Disciplining the National Essence

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs the key elements of Liu Shipei's reinvention of ancient China's intellectual history in Euro-American terms and analyzes the violent conceptual transformations that this effort required and that foreshadowed many reformulations of the histories of Chinese science and thought published throughout the Republican period. In his preanarchist phase, between 1903 and 1907, Liu applied these abilities in a series of books and articles devoted entirely or in part to a reinterpretation of ancient China's intellectual heritage. The omission of a separate category for history, for instance, may have been due to Liu's already mentioned conviction that the Classics were all histories. Liu's introduction to the Prolegomenon to a History of Sociology is an example of a much less smooth reconciliation between classical Chinese scholarship and a modern European discipline. One final aspect of the Prolegomena is highlighted in the chapter. Keywords: ancient China's intellectual heritage; ancient China's intellectual history; Chinese science; Euro-American; history of sociology; Liu Shipei; violent conceptual transformations