The Darkened Light of Faith is a work in the history of black political thought that speaks to contemporary challenges. It provides intricate reconstructions of David Walker’s rhetorical methods in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World; the democratic perfectionism of Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, and Anna Julia Cooper; Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany’s debate about the meaning and implications of civic republicanism for oppressed peoples; Ida B. Wells’s and Billie Holiday’s use of journalism and music to reeducate American moral sense on lynching; and W. E. B. Du Bois’s use of art as propaganda to call readers to higher character. Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin make cameo appearances. Rogers provides not only riveting intellectual history but also rigorous argument about the faith-based character of democratic transformation.

Rogers’s remarkable book manages to be both deep and broad, both provocative and persuasive; it attends with equal care to the burdens of historical reflection and of theoretical investigation. I’ve learned a great deal from the text, and expect to keep learning as I return to it over time. One admirable feature is the ease with which it explores particularism while resisting parochialism. Rogers examines a distinctively black tradition of political theorizing, a tradition that Eddie Glaude calls “Black democratic perfectionism”1 and that in Rogers’s account includes Baldwin, Du Bois, and Wells. Rogers neither gives the tradition the name that Glaude assigns it nor shows much interest in naming it at all, apart from a stray reference or two to “Black perfectionism.” This bears further study. He identifies the tradition as a distinct enterprise while noting that it was not hermetically sealed off from the wider discursive world. Perfectionists also contributed to other traditions that one might, in the right mood, call “mainstream,” and that include Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, and Sidney Hook. Rogers reminds readers that the perfectionists were in conversation with racial liberals and classical rhetoricians and theorists of democracy and assorted others, and that deepening these conversations is essential both to realizing whatever potential the mainstream views still have, and to understanding the content and value of the black perfectionist intervention.

Contrary to the notion of collective self-rule, in modern democratic states the set of individuals that make the rules and the set of individuals to whom rules apply cannot be one and the same. Recognizing this “non-identity thesis” has important implications for democratic theory. Among them is the need to recognize that any democratic system will involve rule over others and that democratic procedures will not be sufficient for political legitimacy.

Rousseau’s civil religion in the Social Contract has been interpreted as either an authoritarian institution that reinforces the collectivist ideal of the Social Contract or as a non-coercive proposal aimed at promoting toleration. This article offers an alternative account that emphasizes popular sovereignty as both the source and object of civil religion. On this reading, civil religion is a democratic choice by a sovereign people of the kind of beliefs and behavior they want to collectively endorse and expect from each other. When established by the people, civil religion serves the higher function of exemplifying and preserving political freedom in a political community. Recognizing the popular roots of civil religion helps us to understand it as an essential condition for maintaining the body politic that Rousseau envisions in the Social Contract and an important component of his democratic thought.

It is an ugly and dispiriting thing to bear witness to the full measure of horror in the United States’ past and present of racial domination. A history running from genocide, colonization, and enslavement through lynch law and Jim Crow to contemporary mass incarceration and organized abandonment attests not only to the longevity of white supremacy, but its creative capacities for reorganization and institutional innovation. In view of this long national nightmare, what could sustain faith in the dream of a multiracial democracy that has not yet materialized—and may never come to be?

The public release of OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022 was, in the jargon of political science, a “critical juncture” in which AI’s potential was made manifest to ordinary people. Following the initial enthusiasm, however, came a strong undercurrent of skepticism about the human costs of AI advances. In 1958, Hannah Arendt presciently observed:

Sungmoon Kim’s criticism largely misunderstands liberal polycentrism and the cultural knowledge problem that motivates it. In his attempt to defend a pragmatic Confucian democracy, he doubles down on precisely the monocentric thinking that polycentrism transcends. He conflates liberal polycentrism with standard political liberalism. Kim seems to think that our position merely seeks a neutral state in which Confucianism is contained within small social worlds. While our framework does adhere to state neutrality, it is not merely a management strategy for pre-existing differences. It is grounded in cultural experimentation in the face of ongoing social change. We are not simply trying to carve out maximum space for plurality because people disagree. Rather, we recognize that we do not, and cannot, know how these differences will interact, revise, and evolve to produce new cultural pathways beyond what exists. Kim misses this point, and it is not a small one.

