The canon and comparative political thought

Introduction

The urge behind the growth of interest in the past decade and a half in what has become known as comparative political thought ¹ can be defined, quite simply, in terms of a desire to enlarge theoretical conversations beyond Western discourses. Related to this desire is an effort to question the assumption that Western thought can unproblematically apply to political constellations in other parts of the world, an assumption that overlooks both significant issues of translation and the theoretical resources unique to non-Western locales. This concern with the nature of knowledge transmission between the West and non-West, moreover, nearly without exception draws inspiration from an older body of the literature that casts light on issues of cultural representation bound up with the modern European colonial experience and its legacy. The creation of an idea of “the West,” the corresponding de-valuation of cultures and intellectual traditions seen to be foreign to Europe and North America, and how these gestures both formed the basis of and served as rationalizations for modern Western expansionism within Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America have been examined and critiqued by a number of scholars associated with post-colonial theory (Amin, 1989; Bernal, 1987; Cesairé, 2000; Said, 2003).

Yet, while attention toward domination and exclusion has assumed a position of central importance in this field within a subfield, less scrutinized have been the thematic inheritances of the history of political thought in the practice of comparative political theory and how they limit theoretical investigations in less conspicuous ways. As this essay will argue, despite the overarching preoccupation in comparative theory with being sensitive towards issues of difference in cross-cultural inquiry, there remains an assumption in comparative scholarship that the absence of non-Western political philosophers is an unfortunate omission which can be remedied, somewhat unproblematically, through an act of straightforwardly including the texts and traditions associated with these thinkers. ²

The trouble with such a view is that it presumes a level of smooth and equal exchange between these figures, abstracted from the discrepancies in influence which attach to the traditions that they are affiliated with. Western canonical authors have been examined, critiqued, and historically situated with a level of frequency and sophistication which would be problematic to underestimate or ignore. Given this past of canon construction, which serves as an important pillar of how theory is practiced today, the Western figures in such a dialogue are afforded authority in the use of their theoretical tools that is not at the disposal of their interlocutors. With this observation as a point of departure, I will argue for an understanding not of the exclusion of non-Western theory but of the continued limitations found within comparative thought as a result of this history and focus in particular on themes that inform the creation of the theory canon. These themes, while not unconnected to the problem of the connections between colonial power and discourse, point to more indirect ways of esteeming certain forms of theory over others.

In specific terms, this essay will examine the place of “the good” or “the common good” for Leo Strauss and “the political” for Sheldon Wolin in each of their respective accounts of the development of the “canon” of political philosophy. The suggestion made here is not that the canon exhausts scholarship in political theory today. From the use of different literary genres, to historical archives, to alternative research strategies derived from other disciplines and political science subfields, political theory has been able to draw on myriad sources when producing work. And yet the canon remains the dominant reference point for understanding the history of political thought, not only in the form of the arguments of those who have come to be construed as its pre-eminent figures but also through the interpretations of its most prominent narrators. Insofar as canonical authors structure comparative theory, whether explicitly through exegesis and evaluation of their work or implicitly through engagement with approaches that they can be seen to inspire, then examining the ways that they have been interpreted will assist in avoiding an unquestioning embrace of their theoretical models as universally valid or a subtle privileging of these models in relation to non-Western works.

The distinct representations of the canon in the work of Wolin and Strauss demonstrate that there is no single, definitive view of what characterizes the tradition of Western political thought. This essay, furthermore, does not maintain that work related to the canon is inevitably bound up with the readings offered by these two authors. They are looked to as important narrators who, through the themes that they underscore, configure the ways in which the canon has become known, and in doing so, they both frame and limit theoretical inquiry. It is this latter point, the limitations to thought that emerge from their writings, which will be the focus of this piece.

In addition, the views of the canon that are present in the writings of Strauss and Wolin are not portrayed as being necessarily parochial or deliberately exclusionary of non-Western modes of thinking. What is being maintained is not that these authors deliberately choose to circumscribe the study of political thought in a manner that makes it exclusively Western. Rather, my claim is that the iterations of that which has become known as the “tradition” of political philosophy which are found in their work and the debates that they respond to in fashioning conceptions of this tradition are not sufficient to conceiving of an inclusionary mode of comparative study and that scholars of comparative theory ought to be cognizant of such pitfalls. This means that even when non-Western works form the basis of a particular theoretical investigation, as is the case with comparative political thought today, the retention of salient themes from the canon can lead to an approach that proceeds on terms foreign to these works and result in distortions of the epistemological aspects that define them. By way of demonstration, I will refer to medieval Islamic thought and focus in particular on the figure of Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah in order to highlight the shortcomings of adopting the aforementioned views as guiding models.

Alternative visions of decline

Both Strauss and Wolin offer views of decline which lament the loss of a key idea or philosophical orientation in the histories that they are chronicling. ³ For Strauss, this means a defense of the notion of the “common good” and a diagnosis of the broader social and political ills which apparently stem from its loss. Both also articulate views of political philosophy that are situated in a context of supposed conflict with methodology in the social sciences, and both envision their theoretical projects as efforts to combat perceived assaults on the practice of political philosophy.

In his essay “What is Political Philosophy?” Strauss (1988) claims that this mode of thinking is in a state of “decay” and “putrefaction” in the mid-twentieth century owing to the growth of science-oriented approaches (p. 17). According to his argument, the divisions that characterize the penetration of the scientific method into the study of politics have resulted in limiting the scope of philosophical views and rendering them increasingly discredited. He defines (Strauss, 1988) political philosophy as “the conscious, coherent and relentless effort to replace opinions about the political fundamentals by knowledge regarding them” and distinguishes it from both political theology and social philosophy by virtue of its apparent focus on un-mediated reason and its privileging of the political bond as the highest form of human attachment (pp. 12–13). It is less these approaches though, than science, from his viewpoint, that threatens political philosophy. The preoccupation with empirical observation and precise measures in this method, as well as its rejection of evaluative standards, entail for Strauss an assault on a particular type of normative thought which is held to be the preserve of political philosophical research. By relinquishing value judgments in favor of an examination of observable facts, social science apparently leaves itself incapable of critiquing political and moral excess and is therefore implicated in concrete political crises (Strauss, 1971: 35–80).

History (or more accurately historicism, which he often conflates with history) alongside science—“the two great powers of the modern world” (Strauss, 1988: 18)—is the other method or discipline that is said to engender the decline of political philosophy. It does so by denying the transhistorical nature of philosophical wisdom and insisting that erstwhile conceptions of themes in political philosophy, such as the state, citizenship, and authority, by virtue of belonging to the past are outdated and impertinent to present political arrangements. The result has been the bracketing of questions such as what is the most just political order in favor of what is preferable or desirable: “The questions of the modern state, of modern government, of the ideals of Western civilization, and so forth, occupy a place that was formerly occupied by the questions of the state and of the right way of life” (Strauss, 1988: 59). These higher and less variable orientations of political philosophy are jettisoned through historicist approaches, and, as mentioned above, this altered method of thought leaves these new disciplines powerless to address broad political and ethical wrong-doing.

Thus, what both historicism and the social sciences do away with for Strauss is a guiding outlook which structures political order in a fundamental way. Strauss’ term for this orientation is the “common good.” In specific terms, it is an idea that transcends particular affiliations and conflicts by being predicated on what is just, irrespective of the historical epoch and locale. According to him, the common good also captures political and moral views comprehensively and as a consequence is constitutive of societal order in a manner that other ideas or value commitments are not: “All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life, or of the good society. For the good society is the complete political good” (Strauss, 1988: 12). He concedes (Strauss, 1988: 16–17) a degree of vagueness and disagreement with regard to the good and yet embraces this dimension of it, seeing it as the task of political philosophy to illuminate its many levels through a constant process of questioning. With the loss of this deeper orientation, political philosophy becomes fragmented and focuses itself upon partial problems of policy and institutional design (Strauss, 1988: 86–89). Furthermore, these modest aims which subtend political thought are indicative to Strauss of underlying social and political crises. When reflections concerning politics abandon a focus upon the good, political life generally becomes disoriented.

Ancient political philosophers, and in particular Plato and Aristotle, are held aloft by Strauss as the original and most refined proponents of the good. They are portrayed as having a preoccupation with an ultimate aim that enables them to conceive of justice and order in an all-encompassing manner, something that is said to be forsaken not only by social science and history but also by the supposed progenitors of these disciplines in the history of ideas, such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. His reading of the history of political philosophy thus turns on a conception of decline because thinkers subsequent to Plato and Aristotle are seen to fall short of the broader teleological purpose which these two figures foreground in their thought. It is for this reason that Strauss (1988) holds that all post-classical philosophy “has a derivative character,” as its objectives are always already presupposed by and can only be measured according to the idea of common good that is outlined in this early period (p. 28).

The most obvious way in which Strauss’ reading of the canon limits theoretical study is apparent in this privileging of classical thought. His lofty view of the ancients assumes a secondary position for all later political philosophy in terms of robustness and novelty. For the thinkers who have come to be component parts of the Western canon, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Friedrich Nietzsche, this means fixed positions within a broad narrative in which they, at best, play a supporting role and, at worst, are held responsible for contaminating philosophical thought.

This can be seen clearly in his characterization of Machiavelli, for Strauss (1988) the “founder of modern political philosophy” (p. 40). Machiavelli’s anti-utopianism, which implies a rejection of considerations of the good within the domain of political life, is understood as initiating the broad “decline” that Strauss is diagnosing. His dismissal of ultimate ends involves a failure to take seriously and sufficiently refute these broader purposes and so is described as a type of “decayed Aristotelianism” (Strauss, 1988: 47). In the same vein, Machiavelli’s bracketing of the “important themes” (true justice, the good), which Socrates, for Strauss (1978), reveals to be the “key to the understanding of all things,” leads him to his well-known endorsements of violence and immorality in politics (p. 19).

As with Strauss, Wolin’s conception of the canon is directed against the increasing dominance of the scientific method in political science research and what this has entailed for the marginalization of theoretical study. Social scientific research, or “methodism” in his terms, defines itself through a break with past approaches to politics, represented by “traditional” political theory. It does so by doing away with arguments and claims that are not amenable to empirical observation and scientific testing. Focusing on “rigor, precision [and] quantifiability” allows methodism to argue for transcending the normative assumptions which buttress the arguments of figures such as Machiavelli, Bodin, and de Tocqueville (Wolin, 1969: 1071). Knowledge concerning politics in this natural-science-based model is incremental and cumulative and proceeds according to the discrediting or falsification of previous approaches. By moving beyond the unverifiable and designing research with a paradigm that is believed to be bereft of value orientations, methodism in Wolin’s (1968) view fashions itself as capable of achieving neutral and universally valid information (pp. 126–127).

In response, Wolin offers three main critiques of methodism. First, he faults scholars associated with this approach with being inattentive to history. In doing so, they fail to acknowledge how and in what ways present research schemes have been shaped by past approaches. A historical understanding not only enables an appreciation of greater nuance in one’s view of current methods, but more importantly it reveals the degree to which theoretical models that are regnant today have evolved in conversation and in tension with different scholarly views of politics (Wolin, 1969: 1071). The social scientific point of departure which assumes that history is insignificant to a rigorous understanding of present methods is, as a result, less prepared to conceive of alternative methodological approaches, which could be informed by a reading of the past. Second, he takes issue with the idea of the social scientific claim to value neutrality by pointing to the thinly normative nature of this work. This view for Wolin neglects the extent to which empirical observation always already relies upon a pre-existing theoretical framework that is infused with norms and values, conceptual divisions, and linguistic inheritances. Again the ahistorical nature of this methodology obfuscates the ways that dominant (scientific) understandings of politics in our contemporary moment cannot be made sense of in the abstract; when they are, one fails to grasp the value-laden character of ostensibly objective methods (Wolin, 1969: 1064).

Third, Wolin charges that the over-emphasis upon refining techniques that is found in methodism results in a lack of interest in concrete political problems. Taking a page from George Sabine (1939: 3), he insists that traditional political theory has been continuously marked by a desire to respond to political crises, and as a consequence, thinkers such as St. Augustine and Hobbes would attempt to re-think the political world on a grand scale. These “epic political theorists” seek to make sense of broad inter-connections because they attend to foundational questions and concepts such as justice, sovereignty, and violence, precisely the issues that are thrown into question during periods of crisis. The act of consciously setting aside these topics, and the normative concerns that accompany them, leaves social scientists ill-prepared to respond to large-scale political dilemmas (Wolin, 1969: 1075). Closely connected to the issue of foundations, political theorists are also said to deal with problems on a “systematic” level, which transcends technical and administrative matters and focuses instead upon the political whole, or order, broadly understood. Political theory in an “epic” sense, because of its systematic focus and its attention to foundations, can therefore be understood as a more advanced or elevated approach to the study of politics (Wolin, 1969: 1080).

In his major study of the canon, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, this elevated conception of the political world manifests itself in his phrase “the political.” Traced back originally to Aristotle and his gesture in The Politics to distinguish the domain of politics from that of the household and the village, Wolin understands the concept as an effort to assert a degree of distinctness and autonomy to the practice of politics and to appropriate to it a controlling function vis-à-vis other domains such as morality, economics, aesthetics, and the law. In this role, “the political” is the guiding theme in his reading of the canon (Wolin, 2004: 5). He unequivocally argues that the notion of an autonomously existing sphere of politics is not something inscribed in reality but the product of acts of imagination and evocation of theorists. As actually existing reality, political life is bound to overlap and become interconnected with the above-mentioned arenas of life, but proponents of the notion for Wolin are not involved in simply representing reality descriptively. In this sense, calling forth a sphere known as “the political” is not a simple reflection of empirical facts but a space that is consciously delineated by particular theorists in order to re-create the world in a preferable manner (Wolin, 2004: 5–6).

Hobbes’ division between the state of nature and the commonwealth is an important illustration of this theoretical tactic for Wolin. In Leviathan, the political world is clearly marked off from the pre-political. In the latter, there is no sense of property, justice, or authority—these terms only acquire meaning with the contract and the institution of the sovereign. Prior to that point, they are absent, and as such politics more broadly cannot be said to exist. It is in other words created in the imagined assemblage that he calls forth. Hobbes’ frequent use of the term “artificial” in the introduction to the text conveys in a deep sense the constructedness of political society and the autonomy of politics for Hobbes (Wolin, 2004: 259). The advantage of this move from Wolin’s perspective is that it allows a major re-fashioning of the political world by virtue of treating it as something coherent and distinct. This view captures for him both an idea of the political as autonomous and epic in the sense described above, meaning concerned with lofty questions of order and the potential for re-making the world in a desirable manner.

Wolin identifies, and laments, a departure from this style of thinking about “the political” in early liberalism and in John Locke in The Second Treatise in particular. By refusing to treat the state of nature and civil society as distinct in a strict sense, Locke is seen to blur the boundaries between the political and the pre- or non-political. Locke’s argument about the presence of property and some semblance of human cooperation in the state of nature is an important example of this tendency for Wolin (2004): “The effect of treating as political what Hobbes had considered to be not only pre-political but anti-political was to obscure the identity and depreciate the status of the political” (p. 274). This eclipse of the uniqueness of the political domain in Locke and later thinkers who would come to be thought of as liberals is a consequence, in Wolin’s (2004) eyes, of a refusal to treat politics as distinct and to allow it to become intermeshed with social and economic concerns (p. 277).

Thus, Wolin goes on to speak of the “sublimation” of the political that is effected by late nineteenth-century social theorists including Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx. By treating “society” as determinative in a final sense, concretely political practices and concepts such as “citizenship, obligation, [and] general authority” become overshadowed (Wolin, 2004: 374). Wolin (2004: 385–386) also highlights in social theory a trend toward abandoning thinking about politics on the level of the whole and instead to focus on a more individualized and local level. The effect, according to Wolin, is to de-politicize thought and to forsake efforts toward substantive political transformation. He argues that a more full-bodied appreciation of the political would mean to reverse this shift by transcending the local and the particular and re-capturing the importance of broad and universal aims when it comes to the exercise of politics:

The urgency of these tasks is obvious, for human existence is not going to be decided at the lesser level of small association: it is the political order that is making fateful decisions about man’s survival in an age haunted by the possibility of unlimited destruction. (Wolin, 2004: 389)

In his contemporary moment, Wolin identifies a further instance of the denial of “the political” in John Rawls’ thought. Inasmuch as in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, Rawls distances his project from issues of power and political conflict and focuses instead on matters of doctrinal conflict between different religions and ethical codes. Rawls’ thought ends up escaping from “the political.” By presenting his philosophy as operating above the fray of the messiness that characterizes uniquely political conflicts, he proves incapable of critiquing manifestations of coercion and domination (Wolin, 2004: 541).

The views of political philosophy found in these two authors affect examinations of comparative theory inasmuch as non-Western authors and texts are evaluated with respect to the plot-lines that they offer. Positing a guiding theme in narrating the tradition of political thought as both of these thinkers do is not necessarily misleading or problematic, but it does set boundaries to theoretical discourse. The major figures of Western political philosophy are assigned fixed positions in their accounts and are interpreted in view of these positions; non-Western thinkers, although they are largely absent from these two narratives, would in the conceptions of Wolin and Strauss also be made to fit into their narratives. By this is meant that the alternative concepts and frameworks which often animate these works, as well as the distinct interpretations of concepts and frameworks that are more familiar to Western political philosophy, are assimilated within the broader storylines of Strauss and Wolin in a manner which erodes the unique contributions that these writings offer. In privileging the common good or the political when reflecting on the evolution of the canon, the degree to which sources from outside the tradition can enrich theory discussion is to an extent predetermined. As an illustration of the potential difficulties involved in approaching non-Western works through the lenses privileged by the three above-mentioned theorists, I propose here a brief reading of an aspect of the thought of the thirteenth-/fourteenth-century Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328).

Ibn Taymiyyah: toward a different view of the good and the political

If reflections on the caliphate can be seen to inaugurate political thinking in Islam (Rosenthal, 1968: 3), then the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 at the hands of the Mongols can justifiably be considered an important turning point in the genealogy of this line of thought. Like many of his contemporaries, Ibn Taymiyyah was deeply affected by this event and the subsequent instability (both real and imagined) which it engendered. What largely sets his reaction to the fall of the Abbasids apart from others in his milieu is both the particularly conservative form of rule that he defends as a consequence of it and the unique theoretical paradigm that he fashions in response.

His conservatism can be seen in Ibn Taymiyyah’s relation to the rulers of his time, the Mamluks, the successors to the Abbasids in the central regions of the Near East. As something of a religious advisor to Mamluk authorities, and despite the fact that he frequently ran afoul of them (Little, 1973), Ibn Taymiyyah sanctions the often heavy-handed tactics that they used in maintaining power. In the wake of the fall of the Abbasids and in light of what Ibn Taymiyyah perceives as a threat to the maintenance of religious life under the Mamluks, he elevates order (understood as unquestioned political power) as a chief value and stands in favor of the tactics used to achieve it, going so far as to defend the employment of torture under particular conditions (Johansen, 2002).

His theoretical innovation can be understood as an elaboration of this commitment to a strong sense of order. As a Ḥanbalī jurist and theologian, Ibn Taymiyyah espouses certain traditionalist views that can be found in his legal school, such as the un-createdness of the Qur’an and an emphasis on the primacy of textual sources (ḥadīth of the Prophet, the Qur’an) as the basis of jurisprudence. At the same time, and consistent with common practice across the four Sunni schools of law, ⁴ Ibn Taymiyyah practices some degree of independent judgment in his legal work which is not easily commensurable with Ḥanbalī doctrine. ⁵ With regard to his relation to and thinking concerning politics, this independence of mind translates into a departure from the apolitical stances of the eponym of his legal school, Aḥmad Ibn Ḥanbal, who equates politics with injustice and thus advocates simple disengagement from it (Cook, 2000: 157). Ibn Taymiyyah, by contrast, looks upon the proper (read coercive) use of political power as necessary in order to allow for the realization of more lofty religious objectives. How does this position manifest itself theoretically?

His Kitāb al-Sīyāsah al-Shar’īyyah (Ibn Taymiyyah, 1983) stands out, in comparison with some of his other works, for its sustained engagement with political questions and for the genre of advice-giving or counsel that he adopts in the treatise (Hassan, 2010: 346). Relatedly, it is also a work in which he marginalizes discussion of the caliphate and focuses upon the implementation of sharī’ah. The paradigm of al-sīyāsah al-shar’īyyah (religiously sanctioned governance) is one in which the institutional form of political power in an Islamic society is secondary to the religious tasks which that power undertakes. In contrast to someone like the tenth-/eleventh-century Shāfi’ī jurist Abū al-Ḥasan al-Māwardī who holds that caliphal authority is mandatory ⁶ and sets out clear guidelines concerning the religious values and levels of competency that are needed for political rule (Al-Māwardī, 2000), Ibn Taymiyyah argues only that rulers remain committed to the realization of maqāṣid al- sharī’ah (the objectives of the law) and that they create a form of order that is suitable to reach these ends (Johansen, 2008: 275–276).

In minimizing the importance of the institutional form of Islamic governance, Ibn Taymiyyah simultaneously lowers the threshold of that which can be considered legitimate rule. He views the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate as an event which signals the eclipse of one, extraordinary, source of legitimacy, and in the wake of this transformation does not endorse a return to the caliphate as an ideal. His argument here is noteworthy because he does not establish equivalence between the nobility of Divine law, on the one hand, and the nobility of political rule, on the other. The latter is explicitly acknowledged to lack the charisma and rectitude that early leaders, from the Prophet to the Abbasids, are considered in orthodox Sunni Islam to have held. This does not imply an endorsement of arbitrary rule by Ibn Taymiyyah, but it does mean a less than stringent standard for those qualified to govern. It also means that religious law maintains an elevated position even and despite being realized practically by faulty political forces. Put differently, while forsaking the ideal of the caliphate, he remains committed to allowing religious ideals to flourish, albeit within the framework of a political system that relies quite explicitly on brute force.

It is for this reason that he opens the text (Ibn Taymiyyah, 1983: 14) with a discussion of the “most fit” (al-aṣlaḥ) among imperfect candidates for offices charged with governing the affairs of the faithful. The assumption is that the qualities necessary for upstanding rulership are rare or rarely found absent certain vices that are said to tarnish governance. Hence, when discussing his definition of just rule and how it demands both “reliability” (al-imānah) and “strength” (al-quwwah), Ibn Taymiyyah (1983: 16–17) quickly notes the improbability that these characteristics will appear in a single deputy and argues for discovering that which is most suitable to the public function under consideration. The important takeaway is that he stresses the fact that the offices to be filled are “religious offices” (manāṣib dīnīyyah) and that the flaws of individual rulers matter less than the instantiation of religious norms which they are charged with.

Both in Kitāb al-Sīyāsah al-Shar’īyyah and in other works, Ibn Taymiyyah acknowledges that even when bracketing the vices of rulers, the realization of religious norms in the temporal world is a fraught process because political circumstances militate against a straightforward application of these norms. His skepticism with regard to religious ideals emerges clearly in his discussion of the Islamic doctrine of “enjoining the good and forbidding evil” (al-amr bi’l ma’rūf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar). Described simplistically, the doctrine is a broad moral code that distinguishes between right and wrong and prescribes action accordingly. Ibn Taymiyyah (1976: 9, 1980) understands it as a collective duty (farḍ kifāyah) of the community, and the capstone of Islam, the principle through which the Divine made the faith consummate for believers.

What makes Ibn Taymiyyah’s discussion of this doctrine unique is that he is dismissive of the potential of unambiguously realizing “the good.” More often than not, an ideal is not present, meaning an action by a ruler or deputy will entail both good and evil, wherein it is incumbent to choose the path in which benefit will outweigh harm (Ibn Taymiyyah, 1976: 21). By virtue of his belief that political experience is such that injustice is inescapable and because there exist no strict principles in the Divine law for the particular aspects of rule, he looks upon political morality in the form of “enjoining the good” not in absolutist terms but in terms of doing what is possible (Cook, 2000: 156). In the same vein, he holds (Ibn Taymiyyah, 1980: 115–116) that when the consensus of the community (ijmā’) comes to agree upon what has been prohibited, or to annul what is obligatory, then their decision is characteristic of enjoining the good and prohibiting evil because consensus takes priority over established custom.

Ibn Taymiyyah’s practicality with regard to the doctrine of “enjoining the good” appears most explicitly when he rejects resistance against unjust rulers on the grounds that doing so would be in keeping with what is good. He sees in such an interpretation the roots of disorder and infighting and so advises patience vis-à-vis coercive rulers. In contrast to “the whimsical ones” (ahl al-ahwā’), a category which for him encompasses Mutazilites, Shi’ites and others who may look upon resistance to unjust rule as desirable if not obligatory, Ibn Taymiyyah (1980: 120–121) counters that such an action cannot guarantee the continuation of religious customs. Instead what is to be preferred is a more moderate reading of the principle that does not lead to outright conflict. Political order is therefore elevated above a strict reading of “enjoining the good.” By casting politics as an arena of injustice and coercion, framing political actors as imperfect and prone to vice, and isolating Islamic law as something untainted by comparison, Ibn Taymiyyah is able to conceptualize political life in a manner that is largely devoid of utopian strivings.

Understanding Ibn Taymiyyah as such is not meant to suggest that he is wholly unique among pre-modern Muslim thinkers in his attention toward coercive power and his skepticism toward idealism. Similar emphases can be found in figures as diverse as Ibn al-Muqaffa’, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Jama’a. Yet, in his theorization of al-amr bi’l ma’rūf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar and al-sīyāsah al-shar’īyyah, a novel interpretation of these terms (elaborated to some extent by his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīyyah) can be gleaned, as can a peculiar attempt to bring together a focus on the hard core of political life with an effort to think beyond it. Understood differently, by viewing the moral ideals of Islam as ensconced within a system of governance but not reducible to its coercive functions, Ibn Taymiyyah posits a parallel sphere outside of politics that may serve to inspire change regarding some of its darker aspects.

How does this sketch of one dimension of Ibn Taymiyyah’s political thought relate to the aforementioned Western theorists? Is it the case that their narratives of political theory do not adequately capture the contours of Ibn Taymiyyah’s work? The commentaries of Charles Butterworth and Ovamir Anjum, who, respectively, draw on Strauss and Wolin in their readings of medieval Islamic thought, and Ibn Taymiyyah in particular, are useful to look at it in responding to these questions and elaborating in specific terms what I have described as the limits that may be imposed on non-Western thought when straightforwardly adopting their themes and frameworks.

In an article that is primarily dedicated to interpreting the works of three other prominent medieval Muslim thinkers (al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīna, and Ibn Rushd), Butterworth begins by addressing a key debate of Strauss in his understanding of Western thought. The notion of the good, or human happiness, which can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, has been “rejected,” he claims, by Renaissance/early modern thinkers such as Machiavelli and Bacon and more recently by twentieth-century thinkers including Max Weber and Martin Heidegger. “Yet precisely because a rejection of a philosophical position is not equivalent to its refutation,” he writes, “it behooves us to think again about its merits” (Butterworth, 1983: 225). This process of re-thinking involves tracing the genealogy of Greek thought through its commentators in the tradition of medieval Islamic philosophy, presumably so as to problematize the modernist “rejection” of the good and re-value the contributions made by the ancients.

In and of itself, this is hardly an objectionable effort. Butterworth provides a nuanced reading of the three authors in this piece and insightfully brings out connections with their Greek predecessors. Problematic is the fact that this (Western) debate between the ancients and the moderns is invoked to construct a different but analogous classification within Islamic thought, which on inspection proves untenable.

This position is apparent in a separate article where Butterworth divides medieval Muslim thinkers into two groups according to their supposed preoccupations with either prudence or legitimacy. The prudence-oriented group, also identified as those who are philosophically inclined, is said to take Plato and Aristotle as their points of departure in comprehending politics. This means that politics is defined for them as practical wisdom guided toward the unity of knowledge and reflections on the best regime, concerns that are mediated through a grasp of the textual resources in Islam, and the role of prophecy. Al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīna, and Ibn Rushd are named as exemplars of this prudence-oriented tradition of thought (Butterworth, 1982: 85–86).

The “legitimacy” theorists are by contrast taken by Butterworth to be jurists above all else, intent on the implementation of Islamic law. This focus translates into an emphasis on sharī’ah and the examples of the early Islamic community in understanding the proper meaning of what is legal or legitimate to the exclusion of the practical, lived experience of the law since the time of the Prophet. It also indicates general inattention toward deeper philosophical concerns and the non-Islamic traditions that have made sense of them. Al-Ghazālī, al-Juwaynī, and Ibn Taymiyyah are taken to be representatives of this group (Butterworth, 1982: 84–85).

To focus solely on Ibn Taymiyyah, what Butterworth’s classification suffers from is a narrow understanding both of how the good life is to be construed and of what counts as properly philosophical concerns. Ibn Taymiyyah does not provide a privileged position to, and one could say that he even neglects, discussion of practical wisdom and the best regime as paths leading to the good. In fact, as is clear from the exegesis above, politics is for him principally about establishing order and doing so through morally disagreeable means. This, however, does not mean that a conception of the good is absent from Ibn Taymiyyah’s political thought; rather, that in contrast to how it is made sense of in Aristotle and Plato (or at least Strauss’ rendering of them), it is coupled with what may be taken to be the more unseemly aspects of political life. For Ibn Taymiyyah, this does not mean the rejection of Islamic morality but the more secure enabling of its realization.

Furthermore, while Ibn Taymiyyah’s specialization in Islamic jurisprudence is without question, the divide that Butterworth (1982) draws works to obscure the ways in which his work transcends a “strictly legalistic” (p. 84) focus, touching on theological–moral, and also what can be described as political theoretical issues. As mentioned above, part of what makes Ibn Taymiyyah’s Kitāb al- Sīyāsah al-Shar’īyyah stand out in his broader oeuvre are the notes of counsel which it contains, making it a type of advice-giving text. As such, he hardly lays out legal maxims in an abstract manner independent from context, but instead recognizes the importance of contingency and circumstance in understanding the interplay between law and politics. This is nowhere clearer than in his flexible conception of al-amr bi’l ma’rūf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar. Elsewhere, Ibn Taymiyyah (1993) engages extensively with Greek logic and also, contrary to conventional views, is known to have been a proponent of a form Sufism. ⁷ In all of these methodological guises, a variant of the good comes out of Ibn Taymiyyah’s thought. This shows that not only does his legal training not make him anathema to reflecting on this topic but also that he proposes approaching it from a variety of angles, some of them not philosophical in the sense which Butterworth forwards.

The essential takeaway to call attention to is not to see this emphasis in Ibn Taymiyyah as something of an improvement in the thinking of Aristotle and Plato, it is merely to indicate that the contours of his thinking on this question are not adequately understood when we adopt, as Butterworth does, Strauss’ narrative of decline from antiquity. This is also not to charge Butterworth with identifying Ibn Taymiyyah and the other “jurists” in medieval Islam as forerunners of the social scientific and historicist trends which Strauss identifies as the chief forces behind attenuated attention toward the good. It is, though, meant to complicate his implicit suggestion that the value of Islamic thought in the medieval period can be measured by the extent to which it can be seen to extend the teachings of the ancients and enhance our understanding of whether or not their “rejection” in the modern West beginning with Machiavelli is a convincing theoretical gambit.

Ovamir Anjum (2012) offers a more sustained treatment of Ibn Taymiyyah in his recent book. In it, he presents a careful and creative reading of Ibn Taymiyyah’s political thought, as well as a sophisticated treatment of pre-modern Islamic thought broadly. For the sake of the argument made here, I will focus on his use of Wolin’s notion of the political and the problems that it poses for his interpretation of Ibn Taymiyyah.

Anjum explicitly invokes Wolin’s understanding of the political toward the beginning of his study, writing that it enables us to move beyond an accepted (Strauss-inspired) dichotomy between Greek and Semitic thought that takes the latter as more theological than political, as well as to bring to the fore certain terms affiliated with politics that cut across Islamic and Western theory generally. Characteristics of the term according to him are a conception of political community, a normative vision of life oriented by reason, and an idea of human agency. This understanding of the political for Anjum does not preclude the possibility that these traits be made sense of through a theological language. For Islamic thought, he insists, theology and jurisprudence are the logical starting points for an understanding of the political, and coming to terms with their importance within classical and medieval Islamic thinking allows us to sharpen our view of what is seen as political in this context (Anjum, 2012: 16–18).

Additionally, echoing once again Wolin, Anjum (2012) argues that what distinguishes the political for him is that it is “not to be confused with self-interested and even hypocritical action” but rather “restored to its pride of place as relating to the highest activity of envisioning and enabling the collective pursuit of the good of the community” (p. 9). With his notion of the political, he aims first to transcend an undue focus on the caliphate found in many existing studies of Islamic thought, instead widening the focus of what is political to include epistemology, theology, and law. Second, he attempts to offer a lofty conception of the political, something that is in keeping with Wolin’s epic sense of the term. While self-interest is an inevitable part of political life, Anjum (2012: 16–17) remarks, his view of the political as oriented toward systematic reflection on politics uncovers a civilizational characteristic distinct to Islam and articulated best by Ibn Taymiyyah.

Specifically, this means for Anjum that Ibn Taymiyyah proposes a justice-centered view of the political that can be found across his various writings and which is understood along the lines of the protection of rights and the promotion of normative values found in sharī’ah. So, morally robust is this justice-centered conception, according to Anjum, that it prevents Ibn Taymiyyah from forsaking rights for the sake of state efficiency, as well as from falling into a form of political pragmatism which would force a compromise of moral principles. ⁸ He makes the same point (Anjum, 2012: 238–239) differently by contrasting Ibn Taymiyyah with al-Ghazālī where the latter is said to look upon politics as a domain of “necessary evil,” and the former sees it as something praiseworthy from a religious standpoint inasmuch it can bring one closer to the Divine. Therefore, whereas he departs from Wolin’s understanding of the autonomy of the political, instead emphasizing the ways in which theological and ethical elements animate the practice of governance in Ibn Taymiyyah, he does end up adopting (and adapting) a version of Wolin’s epic ideal of the political. For Anjum, this means that Ibn Taymiyyah steers clear of the messiness of partisanship and power plays by maintaining a commitment to a morally and religiously laudable understanding of the practice of politics.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the ways in which Ibn Taymiyyah distances himself from a strict adherence to what is morally just in the sphere of politics. Indeed precisely because he envisions political life as governed by morally questionable forces that Ibn Taymiyyah calls for alternative, or at the very least modified, norms of conduct in this domain. His rigid view of political order is an example of this point of view where he understands the exigencies of his post-Abbasid moment to require forms of governance that are anything but laudable from a theological–moral perspective.

