Liu Bei, Plato et al. on Kingship: A Microhistory of Seventeenth-Century Globalization and Political Thought

Abstract

This paper is a microhistory of a seventeenth-century approach to global political thought, one that seeks to theorize globally shared conditions beyond the East/West divide. It focuses on the Spanish thinker Domingo Fernández Navarrete, who, after his global travels, offered a unique account of a king's dual pains by comparing Liu Bei, a Chinese emperor, to Plato, Seneca, Aquinas, etc. It contends that Navarrete's embodied theory of kingship deepens the Thomist conception of the body politic and forms a part of the global re-reading of Liu Bei. In so doing, this paper also seeks to clarify different senses of globality and further the dialogue between global history and comparative political theory.