Scholars have identified a primary goal of legislation in Plato’s Laws: to make citizens virtuous and thereby happy. But in focusing on this goal, they have left unexplored another: to shape how citizens understand and face death. This article shows how these two goals are tied together. I first argue that in book I, Kleinias serves as an example of how legislation can miseducate citizens by leaving them with conflicting views of virtue and thus with conflicting evaluations of death. Then, I turn to two of the Stranger’s statements on virtue, happiness, and death in books I and II and argue that these statements hold a positive teaching on virtue, and thereby death, that he thinks wise law must inculcate in citizens.

Sungmoon Kim’s book is an important contribution to constitutional scholarship. It is as important for what it does as much as for what it says. The book is amongst the first to combine Asian and Western meditations on state governance. Kim has a deep and broad understanding of both Confucian traditions and liberal traditions, in particular, that centered around John Rawls. His book is an object lesson in the value of exchange between traditions. For those within Western constitutional traditions, Kim’s book proves how much there is to learn from Confucianism—and, indeed, from other Asian traditions too. For those within Confucian traditions the converse may be true; each has something to learn from the other. Kim’s willingness to engage and combine these differing approaches guides us toward a form of constitutional scholarship that is unafraid of, and draws strength from, cross-cultural engagement.

Rousseau and Heidegger’s critiques of the modern commercial city, as well as their valorization of rural life, speak to problems of urban–rural polarization and rural alienation. This article disentangles Rousseau’s rural political vision which promotes agrarianism in service of egalitarian republicanism from that of Heidegger, which seeks to radically overcome the “uprootedness” of post-Enlightenment civilization by reconnecting the Volk to its primordial rootedness-in-the-soil of the fatherland. It proceeds by (1) comparing their critiques of the modern commercial city, (2) reconstructing their plans for rural political renewal, and (3) identifying the roots of their differences in competing understandings of “Being,” “nature,” and “history.” It concludes that Rousseau’s more nuanced evaluation of agrarianism, which better comprehends both the limits and possibilities of rural life, serves as a valuable corrective to Heidegger by providing a vision of rural politics that challenges but nevertheless proves more amenable to compromise with increasingly urbanized liberal democracies.

One of the most influential texts in Asian studies in recent memory has been Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, which boldly claims that “Martin Heidegger was actually doing European studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas.”1 Chen’s argument is not that East Asians must acknowledge the incommensurability between Western and non-Western political thought; rather, the emphasis is on the urgent need to renew our self-understanding in the era of globalization. In his view, this reconstruction of the “Eastern self” involves utilizing Western-origin conceptual categories and theories not as universal theoretical paradigms but as comparative vantage points. Confucian Constitutionalism does precisely this—it develops a normative theory of constitutional democracy that is comparative in both methodological orientation and content. This ambitious book deftly reconstructs Confucian constitutional thought through critical dialogue with Confucian meritocratic tradition, on the one hand, and contemporary constitutional theory, on the other hand. It proposes this reconstructed Confucianism as an alternative to Western liberal democracy, one that is most suitable for East Asian communities (2).

Confucian Constitutionalism can be seen as aiming to translate constitutional democracy into the vernacular cultural language of East Asia: “Confucian democratic constitutionalism invites them to reformulate their constitutional identity and public morality in mediation of Confucian civic culture that is still in play in their social, legal, and political lives but for the institutional expression of which they lack an adequate language” (204). The importance of this task is twofold. The first is that the relatively young democracies of East Asia are frequently characterized by an “incongruence between the formal liberal constitutional order and the Confucian civic culture that continues to inform people’s moral reasoning and judgment” (203–4) and yet, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, constitutional rights must be “enduringly linked with the motivations and convictions of the citizens, for without such a motivational anchoring they could not become the driving force behind the dynamically conceived project of producing an association of free and equal individuals.”1 The second reason this matters is that a significant strand of Confucian political theory—so-called “meritocratic” theories—offers a competing ideal which is not democratic in character. To the extent that these vernacular political theories can get a grip on East Asian societies, they are liable to increase the dissonance between the formal institutional order and the background civic culture in democratic states and weaken the forces of democratization in authoritarian states. Hence Kim aims to provide both the conceptual resources for, and an attractive ideal of, Confucian democratic constitutionalism as well as a critical perspective on Confucian political meritocracy.