Abstract
Mou Zongsan was one of the most important Chinese philosophers of the twentieth century, yet his political thought is given little attention. This is unfortunate, because his political philosophy presents significant challenges to liberal views on freedom and the basis for democracy. Mou rejects the liberal understanding of freedom as absence of interference, and instead argues for a limited conception of positive freedom in government that includes teaching basic moral values. He bases democracy on the Confucian idea of respect for humanity's universal moral potential. At the same time, Mou also provides an alternative to many current conceptions of Confucian democracy, which favor pragmatist and communitarian interpretations. Mou's thought thus illustrates how Chinese conceptions of Confucian democracy frequently differ from those in English-language scholarship. The goal of this article is to examine how Mou creatively interpreted Confucian thought to develop a unique New Confucian theory of democracy that neither uncritically accepts liberalism nor discounts the importance of liberal features such as individual freedom and rights. It also considers major objections to Mou's view of democracy and his possible responses.
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Notes
The only exception is The Special Character of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue de tezhi), which has been translated into French as Spécificités de la philosophie chinoise. The foundation for the study of Chinese philosophy and culture, based in California, has been translating some of Mou's works into English, but as yet only a few selected chapters are available. See www.fscpc.org/mouzongsan/mou.asp.
Although Mou thinks abdication is better than hereditary succession, it still does not give power to the public.
Here Mou explains how he drew these terms from logic, specifically Bertrand Russell.
Mou himself classified his dialectic as Hegelian (Mou, 1990, p. 122).
Mou coined this term based on the Book of Changes (Yijing).
Irene Bloom argues for attributing such a view to Mengzi (Bloom, 1998, pp. 104–109). Although I agree that it may be implied by Mengzi, in my reading he does not seem to have taken that step himself. Thanks to Steve Angle for drawing my attention to this.
Consider Audi (2000, pp. 4–27). Every path to liberal democracy he discusses has some substantive view on what persons are and/or what human good is, with the exception of intuitionism, which considers the principles for democracy self-evident. Intuitionism was thus not a way Mou could argue for democracy.
This is particularly ingenious, as it implies that anyone who attempts to amend the constitution to remove limits on his or her power is ipso facto not a sage.
I am indebted to He Xinquan for very helpful discussion of this issue.
Though Mou's distinction is quite close to Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between positive and negative liberty, I am not aware of any references to Berlin in Mou's writings. The Taiwanese liberal theorist Zhang Foquan introduced this distinction in Chinese (Foquan Zhang, 1953,1993, pp. 189–190). Mou certainly would have known of Zhang's work, and it is likely that he was responding to it.
In Neo-Confucian terminology, the original mind refers to the mind free of natural desires, which Mou will identify with Kant's pure practical reason.
I thank Lee Ming-huei for a helpful discussion of the ideas in this paragraph.
His assessment of what is feasible may be overly optimistic as well. I cannot speak to China, but when I have explained Bell’s proposal for a meritocratic house to people in Taiwan, the near-universal response is vehement rejection. Obviously, this is merely anecdotal.
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Acknowledgements
Research on this article was undertaken while a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and I thank the Institute for this opportunity. I would like to thank Steve Angle, Daniel Bell, He Xinquan, Lee Ming-huei, John Makeham and the editors and reviewers for Contemporary Political Theory for their comments.
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Elstein, D. Mou Zongsan's New Confucian democracy. Contemp Polit Theory 11, 192–210 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2011.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2011.23