Oriental Despotism Research Articles

Henri H. Stahl’s conception of historical sociology and the Bucharest School of Sociology

The Romanian school of sociology founded by Dimitrie Gusti was a favorable medium for elaborating theoretic ideas. The school became a cradle for at least two prominent theoreticians (Henri H. Stahl and Traian Herseni) whose conceptions are worth of attention not only from sociologists but for the theoretically minded historians, too. We should keep in our mind that according to the methodological attitudes of the Bucharest school field researches were highly encouraged. It means that any generalizations, theoretic suggestions or entire conceptions produced by the followers of Gusti were solidly based on empirical data. Stahl started to elaborate his conception of tributalism in the 1960s. Coincidently, at this period the international discussion about the so-called Asiatic mode of production revived so the Stahl‘s theoretic ideas were well-timed. Stahl was not the only Romanian scholar who got involved in the discussion, but his conception was more original: according to him, tributalism should be treated as something different from Oriental despotism although there were some obvious similarities between the two. Despite the fact that the majority of Romanian historian community ignored the Stahl’s innovative conception, there were some attempts in Romania as well as abroad to elaborate (Daniel Chirot) or at least to popularize (Miron Constantinescu, Constantin Daniel) his ideas.

Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India

Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India

O. V. Bol'shakova . Vlast' i politika v Rossii XIX–nachala XX veka: Amerikanskaia istoriografiia [Power and Politics in Russia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: American Historiography]. Moscow : Nauka . 2008 . Pp. 262. $16.50.

We are long past the day when U.S. historians writing about Russia routinely had their works ignored, dismissed as “bourgeois scholarship,” or, worse, deemed rank falsifications by Soviet officials. Yet almost twenty years after the fall of communism, the efforts of American rossievedy are often unknown to their Russian colleagues or poorly integrated into their works. In the book under review, O. V. Bol'shakova undertakes to remedy this situation. Bol'shakova limits her purview to works dealing with the tsarist government and the process of reform during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She begins by briefly sketching the origins of Russian studies in the United States in the early twentieth century and quickly moves to the years after World War II, examining some of the reigning paradigms of the 1940s and 1950s (oriental despotism and totalitarianism) that purported to explain the nature and development of Russia and the Soviet Union. But Bol'shakova gives the most attention to the contributions of Michael Karpovich, whose Harvard seminars produced the leaders of the first generation of American Russian scholars: Leopold Haimson, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Marc Raeff, Nicholas Riasanovsky, Donald Treadgold, and others. Their teaching and research over the next decades would define the field.

Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and Indiaby Michael Curtis

<i>Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India</i>by Michael Curtis

“The blessings of freedom”: Britain, America, and “the East” in the Fiction of Robert Bage

Even as Britain's failure to retain its authority in the Western hemisphere provides the point of departure for Robert Bage's Mount Henneth (1782) and The Fair Syrian (1787), these novels take characters on Eastern adventures, making them encounter the effects of despotic power in the condition of Eastern women. By invoking such a generalized idea of Oriental despotism and by reframing “British” liberty in relatively uncontroversial terms, these novels address the ideological repercussions of Britain's conflict with its colonists. Hermsprong (1796) briefly revisits the seraglio, paralleling Turkey and Britain while also identifying its hero's freedom of expression as a “native” English as much as an American instinct.

Telling Chinese History: A Selection of Essays. Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr. , Lea H. Wakeman

