This is the nineteenth volume released under the Global Encounters: Studies in Comparative Political Theory series launched in 1999 under the general editorship of Fred Dallmayr. As described on the publisher's Website, the series marks the inauguration of comparative political theory as “a new field of inquiry and intellectual concern.” Each of the book's 14 contributors (mostly political theorists, along with a few historians and others) was asked to address at least one of the following themes: “the role of Asian traditions in the making of medieval and modern Occidental political discourse”; “the dissemination of Eurocentric political thought in the Asian world, especially the ways in which the Western traditions of political ideas were accepted, rejected, or transformed in contact with vernacular intellectual traditions”; and “the comparison of European and Asian historical processes at work in the construction of political discourses” (p. 3). Accordingly, the book is divided into two main parts: “Western Conversations with Asia” (Part II), and “Asian Dialogues with the West” (Part III). The preceding section (Part I) is short but important in setting out the broader objectives of the book, to which I will return later.

Part II begins with Cary Nederman's essay on medieval interreligious writings as dialogical models. The following three chapters (by Bruce Buchan, Brett Bowden, and Vicki A. Spencer, respectively) focus on selected Enlightenment figures. Together these chapters point to a common theme: that the Eurocentrism of political theory may have inadvertently disguised the extent to which Asia was engaged in the Enlightenment mind-set. While Asia as the “Other” functioned mainly as a sign of European superiority, Spencer notes that Islam was also a foil for critiques of Christianity. The section ends with Philip Nel's chapter on Islamic economics as a corrective to contemporary liberal conceptions of distributive justice.

Part III starts with an essay by Nelly Lahoud, who contrasts two Islamic responses to the West as the Ottoman Empire faced European colonialism. Anthony Parel and Makarand Parajape each focus on the evolution of Indian thought in its struggle with nation building, which yielded a distinctly postcolonial Indian identity that defies a simplistic East–West dichotomy. Peter Zarrow studies the Chinese conception of the state from 1860 to 1911, examining how this Western concept was “translated” into a Chinese idiom. Responding to the view that Confucian ethics lacks a comprehensive theory of justice, Joseph Chan provides a Confucian perspective on distributive and social justice. The last two chapters focus on Japan's historical encounter with the West. Takashi Shogimen argues that the very conception of “body politics” was alien to Tokugawa Japan, despite its exposure to Western medicine and anatomy. Alistair Swale discusses the equivocal embrace of Westernization by certain Meiji intellectuals and bureaucrats.

Taken separately, each chapter is illuminating. Yet the chapters are awkwardly put together as a book. They range from 12 to 26 pages in length, and their quality is uneven. The best chapters are all solidly grounded on careful textual analysis that skillfully negotiates between historical understanding and philosophical insight. Nederman's study of medieval dialogical models throws into relief the challenge of conducting real dialogues between disparate parties of different religious convictions when the only model that signals a complete breakdown of communication among the parties—“dialogue of mutual incomprehension”—is a true historical account, rather than an imagined dialogue. Parel's distinction between “political thought in India” and “Indian political thought” deciphers contrasting ways of engaging Western ideas, demonstrating that the issue is not how much one borrows from others for new ideas but how one borrows. In his study of the late-Qing conception of statehood, Zarrow juxtaposes literal with conceptual translation to show how a new way of thinking—one that straddles the “local-outside” divide—can be fostered through the development of a new vocabulary. These are examples of comparative work at its best, work that enhances our thought process with nuances, rather than inundating it with sweeping conclusions.

In contrast, other chapters seem to employ comparison didactically, the message being that it is high time for the West to suspend its claim to superiority in relation to the rest of the world. These chapters are prone to generalization based on dubious evidence that can easily put off readers. One example is found in Chapter 5, where Bowden challenges the Western monopoly over what counts as democracy. Democracy as practice, rather than as institutions and processes, is apparently a universal phenomenon that is coeval with the existence of human community. Soon we learn that democracy as practice means “‘decision-making by discussion,’ or the application of public reason” (p. 101). Yet what can be more Western, indeed more liberal, than the concept of “public reason”? In the case of Lahoud's treatment of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani as an inauthentic “other” whose “views about the Islamic tradition were conditioned by European views of Islam” (p. 176), we find “Usama bin Laden” (the preferred spelling of the CIA and the FBI) having the last words on American (read Western) domination over the Islamic world (p. 180). Such rhetoric is inappropriate in scholarly writing, especially since not all of the Western world follows American policy on the Middle East and not all Muslims regard bin Laden as their representative voice.

Together, these contrasting chapters suggest an unstated tension between those that are composed as scholarship on comparative thought and those that advocate comparative political thought as a superior form of theorizing with respect to today's ills. Although the two are not necessarily incompatible, it can be problematic when the latter outweighs the former, thereby diverting attention away from substantive issues that can actually move scholarship ahead. Part I of the volume, titled “Comparative Approaches to Political Thought,” seems to have done just this by focusing on the need to find an alternative way of theorizing, rather than on the challenge of how to theorize differently, including the urgent task of developing new ways of understanding differences that are neither Westcentric nor based on simplistic East–West polarities.

In Chapter 1, Dallmayr, also a contributor, pitches comparative political theory as the new global praxis that aims to connect “scholarly understanding” with “practical engagement” to realize the good (p. 23). Comparative political theory is about “finding truly universal principles or yardsticks of human conduct” that can curb the perversion of self-interest in this globalized world (p 18). Yet there is no specific discussion on how this “new field of inquiry and intellectual concern” has moved us closer to “finding truly universal principles” since its inauguration. The question is of some concern when the “dominant approach” in comparative political theory, which Dallmayr has helped to shape, is Western to its very core. As described by Nederman, it is “a ‘dialogical model’ of philosophical hermeneutics, drawn from Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer” (p. 45). While the next chapter, by Antony Black, is billed as a sketch of the global history of political thought, it is in fact more about the moral shortfalls of the West based on the familiar themes of unchecked individualism, consumerism, and the need for a new “public philosophy”(pp. 37–39). Since “secular liberal democracy contains no inherent logic limiting people's freedom of consumption,” the West should learn from the “existing traditions” of India and China, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucian, and Taoist thought (pp. 39–40). This turn to Asia to fill the “moral void” of the West is paradoxically validated by the well-worn Weberian thesis, namely, that Eastern cultures are not conducive to capitalism (p. 40). Yet this thesis has been challenged several times over by Asian economic development, and both India and China are fully consumerist societies.

Of course the West can learn from the East (and vice versa). But substantive learning can be facilitated only by thorough scholarship rather than political rhetoric, and political theory is no exception. Despite its drawbacks, the volume has importantly shown that comparative political theory is a new field of inquiry only if one is boxed in by academic labels. There is, in fact, a rich tradition of East–West encounters that we as political theorists have belatedly begun to tap into.