On the antique rhetoric of friendship

Rhetorical tropes of intimate friendship (you 友) employed in the classical era in China present a stark contrast to those that survive in Latin and classical Greek sources. For this ideal form of friendship was described far less often in terms of the material and psychic advantages that can accrue from alliances outside the immediate family circle than in terms of the propensity for true friendships to foster the development of the singular traits and potentials of each partner in the intimate friendship. This essay argues, contra many social historians, that moderns cannot extract any underlying social realities from the early discussions of the theme, even if our sources allow us to see how certain social exchanges were construed, valued, and promoted by members of the governing elite

J. Michael Farmer, The Talent of Shu: Qiao Zhou and the Intellectual World of Early Medieval Sichuan. Reviewed by Michael Nylan

non

Circle of Fear in Early China

Montesquieu wrote that “China is a despotic state whose principle is fear”. And indeed, in the early modern context in China, fear and despotism, on the one hand, were opposed to ziyou 自由 (“freedom”), on the other. These constructs created a discursive space in which theorists of the nation-state felt the need to articulate the complex relations binding despotism to fear. By contrast, during the early empires in China a different set of relations was imagined, wherein salutary fear was aligned against both despotism and freedom and, crucially, with according others a proper sense of dignity. For by the arguments of remote antiquity, “submission to instruction and fear of the gods” functioned both as a vital check on despotism and as the key barrier to the unchecked and unhampered self-assertion by subjects and rulers. Yet this notion of ritual operating within a circle of fear it helped to foster has so far escaped scholarly notice, perhaps because it does not square with the ritual theories that dominate our modern discourse and perhaps because such ritual fear has been dismissed easily as remnant, primitive superstition