Confucian nation? A perfectionist justification in a pluralist society

In the past two decades, Confucian political philosophers have made important contributions to contemporary political theory by exploring the ideas of Confucian democracy and constitutionalism and articulating their proper institutional forms. Largely inspired by classical Confucianism, these scholars are convinced that Confucian philosophy, unadulterated by East Asia’s actual Confucian historical experiences, can provide an attractive political alternative to a Western-style liberal democracy. Indeed, the scholarly eorts to rejuvenate philosophical Confucianism in ways compatible with modern (fully or partially) democratic institutions and social conditions provide a timely pluralist corrective to the monistic global dissemination of liberal democracy. However, an important practical challenge remains-that is, how to make Confucianism relevant to ordinary East Asian citizens who have much objection to it. For most East Asians, Confucianism is still one of the greatest obstacles that prevented their nation from developing into a modern nation-state.2 Traditional Confucianism’s so-called “feudal” legacies such as patriarchy, patrimony, and androcentrism, make many citizens in the region, let alone progressives and feminists, repugnant to Confucianism and doubtful of its modern relevance. It is debatable whether this is due to Confucianism indeed blocking the region’s otherwise smooth modernization, or whether patriarchal, patrimonial, and androcentric elements are at the heart of Confucian philosophical thought and ethics,3 but it is hard to deny that Confucianism, as experienced and practiced by East Asians themselves, has long been implicated with such elements, prohibiting society from embracing gender equality and individual freedom as the public norm, until the West-led modernization took place. For contemporary Confucian political theory, therefore, the most pressing questions are: why should ordinary East Asian citizens, who are neither themselves Confucian any more in the traditional sense, nor whose polity is not Confucian in terms of its formal political institutions, care about Confucianism? And if there is indeed a reason that they should, how can Confucianism, required for that reason, be more directly relevant to them? In this chapter, I argue that in contemporary East Asia in which people are subscribing increasingly to diverse moral, philosophical, and religious doctrines as private individuals, Confucianism as a shared cultural heritage still has profound implications for their public life. Then I illuminate the public significance of Confucianism in contemporary East Asia from a nationalist standpoint. My central argument is twofold: (1) Confucianism as a shared cultural heritage enables the East Asian people to govern themselves as a Confucian nation, a uniquely East Asian mode of a civic nation that is neither liberal nor antiperfectionist; and (2) at the core of the Confucian nation is a Confucian public culture that provides East Asian citizens with an environment for collective self-government, thereby enabling a Confucian citizenship within the modern, mainly liberal, constitutional structure. This chapter consists of three main sections. After conceptualizing the idea of a Confucian nation with special attention to the fact of pluralism in East Asia, I then articulate its non-liberal civic character by critically engaging with the existing “ethnic versus civic” formula of the nation. Then, in the third section, I justify Confucian public culture as the culture of the Confucian nation from a perfectionist perspective with reference to John Rawls’s distinction between full and partial comprehensive doctrines.