The Politics of the Past in Early China.

详细信息   

• 作者：Leung ; Vincent Sueh Han.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2011
• 导师：Puett, Michael,eadvisor
• 毕业院校：Harvard University
• ISBN：9781267107596
• CBH：3491883
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：9674997
• Pages：237

文摘

This dissertation studies the different uses of the past under the political transition from the Western Zhou aristocratic feudatories to the Qin-Han bureaucratic empires in the first millennium BC. More specifically, it studies the transformations of the past into political capital, and their subsequent mobilization towards the support and critique of various political positions and ideals, in this protracted period of historical transition. It is divided into four chapters, each focused on a set of primary texts in roughly chronological order. The first chapter begins with both received and paleographic sources from the Western Zhou, and argues for the predominance of the genealogical past in this period. The second half of the chapter turns to sections of the Analects and the Mozi from the sixth- and fifth-century BC, and argues for their common disavowal of the genealogical past, the alternatives that they each came up with, and the politics that each alternative implies. Chapter two turns to the late Warring States in the fourth- and third-century BC, focusing in particular on the complex relationship between the idea of laws and history in the Legalist tradition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Qin imperial ideology, which radicalized the Legalist paradigm for a vision of itself as the end of history. Chapter three studies the representations of the past in the writings of two early Han officials, Lu Jia and Jia Yi, from the first few decades of the second-century BC, as responses to the problematic legacy of the Qin empire. Finally, in chapter four, I study the Records of the Grand Historian Shiji) by Sima Qian from around the turn of the first-century BC as a work of critical intervention, by way of its complex historical narratives, into what he understood to be the perils of early Han imperialism. The dissertation is concluded with an epilogue that summarizes the findings of the chapters and larger themes of the study.