University of Wisconsin–Madison
Viren Murthy

Viren Murthy

Professor of History

vmurthy2@wisc.edu

608.263.1627

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Office: 3225 Levy Hall
Office Hours: TBA

Viren Murthy

My work probes the historical conditions for the possibility of philosophy and politics in the modern world and in East Asia in particular. I am generally interested in the attempts of East Asian intellectuals to resist modernity through reviving premodern philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism. My first book, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness, shows how in early 20th century China, Zhang Taiyan, drew on Consciousness-Only (Yogācāra) Buddhism to formulate a theory of revolution. In particular, the book explains how this seemingly ancient body of knowledge is reformulated as China was incorporated into the global capitalist system of nation-states.
In June 2022, I published The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future (Routledge), which is a collection of essays that explore how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilize traditional texts to create a better future. They produce what I call “back to the future” narratives, in which they conjure the past to envision a world beyond global capitalism. These narratives are nationalistic but unlike in England and the United States, this nationalism is connected to anti-imperialism and resistance to global inequality. I suggest that such inequality also divides Europe, which enables comparisons between Germany and Asian nations, all of whom saw themselves as being marginalized.
My third monograph Pan-Asianism and Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2023) shows how intellectuals in China and Japan promoted unity among weak Asian nations to resist Western domination. To promote such unity, pan-Asianists struggled against Eurocentric visions of history articulated by philosophers such as Hegel, who argued that the Orient had to follow the West. At the same time, these thinkers appropriated Hegel’s criticisms of abstract individualism. I contend that Japanese and Chinese pan-Asianists drew on elements of both Asian and Western culture to posit a world beyond narrow self-interest, capitalism, and imperialism. The legacy of pan-Asianism is complex given that Japan employed this ideology to promote imperialism. Consequently, postwar Japanese pan-Asianists had to confront the problem of war memory. Postwar pan-Asianists tried to show that a healthy transnationalism was both possible and necessary to struggle against Western imperialism.
My present project concerns how East Asian intellectuals drew on G.W.F Hegel to uncover logics to Chinese and Japanese history, which culminate in a new world order inspired by their respective cultures.
In addition to the above projects connected to East Asia, I am also involved in a project on South Indian Classical Music and Tamil Identity, which also explores issues of how traditions have been reconstituted by capitalist modernity.
I have also been interested in how Marxists in (primarily in the North Atlantic) have drawn on Jewish Messianism to confront capitalist modernity.

Education

Ph.D., University of Chicago
M.A., University of Hawaii at Manoa
B.A., Lake Forest College

Books

The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future

Viren Murthy. The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future. Routledge, 2022.

Drawing on a wide range of texts and using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume shows how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilized the past to create a better future. It is especially significant today given a world where, amidst tensions within Asia and the rise of China, East Asian intellectuals and governments constantly find new political meanings in their traditions. The essays illuminate how throughout Chinese and Japanese history, thinkers constantly weaved together nationalism, internationalism, and a politics of time. This volume explores a broad range of subjects such as premodern and early modern attempts to conjure a politics of Confucianism, twentieth-century Japanese Marxist interpretations of Buddhism, and Japanese and Chinese endeavors to imagine a new world order. In sum, this book shows us why understanding East Asian pasts are essential to making sense of ideological trends in contemporary China and Japan. For example, without understanding Confucianism and how modern intellectuals in China grappled with this body of thought, we would be unable to make sense of the Chinese government’s current promotion of the Chinese classics. This book will interest students and scholars of political science, history, Asian studies, sociology, and philosophy.

Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution

Viren Murthy. Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution. The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In this book, Viren Murthy offers an intellectual history of the writings of theorists, intellectuals, and activists—spanning leftist, conservative, and right-wing thinkers—who proposed new ways of thinking about Asia in their own historical and political contexts. Tracing pan-Asianist discourse across the twentieth century, Murthy reveals a stronger tradition of resistance and alternative visions than the contemporary discourse on pan-Asianism would suggest. At the heart of pan-Asianist thinking, Murthy shows, were the notions of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the “advanced world” on equal terms—an idea that grew to include non-Asian countries into the global community of Asian nations. But pan-Asianists also had larger aims, imagining a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. The fact that the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding of its roots, history, and potential.

Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy

Viren Murthy (Co-editor), Fabian Schäfer (Co-editor), and Maz Ward (Co-editor). Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy. Brill, 2017.

Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship between philosophy, politics and capitalism by rethinking Kyoto School philosophy in relation to history. The Kyoto School was an influential group of Japanese philosophers loosely related to Kyoto Imperial University’s philosophy department, including such diverse thinkers as Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nakai Masakazu and Tosaka Jun. Confronting Capital and Empire presents a new perspective on the Kyoto School by bringing the school into dialogue with Marx and the underlying questions of Marxist theory. The volume brings together essays that analyse Kyoto School thinkers through a Marxian and/or critical theoretical perspective, asking: in what ways did Kyoto School thinkers engage with their historical moment? What were the political possibilities immanent in their thought? And how does Kyoto School philosophy speak to the pressing historical and political questions of our own moment?

East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories

Viren Murthy (Co-editor), and Joyce C.H. Liu (Co-editor). East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

In this volume, leading scholars from around the world suggest that radical ideologies have shaped complex historical processes in East Asia by examining how intellectuals and activists interpreted, rethought and criticized Marxism in East Asia. The contributors to this volume ask how we can use Marxism to understand East Asia in a global capitalist world, and where the problems that Marxism highlighted, including imperialism, domination and inequality, are increasingly prevalent. The volume draws on various disciplines to reinterpret Marx, and shed light on the complex dynamics of global capitalism in various historical/national contexts. The distinguished contributors illuminate, rethink and make accessible highly complex Marxist concepts, such as the question of class contradiction, the temporalities of capitalism, real and formal subsumption, relative surplus value and the commodity form, the question of class and the proletariat. At a time when people around the world are struggling to cope with the crises of global capitalism, this volume on regional responses to capitalism is especially welcome. It will be of interest to students and scholars of East Asian studies, social and political theory, sociology and globalization studies.

