Democracy After Virtue and the Circumstances of Modern Politics

Sungmoon Kim's justification of pragmatic Confucian democracy hinges on its effective response to what he describes as the circumstances of modern politics in East Asia. These circumstances are, notably, the loss of monarchy, the associated impossibility of any appeal to the mandate of heaven, and growing pluralism and so reasonable moral disagreement. The kind of liberal modernity and representative democracy already imported into several Confucian societies require accommodation. Kim is to be applauded for taking contemporary political reality seriously; political theorists still do this too rarely, and can sometimes stumble when they try.

Pragmatic Confucian democracy, as its name suggests, synthesizes pragmatism, Confucianism, and democracy. But pragmatism is not assimilated in a full and demanding Deweyan "great community" sense, because power is delegated to winners of elections for broadly Schumpeterian reasons (with a Confucian riff, for elections are necessary to help establish bonds between rulers and ruled). Confucianism is not assimilated in any full sense, because social change has diminished the depth of commitment to Confucian values in East Asia, while political change has made the overarching imposition of those values implausible. And democracy is assimilated not in Barber's (1984) sense of "strong democracy," but rather in terms set by the fact that existing democracies in East Asia developed mainly as rejections of authoritarianism, importing liberal electoral institutions. In short, pragmatic Confucian democracy is thinly pragmatic, thinly Confucian, and thinly democratic. These three thins help locate Kim's theory; they do not imply any deficiencies in that theory.

Thin Confucianism means that virtue does still need to be cultivated in both citizens and leaders—Kim's theory is "inevitably perfectionist."¹ Though whether moral growth is simply a welcome "by-product"² or central to pragmatic Confucian democracy is not clear. In traditional Confucian thought (and Bell's 2015 Confucian meritocracy), it is the job of rulers to inculcate moral virtue in the people. Pragmatic Confucian democracy must endogenize both the definition and the cultivation of virtue in the people themselves, while respecting some democratic constraints, as well as some Confucian constraints. If this kind of cultivation remains, I don't quite see why the book is titled Democracy After Virtue, for virtue remains central—unless "after" means "pursuing" rather than "subsequent to."

Here I want to suggest two things. First, that especially given pragmatic Confucian democracy is in large measure a response to empirical circumstances, it would do well to be informed by some more systematic empirical inquiry. And second, that there are further aspects of contemporary political circumstances in East Asia (and elsewhere) beyond those specified by Kim that merit a response. I will do my best to ascertain the degree to which pragmatic Confucian democracy can respond to these further aspects.

Serious Empirical Attention: Political Theory and Social Science

How then should a pragmatic Confucian democratic theorist deploy empirical inquiry? Normative theories cannot be tested empirically, but they can (and should) be informed by empirical inquiry in several different ways. Possibilities (following Dryzek 2007) include:

1. 1. No facts, just assumptions. This kind of political theory is evidence-free, and so has universalist pretensions as an ideal. Rawls's reasoning about the political arrangements a rational individual would support behind a veil of ignorance is a well-known example. The essential cultural dimension of Confucian theory presumably rules out this kind of approach to political theory.

2. 2. Stylized facts. Stylized facts are ubiquitous in political theory. Rawls's (1993) "fact of reasonable pluralism" is perhaps the most famous. Stylized facts are not necessarily true. For example, "those with more formal education are better able to take advantage of deliberative processes" is widely accepted, but may not be true (and it certainly does not have to be true, given the possibilities of process design).

3. 3. Bad facts. Bad facts are worse than stylized facts. They are not necessarily false, rather it is their erroneous deployment that is so bad. So the findings from monological social science (survey research) often get deployed to criticize the prospects for dialogical politics—and that kind of politics would include pragmatism in general...