Beyond Freedom and Slavery: The Classical Confucian conception of status

This seminar is organised by the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP). It will take place on 22 September at 16:00 at City St George's, University of London. The event is free and open to the public. Those interested are invited to register here.

The specific address is:

College Building

280 St John St
EC1V 4PB

Speaker: Loubna El Amine, King’s College London

Title: Beyond Freedom and Slavery: The Classical Confucian conception of status

Abstract: This talk presents material from my forthcoming book on the Confucian conception of status. The book highlights inclusion as a central ideal of Confucian political thought while questioning the necessity of the freedom-slavery duality taken for granted in Western political thought. For the purposes of this talk, I focus on the case of manual labor. I show that the early Confucian texts offer no philosophical argument against manual labor as demeaning or as an obstacle to other pursuits, nor do the Confucian Classics reveal any anxiety, on the part of male elites who produced them, about social mobility. Although artisans and farmers are depicted as low in some accounts of the community’s hierarchy, I contend that this holds only for the socioeconomic dimension of this hierarchy—a dimension that can be transcended. I show that the Confucian sociopolitical hierarchy is fluid and inclusive both because it rests on the intuition of equal moral worth at birth and because it is guided by a commitment to merit rather than privilege.