Word: levensons
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...Levenson was born in Boston in 1920. After a stint at Boston Latin, he entered Harvard in 1937, majoring in European history. The war sent him to Japanese language school, and eventually to Japan itself, but when he returned to Harvard in 1946 Levenson turned to China, the country that held his concern for the rest of his life, earning a Ph.D. in 1949. Looking back on this choice, Levenson said in 1968, "In Chinese history there were big open spaces and the promise of a road that went the long way home...The interest in China is an interest...
...book that emerged from his dissertation, Levenson addressed a problem that became one of the main intellectual themes of his subsequent work. The book, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China, examined the life and though of Liang (1873-1929) as a lens through which to view "what his milieu expected of him and could offer him." In his role as intellectual historian, Levenson viewed himself as far more than a recorder of Liang's stated thoughts...
From the ways that Liang though while the traditional culture of Imperial China crumbled about him, from the constructions he put on thoughts that had been expressed in other times or places, Levenson hoped to extract insights on the dilemmas faced when cultures clash. When he stated the thesis of his work in his introduction, Levenson set up the dialectic that expressed those dilemmas as dynamic forces withing the individual and his society...
...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...