I. Does It Make Sense to Search for a Comparative Political Theory in an Intercivilizational Perspective?

“Since the Western tradition of political philosophy has demonstrated its capacity to meet new challenges, there is no reason to believe that it will not be able to meet the ones facing it today,” remarked Bhikhu Parekh in his inaugural lecture on The Philosophy of Political Philosophy in 1986. But in order to respond to these new challenges:

This is quite an agenda, and one not easily implemented. Parekh's call for a creative response by political philosophy to the changing context of human existence can be read as the quest for a hermeneutical science of man that breaks with the axiomatic assumptions of mainstream Western social science to develop the “language of cross-cultural theory” Charles Taylor proposed many years ago. This language “in which we can understand another society is not our language of understanding, or theirs, but rather what one could call a language of perspicuous contrast. This would be a language in which we could formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both.” Such an interpretive approach to the understanding of another society “can make us challenge our self-definitions. It can force us to do this, because we can not get an adequate explanatory account of them until we understand their self-definitions, and these may be different enough from ours to force us to extend our language of human possibilities.”Footnote ² Fred Dallmayr, an untiring protagonist of rejuvenated comparative political theory, names Parekh and Taylor, among others, as partners in an interdisciplinary scholarly enterprise “to keep pace with the unfolding cross-cultural and globalizing scenario” and, as he put it, to “replace or supplement the rehearsal of routinized canons with a turn to global, cross-cultural, or ‘comparative’ political theorizing.”Footnote ³ Dallmayr correctly points out that such a reorientation of political inquiry would have the implications for the entire profession of political science that Taylor spelled out: the required hermeneutical turn would undermine the epistemological foundations of mainstream political science because, in order to comprehend the historico-political world in its global breadth and temporal depth, a new conceptual approach to the manifold modes of human self-expression and self-actualization would have to take place. Furthermore, it would have to do so without measuring the plurality of human orders and symbolic forms with the yardstick of a scientific construct posing as “Western modernity.”

However, the initiative to refocus political theorizing in the light of an emerging global ecumene raises several questions. The first concerns the character of the phenomenon of globalization and the prevalent interpretation of this phenomenon through modernization theories that presume an ongoing Westernization of the world. The second and related question concerns the claim of Western social science to the universal validity of its paradigm of world-interpretation. Since I intend to offer neither another globalization study nor a critical report on the varied conceptions of modernization, I will confine myself to clarifying how these two questions interrelate, and why they have a bearing upon a possible quest for a shift of focus in political theorizing.

Max Weber, godfather of modern social science and one of its most outstanding comparativists, exemplifies the way in which these two questions are linked.

According to Weber, modern, rational European culture is the outcome of an historical process of development that is driven by rationalization and intellectualization; a tendency to force humankind into the iron cage of an inner-worldly rationalized and intellectualized cosmos inheres in this development. The process of intellectualization is fostered by science, and science is fostered by the process of intellectualization. The universality of the process and the universality of science are mutually dependent. Any self-reflexive analysis that attempts to consider this universal rationalist culture that was prefigured in Europe must follow the rational principles of science. Science, by virtue of being rational, is universal; it leads to an understanding of the whole of civilized humanity (Kulturmenschheit) viewed from the vantage point of a rationalized and disenchanted world. Reality presents itself to the scientist as “a chaotic stream of events moving through time.” Only the science of culture can extract from the inexhaustibly rich, empirically given reality a cognitive pattern of culturally relevant historical interrelationships. This “scientific truth” implies that a methodologically correct argumentation must also be acknowledged to be correct by a Chinese. For him, too, the “thinking order of empirical reality” (denkende Ordnung einer empirischen Wirklichkeit) put forth by social science is valid. Only the science of the disenchanted world enables one to study the enchanted worlds, because it alone puts one in the context of the universal process of rationalization that is epitomized by European culture.

