The Analects and Forms of Governance

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon the political dimension of the Analects, especially its view of governance. This dimension has been ignored in the literature, but I argue that this may have been the central focus of the Analects and early Confucianism. In fact, the political issues central to them are comparable to those in Western modernity, and thus we can take the Analects and early Confucianism as addressing issues of modernity. Two central issues brought about by China’s early modernity are the search for a new social bond in a society of strangers, and for a new structure and selection mechanism of the ruling class which was to replace the collapsing hierarchy of hereditary nobility in feudalism. Confucius introduced the idea of humanity as an answer to the former, offering a new glue between rulers and their subjects and basing the legitimacy of the sovereign on the service to the people, and he introduced meritocratic hierarchy that is based upon some forms of equality and upward mobility as an answer to the latter. The Confucian ideal regime that combines meritocracy elements with popular ones is different from contemporary liberal democracy, and can address some fundamental problems in contemporary politics better than the latter.