Confucian Sentimental Representation

Kwon conceptualizes a unique mode of political representation in East Asian society, which derives its moral foundation from Confucian virtue politics. Contemporary East Asian societies understand democracy differently than Western societies do. Even citizens in consolidated democracies such as Taiwan and South Korea have different conceptions of an ideal relationship between a political leader and ordinary citizens, as well as a political leader’s accountability and political legitimacy. A political leader’s proper conduct, including his or her everyday languages, behaviors, and expressions when facing citizens’ sorrow, anger, and resentment, plays a crucial role in evaluating whether he or she has political legitimacy in East Asian society. Kwon analyses how this “affective accountability” forms the basis for political representation in these societies and examines how this can be reconciled with liberal democracy. A vital contribution not only to Confucian political theory, but also to political theory writ large that will be of especial value to political scientists with an interest in East Asian democracy.

Ongoing debates among political theorists revolve around the question of whether the overarching goal of Confucianism--serving the people's moral and material wellbeing--is attainable in modern day politics without broad democratic participation. One side of the debate, voiced by Confucian meritocrats, argues that only certain people are equipped with the moral character needed to lead and ensure broad public wellbeing. The other side, voiced by Confucian democrats, argues that unless all citizens participate equally in the public sphere, a polity cannot attain the moral growth that Confucianism emphasizes. Written by one of the leading voices of Confucian political theory, Confucian Constitutionalism presents a constitutional theory of democratic self-government that is normatively appealing and politically practicable in East Asia's historically Confucian societies, which are increasingly pluralist, multicultural, and rights sensitive. While Confucian political theorists are preoccupied with how to build a Confucianism-inspired institution that would make a given polity more meritorious, Sungmoon Kim offers a robust normative theory of Confucian constitutionalism--what he calls "Confucian democratic constitutionalism"--with special attention to value pluralism and moral disagreement. Building on his previous theory of Confucian democracy, Kim establishes egalitarian human dignity as the underlying moral value of Confucian democratic constitutionalism and derives two foundational rights from Confucian egalitarian dignity--the equal right to political participation and the equal right to constitutional protection of civil and political rights. He then shows how each of these rights justifies the establishment of the legislature and the judiciary respectively as two independent constitutional institutions equally committed to the protection and promotion of the people's moral and material wellbeing, now reformulated in terms of rights. Aiming to contribute to both political theory and comparative law, Confucian Constitutionalism explains how Confucian democratic constitutionalism differs from and improves upon liberal legal constitutionalism, political constitutionalism, and Confucian meritocratic constitutionalism.

This book is about the philosophical, historical, and interpretative aspects of Mencius. It explores his influence, reception, and relevance in China from the third century BCE to the present, as well as offers comparative studies of Mencius and major figures in the history of Chinese and Western philosophy. With 34 accessible articles written by leading philosophers and scholars, the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius provides both broad pictures and in-depth discussions regarding the work of one of the most important and influential Chinese philosophers. It covers his normative ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, epistemology and moral psychology. The last section of the volume, “Mencius and Western Philosophers: Comparative Perspectives,” explicitly puts him in dialogue with major Western philosophers. The Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius serves as an essential volume for college students, graduate students, and scholars who study and teach Mencius as well as Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy in general.​

Meritocratic Democracy puts into dialogue contemporary works in Western democratic theory and Confucian political theory to examine the effectiveness of democracy as a decision-making system, the role of political leaders and political parties in real-world democracies. The result is a unique cross-cultural theory of democracy, meritocratic democracy, which combines democratic principles with a system of 'partisan juries' at the party level to enhance the quality of political leaders in democracy. Ultimately, this book shows that cross-cultural dialogue is imperative to generate innovative solutions to pressing political issues and foster reciprocal corrections.

