Taisu Zhang: The Closest Thing to an Out-of-Body Experience

I am a professor of law and history. Specifically, I write and teach about comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and, to a lesser extent, contemporary Chinese law and politics.

I wake up around 7:30, drive the kids to school (when it is in-person during the pandemic), return home, exercise, spend the rest of the morning teaching or doing administrative tasks, and then make lunch. Generally I try to reserve my afternoons (my wife picks the kids up from school) and early evenings for research and writing but am not always successful at doing so. I make dinner around 6:30, spend part of the evening working on homework or other projects with the kids, and read quietly from around 9 to 11, after they are in bed, sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure.

At the moment, I’m mainly doing literature reviews for a couple of research projects on, respectively, the history of business corporations, the institutional implications of legal codification, and the possible connections between legality and political legitimacy. This means that most of my day-to-day reading consists of academic articles (most relatively recent) and books (some quite old) on these topics, such The Economic Institutions of Capitalism by Oliver Williamson, a book on “the politics of European codification,” and so on.

Although I’m fully bilingual (Chinese and English), I could read independently in English before I could do so in Chinese. The first book I remember reading alone was therefore The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, at age 6.

Page folder, although this often fills me with guilt.

Age 6, although not necessarily because of Mark Twain.

A: At age 16, probably Yu Yingshi’s Zhu Xi de Lishi Shijie [Zhu Xi’s Historical World]. As a 16-year-old, I was beginning to intellectually rebel against the standard nationalist history of China taught in Chinese high schools, but didn’t yet have a good book at hand that could truly clarify my doubts and scepticism. Yu’s book (which I read later in college) could likely have saved me quite a bit of mental anguish. If I could talk to my 25-year-old self, I would just tell him to go carefully read Max Weber’s Economy and Society another couple of times, and perhaps also Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Capital. At the time, I had unknowingly made some conceptual and theoretical missteps—especially about the so-called gesellschaft/gemeinschaft distinction—that made some of my early intellectual progression much more difficult than it should have been, and those books would have helped identify them.

At home, curling up on the living room sofa, the kids in bed, my wife sitting across from me with her own book, two mugs of citrus tea on the coffee table.

If you define my career as “law professor,” then I would say Economy and Society, HLA Hart’s The Concept of Law, and Bob Ellickson’s Order Without Law. These books lay out, perhaps more accessibly than most other classics in the field, the central intellectual tools—jurisprudential, sociological, and economic—that a good legal scholar should have, at least in my opinion.

How dead are we talking about, and what do we mean by author? If I could have my pick of anyone who has written a book in human history, and assuming that language was no obstacle, I’d go with Dai Zhen (Chinese philosopher, 18th Century), Liang Qichao (Chinese scholar, late 19th/early 20th Century), Weber, John Maynard Keynes, and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. These are not necessarily the intellectual figures I’m most fascinated by, but given the way they thought and wrote, I suspect there would be enough intellectual synergy in this group to generate some truly deep conversation.

Nico Krisch’s Beyond Constitutionalism. I bought a number of recent books on comparative constitutionalism last week, just because I felt I needed to keep up with that field a bit more aggressively. Krisch’s book, which thus far has been very interesting, was the last one.

Its ability to (sometimes) let me forget about myself, and instead immerse myself in someone else’s thought process and perspectives. Good reading is the closest thing to an out-of-body experience in my life.

In terms of personal enjoyment, two come to mind: Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration, and Luo Xin’s Cong Dadu dao Shangdu: Zai Gudao shang Chongxin Faxian Zhongguo [From Beijing to the Ruins of Xanadu: Rediscovering China on an Ancient Pathway]. While confined to a small segment of the United States during the pandemic, I’ve found myself becoming more interested in the experience of other intellectual exiles—in Behabib’s book, Jewish intellectuals—while also experiencing quite a bit of longing and nostalgia for travel in North China, which Luo’s book spoke to very powerfully.

I’ve always wanted to experience the events in the Three Body Problem trilogy.

“Everyone would benefit” is a very high standard. It’s hard to think of a book that truly meets that standard… War and Peace, maybe?

Probably… Plato’s Republic. It was my first serious engagement with philosophy, and at age 15-16, it completely changed the way that I thought about truth, normativity, and existence. I really did feel myself coming out of a cave. The first book one reads that has that kind of effect usually has the largest impact, as it did in my case. The Four Books (the Analects, the Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean, and The Great Learning) of the Confucian Canon, have likely had, cumulatively, a much stronger, more sustained long-term influence on my intellectual and moral life, but in terms of immediate impact, they didn’t produce the shock value of reading The Republic for the first time.

My father, who is a philosopher, has been telling me to read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for years (I read Tractatus in college, which was a brutal if ultimately rewarding experience). I’m thinking of finally doing so this summer. I also haven’t read as much of Judith Butler’s work as I’d like and may make some progress on that front soon.

Professional obligations aside, I’d like to spend more time reading poetry—by which I mean classical Chinese poetry. I recently had a beautiful collection of Ming and Qing Dynasty poetry (which I’m much less familiar with, compared to the more conventionally popular Tang and Song poetry) mailed to me by a friend, and look forward to digging in at the earliest convenience.