#confucius — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #confucius, aggregated by home.social.
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Today is known as Confucius Day, which celebrates the birthday of Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, distinguished teacher, and respected scholar. For more than 2,500 years, the man born as Kong Qiu, has helped to guide and teach people worldwide. #FactsMatter #Confucius
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Today is known as Confucius Day, which celebrates the birthday of Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, distinguished teacher, and respected scholar. For more than 2,500 years, the man born as Kong Qiu, has helped to guide and teach people worldwide. #FactsMatter #Confucius
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Today is known as Confucius Day, which celebrates the birthday of Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, distinguished teacher, and respected scholar. For more than 2,500 years, the man born as Kong Qiu, has helped to guide and teach people worldwide. #FactsMatter #Confucius
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If you make a mistake and do not correct it, that is a mistake.
-- Confucius -
If you make a mistake and do not correct it, that is a mistake.
-- Confucius -
If you make a mistake and do not correct it, that is a mistake.
-- Confucius -
If you make a mistake and do not correct it, that is a mistake.
-- Confucius -
"Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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A quotation (probably not) from Eleanor Roosevelt
He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
(Misattributed)More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-eleanor/85…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #eleanorroosevelt #confucius #application #complaisance #consideration #contemplated #education #ignorance #learning #thinking #thought
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A quotation (probably not) from Eleanor Roosevelt
He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
(Misattributed)More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-eleanor/85…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #eleanorroosevelt #confucius #application #complaisance #consideration #contemplated #education #ignorance #learning #thinking #thought
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A quotation (probably not) from Eleanor Roosevelt
He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
(Misattributed)More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-eleanor/85…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #eleanorroosevelt #confucius #application #complaisance #consideration #contemplated #education #ignorance #learning #thinking #thought
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A quotation (probably not) from Eleanor Roosevelt
He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
(Misattributed)More about this quote: wist.info/roosevelt-eleanor/85…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #eleanorroosevelt #confucius #application #complaisance #consideration #contemplated #education #ignorance #learning #thinking #thought
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De Oudheid samengevat (door artificiële intelligentie)
Een van de lezers van deze blog, Bart Strörmann, stuurde me eind vorige maand een door artificiële intelligentie gegenereerd lijstje van tien belangrijke gebeurtenissen uit de Oudheid en vroeg mijn commentaar daarop. “Wat een leuke vraag!”, dacht ik, “daar zit een tof blogje in”. En vervolgens raakte ik dat lijstje kwijt. Sorry Bart. Ik heb Claude gevraagd een nieuw en iets langer lijstje te genereren.
Goedemorgen! Zou u een lijst kunnen geven van de vijftien belangrijkste gebeurtenissen uit de Oudheid?
Hier is het antwoord.
- Uitvinding van het schrift (rond 3200 v.Chr., Sumerië) Het spijkerschrift in Uruk markeert het begin van de geschreven geschiedenis.
- Eenwording van Egypte (rond 3100 v.Chr.) Boven- en Beneden-Egypte worden één rijk onder de farao’s.
- Bloei van de Indusbeschaving (rond 2600-1900 v.Chr.) Steden als Harappa en Mohenjodaro kennen geavanceerde stadsplanning en een tot nu toe onontcijferd schrift, een van de grootste vroege beschavingen naast Sumerië en Egypte.
Dit lijkt me een perfect begin. Het feit dat het schrift wordt genoemd, betekent dat de AI begrijpt (of reproduceert) dat dit echt een game changer was. Het staat natuurlijk op alle websites. Schrift was een zogeheten “container”: iemand doet er informatie in die er op een andere plek of op een ander tijdstip uit kan worden gehaald.
- Wetten van Hammurabi (rond 1750 v.Chr.) Een van de oudste uitgebreide wetscodes uit Babylon, fundamenteel voor bestuur en recht.
De tekst is belangrijk, maar niet omdat ze fundamenteel was voor bestuur en recht. Geen mens kon de lange spijkerschrifttekst lezen. Het vertelt wel iets over het verlangen van de vorst om zichzelf te presenteren als rechtvaardig.
- Shang-dynastie en het ontstaan van het Chinese schrift (rond 1600-1046 v.Chr.) De orakelbotinscripties vormen de vroegste vorm van Chinees schrift en markeren het begin van de historische Chinese beschaving.
- Ineenstorting van de Bronstijd (rond 1200 v.Chr.) Gelijktijdige val van het Rijk van de Hittieten, Mykene en andere machten in het oostelijk Middellandse Zeegebied, gevolgd door een donkere periode.
Leuk geprobeerd, en gebaseerd op gangbare websites, maar zo duister is die periode niet meer. En het idee van een “val” is ook wat uit de mode aan het raken. Bonuspunt voor het vermijden van het woord Zeevolken.
- De Axiale tijd (rond 8e-3e eeuw v.Chr., met een piek rond 500 v.Chr.) Confucius en Lao Zi in China, Boeddha in India, Zarathuštra in Perzië, de Hebreeuwse profeten en de Griekse filosofen (Sokrates, Plato) ontwikkelen vrijwel tegelijkertijd fundamenteel nieuwe ideeën over ethiek en het bestaan, verspreid over heel Eurazië.
Dit is flauwekul. Het idee van een Achsenzeit waarin alles tegelijk zou zijn gebeurd, is chronologisch niet houdbaar. Zarathuštra leefde een paar eeuwen eerder en niet in Perzië. Als je een periode van 800 tot 200 aanwijst, tja: dat is wel heel vaag.
- Opkomst van Achaimenidisch Perzië (vanaf 550 v.Chr.) Cyrus de Grote bouwt het grootste rijk dat de wereld tot dan toe had gezien, van Egypte tot de Indusvallei.
De Assyriërs legden de grondslagen van dat rijk, maar vooruit: ik reken het goed, al waren het Cyrus’ opvolgers die het rijk uitbreidden tot de genoemde omvang.
- Grieks-Perzische Oorlogen en Atheense democratie (5e eeuw v.Chr.) De Griekse stadstaten weerstaan de Perzische expansie, terwijl Athene experimenteert met de eerste vorm van democratie.
Oei. Wat de AI hier feitelijk reproduceert, al staat het er niet expliciet, is het negentiende-eeuwse verhaal dat er een oosterse cultuur was en een westerse, en dat die laatste dankzij de Griekse overwinning in de Perzische Oorlogen overleefde. Zo bleven democratie, vrijheid en humanisme bestaan, die anders zouden zijn gestikt in oosters despotisme en obscurantisme. Weber veegde al ruim een eeuw geleden de vloer in met dit soort kletspraat. Meer hier.
- Veroveringen van Alexander de Grote (336-323 v.Chr.) Alexander verslaat het Perzische Rijk en trekt tot in India, waardoor Griekse en Aziatische culturen zich vermengen (hellenisme).
