Confucian and communitarian responses to liberal democracy

Review of Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 561-592

  Fox, Russell Arben ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248108929     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500027728     Document Type: Review

References (99)

1. This article uses "classical Confucianism" to refer to those principles taught in the Lun Yu (the Analects, or selected sayings, of K'ung Fu Tzu or Confucius) and, to a lesser degree, in the Meng Tzu (the Mencius, a collection of sayings attributed to an early Confucian scholar of that name). Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the Analects and the Mencius will be based on the translations of D.C. Lau; see The Analects and Mencius, ed. and trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Group, 1979 and 1970, respectively). Confucian concepts and texts will be referred to in English by their common (if somewhat inaccurate) Wide-Giles transliterations. It is admittedly difficult to isolate a single strain of Confucian thought which deserves the label "classical." Over the centuries there have been numerous conflicting interpretations of Confucius's writings, and many rival schools of Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought. This article will attempt to stay close to the historical Confucius, turning to Mencius only when his comments are directly pertinent to subjects already brought up in the Analects. The use of Mencius, as opposed to other early interpreters of Confucius, is a reflection of his close association with Confucius's original writings through the centuries, during which the two works have been joined together in the Ssu Shu (the Four Books), long the basis of an orthodox Confucian education.
2. For an introduction to the varieties of Confucianism and a defense of the historical importance of the Analects, see A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, ed. and trans. Wing-tsit Chan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), esp. chap. 2. Over the last thirty years many authors have contributed to a revival of the "classical" Confucian message; their work, which will often be referred to in this essay, has been significant enough that one Confucian scholar has suggested that we may be on the verge of new "epoch" of Confucian humanism.
3. See Tu Wei-ming, "Towards a Third Epoch of Confucian Humanism," in Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 141-159
4. Most scholars include China, Taiwan, North and South Korea, Singapore, Japan and sometimes Vietnam in this region. Some useful texts which treat this area as a whole include Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, ed. Tu Weiming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) 00; The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation, ed. Gilbert Rozman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991);
5. and Peter Moody, Jr., Political Opposition in Post-Confucian Societies (New York: Praeger, 1988). Moody uses "post-Confucian" to indicate the political transformation of traditional Confucian regimes, not the end of the influence of the classical Confucian tradition itself.
6. See Bilahari Kausikan, "Asia's Different Standard," and Aryeh Neier, "Asia's Unacceptable Standard," both in Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 35,43.
7. The oft-made association between the "communitarian values [which] constitute the persistent and dominant social and political understandings in East Asia" and authoritarianism is noted and criticized in Daniel Bell, "A Communitarian Critique of Authoritarianism: The Case of Singapore," Political Theory 25 (1997): 6-32, see esp. 7 and 26 n.5.
8. David L. Hall, "Modern China and the Postmodern West," in Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), p. 50.
9. Samuel Huntington, among others, has argued that there is a distinct Confucian "civilization" which poses a serious challenge to the West. See Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?," Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22-49.
10. Daniel Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, David Martin Jones, Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 1-16, 36-40.
11. Tu Wei-ming, "Embodying the Universe: A Note on Confucian Self- Realization," in Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Roger T. Ames, Wimal Dissanayake and Thomas P. Kasulis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 181.
12. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 174.
13. John R. Wallach, "Liberals, Communitarians, and the Tasks of Political Theory," Political Theory 15 (1987): 593.
14. Communitarianism has long been faced with accusations of nostalgia or irrelevancy. Most of those writers who have avoided these charges have made creative use of certain aspects of the Western tradition, like Aristotelianism or civic republicanism, to suggest real alternatives to liberal modernity, rather than simply list modernity's failures. For instance, Alasdair Maclntyre's After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) ambitiously appropriate the ideal of a Aristotelian-Thomist community to reveal the flaws of liberal individualism. Michael Sandel, in his recent book Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), goes an impressive distance towards arguing for a more republican vision of American society which would address many communitarian complaints. An important exception to this heavy reliance on history is Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), a book that mixes history, philosophy, sociology and practical politics in making its case for a more direct and communitarian form of democratic decision-making.
