This book explores the interaction of European Enlightenment thinkers with Chinese theory and shows how ideas from China and ideas about China had a profound impact on Enlightenment thought.

Challenging the orthodox account of the Enlightenment as an innovation that emerged solely among European men, the book argues that many ideas which led to human progress originated outside Europe. Focusing on the cultural interaction between Europe and China it demonstrates how Chinese theory precipitated debate and demanded theorization by fundamentally challenging the intellectual framework inherited from European antiquity. The result was neither European nor Chinese, but a dynamic fusion that has continued to produce theory right up to the present day.

In illustrating how cultural interaction with alien perspectives, civilizations, and worldviews can further human development, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese and European history and philosophy.

Table of contents:

1. Even without an Overlord: Christian Wolff and Confucianism
Heiner Roetz

2. How America’s Founders Learned that Equality Means Meritocracy
Martin Powers

3. Confucius and the American Enlightenment
Alfred Hornung

4. Francois Quesnay’s Despotisme de la Chine as a Critique of Early Political Liberalism
Dirk Schuck

5. A New Cosmology and a New Aesthetics: Pierre Bayle and the Monistic Connection of Shaftesbury to China
Yu Liu

6. Chinese Metaphysics in the Formation of European Organicist Thought: German Romanticism, Structuralism and Relational Politics
Shuchen Xiang

7. China in the Political Imaginary of Restoration England: Revisiting John Webb’s Fantasy about the Chinese Language
Longxi Zhang

8. The East-West Orientation in Immanuel Kant’s Thinking
Daniel Purdy