Woordkeuze: de diverse culturen vermengden niet maar bestonden naast elkaar. Dat is wezenlijk anders.
- Maurya-rijk en keizer Ashoka (rond 268-232 v.Chr.) Ashoka verenigt vrijwel het hele Indiase subcontinent en bekeert zich tot het boeddhisme, wat bijdraagt aan de verspreiding ervan door Azië.
- Eenwording van China en opening van de Zijderoute (221 v.Chr. – 130 v.Chr.) Qin Shi Huangdi verenigt China en bouwt aan de Grote Muur; onder de Han-dynastie opent Zhang Qian de Zijderoute, die Rome, Perzië, India en China met elkaar verbindt.
Dit lijkt me in orde.
- Van Romeinse Republiek naar Keizerrijk (27 v.Chr.) Na de Punische Oorlogen en burgeroorlogen wordt Augustus de eerste keizer, wat de Pax Romana inluidt.
Ik zou hebben gezegd: vanuit Italië wordt het Middellandse-Zeegebied verenigd. Maar het belang is correct geïdentificeerd. Ik zou de gelijktijdigheid van de bloei van dat Mediterrane Rijk en Han-China hebben genoteerd.
- Val van West-Rome en bloei van het Guptarijk (5e-6e eeuw na Chr.) Terwijl West-Rome in 476 uiteenvalt, beleeft India onder de Gupta’s een “gouden eeuw” van wetenschap, wiskunde (het cijfer nul) en kunst – een teken dat het einde van de Oudheid zich niet overal gelijktijdig voltrekt.
Beter: het keizerlijk hof in Constantinopel verliest tijdelijk het gezag over Italië en de Maghreb, en voorgoed over de westelijke periferie. De parallel met Gupta-India zou ik zelf niet hebben bedacht, dus hier pikte ik iets leuks op.
- Opkomst van de islam (eerste helft 7e eeuw na Chr.) Mohammeds prediking vanaf 610 en de snelle Arabische veroveringen vormen het slot van de Oudheid en de opmaat naar de Middeleeuwen in het hele continent.
Hier zou ik zelf ook eindigen. Kortom, ik vind het al met al een aardig lijstje, dat precies biedt wat je verwacht: namelijk de grootste gemene deler van wat de artificiële intelligentie online heeft kunnen vinden. Het is knap dat Claude uit die ongedifferentieerde nevenschikking van zinvolle en onzinnige informatie een hoofdlijn weet te distilleren, en het is jammer dat het een verouderd verhaal oplevert.
Ik weet niet of ik vooruitzie naar de toepassing van artificiële intelligentie. Het lijkt me wél een handig middel om al die nooit geciteerde archeologische rapporten eens samen te vatten en patronen te ontdekken. Een oefening als deze levert echter een verhaal op dat op één punt meer dan een eeuw verouderd is. Dat is bedenkelijk en ik vrees dat de toekomst ons een nieuwe waarheidstheorie zal brengen, waarin waarheid niet langer betekent dat een bewering correspondeert met de feiten of consistent is met eerdere waarheden, maar waarin als waar geldt wat de AI zegt. We leven in interessante tijden, zullen we maar zeggen.
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Deel dit: #Achaimeniden #Achsenzeit #AlexanderDeGrote #artificiëleIntelligentie #Ashoka #AtheenseDemocratie #Augustus #Boeddha #Confucius #Constantinopel #container #CyrusDeGrote #HanDynastie #Harappa #Hittieten #LaoZi #Maurya #MaxWeber #Mohammed #Mohenjodaro #PerzischeOorlogen #Plato #QinShiHuangdi #ShangDynastie #Sokrates #Uruk #waarheid #WettenVanHammurabi #Zarathuštra #Zeevolken #ZhangQian #Zijderoute -
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In this post I talk about Confucian political ideology--and what I think modern people could learn from what he had to say.
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In this post I talk about Confucian political ideology--and what I think modern people could learn from what he had to say.
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #360panorama #NewMexico
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #360panorama #NewMexico
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #360panorama #NewMexico
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #360panorama #NewMexico
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"he noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"he noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"he noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"he noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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The Voice Behind the Shield: When the Adversary Carries a Truth
What if the villain's crime and the villain's argument are not the same thing? From Kumbakarna's doomed loyalty to Iblis's refusal, Ravana's devotion, Zhuangzi's honest thief, Prometheus's fire, Devadatta's schism, and the Grand Inquisitor's bread, this essay asks whether truth can survive an untrue mouth — and finds, in Javanese tepa slira, a way to hold both.https://legawa.com/2026/07/08/the-voice-behind-the-shield-when-the-adversary-carries-a-truth/
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Ketika Kebodohan Duduk di Singgasana: Catatan tentang Kuasa yang Tak Ditopang Kebijaksanaan
Kisah Kertapati di desa Ngadirojo menggambarkan bahaya keputusan cepat tanpa kebijaksanaan. Lurah yang terburu-buru menutup sumur lama justru menyebabkan penyakit. Pelajaran dari cerita ini mengingatkan pentingnya berpikir mendalam dan melibatkan kebijaksanaan bersama dalam pengambilan keputusan demi kebaikan kolektif, bukan semata kepentingan pribadi. -
Ketika Kebodohan Duduk di Singgasana: Catatan tentang Kuasa yang Tak Ditopang Kebijaksanaan
Kisah Kertapati di desa Ngadirojo menggambarkan bahaya keputusan cepat tanpa kebijaksanaan. Lurah yang terburu-buru menutup sumur lama justru menyebabkan penyakit. Pelajaran dari cerita ini mengingatkan pentingnya berpikir mendalam dan melibatkan kebijaksanaan bersama dalam pengambilan keputusan demi kebaikan kolektif, bukan semata kepentingan pribadi. -
Ketika Kebodohan Duduk di Singgasana: Catatan tentang Kuasa yang Tak Ditopang Kebijaksanaan
Kisah Kertapati di desa Ngadirojo menggambarkan bahaya keputusan cepat tanpa kebijaksanaan. Lurah yang terburu-buru menutup sumur lama justru menyebabkan penyakit. Pelajaran dari cerita ini mengingatkan pentingnya berpikir mendalam dan melibatkan kebijaksanaan bersama dalam pengambilan keputusan demi kebaikan kolektif, bukan semata kepentingan pribadi. -
Ketika Kebodohan Duduk di Singgasana: Catatan tentang Kuasa yang Tak Ditopang Kebijaksanaan
Kisah Kertapati di desa Ngadirojo menggambarkan bahaya keputusan cepat tanpa kebijaksanaan. Lurah yang terburu-buru menutup sumur lama justru menyebabkan penyakit. Pelajaran dari cerita ini mengingatkan pentingnya berpikir mendalam dan melibatkan kebijaksanaan bersama dalam pengambilan keputusan demi kebaikan kolektif, bukan semata kepentingan pribadi. -
In this temple in Hangzhou, the founder of #Taoism, the #Buddha, and #Confucius chill together peacefully (figures left to right). If only all of our traditions could mingle so easily...
