Kang Youwei : Du confucianisme réformé à l'utopie universelle

Roger Darrobers : Kang Youwei. From Reformed Confucianism to Universal Utopia. The three classics of Kang Youwei (1858-1927) Xinxue weijing kao (An Examination of the School of the Xin Dynasty's False Classics), Kongzi gaizhi kao (An Examination of Confucius' Institutional Reforms), and Datongshu (The Book of Unity), all published after 1891, aroused a vast interest. The first two bring into question the entire Confucian tradition, suggesting that Confucius was a reformer, even before that term existed. The latter work, published posthumously in 1935, radically departed from Kang's earlier erudite and polemic style, and proposed a universalistic philosophy to explain the pain of human suffering. This article examines each of the three classics, in turn, finishing with Datongshu, which, owing to its opening to the world, represents a special case for an intellectual work mostly based on Chinese tradition.