In Favor of Specificity

In Favor of Specificity 

by Eniola Anuoluwapo Soyemi

A famous academic, widely reputed as broad-minded, once gave a public interview on what he perceived as the crisis of democracy overrunning the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and much of Europe. What struck me was that neither interviewer nor interviewee stated the electoral, representative nature of the democracy they were speaking of. Neither did they make explicit the particular democratic traditions to which they believed the current predicament traced. 

The unelaborated assumptions passed on to the reader were that this democracy in crisis was democracy's only kind and that the Ancient Greek and Roman traditions that birthed it were the only known histories and geographies of meaningful democratic practice. 

The conversation was grounded in unspoken premises that served only to bury the reader’s curiosity that there might be other authentic democratic traditions whose socio-historical and geographic wellsprings do not trace to Athens, Sparta, and Rome.

We were not engaged to imagine that there have been democratic conceptions and practices located in other spaces and times, and which are not the present cause of sustained moral catastrophe. We were left unmotivated to, for instance, investigate the democratic practices that form part of the autonomous precolonial experience of numerous traditional African public spheres.

These are histories of democratic practice that rarely influence academic, let alone public, understanding of the concept. The result is that across the world, and even throughout much of the African continent where post-colonial creations remain occupied with thin and easily corruptible electoral politics, perniciously false and misguided notions about democracy persist. For instance, that an unspecified “democracy” is not of authentically African provenance; that there is only one birthplace of a generalized and singular democratic experience; that the substantive questions we all have about democracy and its practices are the same.

While scholars of traditional African democracy have sometimes been concerned with questions similar to those that arise from the study of Greco-Roman democratic practice, they have also, most interestingly, been engaged by many that are different and yet ought to be of value to us all.

For example, what is the benefit to justice of a democratic deliberative practice that is able to unflinchingly confront complex conflicts without aiming, necessarily, for their moral resolution? Could it be possible for democratic practice to produce a more consensual form of politics with the elimination of political parties? How does such practice alter the nature of our respective equalities and freedoms where the moral nature and value of communal interaction and not the possibility for legitimating political decisions to the individualized “free” is the analytical focus?

Traditional African democratic practices will be merely one set to add to our cumulative understandings of democratic possibilities. The consultative village practices of precolonial India may be another. There are others.

A lack of specificity was not peculiar to the conversation I highlight, nor was it surprising since it is the type of unspecificity that characterizes so much present-day academic study in political theory— a field of inquiry concerned with the social, political, and moral conceptions and practices that frame our existences in political community—for example, the nature of democratic rule.

I was recently asked by a fellow theorist whether it was dangerous to have a branch of political theory we call, explicitly, “African”?  The question, I think, was meant to intone the valid concern—already grappled with by many African political theorists—that there has been a tendency to define what is “African” about African political theory by harmfully essentialist, ethno-anthropological criteria.

I attempted, unsuccessfully, to perform a modest answer. What I ought to have said was that it is equally, if not more, dangerous to perpetuate a political theory that pretends to be neutrally unattached to any specific geographic location whilst being, to an unjustifiable degree, anchored in a Euro-American historicity.

There is not, within political theory, some formal thing called Euro-American political thought because what has been taken as a general political theory is composed almost absolutely, with only a handful of very notable exceptions, of political theorizing that can only be contextualized within a Euro-American socio-historical and cultural perspective—and this includes much “critical” work done within the field. 

Would it really be so bad to call a spade its name—and formally label much of what is taught simply as political theory—Euro-American political theory? To be sure, those of us interested in pursuing something that is most honestly called African political theory are concerned with a particular, specified, though hopefully generalizable, mode of epistemic thought and theorizing, but so is everyone else.

The current disciplinary labeling allows for the rather harmful deceit that much of the work being done in the mainstream of what is called “political theory” rises to the level of the universal. Much of it does not. And that work that is done under “Vietnamese,” “African-American,” “Chinese”, or “African” political theory is peculiar—little of it is.

As a result of our understandably limited knowledge of many parts and histories of the world, including the ones to which we may even be most personally attached, and as a result of the often, inevitable narrowness of our intellectual perspectives, I think little, if any, political theoretical work is yet deserving of bearing only a general title.

But to submit to specificity requires also admitting that, at present, political theory is, by and large, no less in the business of setting and reproducing tastes and preferences than are the judges of a cooking competition. For a field that aspires to the work of objectifiable science, perhaps such a submission is impossible.

Nevertheless, it remains unjust to perpetuate a discipline predicated on the pretense that there is, at present, any part of it not skewed by a specifiable socio-historically located epistemology, and its only outcome is the continued exclusion of those histories and geographies upon whose dismissal a supposedly unspecified political theory has always been based.

Where do we go from here that is not some unsatisfactory, all-too-comfortable reiteration of where we have already been? Apart from a loss in the structural power of those whose dominance has only been secured not by weeding out the weak but by suppressing the “too different,” what would be so terrible about putting the label “political theory” and the much-needed generality it implies in a safe box—reintroducing it only when we have a discipline worthy of its unspecified name?

If we are uncomfortable with the notion of an African political theory, and that of political theories that are explicit in their socio-historical attachments—which is not equivalent to being self-unreflective—then I suggest that we are still, sadly, uncomfortable with a political theory that could eventually earn the right to call itself general.

This aspiration to generality is not, I think, achieved by the inclusion of a handful of seminars on Fanon, Nkrumah, and Nyerere in undergraduate “Introduction to Political Theory” courses. And while such shallow progress may give some comforting illusion that political theory, as it is taught now in many parts of the world, is on its way to being genuinely inclusive and we need not allow more focused, specified attention on those intellectual localities long ignored by mainstream theory, it is merely that.  

We should be concerned when work that ought to be critical of an existing framework fits easily into pre-existing boxes that were implicitly designed to exclude the frames and modes of analytical examination with which most African, and other comparative political theorists, are concerned. 

It is, I think, part of the nature of human beings to do what is least required when opportunities for structured change arise—to give the appearance of moving forward when we have stepped only slightly sideways. I do not, therefore, expect academies of higher education, particularly those across Europe, the United Kingdom or the United States, to suddenly take seriously the focused teaching and publication of as many localities of political thought as possible, and not only those parts with which they are most comfortable, whose mode of analysis seems least conflicting, more easily integrated into existing Euro-American understandings. Nor do I expect them to formally give the field's mainstream its more accurate name—Euro-American political theory.

But, if only for the sake of public conversations that are capable of better, more robustly informing and invigorating general populations, perhaps an unusual few may show greater courage.

Dr. Eniola Anuoluwapo Soyemi is a Nigerian political theorist based at the Centre for International Studies and the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford.