It is always a delight to see contemporary engagement with the rich insights of Mencius and Xunzi. In the case of Sungmoon Kim’s thoughtful and ambitious book, this delight is further accompanied by a feeling of confidence about future possibilities. Indeed, the analytic style and the conceptual devices Kim adopts in his discussion and reconstruction of these two thinkers’ ideas provide us with a more focused and structured way to notice and appreciate their commonalities and differences. Moreover, he attends to (...) the differences in the social and political contexts these two thinkers were embedded in, as well as their different views regarding human nature and moral psychology. This attention is then followed by his... (shrink)