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.