Confucian Concord

Reform, Utopia and Global Teleology in Kang Youwei's Datong Shu

Series: 

In Confucian Concord, Federico Brusadelli offers an intellectual analysis of the Datong Shu. Written by Kang Youwei (1858-1927) and conceived as his most esoteric and comprehensive legacy to posterity, the book was eventually published posthumously, in 1935, considered “too advanced for the times” in Kang’s own opinion.

Connecting Datong Shu to its author’s intellectual biography and framing it within the intellectual and political debate of the time, Brusadelli investigates the conceptual and philosophical implications of Kang’s ‘global prophecy’, showing how an apparently ‘utopian’ and ‘escapist’ piece of literature was actually an attempt to save (at least ideally) the imperial political order, updating the traditional Confucian universalism to a new, ‘modern’ world.

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Federico Brusadelli, Ph.D. (2016), University of Naples “L’Orientale”, is Lecturer in Sinology at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg.
"Brusadelli's approach is an exciting one that does not shy away from unorthodox solutions, for example, interpreting China's modernizing ambitions from a standpoint that attempts to transcend the binary oppositions of "traditional" versus "modern," "Chinese" versus "Western." The questions that we, the readers, are after in this excellent work have to do as much with the origins of Kang's influential ideas as with their impact on the rise of nationalism in China, on Mao Zedong's own utopian views, and finally, on the political challenges that the China of our present time needs to face." - Lehel Balogh, Hokkaido University in Relgious Studies Review, Vol. 47, No. 3 (September 2021).
Acknowledgments

Introduction

part 1: Roots


1 The Sage and the Unicorn: Confucian Progressivism and Esoteric Classicism

2 Indra’s Net: Buddhism and the Hidden Face of Kang’s Confucianism

3 State and Science: The Weight of the West

part 2: Threads


4 Nation: Defending Universalism from the Builders of Borders

5 Democracy: “You Don’t Wear A Fur in Summer”. Between Utopianism and Pragmatism

6 Socialism: Confucian Equality, from the Well–fields to the Communes

part 3: Legacies


7 The Red Concord: Kang Youwei and Mao Zedong, Meeting in the Land of Utopia?

8 A Datong for the Third Millennium: Globalism versus Nationalism
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
All interested in Chinese intellectual history and Chinese political thought, and anyone concerned in the global history of ideas in the 19th and 20th century.
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