The Book of Politics

“Reading The Book of Politics is an adventure. Michael Dutton’s intellectual omnivorousness is exuberantly and unapologetically on display here. I cannot think of another author who is equally at home explicating Schmitt, Mao, and Zhuangzi and rounding up many such unusual suspects into a wildly inventive and deeply penetrating meditation on the modern condition.” - Haiyan Lee, author of A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

“We are all on the planet experiencing the closing of Westernization and the opening of ‘dewesternization’ and decoloniality demanding a radical departure from Western disciplinary regulation and management of intersubjective relations. Michael Dutton’s The Book of Politics assertively takes up the challenge. Dutton takes China as a method, reverting Orientalism and its continuity in area studies. He finds in art and literature the vital affective energy that allows him to depart from the measurement of reality demanded by the myth of (social) sciences. The arguments may, in his own words, be 'hard to swallow’ which is a defiant invitation to engage with this splendid book.” - Walter Mignolo, author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations

"Theoretical, poetic and impassioned, this book decries the decay of liberal democracy under neoliberal capitalism in search of political energy for social change. It makes an inspirational read and will appeal to students and scholars in all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences." - Ban Wang, The China Quarterly

"Like all great books, this one raises endless questions. . . . There is urgent value in the book’s refusal to condemn politics or to dissolve the political as a practice into a vague sociality." - Andrew Pendakis, Critical Inquiry