Critiques of Western modernity that use western knowledge as an alternative conception of politics reify Western sovereignty over marginalized cultures by simply trying to situate non-Western knowledge into an Western epistemic framework. Their method is a Eurocentric criticism of Eurocentricity.

Destabilizing the Local In claiming to offer a distinct approach to cross-cultural engagement that takes historically marginalized (often coded as “non-Western”) traditions seriously as sources of theory production, my call to recenter theory implicitly criticizes existing alternatives for stopping short of this more radical goal. In much scholarly literature on cross-cultural theorizing, solutions to the problem of Eurocentrism aim primarily to draw attention to the limits and contingency of those “master signifiers” inscribed within and by dominant (often coded as “Western” or “Europeanized”) social scientific and humanistic discourse (e.g., Euben 2006). This effort, pioneered and articulated by postcolonial studies, defines Eurocentrism as the projection of “the West” and its disciplinary categories as a universal measure of knowledge against which all other life-worlds or cultures must be compared (Prakash, 1475 n.1; Chakrabarty, 29, 43). Confronting Eurocentrism so understood thus entails recognizing the closures, contingencies, and silences enacted within Europeanized discourse as its local categories become inscribed as universal ones. This kind of “critical work seeks its basis not without but within the fissures of dominant structures” (Prakash, 1486–87). It thus aims more to mitigate what Fred Dallmayr calls the “bland universalism” accompanying colonialism and first-world capital flows (1996, 99), than to engage foreign discourses as potential outside replacements for the problematic categories of Europeanized knowledge. Precisely because this confrontation with Eurocentrism aims at its “fissures” rather than its alternatives, the critical stance that undermines the certainty of Europeanized categories—and so enables the entry of more cosmopolitan renderings of human life-worlds—also returns the theorist to the very audience and discourse whose terms originally prompted the critique. Although addressing Eurocentrism on one level, it reconstitutes it on another: the analysis chastens Europeanized categories only insofar as it continues to inhabit them (Jenco). Those theorists who explicitly urge the inclusion of non-Western voices [End Page 30] in our debates about political life, including political philosophers such as Charles Taylor as well as comparative theorists such as Roxanne Euben, ground this move in an understanding of knowledge as local and rooted. In contrast to an older cosmopolitanism that promoted indiscriminate tolerance or rootless eclecticism, this “new cosmopolitanism” is characterized by its resistance to imperializing universalism, on the one hand, and its unwillingness to sacrifice the “rootedness” of individual persons within their particular cultural backgrounds, on the other (Malcomson, 233–35). In this way they can resist both functionalist equivalences and universalizing ambitions—Archimedian vantage points that transform localized insight into general, “universal” knowledge—and instead seek a new space for communication across cultural differences (Benhabib; Euben 1999). Many culturally sensitive political thinkers analogize this cosmopolitan negotiation of rooted selves to a conversation that takes place between differently situated interlocutors to encourage mutual transformation—whether in the form of convergence, as for Bikhu Parekh and Charles Taylor (1999), or of accommodation without strict consensus, for James Tully and Fred Dallmayr (1996). Charles Taylor calls what emerges “a language of perspicuous contrast,” in which rather than imposing “our” terms on “them” we “formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to human constraints at work in both” (1985, 125). Hans-Georg Gadamer and those comparative political theorists influenced by him such as Fred Dallmayr invoke a similar process that encourages a “fusion of horizons.” These dialogic, supposedly mutually transformative encounters are conducted as often between texts as between people, and mean to facilitate mutual sympathy, grounded in the credibility of differently situated ways of life, as a means of combating universalist hegemony and hierarchical power relations (Dallmayr 2004; Euben 1999, 13). The dialogic approach further develops the postcolonial articulation of Eurocentrism by showing how critique can flow from both cultural locales without asserting the singular dominance that characterizes more “homogenizing” approaches. There are problems with this position, however, despite its important role in correcting imperializing narratives fueled by unreflective, often Western-centric universalism. Pratap Mehta, speaking of the cosmopolitan viewpoint that underlies these and other approaches to [End Page 31] cultural difference in political theory, has insightfully pointed out that its “hermeneutic potential is greater than its transgressive possibilities” (633). That is, the encounter with otherness has enhanced the interpretive richness of our self-reflections by making us ever more aware of the silences and contingency of “our” own sources of knowledge. But it has ignored possibilities for fundamental transformations in knowledge production prompted not only by the inclusion of cases and voices that our own theories marginalize, but also from shifts in the very audience, language, and resources assumed in the production of intellectual work. Roxanne Euben’s analysis of “Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge,” for example, gathers Muslim perspectives not to set political theory on a new track addressed to Muslim audiences disciplined by their terms of debate, but to make a tripartite argument notably independent of any particular Muslim viewpoint: that “the association of travel and the pursuit of knowledge is not confined to any particular cultural constellation or epoch”; that “knowledge about what is familiar and unfamiliar is produced comparatively,” and finally that “the course and consequences of exposures to the unfamiliar are unpredictable” (2006, 15–16). Farah Godrej’s plea for including non-Western perspectives within a cosmopolitan political theory, similarly, does not expect to advance political theory along non-Western lines so much as enhance the discipline’s capacity for self-reflection. She recommends an immersive interpretive understanding of texts situated in non-Western cultural frames to thereby “disturb or dislocate our familiar understandings of politics,” working from the assumption that “the very movement of [a] Western reader within the ‘Western tradition’ of political theory . . . may allow her to find familiarity in these [Western] texts that eludes her in the encounter with a non-Western text” (138, 139). Godrej and Euben are representative, but certainly not exhaustive, of how the attempt to unmask Western universalistic ambitions through localizing or “rooting” knowledge in culturally specific contexts ends up effacing the ability of historically excluded traditions or debates to discipline our own inquiry. Despite the fact that these theorists all recognize such others as theory-producing, self-reflective beings—hence their inclusion within political theory and philosophy—they paradoxically prohibit the often long-standing strains of [End Page 32] thought that lay behind their claims from displacing the very debates or categories in Western thought recognized to be problematic. Rather, frameworks of comparison confine theoretical claims to their communities of origin, resulting in the paradoxical insistence by cross-cultural theorists that any project of inclusion cannot transcend its own origins in European Enlightenment thought. This is not only for the reason that European thought dominates global knowledge production—a key motivation for postcolonial theorists, whose project turns in large part on exposing the aporia of Western modernity in global settings—but because the individual Western researcher is assumed to be rooted in her local, Europeanized categories to such an extent that his or her understanding of non-Western ideas is permanently constrained. Indeed, this embeddedness is seen by many, including Charles Taylor, as the constitutive problem of learning across cultures (1985, 130–31; Godrej, 158, 159), on the assumption that the only other alternative would be a “view from nowhere” that reinforces existing power relations by according the status quo a claim to neutrality (Euben 2006, 27). The starting assumption of these analyses is revealed to be precisely that we cannot transcend our own situated particularity radically enough to do more than, in Euben’s words, “negotiate” these other particulars, as we “disclose commonalities in the cross-cultural production of knowledge” (45). As Anglophone political theorists, we are situated always-already within the putative tradition that constitutes political theory, and always-already outside of any other possibilities.