15/01/2025 (Wednesday) 11:00-12:30 E21B-G002
Political Theory from a Global Perspective
Abstract:
Underlying many of the dominant theories in the social sciences and humanities has been an implicit (and often explicit) teleology in which Euro-American concepts that arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are assumed to be normative.The goal of this talk will be to push against this assumption by bringing some of the political theories that emerged in the classical Chinese tradition into this larger conversation.I will argue that these theories from classical China have much to offer contemporary discussions.
Bio:
Michael Puett’s interests are focused on the inter-relations between history, anthropology, religion, and philosophy, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity.
