Circumstances, Politics, and History: Reading Notes on Wang Hui's "General Introduction" to The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought

The authors discuss the role that two key categories of Wang Hui's "General Introduction" to The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, namely, the pair "heavenly principles/axiomatic" and "temporal circumstances," play in opening a basic renovation of the investigation on the modern Chinese intellectuality. The article also examines the political and intellectual circumstances in which Wang Hui's work was conceived and developed, focusing on the passage from the 1960s to the 1990s and the exhaustion of the network of previous historical-political categories structuring the dichotomy of empire and nation-state.