4 - A Decentralized Republic of Virtue

Summary

Youngmin Kim’s scholarly engagement with the history of Chinese political thought has led him to grapple with a problem that is central to the project of deparochializing political theory: how to delineate the boundaries of a thought tradition such that it is tractable as an object of study and deepened understanding. Rather than looking to geographic regions or broad intellectual traditions to provide the requisite boundaries for units of comparison, Kim turns to the self-identification of individuals as bearers of “a collective identity that they themselves construct.” In this chapter, Kim argues that the tradition of True Way Learning (TWL), a branch of Confucian tradition that became dominant in mid- to late imperial China, constitutes a sufficiently well-bounded community of thought and practice to serve as a useful comparator with similarly bounded traditions in other historical contexts. The chapter develops a comparison between TWL and the Kantian and Madisonian republican traditions in Euro-American thought and holds out the possibility that TWL might still serve as an ideational resource for twenty-first-century Chinese reformers, just as Enlightenment republicanism has inspired reimaginings of anti-despotic political order among American and European thinkers.