More at suchanek.name/texts/atheis... -
In this temple in Hangzhou, the founder of #Taoism, the #Buddha, and #Confucius chill together peacefully (figures left to right). If only all of our traditions could mingle so easily...
More at https://suchanek.name/texts/atheism/ChapterReligions.html#SeqChin
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In this temple in Hangzhou, the founder of #Taoism, the #Buddha, and #Confucius chill together peacefully (figures left to right). If only all of our traditions could mingle so easily...
More at https://suchanek.name/texts/atheism/ChapterReligions.html#SeqChin
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In this temple in Hangzhou, the founder of #Taoism, the #Buddha, and #Confucius chill together peacefully (figures left to right). If only all of our traditions could mingle so easily...
More at https://suchanek.name/texts/atheism/ChapterReligions.html#SeqChin
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A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.
— Confucius
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A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.
— Confucius
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A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.
— Confucius
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A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.
— Confucius
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"Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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"Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."
– Confucius
Daily #Zen #Buddhism #Confucius
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #CoyoteButtesNorth #TheWave #VermilionCliffs #Utah
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #CoyoteButtesNorth #TheWave #VermilionCliffs #Utah
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #CoyoteButtesNorth #TheWave #VermilionCliffs #Utah
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
-- Confucius⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Confucius #Learning
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #CoyoteButtesNorth #TheWave #VermilionCliffs #Utah
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By three methods we may learn wisdom: First by reflection, which is noblest; second by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
-- Confucius -
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First by reflection, which is noblest; second by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
-- Confucius -
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First by reflection, which is noblest; second by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
-- Confucius -
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First by reflection, which is noblest; second by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
-- Confucius -
The Man without Superstition: John Toland and China
“None are found today in the whole mortal world, who are either as refined in their manners and more honourable, or in all the burdens and responsibilities of the good civic offices less in error than the sect of the Chinese called the literati. Their commission and mandate from the king is a civil administration which excludes religious cults. Although they believe in an eternal and incorruptible world, they do not believe in a Spirit which is distinguished from the structure of matter; and they completely reject as stories and political contrivances the doctrine of the future existence of souls”John Toland,
Adeisidaemon sive Titus Livius a Superstitione Vindicatus,(Amsterdam,1709)The Chinese literati were the mandarins, trained in Confucianism, who rose by a series of examinations to fill the official positions as judges and administrators in imperial China. John Toland (167-1722) had a positive opinion of Chinese society and culture, and particularly Confucianism. His views stand in stark contrast to the hostile attitudes that became common among Europeans in the course of the 19th century. For Toland, China was a model, an example to follow. Europeans had much to learn from it. When did the change take place and why?
The transitional point may come with Montesquieu, who made critical remarks about China in De l’esprit des loix (1748). It may be that attitudes to China changed as anti-absolutist and republican views gained traction in Europe. The change may be due to the very negative account of China that George Anson published after his piratical voyage around the world. But there were plenty of earlier critics of China such as Daniel Defoe. Defoe was a sinophobe if ever there was one. Nor is the equation between radical political views and hostility to China entirely satisfactory. Toland was a radical Whig, an anti- absolutist and a republican but found much in China to admire.
What impressed Toland about China was that the government seemed to operate on largely secular principles. It was unlike any European state in that respect. All European states were confessional states. They might tolerate religious minorities to some degree but this was by no means common. The Dutch Republic and England were exceptions but even there toleration was limited and always under threat. The Chinese form of government seemed to Toland to have produced an exemplary system which was superior to that found in European states because it was entirely civil in character.
It could be argued that the Chinese literati had a state religion no less than the ruling elites of Europe. They were Confucians and practiced rituals which were intended to ensure the welfare of the empire. But Toland did not regard Confucianism as a religion since the Chinese literati did not recognise spirits that were separate from the structure of matter and nor did they believe in punishments and rewards for an immortal soul after death. Such beliefs were no more than “stories and political contrivances” as far as he was concerned. They were a feature of the “priestcraft” which the clergy used to instill superstition and fear into the minds of the faithful, as far as Toland was concerned.
Toland dedicated Adeisidaemon to “carissime Antoni,” my dearest Anthony, that is to say Anthony Collins the freethinker at whose house he often stayed. Collins was associated with a group of radical Whigs that emerged in the growing coffee house culture of London. They often gathered at the Grecian coffee house. It was to the Grecian that George Berkeley went as a young ecclesiastic intent on confronting deists and afterwards claimed he had heard Anthony Collins argue for the non-existence of God. Among this group were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who produced the Independent Whig a journal to which Collins contributed as did Toland’s patron Robert Molesworth. China figured in Trenchard and Gordon’s writings as an example of a state in which religious diversity was tolerated, producing a happy and prosperous society.
The problem that confronted the radical Whigs after 1688 was how to develop an effective state that preserved the liberties they valued, including freedom of thought, in a period of rapid social and economic change that seemed to favour powerful, well-armed, well-resourced centralised states. John Locke had drawn on the earlier concepts of natural rights to develop a theory which included the right of resistance but the post-1688 Whigs were not in the business of overthrowing the state. Whatever its shortcomings might be they wished to defend the British state against internal and external threats. The plea for toleration was rooted in their religious thinking but there was a political aspect to it as well and it became an integral part of their theory of the state. Toleration became central to their political writings and China was an integral to their arguments for toleration.
Toland can be identified with the “Country” ideology associated with Harringtonian republicanism. But if we take his use of China as a model form of state seriously then the court versus country dichotomy looks a little strained. China was not a republic in a traditional sense. Already in 1700 Toland’s edition of Oceana by James Harrington had referenced Confucius. The frontispiece shows Confucius alongside Moses, Solon, Lycurgus, and Numa Pompilius, Brutus the defender of Roman republican virtues and William III who had come to the defence of the English constitution against what the Whigs believed to be the tyranny of James II. Here was a strange amalgam fusing the Biblical concept of law, with the classical republics of ancient Greece and Rome, added to the contemporary political experiences of 1688, which were now combined with the relatively recently discovered figure of Confucius.
This odd assembly of notables represents a visual summary of the political conceptions that ran through the ideology with which the Whigs sought to underpin their developing vision of the state. James II’s attempt to create a centralised, efficient, bureaucratic state on the lines of those that were emerging across Europe had offended his subjects, both Whig and Tory, and led to his overthrow. Even with James gone the same fundamental problem remained. Could such an effective state exist without being absolutist in character and being based on the principle of divine right?
