Reviewed by Antong Liu, Singapore Management University

The main body of this book is an extensive essay by Sungmoon Kim on the concept of power and its evolution in Confucian political thought. While arguably underlying any attempt to theorize politics, power “remains one of the least examined concepts” in the Confucian tradition (7). This lack of attention to power, as Kim claims, correlates with scholars’ overemphasis on Confucian moral virtue (3) but weakens the potential for Confucianism to thrive as a robust political theory in contemporary East Asia (8). To mitigate it, Kim begins by interpreting several moments in the ancient history of Confucian political thought in…