Telling Chinese History: A Selection of Essays, by Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr., selected and edited by Lea H. Wakeman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xx + 453 pp. US$60.00/£35.00 (hardcover), US$24.95/£14.95 (paperback). This book is a collection of articles by the distinguished historian Frederic E. Wakeman (1937-2006) on various aspects of Chinese history. As the articles selected here show, his work is characterized by its attention to theory, its deep interpretations of certain periods of Chinese history, and its emphasis on human details. Wakeman was widely learned in the history not only of but of other countries as well, and his comparative observations added to and deepened his interpretations. This book was compiled after Wakeman' s death by his wife Lea. It consists of five parts, representing emphases in Wakeman's work. These are 1) in the context of world history; 2) the Ming-Qing period; 3) Shanghai in the Republic period; 4) the historiography of Chinese history; and 5) modernity and the state. The themes of the earlier parts tend to relate to earlier periods. The chapters are from various sources, ranging from scholarly journals like Journal of Asian Studies to chapters in well-known books and to book reviews. In addition, there is an interpretative introduction to Wakeman's work in general, and to this book in particular, by S. N. Eisenstadt, himself a distinguished historian of China. Major themes taken up in the book include early relations between the West and China, ideology, bureaucracy and change. The arguments presented are not all consistent throughout the book, but that is defensible, as this is a republication of particular major articles. Wakeman's writing style is always interesting, and I found this book at times quite difficult to put down. For example, the chapter entitled Romantics, Stoics and Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century China includes many personal, even intimate, details about historical figures and links their experiences to the broad sweep of the history that saw the fall of the Ming Dynasty and the rise of the Qing. Although Wakeman certainly had interests in the big picture of Chinese history, the common themes that recur throughout this book are comparatively few. One is the power of the state linked with the issue of essential change. One chapter is entitled Models of Historical Change: The Chinese State and Society 1839-1989 and was originally published in 1991. Wakeman discusses four models of the state, beginning with Karl Wittfogel's oriental despotism, and analyzes the development of police power in China. His conclusion is that the state has increased its power over society, with the People's Republic having the largest extent of power, and takes this as indicative of a gathering momentum of change in China. …

Jahangir as Francis Bacon's Ideal of the King as an Observer and Investigator of Nature

AbstractThe Mughal Empire is paradigmatic in many of its formulations, and it is epitomised in the persons of its first six padshahs or emperors. The Great Mughals, Grao Mogor, Grand Mogul, Großmogul or Groote Mogul, as the padshahs were known in Europe, have been considered as paragons of rulership. In critical appraisals, which were the prevailing view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were the quintessential Oriental despots, held up as a warning to those rulers in Europe with similar aspirations. One thinks here especially of Francois Bernier's letters of the Mughal court to his French contacts which included Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). In more sympathetic (and more recent) eyes, such as those of the world-traveller, philosopher and enthusiastic inter-culturalist Count Hermann Keyserling, who was in India in 1911, they were “the grandest rulers brought forth by mankind”. Keyserling came to this conclusion because the Mughals “combined in their personalities so many divers talents: they were men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche, and at the same time aesthetes and dreamers”. He felt that such a “superior human synthesis” (grossartige Menscheitsynthese) had not shown itself in any European king. Here I discuss to what extent the emperor Jahangir fulfilled Francis Bacon's ideal of the perfect ruler.

“The blessings of freedom”: Britain, America, and “the East” in the Fiction of Robert Bage

Even as Britain's failure to retain its authority in the Western hemisphere provides the point of departure for Robert Bage's Mount Henneth (1782) and The Fair Syrian (1787), these novels take characters on Eastern adventures, making them encounter the effects of despotic power in the condition of Eastern women. By invoking such a generalized idea of Oriental despotism and by reframing “British” liberty in relatively uncontroversial terms, these novels address the ideological repercussions of Britain's conflict with its colonists. Hermsprong (1796) briefly revisits the seraglio, paralleling Turkey and Britain while also identifying its hero's freedom of expression as a “native” English as much as an American instinct.

Recognition, Deference, and Respect: Generalizing the Lessons of an Asymmetric Asian Order

AbstractAs many distinguished academics and officials have pointed out, the current rise of China is not a completely new phenomenon, but rather the return of China to a position of regional centrality and world economic share that were considered normal less than two hundred years ago.1 This fact underlines the importance of history in putting the present into perspective, and at the same time, to the extent that all history is history of the present, it requires a reevaluation of the structure of China's traditional relationships. Hitherto, China's place in modern social science has been in an exotic corner, a failed oriental despotism. To be sure, traditional China did collapse, and today's China is a different China rising in a different world. We might assume that China is rising now precisely because of its differences from traditional China, that it is the last step toward the end of history rather than a resonance with the past. However, the convenience of such an assumption makes it suspect. If China is simply the latest avatar of Western modernity, then it requires of the West some readjustment, but not rethinking. However, the only certainty about China's rise is that it is a complex phenomenon, and the convenience of constructions such as China-as-Prussia or China-as-Meiji Japan derives from their preemption of open-ended study rather than from their insight into complexity. To the extent that China is China, both past and present require reconsideration.

