Introduction: five trends in confucian studies

 
JOHN H. BERTHRONG
 
 
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Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought
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Confucian Thought: Self-hood as Creative Transformation
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Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness
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The Triadic Chord: Confucian Ethics, Industrial East Asia, and Max Weber: 
Proceedings of the 1987 Singapore Conference on Confucian Ethics and the Modernisation of 
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and the Four Mini-Dragons
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Contemporary Discussion of Confucian Humanism in East Asia
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in Modern China and Beyond
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Zhang Longxi. 1998. 
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Journal of East-West Thought 
CONFUCIAN ROLE ETHICS: A MODEL FOR 21
st
CENTURY 
HARMONY? 
Henry Rosemont Jr.

Exemplary persons help the needy; they do not make the rich richer.
1
Analects 8.6 
George Orwell might have had the date wrong, but the horrible world he described in
 
1984 
could yet become a reality if current geopolitical trends continue unchecked. 
As competition within and between nations grows more fierce, as more states are 
failing and/or engulfed in civil wars, as resources become more scarce, as ideologies 
become more absolutist, and – most important – as the disparity between the haves 
and the have nots grows ever wider with terrorism becoming ever more common in 
response, we can see the slaughters, economic dislocations, and environmental 
destruction characterizing the early years of this century as harbingers of what might 
well be the future.
2
Globalization activities are arguably responsible for many of the problems 
currently destabilizing the world, and their potential for improving the lot of mankind 
will remain unrealized, I believe, until and unless those activities are regulated by an 
international authority with many of the trappings of a world government. Just as the 
United States would quickly degenerate if each of the 50 member states developed 
their own economic, legal and foreign policies with respect to the other 49 – and the 
same holds true for China -- so, too, may we expect much, if not most of international 
affairs to degenerate unless there is an international organization with sufficient 
authority to bring harmony out of the present growing discord. It is clear, to me at 
least, that the “invisible hand” of unbridled capitalism cannot wield the needed baton. 
If harmony is a goal, then democratic procedures and processes should be cooperative 
rather than competitive in spirit, and those procedures must govern much in the 
economic realm as well; the good must be seen as an objective possibility for all 
rather than subjectively determined privately for each of the almost 7 billion people 
now living , thus placing us in competition – democratic or otherwise – with those 
who define the good differently. 
But “harmony” is not a common term in contemporary political and moral 
discourse in the West, in part because it seems incompatible with the capitalist ethos 
of rugged individualism, competition, and self-interest, enlightened we hope, but 

Dr. HENRY ROSEMONT JR., George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor of the 
Liberal Arts Emeritus at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Senior Consulting Professor at Fudan 
University, and Visiting Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University. 
1
Analects
6.4. All citations to this text are from the translation by Roger Ames and myself
(Random House/Ballantine Books, 1999), which I have modified on occasion. 
2
The best-selling 
Guns, Germs & Steel
by Jared Diamond, among many such books, takes up 
these themes. W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. 

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