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.

Kim’s book is rich with thought-provoking ideas that are relevant to contemporary societies. I focus on its discussion of the “pluralism dilemma” and Kim’s appeal to “public reason Confucianism” as a response. The pluralism dilemma is the dilemma that a Confucian democratic theory has to meet both “the pluralist demand” and “the Confucian demand” (70). While the “Confucian” part of the theory is supposed to prefer Confucian doctrines over other doctrines, the “democratic” part is supposed to “accommodate as many reasonable conceptions of the good and comprehensive doctrines as possible” (70). What is original about Kim’s theory is that it seeks to accommodate both.

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.”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.

Political and legal theorists have long been interested in how the principle of national self-determination emerged over the course of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to anti-colonial movements. In general, national self-determination has been associated with the anti-colonial turn to statehood, sovereignty, and representative government. This article recovers an anti-statist, anti-electoral theorization of self-determination from the work of Indian political thinker Radhakamal Mukerjee. I show how Mukerjee’s engagement with evolutionary theories of politics in the early twentieth century led him to depart from Indian nationalist appropriations of the discourse of self-determination in the aftermath of WWI. Mukerjee historicized state sovereignty, representative government, and individual rights as products of Western Europe’s trajectory of political development and constructed “Asia” as a region marked by anti-statist collectivism. The article thereby highlights the overlooked role of evolutionary arguments in forming a novel, anti-statist conceptualization of anti-colonial self-determination.

Many academics assert a link between the principles that ought to determine the selection of teaching material in higher education and the principles that ought to govern a just society. This article considers five models of this relationship: (1) Identification, in which good syllabus design is part of social justice; (2) Isomorphism, in which a good syllabus takes the same form as a just society; (3) Instrumentalism, in which a good syllabus is a means for achieving social justice; (4) Isolationism, which seeks to protect syllabus design from undue social influence; (5) Interdependence, in which the quality of a syllabus and the justice of a society depend on each other in a variety of complex ways. I conclude that Interdependence incorporates the most important insights of the other four models while avoiding their individual limitations.

Scholarship over the last 70 years has shown that Madison looked to Hume for insight regarding faction, constitutional attachment, and political methodology. But the now commonplace image of a Humean Madison is misleading. I argue that Madison’s understanding of self-government drew from the science of man articulated in Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, and Reid’s common sense philosophy. These Scottish sources, all of which were critical of Hume, relied on Butler’s conception of the authoritative conscience. This recovery of Madison’s Scottish sources restores the primacy of reason and conscience in his system, in which the interest-based clash of factions, about which Hume theorized, is a secondary mechanism, always subordinate to the reason-based pursuit of the common good. For Madison and his Scottish sources, the will’s responsiveness to reason is the sine qua non of self-government.