India as a Philosophical Problem: McKim Marriott and the Comparative Enterprise
Author(s)
Gerow, Edwin
Abstract
McKim Marriott’s recent efforts to formulate a theory of Indian civilization invite comparison with the works of other theorists of culture, notably Louis Dumontand Oswald Spengler. Marriott’s purview is equally comprehensive, and raises again, perhaps in more “modern” terms, all the questions fundamental to such vast programs, which have influenced the Western historical tradition since Vico and Hegel. In this discussion of the comparative enterprise and Marriott’s place in it, appeal can usefully be made to the “organon” of Richard McKeon, as a tool for conceptualizing (or disambiguating) the points of ambiguity that make a variety of theoretical positions possible or even necessary. Only such a meta-language gives one license to “compare comparisons.”