Toland’s comments on China in Adeisidaemon were an attempt to suggest how that could be done. They reflect a radical Whig approach to articulating a concept of a non-absolutist state which did not rely on superstition to maintain the loyalty of its citizens. From different sources, political traditions and periods of history Toland assembled a unitary vision of an ideal state. It was a republic but not in the modern sense of a state without a king. This utopian republic had a king who respected the law and appointed magistrates who governed without partiality for any religious sect. This was a state founded on law which could be tolerant of diversity among its citizens. Toland was doing rather more than preserving the Whig tradition. He was expanding it in significant ways.
The makeshift character of Toland’s concept of the state underlines how recent the British state was. Created by the Act of Union of 1707 Great Britain had come into existence only two years before Toland published Adeisidaemon. Historian J.H. Plumb argued that Britain had achieved a unique stability under a kind of Venetian oligarchy of super-rich Whigs after three generations of rebellion, treason and plot. Plumb’s view was not one which Toland and his contemporaries would have recognised. They feared that the gains of the 1688 Revolution would be overthrown by an external threat at any moment or undermined from within by corruption and financial speculation. From their point of view, Great Britain was a kingdom beset with economic and political problems at home and powerful enemies abroad. It was vulnerable and insecure, a precarious newcomer on the world scene. As the Whig oligarchy eventually consolidated its hold on power Toland’s writings began to look outmoded. By the end of the century Burke could dismiss the revolution of 1688 as “a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession”. But in Toland’s lifetime the British state was not, as Plumb argued, “legitimised by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power.” That was still to come.
Britain was a state with shallow historical roots that seemed illegitimate to wide sections of society. Toland and his contemporaries still saw themselves as engaged in a life and death struggle against absolutism. They can look like conspiracy theorists but their paranoia had some foundation. Toland’s political world was shaped by conspiracies. The Whigs had good grounds to fear a popular counter-revolution urged on from High Church pulpits and backed by foreign armies and subsidies. Support for the exiled Stuart monarchs and the mystique of kingship remained strong.
The very newness of the British state made it difficult to characterise in terms of the traditional political vocabulary derived from either ancient and renaissance city states or the dynastic states of Europe. There was a theoretical lag in comprehending what the complex upheavals of the late seventeenth century had brought into being in Britain. Toland’s Adeisidaemon is a long way from being a work of systematic political theory. He never presented such a theoretical account of the state. What he did, in an allusive and imaginative way, in Adeisidaemon was to sketch the outline of a state by stretching the established republican tradition into a new form.
At the centre of Adeisidaemon was the Roman historian Titus Livius, better known as Livy, who wrote a history of Rome from its foundation to his own lifetime in the reign of Augustus. In the course of Livy’s narrative Rome was repeatedly faced with outbreaks of superstitious mass hysteria from the population in times of danger. The role of the political elite in Livy’s view was to exercise a restraining and moderating influence and bring the citizens back to correct religious rites rather than displays of emotion. Livy’s account of Rome had a resonance in early eighteenth century Britain, when London remained the centre of militant Tory, High Church, or Jacobite popular protest. In the Sacheverell riots of 1710 High Church clergymen egged on the crowds than burned dissenting meeting houses and threatened the Bank of England. The Hanoverian dynasty was far from popular. Effigies of George I were burned and Jacobite mementoes imported to meet popular demand. The writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld later recalled the terror that the Jacobite rising of 1745 caused in her Dissenting Leicestershire home. Livy’s admonitions offered a contemporary political lesson which retained its relevance for Whigs long after Toland’s death.
If Livy’s history of Rome offered a case study in the dangers of superstition, China offered an apparently exemplary model of how a state could restrain superstition by good governance. The Qing dynasty seemed to have overcome the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century when the previous dynasty had been overthrown. In the course of the eighteenth century its population and economy were growing strongly. It held together a large and diverse empire which seemed impregnable to external attack. China provided a glimpse of the way in which republican virtues could be preserved in an era of large, territorial states with powerful executives. The philosophy of Confucius seemed to be the ideological underpinning of this state and to offer an alternative to divine right absolutism.
Toland’s death in 1722 followed the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. He lost all the money he had invested in the speculative venture and died in poverty as a result. It was more than a personal tragedy. He was one among thousands ruined by the crash. The scale of the crisis comes into focus when it is remembered that the British government was still paying the debt it incurred in 2008. The financial crisis coincided with the exposure of the Atterbury Plot. Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester was found to have conspired to oust George I and restore the Stuart line. Here was ample confirmation of the vulnerability of the Hanoverian regime and the danger of High Church conspiracies whipping up popular emotions. Toland’s appeal to Livy and the Chinese literati as men without superstition seemed to be justified by events.
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).Diego Lucci, “Deism, Freethinking and Toleration in Enlightenment England,” History of European Ideas, 43 (2017): 345-358
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
George F.E Rudé, Ideology and Popular Protest, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980).
#Confucius #deism #Toland -
The Man without Superstition: John Toland and China
“None are found today in the whole mortal world, who are either as refined in their manners and more honourable, or in all the burdens and responsibilities of the good civic offices less in error than the sect of the Chinese called the literati. Their commission and mandate from the king is a civil administration which excludes religious cults. Although they believe in an eternal and incorruptible world, they do not believe in a Spirit which is distinguished from the structure of matter; and they completely reject as stories and political contrivances the doctrine of the future existence of souls”John Toland,
Adeisidaemon sive Titus Livius a Superstitione Vindicatus,(Amsterdam,1709)The Chinese literati were the mandarins, trained in Confucianism, who rose by a series of examinations to fill the official positions as judges and administrators in imperial China. John Toland (167-1722) had a positive opinion of Chinese society and culture, and particularly Confucianism. His views stand in stark contrast to the hostile attitudes that became common among Europeans in the course of the 19th century. For Toland, China was a model, an example to follow. Europeans had much to learn from it. When did the change take place and why?
The transitional point may come with Montesquieu, who made critical remarks about China in De l’esprit des loix (1748). It may be that attitudes to China changed as anti-absolutist and republican views gained traction in Europe. The change may be due to the very negative account of China that George Anson published after his piratical voyage around the world. But there were plenty of earlier critics of China such as Daniel Defoe. Defoe was a sinophobe if ever there was one. Nor is the equation between radical political views and hostility to China entirely satisfactory. Toland was a radical Whig, an anti- absolutist and a republican but found much in China to admire.
What impressed Toland about China was that the government seemed to operate on largely secular principles. It was unlike any European state in that respect. All European states were confessional states. They might tolerate religious minorities to some degree but this was by no means common. The Dutch Republic and England were exceptions but even there toleration was limited and always under threat. The Chinese form of government seemed to Toland to have produced an exemplary system which was superior to that found in European states because it was entirely civil in character.
