Democratic Perfectionism: Liberal and Confucian Perspective

Over the past two decades, political theorists and philosophers in East Asia and beyond have been struggling with a non-liberal mode of political regime and practice related to East Asia’s Confucian philosophical and societal context. As a result, Confucian political theory has emerged as an important sub-field in political theory. For instance, although Western political scientists such as Samuel Huntington once called ‘Confucian democracy’ a contradiction in terms, no informed scholar nowadays would subscribe to such a presumption not least because of the successful democratic transitions of East Asian, and historically Confucian, countries such as South Korea and Taiwan but also because of the collective endeavours of scholars to advance a normatively compelling and sociopolitically practicable mode of democracy in East Asia distinct from Western-style democracies – namely, Confucian democracy.Given the impressive diversity of Confucian political theories in terms of style, political orientation, interpretive angle and methodology, it is difficult to single out the most distinctive feature(s) that these theories have in common as Confucian political theory per se. Nevertheless, it appears that most Confucian political theories hold some shared perfectionist assumptions in common, namely: (1) Confucian ethics is a kind of perfectionist ethics that assumes the existence of the objectively good life and thus aims at the moral perfection of the people; (2) given the inseparability of Confucian ethics and politics, the supreme goal of Confucian politics lies in promoting the objectively good life and securing the socioeconomic conditions that enable such a life; and therefore (3) the state in a Confucian polity is morally authorised to promote a particular (Confucian) conception of the good life. The underlying argument is that democracy is either only instrumentally valuable or unimportant provided that the perfectionist ends are promoted by the state.In this book project, I will attempt to theorise a form of Confucian perfectionism that is fully compatible with the intrinsic value of democracy. To do so, I will first construct a robust normative concept and political theory of democratic perfectionism by critically engaging with liberal perfectionist theory while testing its practical plausibility in the areas of constitutionalism, distributive justice and political leadership. Then, from the perspective of democratic perfectionism thus constructed, I will explore a normatively attractive theory of Confucian perfectionism that is robustly democratic and culturally relevant in East Asia and equally test its plausibility in a contemporary Confucian cultural and societal context.