This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions. This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history.

About the Author
Tao Jiang teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His research interests include pre-Qin classical Chinese philosophy, Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, and cross-cultural philosophy. He is the author of Contexts and Dialogue: Yogacara Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006) and the co-editor of The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China (Routledge, 2013). He is chair of Religion Department and director of Center for Chinese Studies at Rutgers. Jiang co-chairs the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia University as well as the Buddhist Philosophy Unit at the American Academy of Religion. He serves on the editorial boards of several leading Asian and comparative philosophy journals.

Reviews
Jiang always succeeds in providing interesting examples to make his point. It will attract nonacademic but well-informed readers as well as intelligent undergraduates who love Chinese history. It should be read by graduate students who intend to become specialists in Chinese philosophy and pre-imperial China. More important, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China promises to be a valuable resource for those teaching courses that cover to various degrees pre-imperial Chinese thought, politics, and culture at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Instructors teaching survey courses on China or East Asia can refer to the basic information and interesting anecdotes contained in the book to introduce essential ancient Chinese texts and their main ideas. * Hung-Yok Ip, Oregon State University, H-Buddhism *
A distinct feature of this book is synthesizing Sinological studies into its philosophical interpretation. The author acutely recognizes the regretful gap between Sinology and the study of Chinese philosophy. In this book, the comprehensive Sinological references and intimate engagements with contemporary scholarship (particularly in English) of Chinese philosophy are admirable. * Fan He, Dao *
A grand and well argued history of early Chinese philosophy. * Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School *
In this very important book, Tao Jiang provides a dynamic model of the development of moral political philosophy in early China (ca. 551Ac221 BCE), which embodies a new approach to thinking about freedom in complicated socio-political realities. It convincingly demonstrates that thinkers of early China are important for philosophical studies today not only because they cover the themes that remain fundamental in contemporary debates but also because their argumentations came out of intellectual exchanges that were no less robust than their 'Western' counterparts. * British Journal for the History of Philosophy *
Jiang's book as a whole is a brilliant work on early Chinese philosophy that reflects on big issues from fresh perspectives. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in pre-Qin thoughts. * Zemian Zheng, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (JCP) *
Tao Jiang has provided a coherent and sweeping narrative of the development of moral and political philosophy in the classical period of Chinese philosophy. He integrates many plausible insights gleaned from sinology and philosophy to argue provocatively that the classical period can be understood in terms of a struggle to deal with conflicts between the values of humaneness (pertaining to the personal and familial realms) and of justice (pertaining to the political realm). This book is highly recommended both to specialists and to those with a more general interest in Chinese moral and political philosophy. * David Wong, Duke University *
Tao Jiang in this hugely intelligent monograph provides his readers with an interpretive context twice. First, his project of rehearsing the story of the origins of Chinese moral-political philosophy is located within a state-of-the-art account of the politics of the Western academy and the best efforts of its Sinologists and philosophers to make sense of the complex textual narrative of pre-Qin China in all of its parts. Again, appealing to a cluster of seminal themes-humaneness, justice, and personal freedom-he recounts the way in which different philosophical voices advocated for their own disparate and competing models of structuring and construing personal, familial, and political relations within the overarching context of what are fundamentally different valorizations of the notion of Heaven. * Roger T. Ames, Peking University *
Jiang ranges over the entire foundational period of Chinese philosophy with effortless erudition, unfailing intellectual sympathy, and, above all, a brilliantly economical conception that shines a uniquely revealing and integrating light on all the major figures and schools of thought. The result is that rare kind of book which has the potential to change the way Chinese philosophy is viewed and practiced, and has all the scholarly and philosophical attributes that should make it a classic in due course. * Jiwei Ci, The University of Hong Kong, and author of Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis *
Readers will find here a thought-provoking and original way of explaining the formation of pre-Qin moral-political thought. * Jia Qiao, Religious Studies Review *
Readers will find here a thought-provoking and original way of explaining the formation of pre-Qin moral-political thought. * Jia Qiao, Religious Studies Review *


Awards
Winner of Honorable Mention, 2023 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize on Pre-1900 China.



Book Information
ISBN 9780197611364
Author Tao Jiang
Format Paperback
Page Count 536
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 771g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 231mm * 33mm