15. Liu Shu-hsien, "Confucian Ideals and the Real World," in Confucian Traditions, p. 111.
16. Gilbert Rozman identifies several "types" of Confucianism, which have provided ideological support for social reform, elite education, business practices, as well as the daily routine of peasant farmers throughout East Asia. Rozman, "Comparisons of Modern Confucian Values in China and Japan," in The East Asian Region, p. 161.
17. Lujun Yin, "The Crisis of Hermeneutical Consciousness in Modern China," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 17 (1990): 420, 423, emphasis added
18. H. N. Hirsch, "The Threnody of Liberalism," Political Theory 14 (1986): 423.
19. Amitai Etzioni, "A Moderate Communitarian Proposal," Political Theory 24 (1996): 159.
20. Ibid., p. 168 n.4.
21. The point that democracy requires a stronger sense of public life and the common good than modern liberal neutrality permits has been exhaustively made from a variety of perspectives. A review of the importance the American founders attached to civic virtue can be found in Richard Vetterli and Gary Bryner, In Search of the Republic: Public Virtue and the Roots of American Government (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1987), chap. 3.
22. A sociological view of the importance of community ties is provided in Robert N. Bellah et al, The Good Society (New York: Knopf, 1991); see esp. the introduction and appendix.
23. For a strong theoretical defense of the need for a robust civil society, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
24. Charles Taylor, "Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate," in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 16.
25. Etzioni, "Moderate Communitarian Proposal," p. 163. Few communitarians are so opposed to the notion of individual rights and political liberty as to suggest abandoning liberal modernity's most basic "universal principles." In reference to the attempt to recognize the normative claims of diverse communities without falling into relativism and xenophobia, Charles Taylor wrote: "There must be something midway between the inauthentic and homogenizing demand for recognition of equal worth . . . and the self-immurement within ethnocentric standards" (Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], p. 72). Much communitarian literature is taken up with attempts to develop overarching standards that embrace that midway point.
26. Some approaches to value articulation and justification include Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. Part 1
27. "Identity and the Good," which makes a near-theological defense of "moral sources" in human thinking; Martha C. Nussbaum, "Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism," Political Theory 20 (1992): 202-246, which advocates a particular vision of human flourishing;
28. and Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), which looks for a historically informed "minimalism" as a basis for standards of judgment.
29. The notion of "tending" is taken from Sheldon S. Wolin, "Tending and Intending a Constitution" in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1989).
30. This is not to claim that the republics of the Western tradition are the most communitarian of all possible forms of democratic government, or that classical republicanism and contemporary communitarianism are one and the same. That being said however, one may productively note the similarity between this argument and the one made by David Held, who describes two forms of republican democracy: one, more "protective," preserved religious and other aristocratic forms of authority; the other, more "developmental" emphasized the importance of collective activity. Held, Models of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 55, 61 and passim.
31. Besides Barber, Maclntyre, Sandel, Taylor and Wolin, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958);
32. William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
33. and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983). The degree to which Arendt would comfortably consider herself a communitarian is uncertain; she died in 1975, before the term took on its contemporary relevance. Some have seen Arendt as nothing less than a "patron saint of communitarianism," while others have used Arendt to criticize communitarian writers like Sandel.
34. See Bruce Frohnen, The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 201;
35. and Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 162-199
36. George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 229-32;
37. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 82-87.
38. The amount of literature on the moral philosophy of Confucianism is enormous. Some recent important works include Antonio S. Cua, "Reasonable Challenges and Preconditions of Adjudication," and Alasdair Maclntyre, "Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation Between Confucians and Aristotelians about the Virtues," both in Culture and Modernity; on a related subject, see Lee H. Yearly, Mencius and Aquinas (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). Tu Wei-ming is probably the most influential and wellknown writer on Confucian philosophy in the West; some of his most important essays are collected in Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979) and Way, Learning, and Politics.
39. The reference is to David L. Hall and Rover T. Ames, Thinking Through Confucius (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), an excellent and influential example of philosophical engagement with Confucian thought.
40. Ibid., p. 131.
41. Bell, Towards Illiberal Democracy, p. 75.
42. A view summarized in Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 115-120
43. Wing-tsit Chan, "Influence of Taoist Classics on Chinese Philosophy," in Literature on Belief: Sacred Scripture and Religious Experience, ed. Neal Lambert (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1981), p. 143. In many ways the best route towards a language that can communicate the differences in these traditions is a Heideggerian one.
44. For a review of the distinctive characteristics of an immanent ontological view, see Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu University of Hawaii Press, 1987), esp. the essays by Otto Poggeler, Joan Stambaugh, Graham Parkes and Hwa Yol Jung.
45. These ceremonial sacrifices and other rituals of speech, action and social intercourse, as well as traditions in literature and genealogy, originated with the cult surrounding the Shang and early Chou emperors, but had spread by Confucius's time to all levels of Chinese society. The basic texts of these activities and traditions were called the Wu Ching (Five Classics) and included the Shu Ching (Book of History, or Documents), the Shih Ching (Book of Poetry, or Songs), the Li Chi (Record of Rites), the notorious / Ching (Book of Changes) and, perhaps most important, the Ch'un Ch'iu (Spring and Autumn Annals), a compilation often attributed to Confucius himself.
46. Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought In Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 48-50,67 and passim.
47. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius-The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 3, 20. Fingarette expands on his idea of "transformative magic" as follows: "By 'magic' I mean the power of a specific person to accomplish his will directly and effortlessly through ritual, gesture and incantation. The user of magic does not work by strategies and devices as a means to an end: he does not use coercion or physical forces. He simply wills the end in the proper ritual setting and with the proper ritual gesture and word" (p. 3). This is not to make Confucius out to be a mystic, but to emphasize that in Confucianism there was no understanding of seeking advantage or popular or social achievement through the rituals. The rites were about one's fundamental relationship with the world; by doing what one should do, what should be will come to pass. Not for no reason did Fingarette call the/;' "holy."
48. Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, p. 153 36
49. Peter Laslett, "Introduction" to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 122.
50. Karyn L. Lai, "Confucian Moral Thinking," Philosophy East and West 45 (1995): 255.
51. Robert M. Gimello, "The Civil Status of li in Classical Confucianism," Philosophy East and West 22 (1972): 204.
52. Lai, "Confucian Moral Thinking," p. 253. 40
53. Schwartz, World of Thought in Ancient China, p. 107.
54. Steven R. Walker, "Confucianism in America," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 20 (1993):499 n.2.
55. Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, p. 17.
56. Consider this coy comment, involving the tyrannical monarchs Chieh and Tchou: "King Husan asked, 'Is regicide permissible?' Mencius answered: "A man who mutilates benevolence is a mutilator, while one who cripples Tightness is a crippler. He who is both a mutilator and a crippler is an 'outcast.' I have indeed heard of the punishment of the 'outcast Tchou/ but I have not heard of any regicide" (Mencius l/B/8).
57. See Maclntyre, After Virtue, esp. chap. 15. The notion that Confucianism suggests that individuals, through rituals which put them in an immanent relationship with t'ien, makes everyone an "author" of their own lives has been commented on in Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius: "In the interaction between the human being and t'ien, a person becomes an 'authority' in his deference to and embodiment of existing meanings... he becomes an 'author' in his creative disposition" (p. 244).
58. Roger T. Ames, "Rites and Rights: The Confucian Alternative," in Human Rights and the World's Religions, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 201.
59. For a thorough consideration of the issue of creativity from a Confucian perspective, see Antonio S. Cua, Dimensions of Moral Creativity: Paradigms, Principles, and Ideals (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978).
60. Antonio S. Cua, "Confucian Vision and Human Community," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 11 (1984): 227.
61. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1990), esp. pp. 265-307. Gadamer's "interpretive politics" have been directly compared to the communitarian arguments about history and hermeneutics made by Alasdair Maclntyre and Charles Taylor.
62. See Georgia Warnke, Justice and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), chap. 6.
63. Henry Rosemont, Jr., A Chinese Mirror: Moral Reflectbns on Political Economy and Society (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 72-73.
64. Peter Boodberg, "The Semasiology of Some Primary Confucian Concepts," Philosophy East and West (1953), p. 328.
65. W. Theodore de Bary writes that "jen may also be understood as the people, referring to humanity in the most universal sense, embracing all peoples" (De Bary, The Trouble With Confucianism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], p. 19).
66. Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, p. 115.
67. Antonio S. Cua, "Competence, Concern, and the Role of Paradigmatic Individuals (chun tzu) in Moral Education," Philosophy East and West 42 (1992): 54.
