Confucian Iconoclasm: Textual Authority, Modern Confucianism, and the Politics of Antitradition in Republican China
Philippe Major
Dec 2023 · SUNY Press Open Access Book 3 · State University of New York Press
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About this ebook
Confucian Iconoclasm proposes a novel account of the emergence of modern Confucian philosophy in Republican China (1912–1949), challenging the historiographical paradigm that modern (or New) Confucianism sought to preserve traditions against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. Through close textual analyses of Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) and Xiong Shili's New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (1932), Philippe Major argues that the most successful modern Confucian texts of the Republican period were nearly as iconoclastic as the most radical of May Fourth intellectuals. Questioning the strict dichotomy between radicalism and conservatism that underscores most historical accounts of the period, Major shows that May Fourth and Confucian iconoclasts were engaged in a politics of antitradition aimed at the monopolization of intellectual commodities associated with universality, autonomy, and liberty. Understood as a counter-hegemonic strategy, Confucian iconoclasm emerges as an alternative iconoclastic project to that of May Fourth.
About the author
Philippe Major is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for European Global Studies of the University of Basel. He is the coeditor, with Thierry Meynard, of Dao Companion to Liang Shuming's Philosophy.
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