Susan McWilliams's Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory presents a broad-ranging survey of the trope of travel in Western political thought. Elaborating a tradition that begins with the ancient Greek practice of theoria, which emphasized travel as a source of wisdom, McWilliams shows how Western political thought has always included a concern for the kinds of conditions now lumped under the title “globalization.” She also shows that critiques of the Western tradition—such as those found in cosmopolitanism, comparative political theory, or postcolonial theory—have failed to see the organizing power and potential usefulness of the trope of travel within the very tradition they criticize for lacking such resources. While the capaciousness of its travels prevents deep analysis of the authors or concepts under discussion, Traveling Back nonetheless illuminates the ongoing conversation about travel as trope in the tradition and suggests the potential richness of travel as a guiding metaphor for political theory in the future.

McWilliams organizes her book into three substantive chapters, each of which is devoted to four or five thinkers; she discusses some fifteen books at length. The sheer breadth of her discussion leaves little room to sharpen her interpretations against other scholarship on any given thinker, yet the account is not greatly diminished by this absence. Each reading proves enriching, opening a new avenue for considering a traditional figure; McWilliams's juxtapositions within each chapter offer even more provocative pairings.

The first chapter, “Instructions for Traveling,” examines “what political theorists are actually doing when they seem to be issuing instructions about how to travel” (18). Reading works by Plato, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, and Arendt, McWilliams shows how an “ethics of travel” emerges from these thinkers’ various considerations. The traveler is offered as a model of a certain kind of theoretic vision, a mode of theorizing with political multiplicity and cultural diversity in mind. According to McWilliams, Plato's Laws “develops the case that theoretical wisdom about politics emerges from the dialogic encounter between different ways of being in the world” (26). Yet it also highlights the “traveler-city problem,” that is, the tension between new insights acquired during the traveler's peregrinations and the settled ways of the city. Bacon sharpens this tension; Locke goes farther by showing that travel is “morally ambiguous” (37). As Rousseau later writes, travelers need a commitment beyond themselves; in Arendt's language, one must learn how to adjust oneself to the conditions of the changing world but also to the limits of living on earth. The traveling theorist needs to be both settled and detached while remaining wary of the “dehumanization” that can come from removing oneself from social and political convention.

The second chapter, “Reflections on Travel,” connects these questions about travel to reflections of travelers themselves: Herodotus, Montaigne, Tocqueville, Heidegger, and DuBois. McWilliams draws out how Herodotus's travels bring him to appreciate the “permanent incompleteness of human wisdom” (51), an idea that continues in Montaigne's sense of human multiplicity and the embodiedness of all such wisdom. This insight—that the particularity and peculiarity of our bodies lead to varied experiences, no one of them exhaustive of the human experience—dovetails with Tocqueville's considerations of mobility and change as the only constants in human life. McWilliams's discussion of Heidegger's Sojourns introduces an unheralded dimension of Heidegger's work, namely, his sensitivity to the budding tourism industry and its veritable enframing of experience. On McWilliams's reading, Heidegger's writings help us to see how travel can reveal the relative inflexibility of the traveler's mind as he or she cannot help assimilating present to past experience. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk adds yet another dimension to these reflections on travel by showing how the reflections on time and change that travel elicits can bring us up against unimaginable horrors. “Travel provides the exposure to a real ‘scene,’” McWilliams writes: Herodotus wonders at the awesome; DuBois at the awful.

In the third chapter, “Imagined Travelers,” McWilliams continues to develop the ambiguity of travel as both offering a model of engaged and attentive political theory—multiperspectival thinking cognizant of human plurality—and as potentially exploitative, either because of its detachment from the norms of the traveler's home or because of the sheer power of the global knowledge it accrues. If Herodotus's Solon exemplifies the first possibility, the dubious “heroes” of More's Utopia, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and James Baldwin's Giovanni’s Room represent the second. More brings us back to the recurrent issue around detachment as well as the potential for intellectual hubris in the traveler. Similarly, Uzbek in Montesquieu's Persian Letters displays the dangers of trying to see like a traveler. Twain's Hank Morgan exemplifies an explicit desire for domination just as David in Baldwin's novel represents a legacy of such domination. Both Hank Morgan and David use travel to continue their fantasies of exploitation just as Raphael Hythloday and Uzbek seek to impose their will on others through their travels.

McWilliams concludes that experience of travel “is neither necessary nor sufficient on its own for the development of wisdom” (121). Yet if travel cannot replace philosophy in this sense, McWilliams argues that this survey of the trope of travel nonetheless calls political theorists toward two essential insights for theorizing a complex and ambiguous world. First, these treatments of travel lead us to see “the other within,” the diversity within what appear to be homogenous communities as well as the diversity within ourselves, as products of “hybrid” traditions and practices. Second, thinking about travel as a theoretical orientation illustrates the necessity of adopting a stance of “in-betweenness” for political theory: an approach “expansive and creative but aware of human limitation, imaginative but aware of material realities, and attuned to the universal but understanding the importance of the particular” (7). These two conceptual innovations are not put into dialogue with other contemporary thinkers. The concept of the “other within” bears a strong resemblance to Jacques Derrida's concept of cultural nonidentity as well as James Tully's concept of “interculturalism.” “In-betweenness,” moreover, resembles the approach to phronetic social science developed by Bent Flyvbjerg with its own emphasis on case studies and provisional, limited theorizing. Seeing how the versions of these concepts inherited from the tradition specifically compare to contemporary analogues would help make the case for the continuing usefulness of Western political thought that McWilliams wishes to support.

More broadly, McWilliams's argument contains within it a tension that the book never fully addresses. On the one hand, her examples emphasize particularity, historicity, and contingency, thus suggesting an approach to political theorizing that is always contextual and situational—a political theory that most resembles a kind of practical wisdom rather than political philosophy. Yet at the same time, McWilliams subtitles her book Toward a Global Political Theory and frequently speaks of theory in general terms, as if it were not limited by place and time. Does McWilliams wish to offer a less theoretical political theorizing, something akin to what various critics of liberal theory such as Bernard Williams, Raymond Geuss, James Tully, James Scott, and Bent Flyvbjerg have in different ways propounded? Or is this “global political theory” a more refined theory, one that incorporates concepts such as “the other within” and “in-betweenness” but remains committed to developing a complete theoretical vision of political life—and thus a critique internal to the liberal theory that McWilliams both criticizes and promotes?

McWilliams's most suggestive examples, which come at the end of the book, point toward yet a third possibility, one that may well hold the most promise of accomplishing her ambitious agenda. In her conclusion, McWilliams describes the ilustrados, Filipinos who traveled abroad to educate themselves before returning to the Philippines and winning their freedom from colonial rule. McWilliams compares these travelers to those who left New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina only to return years later, ostensibly wiser from their travels. With these examples, McWilliams offers the most concrete instances of travel's political significance, that is, of how the politics of travel really begin upon the traveler's return. Both of these examples show concrete instances of practical political theorizing rooted in a particular set of circumstances. If McWilliams indeed seeks to build on her revival of the practice of theoria, this may be the place to start.