I am quite sure you are right about the necessity for deep immersion in a tradition in order to truly master it, and one should always realize that even mastery is always incomplete; learning is never finished, and the greatest masters are the ones who remain humble. Whenever I have achieved something myself, it has only left me with more problems, and I am very aware that there is always more to know.

I am happier now with your remarks about ‘the political’. I like ‘efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’, because so far as I can see it essentially acknowledges my points that (i) to do comparative politics at all, one needs *some* conception of politics that is independent of the things that are being compared, and that (ii) to avoid treating the Western concept of politics as a norm, one had therefore better have a conception of politics which is not based exclusively on Western examples.

‘Efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’ is sufficiently broad to cover not just Chinese examples of politics but ones in other cultures, without being a merely analytic construct. There is nothing in ‘efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’ of the agora, the Westminster parliament, or a declaration of rights, and that is quite in keeping what I am trying to achieve by way of an abstract notion of politics than can account for the phenomena. It also has the virtue of recognizing the conditional nature of political activity – because, for example, if people do not think it is possible to transform their shared environment owing to a background cosmology which presents the human world to them as fixed, they cannot generate anything they would recognize as such (though, de facto, there may still be some unacknowledged politicking alongside the governing).

Thus, my own conception of ‘politics’, in this broad sense, doesn’t look much like what the average student would understand by it either – I don’t know what that might be, assemblies, elections etc I suppose. My point, then, was only that you must have *some* such notion of politics at work, however thin and abstract, that can cross cultures – I will concede it can be simply shared rather than universal, if you don’t like the connotations of universality. But if this particular notion doesn’t work for all Chinese political thought, some other one will have be found for the other cases; on the understanding that there may, at certain times and places, be no or at least very little politics. Indeed, it is my firm conviction that for most of the time the human species has been in existence there was no politics. Power, and government in the loosest sense, are coeval with the species, but ‘efficacious action taken to transform shared environments’, at least as a self-conscious matter, is not. Politics is something that can appear, disappear, and re-appear.

No doubt you are correct that, once politics does begin to exist, the study is an iterative process; one may find politics where one did not initially expect to, and one may decide later that something that one initially had thought was political is not really political after all. But all these judgments must result, in the end, in a modification of one’s broader conception of political activity that is deficient insofar as it cannot be made explicit.

I cannot, however, see any other support for this notion of ‘efficacious action’ than the biological, anthropological, and phenomenological position I have been defending all along. And to this position, which tries to address human experience at large, I regard post-modernist and feminist critiques as irrelevant - though if you review what I have written, I don’t think you could really sustain the claim that I was unaware of them.

So I ask again, who am I dismissing, or oppressing? Or what does my view rule out? And what are the categories within which I am unknowingly gripped? Moreover, am I seriously supposed to entertain the idea that evolution is an irredeemably Western notion? That anthropology is the preserve of Europeans? Or that phenomenology cannot be practiced by anyone not from the Northern hemisphere? Surely this is not what you mean; but until you can show me exactly how I am continuing an undeniably real tradition of colonial and chauvinistic oppression in making such statements, I will continue to discount them, for reasons that are as follows.

Granted, all knowledge is embedded in some way or other – that is my starting point – but it is embedded in importantly different ways. The categories that structure it are neither undiscoverable nor changeless. And all the structures of thought with which I am concerned are, it seems to me, no-one’s possession; that a certain mode of thought arises first in one culture rather than another does not give that culture any permanent ownership of it. Nor does the fact something has been invented in one culture mean that it cannot be independently re-invented in another, as indeed I believe movable type was invented first in China and later in Europe.

In saying all this I would like to underline that it is intended as an attempt to accommodate the possibility of comparative political thought without dictating how it ought to be done. I have no ‘method’ in that sense; and I regard this is a philosophical, not a methodological, conversation.