At the crossroads of civilizations: A comparative analysis of the development of legal thought in ancient China and the West

Yanlin Wu

At the crossroads of civilizations: A comparative analysis of the development of legal thought in ancient China and the West

Yanlin Wu

Abstract

The relevance of this article is due to the fact that the current scientific literature does not provide a compre- hensive assessment of comparative legal studies of ancient Chinese and Western legal thought, which is important given the polarisation of global politics. The purpose of this review was to comprehensively study and analyse the historical sci- entific literature on this issue. This goal was achieved through a thematic analysis of the accumulated scientific material. The article deals with issues related to the philosophical trends that prevailed in the period of Ancient China, Greece and Rome. The historiographical basis of the work was the works of Chinese and Western researchers in this field. The research resulted in an analysis of theoretical and practical scientific literature on this topic, as well as a critique of the positions of some contemporary authors on the concept of law and legal relations between the people and the state. The main conclusion of this work was that the main differences between Chinese and Western legal doctrines were formed within the complex interplay of the initial conditions of statehood development in East Asia and the Mediterranean. Whereas the problematisation of law in ancient China was based on the understanding of family relations, where the family was headed by the father-ruler, ancient legal thought focused on social contradictions, rights and obligations of different classes. These different problematisations of the law have created the basis for further differences. This study can be used in diplomatic work to improve communication between representatives of different legal doctrines and families in general

Keywords

philosophy; Confucianism; legalism; sophistry; Roman private law

References

[1] Allen, K.R., & Henderson, A.C. (2022). Family theorizing for social justice: A critical praxis. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 14(3), 364-383. doi: doi: 10.1111/jftr.12450.

[2] Assael, Y., Sommerschield, T., Shillingford, B., Bordbar, M., Pavlopoulos, J., Chatzipanagiotou, M., Androutsopoulos, I., Prag, J., & de Freitas, N. (2022) Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks. Nature, 603(7900), 280-283. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04448-z.

[3] Burns, P.J, Brofos J.A., Li, K., Chaudhuri, P., & Dexter, J.P. (2021). Profiling of intertextuality in Latin literature using word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2021 conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human language technologies (pp. 4900-4907). Bangkok: Association for Computational Linguistics.

[4] Cicero, M.T. (2014). On the republic and on the laws. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

[5] Ciutacu, L. (2023). The evolution of the legal institution of marriage in Roman law. Scientia Moralitas Conference Proceedings, 63-67. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7756315.

[6] De Wilde, M. (2021). Roman dictatorship in the French revolution. History of European Ideas, 47(1), 140-157. doi: 10.1080/01916599.2020.1790023.

[7] Deng, Z., Yang, H., & Wang, J. (2022) A comparative study of Shiji and Hanshu from the perspective of digital humanities. In Proceedings of the 21st Chinese national conference on computational linguistics (pp. 656-670). Nanchang: Chinese Information Processing Society of China.

[8] Dongwang, L. (2024). Differences and integration of political thought between ancient Chinese Confucianism and legalism. TRANS/FORM/AÇÃO: Revista de Filosofia, 47(4). doi: 10.1590/0101-3173.2024.v47.n4.e0240042.

[9] Du Plessis, P.J. (2022). Thinking like a lawyer: The case for Roman law. Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Iuridica, 99, 165-172. doi: 10.18778/0208-6069.99.12.

[10] Duan, S., Wang, J., & Su, Q. (2023). Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: A digital humanities perspective. Humanities and Social Sciences Communication, 10(310). doi: 10.1057/s41599-023-01811-x.

[11] Dusenbury, D.L., (2021). Platonic legislations. An essay on legal critique in Ancient Greece. Cham: Springer International Publishing, “Springer Briefs in Philosophy”.

[12] Eberle, L.P. (2024). The edicts of the praetors: Law, time, and revolution in ancient Rome. Law and History Review, 42, 237-261. doi: 10.1017/S0738248023000500.

[13] Gimenez, C. (2020). Humanity remembers: On Jung, mythological criticism and archetypes. Bridging Cultures, 5, 58-70.

[14] Gomperz, T. (2017). Greek thinkers: A history of Ancient philosophy. Norderstedt: Hansebooks GmbH.

[15] Gordley, J. (2023). The rule of law in traditional China. In H. Jiang & P. Sirena (Eds.), The making of the Chinese Civil Code (pp. 235-248). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[16] Hallebeek, J. (2020). Teaching Roman law in the 21st century: A note on legal-historical education in the Netherlands. Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte.Romanistische Abteilung,137(1),194-227.doi: 10.1515/zrgr-2020-0006.

[17] Lehoux, D. (2020). Saved by the phenomena: Law and nature in Cicero and the (Pseudo?) Platonic epinomis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 81, 55-61. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2019.03.001.

[18] Li, W., Shao, Y., & Bi, M. (2022). Data construction and matching method for the task of ancient classics reference detection. In Proceedings of the 21st Chinese national conference on computational linguistics (pp. 600-610). Nanchang: Chinese Information Processing Society of China.

[19] Liang, Z. (2020). Discrimination of law. Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press.

