Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue

Abstract

What a rich and complex book has brought together these commentators. Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue is grounded in contemporary politics and yet challenges us to imagine democratic possibilities for East Asian societies with long Confucian histories, contemporary Confucian practices, and heterogeneous commitments to Confucian virtues.For any of us, imagining the meaning and potential meaning of “Confucian democracy” is easier if we recognize that we have never seen an actual “liberal democracy” either. If you are willing to see democratically endorsed oppression of freedom and obstacles to equal participation of a majority or a minority within a country and still call the government that authorizes these a “liberal democracy,” then you are ready to play the “what is Confucian democracy?” game.However, if you want to come up with a Confucian democracy that functions outside of your imagination, then you also need to consider the contemporary circumstances of politics, national and international. Sungmoon Kim begins and ends his theoretical search for Confucian democracy with these circumstances. This is the approach to Confucian democracy that has been one of the defining features of Kim’s scholarship throughout his career. The other has been careful, rigorous treatment of serious political philosophers, revealing for us in their work both strength and opportunity (for improvement). In his scholarship he has always been a generous and critical interlocutor whose work he engages is flattered by the engagement despite the inevitable criticism it entails. I worry in this instance that some of these interlocutors dictate too much of the shape of the argument, more than the circumstances of politics do.Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue is a Confucian and pragmatist construction of a democratic theory. He sets out to create a democratic theory appropriate for guiding East Asian states with a Confucian history and complicated and heterogeneous respect for Confucian virtue ethics today and for providing a Confucian account of the democratic moments within the recent past of these East Asian states. Calling his approach pragmatic and his theory a “Pragmatic Confucian Democracy,” Kim sets his approach to the scope and function of Confucian Democratic Theory apart from those of most others in this field because for Kim any such attempt must begin with “the circumstances of modern politics in East Asia.”1 Because Confucianism is a perfectionist virtue ethics, Kim argues that a Confucian democratic theory respects democracy instrumentally, not only for enabling the people to hold their leaders to account for promoting or not promoting the well-being of the people (as in Korea and Taiwan), but also for being able to accommodate the pluralism of contemporary East Asian societies, enabling those with Confucian virtues to cultivate these in community with each other, and with those who do not. Kim does not support a view of Confucian democracy that would support people being oppressed by civic instantiations of Confucianism that demand too much of them. The argument is then applied to three questions of justice faced in contemporary political circumstances: punishment, socioeconomic inequality, and humanitarian intervention.The argument is huge, but the conversation partners are narrow. The field of Confucian democratic theory and political argument is vast. It has been developing since the end of the last Chinese dynasty and enjoyed a resurgence since in the 1990s various East Asian countries explored renovating and relegitimating their government institution with both Confucian and democratic influences. In this vast field as Kim constructs it, the contemporary conversation has two main perspectives: one that chooses democracy as the best way of realizing Confucian perfectionism in civic culture (Confucian Democrats, generally Sor-hoon Tan and Steve Angle) and one that chooses Confucian meritocratic institutions as means for accountable (but not democratically accountable) governance (Confucian Meritocrats, generally Joseph Chan and Daniel Bell).My comments and corresponding questions focus on four aspects of this wonderful book, a book that prompted me to further the implications of a pragmatic Confucian methodology of political theory.First, Kim refers to his pragmatism as grounding his theory in “the circumstances of modern politics in East Asia.” How true is his pragmatism to the Deweyan interest in the public and its problems? Second, Democracy After Virtue could be read as a pragmatist reflection on democracy for societies that now hold Confucian values only heterogeneously. However, Confucianism could also be read as a pragmatist political theory such that if the contemporary puzzle for East Asian political societies (Deweyan publics) were “how to do democracy” now that Confucianism is not the only virtue ethics held within each, the answer might be Kim’s Democracy After Virtue. Third, Kim centers much of his interpretation of Confucian virtue ethics on the Mencius. Given the rich history of Confucian thought, why? Fourth, given Kim’s espoused pragmatism, why does he follow other political theorists in the framing of what a Confucian democrat must address as part of a Confucian democratic theory? Do Confucian considerations affect what constitutes a problem? Or do contemporary political circumstances? Rather than discussing all three substantive chapters, I illustrate this point in my last section by discussing chapter 6’s focus on humanitarian intervention. I take each of these four questions in turn, but the overarching observation is that the book strikes me as ambiguously grounded in Confucianism—but only some Confucianism—and in contemporary political puzzles for East Asian societies—but using only some contemporary arguments. I think this ambiguity most easily visible in the meaning of “modern.” So, I will start there.Much of Kim’s larger opus has been oriented toward examining contemporary East Asian thought through the lens of the modern political societies in which pluralism, public reason, and democratic constitutional institutions and aspirations exist alongside Confucian perfectionist virtue ethics. At a time when places that have had some form of pluralism, public reason, and democratic constitutional institutions (United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland) are now challenging these values with more authoritarian or nationalist turns away from pluralism, public reason, and democratic constitutional institutions, it seems very important to reflect on whether Kim’s form of pragmatist Confucian democracy is grounded in “the modern” (a set of ideas) or “the contemporary” (ideas today). If the latter, whose contemporary? Those who would seize power to oppress or those who struggle against oppression? If the former, then how pragmatist will he be willing to be if the people shift their aspirational attentions from pluralism, public reason, and democratic constitutional institutions and toward support for some of the more illiberal forms of democracy we are seeing around the world today. What does Confucian democracy have to say to support or resist democratically endorsed oppression?“Modernity” in political thought generally refers a set of ideas (Enlightenment) that developed in a particular time (the long eighteenth century) and events (revolutions against absolute monarchy and introduction of institutions of representation) in the history of Western political thought. When Kim refers to “the circumstances of modern politics in East Asia” he is describing these ideas as they are institutionalized in the context of contemporary East Asian lives. The point seems to be that East Asian contemporary societies are currently experiencing a form of modern politics in this historical sense that is inflected with East Asian contemporary practices that include Confucian values. In chapter 2 Kim sets out the value of democracy—particularly understood in the sense of John Dewey’s pragmatist democracy—for Confucian societies. But Dewey himself would ask Kim, how similar are the “circumstances of modern politics” in which liberal democracy developed and the circumstances of “the political lives of men and women who actually exist in East Asia, struggling between a modernity of Western origin, of which liberalism and (representative) democracy are defining elements, and a traditional way of life strongly influenced by Confucianism—even if many of them (especially women) do not identify themselves as Confucians in the traditional sense, and sometimes actively resist the way of life that Confucian rituals and ethical precepts impose”?2 For it to be a pragmatist theory, that is, a political theory that reflects the public’s engagement with its problems, it needs to be grounded in the political lives of people today in a way that is slightly different from how Kim does. Kim grounds the book in three contemporary questions: punishment, equality, and humanitarian intervention. Are these at the heart of the “political lives of men and women who actually exist in East Asia”? Maybe they are. The argument of the book suggests that they should be and that Kim has an idea about how they should be adjudicated in a contemporary pragmatic Confucian democracy. However, as I read it, Kim’s defense of the modern dimensions of democracy is insufficiently grounded in the political struggles that led to the value of democracy in East Asian contemporary societies.This leads to a second question. What is Kim’s methodology? We sometimes do not think about political theory as having methodology, but instead talk about schools of thought. Yet, pragmatists certainly do have a methodology (as do Confucians). On my reading pragmatists turn to lived political experience. As Dewey sets out in The Public and Its Problems (on which Kim draws favorably), the experience of our problems makes each aware individually of ourselves as part of a collectivity wrestling with a common problem. For Confucians, there is some variety, but over the history of Confucian thought, in its internal conversations and in response to a range of political and ethical alternatives, one strand, arguably its “pragmatist” strand, asserts the import of assessing governance against the standard of the well-being of the people. However, this “Confucian” pragmatism differs from Dewey’s because it does not rely on the public to identify a problem with their well-being. In Confucian “pragmatism,” the suffering public can maintain its hierarchical respect for its leaders while the scholar-official-critic raises the concern over the people’s well-being to the leader.What is Kim’s methodology? As Kim develops his argument, we see the shortcomings of both sets of his interlocutors—the Confucian Democrats and the Confucian Meritocrats—and the value of setting the differences against the relief of contemporary politics. I am very sympathetic to this approach. I think if we are going to make arguments for people who hold Confucian values about what kind of political equality they can live by, it is appropriate to pay attention to the values they do live by. For Kim the circumstances they live by are plural (with Confucian perfectionism being one of the values).My concern is that Democracy After Virtue utilizes a thin theoretical reconstruction of Confucian virtue ethics as perfectionist. One might argue that Kim has addressed these issues in other work. What is missing in Democracy After Virtue?First, the dynamics within Confucianism. Within Confucian political theory—even in its most authoritarian form—the virtue of rule for the benefit of all is consistent. What differs is the political import of the differing views of human nature between Mengzi and Xunzi to which Kim alludes on pages 26–27. By following Joseph Chan’s reconstruction of Confucian perfectionism—commitments to ren, filial piety, righteousness, and ritual