This speculative grounding of the Weberian paradigm explains why the vision of universal modernization is entwined with the universality of empirical social science. This scientific universality derives from the rational principle that is brought forth by the intellectualization process itself: it embodies a logic of scientific inquiry that enables the civilized human being to “order the empirical reality analytically in a valid way,” thus bringing order to a chaos of facts out of a reality that is “irrational.” This science rests on the fundamental (neo-Kantian) presumption that empirical reality is a chaos and that only rational science can make valid sense of it. This sense, in turn, is contingent upon the scholar's own personal value judgment of the significance of the cultural phenomenon under investigation.Footnote ⁵ Thus, Weber's exemplary Chinese must resign himself to a scientific discourse that is a monologue. This discourse has premises that preclude dialogical encounters between different modalities of humanity that, in themselves, could be considered meaningful. Within the framework of Weber's science, a search for an intercivilizational, comparative political theory does not make sense; Weber's science homogenizes the civilizational multiversums of culture; it justifies such homogenization on the grounds that science alone can endow chaotic reality with meaning—a meaning provided by the regulative idea of modernization itself.

The modern social scientist is heir to Weber, and both are heir to a specific view of history evoked by the experience of the European rise to power, which made the Western nation-states the major actors on the stage of world politics and signified the emergence of a Western-dominated, global ecumene. Turgot's discourse “On the Successive Advancement of the Human Mind”Footnote ⁶ is an early example of the still current notion of a universal progress in history that became an operative force in the historical consciousness of the European intelligentsia. Turgot's reconceptionalized history conceives the history of mankind as a closed, world-immanent chain of events, while, at the same time, retaining the Christian belief in a universal meaning of history. This history is moving toward the telos, or end, of human perfection. Such belief in an intramundane process of progress has remained a constant factor from Turgot and Condorcet, through Comte, Spencer and Marx, down to the modernization theorists of the present day. Weber himself, skeptic though he was, shared the belief in the teleological structure of history and the progress of science. But he denied that any advancement toward human perfection took place. On the contrary, he was deeply troubled by the price humankind was forced to pay for the progress toward a disenchanted world.

Mainstream social science, however, became increasingly less Weberian and more Comtean. It did so because of the seemingly irresistible process of change that engulfed the world in the twentieth century in the form of development toward a global rationalism. The model reconstructed by structural-functional social science insisted on principles of generalization and prediction in “developmental classifications,” such as the social and political system. And it exemplified the sociological imagination's inclination to uncover laws that govern the evolution of modern society (a decidedly un-Weberian enterprise). The development of European and Anglo-American society was assumed to be the paradigm of a world becoming modern and free of the fetters of civilizational diversity.

Up to the end of the twentieth century, the Western, that is, the mainly Anglo-American, vision of a new universal world of liberal democracy and capitalism had to compete with the now defunct Marxist-Leninist universal progressivism. The failure of the Marxist-Leninist model of progressivism seemed to imply the triumph of the Anglo-Americanist, engendering the dream of a universal and unified West on a global scale. Indeed, a global ecumene has come into being, but it is marked by the strong resurgence of spiritual, intellectual, and political forces that challenge the dream of Western globalism. The human sciences should take note of this experience.

II. The Hermeneutical Quest for Intercivilizational Reflection on the Modes of Being Human, the Forms of Human Order, and the Reassertion of Their Symbolic Representations

Above I referred to the diverse initiatives that characterize the search for comparative theorizing in the social and political sciences. By challenging the prevalent paradigm of intercultural understanding, these initiatives have shifted the focus of inquiry. Study of non-Western cultures has increased as a result of changes in international politics. That mainstream social scientists were out of touch with experiential reality has gradually become obvious. As a consequence, the conventional view of the modernizing processes has been revised.

The neo-Weberian Eisenstadt is a leading proponent of this revision. “Contrary to the vision implicit in the ‘classical’ studies of modernization and the convergence of industrial society behind which loomed a conviction of the inevitability of progress toward modernity—whether political, industrial, or cultural, there slowly developed a growing recognition of the great symbolic and institutional dynamics attendant on the spread of modern civilization.” A new perspective on “modernization” thus gradually emerged. As Eisenstadt points out, “the process of modernization should no longer be viewed as the ultimate end of the evolution of all known societies,” nor can it any longer be assumed that modernization is “to bring out the evolutionary potential common to all societies.” Rather, modernity is a specific kind of civilization that originated in Europe and expanded into the world. “A great variety of modernizing societies developed … out of the interaction between the expanding civilisation of modernity and the various Asian, African, and Latin American civilisations. They share common characteristics but also evince great differences among themselves.” Common to these societies are problems that arise from urbanization, industrialization, and increased communication; but “they differ in the institutional ‘solutions’ to these problems … . These differences crystallize out of the selective incorporation—hence, also transformation—of the major symbolic premises and institutional formations of the original Western civilization as well as that of the traditions and historical experiences of their own civilization.”Footnote ⁷

