The Making of an Anachronism

bureaucracy without Confucianism—Confucianism without bureaucracy—Confucianism’s intellectual content had profoundly altered. When a school of thought persists outside its familiar matrix, does this prove its vitality or its emptiness ? Burckhardt, referring to Orthodox Christianity after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, which had been so intimately bound up with it, left this question open. ¹ With Confucianism, it seems, the issue is less in doubt. For revolution had at last intervened in modern Chinese history, putting an end to bureaucracy’s long imperviousness to the ko-ming, mandate-changing, of the olds monarchical system. And the literal meaning of Confucian language was shaken.