The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel

Metzger continues the effort started in A Cloud Across the Pacific (The Chinese University Press, 2005) by viewing modern Chinese thought as political philosophy; placing it in a sociological context, noting its causal relationship with paideia; examining its historical context by emphasizing the lines of continuity with the Confucian tradition; and exploring its comparative context by describing it as sharing an agenda with and diverging from the leading forms of Western liberalism. East and West, he argues, are ivory towers that use their rationalistic philosophies to insist that the great disasters of history are caused mainly by the bad decisions of political leaders, instead of seeing how their own philosophical discourses lend credibility to these decisions and trying to improve these discourses by uncovering their culturally inherited premises. In an increasingly democratic era when political philosophy is no longer viable as a theory of global-political evolution and as public criticism increasingly affects leadership decisions, Metzger seeks to vindicate a neo-Hegelian definition of political philosophy as the effort to influence public criticism by advertising an outlook more logically and thoroughly supported by a variety of cross-cultural textual evidence.