Stanford Humanities Center
Since mid-twentieth century, reckoning with past political mistakes has become an important source of normativity in contemporary political theory. Sensitivity to historical mistakes, it is said, guards against the utopian and destructive tendencies of modern ideologies, setting up the prevention of cruelty as a normative pursuit for political theory. In this talk, I take Chinese political thought in the post-Cultural Revolution society as a case study to examine the relationship between historical mistakes, political thinking, and future-oriented political visions. Through this examination, I bring contemporary Chinese political thought to a dialogue with the thematic focus on memory and past cruelty in contemporary political theory, and explore the strengths and limits of political theories that ground themselves in the remembrance of past mistakes.
About the Speaker
Bio: Dr. Simon Sihang Luo is a political theorist whose work focuses on comparative political theory, contemporary political theory, and radicalism. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University, Bloomington. Simon’s current book project investigates the multiple uses of the memories of the Cultural Revolution in theoretical debates in the contemporary Chinese intellectual sphere.
About the Series
Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the East Asian Humanities Workshop aims at promoting intra- and inter-departmental communication among faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who share research and teaching interests in East Asia in the Stanford community. In particular, it is intended to foster stronger ties between EALC faculty and graduate students across the China-Japan-Korea programs as well as greater cross-disciplinary exchange among East Asian Studies scholars across the humanities and social science disciplines, including literature, linguistics, history, art history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science. It is also intended to enhance graduate student professionalization. The workshop meets, on average, twice a month during the academic year and engages in a variety of activities determined by its participants.
If you have suggestions you would like to make for future workshop activities, please feel free to email your ideas to our 2024–25 faculty supervisor, Ban Wang (banwang@stanford.edu), and our graduate student coordinators, Shuwen Yang (yangsw@stanford.edu) and Ningyuan Zhou (zhouny@stanford.edu). For those interested, you may also request to join our mailing list so that you are aware of any upcoming events: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/eas-workshop.