China and Democracy

China and Democracy Sources arid Resources Mireille DelmasMarty and PierreEtienne Will (eds.), La Chine et la democratie, (China and Democracy) Paris, Fayard, 2007, 896 pp.The contributors to La Chine et la democratie, edited by Mireille Delmas-Marty and Pierre-Etienne Will, address following question: To what extent does Chinese political culture, in both its historical dimension and in a larger sense Chinese in general, contain elements capable of adjusting to values and practices of modern democratic liberalism offered as an example to China over past century or more (l)The book, made up of 21 chapters grouped into six sections, takes reader from past to present, with some authors contributing more than one chapter. The chapters by Anne Cheng and Pierre-Etienne Will in first section, Tradition and reconstruction, challenge some of received ideas on China that feed images of country in Western imagination. Will retraces contrasting images of China in nineteenth century European authors' worb that oscillate between despotism and democracy, adding nuance to usual perception that eighteenth century was characterised by Sinophilia and nineteenth by Sinophobia. Cheng, for her part, applies a systematic and critical analysis to research trends focused on idea of seeds of democracy in Confucian tradition. She traces origins of these currents, stressing need for a more specific definition of Confucianism, which is often used in an essentialist and imprecise way.Will and Jerome Bourgon share second section, which is devoted to imperial institutions. Will deals with curbs on excessive power under Ming dynasty, presenting three censorship missions and a case study from Emperor Wan Li's rule. He makes a nuanced analogy with constitutional control developed in France, and sheds li^it on normative bases that could invoke censorship in implementation of control functions. Will aims to establish that several control institutions at time functioned quite well alongside notion of Constitution as understood today. Bourgon offers a re-examination of many received ideas on China and its supposed ignorance of notion of as advanced by some European and American Sinologists. He focuses on principles of legality and rule of law in context of their importance to question of democracy. Bourgon notes that China adopted the first judicial system in modern sense of term back in third century. He deals with question of whether China was originator of principle of legality of punishment, detailing several elements from history of Chinese law in a comparative perspective, and he forcefully refutes idea that China was unaware of rule of law. He concludes with a call for overcoming several epistemological obstacles, such as concept of oriental despotism, in order to understand law in imperial China.The third section deals with transitions, with four contributions dealing with law at different stages from end of Empire to Republic. Bourgon studies emergence of legal profession in ancien regime between 1740 and 1930, and establishes existence of a veritable epistemic community of jurists toward end of imperial era. The Tongzhi restoration marks a turning point in this community's formation. While in political sphere this period is associated with last stages of Chinese conservatism, Bourgon shows that it was in fact rich in innovations for evolution of Chinese law and legal professions, notably in establishment of magistrates and Westernisation of China's legal system.Zhang Ning examines handling of penalty, banditry, and special practices, focusing on several penal codes from late Qing and Republican periods. She stresses need to understand drawn-out internal turmoil of China's history over last 130 years in order to grasp factors behind death penalty culture associated with China today. …

From ‘Filthy Catamite’ to ‘Queer Icon’: Elagabalus and the Politics of Sexuality (1960–1975)

