THE OTHER SIDE OF FREEDOM: CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY IN CHINESE ORTHODOX PHILOSOPHY FROM 1980 TO 2002

Chinese orthodox philosophy is often described as communitarian and characterised by the concept of positive freedom, which, defined by Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of liberty, deems it necessity to curb individual freedom for the good of a community. Still, some orthodox Chinese writers also use aspects of negative freedom, insisting on a sphere of individual freedom that no authority can curb, and thereby seem to defy the categorisation as wholly communitarian. Edmund S. K. Fung theorises that Chinese intellectuals are best not described along the lines of Berlin's theory, but can be shown to use both negative and positive freedom simultaneously without giving precedence to either. By analysing articles from the journal Social Sciences in China this thesis gives an overview of the temporal changes in the Chinese orthodox perception of freedom from 1980 to 2002; and, by demonstrating that every treatise on freedom gives ineluctable precedence to only one of the two concepts of liberty, shows that Berlin's theory is apt to describe the orthodox Chinese intellectual discourse on freedom