Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom, by Tao Jiang

Abstract

One important question to ask when either writing or reviewing is: what is the ideal audience for this book? I would not recommend Tao Jiang’s Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China as an introductory book for non-specialists. Some of the best parts of this book are the opening accounts of the methodological disputes between Sinologists and philosophers (pp. 1-26), the discussions of how Chinese philosophy ties into issues of identity politics and ‘Orientalism’ (pp. 26-34), and the summary of recent archaeological discoveries and how they might inform our understanding of the received canon (pp. 97-111, 185-90). However, these sections will, in my opinion, be most interesting to those already conversant with Chinese philosophy. This book is also pitched to cognoscenti in its presentation of Chinese philosophers. For example, early in the book, Jiang informs the reader, ‘For Confucius, the Zhou [dynasty] institution of ritual and music represented the most legitimate and effective way of organizing the sociopolitical world’ (p. 54). However, the reader is not given an account of what ‘ritual’ refers to until later in the chapter. After quoting at length another author who gives a very abstract description of ritual, Jiang adds, ‘Simply put, in the ancient Chinese context, ritual was the general structure through which human beings interacted with each other as well as with the natural and the supernatural worlds’ (p. 68). But there is no specific example of what a ritual is until even later in the chapter (p. 73). My sense is that most general readers (and most philosophers) will need more examples of rituals and a clear explanation of why one might take ritual seriously as a tool of social control.