Eisenstadt's revision of the structural-functionalist paradigm offers a fresh understanding of modernity: a plurality of modern and modernizing societies and cultures. These feature varying modes of structural and symbolic differentiation that, in turn, are shaped by the blending of intercivilizational, modernizing factors with their respective civilizational foundations. These “distinctive patterns of modernity, different in many radical ways from the ‘original’ European ones, crystallized not only in non-Western societies, in societies that developed in the framework of the various great civilizations—Muslim, Indian, Buddhist, or Confucian—under the impact of European expansion and in their ensuing confrontation with the European program of modernity.” Within Western, that is Christian, civilization—however defined—“not just one, but multiple programs and institutional patterns of modernity” also developed. Different patterns of development could be seen, for example, in North America and Latin America.Footnote ⁸

A global modernity is in the making. It is diverse in its appearance, because it is historically structured by the civilizational configurations that emerged in the axial age more than 2500 years ago. The great civilizations—whatever historical metamorphoses they underwent under the impact of the dynamics of change unleashed in Europe—still chart the global ecumene and provide it with an historical depth that must be regained in our understanding of modernity. Civilizations—clashing or not—do matter in that they establish the basis of humankind's global existence.

The foregoing reflections mandate a break with the foremost paradigm of social science, since it is theoretically and methodologically bound up with a one-dimensional notion of modernization. Indeed, the fundamental assumption of social science has to be critically assessed: namely, the assumption that the socio-historical world is an irrational chaos of events onto which social science imposes order by categorical fiat. The German sociologist Joachim Matthes, a well-known expert on comparative social research, points to the epistemological issue at stake. The conceptual and methodological canons of empirical research programs substitute scientific experience, derived from methodological procedures, for the actual experiences of socially involved human beings. Such programs imply that members of a society—despite the fact that they create the social world—are unable to acquire authentic knowledge of the social world through their own self-understanding. Authentic knowledge discloses itself only to those “who by means of professionally acquired and cultivated methods … elevate themselves above the constraints of social affairs and … work their way to an understanding of what is truly real about social affairs: the sociologist.” From this point of view, human reality is not self-interpretive, but dependent on the scientifically processed experience of the research person “who is compelled, so to speak, to operate ‘behind the back’ of the experiential horizon of the members of the society he investigates.”Footnote ⁹ This is the ultimate cause of what Dallmayr called the “hegemonic and imperialist mode of political theorizing.” The political theorist is thus called upon to part company with the unquestioned epistemological presuppositions of normal social science. “Faithful to the Platonic motto of ‘wondering’ (thaumazein) the theorist of the global village must shun spectorial allures and assume the more modest stance of co-participant in the search for truth: by opening mind and heart to the puzzling diversity of human experiences— and also of jeopardizing cherished preconceptions or beliefs.”Footnote ¹⁰

This alternative approach is hermeneutical in the sense that Taylor has outlined it. It follows from Taylor's argument that the investigation of social reality must first turn to the symbolic universe of human self-interpretation, since societies and other human figurations express experiences of order and disorder by means of imaginative symbolization. Only by studying those acts of self-interpretation that flow from the experiential world of concrete human persons can the entire fabric of human existence be brought into focus on its own terms. Because the human being is an animal symbolicum (Cassirer), a self-interpreting animal, the realm of the human being is self-interpretive. The hermeneutical enterprise begins with the insight that the historical field reflects patterns of meaning “as they [have] revealed themselves in the self-interpretation of persons and societies in history.”Footnote ¹¹ These patterns of meaning emerge from “man's consciousness of his humanity as it differentiates historically” in that the human condition unfolds its potentialities in the civilizational process. “History is the process in which man articulates his own nature; and neither the dimensions nor the limitations of man are explicitly known before they have been experienced and the experience has articulated the order of human existence.”Footnote ¹² The power of imaginative symbolization and the social embodiment of symbolic forms refer to the dimension of spirit and freedom that is beyond the evolutionary determination of human beings as a biological species. The generally recognizable generic qualities of human societies and their orders are inextricably interwoven, according to Eric Voegelin, with unique qualities by virtue of the human capacity for self-interpretation and self-actualization. Thus, Voegelin formulates the epistemological counterposition to Weber. It involves the turn to an interpretive understanding of the meaningful texture of the socio-historical world, that is, an experiential field encompassing the realm of the human being under the condition of his historicity that presents itself as the arena of human agency in terms of the manifold political orders and attendant symbolic forms of societal self-interpretation. In this sense, the modality of human agency is political because it articulates the human being's search for his humanity and its order; that is, it articulates the political in the most comprehensive meaning of the term, a topic to which I will return presently.