propriety3—as his working definition of Confucian virtue ethics, Kim sets aside other Confucian virtues that taken together have relatively more political content: ritual propriety (li), righteousness (yi), wisdom (zhi), right action (xin), reverence (jing), benevolence (hui), dutifulness (zhong), thinking (si), and virtue (de).4Second, Confucian self-cultivation is not merely a social practice of teaching and self-cultivation in community, it is also a political practice of scholar-activists and scholar-officials pointing out when rule is inconsistent with the way and when circumstances require reinterpretation. We see elements of this view of Confucian self-cultivation even within the passages from the Mencius from which Kim cites. However, reaching more broadly across the history of Confucianism, there is much more. Moreover, and this point would support the argument that Kim made in his first book, Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice: Confucianism maintains cultural resonance such that even critics of ostensibly Confucian authoritarian governance have drawn in part from Confucian vernacular to support their resistance.In sum, Kim’s methodology is Confucian on one reading of Confucian methodology for political theory. Moreover, there is more within the political theory of Confucianism to support his claim that pragmatism is consistent with Confucianism. In fact, there had been a “pragmatist” strand in Confucianism long before Pierce, James, and Dewey developed their versions in and for American Political Thought. Further, the Confucian version does not wax toward relativism as contemporary Anglo-American pragmatist Richard Rorty’s does,5 but rather takes the changing and diverse circumstances of politics as the context for further understanding what ritual propriety (li), righteousness (yi), wisdom (zhi), right action (xin), reverence (jing), benevolence (hui), dutifulness (zhong), thinking (si), and virtue (de) mean and require.My third question for Kim follows from resurfacing the critical dynamics of engaged Confucian political thought of the preceding discussion. Given his commitment to theorizing from the circumstances of politics, why follow his primary interlocutors, doubling down on their static view of Confucianism? There are two moves here: (1) Kim follows his interlocutors and others who seek to reconcile contemporary values with Confucian historical thought, and (2) Kim focuses on a Mencius-centric static account rather than exploring the dynamics and critical potential of the Confucian tradition. By my question, you can see my preference for the latter, and I may very well be criticized for seeing in the history of Confucian thought more dynamics than those who have resisted oppression that is justified by Confucian values. However, if the point is to renovate Confucianism for contemporary political society in East Asia, especially when democracy is under threat in certain places, then it seems that rather than selecting from Confucianism those aspects most useful to contemporary societies, another approach might be to work within Confucian history, emphasizing its critical and dynamic moments.Kim makes use of historical classics—mostly the Mencius, but a touch of the Analects and a bit of Xunzi. Kim makes relatively scant use of the history around the development and use of Confucianism. Following in his vein of pragmatism, what was happening politically in key moments of Confucian renaissance?However, this is not his approach. Instead, Kim himself is Confucian, giving careful, respectful attention to the leading scholars of contemporary Confucian political philosophy. By framing his project as respectful engagement with their work, Kim follows norms of analytic political theory and Confucian respect for his seniors. However, there is a loss for the audience in his centering his engagement with contemporary Confucian scholars on the historical texts that they select. He offers an improvement on their interpretations of these texts. Consequently, his own Confucian deference leads to an arguably less Confucian Confucianism.What might a more Confucian Confucianism consider? Consider, for example, Mengzi resists the Mohist view that ren is a universal concept creating equal obligations to all of humanity. Mengzi affirms the five relationships. “[B]etween father and son, there should be affection; between sovereign and minister, righteousness; between husband and wife, attention to their separate functions; between old and young, a proper order; and between friends, fidelity” (Mencius IIIA4, 8). Kim makes use of the Mencius’s account of the import of the five relationships in his chapter on punishment (chapter 4), but does not take up the import of Mengzi’s rejection of Mozi’s affirmation of universal humanity to political ethics in his consideration of a Confucian approach to humanitarianism. The Mohist view may be more useful in thinking about humanitarian intervention, particularly in thinking about the import of gender, peace, and security (UNSCR 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, 2242, 2467, 2493)6 and the developing international law around the Responsibility to Protect. I do not know the domestic conversations within East Asian societies about these priorities, but political arguments that emphasize moral obligation grounded in relationships have been used in the United States to justify anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies and those recognizing the humanity of all have been used to justify humane approaches to immigration and attention to the inhumanity of drone warfare and civilian casualties. The latter, however, has come packaged with a form of liberalism that, ironically, treats those who suffer man’s inhumanity to man as victims in need of saving rather than as important agents in the political transformation necessary to enable them to enjoy their equal humanity.Throughout the history of Confucian thought, Confucianism has been moral thought, political