ABSTRACT
Harmony (he 和, also xie 諧, tiao 調, mu 睦) undoubtedly belongs to the important topoi of Confucian socio-political thinking. Nevertheless, its ranking in the normative vocabulary of Confucian texts is not uniform. While it is not a conspicuous issue in the Mengzi, in the Xunzi he frequently appears as a main concept. I suppose that this difference is not without significance. Certainly, a harmonious society is a shared goal of these two Confucian thinkers. But, while for Mengzi (Mencius) it is probably a by-product of the spontaneous work of the ‘good’ impulses of the human being, provided they are ‘extended’ and allowed to develop freely, Xunzi is much more concerned with achieving harmony as a difficult and constructive political activity aimed at establishing a ‘just’ society. This is certainly due to Xunzi’s sceptical anthropology (or, better, to the sceptical part of his anthropology), which has to take into account that human beings are not by natural inclination on the side of order. In what follows, I will outline Xunzi’s conception of a just society in order to show that justice, not harmony, is the fundamental category of his political philosophy.
