No dia 23 de outubro, Joshua Sooter (New York University) será o orador convidado de um seminário conjunto organizado pelos Grupos de Investigação SPARC e RIGoP. O tema para esta sessão será The Collapse of Consensus: From Qing China to Our Authoritarian Present. A partir das 14h 30, na Sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa e online

Nineteenth-century China offers striking examples of the limits of conservative intellectual and political responses to profound social upheaval and economic rupture. In the aftermath of the devastating Taiping War (185-1864), and the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), local scholar-administrator Yu Zhi (1809–1874) diagnosed his world as experiencing a dangerous cleavage between governance (zheng) and teaching (jiao). This divide, for Zhi, constituted an existential threat to China’s imperial order. His treatments for these ills—reviving local militias, raising compulsory taxes for temples, commissioning public morality plays—were imaginative yet ultimately conservative dead ends, out of touch with the overwhelming socioeconomic onslaught of capitalist modernity.

Others, such as the Hunan magistrate Zhou Han (1842–1911) offered competing but complementary treatments. His work fomented violent uprisings against Christians with obscene placards and pornographic texts, portraying the necessity of spiritual warfare against a deviant “Other.” His lurid media resonated with popular anxieties but failed to generate viable programs of governance.

As an historian of ideas speaking to political scientists, I invite conversation on how these two distinct but intersecting responses by Confucian intellectuals—each a failure in their own right— can help us think through our present fractured moment. First, the discourse of both figures reveals the limits of maintaining and advancing novel politico-social agendas through inherited frameworks that are being undone by broad economic forces.s it possible today’s conservative and extreme right movement may buckle under similar pressures? The stories of Yu Zhi and Zhou Han also highlight how European concepts and political frameworks—notably ‘secular’ notions of state and politics, human and religious rights, and even the notion of “society”—are conceptual battlefields forged in the era of industrial capitalist modernity. Looking forward, what new politics and imaginaries might we need to see past our own inherited, and possibly crumbling, frameworks as economic, social, and political shifts wash across our world?

Joshua Sooter is an historian of ideas and social movements. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in global intellectual and Chinese history. After growing up as a conservative Evangelical farm boy in Missouri, he has subsequently lived, researched, and taught on four continents. His experiences fomented a deep interest in how ideas move across time and space and an appreciation of the historical mutability of “common sense.”