1 This article uses “classical Confucianism” to refer to those principles taught in the Lun Yu (the Analects, or selected sayings, of K'ung Fu Tzu or Confucius) and, to a lesser degree, in the Meng Tzu (the Mencius, a collection of sayings attributed to an early Confucian scholar of that name). Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the Analects and the Mencius will be based on the translations of D.C. Lau; see The Analects and Mencius, ed. and trans. Lau, D. C. (London: Penguin Group, 1979 and 1970, respectively)Google Scholar. Confucian concepts and texts will be referred to in English by their common (if somewhat inaccurate) Wide-Giles transliterations.

It is admittedly difficult to isolate a single strain of Confucian thought which deserves the label “classical”. Over the centuries there have been numerous conflicting interpretations of Confucius's writings, and many rival schools of Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought. This article will attempt to stay close to the historical Confucius, turning to Mencius only when his comments are directly pertinent to subjects already brought up in the Analects. The use of Mencius, as opposed to other early interpreters of Confucius, is a reflection of his close association with Confucius's original writings through the centuries, during which the two works have been joined together in the Ssu Shu (the Four Books), long the basis of an orthodox Confucian education. For an introduction to the varieties of Confucianism and a defense of the historical importance of the Analects, see A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, ed. and trans. Chan, Wing-tsit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 2. Over the last thirty years many authors have contributed to a revival of the “classical” Confucian message; their work, which will often be referred to in this essay, has been significant enough that one Confucian scholar has suggested that we may be on the verge of new “epoch” of Confucian humanism. See Wei-ming, Tu, “Towards a Third Epoch of Confucian Humanism”, in Way, Learning, and Politics: Essnys on the Confucian Intellectual (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 141–59.Google Scholar

2 Most scholars include China, Taiwan, North and South Korea, Singapore, Japan and sometimes Vietnam in this region. Some useful texts which treat this area as a whole include Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, ed. Wei-ming, Tu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation, ed. Rozman, Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Moody, Peter, Jr., Political Opposition in Post-Confucian Societies (New York: Praeger, 1988)Google Scholar. Moody uses “post-Confucian” to indicate the political transformation of traditional Confucian regimes, not the end of the influence of the classical Confucian tradition itself.

3 See Bilahari Kausikan, “Asia's Different Standard”, and Neier, Aryeh, “Asia's Unacceptable Standard”, both in Foreign Policy 92 (1993): 35, 43.Google Scholar

4 The oft-made association between the “communitarian values [which] constitute the persistent and dominant social and political understandings in East Asia” and authoritarianism is noted and criticized in Daniel Bell, “A Communitarian Critique of Authoritarianism: The Case of Singapore”, Political Theory 25 (1997): 6–32, see esp. 7 and 26 n.5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Hall, David L., “Modern China and the Postmodern West,” in Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, ed. Deutsch, Eliot (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), p. 50.Google Scholar

6 Samuel Huntington, among others, has argued that there is a distinct Confucian “civilization” which poses a serious challenge to the West. See Huntington, , “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Bell, Daniel, Brown, David, Jayasuriya, Kanishka, Jones, David Martin, Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 1–16, 36–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Wei-ming, Tu, “Embodying the Universe: A Note on Confucian Serf-Realization,” in Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Ames, Roger T., Dissanayake, Wimal and Kasulis, Thomas P. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 181.Google Scholar

9 Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 174.Google Scholar

10 Wallach, John R., “Liberals, Communitarians, and the Tasks of Political Theory,” Political Theory 15 (1987): 593.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Communitarianism has long been faced with accusations of nostalgia or irrelevancy. Most of those writers who have avoided these charges have made creative use of certain aspects of the Western tradition, like Aristotelianism or civic republicanism, to suggest real alternatives to liberal modernity, rather than simply list modernity's failures. For instance, Maclntyre's, AlasdairAfter Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)Google Scholar and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar ambitiously appropriate the ideal of a Aristotelian-Thomist community to reveal the flaws of liberal individualism. Sandel, Michael, in his recent book Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, goes an impressive distance towards arguing for a more republican vision of American society which would address many communitarian complaints. An important exception to this heavy reliance on history is Barber, Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar, a book that mixes history, philosophy, sociology and practical politics in making its case for a more direct and communitarian form of democratic decision-making.