A hermeneutical science suggests a mode of theorizing that translates the meaning of self-interpretation into the language of rational discourse, which Taylor has called “a language of perspicuous contrast.” It does so, however, without abandoning the claim of its reflective analysis to arrive at a universally valid knowledge of the multifaceted realm of political agency in its temporal depth and global breadth. The universality of this hermeneutics of human self-understanding derives from the consciousness of the equivalence of experience and symbolization in history. The symbolic ensembles in question are engendered by experiences that relate to the perennial issues of the human predicament and are, therefore, equivalent expressions of the human condition—a fact that is evidenced by the claim to universalism inherent in the founding documents of the great civilizations. From the awareness of the equivalent representations of humanity emerges the moment of reflexivity that crystallizes in reflective understanding of the symbolic forms in terms of a universal hermeneutic.

Human self-reflexivity originated with the spiritual outbursts in an era once designated as “axial time” by the philosopher Karl Jaspers. They signaled a breakthrough toward a consciousness of the human self, its limitations and its position, in the comprehensive whole of being, and thus brought forth the “fundamental categories in which we still think today.”Footnote ¹³ In this sense, the reflective inquiry concerning the historical field of experiences and symbols is heir to the beginnings of human self-reflection. But as Eisenstadt notes,

Voegelin, however, points out that the reflective explication of human reality “has always drawn its dynamism from contemporary conflict situations. If today's horizon of the phenomena in question is truly global, it is because the entire globe has become a contemporary field of tensions.”Footnote ¹⁵ We deal with a “tensional cosmopolis,” as Dallmayr appropriately called it.Footnote ¹⁶ In Voegelin's words: “Today we stand at the threshold of the beginning of great philosophical developments … which for the first time must explore the realm of phenomena in its global breadth and temporal depth”Footnote ¹⁷—and this holds true in particular for the hermeneutics of comparative political theory.

III. The Political Reconsidered in an Intercivilizational Perspective

Self-interpretation was considered the pivot of the hermeneutical approach to the socio-historical world. Human beings bring forth symbols that express their experiences of order in time and space; these materialize into recognizable historical configurations of typical societal forms and symbolizations. The great post-axial-time civilizations—described for the first time by Jaspers in his seminal philosophical study of world history—are in a sense the most eminent and comprehensive configurations. From the series of socio-cultural transformations in the so-called axial age—from 800 BC to 600 AD, in China, India, the Near East, and the European Mediterranean—great historical configurations emerged that “transformed the shape of human societies and history in what seems to be an irreversible manner.” They “ushered in a new type of social and civilizational dynamics in the history of mankind”Footnote ¹⁸ that is still present in the global ecumene just below the surface of modernity. Briefly defined, this radical change involved “the conceptualization and institutionalization of a fundamental tension between the transcendental and mundane orders.”Footnote ¹⁹ From this basic tension evolved the image of a differentiated reality that separated the divine from the human, and nature from society and history. Therefore, the breakthrough toward transcendental visions revolutionized human understanding of its part in the drama of being and brought forth the self-interpretative complexes of order that have determined the global field of human self-understanding to this day: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and, last but not least, Hellenic philosophy—to name just the most important formative cultural forces that have been shaping the world for the past millennia. With the chasm between the transcendental order, embodying the idea of a higher moral or metaphysical order, and the mundane order, a far-reaching reordering of societal existence to attune the institutional and social structure to the imperatives of the transcendental vision originated. “This changed the dynamics of history and introduced the possibility of world history or histories.”Footnote ²⁰

William C. Smith elucidates the common core of the different civilizational visions of the transcendent, drawing on comparative historical studies that included the instances of Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Christian spiritual life. “Now that a world conspectus is available, it is evident that at most times and in most places humankind has been effectively aware that one lives in a world whose greatness transcends one's grasp but does not totally elude one, that Truth, Beauty, Justice have beckoned to one imperiously yet graciously. That awareness we see crystallized in poetry, and art, and philosophy or theology and ritual, and social structure, and political aspiration”; it is present in every symbolic form and its social embodiment. This awareness, Smith continues, “comprises, in varying degrees of emphasis, an appreciation of the transcendent quality of this world as it is, and a countervailing drive to change it into a world as it ought to be, and a vision of moving beyond both, being beyond both; a recognition of personal transcendence both in oneself and in one's neighbour, a sense of being somehow enabled to realize this in fumbling or in fullest richness.”Footnote ²¹ Smith is a professor of religion, which may have induced him to exclude Hellenic philosophy, as well as Confucianism and Taoism, from his consideration; wrongly I think. Both of these symbolic ensembles differentiate a higher moral order from the mundane world and set a transcendent standard for the ordering of the latter.

It goes without saying that the spiritual outbursts were not just events external to the people concerned: insofar as the tensional structure was experienced as an existential tension inherent in the human condition itself, such experiences changed the very heart of the human being. Within the comprehensive reality of being, the emerging symbolizations of these tensional experiences express themselves in the perennial language that depicts human existence in terms of a tensional polarity of life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, eternity and time, order and disorder, sense and senselessness, and, finally, truth and untruth. The consciousness of the existential tension is an empirical constant present in post-axial-age civilizations signified by an equivalence of tensional experience and its symbolization. The awareness of the existential structure gives rise to various ways of human self-understanding, all of which signify realms of human possibilities that unfold on the horizon of the existential structure as it is experienced by the concrete persons in their concrete historical situations. The diversity of human perspectives can be traced to the different responses made to the experience of existence. However, all of these reactions spring from the same motivation: the attempt, by means of human agency, to reconstruct personal and societal life by attuning it to the tensional touchstones of truth, order, and eternity. Human agency strives for the resolution of the contradiction between the human capability for self-transcendence and the experience of the finitude of human life. The one holds the promise of order; the other discloses the abyss of existential anxiety. “Anxiety is the response to the mystery of existence out of nothing. The search for order is the response to anxiety.”Footnote ²² Thus, it is the very structure of existence that evokes the order creating human imagination that assuages anxiety by sheltering human beings within an institutionalized cosmos of meaning. Empirically, it follows that the civilizational complexes of order show a symbolic center based on a specific exegesis of the tensional structure that focuses on a particular vision of humanity and its order in society and history. Historically, it reflects the idea of a paradigmatic humanity as represented by the great founding personalities of the historically effective symbolic creations: Confucius, Laotse, Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Socrates-Plato, Christ, and Muhammad. Such personalities were elevated to the status of holiness, and their lives mythologized (Plato being the exception for reasons to be discussed below).

The emergence of these new types of ontological visions proved crucial to the historical formation of humanity in that they evoke community by an act of imagination in accordance with their diverse ordering ideas of paradigmatic humanity. At first, and often for a long period of time, the new truths were embodied in nuclear communities that often displayed a penchant for apolitical and spiritual solipsism, distancing themselves from a social environment in disarray. Once, however, those groups underwent internal consolidation, the evocation of communal order proceeded from a new social element, from “a new type of elite which was cited as the carriers of models of cultural and social order. Examples would include the Jewish prophets and priests, the Greek philosophers and sophists, the Chinese Literati, the Hindu Brahmins, the Buddhist Sangha, and the Islamic Ulema.”Footnote ²³ These carriers were of pivotal importance in the construction of the new civilizational collectivities and the attendant patterns of collective identities that gave meaning to the configurations of power. Thus, in the post-axial civilizations, the quest for power and domination became bound up with the spiritual dynamics of the transcendental vision. And a far-reaching reordering took place, rooted in the conception of the relation between the sphere of societal organization and the higher transcendental order.Footnote ²⁴ From the axial era onward, the tentative alliance between cultural and ruling elites brings forth the symbolic forms of societal self-interpretation that are constitutive of societal existence in time and space. In this sense comparative theorizing is contingent on an understanding of the axial origins of socio-symbolic forms. For these forms reveal the matrix of diverse modes of symbolic explications of societal order in history and articulate the “political” of societal existence,Footnote ²⁵ as will be argued below.

