CULTURAL CONFRONTATION AND COMPROMISE: THE RESPONSE OF NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES TO WESTERN POLITICAL IDEAS

This essay proposes a new method of understanding non-Western societies' responses to Western political ideas and religions. While the two main existing explanations of non-Western responses to the West can account for why non-Western societies accept or refuse Western cultures, both fail to address how Western and non-Western cultures interact with each other. This failure keeps the two dominant approaches from facilitating powerful and realistic understandings of non-Western societies' responses to Western cultures. This article proposes an alternative approach rooted in Gadamer's hermeneutical theory. This proposed alternative view directly addresses the interaction between Western and non-Western cultures, and holds that such interactions can be effectively explained by looking into the ways non-Western societies' intellectuals perceive and receive Western cultures. This new Gadamerian perspective leads to a better model of non-Western societies' attraction to, repulsion from, and incorporation of Western cultural elements.