Group meeting: “Between Tradition and Modernity. Liberalism and Confucianism in China and Europe: A Transcultural Perspective”

Restarting our collaboration

A couple of years ago, a few months before the pandemic started, we had agreed in principle to organize a third joint Workshop between Fudan and Exeter on our ongoing exploration of how philosophical and political ideas, traditions and languages transfer and interact across different cultural contexts, with a particular focus on the case of China and Europe. Building on the conversations we had at the Workshops organized at Fudan in April 2017, and Exeter in May 2018; we had decided to organize a more focused Workshop exploring the way in which particular traditions had travelled and been negotiated across different contexts. We had also discussed the possibility of using the Workshop as the basis for a collection of essays to be submitted for publication either with an academic Press, or as a special issue of a Journal suitable for this kind of studies. Unfortunately, the events of the last year or so I have prevented us from pursuing such a plan.

The recent agreement between the College of Social Science and International Studies at Exeter, and the University of Fudan to organize a few online initiatives under the Fudan-Exeter Global Thought Network gives us the opportunity to restart our collaboration and to organize a series of initiatives in preparation of the Workshop and the publication that we had discussed a couple of years ago. This is what we propose to do at our online meeting on Friday 2 July. As part of the preparation for the Workshop and the ensuing publication, we aim to produce some material (see below) to be uploaded on two dedicated website pages: the one for the Fudan-Exeter Global thought Network, and the one on the research project on The Entanglement of Political Languages and Philosophical Traditions, which is not limited to the Sino-European case, but is intended to have a more global reach. We also hope that the present collaboration will help developing further collaboration and exchanges between our Universities.

The intellectual context for this project

The context for this project is the increasing cultural and academic exchanges between countries and regions across the world, and more generally the interpenetration of different political discourses and philosophical traditions in a more globalised world. In spite of the re-emerging political tensions and the return, particularly after the economic and more recently the pandemic crisis, to more nationalistic rhetoric, whose causes are complex and have their roots in both internal and international contexts; we expect such exchanges to continue, playing perhaps an important role in facilitating reciprocal understanding.

The more globalized world in which we live, is also one where the centre of economic and political power is no longer concentrated in one or two super-powers. This poses both a political and intellectual problem to Europe and Western-centred conceptions of the world order. One symptom of this lies in the growing awareness that the modern European conceptual lexicon, centred around ideas of rationality, enlightenment, economic progress, sovereignty, freedom, democracy, and rights may have a parochial and contingent history that  increasingly needs confronting with the histories, conceptual vocabularies and traditions of the non-European world. As scholars seek to better understand this history and the way it has become entangled with other languages and cultures, there is an urgent need to interrogate the ways in which the different conceptual lexicons arose in the first place, and are open to transformation and reciprocal borrowings with other cultures and civilizations. Indeed, such borrowings have always taken place, but they are not always fully acknowledged in the way in which each cultural tradition conceives its past.

The Workshop and publication we propose is meant to offer a contribution to the more general project of a transcultural investigation of our political languages and philosophical traditions.

The Workshop theme: A proposal

The meeting on Friday is meant to discuss and define both the particular theme for our Workshop (and publication), and to decide the kind of contributions that individually and collectively we can make towards it. What follows is only a first proposal, subject to discussion and possible alterations.

The proposal is to explore how two particular traditions, Liberalism and Confucianism, have been received outside their original contexts, and how they have contributed to define the important dichotomy between modernity and tradition within both Chinese and European culture. Such a dichotomy has played an important role in the way in which Chinese and European political cultures have developed and interacted in modern times. The intention is not simply to investigate the reception and re-interpretation of philosophical traditions and political languages in different cultural contexts, but also the way in which this can become part of a transcultural dialogue, and how the transmigration of languages and traditions may contribute to the formation of new ideas and to new forms of cultural self-understanding and political innovation. In short, we would like to explore different forms of cultural dialogue and transculturality: not only the specific ways in which cultural traditions have been received and integrated within new contexts (in our case, the reception of Liberalism in China and Confucianism in Europe in the early modern and modern period), but also the way in which they have contributed to shape a more general self-understanding of a culture (the way, for instance, in which the Liberal and Confucian discourses have become part of a more general understanding of what it means for a culture to endure and transform, and the important role that the dichotomy between ideas of “tradition” and “modernity” in both a philosophical and a political sense may play in it). We want also to explore how the transmigration of traditions and languages may contribute to reshaping and forms of self-reflection in the original context, or to the production of more hybrid traditions and forms of discourse.

An Agenda for the Workshop

As for our discussion on Friday, we propose the following agenda:

1. General outline of the proposal, followed by a discussion of the four main questions at the centre of the proposed Workshop:

a. Liberalism in China (and Europe);

b. Confucianism in Europe (and China);

c. The modernity-tradition dichotomy and how Liberalism and Confucianism may have contributed to give it content in the two cultural contexts;

d. The more general issue of transcultural political and philosophical conversations.

2. Discussion of the organization of the Workshop and of the publication project

3. Brief discussion of the online material to be produced as part of the preparation of the Workshop, such as: research profile of the scholars involved in the project; brief written or video interviews with the scholars about their research interest or recent work; collection of material and bibliographic information on the area of the research and more generally on the development of new “global” and “comparative” approaches to the study of political and philosophical thought.