Introduction: The Bewilderment of Names and Images: East Asia in Western Social and Political Thought

Abstract

In these politically correct, ethically relativist and culturally confused times, the popular discourses of cinema or advertising that saturate us with images of sultry Singapore girls or untrustworthy Asiatics earn official and academic condemnation. It is further maintained, by those who detect a concealed prejudice in most European and North American academic comment on the Near and Far East, that a similar disposition has long informed the discourse of ‘western’ political and social thought. This work thus seeks to identify both how thinkers within the canon of Enlightenment and post Enlightenment European political thought have presented China and the Far East and the ideological implications, if any, of their various interpretations. How, we might wonder, did European thinkers of the Enlightenment and after categorize the Orient in its Chinese manifestation?

Whoever orients himself to the Orient feels incapable of formulating from the bewilderment of names and images that come to him a clear figure and a definite thought.

Paul Valery Orientem Versus 1938