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How China Shaped the Enlightenment: A Transcultural History of Modern Thought book cover

1st Edition

How China Shaped the Enlightenment A Transcultural History of Modern Thought

Edited By Shuchen Xiang, Martin Powers Copyright 2026
218 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book explores the interaction of European Enlightenment thinkers with Chinese theory and shows how ideas from China and ideas about China had a profound impact on Enlightenment thought. Challenging the orthodox account of the Enlightenment as an innovation that emerged solely among European men, the book argues that many ideas which led to human progress originated outside Europe. Focusing... Read more

Introduction: Uncovering The Mythic Origins of European Modernity

Shuchen Xiang and Martin Powers

1. Even without an Overlord: Christian Wolff and Confucianism
Heiner Roetz

2. How America’s Founders Learned that Equality Means Meritocracy
Martin Powers

3. Confucius and the American Enlightenment
Alfred Hornung

4. Francois Quesnay’s Despotisme de la Chine as a Critique of Early Political Liberalism
Dirk Schuck

5. A New Cosmology and a New Aesthetics: Pierre Bayle and the Monistic Connection of Shaftesbury to China
Yu Liu

6. Chinese Metaphysics in the Formation of European Organicist Thought: German Romanticism, Structuralism and Relational Politics
Shuchen Xiang

7. China in the Political Imaginary of Restoration England: Revisiting John Webb’s Fantasy about the Chinese Language
Longxi Zhang

8. The East-West Orientation in Immanuel Kant’s Thinking
Daniel Purdy

Biography

Martin Powers is Professor in the School of Arts at Peking University and Professor Emeritus in History of Art at the University of Michigan.

Shuchen Xiang is the Mt. Hua Professor of Philosophy at Xidian University, China.

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