(Page 19 of 27) - Understanding Democratization: Can National Liberation and Unification be Achieved Through Peaceful Mean of Self Government authored by Sabetti, Filippo.

manifestation of the multiple dimensions that societies possess in the economic, juridical-
institutional, cultural and moral realms. There are more than one way to get particular
things done – so that, as much as he admired private property rights, Cattaneo was
respectful of other forms of possessing. As a way of illustrating the diversity, Cattaneo
offers many examples of the multidimensional and complex world in which people have
lived through time. He then introduces two important corollaries.

The first corollary is that the tendency for some set of principles to dominate and

direct the state is seldom, if ever, realized. Before one set acquires dominance in the
intellectual and public realm, including public opinion, other principles tend to emerge
often unexpectedly, pushing the current of interests and opinion in other directions. The
second is that the more civilized a people is, the more numerous are the organizing
principles it contains. This is what made the European civilization “superior” or stand out
when ranged alongside the other major world civilizations. Hence his attempt to
understand ancient and modern societies and agrarian civilizations like that of imperial
China and Hindu India compared to the rise of Christian Europe as an industrial
civilization. But Cattaneo was quick to point out that stationary peoples and societies do
not exist except in the abstract or in the minds of some theorists. He illustrates the point
using the example of China. After comparing Italy and China, he turns specifically to the
latter, focusing especially on its resource-based achievements requiring considerable
human artisanship. He summarizes these accomplishments in this way:

The person who considers China stationary will find it in continuous
agitation if he looks closely to its history. He will see (people in)
China introducing agriculture over a vast territory, embanking rivers,
digging up canals, establishing settlements of cultivators along the
thousand valleys of its two major rivers and innumerable cities,
absorbing barbarous tribes from the mountains, embracing all its
peoples in one civilization with the bond of a common language;
fashioning laws, arts and writings; and China had achieved all this
when Europe was pertinaciously barbarous and stagnating. Then we
see China breaking up into several federated realms, and in this
comparative liberty developing popular and assorted philosophies;
then transforming itself now into one empire, now into two, as
Marco Polo found. Twice, like in the case of Italy, barbarians
conquered China; the first time it succeeded in expelling them; in
other times, it softened their impact and aggregated the conquerors
into its civilization. In the meantime, assiduous mental work was
propagating on one side the Socratic philosophy of Confucius, and,
on other sides, the abstract philosophy of Lao Tsue, and the
theological metaphysics of Buddhism; more recently, the foments of
a new revolution have come from the Bible [ie.Christianity].
(Cattaneo [1861] 1957, SSG, 3:150-51).

Cattaneo continued, the China we know from history books is an artifactual creation
made by successive generations of people – that is, all these activities reflect the