Sungmoon Kim cares deeply about democracy, especially in East Asia, the part of the world he is from and writes about. Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy is the fifth of the books he has published in the last 10 years to make the case, from different angles, for Confucian democracy.
The new book lays out an account of what Kim describes as “Confucian Constitutionalism,” by which he means the Confucian-inflected design of political institutions, including the public sphere of deliberation, the legislature, and the judiciary. Kim also sets himself the task of answering critics of Confucian democracy, whom he categorizes as either Confucian-meritocratic or liberal (2). Although he offers arguments specific to each, one line of argumentation that permeates the book concerns the idea of Confucianism as an “evolving political tradition” (250). Kim’s distinctive contribution in the book, as in previous work, is indeed to study Confucianism as a “societal culture,” rather than just as a “philosophical tradition” (2)—with its evolving nature tied to the social and political transformations witnessed in East Asia, especially in recent decades. Kim thus presents his own Confucian Constitutionalism as a continuation and revival of the project of early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals who sought “a new model of benevolent government” based on “the people’s self-government,” “the discourse of rights (and responsibilities),” and “the intricate institutional structure of the separation of powers” (251).
The idea here is that Confucianism has developed not only to meet the challenge of modernization but also that this challenge is distinctive in East Asia. For example, “societal pluralism” in East Asia is still “unfolding” (emphasis in the original), in contrast with its fully developed nature in the West, as embodied in John Rawls’s use of the “fact of pluralism” to describe Europe after the Reformation and the wars of religion (1). Put differently, pluralism in East Asia has not erased the “syncretism” characteristic of the region in which Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism could be espoused simultaneously (89). Kim also attributes the relative dearth of religious conflict in East Asian history to the fact that “political, legal, and social institutions were generally predicated on Confucianism, which prizes harmony over conflict” (90).
This historical account is meant as evidence for the distinctiveness of Confucianism, in at least some of its variations, as a “comprehensive doctrine.” Kim contends that Rawls, who developed the concept in Political Liberalism (1993, 13), was not actually interested in the content of comprehensive doctrines. But content matters, according to Kim. More specifically, he argues that some comprehensive doctrines are less encompassing of various aspects of life than others; indeed, he suggests that this is implicit in Rawls’s own—underexplored—distinction between partial and full comprehensive doctrines (77). Because it is less encompassing in this way—it is “partial” rather than “full”—“civic Confucianism” can provide the normative basis for state institutions without impinging on the freedom of citizens to uphold other comprehensive doctrines, especially given East Asia’s syncretism.
But what is civic Confucianism? Kim writes that it is characterized by “benevolence, valuable relationships, trust, filial piety, ritual propriety, respect for elders and harmony” (86); he adds, “Its kernel lies not necessarily in specific beliefs and doctrines but in social practices such as ancestor worship and ritual propriety” (91). It is “difficult … to imagine individuals in East Asian societies of the Confucian heritage who completely reject such Confucian values” (121). But even were such people to exist, he wonders, would it be “politically overbearing if a democratic state encourages [them] to cultivate Confucian values that are widely cherished in society” (121)? The argument here relates to Kim’s distinction between “oppression” and “offense,” which he uses to suggest that the cultivation of Confucian values might be offensive to some—an inevitability in a free society—but that it does not equate to oppression, given the civic nature of these values and the constitutional mechanisms that otherwise constrain the government (83–88).
Yet some areas of government policy, like taxation, frustrate the offense/oppression distinction Kim poses. Imagine a Confucian government taxing its citizens to subsidize practices of ancestor worship, which Kim mentions as characteristic of civic Confucianism. Although this is not oppression, it does constitute more than mere offense. It amounts to coercion. Would it be permissible for the Confucian constitutional state to undertake such taxation, on Kim’s view? If he allows for it, he runs afoul of what he describes as the “pluralist” demand: the meaningful accommodation of group difference (70). If he does not allow for it, then he runs afoul of what he terms the “Confucian demand,” namely the privileging of Confucianism over other comprehensive doctrines (70). Thus, the tension between Confucianism and pluralism has not actually been resolved.
Here Kim might suggest that this is where the use of public reason in general democratic deliberation comes in, allowing citizens to collectively agree about what is and is not acceptable government policy. But the qualifier “Confucian” rears its head again: after all, Kim’s account of public reason is called “public reason Confucianism,” and what makes it “Confucian” is the practice of ritual enabling a “shared cultural semiotics that prizes the virtue of respectfulness (jing 敬) over the agonal expression of the self or personal and group interests” (113). We are back to wondering about those citizens who reject ritual, of the ancestor worship form or otherwise, and the centrality of the value of respectfulness; can their participation in public reason Confucianism be anything but coerced?
Kim’s response to such worries over the tension between pluralism and Confucianism is that this dilemma is not specific to this issue or to his own proposal. He notes at various points that liberalism cannot be perfectly neutral vis-à-vis, for example, the religious subjects of a liberal state (121). The assumption here, which runs throughout the book, is that Confucianism holds the same place in East Asian societies that liberalism holds in Western democratic societies. Liberalism, at least in its Rawlsian variation, is embodied in various institutions of Western democratic states: what Rawls identifies as the “public political culture” of liberal democracies. To ground Kim’s argument for the correspondence between liberalism and Confucianism, some account of the lingering, even if embattled, influence of Confucianism on the sociopolitical institutions of contemporary East Asian societies is thus needed. Here, one would expect important differences between the South Korean and Chinese states’ relationships to Confucianism. This also brings us back to the historical argument about the relationship between Confucianism and the absence of religious conflict in East Asia: In what ways were the relevant social and political institutions Confucian? And is Kim’s proposed Confucian Constitutionalism “Confucian” in the same way as these older institutions? If not, how can we identify it as Confucian, despite the historical change?
It is ultimately a virtue of Kim’s book to raise these big and important questions and compel us to consider the historical trajectory and social composition of non-Western societies without taking Western history as the default model. Add to this the comprehensiveness of the work—which covers the basis and goals of Confucian government, centered on ideals like human dignity and well-being, the rule of law and the place of rights, deliberation in the public sphere, and the design of institutions like the legislature and the judiciary—and you get a highly ambitious and powerful case for thinking about democracy in East Asia in its own right.
