Introduction Part I: Humaneness-cum-Justice: Negotiating Humans' Relationship with Heaven Chapter 1: Ritual and Ren in Confucius' World: Humaneness-cum-Justice at the Incipience of Chinese Moral-Political Philosophy Part II: Humaneness versus Justice: Grappling with the Familial-Political Relationship Under a Naturalizing Heaven Chapter 2: The Great Divergence: Mozi and Mencius on Justice and Humaneness Chapter 3: Justice and Humaneness in a Naturalist Cosmos: Laozi's Dao and the Realignment of Values Chapter 4: Modeling the State after Heaven: Impartiality in Early Fajia Political Philosophy Part III: Personal Freedom, Humaneness, and Justice: Coming to Terms with the State Under a Naturalized Heaven Chapter 5: Zhuangzi's Lone Project of Personal Freedom Chapter 6: Xunzi's Synthesis of Humaneness and Justice: Ritual as the Sages' Partnership with Heaven and Earth Chapter 7: Universal Bureaucratic State as the Sole Agent of Justice in Han Feizi's Thought Conclusion: Regime of Self-Cultivation and Tragedy of Personal Freedom

Jiang always succeeds in providing interesting examples to make his point. It will attract nonacademic but well-informed readers as well as intelligent undergraduates who love Chinese history. It should be read by graduate students who intend to become specialists in Chinese philosophy and pre-imperial China. More important, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China promises to be a valuable resource for those teaching courses that cover to various degrees pre-imperial Chinese thought, politics, and culture at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Instructors teaching survey courses on China or East Asia can refer to the basic information and interesting anecdotes contained in the book to introduce essential ancient Chinese texts and their main ideas.

"Jiang always succeeds in providing interesting examples to make his point. It will attract nonacademic but well-informed readers as well as intelligent undergraduates who love Chinese history. It should be read by graduate students who intend to become specialists in Chinese philosophy and pre-imperial China. More important, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China promises to be a valuable resource for those teaching courses that cover to various degrees pre-imperial Chinese thought, politics, and culture at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Instructors teaching survey courses on China or East Asia can refer to the basic information and interesting anecdotes contained in the book to introduce essential ancient Chinese texts and their main ideas." -- Hung-Yok Ip, Oregon State University, H-Buddhism "A distinct feature of this book is synthesizing Sinological studies into its philosophical interpretation. The author acutely recognizes the regretful gap between Sinology and the study of Chinese philosophy. In this book, the comprehensive Sinological references and intimate engagements with contemporary scholarship (particularly in English) of Chinese philosophy are admirable." -- Fan He, Dao "A grand and well argued history of early Chinese philosophy." -- Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School "In this very important book, Tao Jiang provides a dynamic model of the development of moral political philosophy in early China (ca. 551â221 BCE), which embodies a new approach to thinking about freedom in complicated socio-political realities. It convincingly demonstrates that thinkers of early China are important for philosophical studies today not only because they cover the themes that remain fundamental in contemporary debates but also because their argumentations came out of intellectual exchanges that were no less robust than their 'Western' counterparts." -- British Journal for the History of Philosophy "Jiang's book as a whole is a brilliant work on early Chinese philosophy that reflects on big issues from fresh perspectives. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in pre-Qin thoughts." -- Zemian Zheng, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (JCP) "Tao Jiang has provided a coherent and sweeping narrative of the development of moral and political philosophy in the classical period of Chinese philosophy. He integrates many plausible insights gleaned from sinology and philosophy to argue provocatively that the classical period can be understood in terms of a struggle to deal with conflicts between the values of humaneness (pertaining to the personal and familial realms) and of justice (pertaining to the political realm). This book is highly recommended both to specialists and to those with a more general interest in Chinese moral and political philosophy." -- David Wong, Duke University "Tao Jiang in this hugely intelligent monograph provides his readers with an interpretive context twice. First, his project of rehearsing the story of the origins of Chinese moral-political philosophy is located within a state-of-the-art account of the politics of the Western academy and the best efforts of its Sinologists and philosophers to make sense of the complex textual narrative of pre-Qin China in all of its parts. Again, appealing to a cluster of seminal themesDLhumaneness, justice, and personal freedomDLhe recounts the way in which different philosophical voices advocated for their own disparate and competing models of structuring and construing personal, familial, and political relations within the overarching context of what are fundamentally different valorizations of the notion of Heaven." -- Roger T. Ames, Peking University "Jiang ranges over the entire foundational period of Chinese philosophy with effortless erudition, unfailing intellectual sympathy, and, above all, a brilliantly economical conception that shines a uniquely revealing and integrating light on all the major figures and schools of thought. The result is that rare kind of book which has the potential to change the way Chinese philosophy is viewed and practiced, and has all the scholarly and philosophical attributes that should make it a classic in due course." -- Jiwei Ci, The University of Hong Kong, and author of Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis Readers will find here a thought-provoking and original way of explaining the formation of pre-Qín moral-political thought." -- Jia Qiao, Religious Studies Review

Selling point: Tells a dramatic and often unexpected story about early Chinese moral-political philosophy through a new interpretative framework that brings to light a new arc and dialectic of its development Selling point: Explores tensions in the works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Shang Yang, Shen Dao, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and others, to understand what motivated early Chinese thinkers Selling point: Brings together Sinological and philosophical research of the last several decades Selling point: Structured in such a way that readers can choose to engage the part of the book that interests them most

Tao Jiang teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His research interests include pre-Qin classical Chinese philosophy, Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, and cross-cultural philosophy. He is the author of Contexts and Dialogue: Yogacara Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006) and the co-editor of The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China (Routledge, 2013). He is chair of Religion Department and director of Center for Chinese Studies at Rutgers. Jiang co-chairs the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia University as well as the Buddhist Philosophy Unit at the American Academy of Religion. He serves on the editorial boards of several leading Asian and comparative philosophy journals.

Selling point: Tells a dramatic and often unexpected story about early Chinese moral-political philosophy through a new interpretative framework that brings to light a new arc and dialectic of its development Selling point: Explores tensions in the works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Shang Yang, Shen Dao, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and others, to understand what motivated early Chinese thinkers Selling point: Brings together Sinological and philosophical research of the last several decades Selling point: Structured in such a way that readers can choose to engage the part of the book that interests them most