A Study On Li Gou’s Political Thought

Li Gou lived in the Song Renzong era,when the malpractice of the “Ancestors Family Instructions” were completely exposed, and the imperial government was beseted with difficulties both at home and abroad. He was deeply influenced by Fan Zhongyan, and advocated political reform. His theory not only provided theoretical support for the reformers, but also played an important role in promoting the rise of the Song studies. After Song Dynasty, idealist philosophy of the Song and Ming Dynasties dominated the development of Confucianism. Li Gou’s thought were completely deferent from idealist philosophy of the Song and Ming Dynasties, so it was absent from the public attention for quite a long period. Even today, people still not fully understand and appreciate Li Gou’s thought and his contribution to Confucianism.Facing the serious social crisis, most Confucian scholars before Li Gou talked only about moral education rather than explore how to build a rich state and a powerful army. Li Gou broke the conventional thoughts, advocated for utility and coexistence of King and Domination, and called for the ruling class to be courageous to conduct reforms. For this, he studied Confucian classics in great indepth, looked for good ruling policy, and put forward his own political ideology. Li Gou’s political thought was based on materialism view of the Dao of heaven and the theory of three ranks and five types of human nature, among which rite is core. With rite, Li Gou included and integrated the system of Confucian ethics, as a new standard of reconstruction of the social order. Basing on the theory, he inspected the shortcoming of the political institution, and initiated the reform theory will the spirit of utilitarian.After thousand years, Li Gou inherited Xun Zi’s train of thoughts and reconstructed the Confucian utilitarianism tradition, which is his most important contribution to Confucianism.Li Gou abandoned the learning of sentences and phrases and syntactic and semantic analysis of ancient writings of the Confucian scholar’s of Han and Tang dynasty. He studied the classics by using comments. His criticalattitude to Mencius was an important case of the trend of suspecting classics. Li Gou was also a representative figure of criticizing Buddhism. He advocated that Confucian scholars should not only attack Buddhism from the outside, instead, strengthening the building of the Confucian theory were more important. This is an important turn of attacking Buddhism, and his political ideology can be regarded as an effort to strengthen theoretical construction to Confucianism.After the Song Dynasty, the Confucian utilitarianism school was marginalization in a long time. Today we should use broader theoretical perspective to understand Confucianism, in order to objectively evaluate the thoughts of Confucianism and its thinkers. In addition, Li Gou’s thought also has important significance to the development and innovation of contemporary socialism with Chinese characteristics of. Therefore, it is worthy of our in-depth study and reference.