Volume 26, Number 4 · March 22, 1979
Why Confucius Counts
By Jonathan D. Spence
Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture
by Thomas A. Metzger
Columbia University Press, 303 pp., $15.00
One would be hard pressed, surveying any of the political cultures in human history, to find a parallel for the continuity, longevity, and vitality of Confucianism. This moral and ethical system was given initial shape in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, drawing on traditions of history and ritual that reached at least half a millennium before that. It was codified and strengthened in the first two centuries AD, reformulated and reinforced by major philosophers in the twelfth century, and was still vigorous and subtle in the late eighteenth century—and astonishing record. The Confucian theorists offered apparently simple precepts for the relations between man and man, man and ruler, father and son, husband and wife; but they reached at the same time into the most difficult aspects of our relations with the forces of nature, and had much to say about the central problems of ethics and political activism.
Review, 3322 words
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