WHY IMPERIAL CHINA HASNT CONSIDERED THE IDEA OF LIBERTY?

Abstract

This paper proposes a study on the normative tradition of imperial China in the context of its perceptions on mankind and nature. Its linguistic, intellectual and ethical peculiarities are taken into consideration in order to explain the reasons why liberty hasnt been a concern in classical Chinese culture. The notion is not only absent from the debates of the great Chinese thinkers, but also one cannot find in classical Chinese an ideogram that matches the idea. Why liberty, which is so constitutive of the imaginary and the prevailing discourses in the Western cultures, were absent in a civilization as sophisticated as the Chinese? In order to answer that question, we sought to expose the prevailing characteristics of imperial Chinas normativity, trying to demonstrate how its perceptions on mankind and nature tend to resist and to distance themselves from what, in the Western civilization, was thought as liberty.