Proper Ways to Manage Wealth: Economic Discourse in the Lunyu
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Speaker: Mr FU Yang 傅揚 (Cambridge): yf257@cam.ac.uk
The Lunyu is arguably the most influential text in Chinese intellectual history. Research on economic discourse in the Lunyu , nevertheless, is scarce. Two main trends can be found in existing scholarship that addresses economic ideas in the Lunyu . Historians of economic thought tend to apply concepts derived from modern economics in their analysis. Yet this approach falls into the problem of anachronism, as prior to the eighteenth-century the economic sphere was not perceived as independent from other spheres. Another trend concentrates on analysing to what extent the ideas of the Lunyu have enabled the rise of capitalism in modern East Asia. This concern, obviously enough, is ahistorical.
This article aims to analyse economic discourse present in the Lunyu by locating it in its historical contexts: the decline of ritual order and the rise of the Shi . It argues that although any attempt to reconstruct a systematic economic thought in the Lunyu is problematic, in the text there are certainly some aspects of life in humanity’s early past that can be seen as “economic” in the sense that they had something to do with the management of resources. The discussions of wealth, for example, constitute the economic discourse in the Lunyu , the intention of which is to prescribe how one should behave in personal and collective lives. This article thus examines the ways in which economic discourse is presented in the Lunyu , as well as how economic viewpoints may shed fresh light on our understanding of the Lunyu .
In addition to the analyses of economic discourse in the Lunyu – including the psychology of economic pursuit, arguments about economic decision-making, the relationship between economic life and governance, and attitudes to li 利 – this article makes use of a number of traditional commentaries of the Lunyu . In so doing this study may also provide an opportunity for readers and participants to discuss about how to use traditional commentaries to understand pre-modern Chinese texts.