This was a reply to a conversation with a colleague:

"The essence of comparison is that two things must be in some respect similar, if only in respect of their being things. Otherwise comparison is impossible. If Chinese political thought were either utterly different, or completely identical, to its Western equivalent, presumably comparison would be impossible, on the one hand, and otiose, on the other. It is because there are both significant differences and relevant similarities that comparison between them is interesting and important.

Now it seems to me that you wish to emphasize the differences, presumably because you feel (rightly) that China has been viewed far too exclusively through the lens of Western concepts. I can only agree (and I found Black’s essay on ‘decolonization of concepts’ helpful here) that it is at best misleading and at worst downright false to e.g. see Chinese history in terms of Western periodisations such as medieval, feudal etc. If I wavered on this before, I don’t any longer. Far better, as a starting point, to make use of the native dynastic and imperial periodisations that history generated autonomously. At a more abstract level, I have no difficulty either with the idea that at least some Chinese events, experiences, terminological fields, and so on, don’t have any equivalent at all in Western experience and require considerable elucidation to be made intelligible, if indeed they can be – there is always a zone of untranslatability, as we remarked. There are indeed some things you just can’t fully get (humour is notorious) unless you know the language at least almost as well as a native speaker.

But – if taken to the extreme – an emphasis on pure difference becomes its own form of error, not least because it violates the logical conditions of comparison just noted. It is necessary to disarm the critic who wants to know then why one does not just spend all one’s time talking in Chinese about Chinese things, if all this is so hard for non-Chinese experts to understand. I certainly do not, myself, see any reason why Chinese scholars cannot attain a full mastery of Western history and ideas; I am quite sure, indeed, that many have. The interesting question is, how is this possible?

Any answer is complex and seems to me to have at least two elements. One is biological-anthropological, and says that from this point of view, the things that divide us as human beings are trivial compared to the things that unite us. There has been a major push back in anthropology in the last decade or two against the received C20 wisdom that everything is culture (I found Brown’s Human Universals very helpful in summing up these debates). The trend instead has been to emphasize that we are all members of the same species, and as such we share a common set of experiences – sleeping, eating, excreting, reproducing, ageing, illness, and finally death – to which we cannot avoid responding in various ways. Then there are the natural facts of differing gender, strength, intelligence, height, and so on, which ensures that ‘power’, in a naturalistic sense that includes but is not limited to an ability to exert pure force, is unequally distributed.

This means that in each community of any size there inevitably arises what one might call the problem of order. If e.g. members of a community are allowed to excrete where they will and reproduce with whom they please, deleterious consequences follow. Given the different material resources available to divergent communities, and given also the radical contingency of our imaginations in which one thought does not follow necessarily from another, different solutions are arrived at. But they are recognizable, at least, as different solutions to the same problem. So far we have not got anything that I would be inclined to call ‘politics’, but we have, in the form of a response to the problem of order, the rudiments of ‘government’ in even very simple communities. One does not, at the limits, even need language for ‘government’ of this kind – the human problem is in this respect very analogous to one that animals at large face. I would, then, be inclined to follow Aristotle on this point, and to make language a condition of politics.

And here is where the other, philosophical, element of an answer to the question of how someone embedded in one form of culture can master another begins to appear; language is both the source of much (though not all) of one’s situatedness and the key to an escape from it. But let me not get ahead of myself. What language permits, amongst much else, is a greater ability to deliberate over alternative outcomes and possible courses of action. Of course, this only makes sense as an enterprise in light of the biological-anthropological condition that we find ourselves in, which includes, I should now say, a temporal aspect. This is implicit in ageing and death. We are in the present, but we cannot avoid being confronted with the future. And what is relevant for a discussion of politics is that this confrontation with the future must be faced not merely by individuals, but as communities. This I take to be a kind of structural, phenomenological truth, and so one way of thinking of about ‘politics’ is that it is what occurs when the future of the community is being self-consciously debated by some or all of its members, whether formally or informally.

