New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xii, 262 pp. (Figures.) US$29.99, paper. ISBN 978-0-521-15239-6.
The genre of Asian comparative politics has tended to be dominated by what may be called the historical-cultural explanation. By this I mean the mix of historical narratives and cultural threads. In this broad category the study of political culture may be included. This school tends to see power and politics deeply determined by certain culturally fixed societal norms, rules, and institutions. This exercise has tended to be practiced often from a Western bias.
Well-known for this characterization are Hegel (one man’s freedom), Marx (Asiatic mode of production), Weber (Protestant ethic), and Wittfogel (oriental despotism). Underlying these and some other works of a similar kind is Asia’s alleged lack of modernity. When modernization theory flourished in the third quarter of the last century, this school of thought produced the genre of political culture based on the above-cited classical works.
Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba’s comparative political culture study, Civic Culture: Attitudes and Beliefs of Six Nations (Princeton University Press, 1962), is the first of its kind executed through social survey. Their analysis of citizens’ attitudes and beliefs in the US, Britain, Mexico, Germany, and Italy seems to vindicate the then still-dominant view in Western Europe and North America that democracy is a political system that only northwestern European Protestants could aspire to and achieve. Lucian W. Pye’s comparative Asian political culture study Asian Power and Politics (Harvard University Press, 1987) is another kind not dependent on social survey. Perhaps time helps to mellow the above-cited fixed view of Asian politics. Pye seems to have more distance from the above-cited classical works, possibly including that of Almond and Verba, in that Pye’s analysis of Asian political cultures is much more accommodating of Asia’s diversity. However, both belong to modernization theory. Their thesis is that premodern societies have to go through industrialization, urbanization, and democratization via the important variable of the growth of a middle class to reach democratic politics.
After reading the above-cited classical works, I feel that Bruce Gilley’s book is very fresh and well-versed in Asian politics in terms of the basic political science concepts like state and society, development, democracy, governance, and public policy. Gilley should be applauded since Asian comparative politics has been dominated either by Western-biased modernization theory and fixed political culture narratives or by those area specialists sticking to the description of a society and politics they respectively specialize in.
It is the reviewer’s forecast that Gilley’s book will be seen as a solid step toward a genuinely comparative Asian politics exercise. Yet I am a bit bothered that in Gilley’s book, the overarching notion of the nature of Asian politics still retains the heavy carry-over from the classical works dating back to Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Wittfogel.
The author of the book may well reply that this is the result of very meticulous, thoughtful, empirical, and comparative investigations. The reviewer might well reply that in addition to the state-centric conceptualization, the society-centred conceptualization may open the way to a new Asian comparative politics relatively free from Western bias. As a matter of fact, the reviewer executed the Asia-wide social surveys on the quality of life in the 2000s (Takashi Inoguchi and Seiji Fujii, The Quality of Life in Asia: A Comparison of Quality of Life in Asia, Springer, 2011) in order to construct citizen-oriented society types for twenty-nine societies in East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia. Five society types derived from citizens’ satisfaction with daily life aspects come from factor-analysis results. How key dimensions are ordered determines society types. Survival, social relations, and state dominance are three key dimensions in this order when twenty-nine societies are pooled. Separately analyzed, five society types come up: 1) survival followed by social relations; 2) survival followed by state dominance; 3) social relations followed by survival; 4) social relations followed by state dominance; and 5) state dominance followed by survival. The point of this citizen-centred exercise is that seen from below, Asian politics look very different from Asian politics seen from above.
Takashi Inoguchi
University of Niigata Prefecture, Tokyo, Japan