Title：Non-Political Politics: From Nature to Religion to Heritage
Speaker：Michael Bell ( Chair and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology, university of wisconsin-madison)
Chair：John Chung-En Liu（Professor of Sociology, NTU）
Time：October 30, 2025 (Thu.) 12:30–14:00
Venue：Department of Sociology and Social Work R319
About the Speech
Why do we find it so hard to talk with each other about our differences? Part of the trouble is an old intellectual habit we often use to shore up our positions and shut down debate, basing our contentions in what we claim is external to us. In over 30 years of work, Professor Bell has traced how we commonly rely on what he has come to term non-political politics, claiming to locate our identities and motivations in the externals of nature, the divine, and the embodied heritage we gain from the past. In Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village (Chicago, 1994) he explored our reliance on what he terms the natural conscience we believe to be free of the political. In City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What is Right (Princeton, 2018), he showed how the natural conscience extends into notions of the divine, and how both arise in the late Iron Age, associated with a great expansion of bourgeois life. And in his forthcoming book Our Blood: The Social Experience of Heritas (Chicago, 2026), he traces such externalization of the moral into what he terms heritas, or embodied heritage. With this talk, Professor Bell will be offering a synthesis, connecting these analytic threads together and showing their continued power, for good and ill, in the tapestry of contemporary life.
