In his On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808), Friedrich Schlegel wrote:

The path to a greater future knowledge, in Schlegel's view, went through India. Eager to convince the “able men” of “grander views and opinions” to conduct research on ancient Indian texts, he likened those texts' potential role in his age to the role that Greece and Rome had played in invigorating European knowledge during the Renaissance. Schlegel urged his fellow scholars to consider Indian texts as foundational sources of wisdom and knowledge. More generally, Schlegel, along with other Orientalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, believed that study of “the Orient” would correct European scholarship's narrow Eurocentrism.

Recently, Fred Dallmayr has written of how his work was transformed in the mid-1980s by a sudden realization that his studies had been myopic and particular. This transformation began “in 1984 when I attended a conference in India … [where] I discovered my deplorable ‘Eurocentrism.’ Although I had studied at excellent places in Europe and America, I had never encountered (for instance) the name of Shankara—who occupies a role in the Indian tradition comparable to that of Thomas Aquinas in the West.”Footnote ² Of course, Dallmayr had not only “studied,” as he modestly puts it, but he had attained accomplishments in the field of political theory that few could match. The fact that such a well-educated and prominent scholar of political theory could, by his own account, be ignorant of a major philosophical figure of India strikingly illustrates the provincialism and Eurocentrism of the field in the late twentieth century. It also shows that Schlegel's hope—that European knowledge would transform itself through study of Indian classics—was not realized in the late twentieth century. Now, comparative political theorists are still—or is it again?—urging their colleagues to attend to texts from outside a “Western” tradition.

The emerging field of comparative political theory has sought to correct the Eurocentric bias of political theory by studying texts, traditions, and ideas from outside the West. In doing so, it sets itself against “Orientalism,” as that term has come to be broadly understood, and aligns itself with the spirit of Edward Said's work on the subject. Said's Orientalism has probably been the single most influential challenge to the Eurocentricity of political theory as a field, linking the history of the field with histories of imperialism and oppression, and giving it tools with which to recognize and critique “Orientalism.”Footnote ³ Said's work, and the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric and imperialist knowledge that it helped initiate, is central to some contemporary works of comparative political theory; while not all pieces of comparative political theory actually cite Said's work, many do, and its influence is clear in the way comparative political theorists often articulate concerns about Eurocentrism, essentialism, and the relationship between power and knowledge.Footnote ⁴ Yet comparative political theory has, in some important respects, repeated the projects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism. The Eurocentric provincialism of twentieth-century political theory ought not to be understood as a more recent version of older Orientalism. Instead, it reflects the failure of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism to permanently transform Europe's intellectual landscape, as some Orientalists thought it should and would.

In the following sections, I will first introduce the concerns and methods of significant Orientalist figures (Jones, Schlegel, Müller), before comparing them with those of comparative political theory. Orientalism sought to broaden narrow European scholarly horizons, to compare ancient Indian ideas with those of classical Greece and Rome and modern Europe, and to demonstrate that attention to ancient Indian ideas would transform the human sciences.

Both Orientalism and comparative political theory use comparison to establish both difference and commonality. Using universalist frameworks, Orientalists had no difficulty identifying the value of non-Western traditions and thinkers; to the extent that comparative political theorists avoid universalism, they have more difficulty articulating the value of their subjects.

The comparison between Orientalism and comparative political theory holds lessons for political theory today. Orientalism embraced appropriation as a model of intellectual development in a way that should encourage political theorists to reconsider the politics of Orientalism, as well as the politics of intellectual appropriation. At the end of this essay I will argue that its methodological focus on texts delineated the boundaries of Orientalism's subjects, and suggest that comparative political theory is liable to reproduce those boundaries unless it broadens its methods.

Comparative political theory has been a timely intervention and has produced works of lasting value. While this article engages in debates within and about comparative political theory, it neither engages any particular piece in a sustained way, nor serves as an example of what I argue comparative political theory should strive to do. Rather, my main focus in this article is on the Orientalist texts, which I argue are worthy of renewed attention in light of recent work in comparative political theory. I also aim to contribute to the reflection on method that is already taking place within and about comparative political theory, by pointing to the possibilities and limits of arguments and methods that it shares with earlier Orientalism.

