Early Confucian Political Philosophy and Its Contemporary Relevance

Abstract

In this chapter, I will discuss the political aspect of early Confucian philosophy. The texts I will focus upon are the so-called “Four Books,” i.e., the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean, which can be considered forming a coherent whole. In the first section, I will argue that the political aspect should be taken as the key concern of early Confucians, and from the problems they were facing, that it is more justified to call them “modern” than classical thinkers in the Western sense. In the second section I will show how they answer some of the key questions of their times, especially the search for a new form of social glue, and how their answers can still be relevant to contemporary political issues. In the third section, I will show how they tackle other key issues of their time, especially the selection of the ruling class. In the fourth section, I will show how the regime proposed in the third section combined with ideas discussed in the second section can be (to a large extent) reconciled with, critical of, and constructive to contemporary liberal democratic regimes.