It could be argued that the Chinese literati had a state religion no less than the ruling elites of Europe. They were Confucians and practiced rituals which were intended to ensure the welfare of the empire. But Toland did not regard Confucianism as a religion since the Chinese literati did not recognise spirits that were separate from the structure of matter and nor did they believe in punishments and rewards for an immortal soul after death. Such beliefs were no more than “stories and political contrivances” as far as he was concerned. They were a feature of the “priestcraft” which the clergy used to instill superstition and fear into the minds of the faithful, as far as Toland was concerned.
Toland dedicated Adeisidaemon to “carissime Antoni,” my dearest Anthony, that is to say Anthony Collins the freethinker at whose house he often stayed. Collins was associated with a group of radical Whigs that emerged in the growing coffee house culture of London. They often gathered at the Grecian coffee house. It was to the Grecian that George Berkeley went as a young ecclesiastic intent on confronting deists and afterwards claimed he had heard Anthony Collins argue for the non-existence of God. Among this group were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who produced the Independent Whig a journal to which Collins contributed as did Toland’s patron Robert Molesworth. China figured in Trenchard and Gordon’s writings as an example of a state in which religious diversity was tolerated, producing a happy and prosperous society.
The problem that confronted the radical Whigs after 1688 was how to develop an effective state that preserved the liberties they valued, including freedom of thought, in a period of rapid social and economic change that seemed to favour powerful, well-armed, well-resourced centralised states. John Locke had drawn on the earlier concepts of natural rights to develop a theory which included the right of resistance but the post-1688 Whigs were not in the business of overthrowing the state. Whatever its shortcomings might be they wished to defend the British state against internal and external threats. The plea for toleration was rooted in their religious thinking but there was a political aspect to it as well and it became an integral part of their theory of the state. Toleration became central to their political writings and China was an integral to their arguments for toleration.
Toland can be identified with the “Country” ideology associated with Harringtonian republicanism. But if we take his use of China as a model form of state seriously then the court versus country dichotomy looks a little strained. China was not a republic in a traditional sense. Already in 1700 Toland’s edition of Oceana by James Harrington had referenced Confucius. The frontispiece shows Confucius alongside Moses, Solon, Lycurgus, and Numa Pompilius, Brutus the defender of Roman republican virtues and William III who had come to the defence of the English constitution against what the Whigs believed to be the tyranny of James II. Here was a strange amalgam fusing the Biblical concept of law, with the classical republics of ancient Greece and Rome, added to the contemporary political experiences of 1688, which were now combined with the relatively recently discovered figure of Confucius.
This odd assembly of notables represents a visual summary of the political conceptions that ran through the ideology with which the Whigs sought to underpin their developing vision of the state. James II’s attempt to create a centralised, efficient, bureaucratic state on the lines of those that were emerging across Europe had offended his subjects, both Whig and Tory, and led to his overthrow. Even with James gone the same fundamental problem remained. Could such an effective state exist without being absolutist in character and being based on the principle of divine right?
Toland’s comments on China in Adeisidaemon were an attempt to suggest how that could be done. They reflect a radical Whig approach to articulating a concept of a non-absolutist state which did not rely on superstition to maintain the loyalty of its citizens. From different sources, political traditions and periods of history Toland assembled a unitary vision of an ideal state. It was a republic but not in the modern sense of a state without a king. This utopian republic had a king who respected the law and appointed magistrates who governed without partiality for any religious sect. This was a state founded on law which could be tolerant of diversity among its citizens. Toland was doing rather more than preserving the Whig tradition. He was expanding it in significant ways.
The makeshift character of Toland’s concept of the state underlines how recent the British state was. Created by the Act of Union of 1707 Great Britain had come into existence only two years before Toland published Adeisidaemon. Historian J.H. Plumb argued that Britain had achieved a unique stability under a kind of Venetian oligarchy of super-rich Whigs after three generations of rebellion, treason and plot. Plumb’s view was not one which Toland and his contemporaries would have recognised. They feared that the gains of the 1688 Revolution would be overthrown by an external threat at any moment or undermined from within by corruption and financial speculation. From their point of view, Great Britain was a kingdom beset with economic and political problems at home and powerful enemies abroad. It was vulnerable and insecure, a precarious newcomer on the world scene. As the Whig oligarchy eventually consolidated its hold on power Toland’s writings began to look outmoded. By the end of the century Burke could dismiss the revolution of 1688 as “a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession”. But in Toland’s lifetime the British state was not, as Plumb argued, “legitimised by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power.” That was still to come.
Britain was a state with shallow historical roots that seemed illegitimate to wide sections of society. Toland and his contemporaries still saw themselves as engaged in a life and death struggle against absolutism. They can look like conspiracy theorists but their paranoia had some foundation. Toland’s political world was shaped by conspiracies. The Whigs had good grounds to fear a popular counter-revolution urged on from High Church pulpits and backed by foreign armies and subsidies. Support for the exiled Stuart monarchs and the mystique of kingship remained strong.
The very newness of the British state made it difficult to characterise in terms of the traditional political vocabulary derived from either ancient and renaissance city states or the dynastic states of Europe. There was a theoretical lag in comprehending what the complex upheavals of the late seventeenth century had brought into being in Britain. Toland’s Adeisidaemon is a long way from being a work of systematic political theory. He never presented such a theoretical account of the state. What he did, in an allusive and imaginative way, in Adeisidaemon was to sketch the outline of a state by stretching the established republican tradition into a new form.
At the centre of Adeisidaemon was the Roman historian Titus Livius, better known as Livy, who wrote a history of Rome from its foundation to his own lifetime in the reign of Augustus. In the course of Livy’s narrative Rome was repeatedly faced with outbreaks of superstitious mass hysteria from the population in times of danger. The role of the political elite in Livy’s view was to exercise a restraining and moderating influence and bring the citizens back to correct religious rites rather than displays of emotion. Livy’s account of Rome had a resonance in early eighteenth century Britain, when London remained the centre of militant Tory, High Church, or Jacobite popular protest. In the Sacheverell riots of 1710 High Church clergymen egged on the crowds than burned dissenting meeting houses and threatened the Bank of England. The Hanoverian dynasty was far from popular. Effigies of George I were burned and Jacobite mementoes imported to meet popular demand. The writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld later recalled the terror that the Jacobite rising of 1745 caused in her Dissenting Leicestershire home. Livy’s admonitions offered a contemporary political lesson which retained its relevance for Whigs long after Toland’s death.
If Livy’s history of Rome offered a case study in the dangers of superstition, China offered an apparently exemplary model of how a state could restrain superstition by good governance. The Qing dynasty seemed to have overcome the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century when the previous dynasty had been overthrown. In the course of the eighteenth century its population and economy were growing strongly. It held together a large and diverse empire which seemed impregnable to external attack. China provided a glimpse of the way in which republican virtues could be preserved in an era of large, territorial states with powerful executives. The philosophy of Confucius seemed to be the ideological underpinning of this state and to offer an alternative to divine right absolutism.
