A Comparative Study of Xunzi's Political Philosophy and Enlightenment Social Contract Theories

Xunzi made a notable departure from Mengzi and Kongzi, by insisting that people are inherently bad and need to be shaped by social institutions. This may represent the beginnings of institutional politics in ancient China, which focused on establishing social order from chaos. There are obvious and interesting similarities with Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory in their shared cynicism of human nature, which have received only partial attention. Structurally, the institutionalism found in Xunzi is comparable to the social contract theory, making politics an objective, external and measurable set of institutional rules rather than virtues. There have been no notable attempts at this comparison. The Anglophone scholarship has not paid much attention to the structural and institutional dimensions of Xunzi’s political philosophy. The Sinophone scholarship has not paid as much attention to the comparative elements between the social contract theory and Xunzi’s social-moral institutions. This thesis attempts to supply a comparative interpretation of several key concepts in the Xunzi: 1. order zhi 治; chaos luan 亂, which are Xunzi’s foundational moral concerns; 2. duties yi 義; public gong 公, which alludes to a way public duties are generated from internal impulses; 3. rituals li 禮, which is a means of distributing esteem as a scarce social resource; 4. reason/coherence LI* 理, which is an externally accessible set of quasi-empirical principles that justifies political prescriptions; 5. the way and hierarchy dao 道/ fen 分, which show that hierarchies as the device that makes social order possible. Through these explications, I argue that Xunzi’s systematic political philosophy amounts to an alternative way to achieve civility through social institutions distinct from but comparable to the social contract theory familiar to Western philosophy.