Of course, we have to take note of the fact that the anxieties engendered by fundamental social crises in the axial age vary considerably in their historical appearance and in their geographical scope. Taking a brief look at some of the most exemplary cases of symbolisms welded to power may suffice.

In China, when the relatively consolidated imperial regime of the Chou collapsed and plunged ancient China into five centuries of continuous internal conflict, the experience of chaotic social disorder provoked sensitive minds to envision order by an imaginatively conducted revision of the key symbolism of the traditional understanding of cosmic order. This resulted in a specific Chinese conception that couched the tension between the transcendental and the mundane order “in terms of a metaphysical and/or ethical—and not a religious—distinction between these two orders.”Footnote ²⁶ The creative intelligentsia, the masters of learning of the six schools, represented an effort to establish certain kinds of transcendent intellectual and moral orders. The memoranda of Tung Chung-shu (179–104 BCE), written for Emperor Wu, describe all reality as produced by “heaven-and-earth.” “Heaven, thus can impose a mastery over earth; heaven is in reality the primal source of all the myriad things.” “Thus, man is produced by heaven and furthermore is the image of heaven; it follows then man must reverence heaven on high and take it as his norm for the conduct of affairs.” Heaven is “the great source from which right principles (tao) proceed.” And the emperor, the son of Heaven, “becomes the intermediary between heaven and man.” Only he “receives the mandate (ming) of heaven, and all the empire accepts the mandate of the Son of Heaven.” In fact, the relationship between heaven and man centers on the relationship between heaven and the ruler who mediates between the heavenly and the mundane orders.Footnote ²⁷ This Chinese concept of order was intrinsically bound up with the notion of a Chinese ecumene in imperial form. But it was to be rejuvenated and its traditions to be restated in new intellectual and moral terms. The intelligentsia anticipated the unification of China that was later accomplished by the Ch'in and Han. The thinkers envisioned “stability in unity,” as Mencius summarized this notion. Once unity was achieved, the imperial rulers experimented with the various intellectual currents of the six major schools in pre-Ch'in China in order to establish a meaning creating symbolic order to undergird the reestablished imperial regime. In 139 BCE Emperor Wu decreed the establishment of Confucian classics in the Imperial Academy as the only curriculum, while the teachings of other schools were eliminated. Emperor Wu thus acknowledged that the Confucian classics were canonized; Confucian learning remained the symbolic form associated with the public order of the Empire for nearly 2000 years.Footnote ²⁸

This was the case of China. It merits particular consideration because it set forth the most persistently symbolic form of order in the history of humankind. Let us briefly look at the axial breakthroughs in the Near East and in the Mediterranean world. There the story is more complicated. In the case of ancient Israel, the axial transformation involved the more radical break with the previous, symbolic form that was bound up with the predicament of a Semitic tribal society. Here the differentiation of the two realms of order was marked by the vision of a transcendent ground of being that was experienced and articulated in terms of a personal God. This experience constituted a new society based on common descent from and subordination to a universally divine order. The Israeli polity was symbolically governed by this God.Footnote ²⁹ When this polity collapsed under the impact of Roman imperialism, it mutated into the diasporic civilization of Talmudic Judaism. It separated itself from the Jewish-Hellenistic movements that were in search of intellectual and spiritual reorientation in the wake of the political catastrophe. One of the groups that emerged from these crisis-conscious minds derived its new vision of a truly universal order of humanity from Jesus of Nazareth. Again we have to state that there were various interpretations of the teachings and related ideas concerning the founding personality, the Christ who is the son of God. For centuries there have been divergent interpretations by the Christian intelligentsia of the true meaning of Christianity. However, spiritual figures like Saint Paul were capable of separating the new teachings from Judaism and envisioned a universal, spiritual order in terms of a saving faith that culminated in the idea of the equality of all human beings under God. It addressed all cultures, peoples, and ethnicities within the Greek-Roman ecumene. Again it was the crisis of an empire, this time of the Roman Empire, that brought about an alliance of political power with the symbolic form that was to be called “Christianity.” Between 311 and 380 AD, Christians were elevated from the status of an oppressed minority to become the bearers of the symbolic truth of the empire. Emperor Constantine's turn to the powerful god of the Christians initiated an imperial policy of restructuring the symbolic order in favor of the Nicene form of Christian monotheism. Finally in 380 AD, the Emperor Theodosius decreed that by law the Christian articles of faith were to be the obligatory creed of all subjects of the empire. The decree denounced all dissidents as foolish and insane, to be punished by divine judgment and the emperor's penal authority. Christianity—Hellenized and Romanized—became by imperial intervention the spiritual and cultural fundament of what was to develop into Western civilization.Footnote ³⁰

