Drawing on an impressive range of literature from contemporary political theory, Sungmoon Kim challenges recent Confucian political theories of meritocracy and perfectionism, which treat democracy either as having only instrumental value or as altogether unimportant, even harmful, when the government's primary responsibility is to promote perfectionist ends, a task best carried out by “leaders with superior ability and virtue” (3). Kim's public reason Confucianism is a type of democratic perfectionism, “a normative political theory that justifies public promotion of particular cultural values in the service of democratic citizenship under the normative constraints of core democratic principles” (18). Given its connections with a particular comprehensive doctrine, open to democratic contestation both in formal public forums and civil society, its public reason is not neutral like the liberal concept, but legitimately influenced by the content of the dominant comprehensive doctrine of the background culture (19).

Kim constructs his theory through engaging with Joseph Chan's recent book Confucian Perfectionism (Princeton University Press, 2014), which argues that as a political philosophy for modern times characterized by value pluralism, Confucian perfectionism “should not be derived from a comprehensive doctrine of the good. It should offer a list of items that constitute the good life and good social order—such as valuable social relationship, practical wisdom and learning, sincerity, harmony, social and political trust and care, moral and personal autonomy, and economic sufficiency and self-responsibility” (45–46). While sharing Chan's rejection of a comprehensive Confucianism that advocates extreme perfectionism—such as Jiang Qing's A Confucian Constitutional Order (Princeton University Press, 2013)—because of its inability to accommodate value pluralism, Kim challenges the intelligibility of Chan's political Confucianism, maintaining that Confucianism has meaning only as a way of life, and therefore must be at least partially comprehensive. In Kim's view, the piecemeal items listed by Chan do not differentiate Confucianism from liberalism. This claim unfairly ignores Chan's past works demonstrating that values such as autonomy are not exclusively liberal (“Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties, and Confucianism,” Philosophy East and West 52, no. 3 [2002]: 281–310).

Since Chan's target is fully comprehensive doctrines, his piecemeal values need not be completely severed from Confucian ways of life, if these comprise “a number of, but by no means all, non-political values and virtues and [are] rather loosely articulated” (139). Kim maintains otherwise because Chan's “moderate perfectionism requires us to justify Confucian values in terms that do not require prior acceptance of Confucianism, and that can be shared by others who do not necessarily accept other elements within Confucianism” (46). By contrast, Kim assumes that the public character of East Asian polities is defined by Confucianism, which therefore has a legitimate role in public reason. However, if the “Confucian” virtues promoted by public reason Confucianism as civic virtues are “nonsectarian, nontraditionalist… and generally germane to all citizens as bridging capital” (201), clearly both scholars engage in a reconstruction of Confucianism to create an overlap of values with other comprehensive doctrines to meet the demands of value pluralism.

To Kim, virtues are “Confucian” only if they were promoted as universal human virtues in premodern Confucian East Asia, whereas many of Chan's “items that constitute the good life and good social order” seem to be derived from a modern liberal conceptual framework that is given a “Confucian” interpretation. Will using Confucian, liberal, or more neutral vocabulary be more acceptable to citizens in East Asian societies who do not accept Confucianism even as a partially comprehensive doctrine? An important premise in Kim's defense of public reason Confucianism as the most attractive option for East Asian societies is his claim that, in addition to being historically Confucian, these societies remain (publicly) culturally Confucian, as Confucianism remains East Asians’ “habits of the heart,” despite their lack of self-conscious identification as Confucians, and whatever other comprehensive doctrines they might subscribe to (91–93). This argument justifies public reason being partially Confucian in these societies rather than liberal-neutral. While the evidence that Korean political, legal, and social practices and institutions remain significantly continuous with Confucian traditions is convincing (especially in chaps. 3 and 4), we should be cautious in generalizing this to the entire East Asia, which may not be culturally as homogeneously Confucian as South Korea. The conclusion's too brief response to the possibility that East Asian public reason may in fact be more Western and liberal than Confucian is inadequate (244–45).

Kim acknowledges that even South Korea is becoming less culturally homogeneous with increasing immigration, but he maintains that “Confucian public reason is the inevitable price for a fair integration of immigrants who have joined a new political community voluntarily, with full awareness that they are entering a Confucian society.” And even though “new citizens have the right to contest the currently dominant understanding of Confucian public reason… in no case… are the fair terms of social integration meant to embrace unreasonable pluralism that is likely to erode the society's Confucian public character and undermine the people's right to collective self-government based on it” (103). Rather than addressing multiculturalist concerns about injustice to minorities, this argument will just reinforce that worry. Not all cultural minorities in East Asian societies are immigrants: both Japan and Taiwan have indigenous people, and the People's Republic of China recognizes fifty-five ethnic minorities in addition to the Han majority. If China's public reason were Confucian in character, would this not be unjust to its ethnic minorities?

Nor can we assume that all or most Han Chinese are Confucian, either in private or public. I strongly suspect that Chinese attitudes to Confucianism are much more varied and ambivalent than the Koreans’, owing to very different historical trajectories. This ambivalence goes beyond their not self-identifying as Confucians to outright rejection. We underestimate the impact of the May Fourth movement and everything that followed if we assume that we could equate being Chinese with being Confucian. Even if it is foolish today to advocate complete Westernization or to blindly worship Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy, how many Chinese would wish to reinstate the public institutions once identified with “man-eating” Confucian ritual propriety?

Tu Wei-ming, who grew up in Taiwan, would agree with Kim about East Asians’ Confucian “habits of the heart” (Tu's “psycho-cultural constructs”), but he dissociated Confucianism as a way of life from “politicized” Confucianism, that is, the public institutions of imperial Confucianism (Confucianism in Historical Perspective, IEAP, 1989). Although family and social life may be vaguely Confucian in character, Taiwanese attitudes to Confucianism in politics are complicated by its historical association with the Chiang Kai-shek regime, as well as with culturalist-nationalist revivals in today's mainland China, from which pro-independence and pro-democracy forces wish to separate Taiwan. Against reservations about repressive historical practices, (re)acceptance of Confucianism is more likely to succeed through its reconstruction by way of new interpretations of traditional texts (209–26) rather than through its continuity with traditional institutions and practices.