Jones, Schlegel, Müller

In the eighteenth century, a new body of research opened up in European scholarship. This Orientalist scholarship was based on studying ancient and living languages of Persia and India, which were seen as keys to studying the associated texts, literatures, religions, etc., of both contemporary institutions and ancient civilizations. We will look at two tendencies of Orientalist scholarship. The first of these is the tendency to note difference in terms of equivalence—to find, in other words, that East and West are different, but that each has equivalent structures, values, systems, and morals. This first tendency of Orientalist scholarship is exemplified by William Jones (1746–1794), a central figure in British Orientalism, widely influential in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual circles, who worked within the bureaucracies of British colonialism to instrumentalize Orientalist scholarship. Jones argued that India ought to be ruled according to “traditional” Muslim and Hindu laws, rather than according to a foreign English legal system. Jones spent considerable time in South Asia, learned local classical languages, and argued that European institutions and scholars should broaden their horizons by attending to the languages, literatures, and institutions of that world.Footnote ⁵

Jones's work contributed to the Orientalist “discovery” that Sanskrit and European languages were related, which had far-reaching consequences, especially in the nineteenth-century European scholarly world.Footnote ⁶ The newly revealed relationship between ancient India and Europe became the basis for interdisciplinary, wide-ranging excitement about the laws, literature, history, poetry, and philosophy of the Orient, and spurred European scholars to adopt a comparative approach to these fields. It is from this era that we will draw examples of the second tendency of Orientalism, which is to find commonalities and to locate in those commonalities the basis for the value that the Orient held for Western knowledge. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Max Müller (1823–1900) were two Orientalists who articulated most passionately the broader value of Orientalist studies. For both, ancient Indian texts and literatures held value that European scholars ought to exploit.

Both tendencies of Orientalism—the tendency to emphasize equivalence through difference, and the tendency to find value in commonality—were at work in a more general argument that Europe needed to pay attention to the knowledge of India. Schlegel's On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians reveals his conviction that European knowledge would be completely transformed, for the better, by its study of ancient Indian literature and philosophy. Characterizing the significance of the “Orientalist Renaissance,” Schlegel wrote:

Schlegel's remarks reflect a general excitement about Orientalist studies that swept through the intellectual climate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “like a rapid-fire series of explosions.”Footnote ⁸

We begin, then, with William Jones, and what I am calling his appeal to the equivalence of difference. Jones attempted to codify what he took to be “traditional” Hindu and Muslim law, in order to enforce it via colonial institutions, so that, in his words, “the administration of justice and government in India, will be conformable, as far as the natives are affected by them, to the manners and opinions of the natives themselves.”Footnote ⁹ In their efforts to govern according to “tradition,” Jones and like-minded Orientalists strove to render structures and texts of Muslim and Hindu law parallel to those of British case law. Jones and other British Orientalists insisted on codifying what they took to be local and particular law: In civil matters, Indian Muslims ought to be governed by Islamic law, and Indian Hindus by Hindu law. Jones's efforts to codify law asserted the functional value of Muslim and Hindu “tradition” and law in the Indian context. In this respect, Jones argued that the institutions and texts of Asia were equally valid to those of Europe; though different, they were similarly appropriate to the particular people and place of their administration. Jones's Orientalism acknowledged difference, and held that the validity of laws and values is contextually embedded, rather than universal.

In contrast to this Orientalism, “Anglicists” (opposed to the Orientalists such as Jones and Hastings) denied that Hindu or Muslim legal structures could be equivalent to English ones. These Anglicists would later prevail in the British colonial administration, ending the earlier and in some respects more open “Orientalist” era.Footnote ¹⁰ The Anglicists believed without hesitation in the universal value of British moral codes, legal structures, and educational curricula, putting in place a program to rule India according to British law and to spread Britain's knowledge to Indian shores. This approach, characterized by Macaulay's Minute on Education, set aside any Orientalist reservations about importing foreign values, or about how legal structures' validity might depend on the (cultural) context in which they might appear.

Jones's Orientalism emphasized the equivalence of difference, against the Anglicist insistence on universal standards of value. For the later Orientalists Schlegel and Müller, however, it was the commonality between India and Europe that revealed the particular value that ancient Indian texts held for European knowledge. This emphasis on commonality, despite seeming difference, is the second Orientalist tendency that we will explore in some detail. For Schlegel and Müller, ancient India, for all its difference, was in fact recognizable as a relative of Europe precisely because of the commonalities to be found between them.