Toland’s death in 1722 followed the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. He lost all the money he had invested in the speculative venture and died in poverty as a result. It was more than a personal tragedy. He was one among thousands ruined by the crash. The scale of the crisis comes into focus when it is remembered that the British government was still paying the debt it incurred in 2008. The financial crisis coincided with the exposure of the Atterbury Plot. Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester was found to have conspired to oust George I and restore the Stuart line. Here was ample confirmation of the vulnerability of the Hanoverian regime and the danger of High Church conspiracies whipping up popular emotions. Toland’s appeal to Livy and the Chinese literati as men without superstition seemed to be justified by events.
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).Diego Lucci, “Deism, Freethinking and Toleration in Enlightenment England,” History of European Ideas, 43 (2017): 345-358
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
George F.E Rudé, Ideology and Popular Protest, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980).
#Confucius #deism #Toland -
The Man without Superstition: John Toland and China
“None are found today in the whole mortal world, who are either as refined in their manners and more honourable, or in all the burdens and responsibilities of the good civic offices less in error than the sect of the Chinese called the literati. Their commission and mandate from the king is a civil administration which excludes religious cults. Although they believe in an eternal and incorruptible world, they do not believe in a Spirit which is distinguished from the structure of matter; and they completely reject as stories and political contrivances the doctrine of the future existence of souls”John Toland,
Adeisidaemon sive Titus Livius a Superstitione Vindicatus,(Amsterdam,1709)The Chinese literati were the mandarins, trained in Confucianism, who rose by a series of examinations to fill the official positions as judges and administrators in imperial China. John Toland (167-1722) had a positive opinion of Chinese society and culture, and particularly Confucianism. His views stand in stark contrast to the hostile attitudes that became common among Europeans in the course of the 19th century. For Toland, China was a model, an example to follow. Europeans had much to learn from it. When did the change take place and why?
The transitional point may come with Montesquieu, who made critical remarks about China in De l’esprit des loix (1748). It may be that attitudes to China changed as anti-absolutist and republican views gained traction in Europe. The change may be due to the very negative account of China that George Anson published after his piratical voyage around the world. But there were plenty of earlier critics of China such as Daniel Defoe. Defoe was a sinophobe if ever there was one. Nor is the equation between radical political views and hostility to China entirely satisfactory. Toland was a radical Whig, an anti- absolutist and a republican but found much in China to admire.
What impressed Toland about China was that the government seemed to operate on largely secular principles. It was unlike any European state in that respect. All European states were confessional states. They might tolerate religious minorities to some degree but this was by no means common. The Dutch Republic and England were exceptions but even there toleration was limited and always under threat. The Chinese form of government seemed to Toland to have produced an exemplary system which was superior to that found in European states because it was entirely civil in character.
It could be argued that the Chinese literati had a state religion no less than the ruling elites of Europe. They were Confucians and practiced rituals which were intended to ensure the welfare of the empire. But Toland did not regard Confucianism as a religion since the Chinese literati did not recognise spirits that were separate from the structure of matter and nor did they believe in punishments and rewards for an immortal soul after death. Such beliefs were no more than “stories and political contrivances” as far as he was concerned. They were a feature of the “priestcraft” which the clergy used to instill superstition and fear into the minds of the faithful, as far as Toland was concerned.
Toland dedicated Adeisidaemon to “carissime Antoni,” my dearest Anthony, that is to say Anthony Collins the freethinker at whose house he often stayed. Collins was associated with a group of radical Whigs that emerged in the growing coffee house culture of London. They often gathered at the Grecian coffee house. It was to the Grecian that George Berkeley went as a young ecclesiastic intent on confronting deists and afterwards claimed he had heard Anthony Collins argue for the non-existence of God. Among this group were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who produced the Independent Whig a journal to which Collins contributed as did Toland’s patron Robert Molesworth. China figured in Trenchard and Gordon’s writings as an example of a state in which religious diversity was tolerated, producing a happy and prosperous society.
The problem that confronted the radical Whigs after 1688 was how to develop an effective state that preserved the liberties they valued, including freedom of thought, in a period of rapid social and economic change that seemed to favour powerful, well-armed, well-resourced centralised states. John Locke had drawn on the earlier concepts of natural rights to develop a theory which included the right of resistance but the post-1688 Whigs were not in the business of overthrowing the state. Whatever its shortcomings might be they wished to defend the British state against internal and external threats. The plea for toleration was rooted in their religious thinking but there was a political aspect to it as well and it became an integral part of their theory of the state. Toleration became central to their political writings and China was an integral to their arguments for toleration.
Toland can be identified with the “Country” ideology associated with Harringtonian republicanism. But if we take his use of China as a model form of state seriously then the court versus country dichotomy looks a little strained. China was not a republic in a traditional sense. Already in 1700 Toland’s edition of Oceana by James Harrington had referenced Confucius. The frontispiece shows Confucius alongside Moses, Solon, Lycurgus, and Numa Pompilius, Brutus the defender of Roman republican virtues and William III who had come to the defence of the English constitution against what the Whigs believed to be the tyranny of James II. Here was a strange amalgam fusing the Biblical concept of law, with the classical republics of ancient Greece and Rome, added to the contemporary political experiences of 1688, which were now combined with the relatively recently discovered figure of Confucius.
This odd assembly of notables represents a visual summary of the political conceptions that ran through the ideology with which the Whigs sought to underpin their developing vision of the state. James II’s attempt to create a centralised, efficient, bureaucratic state on the lines of those that were emerging across Europe had offended his subjects, both Whig and Tory, and led to his overthrow. Even with James gone the same fundamental problem remained. Could such an effective state exist without being absolutist in character and being based on the principle of divine right?
Toland’s comments on China in Adeisidaemon were an attempt to suggest how that could be done. They reflect a radical Whig approach to articulating a concept of a non-absolutist state which did not rely on superstition to maintain the loyalty of its citizens. From different sources, political traditions and periods of history Toland assembled a unitary vision of an ideal state. It was a republic but not in the modern sense of a state without a king. This utopian republic had a king who respected the law and appointed magistrates who governed without partiality for any religious sect. This was a state founded on law which could be tolerant of diversity among its citizens. Toland was doing rather more than preserving the Whig tradition. He was expanding it in significant ways.