12 Shu-hsien, Liu, “Confucian Ideals and the Real World,” in Confucian Traditions, p. 111.Google Scholar

13 Gilbert Rozman identifies several “types” of Confucianism, which have provided ideological support for social reform, elite education, business practices, as well as the daily routine of peasant farmers throughout East Asia. Rozman, , “Comparisons of Modern Confucian Values in China and Tapan,” in The East Asian Region, p. 161.Google Scholar

14 Yin, Lujun, “The Crisis of Hermeneutical Consciousness in Modern China,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 17 (1990): 420,423, emphasis added.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Hirsch, H. N., “The Threnody of Liberalism,” Political Theory 14 (1986): 423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Etzioni, Amitai, “A Moderate Communitarian Proposal,” Political Theory 24 (1996): 159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 ibid.,, p. 168 n.4.

18 The point that democracy requires a stronger sense of public life and the common good than modem liberal neutrality permits has been exhaustively made from a variety of perspectives. A review of the importance the American founders attached to civic virtue can be found in Vetterli, Richard and Bryner, Gary, In Search of the Republic: Public Virtue and the Roots of American Government (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1987),Google Scholar chap. 3. A sociological view of the importance of community ties is provided in Bellah, Robert N. et al. The Good Society (New York: Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar; see esp. the introduction and appendix. For a strong theoretical defense of the need for a robust civil society, see Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995).Google Scholar

19 Taylor, Charles, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Rosenblum, Nancy L. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 16.Google Scholar

20 Etzioni, , “Moderate Communitarian Proposal,” p. 163Google Scholar. Few communitarians are so opposed to the notion of individual rights and political liberty as to suggest abandoning liberal modernity's most basic “universal principles.” In reference to the attempt to recognize the normative claims of diverse communities without falling into relativism and xenophobia, Charles Taylor wrote: “There must be something midway between the inauthentic and homogenizing demand for recognition of equal worth ⃛ and the self-immurement within ethnocentric standards” (Taylor, , “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Gutmann, Amy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], p. 72)Google Scholar. Much communitarian literature is taken up with attempts to develop overarching standards that embrace that midway point.

21 Some approaches to value articulation and justification include Taylor, Charles, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, esp. Part 1, “Identity and the Good,” which makes a near-theological defense of “moral sources” in human thinking; Nussbaum, Martha C., “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,” Political Theory 20 (1992): 202–246CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which advocates a particular vision of human flourishing; and Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)Google Scholar, which looks for a historically informed “minimalism” as a basis for standards of judgment.

22 The notion of “tending” is taken from Wolin, Sheldon S., “Tending and Intending a Constitution” in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1989).Google Scholar

23 This is not to claim that the republics of the Western tradition are the most communitarian of all possible forms of democratic government, or that classical republicanism and contemporary communitarianism are one and the same. That being said however, one may productively note the similarity between this argument and the one made by David Held, who describes two forms of republican democracy: one, more “protective,” preserved religious and other aristocratic forms of authority; the other, more “developmental” emphasized the importance of collective activity. Held, , Models of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 55, 61 and passim.Google Scholar

24 Besides Barber, Maclntyre, Sandel, Taylor and Wolin, see Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar; Galston, William, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar. The degree to which Arendt would comfortably consider herself a communitarian is uncertain; she died in 1975, before the term took on its contemporary relevance. Some have seen Arendt as nothing less than a “patron saint of communitarianism,” while others have used Arendt to criticize communitarian writers like Sandel. See Frohnen, Bruce, The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 201Google Scholar; and Honig, Bonnie, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 162–99.Google Scholar

25 Kateb, George, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 229–32Google Scholar; Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 82–87.Google Scholar

26 The amount of literature on the moral philosophy of Confucianism is enormous. Some recent important works include Antonio S. Cua, “Reasonable Challenges and Preconditions of Adjudication,” and Alasdair Maclntyre, “Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation Between Confucians and Aristotelians about the Virtues,” both in Culture and Modernity; on a related subject, see Yearly, Lee H., Mencius and Aquinas (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Tu Wei-ming is probably the most influential and well-known writer on Confucian philosophy in the West; some of his most important essays are collected in Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Way, Learning, and Politics.