Schlegel attended to commonalities between Greek ideas and those evident in ancient Indian literature, concluding that the Indian ideas were the origins of later Greek, Roman, and Egyptian ones.Footnote ¹¹ Of the two philosophical traditions, the ancient Indian and the Greek, the former was closer to the original, and the latter was clearly derivative: “It would be difficult to point out any idea or doctrine, common in either of the different intellectual systems, which was not also known among the Indians.”Footnote ¹² Likewise, Schlegel saw similar commonalities between Indian and Greek poetry and mythology, and concluded, again, that the Greek derived from their older Indian predecessors.Footnote ¹³

In the comparison, ancient India often came out ahead of Greece, in Schlegel's estimation. Schlegel often found the ancient Indian texts more vibrant, true, and valuable than the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. Mindful of how significant it was to make such a claim from within a “European” intellectual tradition, Schlegel wrote that Indian poetry, “if I may so speak, is designed on far grander proportions … [and] is in form even more morally and intellectually beautiful than the grace of Pindar and Sophocles.”Footnote ¹⁴ Concerning philosophical accomplishments, “[e]ven the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason, as it is set forth by Greek philosophers, appears, in comparison with the abundant light and vigour of Oriental idealism, like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood and heavenly glory of the noon-day sun, faltering and feeble, and ever ready to be extinguished.”Footnote ¹⁵ Schlegel thought these ancient Indian texts contained knowledge that, correctly interpreted, showed itself to have descended from the original, revealed truth of God.Footnote ¹⁶ For Schlegel, who converted to Catholicism the same year that this text was published (1808), ancient Indian texts revealed the unity of divine revelation across history, civilizations, and peoples, which further confirmed the divine origins of these truths. Only Christianity, he believed, could ultimately perceive the correct relationship between the different mythological and philosophical systems evidenced in texts from different traditions.Footnote ¹⁷ The relationship of commonality that Schlegel drew, then, between ancient Indian and Christian ideas, was not one of parity. However, the commonalities did not just reinforce for him an idea of the superiority of Christianity; those commonalities helped to demonstrate to a Western audience the inherent value of the ancient Indian texts and ideas. We will return to this aspect of Orientalism when we compare it to contemporary comparative political theory: Orientalism was able to articulate the value of its subjects for Western knowledge.

Schlegel argued that the lessons of Oriental literature would serve as a corrective to what he perceived to be the unwarranted prominence of studies of Greece and Rome as the civilizational foundations of Europe.Footnote ¹⁸ Schlegel recognized and emphasized the significance of displacing Greece with India. When writing that the idea of metempsychosis (reincarnation) was not a Greek innovation, Schlegel warned his readers that they “must … be prepared completely to reject the oldest and proportionately best accounts” of Greek philosophy.Footnote ¹⁹ More broadly, he argued that the Greeks were not rightly seen as the origin of European intellectual traditions: instead their value lay in their being “an indispensable connecting link between the European imagination and Oriental tradition.”Footnote ²⁰ For Schlegel, as for Müller after him, the realization was nothing short of revelatory and revolutionary.

At the heart of Schlegel's assertions of the common origins of ancient Indian and European ideas were the “discovery” of relationships among Indo-European languages and the correlative conclusion that peoples who spoke Indo-European languages, whether they lived in India or Europe, were related to each other, all “members of one vast family.”Footnote ²¹ On the basis of this new knowledge, and suggested by the commonalities he had identified among ancient Indian and European mythologies, literatures, and philosophies, Schlegel identified subjects that he believed would prove especially fruitful with further research. Roman law might have borrowed from older Indian law, and Homer had to be reconsidered in the context of “the grand circle of Asian legendary history,” rather than the “narrow sphere of Hellenic tradition.”Footnote ²² Such comparative study was likely, he thought, to support the theory that these legends and laws originated in Asia, and migrated westward “with the nearer advance of … the people themselves.”Footnote ²³ The apparent “fact” of human migration made the common intellectual patrimony between India and Europe even more compelling, because migration implied a kinship, not just a relationship, between these human groups.

The history of connection between Asia and Europe was an imperative for comparative study of the civilizational products of human societies, for broadening the horizons of European history, and so for considering Europe more modestly to be part of a larger civilizational whole. For Schlegel, the discovery of the relationship between Europe and India meant that isolated and isolating “prejudiced and narrow” ideas would necessarily be cast away, that “many points will first become intelligible in their general connexion, and every feature thus viewed will appear in a new light.”Footnote ²⁴ This is another aspect of Orientalism of note for comparison with later comparative political theory: it predicted and demanded the transformation of European knowledge.

