Henry Rosemont, George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts, St. Mary's College of Maryland
A welcome addition to the growing corpus of collaborative efforts of David Hall and Roger Ames. In this volume, their concerns center on getting beyond the liberal Western tradition, both for understanding the prospects for political change in China, and to make a signal contribution to the ongoing debate on neo-pragmatism-focusing on John Dewey-in the U.S. This book is an excellent addition to the literature in both areas, and more generally to the exciting development of comparative philosophy.


Book Description
Must China be transformed into a liberal democracy, complete with free enterprise capitalism, in order to successfully enter the larger world marketplace? David Hall and Roger Ames explore whether any type of democracy will figure prominently in China's future. The authors believe it is a mistake to equate modernity with westernization and rugged individualism. Hall and Ames argue that as a modern China embraces its larger role in the global marketplace, a new type of democracy will emerge-a blend of traditional Western democracy and the Eastern emphasis on community-which closely resembles John Dewey's "communitarian democracy."


About the Author
David Hall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. Roger Ames is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i. Together they have written THINKING THROUGH CONFUCIUS (1987), ANTICIPATING CHINA (1995), and THINKING FROM THE HAN (1998) in addition to authoring many books individually.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Will democracy figure prominently in China's future? If so, what kind of democracy? In this insightful and thought-provoking book, David Hall and Roger Ames explore such questions and, in the course of answering them, look to the ideas of John Dewey and Confucius.

Those most sanguine about the future of Chinese-Western relations presume that a modernized China will be essentially westernized as well. They believe that in order to enter the family of nations China must be transformed into a liberal democracy, complete with free enterprise capitalism and rational technologies. Only in this manner, so this argument goes, can there be hope for increased rights and freedoms for the individual Chinese.

Contrary to this view, the authors argue that it is a mistake to equate modernization with westernization and to believe that individualist, rights-based democracy and its economic and technological accouterments are inevitable consequences of civilized development. Modernity, the authors claim, far from being a universal expression of the human spirit, is a peculiarly Western invention which must be adapted significantly if it is to be useful in a Chinese environment.

In The Democracy of the Dead, Hall and Ames argue for the viability of the traditional Chinese cultural sensibility and claim that the China which may well come to dominate the global culture of the twenty-first century will not be a society of increasingly rugged individuals, nor will it be the Netscaped, McDonaldized Theme Park of which Western entrepreneurs have begun to dream. Rather, China is likely to maintain far more of its traditional character than most now suspect possible, and will, therefore, enter the modernworld largely on its own terms.

Hall and Ames argue that accommodating the legitimate desires of the Chinese people will require the promotion of a communitarian form of democracy seriously at odds with the liberal democratic model which dominates Western democracies. This will best be accomplished by appealing to the communitarian strain of thought within our own tradition. To this end the authors offer John Dewey's theory of democracy, that of the "communicating community", as the vision which is best suited to engage the realities of Chinese social practice and to promote the realization of a Confucian democracy in China.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews