Confucian Constitutionalism: Mencius and Xunzi on Virtue, Ritual, and Royal Transmission

Abstract 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 of lizhi constitutionalism and dezhi constitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, this paper draws attention to the complex mixture of idealism and realism found in both thinkers' constitutional political theories and identifies such common ground in terms of “Confucian constitutionalism.” This paper presents Mencius's idealistic defense of abdication and his realistic resolution of the constitutional crisis latent in it, then it examines Xunzi's refutation of the three conventional rationalizations of abdication, and it concludes by recapitulating the common Confucian constitutionalist ground that Mencius and Xunzi shared and discussing its implications for the study of constitutional theory.