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.