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This book could with good reason have ended with the last chapter. In that briefest of chapters I argued for approaching freedom in the spirit of a question, especially regarding its relation to the good, after having tried to show, in previous chapters, why freedom must be an important part of any solution to China’s moral crisis and, by implication, to many of its other problems. But I cannot quite resist the temptation, in this afterthought of a chapter, to make a modest beginning in taking up the question of freedom beyond arguing for its necessity. This is a rather different undertaking from what has been pursued in all the previous chapters and, for this reason, the attempt must be judged somewhat independently. While this final chapter obviously presupposes and builds on the main steps of argument in the previous chapters, it should not be deemed to weaken any of the latter if the further, tentative steps it takes do not constitute good enough answers to questions raised in the earlier. In this spirit, then, I shall pursue an idea about freedom that I should like to think is both definite and appropriately open, and I shall do so by taking some care to situate the question of freedom within the space of broader moral and political possibilities in the foreseeable future of China.

But I must first take a long detour devoted to reflections first on human nature and then on modernity. I see no better way to give a glimpse of the need for this detour than with reference to Marx’s cautionary methodological remarks directed at Jeremy Bentham, although utilitarianism is otherwise of no concern for my purposes.