比较历史政治视角下的中国政治文化探析

Exploring Chinese Political Culture from the Perspective of Comparative Historical Politics

西方政治学在考量中国政治文化相关问题时遭遇了众多的“例外”并因此陷入解释的困境。究其原因在于西方政治学对历史方法的忽视和对现代化范式的迷思。这使得它对中国政治文化的研究脱离了中国的历史长河,把中国政治文化发展看作是西方现代化理论的又一版本。本文呼吁从比较历史政治视角来研究中国政治文化,并考察中国政治文化的四个传统核心要素,即大一统思想、追求政治稳定、民本观以及对权威和科层制的敬畏。研究结果不仅表明这些价值观是有历史稳定性和中国特殊性的,也显示了比较历史政治分析方法的应用价值。

Western Political science encounters much exceptionalism when studying issues concerning China’s political culture and cannot adequately address them. The inadequacy is due to a general neglect of historical methods and an obsession with modernization paradigm in the discipline. As a result,the study of China’s political culture is torn away from Chinese history and loses itself to become another version of Western modernization thesis. This article calls for the application of a perspective of comparative historical politics to the study of China’s political culture. The article examines four potential core value components of China’s political culture,namely,the quest for great unification,the preference for political order,the orientation towards substance,and the deference to authority and hierarchy. Results show that those values have historical continuity and China-specificity thereby demonstrating the value of the perspective of comparative historical politics.