The axial breakthrough in the Greek polis was of a very different kind. It was the accomplishment of an all-Hellenic intelligentsia that emerged from the crisis of the archaic Greek society and transformed it in the image of an order “which ultimately transcended the competence of every force, and which only could be comprehended as an all-embracing context.”Footnote ³¹ It was articulated in Solon's vision of the eunomia against which a society in the state of disarray was to be measured. Eunomia depends on the presence of justice and the just (dike) in society. The just is the measure, and this measure transcends the mundane order. In the words of Solon: “It is very hard to apperceive the unseen measure of right judgment in thinking vision (noesai), and yet it alone contains the right boundaries of all things.” The unseen measure is the source of order that in itself is beyond mundane existence.Footnote ³² The historic uniqueness of the Hellenic idea of eunomia was rooted in the fact that “the final responsibility for order was borne by all.”Footnote ³³ The ordering force of the unseen measure committed the members of the polis-society to a common realm of action referred to as ta politika. And the involvement in the common affairs of ta politika makes the polites, the individual concerned with polis-affairs, the actual and symbolic representative of the specific Hellenic paradigm of post-axial order. Like other axial breakthroughs, this one also evolved from the interplay of an autonomous intelligentsia with political elites, but it differed from the others in terms of the societal formation it engendered. Moreover, it brought forth a symbolic form that detached itself from the axial evocation of the polis-order in response to the existential crisis of the world of the polis in times of internal wars and external threat of imperial subjugation. This response took the form of reflexive questioning in terms of philosophy and found its ultimate expression in Plato's and Aristotle's great visions of metaphysical order that extracted from the polis-order a paradigm of human order that claimed universal validity and set standards by which human affairs can be judged. It is the philosopher who represents the paradigmatic humanity of the polis. And the orienting center in the life of the paradigmatic human being is his rational self. The symbol of reason adumbrates the sensorium for the reflective mediation of the transcendent and the mundane in terms of the political modality of human existence. That the transformation of the political thinking of the Greeks into an understanding of the “political” per se has some bearing on the grand theme of intercivilizational hermeneutics of socio-symbolic forms will be argued presently.

First, however, I will briefly return to the post-axial problem of order and formulate a few conclusions drawn from the preceding analysis.

Once the symbolic form has been fused with a power unit, central concepts of order evolve—the Chinese tao, the Buddhist dharma, the Hellenic nomos, the Christian corpus mysticum, the Islamic umma, or Western democracy—each claiming to be a symbolic representation of paradigmatic humanity. These concepts of order are constitutive for the community and form the basis of all functioning societal organizations in history. They provide a sharing in the substance of community that transcends the intersubjective reality of individual beliefs, aspirations, and actions. They create a more or less extended realm of communication and interaction that evinces the transcendental truth of society, irrespective of the type of societal formation, power structure, or its civilizational affiliation. The community-sustaining, symbolic ensembles of societal self-interpretation confer meaning upon the common life and render it an idee directrice that legitimizes the terms of rulership.

