BASC70184 - Culture and Control in Confucianism: Xunzi on the Imperatives of Civilization

Course Description

Instructor: Stephen Walker.  Xunzi (3rd century BCE) is the most sophisticated and influential advocate of Confucian culture from China’s classical period. A scholar, teacher, political advisor, and philosophical polemicist, Xunzi argues that social order and personal happiness depend on the constant performance of complex, richly symbolic cultural forms. He promotes a meritocracy centered on conscientious, learned, and sensitive individuals who earn political privileges through rigorous self-improvement. The core of this self-improvement is commitment to an extensive corpus of poetry, music, records of past leaders, and meticulous standards for interpersonal conduct—inherited texts and norms that, in Xunzi’s view, have proved their civilizing power beyond all others. Reading Xunzi together will help us explore questions about education, power, beauty, history, and many related topics; his intellectually keen and rhetorically masterful writings also provide a valuable point of entry into East Asian thought as a whole. Course code: BASC70184 China Studies