Abstract

One of the exciting developments in political theory in the last decades is that the boundaries of the discipline gradually but vigorously expanded beyond “the West,” as evident in the rise of work that is often labeled “comparative.” Basic to this shift is the recognition that various thinkers, ideas, and contexts—usually marked as “non-Western”—have been peripheral to, and remain marginalized in, the discipline of political theory. However, the discipline’s framing of the “comparative” as the study of “non-Western political thought” tends to take for granted the boundary between “West” and “non-West.” The primacy of this assumed correspondence between “comparative” and “non-Western” is most visible and problematic in the ongoing institutionalization of the “comparative turn.” I understand comparative political theory as an immanent critique of political theory: the discipline presents itself as global, but in practice it is too often confined to studying a few places, histories, and bodies of knowledge. The “comparative” calls for political theorists to more reliably study politics and power anywhere. To take “comparative” to mean the study of equivalent, coherent forms of “non-Western” otherness is to elide the historicity of “the Western” and the ways in which it has been made in relation to non-Europeans.