Abstract

Within the long tradition of debating the role of tradition in modernity that has been central to the Western and Chinese experiences of modernity, I believe three possible attitudes toward the relation between modernity and tradition can be distinguished. The first regards them as essentially antithetical. Modernity is basically construed, from this first perspective, as a process of emancipation from a tradition perceived as limiting the human potential for liberty. The Enlightenment thinkers have generally been associated with this approach, which I will call "anti-traditionalist."The second attitude offers a reversed image of the first. Modernity and tradition retain an essentially antithetical relation, but...