Nobility and Civility or Degrees of Freedom

Nobility and Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and the Common Good

Author: William Theodore de Bary

Globalization has become an inescapable fact of contemporary life. Some leaders, in both the East and the West, believe that human rights are culture-bound and that liberal democracy is essentially Western, inapplicable to the non-Western world. How can civilized life be preserved and issues of human rights and civil society be addressed if the material forces dominating world affairs are allowed to run blindly, uncontrolled by any cross-cultural consensus on how human values can be given effective expression and direction?

In a thoughtful meditation ranging widely over several civilizations and historical eras, Wm. Theodore de Bary argues that the concepts of leadership and public morality in the major Asian traditions offer a valuable perspective on humanizing the globalization process. Turning to the classic ideals of the Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, and Japanese traditions, he investigates the nature of true leadership and its relation to learning, virtue, and education in human governance; the role in society of the public intellectual; and the responsibilities of those in power in creating and maintaining civil society.

De Bary recognizes that throughout history ideals have always come up against messy human complications. Still, he finds in the exploration and affirmation of common values a worthy attempt to grapple with persistent human dilemmas across the globe.

Foreign Affairs

De Bary, arguably the West's leading scholar of classical Asian thought, has written an elegant and thoughtful essay on the essence of true leadership and political virtue as expounded in the classics of Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Japanese thought. Instead of treating the classical writings of Asia as mere relics of "traditional" thought that will be replaced by more "modern" thinking, he demonstrates that the great books of Asia contain within them valuable concepts and insights for preserving civilized life in an age of materialistic globalization. By respectfully exploring what the Asian classics say about learning and leadership, virtue and civility, and nobility and the common good, de Bary clearly demonstrates that the West has no monopoly on liberal thought; Asian writers have much to say that is relevant to human rights, democracy, and civil society. In the past, de Bary has worked mainly within the context of Confucianism, but here he reaches out to include the texts of other Asian classical traditions. His revisiting of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, for example, opens up whole new dimensions of Japanese culture. Just to follow de Bary's journeys through Asian classical texts is an intellectually broadening experience for anyone, including specialists on contemporary Asia.

Table of Contents:

1	Confucius' noble person	1
2	The noble paths of Buddha and Rama	13
3	Buddhist spirituality and Chinese civility	44
4	Shotoku's constitution and the civil order in early Japan	63
5	Chrysanthemum and sword revisited	80
6	The new leadership and civil society in Song China	119
7	Civil and military in Tokugawa Japan	147
8	Citizen and subject in modern Japan	168
9	"The people renewed" in twentieth-century China	203

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Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, 1862-1914

Author: Rebecca J Scott

As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people—cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses and labor organizers—forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.

Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences?

Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.

Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipationsocieties.