The Confucian Quest for Order

Download or read book The Confucian Quest for Order written by Masayuki Sato and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xun Zi, one of the principal thinkers of the pre-imperial period and as such still widely read, ought to appear on any reading list on Chinese intellectual history. Dr. Sato's volume deals with the origin and formation of Xun Zi’s political thought, with close focus on the intellectual activity of the Jixia Academy and its impact on this synthesizer’s theory on rituals and social norms. The author convincingly deals with the problems of textual authenticity and biography. The main part of the work treats the shift of intellectual inquiry from an argument of ethical matters to an analysis of the principle(s) of socio-political mechanism, thus showing Xun Zi as a formative synthesizer of the two main streams of early Chinese intellectual discourse.