Sungmoon Kim

Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea

This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (chŏng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the chŏng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the binary of individualism and collectivism and of liberalism and nationalism, represents the essence of Korean national citizenship. In other words, this essay attempts to make a Korean case of “liberal nationalism” in its post-Confucian context.

Public Reason Confucianism: A Construction

If perfectionism is understood as the states non-neutral promotion of a valuable way of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralism within the putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension between Confucian perfectionism and value pluralism can be avoided by making Confucian perfectionist goods the core elements of public reason with which citizens can justify their arguments to one another and by which the state can justifiably exercise its public authority to reasonable citizens who otherwise subscribe to various comprehensive doctrines. By defining a mode of Confucian perfectionism working through Confucian public reason broadly shared by citizens as public reason Confucianism, this article attempts to balance the Confucian politys internal societal pluralism and the peoples collective self-determination.

Confucianism and acceptable inequalities

In this article, I explore an alternative model of Confucian distributive justice, namely the ‘family model’, by challenging the central claim of recent sufficientarian justifications of Confucian justice offered by Confucian political theorists – roughly, that inequalities of wealth and income beyond the threshold of sufficiency do not matter if they reflect different merits. I argue (1) that the telos of Confucian virtue politics – moral self-cultivation and fiduciary society – puts significant moral and institutional constraints on inequality even if it meets the threshold of sufficiency and largely results from differing individual merits; (2) that the Confucian moral ideal of the family state establishes and gives justification to the ‘family model’ of distributive justice that shifts the focus from desert to vulnerability and from causal responsibility to remedial responsibility. The article concludes by presenting Confucian democracy as the socio-political institution and practice that can best realize the Confucian intuition of the family model of justice.

Transcendental collectivism and participatory politics in democratized Korea

This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is based on a detailed case study of a recent episode of citizen action. The article shows how the search for a new democratic citizenship that was capable of overcoming the parochial regionalism that has bedeviled Korean politics for decades, led ordinary (especially young) Korean citizens to come up with a new national democratic civic ethos that corresponded to the changed political environment. This new ethos was uri‐responsibility, a uniquely Korean view of collective moral responsibility. After examining uri‐responsibility and comparing it with Kantian‐liberal accounts of responsibility, its strong democratic implications for Korea are explored.

Filiality, Compassion, and Confucian Democracy

Ren, the Confucian virtue par excellence, is often explained on two different accounts: on the one hand, filiality, a uniquely Confucian social-relational virtue; on the other hand, commiseration innate in human nature. Accordingly there are two competing positions in interpreting ren: one that is utterly positive about the realization of universal love by the graduated extension of filial love, and the other that sees the inevitable tension between the particularism of filial love and the universalism of compassionate love and champions the latter in that filial love appears to create a serious obstacle to modernizing Confucianism. Nevertheless, both interpretations agree that compassion, given its universal and humanist implications, can be unquestionably conducive to the modern project of ‘Confucian democracy’. This paper counters this shared view by arguing that in order to make Confucian democracy culturally meaningful and politically viable, it must accommodate uniquely Confucian relational virtues, particularly filiality.

The virtue of incivility: Confucian communitarianism beyond docility

This article argues that in order to make Confucian communitarianism a viable political vision, namely, Civil Confucianism, its emphasis on civility must be balanced with what I call ‘Confucian incivility’, a set of Confucian social practices that temporarily upset the existing social relations and yet that, ironically, help those relations become more enduring and viable. The central argument is that ‘Confucian civility’ encompasses both social-harmonizing civilities that buttress the moral foundation of the Confucian social order and some incivilities that upset that foundation, albeit temporarily, in order to revise and thereby revitalize it. The article presents Confucian civility as both deferentially remonstrative and respectfully corrective (in the familial relations) and uncompromising and even intractable (in the political relations). It concludes by examining the implications of the virtue of Confucian incivility for constructing a less conservative and more socio-politically vibrant version of Confucian communitarianism than the prevailing suggestions of it.

Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Rethinking the Value of Democracy in East Asia

In contemporary Confucian political theory, there is surprisingly little effort among the theorists to illuminate the value of democracy. When they do on rare occasions, their focus is largely on democracy’s instrumental contribution to Confucian goods. In this paper, I argue that, given democracy’s dual aspects as a political system and as a way of life, it has both instrumental and intrinsic values, and insomuch as it is a kind of democracy, Confucian democracy, too, ought to possess both values. Central to my argument is that, once introduced and justified instrumentally as a political system, democracy in a Confucian society attains its noninstrumental value as it becomes consolidated as a democratic-Confucian way of life in which democratic institutions, rights, and practices are socially mediated by and negotiated with Confucian values, civilities, and moral sentiments. I present my overarching normative framework in terms of pragmatic Confucian democracy.

Virtue Politics and Political Leadership: A Confucian Rejoinder to Hanfeizi

In the Confucian tradition, the ideal government is called ‘benevolent government’ (ren zheng), central to which is the rulers parental love toward his people who he deems as his children. Hanfeizi criticized this seemingly innocent political idea by pointing out that (1) not only is the state not a family but even within the family parental love is short of making the children orderly and (2) ren as love inevitably results in the ruin of the state because it confuses what is right/meritorious with what is not, thus disrupts the legal system. In this paper, I defend Confucian virtue politics against Hanfeizis criticisms. I argue that by failing to grasp the complex nature of ren that encompasses both emotion (ren as love) and moral virtue (ren as filiality), Hanfeizi also failed to understand the actual process in which the rulers parental love is extended to the people.

The Secret of Confucian Wuwei Statecraft: Mencius's Political Theory of Responsibility

Despite his strong commitment to the ideal of wuwei statecraft, Mencius advanced a distinct yet cohesive theory of Confucian youwei statecraft that can serve the ideal of wuwei, first by means of the principled application of individual and social responsibility under unfavorable socioeconomic conditions, and second by offering a concrete public policy (i.e. the well-field system) that contributes to a decent socioeconomic condition on which the society can be self-governing and where individuals (and families) can fully exercise their individual moral and socioeconomic responsibility. My central claim is that Confucian wuwei statecraft has a practical and social background, namely, a socioeoconomically and morally self-governing civil society.

Confucian Authority, Political Right, and Democracy

In his book Confucian Perfectionism, Joseph Chan derives the so-called service conception of political rights from the classical Confucian service conception of political authority, and justifies a mode of democracy decoupled from democratic principles of popular sovereignty, political equality, and popular right to political participation. He also offers the fallback idea of (human) rights as the conception of rights best suited for his version of Confucian perfectionist democracy. In this essay it is argued that not only is there a significant tension between his service conception of political rights and the fallback idea of (human) rights, but, more fundamentally, the service conception of political rights erodes, rather than buttresses, his idea of Confucian democracy.