Elagabalus. The name evokes an image of a depraved sybarite treading in silver dust and sand of gold, his head crowned with a tiara and his clothes studded with jewels, working at women's tasks in the midst of his eunuchs, calling himself Empress and bedding every night with a new Emperor, picked for choice from among his barbers, scullions, and charioteers (Huysmans 1959, 45). (1) Such portraits of Elagabalus derive, ultimately, from the accounts of the emperor's reign (218-22 C.E.) provided by Dio Cassius, Herodian, and the author of the Historia Augusta. These historians represent Elagabalus as an oriental despot prone to extravagance of all sorts and as a religious fanatic determined to impose a Syrian god upon the Roman populace. (2) They also report that the emperor cultivated a feminine appearance; that he married three women (including a Vestal Virgin) and one man; that he had a sexual predilection for well-endowed males; and that he asked his court physicians to construct a vagina in his body. (3) Elagabalus, if these sources are to be credited, (4) was an emperor gone wild. The exploits of bad emperors have exercised a potent fascination down through the centuries, but different forms of imperial misbehavior have drawn attention depending upon what political and moral anxieties happened to be ascendant in a given cultural moment. Moderns have tended to regard, for instance, Elagabalus's taste for gastronomical novelties as little more than a sideshow curiosity, but have seized upon the emperor's effeminacy and sexual 'deviancy' as significant factors behind his ultimate ruin. (5) This tendency relates directly to the prominence that gender and sexuality have assumed, as sites of political contestation, in modern Western societies. Within this particular cultural climate, Elagabalus has become an iconic figure through whom ideologies of gender and sexuality can be naturalized, contested, and renegotiated. Elagabalus, indeed, has come to occupy an especially complex position in the modern imagination, because the historical sources, in reviling the emperor as a gender and sexual deviant, enable a variety of different contemporary identifications: modern readers of Elagabalus's lives can identify the emperor as 'homosexual,' 'bisexual,' or 'transgendered.' (6) All three of these identifications involve a certain violence to the historical sources, but all can nonetheless claim to be grounded in ancient evidence. This article examines representations of Elagabalus in three texts published between 1960 and 1975: Alfred Duggan's Family Favourites, Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner's Child of the Sun, and Martin Duberman's Elagabalus. Inasmuch as the publication dates of the selected texts span a formative period in the development of modern sexual politics, they can serve as an ideal site for examining different representations of Elagabalus during a time of substantial political tension and cultural change. In all three texts, Elagabalus emerges as a 'queer icon': a non-heterosexual representation that performs significant ideological work in either naturalizing or challenging popular constructs of the 'queer' (not in every case strictly 'homosexual') male. This study, then, delineates the different ways that representations of Elagabalus contributed to the politics of sexuality between the years 1960 and 1975. Family Favourites; or, It Was All at Bottom Harmless Enough The earliest of the three texts is Alfred Duggan's Family Favourites. Published in 1960, (7) this novel belongs to a line of quality historical fictions that the Oxford-educated author composed in rapid succession during the later years of his life. (8) Writing a novel about Elagabalus was an audacious move for Duggan, (9) who had cultivated a broad-based readership by the early 1960s (Waugh 1983, 626), and Family Favourites appears--if reviews in the popular press are any indication (10)--to have disconcerted that public, especially in the author's Britain. …

Ideology and empire in eighteenth-century India: the British in Bengal

Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.

Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment: Anquetil Duperron on India and America

This article discusses the egalitarian ideas of the French Orientalist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, showing that they inform his writings on Zoroastrianism and India, his critique of Montesquieu's theory of Oriental Despotism, as well as his later defense of the Arctic peoples of America and Eurasia. It further shows that Anquetil's global egalitarianism was part of his project for a comparative study of world religions and civilizations. Anquetil's case fits into the recent historiography of the Enlightenment, which has underlined the importance of strong currents of critique of European expansion and Eurocentrism in eighteenth-century thought.

Water Calamities and Dike Management in the Jianghan Plain in the Qing and the Republic

The relationship between the state and water control has long been an important topic in Chinese studies. In the 1950s, Karl Wittfogel’s theory of “oriental despotism,” which considered the imperial state as having unlimited power over the development of the rural economy, no longer convincing—it is simply not based on sound factual evidence. By contrast, most scholars, especially in China and Japan, tend to lay the blame for water calamities at the doorstep of the Qing government. The government, they argue, was incompetent in managing water control and in fact in the end it abandoned efforts at water control. This interpretation dominates recent scholarship on the middle Yangzi River valley—mainly the Jianghan plain and the Lake Dongting plain—an area rich in hydraulic problems since late imperial times (particularly in the late Qing).

Said Amir Arjomand. « Coffeehouse, Guilds and Oriental Despotism. Government and Civil Society in Late 17th to Early 18th Century Istanbul and Isfahan, as seen from Paris and London ». Archives européennes de sociologie / European Journal of Sociology, 45/1 (2004), pp. 23-42.

The author probes the question of the existence and nature of a civil society in 17th century Istanbul and Isfahan through the prism of contemporaneous Western perspectives on the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran with their focus on despotic and oppressive governments. These same sources, however, also suggest the limited reach of rulers, and they reveal the existence of a lively “public sphere”, of which the court itself was part inasmuch as it was, at least in the Iranian case, public specta...

Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (review)

Reviewed by: Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India ed. by Harald Fischer-Tine and Michael Mann Srirupa Prasad Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India. Edited by Harald Fischer-Tine and Michael Mann. London: Anthem Press, 2004. Colonialism as Civilizing Mission takes a fresh look at one of the most complex yet productive “tensions”[1] that remained at the heart of colonialism—the “civilizing mission” undertaken by British imperialism across much of its colonial territory. The editors and the contributors to this volume collectively seek to ask a fundamental question—to what extent was this colonial grand narrative a success? The answer to this, they argue, lies in deciphering some of the “paradoxes” and “inconsistencies” (24) that have defined the very ideological and moral core of this “civilizing mission,” instead of accepting interpretations which call for straightforward affirmation or negation. But what the volume argues in a novel way is that such “irregularities” were not anomalies in an otherwise well-scripted endeavor. These very uncertainties were productive precisely because they were appropriated by colonial ideologues and “enabled the British to react flexibly to changing colonial parameters and to ‘improve’ the means and mechanisms of self- legitimation.” (Ibid) In the context of this broad intellectual agenda, in their Introduction Fischer and Mann make a case for their particular enquiry by arguing that while historians have analyzed some of instances of the European colonial “civilizing mission,” the very formation of this ideology has never been looked at critically. According to them, “historians who have written so far on the multifarious colonial attitudes towards British India and the other colonies have never paid close attention to the British civilizing mission in India and elsewhere as programme, conceptand ideology.” (26) The authors explore the emergence, consolidation, execution, and eventually some of the internal limitations of this classic instance of imperial-humanitarianism par excellence through a selection of empirically rich essays collectively reiterating the centrality of the mission civilisatrice as, “the sole ideology of British colonialism in India and elsewhere in the world, except in the white-settler colonies.” (24) What is intellectually stimulating is the variety that this volume offers— ways in which individual essays bring into light a new body of archival sources as well as the manner in which each essay offers a specific geographical-cultural episode of a larger pan-Indian narrative around the colonial “civilizing mission.” Also productive is the way in which these essays have been brought together to document the chronological unfolding and articulation of this mission. For example, in the introductory essay to the section titled, “Trial and Error,” Michael Mann discusses some of the juridical reforms undertaken by the British in Bengal between 1772–93 — when “civilizing” became a legal codeword to control the powers of the “Oriental despot” (32) in an attempt to consolidate once and for all the legal framework of Bengal that would be vital to the future colonial administration. What is interesting to note, as Mann points out, is the way some of the discourses and concepts around “improvement” in Bengal, India or elsewhere in the British colonies were developing contemporaneously with the Enlightenment discourses in 18th century Britain. These discourses were therefore far from being complete and definitive.[2] The second and third sections, “Ordering and Modernizing” and “Body and Mind,” trace the more concrete phase in the program around the “civilizing mission.” In her essay, Melitta Waligora stresses the need to make “caste” an object of historiography since it was one of the central objects of oriental knowledge that in turn gave a material and moral justification to the British “civilizing mission.” She shows how the trajectory of knowing, naming, and ordering castes changed over time. Similarly, in explicating how the “civilizing mission” was an embodied ideology that found expression in the potential upliftment of Indian bodies and souls, James Mills and Mridula Ramanna show respectively (through practices around asylums and preventive medicine) that here as well, the “civilizing mission” was in reality a set of undertakings that would at best grant to the colonizers what Jacques Donzelot in a different context has termed, “supervised freedom” — freedom that had to be forever policed.[3...

Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu

AbstractThe issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is far from simple. The concept of oriental despotism allowed early-modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds which were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress, but political and moral. However, it would be incorrect to treat this as a pure European fantasy based on the uncritical application of a category inherited from Aristotle, because both the concept and its range of application were often hotly contested. By assessing the way travel accounts helped transform the concept from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this article argues that oriental despotism was not a mental scheme that blinded Europeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather a compelling tool for interpreting information gathered about the Orient, one which served a common intellectual purpose despite important differences of opinion in Europe about the nature of royal power.

In Russia a Democracy and Does it Matter?

cratic and free market a country than not and that since 2000, despite troubling restrictions on the media and political parties, Russia has become democratic.1 These views, it must be said, are singularly opposed to that of most experts, many of whom discern instead what Gordon Hahn calls stealth authoritarianism or some thing resembling it.2 That said, are Powell's and other similar claims true, and does it really mat ter to U.S. policy one way or another? The fact that we must revisit these questions again illus trates the lamentable but deeply rooted tendency of U.S. experts and administrations to evaluate Russia either on the basis of personal relations among leaders or on the basis of superficialities rather than deeper observation, particularly one informed by Russian history. Such superficialities-for example, the trans position of statistical similarities between Mex ico, Turkey, and Russia and the assertion of structural congruence among them on this dubi ous basis-reflect a longstanding and often self serving fallacy in foreign studies of Russia. This fallacy assumes that what looks like Western forms and relationships (for example, economic statistics) indicates that Russia has finally become more like us. Supposedly, five good years of economic growth mean that Russia is becoming a capitalistic and genuine mar ket economy. Actually, one constant factor of Russian history has been Russian rulers' quite successful adaptation of Western democratic institutions and practices for purposes that are fundamentally illiberal and antidemocratic. As the Russian dissident Boris Kagarlitsky observes, because of the differences between Russia and Western states and societies, West ern institutions, transposed into Russia, become mere facades for an enduring political system nearly akin to what classical writers termed oriental despotism.3 Consequently, the social roots that nourish Western practices, discourse, and institutions cannot be sustained in Russia and become something quite unrec ognizable.

