SOURCE: Creel, H. G. “Confucianism and Western Democracy.” In Confucius: The Man and the Myth, pp. 254-78. New York: The John Day Company, 1949.

In the following essay, Creel traces Thomas Jefferson's ideas and the ideals of the French Revolution to the writings of Confucius.

In the Western world democratic institutions made their most rapid and dramatic gains in connection with the American and French Revolutions. It is no doubt true that these revolutions were not “caused” by the philosophic movement known as the Enlightenment; but it is true that this new pattern of thought determined, in very considerable measure, the direction in which men moved once the revolutions had given them freedom of action.

The philosophy of the Enlightenment has some very remarkable similarities to Confucianism. Since it developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this was precisely the period at which Confucianism came to be effectively...