일차 세계대전 직후 중국 관념 철학자들의 사회주의 재해석과 그 한계 - 빈곤의 현실과 역사유물론의 역설 -

Abstract

This article explores the idealist philosophy of socialism that Liang Qichao, Zhang Dongsun, and Zhang Junmai formulated in the aftermath of the First World War. These Chinese philosophers believed that the global catastrophe of the First World War resulted significantly from the moral bankruptcy of the modern Western civilization of capitalism. They thought that this capitalist civilization was founded on the basis of the positivist philosophy that explains the world, including human beings, in accordance with the inevitable laws of natural movements, resulting in the loss of morality as any important issue of consideration in philosophy. As they shared this critique of positivism with western thinkers, they joined the global revolt against positivism and tried to construct an alternative vision of the world, particularly a vision of socialism that they saw as a sign of the retrieval of morality after the war. In opposition to the Marxist materialist conception of history that was then interpreted mainly as the theory of economic determinism in China, Liang and the two Zhangs tried to reinterpret the meaning of socialism with a special stress on free human will as a motivating force for social change. While suggesting morality, ethics, and culture as important issues in a socialist movement, they constructed an alternative vision of socialism as a global-historical project to build a morally desirable future, rather than as an inevitable consequence of natural movement of history.<BR> While concentrating on critiques of the moral bankruptcy of capitalism, however, their idealist theory of socialism neglected to acknowledge the contradictions imbedded in the social relations of production under capitalism. As they believed that China should solve the problem of poverty that resulted from the lack of productive force to save the Chinese people, they tended to stress the necessity of improving China’s productive force without any consideration of the relations of production or class relations. During the so-called socialist debate, they themselves interpreted historical materialism as an evolutionary theory of economic development and appropriated this revolutionary theory to support their advocacy for capitalist development in China as a precondition for genuine socialism. In doing so, these philosophers themselves fell in a trap of “inevitability” (the positivist logic that they aimed to overcome until one year ago) - not the inevitability of socialism but the inevitability of capitalism -. By endorsing the necessity of capitalist development and relegating socialism to the future, they neglected to address any problems in the relations of production and, because of their failure to address social injustice and unfairness, their idealist theory lost any transformative significance.