Speaker: David Pickus, Associate Professor.
Title: Violence and Political Decay: The Hebrew Bible, King David and Lessons for Today
Moderator: Daniel A. Bell, Dean at the School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University.
Host: School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University.
Date and place: Jun 13th, 2018 (19:00), Room No: E111, Zhensheng Courtyard.
Bio of Speaker:
David Pickus is an associate professor at the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, specialising in Global Studies. Previously, he was an associate professor at the Department of History of Renmin University, China and an honors faculty fellow and a principal lecturer at Arizona State University. He has been invited to many academic conferences and lectures in Europe, China and Vietnam etc. and served as consultant and participant in the TV documentary A History of God. He mastered many languages such as German, Serbian, Hebrew, Mandarin (Chinese), Indonesian, Italian and French etc. He has published the book Dying with an Enlightening Fall: Poland in the Eyes of German Intellectuals, 1764-1800 and more than 20 papers.
Content:
The important job of any political institution is to contain the use of violence in society and stop the spread of hostile and aggressive behaviour. However, due change in society the institutions that worked well in the past may not be effective in the present, and we must reflect on our experience in order to devise better solutions. This lecture argues that there is an impressive example from ancient Western history, namely the story of David in the Hebrew Bible, in order to learn how earlier societies coped with a crisis of political decay. The Speaker argued that even though this ancient text was not written to provide lessons for today, we can, in fact, use it to deepen our understanding of political choice and behaviour. He also used this case to explain why the humanistic study of a classic text is an important and valuable component of education about government and administration.
