Abstract
Traveling Back is a beautifully written examination of travel narratives in the history of Western political thought, ranging across work that is both canonical and less well known. McWilliams frames her examination of these works as a response to recent critiques, made by cosmopolitan, comparative and postcolonial theorists and scholars of globalization, that “for political theory to be global, its Western tradition has to be updated or superseded or usurped or even eradicated” (p. 4). McWilliams argues instead that a global political theory can already be found by “traveling back” to the thinkers “behind us” (p. 5—here the “us” is presumably her Anglophone political theory audience). “Where questions of travel appear in the history of Western political thought,” she argues, “we find self-critical questioning” about our global interconnectedness, the status of hybrid identities, and the threats of political and cultural imperialism which accompany globalization (p. 5). This questioning began and is emblematized by the Greek theoros, an observer and traveler who reached beyond the parochialism of his own circumstances to engage in “an intellectual process that involved both comparing particular cultures and identifying patterns and possibilities across those cultures” (p. 10). In three rich chapters, McWilliams presents the different facets of such questioning.
Chapter 1 examines works in Western political theory which issue what McWilliams calls “travel instructions,” and explain why travel offers a uniquely insightful model of “theoretical vision.” McWilliams argues that these works—many of them not obviously concerned with travel, such as Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Arendt’s The Human Condition—collectively and individually showcase the importance of how to see, rather than what is being seen. As such, she claims, they help us theorize in a plural and hybridized world: they open us to disturbing experiences that may unsettle our present assumptions, while equipping us with the rhetorical capacity to translate our experiences of “in-betweenness” into “recognizable speech” for home audiences, to convince them of the value of ideas that seem unfamiliar or threatening (p. 34, 40).
Chapter 2 considers reflections about actual travel, written by Herodotus, Montaigne, Tocqueville, Heidegger and DuBois. Although this chapter emphasizes the importance of seeing for oneself over engaging in “armchair theorizing,” the discussion again focuses on theoretical lessons gained from reflections on travel, rather than on the details of destinations or journeys: we are warned against the dangers of holding preconceived ideas in general (p. 72), but particularly “about people and polities are distant and far away” (p. 52); relatedly, we are encouraged to welcome the element of surprise when travel exposes us to what we did not expect, and to recognize “the imperfection of all human communication” when we attempt to distill these experiences for others (p. 59). Chapter 3 takes up analysis of imagined travel stories, examining works of fiction such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to note the ways in which thinking like a traveler can sometimes encourage imperialism, negligence, or tyranny. McWilliams suggests that by attending to inequalities of mobility, questioning our own urges to dominate others, and acknowledging our own finitude (p. 108), we can avoid confusing “theoretical investigation with intellectual hubris or political ambition” (p. 91).
It is difficult not to compare this book to Roxanne Euben’s Journeys to the Other Shore (Princeton, 2006), which also takes up the theme of travel in political theory. Both books articulate very similar insights: that categories of home and away, as well as self and other, are continually refigured in the comparisons invited by travel; that travel can reinforce prejudices as much as liberate thinking; that human beings are situated and embodied, yet interconnected, creatures who are always negotiating but cannot transcend the particularities of their circumstance. But there is at least one important difference between these two books. Euben’s engages Islamic travel narratives to argue for their relevance to issues of concern to contemporary political theorists—including connections between power, travel, and knowledge—as well as to Muslims themselves. In doing, so Euben demonstrates, as well as argues for, the way in which engagements with specific, variously situated theoretical perspectives can enrich and challenge our thinking about membership, communities, mobility and even the location of theorizing.
Traveling Back, however, lacks any confrontation with a specific particularity, even as it continually emphasizes the importance of particularity to grasping the human condition. McWilliams organizes her discussion of travel narratives in each chapter thematically rather than contextually, emphasizing abstracted lessons about self-realization and interconnectedness rather than contemplating the challenges raised by the specific locations visited in those narratives. This organizational choice, while rhetorically defensible, nevertheless gives the impression that the destination, purpose, or duration of one’s travel is entirely irrelevant—particularly as the majority of the works McWilliams analyzes feature theoretical or imaginary rather than actual travel. We might travel to Massachusetts or Madras, to Beijing or Beirut, to the past or the future. What really matters is not what we find there specifically, how long we stay, to whom we speak, or in what language we converse with them. (McWilliams tends to see translation as a general metaphor for travel or theorizing, rather than as a specific moment or process of communication, e.g., pp. 12–13, 33–34, 59; and she does not grapple with the limitations of her own reading of texts in English translation.) We need only exhibit a vision which remains open to unsettling and defamiliarizing experiences while remaining aware of our communal duty (p. 46). And even this vision, McWilliams tells us, need not be gained through travel; it can be gleaned from reading accounts by travelers, or even—as the very premise of this book demonstrates—accounts about accounts by travelers. Indeed, such “theoretic travel” or “travel of the fourth order,” as McWilliams calls her own efforts in the book (p. 18), appears to be superior to actual travel, which never guarantees that one will come to the insights McWilliams presents in this book anyway. “There are some travelers who are better than others,” she explains, who possess “practices and habits of mind that separate them from the traveling mass” (p. 47): namely, habits which maintain a stance of “in-betweenness” as well as awareness of “the other within” (p. 48), enabling travelers to follow in the path of the Greek theoros. Although these are the very habits of mind that travel is supposed to cultivate, it seems we can (and must) somehow also possess them before our journey even begins—begging the question of what the actual embodied experience of travel really has to offer.
It is for this reason that Traveling Back fails to provide the kind of fully realized, “global political theory” its title promises. Like Euben, McWilliams hopes to show that travel and engagement with otherness has always been a part of Western political thought. But where Euben uses this insight to open political theory to the challenges of globally diffuse ideas and experiences, McWilliams uses it to refute the novelty of recent efforts in comparative, cosmopolitan, and postcolonial theory. This is a dangerous move. If all that is sought in calling for a more “global” political theory is greater purchase on the simple fact that we live in a world of plurality and under conditions of global interconnectedness, then McWilliams’s survey of travel narratives would suffice to show that such resources do indeed already exist within the Western tradition. However, most work in postcolonial and comparative theory goes farther than simply noting the fact that difference exists. Such work aims to demonstrate how specific experiences or bodies of thought that have been marginalized by mainstream political theory trouble and potentially displace existing modes of thought or categories of debate—for example, postcolonial accounts denaturalize the universality of the terms of Enlightenment modernity, by narrating specific histories of colonial violence as well as the agency of subjugated peoples in adapting or resisting “Western” categories and institutions. These accounts emphasize not only that, but also how, marginalized voices and experiences trouble the self-perception, content, and practice of political theory, and they argue that any political theory calling itself global must remain open to the challenges such specificity poses. Even reflections about travel, as Euben has demonstrated, must take into account the fact that different people have travelled for different reasons (pilgrimage, forced migration, and annual homecoming during festivals such as the Chinese New Year are some of the globally significant modes of travel that go unmentioned by McWilliams) and they have articulated their insights in different genres of knowledge; some of these, such as the Islamic rihla, are similar but irreducible to those already familiar to political theorists. Insisting that such challenges can be meaningfully (if not sufficiently) addressed by showing that in the history of Western political thought “there have always been thinkers exploring the questions and ideas that seem most pressing in these global times” (p. 5) misunderstands the point of much work in comparative and postcolonial theory. More dangerously, it reproduces the dominance of the Western political tradition, and so undermines the transformation that comparative and postcolonial theory bode for political theorizing. If, as McWilliams herself claims, “understanding involves listening to other people” (p. 127), then we must start actively listening to those other people, wherever and whenever they are located. To build a global political theory, reflecting about the reflections of Western travelers can never be an adequate substitute for engaging the actual experiences and voices of excluded others.