Now at some point in the experience of all communities the question arises of precisely who is to be allowed to participate in these debates and to take decisions. Indeed, this is something of a permanent problem; it may be settled for a certain period (sometimes for centuries, indeed), but the point about it is that it is always liable to re-emerge; there is no way to put it entirely beyond question in principle. One may get on for a very long time with only ‘government’, and ‘politics’ may be restricted to a very small circle; but as the only condition of ‘political’ speech is in the end the intention to deliberate and decide upon the shared direction of the community, it can only be suppressed, not eliminated. Similarly, there will always be a fact of matter about who in a community is in a position under normal conditions to reliably get their own way, whether the means involve money, violence, status, or some combination of such factors. That is – again based on naturalistic foundations – there is always a problem of ‘power’ that goes along with the need for ‘government’.

I must pause here for a second to address the Burma issue. Once we have language, one of its uses will inevitably be to provide some kind of account that legitimates power. At least, I know of no society in which this has not been the case. The details of such accounts may vary widely, but they will always be present. In fact, from what you say of the Burmese case, it strikes me as broadly analogous to the Chinese ‘mandate of heaven’, the Western notion of the ‘divine right of kings’, and the Islamic belief that the existence of a caliph or sultan who implements shari’a law surpasses all other considerations. All of these different cultures developed what we can call a ‘cosmological’ perspective which was widely shared throughout the culture in question and exploited by those who, as a matter of fact, had power, in order to maintain it. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is not in question here; but I take the phenomenon itself to be undeniable, and, yes, universal.

The details of such narratives may differ, and may lose their persuasiveness over time, requiring them to be supplemented or replaced by other accounts, particularly where they are dependent on a more general background of cosmological beliefs that ceases to be credible for other reasons; but some such account there must be, and where the reasons why the group that in fact holds power cease to be credible, retaining power becomes far harder and must in the end rely on brute force. So that, in this sense, the Burma regime is ‘popular’ is something I can easily accept – that does not change my claim that in Burma power – which can by its very nature never in any community be ‘absolute’ in any case – is in the hands of a few. Divine right monarchy was similarly ‘popular’ in C17 France; it did not prevent LXIV from remarking, quite truly, that ‘I am the state’, because it was a feature of the ‘popular’ belief in divine right that authoritative decisions could only come from him.

I hope that it is now becoming clearer in what sense I wish to defend the idea that there are some universal, ‘logical’, truths about the nature of politics. It is neither an essentialist nor ahistorical position that I take myself be occupying. Instead, it is anthropological, and, very much for want of a better word because I don’t like all of its associations, “phenomenological”; it aims to take fully into account the dynamic quality of reality and the contingent quality of all historical change. So when I say that power must always be distributed between one, few, or many members of a community, of course this is in a sense an analytic or necessary truth – but it is only so in the context of the phenomena that I have briefly tried to set out above. I should perhaps also say that this account of politics is only part of a much larger project which aims to give some kind of systematic account of the regions of thought and experience. Let me try and briefly elucidate this.

‘Politics’ I take to belong to the realm of ‘value’. The category of ‘value’ itself I think I can derive anthropologically, partly from the experience of pleasure and pain, and partly from a broader evolutionary imperative. We are naturally averse in the majority of cases to what might lead to our own destruction. ‘Value’ in this sense is not a moral category; that something is pleasurable or painful is not, as such, an argument for or against it (I am not a utilitarian, which is not to say I don’t think consequences matter). But value has the possibility to become a moral category; and the dialectic of the concept of value is such that it can be made to yield the triad of the good, the beautiful, and the true. This dialectic seems to me to work as follows. Value splits first into the practical-aesthetic moment. This logical shift takes place at a time we could call prehistoric. All early peoples we know of responded to the practical problem of order by producing a narrative of legitimation of some sort; but they also exploited the superfluity of form over function which is a similarly naturalistic fact to produce cave paintings, jade carvings, etc.

Now inherent in the practical-aesthetic is also a certain claim to truth. One’s myth is not only right, it is also how things are – it is not merely a story; and similarly, one’s notion of beauty is not simply ‘aesthetic’ but reflects what we are calling ‘cosmology’, which is again a conception of how things are. Truth, however, has a dialectic of its own, and it too becomes internally divided, being made to yield two further dyads, the historical-scientific and the formal-philosophical. The occasion of the emergence of the historical is the scrutiny of the practical narrative of legitimation, and of the scientific to the scrutiny of the cosmology as conceived independently of ourselves. But there is a reflexivity in this process which in turn leads to the examination of its own conditions – their formal statement, as in logic, and their exploration in a process of critical questioning, philosophy. In putting forward this dialectical solution I am aiming to avoid so-called ‘metaphysics’. Where e.g. Hegel (who admittedly provides a lot of inspiration for this way of thinking) went so badly wrong was in thinking that this was a necessary process. It may occur, or not, for reasons that are contingent. I say only that *when* it does occur, and *if* it is worked out to its conclusion, thought will take this form of a triad of dyads. It may always be frustrated in its development. This is much more modest than anything Hegel had in mind.

My own anthropological-phenomenological emphasis is thus intended to ensure a certain conceptual minimalism; I altogether avoid, for example, a speculative philosophy of history of the Hegelian or Marxist sort in which everything has been leading up to the triumph of the West, the final overthrow of the bourgeoisie, or any other such scheme. And while I do insist that forms of thought have a certain logic to them which is operative wherever they arise, that logic is only in terms of their presuppositions; it does not dictate their content. It is thus quite consistent for me to be able to hold that Chinese political thought contains some (plenty?) of unique concepts and that it is located within the practical realm of value, because that is where *all* political thought, Western, Chinese, Islamic, Martian, etc., *must* be located. But of course to say this tells you nothing about the content of Chinese (or any other kind of) political thought, whether it is good or bad, similar or different to other discourses of the same type, dull or interesting, successful or unsuccessful etc. etc.

And that is also why I described the perspective I am outlining as amoral. (My) philosophy recognizes the reality of value as something in the world, if only because people and their values are as much ‘world’ as anything else is (I will have nothing to do with the dichotomy of subject and object insofar as it becomes absolutized; I am not a dualist any more than I am a utilitarian) without engaging in evaluation, but only elucidation. Nor in saying this am I denying the possibility of bringing philosophically-informed reason to bear on practical questions of value, only that when one does this, one has begun to do something else other than philosophy. As for the status I want to claim for this triad of dyads, I want to say only two things.

One is that it is my own – while I have my inspirations, I know of no-one else, for better or worse, who has developed a dialectic that is exactly like this one – and the other is that it is sometimes helpful when one wants to understand what kind of intellectual position one is occupying; and I readily confess that to very many questions, including the ones that interest you, it may be utterly irrelevant and unimportant. Certainly, nothing follows from it that I can see with respect to e.g. how one ought to live, what one ought to think or study, and so on and so forth. It is happily indifferent in this regard, and quite designedly so. It also ultimately has very little to do with ‘politics’, an activity which, regardless of whatever culture it arises within, is ultimately only one local feature of a far more major region on what is in turn a much bigger overall map, so far as I am concerned.

I hope these remarks are clarificatory. At least, the argument that the forms, though not the contents, of various types of thinking are significantly independent of particular cultures - while remaining historic in their changing categorial foundations - is intended to show how we (you and I, specifically) can both have our cake and eat it, because the level of abstraction at which I am claiming this argument is true is quite different to the level at which at least the great majority of so-called ‘political thought’ of any kind takes place; at this practical and evaluative level there is indeed significant and irreconcilable diversity. As a codicil to that, I do *not* see it as the task of ‘political philosophy’ to resolve these practical contradictions, so that we all become Rawlsians, or whatever. Philosophy might have something to say about the logic of political concepts, but it is incapable of decisions of this kind. Reason cannot act, as Hume put it. In very different, Hegelian, terms, I would call the practical realm of value the ‘negative moment’ in which difference reigns supreme. It is a corollary of my view that arguments for the good must be made from within that realm itself, even if informed by the conclusions of thinking elsewhere. But mere difference and simple identity both generate their own contradictions; and with this we reach the point from which I began, that there must be sameness as well as difference for comparison to be possible at all.

As a footnote, I find considerable irony in the ‘subaltern’ desire to defend the mythical Indian account of the past as ‘history’ in the same way that either Greek, Chinese, or Islamic cultures came to know it. Their claim is that it is somehow an instance of intellectual colonialism or a failure of recognition to refuse to admit it to an equal status. And yet it was these Indian myths which were the foundation of a rigid and hierarchical caste system which condemned the lower orders of society to a condition of permanent inequality, and continues to do so. Quite apart from the failure to recognize a real qualitative difference between the critical and the mythical in thought, this strikes me as a piece of intellectual perversity with which I can have no sympathy"