Category Archives: Comparative Political Theory

CFP: Traveling Theorists/Theories

CALL FOR PAPERS: TRAVELLING THEORISTS/THEORIES

SOAS UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 30 JUNE-1 JULY

SOAS CENTRE FOR COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE LONDON CPT RESEARCH GROUP

This workshop explores the myriad and perhaps mysterious ways in which theory travels. The phrase ‘travelling theory’ already puts both terms under question. What is travelling? How is it travelling? Whence is it travelling? And who produces theory and enables it to travel? The workshop is about articulating critical questions about producers, users, and diffusers of theory as well as the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of intellectual production.

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Sungmoon Kim, Public Reason Confucianism now available

Kim, PRC coverSungmoon Kim’s new book, Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia (Cambridge, 2016) has just been published. Congratulations, Sungmoon! Here are links to the CUP website and Amazon. Cambridge has also made available a form that anyone can use to get a 25% discount; click here. Here is the book’s description:

Recent proposals concerning Confucian meritocratic perfectionism have justified Confucian perfectionism in terms of political meritocracy. In contrast, ‘Confucian democratic perfectionism’ is a form of comprehensive Confucian perfectionism that can accommodate a plurality of values in civil society. It is also fully compatible with core values of democracy such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. Sungmoon Kim presents ‘public reason Confucianism’ as the most attractive option for contemporary East Asian societies that are historically and culturally Confucian. Public reason Confucianism is a particular style of Confucian democratic perfectionism in which comprehensive Confucianism is connected with perfectionism via a distinctive form of public reason. It calls for an active role for the democratic state in promoting a Confucian conception of the good life, at the heart of which are such core Confucian values as filial piety and ritual propriety.

Angle papers archive site

Thanks to the enormous help of my research assistant Max Fong, I now have a site at which many of my publications are archived and can be downloaded. We will try to add anything currently missing over the next few weeks. Because of copyright policies, in most cases these are the final, edited versions but not the actual published versions. I am sure that many folks out there are way ahead of me in putting a site like this together; please feel free to share that info!

El Amine and Symposium on Bell in Perspectives on Politics

The new issue of Perspectives on Politics (14:1, March 2016), available here, contains several articles of interest:

  • Loubna El Amine, “Beyond East and West: Reorienting Political Theory through the Prism of Modernity”
  • An extended discussion of Daniel Bell’s The China Model, with articles by Baogang He, Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Leigh Jenco, Andrew Nathan, Lynette Ong, Thomas Pangle, and Joseph Wang.

Hutton Reviews El Amine, Classical Confucian Political Thought

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2016.01.17 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Loubna El Amine, Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation, Princeton University Press, 2015, 218pp., $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780691163048.

Reviewed by Eric L. Hutton, University of Utah

This book’s subtitle, A New Interpretation, provides a convenient starting point for discussing its aims, methods, strengths and weaknesses. The interpretation offered aims to be new not merely in the sense that it argues for a view that previously has not (or not much) been defended by other scholars, but moreover and especially in that it aims to challenge claims made by other scholars. So described, the book might sound like it is primarily for specialists in ancient Chinese thought, and while Loubna El Amine never identifies her target audience very clearly, at points she also provides basic background information that would allow non-specialists to follow along. The book is thus potentially of interest to non-specialists as well, such as Western political philosophers and theorists who know little about Confucian political thought and want a compact and accessible discussion of Confucianism that speaks to their interests. This review will focus on those aspects in which the book addresses a specialist audience, but my discussion is equally for the benefit of non-specialists. As will become apparent from the reservations I express below, the value of the book for non-specialists needs to be carefully qualified, in a way to be explained at the end.

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