Journal of China in Global and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract: Weber’s research on Confucian economic ethics arose from his hypothesis that Western capitalism owed its unique quality to Puritanism. It led him to search for equivalents in other cultures through the comparative study of world religions. The idea of the world and an ethic that shaped inner-worldly action inspired by hopes of the next world had developed from ancient Western and Christian thought, which at one point suggested to Leibniz universal beliefs shared with Chinese classics. That idea was lost with the development of Western rationalism, science and modernity. By Weber’s time, the idea of the world was conflated with the idea of an objective science of social reality, which he projected into his studies of Chinese culture, hence the criticisms of his ethnocentrism. Tianxia and shijie, translations of ‘world’, belong to a distinct world view, where the ideal of the consummate person, junzi, provides self-transcendence directed towards improving life on this earth rather than life in the next. Weber’s receptivity to other cultures changed in accordance with his view that empirical sociology involved understanding the meaning of human action, and, in studying China to the end of his life, he came to recognize that Confucianism was more than an adaptation to the everyday world but also an inner-worldly ethic in tension with and shaping the world. He eventually emphasized cultural differences in the definition of ethics and can be seen as a forerunner of phenomenological views of many worlds, in which the West and China may find common understandings.

Abstract: Max Weber, Leibniz, Confucianism, ethics, rationalism, tianxia, shijie, social reality, junzi (consummate person), world view, ethnocentrism, adaptation, transcendence, universalism, multiculturalism, transcultural communication