), it is impossible to determine what ideas come from Bhutanese sources and what are instead an expression of a universalized “Buddhism.”

Given that the first two chapters suffer from a notable lack of sources, Long often seems to be describing just this type of universalized, unitary “Buddhism”: the phrases “the Buddhist perspective on x,” “in Buddhism,” or, more problematically, what “Buddhists” believe are repeated numerous times. The second chapter includes a review of Buddhist texts that deal with politics, but nowhere does Long indicate whether or how these texts are actually used by Bhutanese Buddhists. Each of the texts has long and varied interpretive traditions, some of which are commonly shared across various Buddhist communities through monastic commentaries, but all of which have their particular genealogies in different national and subnational contexts, none of which are captured in this book.

In fact, there is a jarring lack of specificity when discussing Buddhist influences on Bhutanese political practices and institutions. The variety of Buddhist schools of practice is covered in just two pages (pp. 15–16), and despite the catchy title, nothing in the book indicates what is distinctively or meaningfully “Tantric” about Bhutan’s democratic political model. Because Long seems so keen to present an idealized and appealing picture of Buddhist political thought, he risks reproducing the sense of exoticism that has encouraged global fascination with Bhutan’s GNH approach that has been devoid of close theoretical study. Long conducted some research in Bhutan, with full access to the country’s GNH archives and interviews with key officials. Presumably his vision of what Buddhist political thought “is” comes largely from their self-presentations, but there is no reflection on this positionality.

We can contrast this approach with Matthew Moore’s 2016 book Buddhism and Political Theory. Although Moore also situates himself within a generalized construction of “Buddhism,” he is explicit that he is presenting his own interpretive stance: he does not claim that his readings of components of Buddhist political thought necessarily reflect existing understandings among Buddhist thinkers. Comparative political theorists might still take issue with some of Moore’s distilling moves, but it is clear that he is positioning himself as a theorist “thinking with” Buddhist ideas. For Long, the fact that he draws so rarely on Bhutanese texts or thinkers makes it impossible to know how the generalized principles that he lays out in the first two chapters have actually provided a foundation for the constitutional and policy choices he considers in the rest of the book.

Long’s analysis is strongest when he ventures into territory that critically—even skeptically—examines aspects of Bhutan’s politics and policies. The first section in chapter 6 (pp. 139–51) argues that the model for assessing GNH actually departs from Bhutan’s stated emphasis on deeper forms of happiness by weighing all of the indicators equally. Instead, Long’s closer look at the indicators that he aligns with “higher forms of happiness”—life satisfaction, spiritual practice, levels of stress versus positive emotions—reveals a sharp decline, even between 2010 and 2015. In Bhutan’s own terms, then, the country’s policies seem to be failing to reinforce its “unique” religiocultural heritage and the ends that GNH ought to promote.

But perhaps because of his sympathetic position, Long is too quick to sidestep critiques of Bhutan’s policies. He notes accusations of human rights violations against the ethnic Lhotsampa population in the late 1980s and early 1990s (pp. 157–67), but also dismisses the substance of their complaints as merely an empirical policy “challenge.” In extolling the stabilizing effect of Bhutan’s “shared values,” he neglects to fully consider the effects on ethnic and religious minorities of a system of governance (and increasingly of surveillance, in the case of GNH measurement protocols) based on the religiocultural beliefs and practices of the majority. Here it is surprising that he only mentions twice Driglam Namzha, the code of behavior and ethics generated from the ethnic majority culture, because it features prominently in many other studies of Bhutan (for example, Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt’s 2017 edited volume, Development Challenges in Bhutan, which is not cited at all) and would seem to be a key component in anchoring a study of Buddhist influences explicitly in Bhutanese understandings and practices.

But there are many more potentially impactful points of theoretical engagement that are missed because the generalized approach to “Buddhism” obscures the specificity of (and, presumably, diversity within) Bhutanese Buddhist views. As one example, Long asserts that “the Buddhist philosophical and soteriological understanding of ‘happiness’ is what makes the pursuit of ‘Gross National Happiness’ unique,” contrasting it with the proliferation of other developmental indicators and with both hedonistic and eudemonic approaches (p. 114). Yet throughout the chapter that examines GNH, he never considers the effects of that soteriological particularity. That is, if non-Buddhists (or Buddhists who have a different understanding of happiness from that which the guardians of a seemingly atemporal “Bhutanese Buddhist culture” espouse) do not share the Buddha’s ontological explanation of the emptiness of reality, are they excluded from true happiness? Brian Young’s 2015 account of living with nomadic Brokpa herders in Bhutan argues that the country’s attempt to protect its dominant cultural tradition is “undermining the multiplicity of traditions and languages that have always existed in the country” (“Living with the Brokpa: Economic, Political and Social Change in Bhutan,” Anthropology Now, 7[2], 2015). This conflict can be addressed as a policy question but deserves closer theoretical study, especially in a volume like this one.

One final point is worth mentioning, because it pertains to efforts to promote the study of “non-Western” or other marginalized traditions of thought in the academy. The final chapter attempts to defend the insights from Buddhist thinking as “scientific” by noting convergences between some work in contemporary quantum physics and neuroscience and Buddhist ontological stances on the nature of existence and the malleability of “human nature,” respectively. In stark contrast to the barely cited sections of the book on Buddhist political thought, this chapter is assiduously cited, with theories and ideas attributed to particular scholars. This reflects a general lack of care in treating Buddhist sources and ideas in the same way as other work more familiar within the Western canon, and the overall effect is that the boundaries and norms of “science” remain uncontested while Buddhist political thought is rendered in generalized and still exoticized terms. Although this was undoubtedly not Long’s intention, it serves as a cautionary note as to how work seeking to bring understudied traditions into political theory discussions can actually undermine its stated objective.