Confucian and Communitarian Responses to Liberal Democracy

As East Asian societies struggle with the implications of modenity, the degree to which their Confucian heritage can support institutions of liberal democracy has been much debated. Recently, several authors have argued that the nations of Confucian Asia are indeed modernizing, but in the direction of “illiberal democracy”, which they see as an approach to democratic practice that takes communitarian concerns like social solidarity and political virtue into greater account than other, more liberal democratic societies do. In line with that argument, this article makes an introductory comparison of classical Confucian and contemporary communitarian thought, criticizes the view of Confucianism as necessarily authoritarian and suggests that Confucian theory and practice provides a strong and in many ways unique communitarian response to liberalism, without fundamentally invalidating those humanistic principles basic to democratic reform.