Between Philosophy and Culture, A Symposium on Sungmoon Kim’s Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy

One of the most influential texts in Asian studies in recent memory has been Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization , which boldly claims that “Martin Heidegger was actually doing European studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas.” 1 Chen’s argument is not that East Asians must acknowledge the incommensurability between Western and non-Western political thought; rather, the emphasis is on the urgent need to renew our self-understanding in the era of globalization. In his view, this reconstruction of the “Eastern self” involves utilizing Western-origin conceptual categories and theories not as universal theoretical paradigms but as comparative vantage points. Confucian Constitutionalism does precisely this—it develops a normative theory of constitutional democracy that is comparative in both methodological orientation and content. This ambitious book deftly reconstructs Confucian constitutional thought through critical dialogue with Confucian meritocratic tradition, on the one hand, and contemporary constitutional theory, on the other hand. It proposes this reconstructed Confucianism as an alternative to Western liberal democracy, one that is most suitable for East Asian communities (2).