The canon and comparative political thought

Abstract

While explicitly exclusionary approaches toward the intellectual resources of non-Western regions of the world have been long studied and criticized, less attention has been shown toward the ways in which guiding themes and dominant points of reference culled from canonical authors continue to structure and limit thinking across cultural boundaries in less conspicuous ways. Accordingly, this article examines the importance of how the history of political theory, or the political theory canon, influences the emerging treatment of non-Western works in the field of comparative political thought. Focusing on two prominent narrators of the theory canon (Leo Strauss and Sheldon Wolin), I suggest the manner in which an uncritical embrace of their renderings of the history of political thought can pose problems for treatments of non-Western theoretical works. By way of illustration, I analyze the writings of particular commentators on medieval Islamic political thought who draw on Wolin and Strauss, respectively, and demonstrate how their indebtedness to these canon narrators creates obstacles for their different readings of one medieval Muslim author in particular: Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah.