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On the Will to Be Disciplined

In her challenging and ambitious article, “Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory: The Curious Thesis of ‘Chinese Origins for Western Knowledge,’ 1860–1895,”1 Leigh Jenco “seek[s] to demonstrate not only that, but also how, political theorists might come to be disciplined by the standards of a differently sited conversation” (660), namely, by knowledge perceived as culturally and civilizationally other. In her essay, she mobilizes two primary distinctions—between historical and cultural otherness, and between knowledge that disciplines and knowledge that is assimilated—in order to make a striking claim, namely, that by “situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our past [we will] be able to reconstitute our field of knowledge and our methods of inquiry.” The key here is “situating foreign thought within the genetic narrative of our [own] past.” Like nineteenth-century Chinese reformers confronted with Western science who sought to attribute misty Chinese origins for it, Jenco thinks that the way to give non-Western thought its due—that is, its status as potentially disciplinary knowledge—is to ascribe to it origins in our own “Western” intellectual genealogy. There are three primary questions that present themselves. First, has political theory in fact deprived itself of potentially fruitful innovations and advances by refusing to take on thought from outside a Western horizon and accord it a “disciplinary” role, that is, as a potential source of innovation rather than something to be assimilated? Second, if this self-deprivation is due to a xenophobic unwillingness to treat external others the way we treat