This section explores one of the most fundamental and recurrent questions of political theory: On what bases might political authority be justified? Entries in this section take account of a wide range of political authority, from that embodied in the state to that claimed by an oppositional figure or movement. Rochana Bajpai sketches three main liberal strands of thought in India—colonial, nationalist, and radical—to show that their claims are in some ways mutually constitutive as well as sometimes antagonistic. Despite their differences, all tend to affirm the state as the principle agent of liberal reform rather than focusing on the conditions for individual freedom as such. George Ciccariello-Maher argues that “populism” as an abstract or universal category is not meaningful; rather, it must be understood in terms of radical political content. Contrasting the universal(ist) idea of Laclau with Dussel’s more concretized understanding, the chapter treats Chávez and Venezuela particularly, in the context of how populism is thought of both in a Latin American context and more broadly. Humeira Iqtidar discusses how the search for “tolerance” in Islamic thought occludes its liberal genealogy. Through the writings of two twentieth-century Islamic thinkers, Maududi and Ghamidi, she poses the problem of tolerance as the relationship of the state to difference. Andrew F. March studies how premodern and modern Muslim thinkers reconcile the problem of human rule and popular sovereignty with the idea that all sovereignty belongs to God. He theorizes the relationship between divine law and temporal governance, sharīʾa and siyāsa, by schematizing Muslim thought on political, legislative, adjudicative, and coercive authority. Uchenna Okeja argues that palaver and consensus are metaphors for the public sphere in African philosophy. He uses this idea to reflect on the relationship of democracy to political parties, political action, reconciliation, and anger in deliberation. Pablo Ariel Blitstein examines arguments for the existence of proto-democratic practices in medieval Confucianism, noting their striking convergence with contemporary claims about the meritocracy of Chinese politics. He concludes, however, that the actual functioning of such Confucian practices historically reinforced aristocratic hierarchies rather than the equal opportunities supposedly furnished by meritocracy. David Bourchier traces organicist political and legal thinking in Indonesia from its emergence in the Japanese period to its contemporary resonances, in part to show its non-Indonesian roots against Suharto-era self-stylings of indigeneity. The chapter focuses on the Japanese/independence era and in particular on the legal scholar Supomo, tracing his adaptation of Japanese and German organicist ideas, how his adaptations became part of Pancasila (that is, the five principles of Indonesian state ideology), and how these ideas rose and fell as Indonesian politics unfolded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory
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