The era of self-absorbed Western liberal democratic triumphalism is long gone—good riddance—even if the ghosts of that post–Cold War period still seem to haunt debates about democratic theory and practice. Clear and fresh thinking about democracy’s value(s) is needed, especially in contexts where it is difficult to disentangle democracy and colonialism. To risk stating the obvious: the reemergence of authoritarianism across the globe only heightens the need for creative democratic theorizing.Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue is a book for this moment. Kim makes an important contribution to the kind of problem-oriented and place-based theorizing that The Good Society has long been partial to. Developing his normative democratic vision in conversation with thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Mencius to Benjamin Barber, Kim offers a democratic ideal for East Asian political communities deeply rooted in Confucian practices and virtues.Kim, of course, is not the first to theorize democracy in East Asia. But he aims to fill a democratic gap in burgeoning scholarship on Confucian political philosophy and East Asian democratic theory. Confucian political meritocrats and Confucian democrats, Kim argues, both fail to account for the “circumstances of East Asian politics.” Kim contends that the former, the political meritocrats, neglect the emergence of value pluralism in a “modern” East Asia. As such, their claims are too perfectionist—too committed to a single account of the good—to be justified to diverse East Asian publics. Confucian democrats, on the hand, do not offer a convincing case for democracy given the aforementioned circumstances; according to Kim, their instrumental defense of democratic institutions is tenuous, at best, because nondemocratic institutions may prove better at delivering personal well-being than democratic ones.Kim’s pragmatic Confucian democracy offers a way out of this dilemma. Pragmatist rather than perfectionist, the fact of value pluralism poses no theoretical or practical problem for Kim. And because Kim invokes a specifically Deweyan pragmatism, he provides a stronger justification for democratic institutions than the instrumental accounts advanced by Confucian democrats. A pragmatic Confucian democracy, then, is pragmatic insofar as it is both nonfoundational and justified on no instrumental, pragmatic (in the Deweyan sense) terms. It is Confucian insofar as it recognizes the existence of Confucian moral virtues in East Asian political communities, including a moderate Confucian perfectionism. And it is democratic insofar as it opens space for the free exchange of views regarding the political implications of those (moral) virtues.Participants in this symposium, convened and edited by Brooke Ackerly, raise important questions about the promise and potential pitfalls of Kim’s project. Stephen Macedo celebrates Kim’s ambitious comparative project, but he is skeptical of Kim’s pragmatic commitments and expresses concerns about Kim’s criticisms of political meritocracy. John Dryzek commends Kim’s (Confucian) democratic vision. He believes, however, that Kim’s project needs more empirical support if it is to be justified on pragmatic grounds. Zhuoyao Li is less concerned about empirical evidence than the competing and, potentially conflicting, accounts of pragmatism he thinks underpin Kim’s theory. He, too, however, welcomes Kim’s effort to break new ground on old debates about democracy and Confucianism. Among other things, Brooke Ackerly suggests that Kim pays too much attention to John Dewey and, as a result, overlooks pragmatic resources internal to Confucian political thought. Drawing more on the latter than the former would only strengthen Kim’s project, Ackerly argues. And Ackerly, like the other symposium participants, thinks that Kim’s latest intervention merits the attention of Confucian democrats, Confucian political meritocrats, democratic theorists more generally.Kim has the final word, of course, dismissing some criticisms while grappling with others. His response concludes with a hope that the comparative project undertaken in Democracy After Virtue enriches the pragmatic, Confucian, and democratic traditions. I think the reader will find that in both the book and the symposium, Kim delivers.
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Mar 30, 2022
Mariam Tahir + 1