thought, and a call to action. Its protagonists have been scholar-officials. It has defined itself in conversation with other alternatives being articulated in its time. And, it has been engaged with the circumstances of politics of its time. In this sense, it has been a pragmatist political thought, able to, even though its practitioners did not always, look to the public for an account of its problems and guide the renovation of the meaning of Confucian commitments in part by the pressing problems of the day. Suppression of dissent was certainly made possible by Confucian hierarchies, but suppression is itself not Confucian.To restate this question for Kim in a form that might look toward future work: how might the refreshment of his Mencian view of Pragmatic Confucian Democracy with an engagement with the historical debates within Confucianism and between Confucians and alternative views of moral and political life in fact enhance the pragmatism of the theory and the democracy of the theory? I have hinted here as to how I think it might.My fourth question and commentary elaborates on the points I have raised before—the modern-contemporary question, the methodological question, and the Confucian question—and focuses specifically on Kim’s choice of Daniel Bell’s interpretation and application of the Mencius to humanitarian intervention. Following what I have said in my first three comments, you may see the critical dimension of my question in a pointed way now: it strikes me as not very Confucian nor very pragmatist to follow Bell in this way. Yes, it is Confucian (and good analytic political philosophy) to engage with a respected scholar in the field. However, it is not Confucian to follow his framing rather than to use the Confucian pragmatist approach of wrestling with the contemporary problems facing East Asian societies. The pragmatist, particularly the pragmatist following Dewey, takes a political problem as one that faces the public freshly aware of themselves as a public through their recognition of a particular public problem.7 The pragmatist, particularly the Confucian scholar-official, takes a political problem as one that is not good for the people taken as a community of people in relation to one another through the five relationships (see again Mencius IIIA4, 8).Again, not an expert on, or even a regular consumer of, East Asian political news media (except recently in relation to Hong Kong in 2020), I don’t know what the questions of humanitarian concern are for contemporary East Asian societies. I would like to know what people think of the One Belt One Road (what Westerners call the New Silk Road), the relationship between the Rohingya crisis and China’s support for development projects in Myanmar, the humanitarian crisis in North Korea, and the crisis of climate change that will affect East Asian societies differently one from another.Daniel Bell is not a pragmatist, so he does not need a pragmatist understanding of a political problem in order to explore what Confucianism offers as an approach to a particular political problem. From a pragmatist framing, the “circumstances of international politics” is all too vague and way more complicated! What problems make people in East Asian political societies aware of themselves as part of a global politics? What would it mean for China to pursue the One Belt One Road strategy in a Confucian way—and what does that mean for democracy and human rights along the road for the majorities and minorities in the countries along its path? What are the implications of Pragmatic Confucian Democracy for how East Asian countries, their societies and their people, take responsibility for climate change?For the Mencius, within the definition of hierarchy is the ethic of not exploiting hierarchy. “When a prince, being the parent of his people, administers his government so as to be chargeable with leading on beasts to devour men, where is that parental relation to the people?” (Mencius IA4). There are so many hierarchies in East Asian international relations: between economic powerhouse South Korea and the authoritarian regime to its North; between China and the countries of the One Belt One Road, for example. Which of these are of interest to East Asian societies individually and collectively? Which are of interest to some and not others? Which are of interest to some within these societies, and not others?Asking these questions in this way, I mean to be asking a final Confucian pragmatist question for Professor Kim: given the plurality in and among historically Confucian societies, given the ways that Confucianism is part of the tea in which these societies have been steeping, but not the only part; given that the meaning of living in a Confucian society differs depending on how Confucian hierarchies have affected each person’s lived experience in part based on where each person is in those hierarchies, what does it mean to be a plural and Confucian society? Whether pragmatic Confucianism is pragmatic first, that is, grounded in the public’s understanding of its political problems, or Confucian first, that is, threats to the well-being of the people are the source of our understanding of an East Asian society’s problems, there must be variability within and across East Asian societies on this point and therefore on a range of questions.Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue both answers these questions and raises them. Given the structure of the argument and the nature of the political puzzle that has been at the heart of his opus lo these many years, Kim’s project will always move our considerations of these questions forward and to deeper terrain. Yet, at the same time, without a more rigorous account and defense of his methodology, the methodology itself renders him vulnerable to the form of immanent critique I have offered here. Engaging and productive scholar that he is, there is surely a work on the horizon that is going to address some of the questions I have raised here.