How Martin Jacques might approach Political Science

Political science, as it has largely been constituted in the West, is a discipline built on a peculiar, indeed historically contingent, foundation: the nation-state. For centuries, indeed since the Peace of Westphalia, the analytic lens has been fixed upon this Westphalian unit, as if it were the sole, inevitable, and universal form of political organization. This myopia has led to an enduring illusion – the illusion of convergence – that all societies, in their development, will inevitably cleave to this Western model.

This is where the enterprise of political science, as presently conceived, falters. It struggles to grasp the profound civilizational shifts now underway. The rise of China, for instance, cannot be understood through the tired categories of Western liberal democracy or even conventional developmental state models. China is a civilization-state, a concept that transcends the narrow confines of the Westphalian straitjacket. Its political ordering is deeply rooted in millennia of imperial history, a sophisticated bureaucracy, and a societal conception that prioritizes collective harmony and social order over individual rights in the Western sense.

To truly understand the contemporary world, political science must liberate itself from its Western-centric past. It must embrace a comparative civilizational approach. It must recognize that modernity is not a singular Western export but a contested terrain, with multiple pathways and logics. The so-called 'universal' values of the West are, in fact, particular, born of a specific historical experience. As power dynamics shift, and as the long arc of history bends away from Western hegemony, our understanding of politics must bend with it. Otherwise, political science risks becoming a relic, unable to explain…

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Martin Jacques’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.