Sungmoon Kim
Biographic Data
| ID | 3624495 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sungmoon Kim |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sungmoon |
| FAMILY NAME | Kim |
| SIGNATURE | KIM S |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of Hong Kong |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
State-of-the-Field Essay: Contemporary Confucian Political Theory: Its Origin, Evolution, and Challenges
Can contemporary Confucian political theory contribute to both a culturally relevant and politically practicable public philosophy for East Asian societies, while simultaneously providing a model of comparative political theory that aspires to deprovincialize the West? This state-of-the-field essay examines how contemporary Confucian political theory has evolved in the past two decades in Anglophone academia, what challenges are posed to its furt…
Political Meritocracy for Responsibility
The political theory of political meritocracy generally focuses on the political elites’ moral and epistemic ability to make a public decision that is conducive to the people’s long-term interests. Understanding political legitimacy chiefly in terms of the government’s good performance, therefore, advocates of political meritocracy stipulate a general causal relation between the political leaders’ superior virtue and good public outcomes. This pa…
Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy
This book aims to present a constitutional theory of democratic self-government that is normatively appealing and politically practicable in East Asia’s historically Confucian societies that are increasingly pluralist, multicultural, and rights sensitive—namely, Confucian democratic constitutionalism. Inspired by early twentieth-century Confucian constitutionalists such as Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming who explored the Chinese people’s self-gove…
Why Confucian Meritocrats Must Be Democrats: Contesting Non-political Human Rights
Im Yunjidang
This Element aims to critically examine the philosophical thought of Im Yunjidang 任允摯堂 (1721–93), a female Korean Neo-Confucian philosopher from the Chosŏn 朝鮮 dynasty (1392–1910), and to present her as a feminist thinker. Unlike most Korean women of her time, Yunjidang had the exceptional opportunity to be introduced to a major philosophical debate among Korean Neo-Confucians, which was focused on two core questions-whether sages and commoners sh…
Im Yunjidang
In Defense of Public Reason Confucianism: Reply to Chan, Mang, Wong, and Angle
Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics: The Political Philosophy of Mencius and Xunzi
Surprisingly little is known about what ancient Confucian thinkers struggled with in their own social and political contexts and how these struggles contributed to the establishment and further development of classical Confucian political theory. Leading scholar of comparative political theory, Sungmoon Kim offers a systematic philosophical account of the political theories of Mencius and Xunzi, investigating both their agreements and disagreemen…
Reasonable Pluralism and Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Reply to Li
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The Political Economy of Confucian Harmony: A Xunzian Vision
A global market economy of pure instrumental rationality now poses a growing threat, jeopardizing common citizenship, the capacity for human flourishing, and harmony between humans and nature. Growing skepticism about the sustainability of market capitalism and its moral legitimacy propels us to search for a new economic model in which humans are no longer held hostage to the unbridled pursuit of self-interest and limitless possession at the expe…
Procedure and Substance
The pragmatic understanding of Confucian democracy not only establishes the inextricable intertwinement between democracy’s institutional-instrumental and moral-intrinsic values but further creates an equally intimate connection between Confucian substance and democratic procedure in a Confucian democracy. This chapter argues that in Confucian pragmatic democracy, democratic procedures exist not so much as formal institutional mechanisms that are…
Sufficiency and Equality
This chapter explores a distributive principle that is integral to pragmatic Confucian democracy—what I call Confucian democratic sufficientarianism . Confucian democratic sufficientarianism critically embraces liberal sufficientarianism’s positive thesis stipulating the threshold of sufficiency but roundly rejects the negative thesis, which allows unlimited desert-based inequalities beyond the threshold of sufficiency. After deriving four propos…
Conclusion
This final chapter emphasizes the critical importance of Confucian political theory’s acceptability to ordinary men and women actually living in East Asia, many of whom are not ready to accept or even actively reject the self-validating moral authority of Confucianism, while struggling with their public standing as “citizens.” It argues that the future of Confucian political theory hinges critically on its ability to furnish a normative framework…
State Coercion and Criminal Punishment
This chapter proposes a novel normative framework for criminal punishment, called the value theory of criminal punishment , as an alternative to desert-based retributivism. Contrary to retributivists who see criminal desert as pre-social and purely individualistic, the value theory understands it as embedded in communal values and social norms, and thus sees crime not in virtue of its pre-socially evaluated wrongness but in terms of a “normative …
Political Participation
This chapter provides a philosophical justification for the right to political participation in Confucian democracy by critically examining the philosophical conundrum surrounding it in Confucian democratic theory from the perspective of democracy’s second-order value and with special attention to the circumstances of modern politics. It argues that the theoretical framework furnished by pragmatic Confucian democracy can show one a way to look at…
Democracy after Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy
In the past two decades contemporary Confucian political theory has been propelled by the dialectical conversation between Confucianism and democracy and, more recently, between Confucian democracy and Confucian meritocracy. However, the absence of a shared point of reference in developing Confucian democratic theory has made it extremely difficult to understand whether the disagreement between Confucian democrats and Confucian meritocrats is mer…
Fred Dallmayr’s postmodern vision of Confucian democracy: A critical examination
As an advocate of 'comparative political theory,' Fred Dallmayr has long engaged with Confucianism with a new vision for democracy suitable in East Asia but little attention has been paid to his idea of Confucian democracy, which he presents as a specific mode of ethical or relational democracy. This paper investigates Dallmayr's ethical vision of Confucian democracy, first, by articulating his postmodern reconceptualization of democracy in terms…
Contingency and responsibility in Confucian political theory
In this article I investigate the Confucian sense of responsibility from the framework of “moral economy,” understood as a causal relationship between one’s virtue and non-moral goods including political position/success, and “contingency,” the failure of moral economy, and argue that early Confucians’ astute understanding of the contingent nature of the political world enabled them to subscribe to the non-causal sense of responsibility. Contrary…
Candlelight for Our Country's Right Name: A Confucian Interpretation of South Korea's Candlelight Revolution
The candlelight protest that took place in South Korea from October 2016 to March 2017 was a landmark political event, not least because it ultimately led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Arguably, its more historically important meaning lies in the fact that it marks the first nation-wide political struggle since the June Uprising of 1987, where civil society won an unequivocal victory over a regime that was found to be corrupt, un…
Confucian Authority, Political Right, and Democracy
In his book Confucian Perfectionism, Joseph Chan derives the so-called service conception of political rights from the classical Confucian service conception of political authority, and justifies a mode of democracy decoupled from democratic principles of popular sovereignty, political equality, and popular right to political participation. He also offers the fallback idea of (human) rights as the conception of rights best suited for his version …
Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward Democratic Theory
It is widely claimed that Mencius's account of punitive expedition can be understood as a Confucian justification of humanitarian intervention and thus has the potential to play the role of constraining China's imperial ventures abroad. This paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external obstacles—the problem of virtue's self-indulgence and the problem of justification to non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius's virtue…
Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Rethinking the Value of Democracy in East Asia
In contemporary Confucian political theory, there is surprisingly little effort among the theorists to illuminate the value of democracy. When they do on rare occasions, their focus is largely on democracy’s instrumental contribution to Confucian goods. In this paper, I argue that, given democracy’s dual aspects as a political system and as a way of life, it has both instrumental and intrinsic values, and insomuch as it is a kind of democracy, Co…
Confucianism, A Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia
Achieving the Way: Confucian Virtue Politics and the Problem of Dirty Hands
Confucian virtue politics is premised on two fundamental assumptions. First, a good government founded on the Way is predicated on the political actor’s personal moral virtue, and there is no qualitative difference between the ruler’s virtue and the virtue(s) that people are ultimately to embody. Second, since there is only one single and holistic Way and the political is extended from the ethical, there cannot be two separate political and moral…
Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia
Recent proposals concerning Confucian meritocratic perfectionism have justified Confucian perfectionism in terms of political meritocracy. In contrast, 'Confucian democratic perfectionism' is a form of comprehensive Confucian perfectionism that can accommodate a plurality of values in civil society. It is also fully compatible with core values of democracy such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. …
Public Reason Confucianism: A Construction
If perfectionism is understood as the state's non-neutral promotion of a valuable way of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralismwithinthe putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension betwee…
Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Rethinking the Value of Democracy in East Asia
In contemporary Confucian political theory, there is surprisingly little effort among the theorists to illuminate the value of democracy. When they do on rare occasions, their focus is largely on democracy’s instrumental contribution to Confucian goods. In this paper, I argue that, given democracy’s dual aspects as a political system and as a way of life, it has both instrumental and intrinsic values, and insomuch as it is a kind of democracy, Co…
Confucianism, Moral Equality, and Human Rights: A Mencian Perspective
This paper attempts to show the compatibility between Confucianism and human rights, first by revisiting the moral philosophy of Mencius, a key founder of the Confucian tradition, then by reconstructing the Mencian-Confucian idea of human rights from the perspective of his moral philosophy. One of my central claims is that not only did Mencius acknowledge core human rights-socioeconomic as well as civil-political-justified by his foundational fai…
Confucian Constitutionalism: Mencius and Xunzi on Virtue, Ritual, and Royal Transmission
By examining Xunzi's and Mencius's contrary reactions toward royal transmission by individual merit or “abdication” (shanrang禪讓), this article attempts to reveal the distinctive features of their respective political theories, which I reconstruct in terms oflizhiconstitutionalism anddezhiconstitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, thi…
Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward Democratic Theory
It is widely claimed that Mencius's account of punitive expedition can be understood as a Confucian justification of humanitarian intervention and thus has the potential to play the role of constraining China's imperial ventures abroad. This paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external obstacles—the problem of virtue's self-indulgence and the problem of justification to non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius's virtue…
To Become a Confucian Democratic Citizen: Against Meritocratic Elitism
This article critiques the meritocratic justification of Confucian democracy from the standpoint of democratic civil society by shifting the focus fromgovernabilityof the people to theirtransformability. Its central claims are: (1) Confucian virtue politics (dezhi) can be creatively re-appropriated in a democratic civil society in terms of cultivating civility in ordinary people who belong to different moral communities; (2) in the modern East As…
Transcendental collectivism and participatory politics in democratized Korea
This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is b…
Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea
This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (chŏng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the chŏng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the…
On Korean dual civil society: Thinking through Tocqueville and Confucius
Candlelight for Our Country's Right Name: A Confucian Interpretation of South Korea's Candlelight Revolution
The candlelight protest that took place in South Korea from October 2016 to March 2017 was a landmark political event, not least because it ultimately led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Arguably, its more historically important meaning lies in the fact that it marks the first nation-wide political struggle since the June Uprising of 1987, where civil society won an unequivocal victory over a regime that was found to be corrupt, un…
John Dewey and Confucian Democracy: Towards Common Citizenship
The Way to Become a Female Sage: Im Yunjidang's Confucian Feminism
Is there a counterpart to John Stuart Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft in the Confucian tradition? If so, who is it? This paper aims to introduce and examine the philosophical thought of a Korean female neo-Confucian thinker named Im Yunjidang 任允摯堂 (1721-1793) who ardently pursued Confucian sagehood and upheld moral equality between men and women by creatively reinterpreting Confucian classics as well as advancing a sophisticated neo-Confucian philoso…
The logic of multiculturalism and Korean democracy
