Ideas in Transit: Democracy, Economy, and Philosophy between East and West

1.00 – 1.30 pm Buffet Lunch

1.30 – 2.45 pm Professor Demin Duan (Peking University): Tocqueville and Democracy: A Chinese Perspective

2.45 – 3.15 pm Tea/Coffee break

3.15 – 4.05 pm Ross Moncrieff (Oxford University): The Reception of Confucianism in Early Modern Britain: Deists, Dissenters, and the Dao

4.10 – 5.00 pm Professor Zhengping Zhang (Zhejiang University): The Reception and the Studies on David Hume’s Economic Thought in China

Professor Demin Duan opened the workshop with an introduction to his new book, Tocqueville between East and West. While concerned with the possibility of viewing China through a Tocquevillian lens, Duan’s book also reflects on recent interpretations of Tocqueville’s thought. A recurring theme in Professor Duan’s talk was a dissatisfaction with the way in which Tocqueville’s thought and work was mobilised during the 20^th century as a proto-Cold Warrior, and his assimilation to an anti-statist liberal position in part similar to Berlin’s or Hayek’s. Duan’s interpretation of Tocqueville and of his Chinese reception casts some light on how Tocqueville’s own ideas are able to capture some of the social forms of so-called ‘illiberal’ China. As Duan suggests, the world that Tocqueville conjures up does not stand in simple opposition to Chinese political and social structures. A Tocquevillian perspective on China, including modern China, needs to be much more subtle. The fulcrum of Duan’s argument is what he calls “feudal liberty”, that he casts in opposition to liberal ideas of liberty formulated particularly during the Cold War period. He relates such feudal liberty to Skinner’s own view of “republican freedom” as different from the liberal view.

The locus of freedom for Tocqueville was never in structural-governmental principles, nor in a doctrine of irreducible a priori human rights (as Duan emphasised, Tocqueville himself was a partisan of French colonialism) – rather, freedom emanated upwards from the underlying human material making up a state, and it is thus people, and the associations they form, which must be attended to. Confucianism, insofar as it is read as a doctrine of civic virtue, does just this. Duan connected such doctrine to classical Western ideas in politics, as well as in music, poetry, or education, developing more holistic views of the body politic and its health. The modern liberal view may regard the dissolution of the division between “public” and “private” realms as a high road to totalitarianism, a charge frequently levelled against China; and yet, in Duan’s view, the Tocquevillian perspective regards the two not only as inextricably entangled, but as connected, and as such as a necessary condition for freedom.

According to Duan, and contrary to Fukuyama’s famous thesis on the end of history, China is not on the path towards liberal democracy as a value-laden telos. Following Tocqueville, Duan thinks that China is following a path to modernity encompassing both East and West. It is therefore necessary to rethink simple dichotomies between democracy and authoritarianism in order to arrive at a distinct concept of freedom in modernity.

Ross Moncrieff’s presentation focussed on Confucian thought, and its British reception in philosophical and theological discussions. Initial contact with Confucius, mediated through the Jesuit mission, spawned a number of distinct responses largely focused on its compatibility with Christian teaching and theology. In his paper, Moncrieff argues that while Confucianism was first used by Anglican critics of Hobbes, who considered the teaching of Confucius as an expression of natural reason reinforcing Christian beliefs; Confucianism was later regarded as a form of deistic “freethinking”, in direct opposition to Christian revelation. Those interpretations partly reflected different readings of Confucianism transmitted to Europe by Jesuit Sinology. On the one hand, the accommodationist interpretation proposed by Matteo Ricci, who thought that Confucius had arrived as some theological truths through natural reasons; on the other hand, by Niccolò Longobardo, who thought Confucianism was a kind of materialism, or, a more sophisticated pantheism.

Throughout Moncrieff’s talk, he reiterated that these interpretations of Confucianism were not mere misinterpretation of Confucianism, based on a kind of Orientalism-like reading of it through the lenses of Western philosophy and Christian theology, but that the British debate had some analogy to that between Neoconfucians in China. In fact, Moncrieff suggests that European and British reception of Confucianism followed a middle way between a kind of unmediated truthful ‘reception’ and a mere Saidian ‘image’, more like an “echo” of Confucius philosophy in the European debate. The Confucius whose voice Europeans heard was indeed his own, but inevitably mediated and filtered through dense layers of translation and interpretation.

Moncrieff also noted that the mixed reception of Confucius in Europe was in sharp contrast with that of Buddhism, which was considered as overt idolatry and therefore in direct contrast with Christian faith. This contrast is also indicative of the kind of Confucius that was permitted to emerge in Europe; a Confucius “made safe” for both his earlier Christian promotors and later freethinkers by downplaying any transcendental orientation. By emphasising Confucius the lawgiver, the compatibilities could be emphasised without either risking religious blasphemy or threatening Enlightenment’s reason.

Professor Zhengping Zhang’s presentation was on Hume’s reception in China. Just as Confucius has seen many incarnations in the West, so too have there been many Humes in China since his work started to be translated in the 1930s. His original fame came through the way in which Kant read him, and the interest in Hume was largely focused on a reconstruction of his philosophical position. By the 1980s, Hume’s philosophy and his other writings acquired fame in China in their own right. There was an increasing interest not only in his science of human nature but also in his economic thought. During this phase Chinese readers were introduced to his monetary theory. More recently, Hume Chinese scholarship has looked at Hume the political-economist and historian.

Although neglected for a long time, Hume’s works on British history were eventually translated into Chinese: his History of England was translated and published in full in 2012. Nowadays, Hume’s historical writings have become a central topic in Hume Chinese scholarship. As in the case of Confucius’ introduction to England, renewed interest in the economic aspects of Hume (along with his Scottish Enlightenment companions Smith and Ferguson) closely reflects the domestic concerns of a society undergoing a dizzying economic rise and elevation in geopolitical weight, with Chinese thinkers interested in finding theoretical footholds in the works of Western writers grappling with similar transformations in their own societies. The writers of the Scottish Enlightenment are regarded as theorists writing at times of rapid changes in their own societies and dealing with issues of commerce, development and inequality, that Chinese scholars think are similar to those affecting China at the present. Just as a return to Tocqueville offers theoretical insights away from the dead-end binaries of Cold War polemics, Chinese thinkers have found in Hume’s works nuanced and realistic approaches to progress and development.

Demin Duan, Tocqueville Between East and West (University of Wales Press, 2025).

• Download the Introduction 

Zhengping Zhang, 'The Reception and Study of David Hume’s Economic Thought in China', in The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry, edited by R. J. W. Mills and Craig Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

• Download the chapter Zheng-ping, Zhang. "10. The Reception and Study of David Hume’s Economic Thought

Ross Moncrieff, 'The Reception of Confucianism in Early Modern Britain'

• Download the paper