One of my favorite books to teach is the Xunzi. In the famous chapter titled “Human Nature is Bad,” Xunzi compares human nature to crooked wood that the ruler must steam and bend straight. “Now without teachers or proper models for people, they will be deviant, dangerous, and not correct. Without ritual and yi, they will be unruly, chaotic, and not well ordered.”Footnote ¹ Immanuel Kant and Isaiah Berlin maintain that liberalism is predicated on the ruler not being able to straighten the crooked timber of humanity and that the effort will lead to violence. Xunzi, on the contrary, argues that the ruler may manipulate words—yi, standards of righteousness—and the environment—li, ritual—to shape the souls of subjects. I object to Xunzi’s authoritarianism but find him to be a profound critic of liberal democracy. One reason to research and teach comparative political theory is to engage thinkers who disagree with things oneself and one’s students take for granted.

Sungmoon Kim and I are both political theorists who reconstruct ideas in the public political culture to make democracy seem attractive to our compatriots. I appreciate this and Kim’s other works that explain how East Asians may appreciate egalitarian dignity, human rights, and democracy. I tend to reconstruct ideas in American political thought when I write about things such as national education standards, but I admire and learn from democratic theorists working in other traditions.Footnote ² Though Kim does not call himself a political constructivist in Confucian Constitutionalism, I posit that he is using the method that John Rawls identified in Political Liberalism to convince East Asians to embrace, in their own way, ideals articulated in the liberal democratic tradition. My question is why he interprets the Xunzi as a resource for democratic theory when it is so manifestly a justification for authoritarian rule. This question is also an invitation for Kim to share what he is thinking when choosing which political cultural ideas to reconstruct.

In this book Kim gives himself the assignment of arguing how Confucianism can support the ideal of equal human dignity that democracy requires. He discusses Mencius, whose theory of innate human goodness seems to lead naturally to egalitarianism and democracy. The harder task is to present a Xunzian case for egalitarian human dignity. Kim discusses this passage from the Xunzi: “There is a saying, ‘The lord is the boat. The common people are the water. The water can support the boat. The water can also overturn the boat.’”Footnote ³ Kim interprets the passage thus: “common people as a whole deserve governmental protection of their well-being, and … irrespective of each individual’s contribution to the well-being of others, possess a significant degree of political power sufficient to overthrow a bad ruler” (62–63). This seems like an implausible reading of the text. Xunzi is not arguing that the people hold political power or would ever be justified in overthrowing a bad ruler. His point is that a ruler’s authority is based on performance legitimacy. Immediately before the discussion of the boat metaphor, Xunzi explains why an enlightened ruler forbids human equality. “If people’s authority is all equal, then they cannot be unified. If all the masses are equal in status, then they cannot be put to use.”Footnote ⁴ Xunzi argues that a well-ordered state will assign everybody their place in a social and political hierarchy. The state may wobble if people are not following rituals and standards of righteousness, but nothing in the text from what I can see assigns the people political power to change the political regime.

In Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics, Kim explains how Xunzi provides a realistic account of how the ruler inculcates civic virtues that do not require moral virtue, at least immediately. Discussing the metaphor of the crooked timber of humanity, Kim explains that:

I infer that Kim is trying to explain how Confucianism can infuse the political culture without requiring everybody to be a Confucian all the way down. He is interpreting this passage in service of his larger goal of explaining how East Asian societies may share certain Confucian political assumptions—about, say, the need for elites to govern—while still respecting the fact of pluralism in such societies. Xunzi shows how Confucian societies may expect all members to share certain perfectionist values while still allowing people to be Buddhists, Christians, or atheists in their private lives. I contend it is a leap to say Xunzi wants the ruler to create citizens. In ancient Greece, citizens would speak in the assembly, but in the Xunzian order, the ruler deploys rituals (li) and standards of rightness (yi) “to train and transform people’s inborn dispositions and thereby guide them”Footnote ⁶ without any concern for what they say during the process. Kim states bluntly that Xunzi espouses authoritarian regimes.Footnote ⁷ Why does Kim interpret Xunzi as a proto-democrat when the plain reading of the Xunzi is that it is a guidebook to authoritarianism?

Kim answers this question in Confucian Constitutionalism: if Xunzi’s philosophical thought can be read as supporting equal human dignity, then “we can secure a more robust Confucian philosophical ground for constitutional democracy.” (57) I believe that I understand Kim’s strategy. Mencius argues that all human beings have sprouts of goodness; this view of human nature lends itself to democratic reconstruction. There is no direct line between a view of human nature and politics. The view that human nature is good may empower authoritarians convinced of the goodness of their nature, and the view that human nature is bad may lead to institutional and cultural checks on rulers.Footnote ⁸ But Xunzi’s view that human nature is bad seems to justify authoritarian measures. Kim situates his interpretation among Xunzi scholars debating how far his view is from Mencius’s, but to me it appears that Xunzi never entertains the idea that strong-willed subjects can criticize the ruler in public. Xunzi may not be that different from Mencius, but neither endorses anything like Aristotle’s view that human beings are political animals.

If one reinterprets Xunzi’s thinking as proto-democratic, one both removes a Confucian critic of democracy and finds an advocate of positive Confucianism who respects citizens’ private lives. But wanting to find another proto-democratic thinker in pre-Qin China does not mean that such a thinker exists. Kim interprets Xunzi’s saying that “anyone on the streets can become a Yu [a legendary sage-king]” as implying that “sagehood, the final destination of moral self-cultivation, is equally accessible to everyone” (59, emphasis original). Who does Kim seek to convince? Scholars of Chinese political thought? East Asian university students? English-speaking political theorists? I do not understand why he is trying to reinterpret Xunzi as a proto-egalitarian when one can find many passages of the Xunzi that justify political hierarchies.

Kim could have tried to reconstruct, say, Zhuangzi, whose view of personal freedom has been interpreted as liberal.Footnote ⁹ Could Zhuangzi be used to justify respecting the political opinions of the lowly and marginalized? Kim has found in the eighteenth-century Korean writer Im Yunjidang a Confucian feminism.Footnote ¹⁰ Could he also find a Korean Confucian scholar who—though he or she may not necessarily appeal to Confucians in other countries—could provide resources for buttressing Korean democracy? One also wonders whether Kim could have reconstructed ideas from twentieth-century Korean debates about democracy. I would like to hear from Kim what is going on in his mind when he is looking for ideas to reconstruct in the service of advocating constitutional democracy in an East Asian context.