Introduction -- The Bewilderment of Names and Images: East Asia in Western Social and Political Thought -- East Asia in the Early Modern European Imagination -- Ambassadors, Economists and Oriental Despots: the Early Nineteenth Century Understanding of China -- Nineteenth Century Progress and Arrested Civilizations -- Peculiar Nation: Sinology and the Social Sciences 1890--1949 -- Awakening, Arising, Developing and Deconstructing: China's Mutable Modernization in Contemporary Social and Political Science -- Index
Summary
This text examines how China has been portrayed in European and subsequently North American social and political thought and what, if anything, this depiction tells us about the character of this thought. Such a question immediately evokes the spectre of orientalism and subsequent chapters explore whether the identification of an orientalist project invalidates the knowledge claims of European and North American social and political thought as it evolved from the 18th to the 20th century
Analysis
Samfundsvidenskab Samfundsvidenskab, alment
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-227) and index
