Jingtang Li (Xin Hong), MPhil: The Metaphysics of Western and Eastern Non-Interferential Natural Order Thinking — Using Laozi’s Wu Wei to Ground Nozick’s Minimal State

In our Daoist Studies section, today we present a summary of an important contemporary contribution by the researcher and Daoist practitioner Jingtang Li (Xin Hong), whose work opens a remarkable dialogue between the classical Daoist philosophy of Laozi and the Western political philosophy of Robert Nozick.

The author demonstrates that the principle of Wu Wei (無為) understood as non-coercive action and non-forcible interference with the natural order is not merely a spiritual or ethical guideline, but a profound metaphysical foundation for understanding spontaneous social order, individual liberty, and the limited role of government. The article brings the Daoist concepts of Dao (道), Ziran (自然), De (德), and Tiandao (天道) into dialogue with contemporary political philosophy, creating a valuable bridge between Eastern and Western intellectual traditions.

This original and insightful study represents a significant contribution to contemporary Daoist scholarship and will be of interest not only to researchers, but also to all readers interested in philosophy, society, and the enduring relevance of Laozi's wisdom.

We warmly invite our readers to explore the full article, published in the journal Daoist Doctrines and Teachings (道教義理), available on the official Daojiao Yili website, where the complete version of the author's research can be accessed.

Editorial Board
Daoist Research Centre of the Slovenian Daoist Temple (DRC SDT)

About the author

Mr. Jingtang Li (Xin Hong) is a practitioner and researcher at the Wuhan Changchun Daoist Temple, where he serves as Lead for International Affairs. He is a formal disciple of Master Wu Cheng Zhen, the first female Fangzhang (Abbot) in Daoist history and Chairperson of the Hubei Provincial Daoist Association. He also serves as Cultural Consultant for the Mexico Daoist Association.

Bridging the gap between ancient Eastern wisdom and modern Western governance, Mr. Li holds an MPhil in Political Economy from King’s College London (specialisation: Neo-liberalism) and a BA (Hons) First-Class from the United Kingdom, awarded on a Full Scholarship. His research focuses on the philosophical synthesis of Daoist Wu Wei and contemporary political-economic frameworks.

The editorial board of Daoist Doctrines and Teachings (道教義理) considers this work a significant contribution to the contemporary study of Daoist political philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions.

Overview

This paper undertakes a comparative metaphysical investigation into one of the deepest structural convergences in the history of political philosophy: the shared commitment to non-interference with spontaneous natural order that runs through Laozi’s Daoist philosophy and Robert Nozick’s libertarian theory of the Minimal State. Bringing the two traditions into sustained dialogue, the paper argues that Nozick’s entitlement theory finds a deeper metaphysical grounding in the Daoist ontology of the Way (Dao, 道) than in the Western liberal tradition alone.

The apparent tension between Nozick’s atomistic individualism and Laozi’s cosmological holism dissolves, the paper contends, once the Daoist concept of the individual as a natural emergence from the primordial void (xu, 虛) is properly understood. Both traditions share a fundamental distrust of artificial, centralised intrusion into the spontaneous order of human social life — and both arrive at the same conclusion by different paths: the good social order is one that allows nature to govern itself.

The Western tradition: from Physiocrats to Nozick

The paper traces the concept of natural order through its principal Western articulations. The French Physiocrats of the eighteenth century — Quesnay, Turgot, Le Mercier de la Rivière — first systematised the idea that economic and social life is governed by immutable providential laws anterior to any human legislation. Their maxim laissez faire, laissez passer expressed not merely economic prudence but a quasi-theological reverence for a natural order that deliberate interference could only disrupt. This sensibility passed into classical political economy through Adam Smith’s invisible hand and was radicalised in the twentieth century by Friedrich Hayek’s epistemological argument: because the information required to coordinate complex social life is irreducibly dispersed across millions of individual minds, no central authority can possess it, and the price mechanism of the free market remains the only available instrument for putting dispersed knowledge to productive social use.

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) radicalised this tradition by arguing that a state limited to protecting individual rights against force, fraud, and theft is the only morally legitimate form of political organisation. His entitlement theory holds that justice in holdings is entirely procedural: a distribution is just if and only if it arose through just acquisition and just transfer. No patterned end-state can be enforced without continuously prohibiting the voluntary transactions through which free individuals would otherwise disrupt it.

The redistributive challenge and its limits

The paper engages seriously with the strongest objections to the natural-order tradition. G. A. Cohen’s socialist challenge — developed in Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995) and Why Not Socialism? (2009) — accepts the self-ownership premise yet argues it is insufficient to generate robust external property rights. Will Kymlicka adds that Nozick’s own historical entitlement theory is indeterminate in practice: given the actual history of acquisition through conquest, fraud, and dispossession, the rectification principle it requires may mandate redistributions more extensive than anything Rawls proposes.

