the Manchester Historian

Legalism has had a somewhat celebrated history given its place in the lineages of pre-Han philosophy. The ideas espoused by the paradigmatic legalists of the Qin dynasty such as Shang Yang (390-338) and Han Fei (280-233) were the subject of vitriolic attack by the Confucian orientated scholars of the Han era. Lu Jia (d.170 BC), for instance, saw the short-lived Qin dynasty’s (221-206) adherence to these figure’s harsh legalism as the reason for its collapse and a model of what not to be followed

The state of Israel was founded in 1948 to provide a home for a people who had not only suffered centuries of oppression, but had just survived one of the worst genocides in history. It is no surprise then, that at the core of Israeli identity is an unresolved sense of trauma, in particular, Holocaust-induced trauma. Israeli identity has formed around two, at times contradictory, responses to this trauma. On the one hand, having witnessed the unimaginable horrors of the genocide, first generation Israelis felt an innate duty to uphold the highest moral standards

On May 28th 1453, when the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI entered the “Church of the Divine Wisdom”, Constantinople was under siege. Perhaps the emperor knelt to pray before the Apse Mosaic of the Virgin and Child. Looking up at the gloriously gilded icon of one of Christianity’s most famous images – a young mother sitting on a throne holding a child upon her lap; the saviour of mankind.

Mao was deeply Marxist in his convictions but he heavily sinified Marx’s theory, applying it to the Chinese situation and adapting it from a European context. Born out of the Marxist theory of scientific inquiry called dialectical materialism, Mao ‘sinified’ his own political actions according to this framework.

There are few bigger questions than that of the meaning of life. Why do we exist, possess aspiration, and abide by certain ethics? For centuries, the answers to these questions have been provided by something many now regard as simplistic and irrational: religion