Origin and Expansion of Chinese Sociology by Shaojie Liu

Author:Shaojie Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811530944
Publisher: Springer Singapore

4.4 Rational Spirit and Positivism Principles

Value pursuit and moral evaluation are the basic contents that sociology cannot exclude. If this judgment is established, then not only many of the arguments of Kang Youwei in the Study of the Reforms of Confucius and Dong Zhongshu’s Study on Spring and Autumn Annals can be regarded as the precious heritage of sociology, but also his Datong Shu should be regarded as an important document of sociology. In Datong Shu, Kang Youwei aimed at the ideal pursuit of seeking common ground and promoting social evolution, and adopted rational principles such as democracy, equality, freedom, and fraternity as social norms and moral standards, and through extensive investigation and analysis of empirical facts, expounded the rich sociological thoughts with the characteristics of constructivism, and these rich sociological literature only viewed as utopian social fantasy were long been sealed up because of the narrow sociological concept.

Zhu Weizhen believed that Kang Youwei’s Datong Shu should be studied together with his Pandect of Practical Reasoning and Public Law, because the latter is the prototype of the former. Zhu Weizhen pointed out: “Kang Youwei’s Datong Shu and its rudimentary Pandect of Practical Reasoning and Public Law, as the representative works of Kang Youwei’s early social doctrine, were almost unknown in the academic circles of the late Qing Dynasty, because these two books were never published at that time. Owing to the propaganda by his students such as Liang Qichao, many people have known Kang Youwei’s ambition in Datong.”41 There are two points worth noting in this passage by Zhu Weiwei: First, the Pandect of Practical Reasoning and Public Law is the embryonic form of Datong Shu, which means that there is not only a close connection between the two works, but also the former contains the most basic principles and viewpoints of the latter; Second, these two works are representative works of Kang Youwei’s social theory.

So far, no one in the domestic sociology circles has explicitly regarded the Pandect of Practical Reasoning and Public Law and Datong Shu as the representative works of Kang Youwei’s social doctrine, and the historian Zhu Weizhen made this judgment, which is worthy of consideration by the sociological circles. These two works are called representative works of social doctrine and can be understood from two levels. On the one hand, the content of these two works is the study of social issues; on the other hand, these two works are written in sociology. The former is the judgment made on the research object, while the latter has the meaning of the subject attribution judgment. Zhu Weizhen may not make judgments in the sense of subject attribution, but it does not rule out this possibility. Because these two works have common or at least coincidence with the sociology in the general sense in terms of research field, premise, basic content, theoretical pursuit and methodological principles.

According to Kang Youwei in his Biography, he began collecting a large amount of Western academic literature at the age of 26 (1883) and became interested in geometry.

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