These objections are taken seriously but ultimately rebuffed. The camping-trip model that grounds Cohen’s argument succeeds only under conditions of mutual familiarity and shared purpose that are absent at the macroeconomic scale. The Soviet experience demonstrated that even coercive central planning failed to coordinate complex production. The rectification objection, properly delimited, remains consistent with the Minimal State framework: rectifying specific historical injustices applies the same rights-respecting procedural standard as protecting current holdings — not an open licence for systematic redistribution.

Daoist ontology: the individual as natural emergence

The paper’s most original contribution is its reconstruction of a Daoist ontology of the individual that simultaneously grounds a robust principle of non-interference and dissolves the apparent opposition between Nozick’s atomism and Laozi’s holism. The key is the concept of xu (虛, primordial void): all things, including persons, arise from the self-differentiation of the undifferentiated Dao — “The Dao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things” (道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物). Individuals are not pre-social atoms choosing to enter social arrangements; they are natural emergences, each possessing its own de (德, virtue or potency) through which the universal Dao manifests in each particular thing.

Drawing on Ames and Hall’s concept of the “focal” self, D. C. Lau’s reading of the “return to the root” (歸根), A. C. Graham’s account of ziran (自然, self-so-ness), and Sarah Allan’s plant-metaphor analysis, the paper argues that the Daoist individual is neither an isolated atom nor a mere node in a collectivist network. Each person is a dynamic, self-organising process — genuinely particular yet continuous with the natural whole from which it emerged. Interference with a person’s de and ziran is therefore not merely a legal violation but a disruption of the natural order itself: an act of wei (為, artificial doing), the opposite of Wu Wei (無為, non-action) in Laozi’s terms.

Tiandao, Wu Wei, and Ziran: the Daoist grammar of non-interference

Tiandao (天道, Way of Heaven) designates the spontaneous, self-correcting cosmic order that maintains balance without a governing intelligence — diminishing the superabundant and supplementing the deficient through the automatic operation of its own dynamic, structurally analogous to Hayek’s spontaneous market order. Wu Wei (無為) is the practical principle derived from this cosmological insight: action that works with the grain of natural process rather than against it, enabling the sage-ruler to govern by not governing. Ziran (自然) describes the outcome of such governance: a society in which each person and community freely expresses its natural character in voluntary relation with others — precisely the social order that Nozick’s Minimal State is designed to protect.

From a Daoist perspective, the Rawlsian Original Position — which places rational individuals behind a “veil of ignorance” to derive principles of distributive justice — does precisely what Laozi proscribes: it substitutes an abstractly rational construct for the concrete, embodied, historically particular person whose spontaneous activities constitute the natural order of society. The “Difference Principle” that Rawls derives from this exercise is, in Daoist terms, an act of wei: a forced imposition that suppresses the natural order rather than allowing it to correct itself.

Synthesis and conclusion

The paper concludes by drawing the ontological and political arguments together. Nozick’s side-constraints — rights that limit what may be done to individuals in pursuit of social ends — function, in the Daoist idiom, as the principles that define the operating conditions of Tiandao: they do not prescribe social outcomes but protect the process through which outcomes naturally emerge. The concept of Natural Equilibrium (the self-correcting zero-sum balance of Yin and Yang) provides the metaphysical bridge: both Tiandao and the market achieve coordination without a coordinator, order without design.

Both traditions diagnose the same pathology in over-governance — the presumption that a central intelligence can replicate or improve upon the self-correcting dynamics of natural order — and both predict the same consequences: disruption, disorder, and outcomes worse than non-interference would have produced. The Treaty of Versailles provides a historical illustration: Wilsonian “man-made justice,” by imposing artificial scarcity and punitive redistribution on post-war Germany, exemplified the Way of Man overriding the Way of Heaven.

The Minimal State is therefore not a parochially Western idea. It is the political instantiation of a universal metaphysical principle — one that Daoist philosophy has articulated for over two millennia: that the good social order is one which allows the natural dynamics of human life to express themselves without obstruction, and that the wisdom of the governor consists precisely in knowing when not to act.

Publication

Ready to publish — 下半年刊. This article is a summary of the paper published in Daoist Doctrines and Teachings (道教義理), No. 1, 2026. The full paper is available through the journal's official website: http://www.daojiaoyili.hk

Bibliography:

The following works are central to the arguments developed in this article:

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971.

Ames, Roger T. and David L. Hall. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.

Graham, A. C. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989.

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Laozi. Daodejing Chanwei《道德經闡微》. Commentary by Wu Cheng Zhen. Wuhan: Wuhan Changchun Daoist Temple Internal Publication, 2016.

Cohen, G. A. Why Not Socialism? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Allan, Sarah. The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.