Schlegel's work was one of the most significant pieces to theorize the link between Europe and India. That link was centrally important in the work of Max Müller.Footnote ²⁵ The German-born Müller was trained by an earlier generation of Continental Orientalists (including Bopp and Schelling in Berlin, and Burnouf in Paris), before he adopted England (Oxford) as his scholarly home. His work emphasized the importance of the ancient Indian language (Sanskrit) as that of an older relative of European civilization, and its significance as a piece of the larger puzzle of the mythology and religion of all of humankind. Müller articulated the value of Orientalist scholarship, and its broader significance, in a series of lectures that he delivered in 1882 to future members of the British Indian Civil Service, published collectively the following year under the title India: What Can it Teach Us? Footnote ²⁶

Though he did not share Schlegel's particularly Christian bent, Müller, too, emphasized the value that could be derived from knowledge of ancient Indian texts—the value of those texts as a source for European knowledge. As had Schlegel, Müller described the value of ancient India in terms of a corrective to the too-exclusive focus on Greece and Rome. He told his audience:

Müller described the value inherent in ancient Indians' accomplishments. For example, they were “the framers of the most wonderful language … the fathers of the most natural of natural religions, the makers of the most transparent of mythologies, the inventors of the most subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most elaborate laws.”Footnote ²⁸ More often, however, for Müller, India's value was not inherent, but came from its relation to Europe. The study of ancient Vedic literature of India was an essential part of scholarly knowledge because it was a unique resource for understanding Europe's past.

Müller emphasized the value that ancient Indian texts held for “us,” or for “Europe,” both affirming the value of those texts, and simultaneously urging “us,” or “Europe,” to appropriate them: “Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study … you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only.”Footnote ²⁹ Accordingly, he advised his audience to seize the wealth of these treasures by studying Sanskrit, which “will open before you large layers of literature, as yet almost unknown [to Europe] and unexplored [by Europeans].”Footnote ³⁰ The ancient language (and people) from which most of Europe had descended, Müller believed, was the Aryan, and “I doubt whether, in tracing the history of the human mind, we shall ever reach to a lower stratum than that which is revealed to us by the converging rays of the different Aryan languages.”Footnote ³¹ Müller's emphasis on kinship reflects not only the significant intellectual intervention of Darwin between the production of Schlegel's and Müller's respective texts, but it also reflects how viscerally powerful he found the idea of kinship to be.Footnote ³²

Müller argued that the discovery of the kinship between India and Europe would change relations between the two: he thought it would improve the colonial relationship of England with India. For example, he advised the future British civil servants to whom he lectured that the ancients of India were “our nearest intellectual relatives,” “fellow-workers in the construction of our fundamental concepts,” and “a collateral branch of that family to which we all belong by language, that is, by thought.”Footnote ³³ He emphasized their kinship with “us,” since “[t]o speak the same language constitutes a closer union than to have drunk the same milk; and Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, is substantially the same language as Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon.”Footnote ³⁴ Müller advised his audience that “India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange, or at the very utmost, a curious country.”Footnote ³⁵ Instead it is linked to Europe: “We all come from the East—all that we value most has come to us from the East, and in going to the East, not only those who have received a special Oriental training, but everybody who has enjoyed the advantages of a liberal, that is, of a truly historical education, ought to feel that he is going to his ‘old home,’ full of memories, if only he can read them.”Footnote ³⁶ Knowledge of that kinship, he suggested, would transform the relationship between British colonial civil servants and their Indian subjects by engendering a sense of fraternity (if not equality and liberty) in British men with respect to their Indian brethren.

Like Schlegel, Müller thought that the revelation of the historical relationship between India and Europe had fundamentally changed the future course of scholarship. Müller's optimism about the potential for scholarly knowledge to change colonial relations for the better was misplaced, and his enthusiasm for feelings of fraternity inspired by beliefs in kinship seems naive and even ominous. Yet his optimism about the transformative potential of this knowledge reflects the radical transformations in historical knowledge that he had seen and personally experienced. The discovery of the relationship among Indo-European languages had transformed scholarship: “though it is taught now in our elementary schools, … but fifty years ago, [it was] like the opening of a new horizon of the world of the intellect.”Footnote ³⁷ Relating the first moment when he was exposed to the “facts, before which one had to bow,” of linguistic similarities between India and Europe, Müller described an experience of almost physical disorientation, in which what had been familiar moved with all the speed, violence, and unpredictability of a storm: “All one's ideas of Adam and Eve, and the Paradise, and the tower of Babel, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet, with Homer and Aeneas and Virgil too, seemed to be whirling round and round, till at last one picked up the fragments and tried to build up a new world, and to live with a new historical consciousness.”Footnote ³⁸ Orientalism threw into question what Müller thought he had known about origins, genealogies, and originality. In sum, “[t]he concept of the European man has been changed and widely extended by our acquaintance with India, and we know now that we are something different from what we thought we were.”Footnote ³⁹ This fundamental transformation in knowledge, then, called for a similarly radical reevaluation of European self-understanding. Müller entreated these young British men to open themselves to such a revelatory experience by taking on the study of Sanskrit and reading the ancient literature of India.

We have seen that Orientalism engaged in questions of relative versus universal value when comparing its subjects with ancient Greek and contemporary European ideas. In this, it prefigured some of the discussions and imperatives of comparative political theory. Like Orientalists before them, many contemporary comparative political theorists argue that political ideas, institutions, and texts from outside the West are worthy of attention, and use comparison and commensurability to make the case for their subjects' value. The argument in both cases is made in part to combat what is understood to be a narrowness of Eurocentric knowledge. The following section will consider points of similarity between Orientalism and contemporary comparative political theory, and why the latter more commonly disavows than embraces the former.

Said's critique and contemporary comparative political theory

Part of comparative political theory's disavowal of Orientalism can be traced to the influence of Edward Said's work. Said's work has illuminated important processes, including the way in which Orientalism appropriated value that it found in its ostensible subject, “the East.” I will return to this point later. However, Said's work has also obscured—in its own generalizations about Europe, Orientalism, and colonial and imperial formations—how Orientalism broadened Europe's intellectual horizons, was a movement of comparison, and forced a critical reappraisal of Europe's relationship with part of Asia.Footnote ⁴⁰ As we have seen, for some Orientalists, Europe was seen as related to parts of the Asian world, rather than as always in contrast with or other to them, as Said's account and subsequent readings of it emphasize. Said's analysis emphasizes that Orientalism contrasts “the East” with “the West,” and links this epistemological “othering” with imperial domination.

Though Said's most basic description of Orientalism is limited and even misleading when considering Jones, Schlegel, and Müller, for example, it was quite useful for describing the Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” view of the 1990s: Said describes, and Huntington exemplifies, a Western view of the East that finds fundamental contrast between East and West, and links this contrast to political futures (particularly imperial fates). Said's account of Orientalism helped to explain attitudes in the contemporary West that comparative political theorists were interested in discrediting and combating.

Said's formulation was useful, then, to scholars who aimed to counter Huntington's popular narrative, and who promoted a more progressive political-intellectual project in comparative political theory.Footnote ⁴¹ Emerging in the years prior to the 9/11 attacks, these works aimed to intervene in what Roxanne Euben described as a “popular mood” in which “to many in the West, Islamic fundamentalism seems a particularly foul emanation from that netherworld of fanaticism, where disciplines of the violent and the irrational abound.”Footnote ⁴² Euben positioned her work against this mood, a corrective to the misconceptions evidenced in representations of Islam, in particular “fundamentalist” Islam. Comparative political theory's work, combating stereotypical, ignorant, and negative Western ideas about Islam, became even more significant after 9/11 and the intensified nationalism and Islamophobia that followed in the United States. Concurrently, debates about “Asian values” and political struggles in East and Southeast Asia inspired political theorists to combat representations of Confucianism as incompatible with democracy.

In these founding contexts, comparative political theory attempted to address difference while actively avoiding conclusions of utter incommensurability or irreducible difference. Comparative political theory took on Said's language about Orientalism—noting that it sees essential contrast wherever it looks—and so countered this with works that contextualized and historicized difference, and emphasized commonality. Because it adopted Said's characterization of Orientalism, comparative political theory has not fully recognized that it shares qualities and questions with earlier Orientalist scholars.

Comparative political theory has often aimed to correct what it sees as European and North American chauvinism, by highlighting commonalities between that “Western” world and those outside of it. Euben writes that comparative political theory should “emphasize shared dilemmas and questions” across apparent cultural divisions.Footnote ⁴³ Such comparison can reveal that these seemingly “other” traditions appeal to familiar principles. Al-Hibri, for example, finds that democracy and Islam are not only compatible, but indeed that democratization in Muslim states can “enhance” the rule of Islamic law.Footnote ⁴⁴ Dallmayr writes that the notion that “the basic purpose of politics is to promote the ‘common good’ or ‘good life’” can be found in Aristotle as well as “Alfarabi, Confucius, and the Indian shastras.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In emphasizing commonalities, comparative political theory avoids “the conclusion that cultures are morally and cognitively incommensurable.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In arguing that comparison yields commonalities across cultures or intellectual traditions, comparative political theorists repeat a significant theme of nineteenth-century Orientalism, as we have seen in Schlegel and Müller. Schlegel and Müller emphasized the commonalities between Europe and India (especially ancient India), and Müller argued that the act of recognizing those commonalities would even encourage Europeans to treat Indians as fellows rather than foreigners.

Sometimes, comparative political theory has emphasized difference, rather than commonality, and here the arguments can resemble Jones's: political theory from other places may be quite different from that of the West, but those differences ought to be understood and respected, not taken as the basis for dismissal. Comparative political theorists have sought to explain and explore different understandings of “agency, subjectivity, and freedom” at work in some practices of veiling, different institutional formations for democratic government and understandings of democracy, or different meanings of secularism and of opposition to it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Non-Western political thought, it is argued, must be understood on its own terms, not judged by the standards of the West. Sometimes, like Jones, comparative political theory emphasizes that different principles are valid and meaningful in different cultural contexts, and that scholarship ought to study and understand those differences. Dorraj, for example, contextualizes the meaning of martyrdom in Iranian political culture in an account which is highly historicized and nonessentialist, but which also attends carefully to elements of “pre-Islamic Iranian tradition and Islamic culture” that give martyrdom its particular resonance and relevance in the Iranian revolution.Footnote ⁴⁸ When emphasizing difference, comparative political theory generally works to contextualize and historicize it. As we have seen, Jones emphasized equivalence through an argument for relative value. He appealed to an overall commonality between the laws and institutions that he studied and those of Europe. Each was equally valid with respect to its own; differences lay at the level of content, and ought, he argued, to be respected.

Whether emphasizing commonality or difference, both Orientalism and comparative political theory argue that Western scholars ought to recognize the value of non-Western texts and ideas. To make a value claim, however, requires invoking a basis for value. Orientalism invoked universalist bases for the value of their subjects without hesitation; the basis of value is more complicated, however, for many comparative political theorists. One strand of comparative political theory embraces universal principles, finding in comparison an opportunity to underscore, strengthen, or refine an idea of a universal good. If comparison shows a basic unity across cultures, traditions, and languages on what the important questions are, this unity in turn reinforces the significance of those common questions and ideas. A certain degree of diversity can be accommodated, or even productive, in this project. Thus, Dallmayr and others have treated different contexts and articulations of what they take to be common problems and universals—how to achieve “the good life” or “democracy,” the meaning of “freedom” or “democracy,” or the philosophical bases of nonviolence—in order to arrive at satisfying answers to those problems or understandings of those universals.Footnote ⁴⁹ Differences, in other words, can be resolved into an underlying unity. Schlegel and Müller unhesitatingly embraced universalistic frameworks in which to fit their Oriental data: for Schlegel, that was the framework of a Christian truth, and for Müller, it was the framework of “the history of the human mind.”Footnote ⁵⁰ It was by embracing these universalistic frameworks that Orientalists were able to identify precisely what was of value about their subjects. Schlegel and Müller, as we have seen, found particular value in ideas contained in ancient texts of India, and argued that these were in some respects more valuable than their Western counterparts.

For many comparative political theorists, however, universalism is suspect at best, and its utility in establishing value becomes a liability as well. Even when noting the shared principles that commonality can reveal, comparative political theory often argues against presuming universalism, precisely on the grounds that any “universal” tends to emerge from, and favor, a particular time, place, culture, etc., in actuality. Attentive to Said's concerns about the Eurocentrism of supposedly universal norms and principles, comparative political theorists seek to make more modest the place of Europe in the field of political theory, and to encourage “the Western practitioner of political theory/philosophy [to] relinquish the role of universal teacher (buttressed by Western hegemony) and be content with that of fellow student in a cross-cultural learning experience.”Footnote ⁵¹ Euben, sensitive to the dangers of “imposing supposedly universal categories and moral rules,” argues that attending to shared questions rather than “universal truths” helps avoid such glib and problematic universalism, but that even here, she warns that comparative political theorists must take care not to assume even “the universality of such questions.”Footnote ⁵² Nonuniversalistic comparative political theory, she argues, must leave open the possibility that it will uncover entirely new questions. But what exactly is the value of uncovering such questions? In seeking to avoid the universalistic frameworks of earlier Orientalists, comparative political theory has struggled to articulate precisely the value of its subjects, a point to which we will return.Footnote ⁵³ Before doing so, however, we will see that earlier Orientalism's valuing of its subjects—even in universalistic terms—is something that Said's critique can help illuminate.

In contrast with much contemporary comparative political theory, earlier Orientalists embraced universalistic frameworks through which they articulated the value of their subject. As we have seen, they urged their fellow Europeans to appropriate that value for the sake of future (European) scholarship and knowledge. Neither Schlegel nor Müller showed the least hesitation or embarrassment about advocating the appropriation of value from ancient Indian texts, because such appropriation was an attractive model of how human knowledge traveled and progressed. Appropriation as a model for the development of human knowledge did not necessarily hold for them a moral liability as a form of domination, nor was it of secondary status as a model of derivation rather than originality. As we have seen, the significant revelation of Orientalism was not that modern Europe was unoriginal, but instead that it derived most fundamentally from India, rather than Greece and Rome. Just as the Greek and Roman patrimony was thought to “belong” to nineteenth-century (northern) Europe (rather than contemporary Greeks and Romans), so ancient India, too, “belonged” to contemporary European men of letters. The appropriation that both Schlegel and Müller advocate—the appropriation of value from ancient Indian texts for Europe's future—is an example of a more general type of intellectual appropriation common in the history of political thought, and is not unique to Orientalism.

Though intellectual appropriation need not imply colonial domination, it is clear that for some Orientalists, the two actions did not merely coincide, but indeed authorized each other, as Said and subsequent scholars have claimed. When Müller told future members of the British Indian Civil Service that “India for the future belongs to Europe, it has its place in the Indo-European world, it has its place in our own history,” he blended the senses in which he thought India rightly “belonged” to Europe, including the political sense.Footnote ⁵⁴ Müller's thought, in particular, reflects a kind of imperialism that Said's book illuminates, and that contemporary political theory disavows.Footnote ⁵⁵ Müller's thought, however, also reveals that this intellectual appropriation depends precisely on valuing its object, not denigrating it. That is, this kind of intellectual appropriation, even when articulated as imperialism, is impossible without value being located in its object (India, its knowledge). The more valuable the object, the more sensible and attractive its appropriation. In this respect, “Orientalism” was largely about identifying value in its subject, rather than denigrating or dismissing it. This act of “Orientalism,” while suggested by Said, is stifled by his own emphasis on how Orientalist views denigrated the East, and is rarely explored by those more interested in how Western knowledge was imposed on (and appropriated by) Indian subjects.Footnote ⁵⁶

Comparative political theorists often aim to avoid the kind of universalistic frameworks that allowed Schlegel and Müller to so confidently identify the value of their subjects. In rejecting universalistic frameworks, comparative political theorists incur difficulty making claims about the value of their material beyond its own cultural, political, or historical context.Footnote ⁵⁷ Some comparative political theorists have tackled this hermeneutic problem quite directly.Footnote ⁵⁸ Comparative political theory often finds that it must justify itself in terms of the value that its “new” subject will have for political theory more generally. As Andrew March has argued, at some level such a claim is required for a new subdiscipline to legitimate itself.Footnote ⁵⁹ Comparative political theorists, however, are generally loath to make such a claim, because they seek to avoid using data from “others” instrumentally to benefit the “self” of (Western) political theory. Farah Godrej, for example, has called for “cosmopolitan” political theory to engage critically across civilizational divides, and to “see new political insights as potentially emerging from any set of resources, past or present, ‘our’ traditions, or ‘others,’” without presuming that texts from other traditions are valuable only in that “they have something to say to us.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Leigh Kathryn Jenco sees even postcolonial scholarship as caught unproductively in a Eurocentric trap, insofar as it claims that “it is impossible for anyone to think without” Eurocentric categories.Footnote ⁶¹ Both Godrej and Jenco call for comparative political theory to seek methods, and not just content, data, or questions, from outside the West, in order to “supplant, rather than embrace” Eurocentrism.Footnote ⁶² Both have proposed that comparative political theory can help broaden political theory's methodological toolkit, an aim I endorse, as will become evident. However, aside from the merits of the methodological innovations they propose, what is striking about these self-conscious efforts to supplant Eurocentrism is that they have mostly duplicated Orientalism's geographical and civilizational emphases, and also its omissions.

To understand why this is so, we need to turn to another quality shared by Orientalism and comparative political theory: both have been predominantly focused on texts and their correct interpretation. Orientalism's emphasis on the authority of the text, and on textual interpretation, is often repeated in the methodology of twentieth-century comparative political theory, reflecting the methodological emphasis of political theory, broadly speaking.

It will be remembered that Jones attempted to codify “traditional” Hindu law. An acceptance of texts as markers of civilization and sources of knowledge underwrote Jones's strategy to assert British colonial authority over local authority. By appealing to the authority of the text itself, local scholarly and priestly elites could be bypassed in the name of governing according to local “tradition.”Footnote ⁶³ The emphasis on the text as the location of authority—and in particular on an ancient, original text—over contemporary, living institutions meant that living, “native” priests and scholars were treated as suspiciously (self-)interested parties, and their interpretations subordinated to the authoritative interpretation based on “the text” itself.Footnote ⁶⁴ The “correct” interpretation was conferred by the authority of the Orientalist's appeal to the (usually ancient) text, untainted by scholarly or popular practices that Orientalism viewed as foreign intrusions or perversions of the pure or original. Thus, Orientalism's appeal to textual authority—made in the name of preserving tradition—actually changed what had become customary practice, by codifying supposedly “traditional” legal structures.Footnote ⁶⁵ Just as the Protestant Reformation's appeal to the Bible as text enabled attacks on the legitimacy of established Church hierarchy and dogma, so Orientalism appealed to the ancient, original text, marginalizing the scholarly and priestly institutions of India that also claimed to be bearers of authoritative interpretation. Schlegel and Müller continued, and intensified, the methodological presumption of Jones's work, in their attention to the authority of the text—in particular, the authority of the ancient, “original” text. The authority of the text itself, and the method of textual interpretation by which the text is available to anyone with access to it, allowed Schlegel and Müller to appropriate ancient Indian texts as part of a “universal” framework and to displace Greece with India as Europe's origin.

