In this compact yet well-argued book, Sungmoon Kim defends a type of political perfectionism that is both Confucian and democratic. In so doing, he sets himself apart from two other types of Confucian theorists: those who say that a Confucian form of perfectionism can only accord democracy instrumental value, and those who say that both Confucianism and democracy are intrinsically valuable but are conceptually independent. In contrast, Kim believes that a full commitment to key democratic values can be grounded in Confucianism. He calls the distinct style of Confucian democratic perfectionism he champions “public reason Confucianism.”

Past the introduction, the book consists of three parts, each with two chapters. Part I begins the philosophical construction of public reason Confucianism. The bulk of Chapter 1 engages with Joseph Chan’s Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (2013; Chan is also the main interlocutor throughout the book). Chan believes that a comprehensive doctrine, if fully implemented in a form of political perfectionism, is incompatible with taking value pluralism seriously. Therefore, Confucian perfectionism needs to be moderate if it is to take value pluralism seriously. Kim, in contrast, attaches the moderation to the comprehensiveness of Confucianism, rather than the perfectionism. His public reason Confucianism will involve a partial, rather than fully comprehensive, form of Confucianism.

There is a second difference as well, however. Chan wants the Confucian goods and values promoted by his preferred polity to be justified by a public reason understood without an essential reference to Confucianism. Kim, on the other hand, builds Confucianism into his conception of public reason. This comes out very clearly in Chapter 2, where Kim argues that his form of Confucian perfectionism will be at home in East Asian societies where Confucian mores, habits, rituals, and moral sentiments continue to hold sway. The evidence for the empirical claim that East Asian societies are Confucian in the required sense, however, comes largely from social science research on South Korean society (pp. 91–93). The restriction may not be adventitious, as Kim concedes that public reason Confucianism is especially salient in those East Asian societies (South Korea, Taiwan; maybe Japan) with both a strongly liberal democratic constitution and citizens who are “saturated with Confucian mores and social habits” (p. 125). The worry remains, however, whether Confucian philosophy best describes the foundations of the relevant social habits. One could argue that filial piety and respect for elders are also prominent in Jewish or Italian culture; but one could wonder if calling it Confucian, or Judaic, or Catholic adds anything substantial to the analysis beyond recognizing that these are configurations with roots in the preindustrial agrarian past. This is a gap that needs to be filled in future research.

Part II showcases what public reason Confucianism might look like in practice. This is the most fascinating part of the book. Chapter 3 discusses the South Korean Constitutional Court’s decision in 2005 to abolish the family head system enshrined in several Civil Code articles mandating that each individual “be registered as a member of a family, which is led by a ‘head of the family (hoju),’ typically the father” (p. 114), the said position passing strictly along the patrilineal line. As Kim notes, this “systematically discriminates against women, by institutionalizing and perpetuating their lower social status as mother, wife, or daughter vis-à-vis that of their male counterparts as father, husband, or son” (p. 117). Chapter 4 discusses the South Korean Supreme Court’s decision, also in 2005, that “women are entitled to formal membership with all accompanying rights of their paternal clan organization” (p. 140), overturning the status quo restricting such membership to male adults.

It turns out that two articles of the South Korean Constitution are in tension: Article 9 (“The State shall strive to sustain and develop the cultural heritage and to enhance national culture”) and Article 26(1) (“Marriage and family life shall be entered into and sustained on the basis of individual dignity and equality of the sexes, and the State shall do everything in its power to achieve that goal”). The latter is no mere lip service since the modern Korean state was “self-consciously founded by its framers as a liberal democracy” (p. 120) in tutelage under the U.S. military government (1945–48). Nonetheless, Article 9 is there as well, and so Korean constitutionalism “remains chronically vulnerable to an identity crisis” (p. 125), having not one but two perfectionisms in its fabric. The running theme in Kim’s discussion is that public reason Confucianism offers a better explanation for the courts’ decisions than standard liberal constitutionalism and holds up a regulative ideal against which they can be judged. Rather than see the decisions as uncomplicated victories for liberalism against Confucianism, Kim invites us to see them as attempts to reconceptualizes the (otherwise liberal democratic) values of human dignity and gender equality “from the perspective of Confucian values,” on the one hand, and to “adapt Confucian values, institutions, and practices to democratic constitutional principles,” on the other hand (p. 135).

Part III returns to more abstract matters. Chapter 5 discusses the distinction between moral and civic virtues. Public reason Confucianism involves a partially comprehensive form of Confucianism because the virtues that it promotes are civic, rather than moral virtues. But the problem is that Confucian theory typically affirms “the ethical continuum between moral virtue and civic virtue” (p. 184). Yet something in the early tradition might be repurposed to help. Kim notes how the Analects talked about Guan Zhong—the wily statesman who instigated various shady schemes but who nonetheless earned Confucius’s praise that he was virtuous, given what he did to bring order to a disorderly world. Kim concludes that the early Confucians held to a “tempered virtue monism” (p. 193): While human moral virtue remains the main basis of the virtue that is needed for politics, the political virtues needed to safeguard the integrity of the polity can sometimes come apart from personal moral virtue in non-ideal circumstances. Kim’s observations about the Analects seem right to me, but what tempered virtue monism there exists in the Analects may not be all that relevant. What Kim needs is for Confucian virtues to take on a public significance despite value pluralism. And, as he points out, this can happen so long as those virtues are not grounded upon controversial moral and philosophical assumptions about human nature and morality and can be cherished from the perspectives of a wide range of ethical communities, even if for morally incommensurable reasons. But these ideas seem only tangentially related to the tempered virtue monism of the Analects.

Chapter 6 argues that the thought of Mencius, suitably reinterpreted, can sustain a commitment to “political equality understood in terms of equal moral opportunity to become a public official.” For Mencius, “human beings are born with moral sensibilities, which incline them toward moral goodness, and . . . such inclinations are a critical part of human flourishing” (p. 210). The implied moral equality between all people in their (often unrealized) potential to become morally perfect is the key. From the idea that “all human beings”—that is, not just those who are virtuous—“are of equal worth, thus deserving equal treatment” (p. 211, 216), Kim derives the commitment to popular sovereignty and the right to political participation. While inspiring, his case would be more persuasive if he had engaged with Mencius’s own argument for political hierarchy based on a division of labor between those who provide the mental direction that commands the obedience of the others and those who obey the former’s direction with their bodily strength. The more troublesome worry is that grounding public reason Confucianism on a Mencian theory requires that we accept controversial moral and philosophical assumptions. More charitably, we should take Kim as arguing that public reason Confucianism is a Confucian theory in good standing, as its key commitments can be derived from deep in traditional Confucian thought. But this falls short of showing that the relevant democratic commitments are justified qua public reason. At the very least, Kim owes us an account of how these commitments are equally derivable from the doctrines of Mencius’s Confucian opponent Xunzi.

All in all, this book is an exemplary contribution to the ongoing debate among modern Confucian theorists. It both ascends to theoretical heights and engages with the messier considerations needed to navigate constitutional cases in an actual polity. It is at once conversant with modern discussions and with plumbing what is said and unsaid in the classical texts. I strongly recommend it to students of liberalism mindful of its limitations and strengths, and all who care about the direction that East Asia is taking politically.