Constitutional Dialogue as Active Confucian Harmony

It is generally believed that harmony is one of the most important political ideals in East Asia, especially in the Confucian tradition, but there seems to be deep disagreement among contemporary scholars as to precisely what it means in the actual political context. Of course, all concepts and ideals are open for debate, as far as their specific moral contents and political implications are concerned, but harmony seems to occupy a unique territory in the conceptual world. For instance, we can imagine fierce disagreement among scholars and citizens regarding what concepts such as freedom and equality should mean in a given sociopolitical and cultural context. But we can also imagine equally strong disagreement as to whether freedom or equality should be an important value at all in societies with different cultural, social and political backgrounds than those that generally characterize liberal democracies in the West. As a moral concept, harmony is distinguished from many other moral and political values in that virtually no one, in East Asia at least, would claim that harmony is a bad thing and prefer disharmony over harmony. When someone says that harmony is bad, what they actually seems to mean is that a particular understanding of harmony is not good or a specific way in which harmony is implemented by the government is not desirable, not necessarily that the ideal of harmony is bad in itself. Like the idea of the common good, there seems to be little disagreement that harmony is a moral and political ideal worth pursuing, but, quite often, this agreement is quickly undermined by the caveat that an attempt to achieve harmony naturally gives rise to contention, conflict, and even oppression and domination....
Copyright © Sungmoon Kim.