Date:
Location:
Ci Jiwei (University of Hong Kong)
Abstract: Thanks to more than three decades of economic and social reform, China today abounds in de facto “liberties of the moderns.” It therefore seems appropriate to try to shed a particular kind of light on China’s moral and political culture by examining its way of organizing modern liberties in comparison with the American way. Using this common denominator, I will discuss various differences between China and the United States, in terms of the presence or absence of public valorization of freedom, the understanding and scope of equality, the ratio of political to social power, and the relation between freedom and the good. While some of these individual differences are striking and moreover add up to an overall difference that is deeper still, it will become clear that even this profound general difference is considerably less than what separates two distinct kinds of humanity, as Tocqueville says of the aristocratic and democratic organization of human society. It will also emerge that China’s moral and political culture has an internal complexity that makes it less uniformly modern than its American counterpart and yet neither need ultimately be the worse for it and both can benefit from their interaction.
This is the fifth of five lectures that Professor Ci Jiwei will give in the series Democracy and China: Philosophical-Political Reflections
Sponsored by the Philosophy Colloquium, Department of Philosophy