The Quest for Liberation: Philosophy and the Making of World Culture in China and the West -- Chunjie Zhang, Paperback

Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.

Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers' shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.

Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East or critiquing the misrepresentation of the East in the West, Zhang's book emphasizes entanglements between Chinese and European thinkers and highlights their quest for liberation in a globalizing world. Their visions of an ontological commons for everyone help us imagine a better world community in our time of global crises, beyond the clash of civilizations.

This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.

Author: Chunjie Zhang
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 09/02/2025
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.61d
ISBN: 9781531510367

About the Author
Chunjie Zhang is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (2017), editor of Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe (2019), and coeditor of Gender and German Colonialism: Intimacies, Accountabilities, and Intersections (2023), Aesthetics and Politics in the Wake of the Enlightenment (The Germanic Review 2020), and Asian German Studies (German Quarterly 2020). She coedits the book series "Asia, Europe, and Global Connections" (Routledge).