In this article, I attempt to construct a normative framework of Korean multiculturalism in the Confucian public-societal context of Korean democracy by focusing on the political implications of the claim to cultural rights (so-called ‘logic’ of multiculturalism) and cultural pluralism that it is likely to entail for Korean democracy. After examining the logic of multiculturalism that often puts multiculturalism in tension with liberal democracy,…
Confucianism in Contestation: The May Struggle of 1991 in South Korea and Its Lesson
This article seeks to present an alternative approach to understanding the politics of East Asian democratization with a special focus on South Korea. Taking the May Struggle of 1991—the largest political upheaval since the June Uprising of 1987—as a case study, it examines how Confucian moral rhetoric and practices were peculiarly employed (or exploited) in a series of authoritarian–democratic confrontations. It argues that Confucianism was neit…
Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea
This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (chŏng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the chŏng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the…
Filiality, Compassion, and Confucian Democracy
Ren, the Confucian virtue par excellence, is often explained on two different accounts: on the one hand, filiality, a uniquely Confucian social-relational virtue; on the other hand, commiseration innate in human nature. Accordingly there are two competing positions in interpreting ren: one that is utterly positive about the realization of universal love by the graduated extension of filial love, and the other that sees the inevitable tension betw…
Transcendental collectivism and participatory politics in democratized Korea
This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is b…
Confucianism in Contestation: The May Struggle of 1991 in South Korea and Its Lesson
This article seeks to present an alternative approach to understanding the politics of East Asian democratization with a special focus on South Korea. Taking the May Struggle of 1991—the largest political upheaval since the June Uprising of 1987—as a case study, it examines how Confucian moral rhetoric and practices were peculiarly employed (or exploited) in a series of authoritarian–democratic confrontations. It argues that Confucianism was neit…
Beyond Liberal Civil Society: Confucian Familism and Relational Strangership
This essay argues that if Confucian familism, which has been blamed as the single greatest obstacle to achieving a civil society, is creatively repossessed, the potential looks very promising for constructing a Confucian civil society that is qualitatively different from a liberal civil society predicated on moral individualism, and for underpinning its unique mode of civility ("sociability") and citizenship ("strangership"). This essay first sho…
Confucian Citizenship? Against Two Greek Models: Confucian Citizenship
The Secret of Confucian Wuwei Statecraft: Mencius's Political Theory of Responsibility
Despite his strong commitment to the ideal of wuwei statecraft, Mencius advanced a distinct yet cohesive theory of Confucian youwei statecraft that can serve the ideal of wuwei, first by means of the principled application of individual and social responsibility under unfavorable socioeconomic conditions, and second by offering a concrete public policy (i.e. the well-field system) that contributes to a decent socioeconomic condition on which the …
On Korean dual civil society: Thinking through Tocqueville and Confucius
The virtue of incivility: Confucian communitarianism beyond docility
This article argues that in order to make Confucian communitarianism a viable political vision, namely, Civil Confucianism, its emphasis on civility must be balanced with what I call ‘Confucian incivility’, a set of Confucian social practices that temporarily upset the existing social relations and yet that, ironically, help those relations become more enduring and viable. The central argument is that ‘Confucian civility’ encompasses both social-…
Confucian Constitutionalism: Mencius and Xunzi on Virtue, Ritual, and Royal Transmission
By examining Xunzi's and Mencius's contrary reactions toward royal transmission by individual merit or “abdication” (shanrang禪讓), this article attempts to reveal the distinctive features of their respective political theories, which I reconstruct in terms oflizhiconstitutionalism anddezhiconstitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, thi…
Before and after Ritual: Two Accounts of Li as Virtue in Early Confucianism
Virtue Politics and Political Leadership: A Confucian Rejoinder to Hanfeizi
In the Confucian tradition, the ideal government is called ‘benevolent government’ (ren zheng), central to which is the ruler's parental love toward his people who he deems as his children. Hanfeizi criticized this seemingly innocent political idea by pointing out that (1) not only is the state not a family but even within the family parental love is short of making the children orderly and (2) ren as love inevitably results in the ruin of the st…
Between Good and Evil: Xunzi’s Reinterpretation of the Hegemonic Rule as Decent Governance
Confucianism and acceptable inequalities
