In answering questions about legitimacy, power, justice, order, inclusion, and peace, political theory has long drawn exclusively on Western thinkers, concepts, and experiences. How can the repertoire of political theory be expanded to include non-Western perspectives, thereby not only increasing its scope and relevance, but also showing that it is not only thinking done in the West that counts as knowledge? This question, which I first began developing as an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut, has been the abiding motivation of my research, writing, and teaching.
I consider my research on non-Western political thought to involve past, present, and future dimensions. The past-oriented dimension—inquiry into the history of political thought—has led to the central pillar of my work, namely the study of ancient Confucian political thought.
My first book, Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. Confucian political thought has usually been interpreted as a direct application of Confucian ethics; the book shows instead that ethics and politics in early Confucianism diverge in significant ways. Contrary to the conventional view that Confucian government aims at instilling virtue in all members of society, I argue that it aims, first and foremost, at promoting political order.
I am currently at work on my second book project, tentatively titled Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Inclusion in the Ancient Confucian Political Community. In support of this work, I have received a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship and a Henry Luce Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies Program in China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship. The book argues that a distinguishing and underappreciated hallmark of the early Confucian conception of the political community is its inclusiveness. I contend that the Confucian Classics represent women, servants, artisans, peasants, and foreigners as taking part in various central social and political activities that the texts elaborate and advocate. Furthermore, these groups do not appear as invariably holding inferior positions within those activities.
My choice to study the ancient period is part of a larger argument I have advanced—that it is only in the pre-modern period that Eastern traditions and thinkers operate more or less independently from Western influence. The modern period, on the other hand, evinces more convergence between East and West than is often acknowledged. My present-oriented research focuses on the normative implications of this convergence. More specifically, I have argued that the world being organized as it currently is, i.e., according to a sovereign state system, and non-Western countries taking part in this system (regardless of how they came to do so), normative ideals of human rights, constitutionalism, and democracy, broadly apply, in the East and the West alike.
One implication of this argument is that alternatives to Western norms require alternatives to the form of political organization making these norms necessary; in other words, these alternatives require us to think beyond the Westphalian state. I have been recently concerned with the question of how to do this, and specifically how histories of Eastern political formations—which have received less attention in political theory, and political science more generally, than histories of the West—can help us in doing so.
Loubna El Amine 