[20] May, L. (2020). Ancient Greece and China. In Ancient legal thought: Equity, justice, and humaneness from Hammurabi and the pharaohs to Justinian and the Talmud (pp. 219-394). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781108670012.

[21] Nedelea, M.O. (2023). The role of legalism in the development of Chinese law. In The 3rd International conference “Development through research and innovation” (pp. 67-76). Chisinau: ASEM. doi: 10.53486/dri2022.06.

[22] Papanikos, G. T. (2022). The five ancient criteria of democracy: The apotheosis of equality. Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, 19(2), 105-120. doi: 10.30958/ajha.9-2-1.

[23] Petratos, P. (2022). Some remarks on the five criteria of democracy. Athens Journal of Humanities & Art, 9(3), 261-274.

[24] Qi, J. (2022). The crime of “Weibushan” in the bamboo slips of Qin: Study on the law and ethical order of the Qin Dynasty. Monthly Journal of Historical Science, 495(1), 19-30.

[25] Ramachandran, M. (2024). Tracing the roots of modern human rights in ancient Greek thought. Morgan Journal of Interdisciplinary Research Studies, 1(1), 25-31. doi: 10.3126/mjirs.v1i1.63313.

[26] Rebenich, S. (2022). Theodor Mommsen’s history of Rome and its political and intellectual context. In V. Arena, J. Prag & A. Stiles (Eds.), A companion to the political culture of the Roman Republic (pp. 81-92). Hoboken: Wiley.

[27] Schofield, M. (2020). Cicero: Political philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[28] Shang, Y. (2022). The book of Lord Shang. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company.

[29] Staiano, M.F. (2023). Chinese law and its international projection. Building a community with a shared future for mankind. Buenos Aires, Brazil: Springer.

[30] Stuart-Buttle, T. (2019). From moral theology to moral philosophy: Cicero and visions of humanity from Locke to Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[31] Tan, Ch. (2020). Confucianism. In M.A. Runco & S.R. Pritzker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity (pp. 195-198). Academic Press. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.23740-1.

[32] Tang, H. (2023). A comparative study of Chinese and Western power supervision systems from the perspective of traditional political culture. Open Journal on Political Science, 13, 18-32.

[33] Toti, E. (2023). The connections between Roman law and Chinese civil law. In H. Jiang & P. Sirena (Eds.), The making of the Chinese Civil Code (pp. 308-324). Cambridge University Press.

[34] Turner, S. (2021). The naked State: What the breakdown of normality reveals. In G. Delanty (Ed.). Pandemics, politics, and society: Critical perspectives on the Covid-19 crisis (pp. 43-58). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

[35] Van den Berge, L. (2024). Aims and methods of legal history – The case of the Roman dictatorship. Law and Method. doi: 10.5553/REM/.000081.

[36] Vlassopoulos, K. (2023). Slavery in ancient Greece. In D.A. Pargas & J Schiel (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of global slavery throughout history (pp. 67-87). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

[37] Wahyudi, A.A., Nasution, M.A., & Rahmat, P. (2022). The concept of justice in the perspective of Greece philosophy and its relevance to the development of modern political law. Journal of Law Politic and Humanities, 2(3), 124-132. doi: 10.38035/jlph.v2i3.

[38] Wang, X.Y.(2023). The legacy of ancient cultures: Rational concepts in ancient Chinese and ancient Greek methodology and their significance in modern literature. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 9(1), 110-122. doi: 10.32601/ ejal.901010.

[39] Wenhao, Z. (2023). Beyond morality: Han Fei’s unconventional insights into human nature. Cultural and Religious Studies, 11(12), 611-615. doi: 10.17265/2328-2177/2023.12.004.

[40] Xia, H. (2021). From evil human nature to law, technique, and power: On the main purpose of Han Fei’s thought. Confucian Academy, 8(4), 88-99.

[41] Xiaoming, C. (2023). Historical evolution and characteristics analysis of the judicial officer responsibility system in ancient China. SHS Web of Conferences, 158, article number 02019.

[42] Xu, J. (2023). A comparison of the Chinese and Western systems of judicial protection of human rights. In Proceedings of the 2023 2nd International conference on public culture and social services (PCSS 2023), (pp. 219-227). Singapore: Springer Nature. doi: 10.2991/978-2-38476-130-2_27.

[43] Yixin, L. (2023). The similarities and differences between the legal thought of the Qin Dynasty and Machiavelli. In Proceedings of the 2023 7th International seminar on education, management and social sciences (pp. 28-41). Singapore: Springer Nature. doi: 10.2991/978-2-38476-126-5_5.

[44] Zhenzhen, G. (2022). What is “Ancient Chinese logic”? In J.-Y. Béziau, J.-P. Desclés, A. Moktefi & A.C. Pascu (Eds.), Logic in question: Talks from the annual sorbonne logic workshop (pp. 3-15). New York: Springer International Publishing. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-94452-0_1.

Suggested citation

Wu, Y. (2024). At the crossroads of civilizations: A comparative analysis of the development of legal thought in ancient China and the West. Foreign Affairs, 34(6), 83-90. https://doi.org/10.59214/ua.fa/6.2024.83