Word: levenson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crisis came when a moribund Confucianism found its links to the realities around those who treasured it becoming more and more tattered. And for Levenson, the record of Liang's attempts to reconcile his intellectual alienation with his emotional bonds to Confucianism was the record of the death of that tradition...
Unfortunately Levenson's era was fraught with tensions which conspired to make his asking any questions extremely difficult. In the early fifties Levenson, like Liang, found himself caught in an objectionable political current that swept him along against his will. His association at Harvard with Fairbank, then suspected by the McCarran Committee of having something to do with Communists at home and abroad, aroused the suspicion of California's loyalty-oath-bearing legislators that Levenson, too, might harbor secret Communist sympathies. Further outcry arose after Levenson's first interview with the University of California in 1949, when he is supposed...
Once safely ensconced at Berkeley, Levenson was greeted by a critical response to his first work that ranged from bland encouragement to outright viciousness. The radical nature of Levenson's work--his relativism, his concern for the context and social bases for thought and his use of dialectics evoked the wrath of the senior American Sinologist then writing, Arthur Hummel. Hummel wrote that Levenson was merely "out to get his man," and that the book "really tells us more about the wayward, corrosive thinking of our time than it does about ... 'the first mind of new China...
...Levenson's later work, though often highly praised, remained a focus for controversy, some of which persists in scholarly journals today. The implications of his method and vision, what he expected of the historian placed heavy demands on those who wrote (and read) history, demands that became clearer as he completed his largest work, Confucian China and its Modern Fate...
...themes. The first volume of the trilogy picks up where Liang Ch'i-ch'ao left off, taking "the problem of intellectual continuity," the persistence of ideas in changing contexts in space and time, to a society-wide level. No longer tied to the life of a single man, Levenson dispensed with conventions of narrative history, choosing instead to write three books as a web, jumping centuries and cultures to find the comparisons that would treat the same theme from a myriad of settings. From treating crises of intellectuals in an intellectual system, in the second volume Levenson moved...