The UH Manoa Department of Philosophy Presents
The Eliot Deutsch Merit Award Presentation for Best PhD Proposal Defense
The First Political Question: Value Disagreement and the Problem of Collective Action in Early China by Bobby McCullough
Friday, April 25, 2025 | 2:30pm
This dissertation explores what I term “the problem of collective action” in the Eary Chinese political and philosophical context. The problem with collective action can be understood as a tension between value disagreement and the grounds for collective action among members of a political community. Specifically, I construct interpretations of the Xunzi, the Han Feizi, and the Huainanzi that acknowledge and provide solutions to the problem of collective action. Briefly, the Xunzi emphasizes a top-down collapsing of public and private values into a system of value monism; the Han Feizi strictly delineates the separation of public and private values and recommends a top-down extirpation of private values from the public domain; the Huaianzi advocates for a hands-off bottom-up approach that leaves communities to run largely autonomously. The project concludes with an evaluation of these solutions to the problem of collective action and reflections on how we might bring these insights to bear on modern-day political issues.