Popular Opinion and Public Reasoning

Yang Wei

This study examines the rise of popularist discourse in the realms of intellectual transformation, political reforms, institutional innovations, social activism, and cultural construction from the 1580s to the 1680s. Centered on notions such as "popular opinion (gonglun)" and "public reasoning (gongyi)", the popularist discourse presupposed individual perspectives as inherently isolated, incomplete, parochial, and flawed. Broader inclusion of diverse opinions was thus justified as an indispensible check of individual view for optimal outcome. Chapter 1 explores the intellectual transformation from the Neo-Confucian premises to elitist-popularism, in which the daoxue assumptions of individual access to absolute truth, and of the linear transmission of orthodox learning through an enlightened minority (daotong) were questioned. In contrast, the popularist notions emphasized the...