Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (review)

Some twenty years ago, with the demise of the Soviet Union, the so-called Cold War came to an end, terminating four decades of intense global rivalry. This end, no doubt, had profound repercussions, ushering in radically new geopolitical alignments together with a new phase of economic globalization. Behind or despite these transformations, however, one can also detect a curious kind of ideological persistence: in many Western societies, and especially in America, the liberal individualism cultivated as stark antidote to Soviet collectivism remained in place unchanged and was even strengthened and elevated into a global ideological panacea. Under the auspices of "neo-liberalism," individual and corporate profit seeking was steadily unleashed while older social and political restrictions on profit seeking were marginalized or "downsized." As a result of both the Cold War and subsequent developments, it became customary virtually to equate democracy with "liberal democracy" or a system prioritizing individual rights—completely neglectful of the long-standing tension between the latter and democracy seen as a shared political regime. That this equation is by no means cogent or self-evident, even in America, is demonstrated by the work of such prominent American intellectuals as John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. For both, the glorification of self-seeking or atomistic individualism was a derailment or corruption of democracy. For Dewey, in particular, democracy constituted an ethical association or community where private self-seeking is necessarily curbed.¹

In light of this background one can only welcome Daniel Bell's recent book, Beyond Liberal Democracy, a text that exposes some of the glaring defects or short-comings of liberal individualism as practiced in Western societies today.² Without ignoring some of the benefits of individual freedom, the book seeks to correct or remedy these shortcomings through recourse to older Asian teachings, especially the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. In a way, the front cover captures the animus pervading the text: it shows a picture of the Statue of Liberty holding up a copy of the Analects of Confucius. What aggravates or antagonizes Bell is not the Western liberal model as such but rather the missionary zeal with which this model tends to be exported today by Western, especially American, intellectuals and policy makers. His opening chapter makes reference to the American legal theorist Ronald Dworkin, who, during a lecture tour in China in 2002, exhorted Chinese audiences to embrace Western liberal-individualistic values in preference to older indigenous traditions. As Bell comments wryly: "His less-than-modest demeanor and hectoring tone did not help. The deeper problem, however, is that [he] made no serious attempt to learn about Chinese philosophy, to identify aspects worth defending and learning from, and to relate his own ideas to those of Chinese political traditions such as Confucianism and Legalism" (pp. 3–4). What renders the "hectoring tone" even more odd and even absurd is the fact that the same theorist more recently has cast doubt on the very possibility of liberal democracy in the United States—never mind the rest of the world.³

Regardless of the possibility or impossibility of exportation, the meaning of "liberal democracy" in the text is not left in doubt. According to the introductory chapter (p. 9), the "main hallmarks" of liberal democracy are basically three, comprising "human rights, democracy, and capitalism." As Bell adds at a later point: "I define liberal democracy as being composed of three main pillars—human rights, democracy, and capitalism—that have originated and been developed in Western countries" (p. 333). The chief aim of the text is to delineate "alternative models" of these pillars "that may be more appropriate—more feasible and desirable—for East Asian societies." In conformity with this aim, the book is divided into three major parts, dealing respectively with human rights, democracy, and capitalism "for an East Asian context." Part 1 concentrates on such issues as the relevance of "Asian values" for human...