Tocqueville Between East and West , livre ebook

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW
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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW
Tocqueville Between East and West
Demin Duan
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2025
Demin Duan, 2025
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ISBN 978-1-83772-285-3
eISBN 978-1-83772-287-7
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For my family
Le gouvernement le plus rationnel n est pas celui auquel tous les int ress s prennent part, mais celui que dirigent les classes les plus clair es et les plus morales de la soci t . A LEXIS DE T OCQUEVILLE
Contents
Preface
1 Introduction
2 Empire and Freedom
3 Aristocrat in Democracy
4 D j vu: Tocqueville in China
5 People and Hierarchy: Confucianism in Today s China
6 Another Form of Representation
7 A Tale of Two Revolutions
8 Conclusion: Tocqueville Between East and West
Notes
Bibliography
Preface
Studies of history of political thought are usually confined to the time and space of the thinkers under scrutiny. Western scholars rarely, if ever, refer to China when they write on Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, etc., and it is the same for Chinese scholars who conduct research on the western history of political thought. People tend to put those western thinkers in their historical contexts and treat their thinking as exclusively western . But great thinkers have global relevance, and are able to go beyond particular times and spaces. Western political thinkers, especially in the early modern period, have been widely translated, read and discussed in China, ever since the late Qing and early revolutionary era of the 1900s. They have participated in the building up of intellectual and political discourses in China that have had a significant impact at many levels. There is no reason why we should not bring those thinkers into local Chinese contexts, even though they originally belonged only in western, European or French historical contexts, and also address audiences from these contexts. On the other hand, I believe that by starting with a non-western or, more specifically, an eastern or Chinese context, we actually have something new to offer. It is indeed possible to obtain fresh perspectives from which we may reconsider many aspects of those thinkers political thought. This is what I try to do in this book, focusing on Tocqueville.
I am Chinese and moved to Europe to study the western history of political thought, first focusing on Tocqueville and Machiavelli, later expanding to other topics. I then returned to China to teach and undertake research in this field. Now I am bringing my local experience to this study, with Tocqueville Between East and West the result of this effort. I need to thank Professor Howard Williams first, because he persuaded me to write the book and offered much guidance along the way. The online lecture series on political thought that we co-organised also helped me a lot. I want to thank my students as well. By teaching them the history of western political thought and discussing this with them, I think I developed a more or less systemic view of the field for myself. I also have some institutions to thank: the School of Government; the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences; the Institute of Public Governance; and the Centre for European Studies at Peking University. Wang Zhe helped me with some of the notes and references. My family offered me substantial support while I was writing Tocqueville Between East and West . My greatest gratitude goes to them. All errors are, of course, my own.
1 Introduction
China s rise in recent decades seems to have posed sizeable questions to the world, politically and intellectually. Will it be a peaceful rise or will it lead to war? Is the Thucydides trap real in terms of a China-west relationship? How is the world - especially the west - reacting to this change? China s political system is hugely different from western liberal democracies. How do we understand and deal with this difference? At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published his famous book The End of History , which expressed much of the zeitgeist at that time. The stand-off between the two sides - the United States and the Soviet Union - had finally ended, and one of them had won. Like intellectuals in ancient Rome who tried to find reasons for why Rome was able to stand as the greatest empire, post-1989 intellectuals also tried to understand why the west took this victory. Fukuyama s idea was that the United States won due to it representing the end of history. In this idea, the United States is far from perfect, but its political system is absolutely more advanced than the Soviet Union and many others. 1 But where does this leave China?
When the Cold War ended, China was a minor country in the world; poor, largely unindustrialised, and not yet closely connected with the rest of the world. But since then, China has rapidly advanced, mainly in terms of economic development, but also in other fields such as technology, embeddedness in the world, and so on. It has become one of the two largest economies in the world and carries much weight in world affairs. But, at the same time, it has not fulfilled Fukuyama s promise and become a liberal democracy. In the 1980s, it implemented a policy of Open and Reform and introduced a market economy, which directly led to economic development, therefore marking a huge difference between today s China and pre-1980 China. But it has not changed its basic political system, in which the Communist Party of China sits at the very top. Questions have been asked as to whether the economy has grown so fast in spite of the political system or to a great extent because of it. 2 After all, Russia, following Shock Therapy did not manage to demonstrate a similar track record of economic advancement; nor did many other third world countries that introduced various versions of liberal or neo-liberal reforms after the Cold War. 3 Will China finally collapse? If not, what does it mean if we say that there is an alternative model to western liberal democracy? How do we theoretically understand this alternative if it exists at all?
A prominent effort to theoretically imagine this alternative has been undertaken along the lines of modern Confucianism. In seeking to revive the political relevance of Confucianism in modern times, the supporters of this effort argue that western liberal democracy, with one man, one vote as its crucial feature, is only one of many ways to achieve modern development; indeed, there are other possibilities for different cultures and societies. The Chinese political system today represents this modernisation of ancient political culture, which has its own distinctive set of values. 4 The China model may not be applicable to other countries, but it could be, or at least has the potential to be, the