I am happy to announce the publication of a new book, Stephen C. Angle and Yutang Jin, eds., Progressive Confucianism and Its Critics: Dialogues from the Confucian Heartland (Routledge, 2025). More information on the book can be found here. This book is a translation into English of a series of dialogues that I held with Chinese Confucians in Beijing in the spring of 2017. The Introduction and part of the first dialogue are available at Amazon here, in case you’d like to learn more. Enjoy!
Sungmoon Kim, Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2023, 296pp., $83.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780197630617.
Reviewed by Hui-chieh Loy, National University of Singapore
Sungmoon Kim’s book continues his long-standing project of bringing together insights from Confucianism and a political theorizing meant to be fit for the modern world. Like his earlier works, the new book combines interesting discussions of pre-modern texts and thoughtful applications of ancient ideas to modern concerns. The ambition of the book, as stated early on, is to articulate a “democratic theory of Confucian constitutionalism” (1). This ambition situates Kim’s book within the ongoing debate between the two main competing strands of modern Confucian political theorizing: Confucian political meritocracy and Confucian democracy. Kim advocates for the latter, putting his proposals…
A message from Sungmoon Kim:
I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new book series with Amsterdam University Press called “East Asian Philosophy and Political Thought.” As a series editor, I am joined by Ellie Wang, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at National Chengchi University, as the series’ associate editor. Please check out this link for the series web page: https://www.aup.nl/en/series/east-asian-philosophy-and-political-thought
As a series editor, my primary role will be identifying talented (young) scholars in East Asia and beyond and helping them find an intellectual platform in which their original ideas can be taken seriously and critically engaged by other scholars. I hope this will turn out to be a helpful academic venue for all of you who engage in East Asian philosophy and political thought, broadly understood. Please note that this series publishes both authored books and edited volumes that engage in East Asian philosophy and political thought, broadly defined. You can download the book proposal from our web page above.
The Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy at the City University of Hong Kong is hosting an on-line book symposium on Roy Tseng’s recent book, Confucian Liberalism. Speakers include Loubna El Amine, Dongxian Jiang, Sungmoon Kim, and myself, as well as responses from Roy. We begin at 9:00am Hong Kong time on June 8, which is 9:00pm EST on Wednesday evening, June 7. Details are on the poster here.
Sungmoon Kim’s new book Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy has just been published by Oxford University Press; for more information, see here.
The U.S.-China Research Group on Cosmopolitanism consists of nine scholars from the United States and the Chinese cultural sphere who are pursuing a structured exploration of theoretical and practical problems related to cosmopolitanism. In particular, we are looking to draw upon Chinese philosophical traditions in order to explore alternative understandings of the nature and future of cosmopolitanism. Each member of the group has composed a short reflection describing her or his initial thoughts on the topic, which are presented in a blog at the bottom of our web page:
https://uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu/topics/research-group-cosmopolitanism
Members have further developed their short reflections into more substantial accounts and will present these at a meeting at the University of Hong Kong on 5-6 May 2023. These will be made available once they have been further revised and refined.
I am pleased to announce to the launch of a revised and expanded website devoted to Chinese-language writings related to progressive Confucianism, jinburuxue.com! Some of the essays on the site are appearing for the first time in Chinese translation; thanks to their authors for permission to translate them and much gratitude to the students and scholars who done the lion’s share of the translating. The new site is simplified a bit (for example, no more English-language interface, but given that all the content is in Chinese, that seemed superfluous and made maintaining the site much more complicated) but also much more robust, for which I am grateful to my terrific research assistant, Kate Liu. If you have or know of any content (essays of course, but also, at least in principle, other sorts of digital material) that you feel fits with the themes of the site, please contact me.
Two articles on Confucianism and Just War have been published in the latest Philosophy Compass:
Enjoy!
The University of California Press with support from the Berggruen Institute has published Amitav Acharya, Daniel A. Bell, Rajeev Bhargava, and Yan Xuetong, eds., Bridging Two Worlds: Comparing Classical Political Thought and Statecraft in India and China. The full text is available for download here; the Table of Contents is below.
Yutang Jin’s article “Self-Restriction, Political Myth, and the Politics of the Ordinary: Mou Zongsan’s Confucian Democracy” has been published in Political Theory; read on for the abstract.
