Historiography and Chinese modernity—A study of the historiographical ideas of Li Dazhao

ABSTRACT

In search of modernity in China, history played a crucial role. Many leading intellectuals in modern China were historians and/or historical thinkers. Despite his untimely death, Li Dazhao was particularly important. Among his cohorts, Li was arguably the first one who paid close attention to the need for the Chinese to change their views of the past and accept Darwinism as a new historical outlook. That Li later became an avowed Marxist also had a good deal to do with his belief in Darwinism or evolutionism. He was fully convinced that history moves along a linear progressive path, which enabled him and many others to argue the necessity of changing China for the modern. In a word, the acceptance of historical evolutionism paved the way for the commitment to modernity by the Chinese.     

试论互助进化思想在中国的兴起

作为近化论的一个重要分支,互助进化思想在中国的兴起有其历史的必然.首先,国家本位的残酷竞争激起了民族危机意识,使国人深感互助的必要.其次,无序竞争和一战引发的人道主义危机,使国人在反思社会达尔文进化学说的基础上探索更加人道的进化理论.再者,传统的"中庸"、"中和"文化精神,大同学说以及大家族制度为互助进化思想在中国的广泛传播提供了必不可少的文化土壤.     

Missing Links. Indigenous Life and Evolutionary Thought in the History of Russian Ethnography

The history of Russian social anthropology has long been best known for the work of three, late nineteenth-century “exile ethnographers,” each sent to the Russian Far East for their anti-tsarist activities as students. All three men—Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhel'son, and Lev Shternberg—produced voluminous and celebrated works on Russian far eastern indigenous life, but it was the young Shternberg who had perhaps the most profound effect on setting the agenda for the canonic evolutionist line soon to take hold in late Russian imperial and early Soviet ethnography. This essay draws on archival, library, and field research to revisit the life and work of Shternberg in order to tell the story of “group marriage” that he documented for the life of one Sakhalin Island indigenous people, Gilyaks (or Nivkhgu, Nivkhi). Documented in this way by Shternberg, the Nivkh kinship system proved a crucial “missing link” for Friedrich Engels, who had long been eager to provide evidence of primitive communism as man's natural state. For Gilyaks, the die was cast. Their role as the quintessential savages of Engels’ favor made them famous in Russian and Soviet ethnographic literature, and significantly enhanced their importance to Soviet government planners. This essay tracks that episode and its aftermaths as a pivotal moment in the history of Russian social anthropology and of evolutionist thought more broadly.     

李大钊哲学思想发展再探

我在<哲学研究>1981年第6期发表了<李大钊哲学思想发展初探>一文.本文对该文在李大钊哲学思想发展的三个阶段的划分和其哲学思想的评述上,予以实事求是的肯定,同时指出,它对三个阶段时限的划分及某些哲学观点的认知和评述不够准确、妥帖,进而对李大钊哲学思想发展的三个阶段的时限作了新划分,并对某些哲学政治观点的不妥之处作了修正,进行了新的述评.     

对西欧现代化的"内源性"的反思

马克斯·韦伯与结构功能论者否定了直观的历史进化论对西欧现代化内源性的各种论证,而他们自己却也陷入历史进化论的困境。灾变论否定了历史进化论,用偶然性因素或灾变性历史事件来解释西欧的兴起。罗荣渠的灾变论从强调“外因”的作用入手,力图突破欧洲视野。通过对这些思想观点的分析,我们可以得出如下结论:现代社会是在西欧这块地方而不是在西欧传统社会的母体中孕育出的;西欧所经历的现代化进程是一个在世界范围内聚集与融合现代性因素的过程。