Kaviraj on Western Social Theory

Well put...

"To understand political modernity in the non-Western world is impossible without western social theory; it is equally impossible entirely within the terms of that tradition. It is essential to formulate a more complex orientation towards the current resources of political theory to achieve that objective. This is simply because of the nature of the affair we call modernity. I would like to suggest that the entire body of what we call Western political theory is a peculiar intellectual response of modernizing societies of the West to the strange cognitive challenge of their own history; in the sense, to put it somewhat grandly, they constitute the self-reflexive thinking of European modernity. It emerges out of a paradoxical sense that this history was self-created, but at the same time, it was startlingly changeable, because all social forms were made impermanent, and therefore this phase of history was specially cognitively disorientating. As the processes of modernity are universal, but these processes are realized through a trajectory of istoircal events which are specific to each society, we must learn from Western social theory, but not expect it to tell us about our precise future. Therefore we must climb this essential and edifying ladder, but learn to dispense with it when the time comes; that time comes precisely when historical sociology begins. "

from Sudipta Kaviraj "In Search of Civil Society".