I would submit that this blindspot in Anjum’s reading of Ibn Taymiyyah can be traced back to his appropriation of Wolin’s notion of the political. The model of an elevated conception of what politics consists of conceals from view the important ways in which its tasks are anything but noble or epic for Ibn Taymiyyah, but rather mundane and reprehensible, and as such “necessary.” If there is an ideal, or an idealist dimension, to Ibn Taymiyyah’s thought, it can be located in Islamic law; but again sharī’ah exists in an uneasy and complicated relationship with politics for him. To foreground this ideal notion of the political spells a misapprehension of how Ibn Taymiyyah theorizes politics. Thus, while Anjum’s effort to redeem Islamic thought by refusing to reduce it to interest-based competition, or to force it into a subordinate position vis-à-vis Islamic law and theology, is an admirable one, his uncritical borrowing from Wolin in the context of this undertaking leads to complications in his reading. What is being suggested is not that Ibn Taymiyyah somehow disrupts Wolin’s view of the development of political thought in a manner that ought to be noted nor is it even to offer an evaluation of Ibn Taymiyyah’s claims. Instead, what is highlighted is more simply the hermeneutic missteps that are made in Anjum’s use of this theme and how these missteps come about.

Conclusion

This article has been an attempt at calling attention to some of the issues involved in how narratives of Western political theory inform the current practice of comparison within the subfield. What I have attempted to highlight in this effort are the indirect ways in which understandings of the development of the history of political thought continue to give shape to, and importantly constrain, how theory is practiced as it begins to widen its geographical borders. Important questions which follow are why focus on Strauss and Wolin, and to what extent can they be seen to be setting the standard for how it is that comparative political theory is practiced today? Partly for the sake of space, I have chosen to focus on these two narrators of the canon, but such a choice is hardly arbitrary. Among others such as George Sabine, Hannah Arendt, or Eric Voegelin, these two authors have demonstrated significant influence over how the history of political thought continues to be understood and because of this, if for no other reason, they are deserving of attention.

To focus on Wolin and Strauss is, however, not to suggest that their representations set a standard for political theory and how the subfield approaches non-Western authors or that the themes which dominate their work in some sense exhaust the range of theoretical foci which structure comparative political theory (how a term such as “the political” is understood could also just as easily look instead to the iterations found in Arendt or Carl Schmitt). The task in the essay is, on the one hand, to trace influence that is more subtly transmitted, where these canon-builders contribute to but do not absolutely determine dominant focal points in political theory. On the other, it is to take these themes as models (arguably important ones) that structure how theoretical inquiry across cultural boundaries can proceed, what the enabling features of making them central are, and what problems they pose when taking on such a constitutive role.

It may be the case that Western thought also does not neatly align with the emphases which Wolin and Strauss stress, similar to the way that I have suggested that Ibn Taymiyyah’s thought does not. The difference focused upon here is that, first, comparative political theory as a nascent field still has not sedimented itself in a way that Western thought has, leaving open for it the chance not to congeal around a specific set of themes. Second, in Western thought, these themes while constructed and imposed are developed out of readings of individual Western authors—the added shortcoming in comparative theory is that because sustained engagement with non-Western sources is still emergent, it will be made to fit around pre-existing theoretical frameworks and as a consequence pre-determine, to some degree, what these sources contain. ⁹

To dwell on the political and the good as this article has done is not meant as an indication that these terms as such, or even their renderings in Strauss and Wolin, should be set aside. The argument also does not assume the rejection or “radical supplanting” (Jenco, 2011: 27) of Western theoretical concepts or frameworks. The good, the political, and an array of other concepts (humanism, sovereignty, the state of nature) which are to an important extent the products of Western theory and how it has been made sense of remain an integral part of the practice of political theory and of the understanding of politics in the West and beyond. What is called for in this piece is a more careful treatment of these terms ¹⁰ (others could certainly be included) in how it is that they are thought of when generalized and to caution against an assumption of unproblematic translation when they are situated in non-Western contexts.

Relatedly, the focus on the canon offered here can be understood as one particular illustration of the potential shortcomings involved in borrowing from Western theory when examining non-Western thought, one which could be complemented by others. This insight, for example, can be extended to other sources which define political theory in the West, such as leading schools of thought. While possessing a different history and set of theoretical contributions, post-structuralism, critical theory and liberalism all contain conceptual apparatuses and normative frameworks which can pose problems when applied cross-culturally. Again, just as with the Western canon, the argument made here is not to question whether or not these schools of thought ought to be employed, but to caution against an assumption of uncomplicated theoretical conversion when moving from one cultural setting to another.

Arguably more than any other scholar of political theory, John Gunnell (1987, 1993) has cast into doubt the idea of a canon as an independently existing entity with a history stretching back as far as the thinkers who are included under its rubric. He has demonstrated that the notion of such a tradition can be derived almost solely from the efforts of its recent narrators including Wolin, Strauss, and others. Furthermore, in coming up with their particular representations of this tradition, Gunnell points out that Wolin and Strauss were consciously responding to dominant political and academic trends (liberalism, behavioralism) in the post-World War II (WWII) era. Given an altered historical landscape, and given the novel issues that have been raised by encounters across theoretical traditions, it is worthwhile to question whether these themes hold the same purchase today and how they may be revised in light of these changes.