Lead Them with Virtue

“I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Moreover, I learned a great deal indeed from the reading. I have always enjoyed reading about Xunzi. I most highly recommend this excellent work.”

-- John Berthrong, Boston University

"Learning from early philosophers requires both getting the ancients right and applying their lessons astutely. In Lead Them With Virtue, Kurtis Hagen makes novel and powerful arguments on both counts. He shows that early Confucians were much less sanguine about 'just war' than has often been thought, and that we have much to learn from the 'Confucian solution' to peace and security. Over the long term, peace and prosperity come not from military strength but from benevolent governments held accountable by critical intellectuals."

-- Stephen C. Angle, Wesleyan University

"Lead them with Virtue presents a Confucian perspective on topics including just war, dirty hands, the use of the military, humanitarian intervention, and global leadership. Hagen unifies these themes by placing strategic moral leadership at the centre of a sustainable, long-term, Confucian vision."

-- Karyn Lai, University of New South Wales

"Through a thorough investigation of the Confucian views on warfare and the world order, this book has provided an original analysis and insightful discussion of the Confucian approach to political conflicts and their solutions, and argued for this approach to be a plausible alternative to various war and world order theories popular in the West, past and present. Academic by nature, the book nevertheless may well serve as a kind of handbook not only useful to those political leaders who hold the power to wage a war but also beneficial for the general public who are particularly concerned with justifications, procedures, and consequences of engaging war in an increasingly globalized world."

-- Xinzhong Yao, King’s College London

"In this provocative book, Kurtis Hagen challenges the dominant view among the students of Chinese philosophy that early Confucians such as Mencius and Xunzi supported humanitarian intervention. Highlighting the similarity between early Mohists and early Confucians regarding the use of violence, Hagen contends that it is a mistake to understand early Confucians as the advocates of humanitarian intervention who justified military intervention for good consequences as their central concern rather lay in winning the whole world by noncoercive means, virtue in particular. Hagen’s book is one of the first attempts to systematically investigate the Confucian idea of just war and its core contention is worth serious attention and engagement."

-- Sungmoon Kim, City University of Hong