The makeshift character of Toland’s concept of the state underlines how recent the British state was. Created by the Act of Union of 1707 Great Britain had come into existence only two years before Toland published Adeisidaemon. Historian J.H. Plumb argued that Britain had achieved a unique stability under a kind of Venetian oligarchy of super-rich Whigs after three generations of rebellion, treason and plot. Plumb’s view was not one which Toland and his contemporaries would have recognised. They feared that the gains of the 1688 Revolution would be overthrown by an external threat at any moment or undermined from within by corruption and financial speculation. From their point of view, Great Britain was a kingdom beset with economic and political problems at home and powerful enemies abroad. It was vulnerable and insecure, a precarious newcomer on the world scene. As the Whig oligarchy eventually consolidated its hold on power Toland’s writings began to look outmoded. By the end of the century Burke could dismiss the revolution of 1688 as “a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession”. But in Toland’s lifetime the British state was not, as Plumb argued, “legitimised by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power.” That was still to come.
Britain was a state with shallow historical roots that seemed illegitimate to wide sections of society. Toland and his contemporaries still saw themselves as engaged in a life and death struggle against absolutism. They can look like conspiracy theorists but their paranoia had some foundation. Toland’s political world was shaped by conspiracies. The Whigs had good grounds to fear a popular counter-revolution urged on from High Church pulpits and backed by foreign armies and subsidies. Support for the exiled Stuart monarchs and the mystique of kingship remained strong.
The very newness of the British state made it difficult to characterise in terms of the traditional political vocabulary derived from either ancient and renaissance city states or the dynastic states of Europe. There was a theoretical lag in comprehending what the complex upheavals of the late seventeenth century had brought into being in Britain. Toland’s Adeisidaemon is a long way from being a work of systematic political theory. He never presented such a theoretical account of the state. What he did, in an allusive and imaginative way, in Adeisidaemon was to sketch the outline of a state by stretching the established republican tradition into a new form.
At the centre of Adeisidaemon was the Roman historian Titus Livius, better known as Livy, who wrote a history of Rome from its foundation to his own lifetime in the reign of Augustus. In the course of Livy’s narrative Rome was repeatedly faced with outbreaks of superstitious mass hysteria from the population in times of danger. The role of the political elite in Livy’s view was to exercise a restraining and moderating influence and bring the citizens back to correct religious rites rather than displays of emotion. Livy’s account of Rome had a resonance in early eighteenth century Britain, when London remained the centre of militant Tory, High Church, or Jacobite popular protest. In the Sacheverell riots of 1710 High Church clergymen egged on the crowds than burned dissenting meeting houses and threatened the Bank of England. The Hanoverian dynasty was far from popular. Effigies of George I were burned and Jacobite mementoes imported to meet popular demand. The writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld later recalled the terror that the Jacobite rising of 1745 caused in her Dissenting Leicestershire home. Livy’s admonitions offered a contemporary political lesson which retained its relevance for Whigs long after Toland’s death.
If Livy’s history of Rome offered a case study in the dangers of superstition, China offered an apparently exemplary model of how a state could restrain superstition by good governance. The Qing dynasty seemed to have overcome the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century when the previous dynasty had been overthrown. In the course of the eighteenth century its population and economy were growing strongly. It held together a large and diverse empire which seemed impregnable to external attack. China provided a glimpse of the way in which republican virtues could be preserved in an era of large, territorial states with powerful executives. The philosophy of Confucius seemed to be the ideological underpinning of this state and to offer an alternative to divine right absolutism.
Toland’s death in 1722 followed the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. He lost all the money he had invested in the speculative venture and died in poverty as a result. It was more than a personal tragedy. He was one among thousands ruined by the crash. The scale of the crisis comes into focus when it is remembered that the British government was still paying the debt it incurred in 2008. The financial crisis coincided with the exposure of the Atterbury Plot. Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester was found to have conspired to oust George I and restore the Stuart line. Here was ample confirmation of the vulnerability of the Hanoverian regime and the danger of High Church conspiracies whipping up popular emotions. Toland’s appeal to Livy and the Chinese literati as men without superstition seemed to be justified by events.
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).Diego Lucci, “Deism, Freethinking and Toleration in Enlightenment England,” History of European Ideas, 43 (2017): 345-358
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
George F.E Rudé, Ideology and Popular Protest, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980).
#Confucius #deism #Toland -
The Man without Superstition: John Toland and China
“None are found today in the whole mortal world, who are either as refined in their manners and more honourable, or in all the burdens and responsibilities of the good civic offices less in error than the sect of the Chinese called the literati. Their commission and mandate from the king is a civil administration which excludes religious cults. Although they believe in an eternal and incorruptible world, they do not believe in a Spirit which is distinguished from the structure of matter; and they completely reject as stories and political contrivances the doctrine of the future existence of souls”John Toland,
Adeisidaemon sive Titus Livius a Superstitione Vindicatus,(Amsterdam,1709)The Chinese literati were the mandarins, trained in Confucianism, who rose by a series of examinations to fill the official positions as judges and administrators in imperial China. John Toland (167-1722) had a positive opinion of Chinese society and culture, and particularly Confucianism. His views stand in stark contrast to the hostile attitudes that became common among Europeans in the course of the 19th century. For Toland, China was a model, an example to follow. Europeans had much to learn from it. When did the change take place and why?
The transitional point may come with Montesquieu, who made critical remarks about China in De l’esprit des loix (1748). It may be that attitudes to China changed as anti-absolutist and republican views gained traction in Europe. The change may be due to the very negative account of China that George Anson published after his piratical voyage around the world. But there were plenty of earlier critics of China such as Daniel Defoe. Defoe was a sinophobe if ever there was one. Nor is the equation between radical political views and hostility to China entirely satisfactory. Toland was a radical Whig, an anti- absolutist and a republican but found much in China to admire.
What impressed Toland about China was that the government seemed to operate on largely secular principles. It was unlike any European state in that respect. All European states were confessional states. They might tolerate religious minorities to some degree but this was by no means common. The Dutch Republic and England were exceptions but even there toleration was limited and always under threat. The Chinese form of government seemed to Toland to have produced an exemplary system which was superior to that found in European states because it was entirely civil in character.
It could be argued that the Chinese literati had a state religion no less than the ruling elites of Europe. They were Confucians and practiced rituals which were intended to ensure the welfare of the empire. But Toland did not regard Confucianism as a religion since the Chinese literati did not recognise spirits that were separate from the structure of matter and nor did they believe in punishments and rewards for an immortal soul after death. Such beliefs were no more than “stories and political contrivances” as far as he was concerned. They were a feature of the “priestcraft” which the clergy used to instill superstition and fear into the minds of the faithful, as far as Toland was concerned.
Toland dedicated Adeisidaemon to “carissime Antoni,” my dearest Anthony, that is to say Anthony Collins the freethinker at whose house he often stayed. Collins was associated with a group of radical Whigs that emerged in the growing coffee house culture of London. They often gathered at the Grecian coffee house. It was to the Grecian that George Berkeley went as a young ecclesiastic intent on confronting deists and afterwards claimed he had heard Anthony Collins argue for the non-existence of God. Among this group were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who produced the Independent Whig a journal to which Collins contributed as did Toland’s patron Robert Molesworth. China figured in Trenchard and Gordon’s writings as an example of a state in which religious diversity was tolerated, producing a happy and prosperous society.
