Huang Zongxi’s Confucian political moralism

Abstract

Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) is one of the most important Chinese political philosophers of the seventeenth century. Since the early twentieth century, many prominent interpretations have focused on reading him as a liberal or republican thinker. In this paper, I argue that the similarities that he shares with liberalism and republicanism are superficial at best and ill-construed at worst. Instead, his political philosophy is best read as a distinctive Confucian political moralism. The Confucian moral virtues not only define the conditions under which power is justified but also formulate the common good that the political seeks to express. Moreover, the moral nature of government is congruent with the moral-metaphysical structure of the world. My arguments are based on a close reading of his seminal work on politics and take into account his metaphysics and philosophy of history more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Confucianism
• political moralism
• Chinese political philosophy
• Huang Zongxi

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1st Oxford Symposium for Comparative Political Philosophy in 2019. I benefited greatly from the discussions at the symposium. I would like to thank Owen Flanagan, David Wong, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alexandra Oprea, Antong Liu, Songyao Ren, Shoufu Yin, Justin Tiwald, and Patrick Frierson for reading earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to the editors of BJHP and the two anonymous referees for comments that greatly improved the current version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is important to note that according to Bernard Williams, there are various kinds of political moralism, and some forms of political moralism seek to ground liberalism (3). I am using the term to harness the underlying moral features of Huang Zongxi’s political thought that is distinctively Confucian. The Confucian political moralism presented in Huang Zongxi’s work is nevertheless neither republican nor liberal.

2 De Bary translated Mingyi Daifang Lu as Waiting for the Dawn. However, the term ‘mingyi’ literally means ‘the light is being damaged’, which hints at the dire political situation that Huang Zongxi was in, and it is not clear that the title contains the imagery of the dawn. The translations of Huang Zongxi’s work in this paper are all my own with some references to De Bary’s translation of Mingyi. The original writings of Huang Zongxi are from Huang Zongxi Quanji

3 Huang Zongxi’s critiques of the Qing could be found in his poems Jiaoqi Shi 脚气诗 (2012).

4 The term ‘liberalism’ did not appear until early nineteenth century, and even ‘liberal’ meant different things until then, so any essentialist definitions that trace liberalism back into the eighteenth and even the seventeenth century might subject to the suspicion of anachronism.

5 De Bary translated the fa 法when it means the proper institutional designs as ‘Law’ and when it means the existing institutions, rules, and regulations as ‘law’.