Confucianism and Democratic Constitutionalism in East Asia: Evaluating Confucian Democratic Perfectionism

ABSTRACT Recently, Sungmoon Kim developed a theory of what he calls “Confucian democratic perfectionism” aimed at combining Confucianism, public reason, and democracy for contemporary East Asian societies. The primary question guiding this article is whether Kim's promotion of Confucian values is justified by a normative commitment to democratic constitution‐making. I see two specific difficulties with Kim's democratic constitution‐making, with the second more serious than the first. First, in terms of theoretical identity, the Confucian values promoted through a public reason‐based approach are not intelligible as Confucian. Second, Kim's democratic commitment is morally inadequate in two ways—it cannot make sense of substate peoples' right of self‐determination within a singular notion of Confucian democracy, and further, a fallback on the right to democratic participation conflicts with more inclusive standards of popular sovereignty.