ABSTRACT
Classical Greece and Rome, India, and China generated strikingly parallel ways of thinking about what it meant to live a virtuous life. While reality often fell short of the ideal, these ideals marked a breakthrough to a conversation about what was true for human beings as such, rather than just the customs of one or another place. These cultures’ images of political order not strictly bound by territory were also similar in important ways. This chapter conceptualises a ‘first-order universalism’.
