Daoism and Political Liberalism: Two Birds of a Feather?

Traditional Asian models of politics, such as those linked to Confucianism, are generally presented in opposition to Western conceptions of liberal democracy. By contrast, much less consideration has been given to the many commonalities between Daoism, a long-standing alternative school of thought in China, and political liberalism. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study compares fundamental precepts in Laozi’s Dao De Jing (DDJ) with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to illustrate how many core ideas in the DDJ appear as essential elements in Mill’s landmark text on political liberalism. Although the two texts diverge in terms of advocating popular representation and legal rights, they share an overlapping consensus in rejecting authoritarianism, uniformity, patriarchy, censorship, harm, violence, and wastefulness. A reasonable interpretation of these affinities is that East Asia and China in particular already has an indigenous tradition that is relatively compatible with the ideals of political liberalism.