In this article, I explore an alternative model of Confucian distributive justice, namely the ‘family model’, by challenging the central claim of recent sufficientarian justifications of Confucian justice offered by Confucian political theorists – roughly, that inequalities of wealth and income beyond the threshold of sufficiency do not matter if they reflect different merits. I argue (1) that the telos of Confucian virtue politics – moral self-c…
To Become a Confucian Democratic Citizen: Against Meritocratic Elitism
This article critiques the meritocratic justification of Confucian democracy from the standpoint of democratic civil society by shifting the focus fromgovernabilityof the people to theirtransformability. Its central claims are: (1) Confucian virtue politics (dezhi) can be creatively re-appropriated in a democratic civil society in terms of cultivating civility in ordinary people who belong to different moral communities; (2) in the modern East As…
The logic of multiculturalism and Korean democracy
In this article, I attempt to construct a normative framework of Korean multiculturalism in the Confucian public-societal context of Korean democracy by focusing on the political implications of the claim to cultural rights (so-called ‘logic’ of multiculturalism) and cultural pluralism that it is likely to entail for Korean democracy. After examining the logic of multiculturalism that often puts multiculturalism in tension with liberal democracy,…
Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice
This book explores a mode of democracy that is culturally relevant and socially practicable in the contemporary pluralistic context of historically Confucian East Asian societies, by critically engaging with the two most dominant theories of Confucian democracy - Confucian communitarianism and meritocratic elitism. The book constructs a mode of public reason (and reasoning) that is morally palatable to East Asians who are still saturated in Confu…
From Wife to Moral Teacher: Kang Chŏngildang on Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation
This paper aims to investigate the philosophical thought and moral practice of a Korean neo-Confucian female scholar named Kang Chŏngildang 姜靜一堂 (1772–1832), who not only believed in moral equality between men and women and the possibility of female sagehood but actually empowered herself to become a moral paragon. Furthermore, Chŏngildang’s strong faith in moral equality between men and women enabled her to engage in social criticism of the exis…
The Way to Become a Female Sage: Im Yunjidang's Confucian Feminism
Is there a counterpart to John Stuart Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft in the Confucian tradition? If so, who is it? This paper aims to introduce and examine the philosophical thought of a Korean female neo-Confucian thinker named Im Yunjidang 任允摯堂 (1721-1793) who ardently pursued Confucian sagehood and upheld moral equality between men and women by creatively reinterpreting Confucian classics as well as advancing a sophisticated neo-Confucian philoso…
Confucianism, Law, and Democracy in Contemporary Korea
Comparative political theory has grown into a recognized discipline in its own right in the last two decades. Yet little has been done to explore how political theory engages with the actual social, legal, and political reality of a particular polity. East Asians are complexly conditioned by traditional Confucian norms and habits, despite significant social, economic, and political changes in their contemporary lives. This volume seeks to address…
Confucianism, Law, and Democracy in Contemporary Korea
Comparative political theory has grown into a recognized discipline in its own right in the last two decades. Yet little has been done to explore how political theory engages with the actual social, legal, and political reality of a particular polity. East Asians are complexly conditioned by traditional Confucian norms and habits, despite significant social, economic, and political changes in their contemporary lives. This volume seeks to address…
John Dewey and Confucian Democracy: Towards Common Citizenship
Public Reason Confucianism: A Construction
If perfectionism is understood as the state's non-neutral promotion of a valuable way of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralismwithinthe putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension betwee…
Confucianism, Moral Equality, and Human Rights: A Mencian Perspective
This paper attempts to show the compatibility between Confucianism and human rights, first by revisiting the moral philosophy of Mencius, a key founder of the Confucian tradition, then by reconstructing the Mencian-Confucian idea of human rights from the perspective of his moral philosophy. One of my central claims is that not only did Mencius acknowledge core human rights-socioeconomic as well as civil-political-justified by his foundational fai…
Confucianism, A Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia
Chinese history and philosophy (45 works) · Political science (45 works) · Law (44 works) · Sociology (42 works) · Politics (40 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Democracy (25 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (19 works) · Environmental ethics (19 works)