Orientalists' emphasis on the text as the location of authority, and on language as the key that allowed one direct access to the text, enabled them to bypass “traditional” scholarly authority, effectively marginalizing the traditions and institutions out of which their knowledge had grown. The connection between appropriation and textual authority is not a logically necessary one, but historically, it was prominent in Orientalism. Both actions—finding value in “the East” and subordinating it to the authority of “the West”—were validated by the presumed authority of the (ancient) text, and methodological emphasis on direct access to it.

Though Orientalism used textual authority to bypass indigenous scholarship and priestly institutions, comparative political theory often relies on those same institutions for authorization. A long tradition of scholarship helps outsiders to identify what the important texts were. Indeed, the very existence of a long tradition of scholarship helps to determine that there was anything worthwhile about its texts at all. These “traditions” are recognizable as available to and appropriate for comparative political theory because they are recognizably similar in form to “Western” political theory (a tradition of written scholarly exegesis of foundational texts), but also because they are recognizably distinct as traditions from what would be considered “Western” political thought.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this respect, comparative political theory has largely reproduced—though perhaps unwittingly—what Rudolph and Rudolph have called Orientalism's “civilizational eye,” which distinguished pluralities of human societies in terms of “coherent cultural wholes defined by great languages and their classic texts,” in contrast to an “ethnographic eye” that saw pluralities in terms of “customs defined by oral traditions.”Footnote ⁶⁷

It is not coincidental that comparative political theory has in some ways begun with a focus on texts of Chinese, Indian, and Islamic traditions, broadly the same as those central to much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Contemporary comparative political theory often repeats Orientalism's emphasis on parts or traditions of Asia as the most fruitful for comparison with European thought: texts of Islamic philosophy and political theory, and philosophical, legal, and/or religious texts of (especially ancient) Indian and Chinese worlds. The shared emphasis is not fully explained by comparative political theorists' aim to combat “Orientalism,” though contemporary theorists often do contest Orientalism's terms. The shared emphasis in part depends on methodological commonalities that emphasize textual authority: political theory and Orientalism both privilege written texts, particularly great texts, as the bearers of ideas worth studying, and both privilege textual analysis as the method for unlocking meaning. In the text itself lies the authority, the truth, or the important data. The scholar with direct access to the text—preferably the original text, not in translation—is in a position to correctly analyze or interpret it. Insofar as comparative political theory aims to use political theory's textual method to expand its purview, it will reproduce the outlines of an Orientalist world.

Comparative political theory is beginning to consider how its own privileging of texts, as part of a humanistic tradition of political theory, marginalizes and excludes other forms of political theorizing.Footnote ⁶⁹ Recently, thoughtful contributions have treated the problems with text-centered comparative political theory, and proposed alternative methodologies both to avoid the limits of textual interpretation and to take advantage of the possibilities of other modes of understanding and interpretation. Jenco has proposed that conversion be a possible model of cross-cultural understanding—a model that confronts and even embraces irreconcilable difference, and that acknowledges that understanding, or belief, need not always proceed according to textual or logical bases.Footnote ⁷⁰ Godrej has argued in favor of what she calls a “hermeneutics of interpreting the other,” in which the theorist immerses herself in an alien tradition—particularly in an alien tradition of practice, such as an ascetic practice undertaken within a community of practitioners—and tacks between the two conflicting imperatives, that of textual interpretation and exegesis, and that of existential understanding and embodiment, in both representing “the other” and arriving at conclusions about it.Footnote ⁷¹ Each of these authors usefully confronts the limits of textual interpretation, as well as the challenges, for a textually oriented discipline, of intelligently and critically adopting other modes of analysis. It is telling, however, that even these most successful challenges to text-centered method both derive and work from “traditions” that are identifiably linked to the old textual traditions with which Orientalism concerned itself: Chinese and Indian. The point is not that comparative political theory ought not to treat any such texts or practices. Instead, the point is that even when comparative political theory challenges the validity of textual exegesis as a method, this challenge seems most available, in a sense, to those who work on material that could safely be considered within such a tradition.