China's first liberal.

• Author: Osborne, Evan

Scholars and partisans of liberty often dispute whether liberty is the natural desire of all humans or--as Orlando Patterson (1992), among many others, contends--the product of a distinctive Western history that runs through the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment, and the Federalist Papers. The most explicit consideration of why liberty is the just state of society is probably mostly Western, although, owing (ironically) to Western imperialism and in recent years to globalization, the appeal of limited government arguably has spread around the world.

But are the principles of classical liberalism in particular a Western creation? China, which has endured thousands of years of despotism, notwithstanding that it has produced a great deal of political philosophy arguing that the dictator should treat his subjects justly, is an unlikely candidate as a source of classical-liberal thought. However, at least one Chinese philosopher known as Mozi (c. 470-391 B.C.E.) was arguing in favor of some of the principles of classical liberalism centuries before Locke or Voltaire.

In this article, I survey the impressive extent to which modern liberal principles appear in Mozi's writings, themselves also known collectively as the Mozi. Such a philosophical foundation looms large with the geopolitical rise of China, whose rulers in recent years have emphasized other Chinese political-philosophy traditions that laud hierarchy over equality and prioritize obedience above all. I briefly summarize Mozi's life and describe the framework of Chinese philosophy in which he wrote. I then analyze his proto-advocacy of equality before the law and explore his recognition of the dangers of the predatory state, his antiwar liberalism, and his anticipation of the modern liberal conception of the rational self-interested social order.

Mozi in the Chinese Tradition

Chinese philosophy and ethics are the oldest continuous intellectual tradition in history. Like Greek philosophy and drama, they are concerned with social order, governance, individual ethics, and the nature of the choices humans and their societies must make. By the time the Shang dynasty ascended in roughly 1600 B.C.E., there was an awareness that governments could rise and fall. Indeed, the concept of cyclicality and order not only in politics but also in medicine, family, and human affairs generally is an important component of China's traditional way of understanding the world. Ever since China became a cohesive civilization, it has been densely populated, subject to frequent natural disasters (often seen as heaven's punishment for misrule), and struggles over power. China's political traditions for almost its entire history as a cohesive civilization have also been authoritarian, often to an extreme degree. The emperor, though not necessarily seen as literally divine in the way that Japanese emperors were, was the Son of Heaven, charged with implementing the divine will on earth and thus not to be questioned. The checks and balances from other social groups--such as the church, the nobility, and the merchant class that provided some restraint on monarchical power in post-Korean Europe--were little in evidence in China, although this tendency toward absolutist rule was offset to some degree by the vast scope of the territory over which most Chinese emperors ruled, which allowed the monarchs of distant jurisdictions considerable autonomy. The conduct of such local lords, both in terms of what should be done and what historically had been done well and poorly is often the focus of political writing, including that of Mozi. (1)

Because of China's dynastic history and susceptibility to social collapse, order-how to achieve it and what happens when it is absent--was long an important, if not the central, question in Chinese political thought. From order comes security and (by contemporaneous standards) prosperity, and from disorder comes the threat of internal and external violence. Pre-Confucian writings had already established that the force of heaven, although not personified as in monotheistic religions, could and did intervene in human affairs--through, for example, the weather to punish wicked rulers and reward just ones. It was already expected in this tradition that the people would rebel against a ruler who had lost heaven's mandate.

But Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) and his admirers erected a mammoth edifice of work that emphasized hierarchy and ritual as the keys to preserving order. In parallel, Confucian thought emphasized that a superior was owed obedience, provided he merited it by dint of worthy conduct. Confucius was born in the middle of the sixth century B.C., during the eastern Zhou dynasty. Like others before him and like Mozi and others after him, he viewed the present as a time of disorder and decline, and he argued that the conduct of the "sage kings" of the past provided a model to be emulated in the present. In an argument that was to be repeated many times in other places over the centuries, he contended that private virtue was the key to public order, but he added that private virtue involved not only ethical conduct toward others, but also the observance of ritual. He emphasized the intrinsic importance of respect for one's natural superiors--younger brothers toward older, sons toward fathers, dukes toward kings, and all toward the emperor. The Confucian legacy dominated political thought over the centuries, not only in China but across East Asia.

It was in this environment that Mozi taught. Confucianism was already the dominant strain of thought, and some of what Mozi proclaimed, as recorded in the Mozi, directly opposes it. The eponymous Mozi is not a single book by Mozi himself, but a collection of essays of uncertain authorship, most likely containing the thoughts of the teacher Mo Di, whose life is not nearly as well documented as that of Confucius. According to the most widely held view, Mo Di--or, as usually rendered in the Latin alphabet, Mozi (the latter syllabic denoting "master")--was one man who lived in the Chinese state of Lu, in what is now Shandong. As is common with many of the great Chinese philosophers, including Confucius, most if not all of the texts bearing his name were not in fact penned by him, but subsequently by his disciples. Scholars disagree about whether he had artisanal or low-noble background, whether he served time in prison, and the extent, if any, of his work as a mandarin at the provincial level. The Mozi, however, is at minimum a collection of his thought as understood by those who followed him. It is known to consist collectively of seventy-one treatises, but only fifty-three have survived.

Consistent with the preceding discussion and like all Chinese political philosophers until after China's contact with the West, Mozi, when discussing political theory, was not concerned first and foremost with rights in the Enlightenment sense of the term. At the time he wrote, Chinese civilization already had perhaps a millennium of history behind it, and it was already preoccupied with questions of the ruler's legitimacy, which hinged on whether the ruler could maintain order and prosperity. The hierarchy of rule, from the heaven-selected emperor down through kings and dukes, was taken for granted, and the idea of popular sovereignty or citizens actively defending themselves against state predation through the law or other means short of violent rebellion (which was justifiable in the case of sufficient corruption or other instability) would have been incomprehensible to most classical Chinese political thinkers. The imperial system of government was part of the natural order of things.

Order, however, depended on good governance. Within the constraint of the longstanding Chinese conception of governance, Mozi still challenged what was by then the Confucian orthodoxy. In a work known as "Against the Confucians II," he directly criticizes the established Confucian wisdom on a variety of topics, arguing at one point that Confucian scholars, with their seeking of income and employment as in effect the house scholars of Chinese nobles, are essentially rent seekers pursuing gains from an artificially manufactured need for their expertise:

They [Confucians] believe in Fate and accept poverty, yet they are arrogant and self-important. They turn their backs on what is fundamental and abandon their duties, finding contentment in idleness and pride. They are greedy for drink and food. They are indolent in carrying out their responsibilities and fall into hunger and cold, but, when endangered by starvation and freezing, they have no way of avoiding these things. They are like beggars. They stare like billy goats. They rise up like castrated pigs. When a gentleman laughs at them, they angrily reply, "What do you know of god[,] Confucians[?]" In spring, they beg for wheat. In summer, they beg for rice. When the five grains have been harvested, they attach themselves to large funerals with their sons and grandsons all flowing along, and so they get their fill of drink and food. They depend on other people's households for food and rely on other people's fields for wine. (39.4, pp. 353-54) (2) The theme that Confucians had a mistaken understanding of prosperity, where it comes from, and the nature of justice recurs throughout Mozi's work. Because of the nature of Chinese society at the time when he lived, it is unsurprising that Mozi was not an orthodox liberal in the Western tradition. Yet even against that backdrop he still demonstrated a remarkable understanding of several notions immediately recognizable to the modern liberal and often couched in terms of opposition to conventional Chinese thought, especially that of Confucius.

The Centrality of Equality

To think about the preservation of the well-ordered society in a sophisticated way requires thinking about why order comes about to begin with. This question, of course, has...