CHAPTER IV

THE CONFUCIAN POLITICAL IDEAL

In the two preceding chapters dealing respectively with the mentality of Confucian China and the Confucian ethical ideal the political principles of Confucianism have in a measure been foreshadowed. This has been inevitable, for, as has been said, Confucianism is a politico-ethical system in which rules and principles for the guidance of private life are inextricably bound up with those for the regulation of the public careers of men entrusted with the responsibility of governing. With this close affiliation of ethics with politics in mind, it will be our task in this chapter to try to portray the Confucian political ideal corresponding to the ethical ideal already set forth.

1

In referring with some disparagement to the "short sentences and aphoristic sayings in matters political that occur in early writings in the East," 1 Professor Willoughby doubtless had in mind the absence of that theoretic impulse which took its rise in Greece and which, as we have remarked, has been so conspicuously lacking in the whole Chinese cultural tradition. Two distinct lines of development, or, more accurately, a phase of development and a phase of arrest in two widely separated portions of the earth may, we observed, be traced back to at least the fifth century before the Christian era. This century marked what we ventured

1 See Introduction.

to call a spiritual parting of the ways. Greek theorizing produced among other things a philosophy of the city state, and to this impetus our Western political philosophies owe their rise. A distinguished modern authority has expressed our debt to the Greeks in the field of politics in the following felicitous manner: "The first valuable contribution the Greeks made to political study was that they invented it. It is not too much to say that, before fifthcentury Greece, politics did not exist. There were powers and principalities, governments and subjects, but politics no more existed than chemistry existed in the age of alchemy. . . . Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Croesus the Lydian and Cyrus the Persian, ruled over great empires, but within their dominions there were no politics because there were no public affairs. There were only the private affairs of the sovereign and his ruling class. Government and all that pertained to it, from military service and taxation to the supply of women for the royal harem, was simply the expression of the power and desire of the ruler. The great advance made by Greece was to have recognized that public or common interests exist and to have provided, first for their management, and secondly for their study. In other words, the Greeks were the first to rescue the body politic from charlatans and to hand it over to physicians." 2

This is a statement which, if construed too strictly, would doubtless preclude the use of the term "political thought" in discussing the thought of Confucius and his followers on government. And yet it is our purpose to show that there was a certain type or trend of thinking in China that must be described as political even though there was never any

2 The Legacy of Greece, ed. by R. W. Livingstone, 1922, article Political Thought, by A. E. Zimmern, pp. 331-332.

well-defined system or explicit theory of politics.

But to come back to the development of our Western political thought which derives from the Greeks, it is well to be reminded that the greatness of the Greek achievement can be "best recognized when we consider how large a place the true study of politics, and the terms and ideas to which it has given rise, fills in the mind of the modern manespecially in the minds of the modern Englishman. Justice and liberty, law and democracy, parliament and public opinion-all these and many more we owe to the peasants and craftsmen of the small Greek republics who, having felt the need for a better management of their humble concerns, set to work to provide it, with the same inventiveness, the same adaptation of means to end, which led them in other fields, to the invention of the classic temple or of the drama. If it is going too far to say that every modern politician owes his stock-in-trade of general ideas to the Greeks, there are certainly few who do not owe them their perorations." 3

And although the city state disappeared and was swallowed up in the Roman empire, the influence of the thought of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoic philosophy never perished, but in some fashion always persisted. However ignorant Europe might have been at any time of the writings of Plato and Aristotle or the literature embodying the Stoic philosophy of Nature, these constitute an important element in the Western intellectual tradition. Of this the student of the history of Western thought is well aware. But to offer one or two illustrations, Christianity enters the empire and an Augustine gives us the City of God in which the philosophy of Plato is blended with Christian doctrine. 3 Ibid.

The Christian Church becomes the spiritual society of the predestined faithful, the earthly counterpart, as well as the means, for that eternal kingdom which is man's hope and destiny-"that most glorious society and celestial city of God's faithful, which is partly seated in the course of these declining times, wherein 'he that liveth by faith' is a pilgrim amongst the wicked; and partly in that solid state of eternity, which as yet the other part doth patiently expect, until 'righteousness be turned into judgment,' being then by the proper excellence to obtain the last victory, and be crowned in perfection of peace." It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the importance and influence of this conception of the Church's place in society in mediæval political thought. Or again the Stoic Logos crystallizes into a concept of Natural Law and "right reason" in Roman jurisprudence, and this concept becomes a permanent and continuous possession of political theory throughout all the Middle Ages until, in the sixteenth century, at the hands of a Grotius, for example, it receives a fresh and explicit formulation and is made the corner-stone of an attempted system of international law. Once more, in the Summa Theologica of Aquinas, while the thoughts of Aristotle, the Master, are of course the predominating element, yet the Stoics, Cicero, Roman imperial jurists and St. Augustine are all fused together with Aristotle into a complete philosophy of man's human and divine nature and destiny.

Such scattered examples as the above are sufficient to suggest to what extent Greek philosophy perdured and operated in the subsequent political thinking of the West. They are enough to impress us with the fact of a more or less continuous, albeit devious and at times tardy development in political thought from the Greeks to modern times. If the

interests of different ages were not always the same, and if the method and spirit were not always identical-as indeed they were not-none the less the fact remains that the actual results of Greek philosophy in some fashion persisted. And accordingly the genesis of Western political ideas is to be found within and not outside the history of western civilization. This bald statement is a platitude; but platitudinous though it may be, it expresses a truth to which we do not always attach sufficient importance. The study of Western political philosophy is the study of political ideas with reference to principles, real or alleged, that have been established by previous thinking in the West. The study of Chinese political thought is the study of political ideas that have had an altogether different history. Thus one would be led to expect a marked disparity in outlook and method and conclusions between the political thought of the West and the political thought of China. And an attempt at an unbiased comparison would seem to be an undertaking possibly not without value for the political thinking of both China and the West.

Now the greatest and most significant difference, a difference pregnant with important consequences, is to be found in the fact that Chinese political thought has never developed the idea of the state, whereas Western political thought makes it the corner-stone of its political theorizing.

Indeed it is the fact of this difference that chiefly impresses the Oriental when he attempts to understand the political philosophy of the West. We may quote, at some length, the words of a young Chinese publicist who declares that "The peculiar merit of Chinese political thought is that it does not recognize the existence of the state as a self-sufficing entity at all. We commonly hear the criticism that the