This dissertation is an account of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) tradition of locating the cause of certain natural anomalies in human political action and interpreting such anomalies as being associated with disruption and collapse. A significant component of Han dynasty political philosophy was expressed in the form of anomaly discourse, as were many of the important critical views on politics and history held by the preeminent scholars and thinkers of the age. Without developing an understanding of Han anomaly discourse, it is impossible to gain a comprehensive view of Han political philosophy or to understand the arguments that Han thinkers applied to basic questions like “What is a virtuous ruler?”, “What constitutes a successful or failing state?”, and “Is there such a thing as effective statecraft?” Here the “Wuxing zhi” 五行志 (“Treatise of the Five Elements”) chapter of the Han shu 漢書 (“Documents of the Han”) serves as a foundational source for understanding the concepts and terminology of this important trend in Han intellectual life. The “Wuxing zhi” is essentially a catalogue of some four hundred documented anomalous events. In this text, Eastern Han (25-220 C.E.) scholar Ban Gu 班固 (ca. 32-92 C.E.) presented a complicated theoretical apparatus which drew from a collective body of textual works and commentaries ascribed to multiple figures in the Western Han (206 B.C.E.-9 C.E.) tradition of anomaly discourse. Chapters 1 and 2 map the conceptual structure of the “Wuxing zhi.” Chapter 3 studies how certain chapters in Eastern Han scholar Wang Chong’s 王充 (27-c. 97 C.E.) Lun heng 論衡 (“Arguments in the Balance”) engage and discuss ideas embedded in the terms yao 妖, yi 異, and guai 怪, also found in the “Wuxing zhi.” Chapter 4 uses Ban Gu’s biographical accounts of the lives and scholarly work of Liu Xiang 劉向 (77-c. 6 B.C.E.) and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 195-ca. 115 B.C.E.) and records of memorials submitted by them to the Han court to contextualize and further reconstruct the development of analytical approaches to historical anomalies in the Eastern and Western Han periods. Chapter 5 argues that just as Liu Xiang adopted the taxonomy of the Wuxing zhuan 五行傳 (“Five Elements Tradition”) commentary on the “Hong fan” 洪範 (“Great Plan”) to analyze history, Dong Zhongshu’s views were heavily informed by the hermeneutical system and terminology of the Gongyang 公羊 commentary on the Chunqiu 春秋 (“Springs and Autumns”). Thus, while historical study was the dominant preoccupation of Han anomaly discourse and the primary mode through which it sought to ground its political-philosophical claims, the analytical approaches developed in the tradition to observe the historical record came about as the absorption of trends in Western Han and Warring States (468-221 B.C.E.) hermeneutic scholasticism.