Liberal Despotism: Population Planning, Subjectivity, and Government in Contemporary China

My title, Liberal Despotism, is a trope for oriental despotism. The image of oriental is a familiar one. As Hegel writes of oriental forms of government, the nations of the East knew only that one is free--that is, the sovereign. All others are subjects of sovereign power who must be governed through force and coercion. The hallmark of in this instance is that one is governed by others and not by oneself. The subject is at the mercy of caprice and not self-will. Whether for reasons of geography, culture, race, or a combination thereof, these subjects are considered to be either lacking the qualities for the practice of freedom or subject to oppression that inhibits the realization of that freedom. Indeed, it is possible that both situations may coexist; that is, due to oppression a subject may have no possible recourse to develop the capacity for freedom, but given appropriate opportunity, education, and training is nonetheless capable of becoming free (that is, an autonomous and rational individual) at some later point in time. Yet the notion of despotism appears oxymoronic. How can a doctrine that claims to uphold individual liberty and freedom possibly be construed as despotic? Recent studies that take as their point of departure Michel Foucault's notion of have argued that this duality (that is, the bifurcation of the population into subjects who govern themselves and those who are governed by others) within liberal reasoning is neither contradictory nor hypocritical. (1) Rather, they argue that the process of compartmentalizing populations into those that are expected to govern themselves and those that require some form of tutelage or coercion is constitutive of liberal reasoning itself. This article examines how governmentality studies and recent analyses of authoritarian modes of government both within liberal and nonliberal societies might relate to the study of the arts of government in contemporary China. The article takes as its primary focus of analysis recent developments in China's population-planning program. This program is an exemplary instance of the complexities of government and subjectivity in China insofar as it highlights how important aspects of the relationship between the state and the population have been conceived within Chinese governmental reasoning during the Maoist and Dengist eras and how, in the new circumstances of the market economy, that relationship is undergoing a process of conceptual and institutional reconfiguration. Since the early 1980s, the Chinese state itself has accorded the population-planning program the status of a fundamental state policy (jiben guoce) and regards the tasks of the program as crucial to the overall realization of development strategy for China. Given also that it touches upon the reproductive and familial lives of almost every subject in China, the population-planning program is well worthy of consideration as an instance of how Chinese subjects are both governed and resist being governed in the contemporary period. Furthermore, as the policy emphasis is explicitly placed upon rural China, the population-planning campaign also offers an opportunity to examine the crucial question of party/people relations (dangqun guanxi), (2) which goes to the heart of government concerns with maintaining social stability. The population-planning program has been the subject of much controversy primarily because it is seen as an imposition of state will upon target subjects without their consent. In so doing, critics of the population policy would seem to concur with Hegel's assessment that the central problem in this instance is the absence of self-determination upon the part of the target subject. The use of the term subject in this article carries two connotations. The first is the subject in the sense of one who is under the dominion or rule of a sovereign. (3) The second refers to the self-determining subject. …

Coffeehouses, Guilds and Oriental Despotism. Government and Civil Society in Late 17th to Early 18th Century Istanbul and Isfahan, and as seen from Paris and London

Montesquieu popularized the notion of Oriental Despotism as the type of government pertaining to a lawless society based on the equality of subjects in fear and powerlessness. It typified Europe's Other in the age of absolutism. This essay does not examine the idea of total despotic power directly but rather the assumption of the absence of law and its guarantee of a sphere of civil autonomy and agency which will anachronistically be called “civil society”. While substantiating the emergence of a public sphere around coffeehouses, the growth of guilds on the basis of customary law and the development of educational and philanthropic endowments on the basis of the law of waqf, we also take the opportunity to compare the civic and educational institutions of the Ottoman and Safavid empires in the 17th and early 18th centuries.