27 The reference is to Hall, David L. and Ames, Rover T., Thinking Through Confucius (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987)Google Scholar, an excellent and influential example of philosophical engagement with Confucian thought.

28 Ibid., p. 131.

29 Bell, , Towards Illiberal Democracy, p. 75.Google Scholar

30 A view summarized in Ames, Roger T., The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 115–20.Google Scholar

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32 These ceremonial sacrifices and other rituals of speech, action and social intercourse, as well as traditions in literature and genealogy, originated with the cult surrounding the Shang and early Chou emperors, but had spread by Confucius's time to all levels of Chinese society. The basic texts of these activities and traditions were called the Wu Ching (Five Classics) and included the Shu Ching (Book of History, or Documents), the Shih Ching (Book of Poetry, or Songs), the Li Chi (Record of Rites), the notorious I Ching (Book of Changes) and, perhaps most important, the Ch'un Ch'iu (Spring and Autumn Annals), a compilation often attributed to Confucius himself.

33 Schwartz, Benjamin I., The World of Thought In Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 48–50,67Google Scholar and passim.

34 Fingarette, Hrbert, Confucius—The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 3, 20Google Scholar. Fingarette expands on his idea of “transformative magic” as follows: “By ‘magic’ I mean the power of a specific person to accomplish his will directly and effortlessly through ritual, gesture and incantation. The user of magic does not work by strategies and devices as a means to an end: he does not use coercion or physical forces. He simply wills the end in the proper ritual setting and with the proper ritual gesture and word” (p.3). This is not to make Confucius out to be a mystic, but to emphasize that in Confucianism there was no understanding of seeking advantage or popular or social achievement through the rituals. The rites were about one's fundamental relationship with the world; by doing what one should do, what should be will come to pass. Not for no reason did Fingarette call the li “holy”.

35 Hall, and Ames, , Thinking Through Confucius, p. 153.Google Scholar

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43 Consider this coy comment, involving the tyrannical monarchs Chieh and Tchou: “King Husan asked, ‘Is regicide permissible?’ Mencius answered:” A man who mutilates benevolence is a mutilator, while one who cripples Tightness is a crippler. He who is both a mutilator and a crippler is an ‘outcast.’ 1 have indeed heard of the punishment of the ‘outcast Tchou,’ but I have not heard of any regicide” {Mencius 1/B/8).

44 See Maclntyre, After Virtue, esp. chap. 15. The notion that Confucianism suggests that individuals, through rituals which put them in an immanent relationship with t'ien, makes everyone an “author” of their own lives has been commented on in Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius: ”In the interaction between the human being and t'ien, a person becomes an ‘authority’ in his deference to and embodiment of existing meaningsÛhe becomes an ‘author’ in his creative disposition” (p. 244).

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50 Theodore, W. de Bary writes that “jen may also be understood as the people, referring to humanity in the most universal sense, embracing all peoples” (De Bary, The Trouble With Confucianism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], p. 19).Google Scholar

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57 Mencius writes that a benevolent government will “reduce punishments and taxation,” whereas tyrannical governments “take the people away from their own work” {Mencius l/A/5).

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66 Consider the sociological picture painted in Ehrenhalt, Alan, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s (New York: Basic Books, 1995)Google Scholar. Ehrenhalt points out that without an understanding of limitations—limitations arising from the ties of everyday activity, whether the result of economic circumstance, religious custom, or personal choice—individuals cannot enjoy the common goods made possible through mutual association.

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