Jana Rošker is probably among the vanguard of the next phase in the Western reception of New Confucianism (xiandai xin ruxue), which she prefers to call Modern Confucianism. Until about a decade ago, Western treatments of the movement were relatively short and generally took the form of introductory sketches. There then followed a wave of several book-length translations of or descriptive monographs about individual Modern Confucian thinkers – Xiong Shili, Liang Shuming, Tang Junyi, and most especially Mou Zongsan – and these have served the indispensable function of allowing the respective thinkers each to be understood in detail and on his own terms. Though this wave has many years left to run, Rošker's newest book probably signals the beginning of a third phase which (picking up the work begun precociously many years ago by Arif Dirlik and John Makeham) will produce a general political/cultural theorization of Modern Confucianism as a specimen of Chinese modernization.
Readers familiar with Umberto Bresciani's survey, Reinventing Confucianism (Taipei Institute for China Studies, 2001), may think of Rošker's book as a second, more advanced and more focused pass at the subject. Where Bresciani provided an outline of modern Confucianism and most of its major figures over nearly a century, Rošker restricts her attention to the movement's “second generation,” comprising its four landmark figures: Fang Dongmei (1899–1977), Xu Fuguan (1903–1982), Tang Junyi (1909–1978), and Mou Zongsan (1909–1995). Though the older Fang is a borderline case with respect to his year of birth, Rošker includes him with the younger men because he was teacher to Liu Shu-hsien and Cheng Chung-ying, both major figures of the third generation. (Xiong Shili also makes occasional appearances because, as the teacher of Xu, Tang and Mou, he must come to mind frequently in a discussion of that trio's shared inheritance.) Rošker both continues the work of description of those thinkers begun by Bresciani and moves on to critical analysis as well.
On the descriptive plane, one of the book's virtues is that Rošker works hard to divide her attention evenly among the four men. For whatever reasons, Mou Zongsan has claimed much more attention from posterity than the other three combined, with the result that even though Fang, Xu and Tang are well known, their thought is little studied. But it is typical of Rošker, who has produced and supported a broad body of research on Modern Confucianism, that her book comes as close as possible to approaching each thinker as an end in himself and not doling out her attention in proportion to each philosopher's popularity. A still greater virtue of the book is that it takes a group of thinkers who bear such a family resemblance to one another that the lazy mind tends to clump them all together and directly illuminates issues on which one man stood apart from the others, as for example Tang stood apart from Mou and Xu on the idea of “inner sageliness and outer kingliness” (p. 115).
Though perhaps best known for her epistemological writings, the Vienna-trained Rošker began as a scholar of modern Chinese social and political thought and her interest in epistemology is enriched by her sophisticated interest in humanity as the political animal. Rošker's emphasis on social thought is on display in the book's organization. After a very short introduction, she begins with an analysis of Modern Confucianism's approach to modernization that draws on the Marxian work of Arif Dirlik. Where many other authors would tell a conventional story of Confucianism's modernization as an attempt to create a place for science and democracy in Confucianism and a place of esteem for Confucianism in the modern West, perhaps drawing on Eisenstadt's discourse of multiple modernities and maybe commenting also on the movement's nationalist propensities, Rošker tells a Marxian tale, of a movement conditioned by the forces of global capitalism in East Asia and responding to the alienation it produces. Rošker argues that Modern Confucianism may help resist the cultural fragmentation, disguised as “multi-culturalism,” that abets the growth of global capitalism and counteract the alienation of the modern subject (pp. 10–11), and she further suggests that it can even be seen as a “radical challenge to the contemporary global system” by “revealing [its] underlying ideologies” (p. 13).
These chapters on social theory and the full meaning of the modernization of Confucianism serve as a sort of extended introduction to the book and only afterward, in chapter four, does Rošker give the overview of Mou, Fang, Xu and Tang with which most other authors would have begun a comparable book.
Chapter five treats the four Confucians' thinking about science and democracy. Each of them was interested in whether traditional Chinese culture had any inherent tendency toward science or democracy. Probably because they addressed different forms of the question, Rošker gives this chapter a “theme and variations” structure, with a separate section on the opinions of each of the four men. These highlight notable criticisms of their positions too, and sometimes Rošker herself weighs in, for example with an argument that Tang Junyi was kidding himself in thinking that “modern science could somehow be based on traditional Chinese values” (p. 112), a criticism that applies to Mou Zongsan as well.
Chapter six discusses the Modern Confucians' refiguration of the concepts of reason and subjectivity and, in particular, their attraction to Kant as the Western philosopher whose notions of the subject match classical Chinese thought most closely. It is under this rubric that Rošker discusses such standard Modern Confucian topics as the relationships between “empirical self” and transcendental subject and “inner sageliness” and “outer kingliness” and their implications for modern social thought, because of the way they complicate simple notions of human irreducibility.
As with Bresciani's book, a short final chapter gives an updated account of the flourishing of modern Confucianism in the People's Republic of China, with an even-handed treatment of the tension between the outspokenly Mencian thought of Fang, Tang, Xu and Mou and the more Xunzian, disciplinary thinking of contemporary mainland Confucians.
Despite its average size Rošker's book is rather encyclopedic because, in its character as a survey, it contains signposts to countless paths for further reading and thinking. In order to take advantage of the fact, the reader is advised to make diligent use of colored page flags to keep track of the appearance of various topics and themes. The reason is that Chinese University Press has provided an index that is more Sinological than philosophical. Chinese proper names and technical phrases are thoroughly indexed but Western names (e.g. Arif Dirlik) and English conceptual terms (such as alienation, capitalism, democracy and modernization) are not. A little work expended on the first reading will make for easier reference later.
The prolific Rošker deserve the gratitude of all students of contemporary Confucianism for moving the conversation forward with this excellent book.