The problem that confronted the radical Whigs after 1688 was how to develop an effective state that preserved the liberties they valued, including freedom of thought, in a period of rapid social and economic change that seemed to favour powerful, well-armed, well-resourced centralised states. John Locke had drawn on the earlier concepts of natural rights to develop a theory which included the right of resistance but the post-1688 Whigs were not in the business of overthrowing the state. Whatever its shortcomings might be they wished to defend the British state against internal and external threats. The plea for toleration was rooted in their religious thinking but there was a political aspect to it as well and it became an integral part of their theory of the state. Toleration became central to their political writings and China was an integral to their arguments for toleration.
Toland can be identified with the “Country” ideology associated with Harringtonian republicanism. But if we take his use of China as a model form of state seriously then the court versus country dichotomy looks a little strained. China was not a republic in a traditional sense. Already in 1700 Toland’s edition of Oceana by James Harrington had referenced Confucius. The frontispiece shows Confucius alongside Moses, Solon, Lycurgus, and Numa Pompilius, Brutus the defender of Roman republican virtues and William III who had come to the defence of the English constitution against what the Whigs believed to be the tyranny of James II. Here was a strange amalgam fusing the Biblical concept of law, with the classical republics of ancient Greece and Rome, added to the contemporary political experiences of 1688, which were now combined with the relatively recently discovered figure of Confucius.
This odd assembly of notables represents a visual summary of the political conceptions that ran through the ideology with which the Whigs sought to underpin their developing vision of the state. James II’s attempt to create a centralised, efficient, bureaucratic state on the lines of those that were emerging across Europe had offended his subjects, both Whig and Tory, and led to his overthrow. Even with James gone the same fundamental problem remained. Could such an effective state exist without being absolutist in character and being based on the principle of divine right?
Toland’s comments on China in Adeisidaemon were an attempt to suggest how that could be done. They reflect a radical Whig approach to articulating a concept of a non-absolutist state which did not rely on superstition to maintain the loyalty of its citizens. From different sources, political traditions and periods of history Toland assembled a unitary vision of an ideal state. It was a republic but not in the modern sense of a state without a king. This utopian republic had a king who respected the law and appointed magistrates who governed without partiality for any religious sect. This was a state founded on law which could be tolerant of diversity among its citizens. Toland was doing rather more than preserving the Whig tradition. He was expanding it in significant ways.
The makeshift character of Toland’s concept of the state underlines how recent the British state was. Created by the Act of Union of 1707 Great Britain had come into existence only two years before Toland published Adeisidaemon. Historian J.H. Plumb argued that Britain had achieved a unique stability under a kind of Venetian oligarchy of super-rich Whigs after three generations of rebellion, treason and plot. Plumb’s view was not one which Toland and his contemporaries would have recognised. They feared that the gains of the 1688 Revolution would be overthrown by an external threat at any moment or undermined from within by corruption and financial speculation. From their point of view, Great Britain was a kingdom beset with economic and political problems at home and powerful enemies abroad. It was vulnerable and insecure, a precarious newcomer on the world scene. As the Whig oligarchy eventually consolidated its hold on power Toland’s writings began to look outmoded. By the end of the century Burke could dismiss the revolution of 1688 as “a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession”. But in Toland’s lifetime the British state was not, as Plumb argued, “legitimised by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power.” That was still to come.
Britain was a state with shallow historical roots that seemed illegitimate to wide sections of society. Toland and his contemporaries still saw themselves as engaged in a life and death struggle against absolutism. They can look like conspiracy theorists but their paranoia had some foundation. Toland’s political world was shaped by conspiracies. The Whigs had good grounds to fear a popular counter-revolution urged on from High Church pulpits and backed by foreign armies and subsidies. Support for the exiled Stuart monarchs and the mystique of kingship remained strong.
The very newness of the British state made it difficult to characterise in terms of the traditional political vocabulary derived from either ancient and renaissance city states or the dynastic states of Europe. There was a theoretical lag in comprehending what the complex upheavals of the late seventeenth century had brought into being in Britain. Toland’s Adeisidaemon is a long way from being a work of systematic political theory. He never presented such a theoretical account of the state. What he did, in an allusive and imaginative way, in Adeisidaemon was to sketch the outline of a state by stretching the established republican tradition into a new form.
At the centre of Adeisidaemon was the Roman historian Titus Livius, better known as Livy, who wrote a history of Rome from its foundation to his own lifetime in the reign of Augustus. In the course of Livy’s narrative Rome was repeatedly faced with outbreaks of superstitious mass hysteria from the population in times of danger. The role of the political elite in Livy’s view was to exercise a restraining and moderating influence and bring the citizens back to correct religious rites rather than displays of emotion. Livy’s account of Rome had a resonance in early eighteenth century Britain, when London remained the centre of militant Tory, High Church, or Jacobite popular protest. In the Sacheverell riots of 1710 High Church clergymen egged on the crowds than burned dissenting meeting houses and threatened the Bank of England. The Hanoverian dynasty was far from popular. Effigies of George I were burned and Jacobite mementoes imported to meet popular demand. The writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld later recalled the terror that the Jacobite rising of 1745 caused in her Dissenting Leicestershire home. Livy’s admonitions offered a contemporary political lesson which retained its relevance for Whigs long after Toland’s death.
If Livy’s history of Rome offered a case study in the dangers of superstition, China offered an apparently exemplary model of how a state could restrain superstition by good governance. The Qing dynasty seemed to have overcome the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century when the previous dynasty had been overthrown. In the course of the eighteenth century its population and economy were growing strongly. It held together a large and diverse empire which seemed impregnable to external attack. China provided a glimpse of the way in which republican virtues could be preserved in an era of large, territorial states with powerful executives. The philosophy of Confucius seemed to be the ideological underpinning of this state and to offer an alternative to divine right absolutism.
Toland’s death in 1722 followed the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. He lost all the money he had invested in the speculative venture and died in poverty as a result. It was more than a personal tragedy. He was one among thousands ruined by the crash. The scale of the crisis comes into focus when it is remembered that the British government was still paying the debt it incurred in 2008. The financial crisis coincided with the exposure of the Atterbury Plot. Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester was found to have conspired to oust George I and restore the Stuart line. Here was ample confirmation of the vulnerability of the Hanoverian regime and the danger of High Church conspiracies whipping up popular emotions. Toland’s appeal to Livy and the Chinese literati as men without superstition seemed to be justified by events.
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).Diego Lucci, “Deism, Freethinking and Toleration in Enlightenment England,” History of European Ideas, 43 (2017): 345-358
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
George F.E Rudé, Ideology and Popular Protest, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980).
#Confucius #deism #Toland
