Why did the ideological and literary circles in the early Ming Dynasty have a progressive trend of thinking against autocracy and pursuing democracy?

Because productivity determines the relations of production, and the economic base determines the superstructure. The fields of thought and literature belong to the superstructure.

Productivity will inevitably change when it develops to a certain stage. 1. At that time, the commodity economy was highly developed, the seeds of capitalism appeared, and capitalism pursued a more relaxed relationship between people, which caused feudalism friction, and people of insight would put forward plans conducive to democracy. 2. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, people dared to put forward anti-traditional ideas because of the wartime, when ideological autocracy was relatively loose. 3. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, authoritarianism reached its peak in centralization, and feudalism, a huge state machine, was full of drawbacks, contradictions were fully exposed, and bureaucrats were corrupt. As a minority, Qing soldiers entered the Central Plains, which was a great blow to taxi drivers at that time. For example, after the failure of the anti-Qing dynasty, Huang Zongxi and Gu wrote books in seclusion, thinking about the reasons for the demise of the Ming Dynasty and past dynasties, and discovering the disadvantages of autocratic monarchy. 4. With the development of commodity economy, mercantilism appeared among the people in the late Ming Dynasty, businessmen paid attention to equality and mutual benefit, and feudal hierarchy gradually faded.