Abstract
It is above all as a historian, concerned with the concrete data of the evolution of Chinese society, that I intend to approach the history of ideas, conceptions and intellectual currents in China. The time has passed when Chinese history was seen as a long, uniform sequence of virtually interchangeable periods. China's history makes sense, just as ours does. It has been marked by ruptures and has seen periods of rapid evolution. For those who accept that human beings are the product of their society and their history, the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in China are a privileged period for research. The social, economic and political upheavals and transformations that took place over the course of these three centuries, the richness and diversity of intellectual life, the evolution of ideas, the large number of independent minds and remarkable personalities, all add to the exceptional interest of this period.
