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This chapter argues that early Confucians were aware of the conflict between the private and the public, but their solution was to identify and develop the constructive aspect of the private and use what was cultivated from the private to suppress the conflict. Most late modern and contemporary Western liberal thinkers have switched their focus and are primarily concerned with how to protect the private against intrusions from the public. In contrast, early Confucians and Plato (in the Republic) were primarily concerned with intrusions to the public good from the private. But both Plato and modern liberals insist on the sheer divide between the private and the public. To look further into how early Confucians addressed the issue of the conflict between the private and the public may shed light on the universal philosophical issue of the private versus the public. With a fuller understanding of the Confucian rationale on this issue, the chapter then applies the Confucian idea of expanding care to other political and moral issues.

This chapter analyzes the role of Heaven (tian) in the Confucian political vision. The resort to Heaven provides legitimacy for Confucians' political endeavors by supporting some other pursuits, like the achievement and promotion of merit, and political engagement more generally, but also by shielding political actors from responsibility for events beyond their control. The chapter follows Robert Eno's scholarship, which argues that the early Confucians use Heaven as a legitimating device to justify political ideas that are not about Heaven per se. According to him, Heaven is not a “defining interest” for the Confucians, and that early Confucian philosophy seems directed away from metaphysics and religion.

This chapter argues that early Confucians were revolutionaries with a conservative facade. According to this “progressive” reading, they tried to solve issues of modernity not by rejecting modernity but by embracing it, although some of their locutions seem to resonate with those widely used in the “good old days,” and they were not as resolute as thinkers from some other schools. Moreover, not accepting early Confucianism as a moral metaphysics, the chapter also rejects the reading that early Confucians tried to solve political issues by improving on people’s morals alone. Rather, the premise of its reading is that they apprehended the political concerns as primary and the ethical ones as secondary, a byproduct of their political concerns. They were concerned with reconstructing a political order and were thus open to the idea of institutional design, even though they themselves did not discuss it in detail. To take a continuous reading of early Confucianism by asking about which political institutions they would have in mind, especially in today’s political reality, would not be alien to Confucianism.