The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights by Robert Elliott Allinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights by Robert Elliott Allinson Robert Cummings Neville (bio) The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights. By Robert Elliott Allinson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xxiv + 256. Paperback $30.95, ISBN 978-1-350-05986-3. This is a most unusual book. Mao Zedong was one of the most powerful people in the twentieth century. With Chiang Kai-shek he drove out the Japanese from China and then defeated Chiang in turn and carried out a major revolution over which he presided for many years. Everyone knows he was a poet and, like every Marxist leader, he was a philosopher of sorts. His Marxist philosophy evolved from his youth to old age, and he developed differences from the Soviet model of Marxism that were quite significant. He "converted" to Marxism in his twenties and identified himself with that movement until he died in his eighties. But what was his education in philosophy like before he encountered Marxism? Whereas Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had educations in Western philosophy before and as undergirding their Marxism, did Mao have an education in Chinese philosophy, or Western philosophy, before and undergirding his Marxism? This book sets out to answer these questions. Robert Elliott Allinson is a professional philosopher who went to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1977, just after Mao's death. (I lectured in that university that year and met Allinson with whom I had several congenial talks, and a walk around the top of a Hong Kong mountain). Allinson served on many committees and held visiting professorships in a number of Chinese universities before moving, in the present century, to Soka University in California where he now teaches. He is ideally placed to answer these questions, especially to an English-reading audience. Mao himself did not have a splendid early education. In 1909, at the age of fifteen, he attended the Dongshan Higher Primary School, a middle school that taught the Western as well as Chinese classics. He was devoted enough to Confucius that in 1919 he visited Confucius's birthplace in Shandong Province. Mao's college was the First Teachers Training School in Changsha where his major professor was a philosopher, Yang Changji. Professor Yang's daughter became Mao's first wife. Yang first introduced Mao to the German idealist philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen, whose large book on the history of Western philosophy Mao annotated copiously in 1917 and 1918. Mao followed Yang to Beijing and sat in [End Page 1] on his classes at Peking University. He was much involved in the revolutionary events around the time of the May 4th movement in 1919 and worked on making arrangements for the lectures of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. So it was very clear, before Mao converted to Marxism, that he was reasonably well read, at least according to the standards of his time, in both the Chinese and Western classical ideas. Except for brief mentions of other philosophers, Chinese and Western, Allinson found Mao's complex annotation of Paulsen's text to be the best source of his early philosophy. Sometimes the annotations were just agreements or disagreements. But most of the time they developed Mao's own philosophy that was a combination of Eastern and Western sources. First of all, the young Mao was an egoist, meaning that he thought philosophy takes its start from an individual's conception of the self. Whereas Confucius had thought that the ego by itself was just a path toward selfishness, Mao's conception was more materialistic. Mao thought that the self can be expanded to include others, not on their own terms necessarily, but on terms that expanded the individual's own sense of self. Mao never became clear about how this purification of the self so as to include others took place. He rejected altruism as the alternative to his egoism. Second, Mao took Paulsen to demonstrate the history of ideas, Western ideas to be sure, but still ideas in a history. Paulsen's history led up through German idealism. Mao took over Marx's conception of material history, upsetting the Paulsen ideal...