The conceptions of order vary in form and content according to their historical setting. But they display a common feature in that they express a logic of societal order that pervades the different spheres of life and binds social life into a coherent whole. The logic of order is omnipresent in the post-axial, socio-historical world, and it defines an intercivilizational modality of human existence in society and history that is the modality of the political; the political, understood as the formative principle of social configurations and human agency active in the imaginative evocation of order, is in this sense always a human agency motivated by the search of human beings for their humanity and its order. But does this reference to a generalized concept of the political not contradict any genuine hermeneutical understanding of a multifaceted socio-historical world? Dealing with the “notion of politics,” Taylor requests a “more appropriate political science.” “It would put the challenge of developing an adequate theoretical language in which very different politics, Indian and Western, could be compared in an illuminating way.”Footnote ³⁴ Does this more fundamental notion of “the political” furnish a key category designed to come to terms with our quest for an intercivilizational comprehension of the logic of human order? My concluding reflection is devoted to this issue.

The concept of “the political” as denoting the quintessence of a politically organized society or compound of societies is itself formulated within the context of axial spirituality. Hellenic philosophy reflected on the grand theme of the axial age—the basic tension between the mundane and the transcendental orders—and translated the specific case of the polis-existence into an authoritative paradigm of humankind's humanity, the philosophia peri ta anthropina. There was no “philosophy” before Plato transformed this word of everyday language. The hallmark of the philosopher's intellectual enterprise was the reflective distance from the world of power and public order. Consequently, in contrast to all other axial symbolisms, the symbolic form of philosophy never served the function of legitimatizing power and authority. The critical, and in this sense historically unique, contemplation of the ultimate meaning of the tensional experience extracted from polis-life an understanding of human life in community per se, while treating the polis as an exemplary case of the most perfectly actualized human partnership and discovering the utmost actualization of the human being in the political being. Thus, the reflexive questioning of the Hellenic founders of a science of the polis distinguished the ta politika, the public affairs of the polis—in modern parlance “politics” and “policy”—and to politikon—the political. Plato (Laws 757 a–c) and Aristotle (Politics 1253a) express the essence of order in terms of the rule of justice, by calling it “the political.” This concept of “the political” expresses the very substance of the polis-order and blends the analysis of polis-politics with the normative model of human existence in society. The abstract noun to politikon, a substantivation of the corresponding adjective, signifies the general linguistic turn of Hellenic thought toward a reflexive understanding of reality that engendered the reflective language of “science.”Footnote ³⁵ In this sense, the term to politikon is raised to the status of a universal that, in turn, redefines and individualizes the universal so that it can refer to specific cases like the polis. In the course of the reflexive analysis of the polis-order, the normative model of human existence in society comes into view.

Western political philosophy built on the ancient tradition, but for the most part neglected this distinction between politics and the political until recently.Footnote ³⁶ Conventional political theory contents itself with a canonized history of political ideas and interprets Hellenic philosophy as the beginning of Western political thought. From a Eurocentric perspective, this development is quite reasonable, but it cannot go unquestioned. For the purpose of comparative theorizing, I suggest a different approach. Hellenic philosophy represents the most penetrating understanding of the axial emergence of a new form of symbolism and political order. Seen from this point of view, its reflexive interpretation of what has taken place in the course of the axial breakthrough, the philosophical paradigm, provides us with a conceptual apparatus that brings the essence of the political in all historical modalities to our attention. Modern reflexivity differs, indeed in scope and kind, from axial modes of reflexivity, but the principle of human self-reflection has become manifest in the Greek discovery of human being's humanity. In this sense, modern reflexivity is not bound to the letter of Greek philosophizing, but it is certainly dependent on recourse to and continuation of the Greek rational effort.

When, in the light of a global conspectus of human models of order, the question of what constitutes a societal form in historical existence can no longer be answered in terms of the Western model state, the concept of “the political” resurfaces in the quest in history for a comparative theory that reflects on the manifold of human forms of self-interpretation and self-actualization. This quest recognizes the political in its multiformity as a uniform and central category of hermeneutical research because this concept allows one to analyze all modes of politics and the attendant symbolic forms in all the various civilizational settings, without submitting them to an exclusively Western city- and state-centered understanding of politics. Hermeneutic theorizing accepts the diversity of humankind and is truly universal because its transcendental point of reference is the vision of universal humanity. It does not indicate a concrete entity in space and time, but symbolizes the consciousness of the tensional life in the in-between of mundane and transcendental order that determines the human predicament in the post-axial epoch of history.