Dialogue between Civility and Political Actuality: The Political Thought of “New Book”
Author: Chun-Hung Lin
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
To rule by civility also known as “Li-Chih” that rebuilds the political community by emphasizing the crucial network of civility has its academic tradition in Confucian-School. This paper tries to analyze the coral concern of one important text: “New Book” written by Jia-Yi. My dissertation is that there exist a lot of obvious connections between political actuality and construction of political philosophy we may find in the text that Jia-Yi follows the Confucian tradition, especially Hsun-Tsu, of ruling by civility. Three steps to rebuild the identity of political community that may be found in “New book” unfold themselves as “to rule according to civility”, “to rule according to virtues” and “to rule according to Tao” The discourse of this linear development while revealing the procedure of Li-Chih made by Jia-Yi is so much alike that of contemporary communitarianism . Both of them talk about the transition from the normative ethics to the ethics of virtues when the tremendous changes in the social dimension as well as political dimension did happen. We shall also review the history from Warring States Epoch to the building of Han dynasty. The state of power differentiation at the very beginning of West Han dynasty means some kind of displacement in power and reveals the weak control of local political power. Jia-Yi, by means of Li-Chih, made efforts to overturn the displacement. The discourse narrated in “New Book” not only described the situations and problems that the Liu clans faced but gave solutions also. By analyzing the dialogue between civility and political actuality in “New Book”, we may represent the political history by much wider perspectives and find the latent clues to access to actuality.