The intellect, mobility and epistemic positioning in doing comparisons and comparative education

Although there is a field of expertise entitled comparative education, comparative knowledge is not just understandable as the possession of comparativists. Durkheim wrote: ‘Comparative sociology is not a special branch of sociology; it is sociology itself’ (1983, 157). C. Wright Mills also wrote: ‘Comparisons are required in order to understand what may be the essential conditions of whatever we are trying to understand’ (Mills 1970, 163). Without necessarily invoking Durkheim or Mills, we do comparative analysis reflexively and much of the works in intellectual history entail comparative inquiries.