68. One might consider here a statement from John C.H. Wu, "The Status of the Individual in the Political Traditions of Old and New China," in The Chinese Mind: Essentials of Chinese Philosophy and Culture, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968): "It is true that Confucius laid great stress on the rites and the rules of propriety, but his attention was focused on the underlying spirit rather than on the formalities and the letter of specific rules. . . . It is most regrettable that his moral teachings became distorted beyond recognition and rigidified into an official system since the period of the Han [dynasty], when Confucianism . . . lost its original rationality, purity and flexibility" (p. 344).
69. Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, pp. 144-145
70. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 146.
71. Antonio S. Cua, "The Idea of Confucian Tradition," Review of Metaphysics 45 (1992): 827, 830;
72. Cua quotes Analects 18/8. The translation of ch'uan as "moral discretion" is Lau's; see Analects 9/30.
73. Mencius writes that a benevolent government will "reduce punishments and taxation," whereas tyrannical governments "take the people away from their own work" (Mencius l/A/5).
74. Edward Shils, "Reflections on Civil Society and Civility in the Chinese Intellectual Tradition/' in Confucian Traditions, p. 46.
75. Ames, Art ofRulership, p. 29.
76. Several scholars of Confucianism have gone so far as to suggest that the those individuals who were jen (£) served as "prophets," speaking against unvirtuous rulers on behalf oit'ien. See De Bary, Trouble With Confucianism, chaps 1 and 6;
77. also Julia Ching, Confucianism and Christianity: A Comparative Study (New York: Kodansha International, 1977), p. 102.
78. Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, pp. 159-160
79. Hall, "Modern China and the Postmodern West," p. 66.
80. A Heideggerian term whose applicability to Confucius was suggested in Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 195-197
81. Taylor, "Cross-Purposes," p. 170.
82. See Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 1-7.
83. William M. Sullivan, "Institutions as the Infrastructure of Democracy," in The New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions and Communities, ed. Amitai Etzioni (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1995), p. 175.
84. Consider the sociological picture painted in Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Ehrenhalt points out that without an understanding of limitations-limitations arising from the ties of everyday activity, whether the result of economic circumstance, religious custom, or personal choice-individuals cannot enjoy the common goods made possible through mutual association.
85. Sheldon S. Wolin, "What Revolutionary Action Means Today," democracy 2 (1982): 27.
86. Bell, Towards Illiberal Democracy, p. 9.
87. Seung-hwan Lee, "Was There a Concept of Rights in Confucian Virtue- Based Morality?" Journal of Chinese Philosophy 19 (1992): 257.
88. Samuel Huntington, "Democracy's Third Wave," Journal of Democracy 2 (1991): 24.
89. For a general assessment of Confucianism as antidemocratic, see Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
90. The seminal presentation of this argument is probably H. G. Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), esp. chaps. 15 and 16. Many besides philosophers of Confucianism have agreed that there is "nothing in Confucianism, considered in the abstract, hostile to democratic values or institutions" (Moody, Political Opposition, p. 4);
91. Sinologists like Andrew Nathan and Merle Goldman have both argued that Confucianism's contemporary legacy is far more than a simple authoritarianism. See Steve Mufson, "China's Democracy Dodge," The Washington Post, 14 January 1996, Cl, C4.
92. Hall, "Modern China and the Postmodern West," p. 56.
93. Francis Fukuyama, "Confucianism and Democracy," JOUITM/ of Democracy 6 (1995): 23.
94. Michael Walzer, "Comment," in Multiculturalism, p. 99.
95. Tu Wei-ming, "Introduction," in Confucian Traditions, pp. 7-8.
96. Peter R. Moody, Jr., "The Political Culture of Chinese Students and Intellectual: A Historical Examination," Asian Survey 28 (1988): 1145.
97. For an argument that liberalism need not be necessarily neutral regarding individual and common goods, see William A. Galston, "Liberal Virtues," American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 1277-1289
98. David B. Wong, "Community, Diversity, and Confucianism," in In the Company of Others: Perspectives on Community, Family and Culture, ed. Nancy E. Snow (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 1996), pp. 32-33.
99. Fukuyama, "Confucianism and Democracy," pp. 30-33.