Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement (review)

In the midst of the turmoil of the 1960s in China the historian Joseph Levenson wrote, in Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, the third volume of his exhaustive trilogy Confucian China and Its Modern Faith: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968): "When Confucianism finally passed into history, it was because history passed out of Confucianism. Intrinsic classical learning, the exercise of divining from canonical historical records how men in general should make history for all time, lapsed" (p. 100). In his sincere mourning for the passing of the Confucian Way Levenson was premature in judging that Confucianism had passed forever into the museum of cultural history because Dr. Umberto Bresciani, writing about the reinvention of Confucianism, reports that something quite different was happening to Confucianism during the twentieth century.

On January 1, 1958, Zhang Junmai, Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, and Xu Fuguan jointly published A Manifesto on Chinese Culture to the World, announcing that Chinese culture, including Confucianism, was not dead and that a reformed Confucian contribution to world civilization was not only possible but was to be applauded. Although some critical scholars doubt that we can use the publication of the manifesto to mark so precisely the beginning of the revival of Confucianism, it has become a commonplace to mention this important document as denoting an important founding moment in the life of the New Confucian movement.

What Bresciani has done, and done superbly, for the first time in English, is to provide a comprehensive historical narrative of what he calls the reinvention of Confucianism in the twentieth century via the founding of the New Confucian movement. As I will discuss below, his scholarship is as impressive as it is judicious.

Previously, the scholarly community lacked a coherent historical and philosophic account in any Western language of the rise of the revived Confucian discourse now known as Contemporary New Confucianism (although there are two other parallel studies in English that also contain a great deal of information about New Confucianism: Cheng Chung-ying and Nicholas Bunnin, eds., Contemporary Chinese Philosophy [Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2002], and John Makeham, ed., New Confucianism: A Critical Study [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003]). Bresciani's work is unique in its scholarly and historical range. As Bresciani notes, there is a growing controversy about what to call the new movement. The debates over naming it are reminiscent of the great arguments that characterized the discussion of the philosophic typologies in Chinese intellectual history beginning with the works of Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Sima Qian. While it might seem a harmless discussion of how to describe a movement by showing what is new in it and what links it to previous manifestations of Confucian history, any rhetorician knows that setting the range of permissible description or the giving of names and titles is important to any debate. We all remember that when Master Kong was asked what he would do if he were given political power, he responded that he would first rectify names.

We should pause for a moment and consider why it has taken so long for an informed and critical scholar like Bresciani to write a narrative account of the rise of the New Confucian movement and the fact that Confucianism is showing signs of a significant revival in the new millennium. The logic concerning the "necessary" decline of Confucianism from the nineteenth century is this: if Confucianism was the preeminent cultural tradition of China that guided the ship of state over the last two thousand years, then China needed a new captain to pilot China because of the obvious failures of the Confucian state to defend China from the remorseless attacks of the modern West. The shop of Confucianism needed to be closed and boarded over before Chinese intellectuals could set about the business of restoring China to its place of dignity, wealth, and power among the nations of the world.

I remember a prescient...