Hou Wailu

Hou Wailu a Chinese historian of philosophy and of ideas of the twentieth century (1903-1987), one of the founders of the modern study of Chinese intellectual history and a leading exponent of a social and materialist interpretation of Chinese thought. He directed a monumental history of Chinese philosophy and trained and organised a large school of scholars.

Early Life and Education

Hou Wailu was born in 1903 in Fenyang, in Shanxi province. He grew up in a period of rapid intellectual change, when the collapse of the imperial examinations and the rise of modern schools were opening new paths for ambitious young men, and he received a modern education alongside a grounding in the classical texts.

He studied at universities in Beijing and later in Paris, where he encountered European philosophy and historical scholarship and where he deepened his knowledge of the theoretical traditions that would inform his later work. The years abroad broadened his intellectual horizons and gave him a comparative perspective on the Chinese tradition.

He returned to China to teach and research in the 1930s, and he became involved in the intellectual and political movements of the period. He was drawn to the materialist interpretation of history and to the project of understanding Chinese thought as the expression of social conditions, and he began to publish studies in this vein.

The History of Chinese Thought

Hou Wailu's central achievement is the multi-volume history of Chinese thought that he conceived and directed, a work that surveyed the development of Chinese philosophy and social ideas from antiquity to the modern era. Written by a team of collaborators under his guidance, it combined detailed study of the texts with an analysis of the economic and social setting in which ideas arose.

The work treated thought as an aspect of historical life rather than a realm apart, and it sought to explain the succession of philosophical movements in relation to the changes in society and the struggles of social groups. It devoted attention to figures and currents neglected by older accounts, including popular and heterodox thinkers, and it broadened the accepted canon of Chinese intellectual history.

Hou Wailu also wrote influential studies of particular periods and thinkers, including works on the thought of the pre-Qin age, on the Han philosopher Wang Chong and on the thinkers of the Ming and Qing transitions. His monographs combined painstaking textual work with wide theoretical ambition, and they set a model for the interpretation of Chinese philosophy in social terms.

Materialism, Society and Ideas

A guiding conviction of Hou Wailu's scholarship was that systems of thought must be understood through the conditions that produced them. He analysed the relations between philosophical ideas and the economy, the structure of classes and the forms of political authority, and he argued that the history of Chinese thought revealed a long process of development rather than a static tradition.

He wrote on the materialist strands within Chinese philosophy, on the critics of idealism and superstition and on the thinkers who had challenged received authority, and he sought to bring these lesser-known figures into the mainstream of the history of Chinese thought. His work gave a new prominence to debates about the nature of knowledge, the basis of ethics and the relation between the individual and society.

At the same time he insisted on the need for accurate scholarship. He and his collaborators worked directly from the sources, and the critical apparatus of their volumes was substantial. He maintained that a social interpretation of ideas must rest on a sound reading of the texts, and he resisted the reduction of complex thinkers to simple formulas.

Institutions and the Training of Scholars

Hou Wailu held senior academic positions in the history and philosophy institutes of the national academy and in the universities of the capital, and he directed large research programmes in the history of Chinese thought. He led the compilation of source collections, edited series and reference works, and supervised the work of many junior scholars.

His institute became a centre for the study of Chinese intellectual history, and the method and agenda that he set were carried by his students into universities throughout the country. He organised conferences and collaborative projects that brought together scholars from many fields, and he was a central figure in the institutional life of the humanities in the decades after 1949.

He was concerned throughout with the formation of a scholarly community capable of sustaining long and demanding projects. He believed that the study of Chinese thought required both individual erudition and organised cooperation, and the model of collective scholarship that he developed shaped the practice of the discipline for many years.

Influence and Legacy

Hou Wailu is remembered as one of the principal founders of the modern study of Chinese intellectual history and as the leader of a school of interpretation that dominated the field for decades. His multi-volume history and his monographs are standard works of reference, and his insistence on the social dimension of thought left a permanent mark on how the history of Chinese philosophy is written.

His approach has been both followed and criticised, and the debates over the relation between ideas and social conditions that his work provoked continue to animate the field. The breadth of his reading and the scale of the projects he directed gave Chinese intellectual history a new seriousness and a new source base.

He died on 14 May 1987. He is remembered as a scholar of immense energy and organising power who united the study of texts with the study of society and who brought a whole generation of scholars into the examination of the Chinese intellectual tradition. His name is inseparable from the modern historiography of Chinese thought.

See also

• Chinese intellectual history
• Marxist historiography
• Jian Bozan
• Wang Chong