Classic Confucian Thought and Political Meritocracy: A Text-based Critique

Recent debates on Confucian meritocracy largely center around outright normative critiques rather than its textual basis. The unflattering upshot is the lack of attention to a mode of critique that scrutinizes Confucian meritocracy by questioning the way meritocrats invoke Confucian concepts and val...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDao : a journal of comparative philosophy Vol. 20; no. 3; pp. 433 - 458
Main Author Jin, Yutang
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.09.2021
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Chinese
Education
Ethics
Meritocracy
Non-Western Philosophy
Norms
Philosophy
Philosophy of Religion
Politics
Religious Studies
Confucian meritocracy
Confucian political theory
comparative political theory
Confucian democracy
classic Confucianism
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Summary:Recent debates on Confucian meritocracy largely center around outright normative critiques rather than its textual basis. The unflattering upshot is the lack of attention to a mode of critique that scrutinizes Confucian meritocracy by questioning the way meritocrats invoke Confucian concepts and values. Focusing on three meritocrats—B ai Tongdong 白彤東, Daniel A. Bell, and K ang Xiaoguang 康曉光, this article ventures a text-based normative approach by examining continuities and ruptures between core meritocratic arguments they make, and the messages conveyed by Confucian masters. The core argument that I advance is that the meritocratic thesis about the political division of labor does not mesh with the classic Confucian understandings of voluntariness and political authority, which generates uneasy normative consequences for Confucian meritocracy. Ultimately, classic Confucianism does not provide a conceptually secure platform for the meritocratic part of Confucian meritocracy as its ardent advocates claim.
ISSN:1540-3009
1569-7274
DOI:10.1007/s11712-021-09789-6