There has been an increasing recognition of the fluidity and ambiguity of ethnic identities within the context of global mobility. With that in mind, how have films constructed the identity of ethnic Chinese in the United States? This book addresses this issue through three sub-questions. First, why is the family narrative so characteristic of films about Chinese Americans in transnational Chinese cinema? In other words, how and why are images of Chinese or Chinese Americans in transnational Chinese cinema different from those in Hollywood movies? Second, how does transnational Chinese cinema define and negotiate the aesthetic conventions of melodrama commonly used to depict Chinese American families? In terms of establishing melodrama as an evolving mode of, how does Chinese American cinema historically connect with both Hollywood and Chinese cinema? Third, what have the narrative treatments of Chinese American families in transnational Chinese cinema contributed to the ongoing representation of Chinese culture and construction of ethnic Chinese identities in Western societies? This book traverses fields such as cultural studies, Chinese studies, media studies, American studies, and film studies, and engages with a select corpus of films from the 1990s to the 2000s, directed by Chinese American, Taiwanese and Hong Kong filmmakers and produced in the USA, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, to analyze the role the American Chinese family plays in their work. With sensitivity towards transnational bonds and historical processes, a negotiation process of three sets of conflicting forces has subsequently emerged: the traditional and the modern, the national and the transnational, and Chinese American identity crisis in favor of a Chinese identity or a true American identity. Contrasting cultural beliefs undoubtedly create cross-cultural and generational conflicts within the family, yet also open the way to negotiation and compromise. This research on the cinematic depiction of Chinese Americans reveals the historically significant transnational connection among Chinese American, Chinese, and American cultures. On the one hand, ethnic Chinese are represented by boundaries that establish and define the Chinese American community against other communities, and yet, on the other hand, the representation of family life and structure of Chinese immigrants is multiple and fluid, as culture itself is unstable and uncertain. Therefore, a process of fixation and a process of fluidity seem to take place at the same time.

Hegemony and the Politics of Labour takes up a question that goes to the heart of the debate about politics, capitalism, and discourse: how can labour relations and value production be understood as discursive processes? When they launched their poststructuralist discourse theory almost 40 years ago, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe positioned the contingency of discourse and politics in sharp contrast to the deterministic tendencies of the Marxist critique of capitalism. Moving beyond Marxism as an essentialist ‘other’, discourse theory has since remained notoriously silent on questions related to the core workings of capitalism. This book is the first to bring the central categories of discourse theory into conversation with Marx’s critique of political economy. Reintegrating both traditions, it argues that the social relations of labour in capitalism emerge as a hegemonic formation. Its contribution is to extend the reach of discourse theory to the capitalist economy, exploring how a post- Marxist account of labour, value, and class connects to the contingent politics of populism. Hegemony and the Politics of Labour is an original and important contribution to the fields of discourse theory and critique of political economy.

The Ideology of Political Reactionaries offers a new perspective on the beliefs reactionaries share, presenting a theory of reactionary ideology in the process. Rather than taking self-contradictions in the reactionary imagination as a reason for diminishment, complexity is taken as a challenge. The book argues that the features that unite reactionaries lie in rhetoric. Reactionaries make three persuasive appeals: to decadence, conspiracy, and indignation. They also display some recurrent styles. The book’s rhetorical approach entails a critique of the alternative approaches to reactionary politics (dubbed as ‘dispositional’, ‘sociological’, and ‘conceptual’). At the heart of the book is the textual analysis of the writings of a range of figures who are chosen in deliberate diversity and who have interacted with political audiences in different eras and settings: Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Éric Zemmour, Joe McCarthy, Anders Breivik, and Nigel Farage. Analysis of their writings helps the book to reckon with some particular puzzles of ideologies and rhetoric. These puzzles include the proximity of reactionaries to conservatism, the ambiguity of their nostalgia, the myth of their essential charisma, and the apparent fetishisation of facts. The Ideology of Political Reactionaries ought to interest anyone concerned about current ideological trends and, in particular, students and scholars of politics and history.

Political Narratosophy offers a critically subversive rethinking of the political and philosophical significance of narrative, and why feminist epistemology and feminist social theory matters for the meaning of the ‘self’ and narrativity. Through a re-examination of the notions of democracy and emancipation, Senka Anastasova coins the term ‘political narratosophy’, a unique interpretation of the philosophy of narrative, identification, and disidentification, developed in conversation with philosophers Jacques Rancière, Nancy Fraser, and Paul Ricoeur. Utilizing the author’s own identity as a feminist philosopher has lived in socialist Yugoslavia, post-Yugoslavia, and Macedonia (now North Macedonia), Anastasova explores the fluctuating and disappearing borders around which identity is situated in a country that no longer exists. She expertly reveals how the subject finds, makes and unmakes itself through narrativity, politics, and imagination. Political Narratosophy is an important intervention in political philosophy and a welcome contribution to the historiography on female authors who lived through twentieth century communism and its aftermath. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of political theory, philosophy, women’s studies, international relations, identity studies, (comparative) literary studies, and aesthetics studies.