Monographs on significant issues include Wm. Theodore de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (1981), and The Liberal Tradition in China (1983); Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the Ta-hsueh: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the Confucian Canon (1986); John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (1983); Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (1984); and Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (1979). Several studies in comparative philosophy and religion are noteworthy: David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (1977); Julia Ching, Confucianism and Christianity (1977); Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (1985; originally published in French, 1982); Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendency (1992); Anne D. Birdwhistell, Transition to Neo-Confucianism: Shao Yung on Knowledge and Symbols of Reality (1989); Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Message of the Mind in Neo-Confucianism (1989); and Peter K. Bol, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (1992).
Confucianism as it existed since the early 20th century is discussed in Wing-tsit Chan, Religious Trends in Modern China (1953, reissued 1969). The thesis that Confucian humanism is incompatible with modernization defined in terms of industrial capitalism was first formulated in Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951; originally published in German, 1922). Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy, 3 vol. in 1 (1965, reissued 1968), further develops the claim that Confucianism could not survive the challenge of Western science and technology. Critical reflections on the Weberian and Levensonian interpretation include Hao Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (1971); Charlotte Furth (ed.), The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (1976); and Thomas A. Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political Culture (1977). The reasons for iconoclastic attacks on the Confucian tradition are explored in Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (1979); and Kam Louie, Critiques of Confucius in Contemporary China (1980).
Studies of modern Confucian personalities include Kung-chüan Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (1975); Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning (1890–1911) (1987); Joey Bonner, Wang Kuo-wei: An Intellectual Biography (1986); and Guy S. Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity, 2nd ed. (1986). Contemporary manifestations of the Confucian tradition are discussed in Irene Eber (ed.), Confucianism: The Dynamics of a Tradition (1986); and Tu Wei-ming, Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge (1984), Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual (1993), and Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity (1996). Philosophical, ethical, and political perspectives include Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (2000); Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (2006); Daniel A. Bell (ed.), Confucian Political Ethics (2008); Kam-Por Yu, Julia Tao, and Philip J. Ivanhoe (eds.), Taking Confucian Ethics Seriously: Contemporary Theories and Approaches (2010); and Roger T. Ames, Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011). The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica