The retrospective creation of new confucianism
pp. 25-53
in: John Makeham (ed), New confucianism, Berlin, Springer, 2003Abstract
Although most of the promoters and sympathetic interpreters of New Confucianism trace the movement to the early part of the twentieth century, in fact there is little evidence that New Confucianism had attained a degree of integration or coalescence sufficient for it to be recognized and promoted as a distinct philosophical movement or school of thought before the 1970s. Crucially, up until that time, the "New Confucians' did not have a sense of group identity that distinguished them from other Confucian-inspired thinkers. I will argue that a differentiation needs to be made between Confucian revivalism—a conservative cultural phenomenon that has taken on a variety of forms throughout the twentieth century—and a distinct philosophical movement with its own self-identity, which promoted itself as, and became identified as, New Confucianism. I will further argue, against the conventional view, that this latter development did not occur until the early 1980s. Over the next decade, the movement matured rapidly. I will begin by examining the genesis and early uses of the term xin Rujia. It was Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990)—himself later identified as an early New Confucian—who seems to have been the earliest twentieth-century figure to use the term xin Rujia.