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Book Review
| Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History. By ALEXANDER WOODSIDE. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 142 pp. $22.00 (cloth).
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Alexander Woodside has entered the ongoing discussion on the definition of social modernity by examining East Asian Mandarinates and suggesting that they held traits of the "modern" long before the West. Lost Modernities is based on Woodside's lectures given in 2001 for the Edwin O. Reischauer lecture series at Harvard University. |
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His book looks at the tradition of bureaucracy and at civil servants recruited through public examination, beginning in Tang dynasty China (618–907 C.E.) and continuing in Korea and (what is now) Vietnam after they broke away from Chinese rule. Civil service exams in some form were operating in China by the seventh century, by the eighth century in Korea, and the eleventh in Vietnam. Woodside makes the point that the less-known Korean and Vietnamese examination systems are as instructive for historians as the Chinese. (He acknowledges that he is not a Korean studies specialist and cannot speak as authoritatively there as he does on China and Vietnam.) |
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The style of government resulting from this administration by meritocracy held many of the features of what is classified as modernity in histories of Western society. Woodside alleges that "Pascal's proposition—that meritocracy would threaten civil strife because all members of a meritocratic elite would acquire an absolute belief in their own merit—was vindicated in Korea long before it could be tested in Europe" (p. 46). In Europe, aristocratic administration lasted longer but was also bolstered by a tradition of elevating to the peerage those who had performed useful service. In East Asia, elevation by the monarch was more rare, and tended not to be hereditary. |
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