Leibniz and the Political Theology of the Chinese

Abstract

In this paper, I reconsider the ethical-political and political theological contexts of Leibniz’s reception and interpretation of Chinese political culture and thought. This study examines Leibniz’s political philosophy and ‘political theology’ in order to clarify how he interpreted the Chinese political system and Confucian political thought as providing a model of benevolent enlightened kingship rooted in natural theology in the context of the early Enlightenment. This approach – articulated with varying degrees of enthusiasm in thinkers such as Leibniz, Wolff, Bilfinger, and Voltaire – would in the later and post-Enlightenment period—in thinkers such as Herder, Kant, and Hegel – become an instance of the abuses of absolute power and represent the obedience and heteronomy of the ancien régime as much as of the ‘Orient’. The Western idea of China as an ahistorical and timeless regime of ‘Oriental despotism’ developed in earlier thinker such as Montesquieu and was subsequently shaped by disputes over the appropriate relationship between politics and religion and enlightened monarchy and popular self-determination during the long eighteenth-century.