The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School Volume 1-2

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK II RELATION OF ECONOMICS TO OTHER SCIENCES CHAPTER V Economics And Other Sciences In General I. Definition Of Economics The equivalent of the English term economics in Chinese is administering wealth. Such a term explains itself, and calls for no definition. Let us, however, trace the origin of the term. It occurs first in the Appendix of the Canon of Changes as follows: That which enables men to live collectively, is wealth. Administering wealth, formulating rules, and prohibiting the people from doing wrong? this is called justice.1 Since the Appendix was written, the Chinese have usually used the term administering wealth for the art of political economy, and also for the science of economics. But the modern Japanese has adopted another Chinese term, ching chi, for the word economics; and Herbert A. Giles has put this term, ching chi, in his Chinese-English Dictionary for political economy . The term ching ihi, however, has a very broad meaning, and is not a good equivalent for the word economics. It generally means statesmanship, and covers the whole field of governmental action. It thus belongs to politics rather than to economics. It will be well, there- . 1Yi King, p. 381. fore, to keep the old term administering wealth as the equivalent of economics, since it is much more accurate and comprehensive than the term ching chi. As we have taken the scientific term from the Confucian text, let us also adopt its definition. The term administering wealth covers the whole field of economics. Formulating rules and prohibiting the people from doing wrong refer respectively to the ethical and political life. All three of these aspects of life should be directed by the principle of justice, and their relations will be stated l...