Theorizing Elsewhere: Comparison and Topological Reasoning in Political Theory

Abstract

This essay addresses the often neglected role of comparison in political thinking (both formal and everyday). It calls attention to the spatial reasoning of comparisons. In doing so, this article first discusses topological reasoning in debates over the scope and boundaries of the discipline of political theory, and reviews a variety of spatial imaginings found in substantive theoretical arguments, most notably in the field of comparative political thought. This article then looks closely at three recent examples of thinking elsewhere by Anglo-American theorists: John Rawls's The Law of Peoples, Andrew March's Islam and Liberal Citizenship, and John Bowen's Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia. In these three texts, Islam is taken to be the proximate elsewhere of political liberalism. This article demonstrates the importance of comparison and topological reasoning in contemporary political theory in general, and in liberal political thought in particular. Polity (2013) 45, 34-55.The crisis that brings culture to the attention of Anglo-American political theory has less to do with the geographical and moral elsewheres that anthropologists have conventionally studied, and more with the civic and moral centers that give point and sustaining substance to the forms of life of liberal democracy.-David Scott, "Culture in Political Theory"In the epigraph above, David Scott describes a form of discipline-based insularity. He criticizes political theory for its propensity to avoid "geographical and moral elsewheres" in favor of liberal ideological concerns and the "North Atlantic canon." 1 This essay examines the status of such "elsewheres" in political theory and attends to the way political thinkers, when delving arguments, turn to other societies, antiquities, states, utopias, or distant locales. These various forms of 1. David Scott, "Culture in Political Theory," Political Theory 31 (2003): 92-115, at 95.