Confucius Rhetorical Analysis

When people find that there world has become foreign and strange to them, they tend to react in one of two ways. They either try to change the present to match a time in the past when things were alright in their minds or they will try to push for new and revolutionary changes. In the Spring-Autumn period of China, 722-481 BCE, many people were finding themselves in this position as order seemed to be gone from China. Conflict was constant and especially violent and as time went on it only seemed to get worse. It was out of this time that Confucius began to preach his ideas on how to remedy the situation that people found themselves in. Like many thinkers of the time, Confucius offered a solution in the way in which order and virtue could be reestablished in China. …show more content…
Despite the fact that the opinions of Confucius are laid out relatively clearly, it is not clear whether or not Confucius was a reactionary or a revolutionary in his thought. His opinions had a little bit of both types of thought intermixed throughout. Yet in categorizing Confucius, he should be deemed a reactionary because he felt that the best remedy for China was to return to the state to the time of the Zhou Dynasty. Confucius argued strongly for a system of government which was near parallel the government system of the Zhou which on the whole means, he needs to be classified as a reactionary. All of this being said, there is an argument that Confucius simply painted himself as a reactionary in order to garner support and in order to disguise his revolutionary ideas to China and that is an argument that needs to be carefully