The Useless Tree

Edmund Burke channels Confucius

    I am reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism.  It raises many good questions, though I am not sure it provides as clear a set of answers as I had hoped.  In any event, I just came across this quote he adduces from Edmund Burke (from Reflections on the Revolution in France):

…to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.  It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. (152)

     I was immediately struck by the Confucian sensibility here: building up our connection to humanity from our closet loving relationships outward.  "Father a father; minister a minister; ruler a ruler" – and that is how we get to Humanity.

      Just wanted to share that…

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2 responses to “Edmund Burke channels Confucius”

  1. Won Joon Choe Avatar
    Won Joon Choe

    The sensibility which you isolate here is neither “Confucian” or “Burkean,” but common to most political thinkers who have not been seduced by abstract universalism characteristic of late modern liberal thought. Perhaps its most famous classical Western exponent is Aristotle and his articulation of the “love of one’s own,” and it finds its most colorful (not to say curmudgeonly) modern exponent in James Fitzjames Stephen and his Liberty, Equality & Fraternity–a point-by-point rebuttal of J.S. Mill’s rootless cosmopolitanism. As Rousseau said in his Consideration on the Government of Poland, “the extension of human sentiment is limited,” and therefore the intensity of human sentiments becomes ever more attenuated the further you get from the self.

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  2. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Yes, this reflects a wide and deep vein of political thought. My purpose is simply to keep the Chinese ancients in the conversation. Americans and, I suspect, Europeans tend to begin such discussions with citations of Aristotle with nary a menation of Confucius and Mencius.

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