Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam

Rethinking Confucianism is a collection from the UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series consisting of sixteen excellent essays that reexamine the meaning and role of "Confucianism" in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam largely in light of two central presuppositions. The first is that Confucius represents the cultural backwardness and conservative agendas that many progressive thinkers in Asia saw as an obstacle to positive change. The second is that Confucius provides the core values, in all their permutations, of a stable and human-centered community, such as the kind that has recently been credited with enabling the economic growth in so much of Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. Rethinking Confucianism challenges both of these presuppositions on a number of grounds, but in general—and despite the fact that this grand text takes generalization to be more of an impediment than an aid to serious study—I will say that the challenge focuses more on the failure to properly frame the discussions around "Confucianism" in a context that is specific enough to do justice to the inquiry.