This is to announce that the volume Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World: Reorienting the Political, edited by Carl K. Y. Shaw （蕭高彥）and me, has just been published by Lexington and is now available on the internet and elsewhere. Here is the link to the publisher’s website, here on Amazon. And here is the description on our cover:

“Reorienting the Political examines the reception of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-speaking world. The legacies of both Schmitt, the German legal theorist and thinker who joined the Nazi party, and Strauss, the German-Jewish classicist and political philosopher who became famous after his emigration to the United States, are highly controversial. Since the 1990s, however, these thinkers have had a powerful resonance for Chinese scholars.

Today, when Chinese intellectuals debate the Chinese state, the future role of China in the world, the liberal international order, and even the meaning of Confucian civilization, they often employ Schmittian and Straussian concepts like ‘the political,’ ‘friend-enemy,’ ‘state of exception,’ ‘liberal education,’ and ‘natural right.’ The very possibility of a genuine Chinese political theory is often thought to be tied to the legacy of these two thinkers.

This volume explores this complex phenomenon with a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary approach. The twelve essays in this volume are written from a range of perspectives by philosophers, political theorists, historians, and legal scholars from China, Germany, Taiwan, and the United States.”

 

The list of our contributors: Harald Bluhm; Jianhong Chen 陳建洪; Thomas Fröhlich; Chuan-Wei Hu 胡全威; Kuan-min Huang 黃冠閔; Shu-Perng Hwang 黃舒芃; Charlotte Kroll; Han Liu 劉晗; Christopher Nadon; and Mario Wenning.

Thanks to all who made this volume possible (most of them are mentioned in our “Acknowledgments”)!