A Companion to Global Historical Thought

Viren Murthy (Co-editor), Andrew Sartori (Co-editor), and Prasenjit Duara (Co-editor). A Companion to Global Historical Thought. Wiley, 2014.

A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an in-depth overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, across the world, directly addressing the issues of historical thought in a globalized context. Provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, across the world, through essays written by a team of leading international scholars Complements the Companion to Western Historical Thought, placing non-Western perspectives on historiography at the center of the discussion Explores the different historical traditions that have shaped the discipline, and the challenges posed by modernity and globalization

The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia

Viren Murthy. The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia. Brill, 2014.

Edited by: Viren Murthy, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Axel Schneider, University of Göttingen The papers collected in this volume congeal around a debate about the ways and extent of the dominance of linear time and progressive history and the concomitant delineation of the nation in Chinese and Japanese historiography. As China and Japan entered the global capitalist system of nation states, the Chinese and Japanese regimes implemented a number of reforms, which resulted in transformations that affected everyday experience. In the face of imperialism and the perceived threat of being split up, the Meiji and late Qing governments radically reoriented policies in order to become wealthy and powerful in the global arena. People not only began to experience time and space in new ways, but elites also were increasingly exposed to Western theories of history and concepts of nationhood, which became dominant. These changes contributed to the production of new types of historical consciousness and collective identity. The essays in this volume each provide a perspective on the complex ways in which imagining national and regional identity in East Asia were and continue to be enmeshed with visions of time and history. This book should be of interest to all those who are interested in nationalism, modernity in China and Japan, global capitalism and the politics of time.

The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness

Viren Murthy. The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness. Brill, 2011.

Zhang Taiyan (1868-1936) is famous for being one of the first thinkers in China to promote revolution in the early twentieth century. Scholars have addressed Zhang’s revolutionary and nationalist thought, but until this work there has not been any sustained engagement with Zhang’s Buddhist writings which aimed to understand and criticize the world from the perspective of consciousness. These philosophical works are significant because they exemplify how, as Chinese intellectuals entered the global capitalist world, they constantly tried to find resources to create an alternative. As the author argues in the conclusion, this desire to create an alternative to capitalism remained throughout twentieth century China and continues today in the works of critical intellectuals such as Wang Hui. Thus this work is important not only to understand our past, but to hope for a better future.

Videos & Podcasts

Selected Publications

Articles in Edited Volumes

  • “Raga and the Problem of Ownership: Knowledge and Culture in Carnatic Music”, co-
    authored with Annapurna Mamidipudi, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi and Marius Buning eds., Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property, Cambridge:
    MIT Press, 2023, 121-152.

  • “Takeuchi Yoshimi and Deweyan Democracy in Postwar Japan”, in Roger T. Ames,
    Yajun Chen and Peter D. Herschock eds., Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism:
    Resources for a New Geopolitics of Interdependence, Honolulu: University of Hawai Press,
    2021, 157-190.

  • “Takeuchi Yoshimi and the Problem of Tenkō” in Irene Hayter, George T. Sipos and
    Mark Williams eds., Tenkō in Transwar Japan: Culture, Politics, History, London:
    Routledge University Press, 2021, 65-84.

  • “Rethinking Pan-Asianism through Zhang Taiyan: India as Method” in Tansen Sen and
    Brian Tsui eds, Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting India and China, 1911-1949, Oxford:
    Oxford University Press, 2021, 94-128.

Articles in Journals

  • “Rescuing Hegel from Eurocentrism: Oriental Reconstructions of Hegel’s Orient”,
    forthcoming in Hegel Bulletin, Cambridge, 2024.

  • “Doubt, Despair and the Conditions of Left-Hegelian Critical Theory”, Journal of Labor
    and Society, May, 2023.

  • “Rethinking Materialism and Asia: Miki Kiyoshi and Hiromatsu Wataru”, International
    Journal of Asian Studies, 2022, 1-17.

  • “Beyond Particularity and Universality: Moishe Postone and the Possibilities of Jewish
    Marxism,” Jewish Social Studies, Feb., 2020, 127-167.

  • “Conjuring Hope Out of Leftist Melancholy: Thinking Through Recent Scholarship on
    Neo-liberalism and the Legacy of Socialism,” Journal of Labor and Society, Vol. 21.2, 2018,
    231-253.

Invited Talks & Research Presentations

  • July, 18, 2023, “Takeuchi, Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution,”

    Heidelberg University, Germany.
  • July, 11, 2023, “Periodizing Chinese and Japanese Modernity via Hegelian Master

    Narratives”, University of Göttingen, Germany.
  • July, 10, 2023, “Imagining Global Governance: Rethinking Chinese Tianxia Philosophy in

    Light of Marxism and Interwar Japan”, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.
  • June 29, 2023, “Takeuchi Pan-Asianismus und das Erbe der Chinesischen Revolution,

    Hamburg University, Germany.
  • June 15, 2023, “Hegelian Master Narratives and East Asian Modernity”, Heidelberg,

    Worldmaking Conference, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
  • January 4, 2023, “Rethinking Chinese and Indian Nationalism”, Indian Institute of

    Science, Bangalore, India.
  • January 3, 2023, “The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future”, the

    Paraspar Lecture an the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
  • November 10, 2022, “Wang Hui: Contemporary Pan-Asianist?”, Political Theory

    Workshop, University of Pennsylvania.

Advisor To

History Courses