A Confucian Theory of Power

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 China and Korea to defend his idea that Confucian power is best understood in terms of responsibility (16-59). Next, he explores this idea’s implications for contemporary Confucian democracy by focusing on two kinds of responsibility. The first is the liability public officials bear for the suffering of their citizens, even if such suffering is not directly caused by the officials; and the second is the capacity of citizens to attend actively to one another’s concerns (59-71). In this way, Kim issues another challenge to contemporary Confucian meritocrats who attempt to base state legitimacy on performance rather than on responsibility, as these scholars often devalue citizens’ active political participation (69) but hardly develop a realistic way to prevent officials from abusing their power once they assume office (62). Following this essay are six critical responses and Kim’s replies to these responses.

In light of Kim’s meticulous attempt to highlight the role of power in Confucian political theory as well as the creative idea of power as responsibility that he proposes, this book is undoubtedly original and thought provoking for those who care about the future of East Asian societies. Moreover, as a leading expert on Confucian political theory, Kim maintains an extraordinarily high level of historical and philosophical rigor throughout his essay. This allows him to present exegeses with great accuracy and analyses with clear logic, thereby forestalling many potential criticisms on these fronts. Finally, if readers still manage to raise questions about Kim’s account, they will likely find that their questions have been well elaborated in one of the critical responses and that Kim’s thoughtful reply has more or less addressed them. Thus, the remainder of this review focuses on a topic that I believe neither Kim’s essay nor his six critics have adequately covered: the possibility of interpreting the same intellectual history of Confucianism differently.

Kim intends to offer a Confucian “political theory of power”, which is explicitly distinguished from “a conceptual study of power” (14), or an exploration of the ways to comprehend power per se. Instead, Kim aims to “investigate how power was made sense of, often tacitly, within the Confucian political tradition animated by specific political ideas…and to realize a specific goal” (15). As I understand this aim, Kim begins with a rough concept of power and uses it as a handy torch to shed light on several important topics in Confucian political discourses that remain relatively underexamined today. But once illuminated, these topics also enable him to reflect on that torch itself and hence to gain a better sense of the concept of power.

For example, in the second section of the essay, Kim revisits the Confucian distinction between “the Kingly Way” and “the Way of the Hegemon”, a distinction that bears far greater normative weight than contemporary Confucian performance meritocrats have acknowledged (17). Whereas hegemons rely on raw force to coerce, real kings rely on moral virtue to guide. Although both may increase the wellbeing of the ruled, the Way of the Hegemon is widely considered morally inferior to the Kingly Way in the Confucian tradition. Kim explores this distinction in light of its relevance to power. As he contends, for many pre-Qin Confucians, the wellbeing of the people under the rulership of a hegemon is always contingent upon the use of coercion, but coercive force can be easily abused (24). Thus, such uncertain wellbeing is never as appealing as the more solid one under the rulership of a king. It follows that, in neglecting the Confucian rejection of the Way of the Hegemon, contemporary Confucian performance meritocrats mistakenly assume that all ways to make the people happy are equal (25).

Moreover, when the distinction between the two Ways is understood in terms of power, it also becomes possible for Kim to abstract the pre-Qin Confucian understanding of power primarily as force-based coercion in light of its contrast to virtue-based guidance. On this basis, Kim proposes that the idea of power as responsibility can be largely understood as the result of post-Qin Confucian scholars’ attempt to tame coercion in the historical context of hereditary kingship, thereby leading to a reconceived understanding of power that aims to displace force (26).

This is a brilliant methodological move: without imposing an elaborate but likely exogenous definition of power on the Confucian tradition that does not even use any single term to capture that concept (15), Kim allows power to be a theme for the study of Confucian political thought and lets power reveal its own meaning within the Confucian tradition as its political and intellectual history unfolds. As such, in a somewhat Hegelian way, this approach also helps resolve the chicken-or-egg issue regarding the relationship between concept and phenomenon: in exerting influence on each other, they evolve with each other.

Meanwhile, readers may still wonder whether Kim nevertheless begins with a thin understanding of power to operationalize his approach, and if so, why he prefers this to another understanding of power. At first glance, this may not appear to matter much because the initial understanding of power, whatever it is, will eventually evolve into power as responsibility. However, I argue that the starting point exerts tremendous influence on the way in which the ensuing history is interpreted, as different starting points may give rise to vastly different interpretations even if historical facts themselves remain the same. Let me elaborate.

Kim summarizes three Western ways to understand the concept of power: “power-over”, “power-to”, and “power-with” (14). Whereas “power-over” roughly corresponds to the idea of power as coercive force, “power-to” captures the idea of power as enabling. As mentioned above, although Kim rightly insists that “power-over” and “power-to” coexist in the Confucian tradition, he seems to privilege “power-over” a little more in his discussion of pre-Qin Confucianism, as this “negative” understanding of power leads to Confucians’ worry about the abuse of coercive force (22). “Power-over”, in this sense, becomes the starting point of Kim’s inquiry, and the remainder of the history is largely interpreted as a series of attempts by Confucians to enrich and transform the meaning of power in order to tame and even sideline “power-over”. Put differently, post-Qin Confucians often appear in Kim’s essay as conscientious defenders of “power-to”, who attempt to impose moral restraints on hereditary rulers and allow ministers and even the ruled to share political responsibility with their rulers. The democratic implications at the end of the essay hence follow.

But what if Kim treated “power-to” as the starting point of his inquiry instead? Doing so may have produced a different interpretation of the Confucian tradition. In pre-Qin texts, sage-kings are frequently depicted as offering non-coercive guidance to their people by means of virtue and rituals. Such guidance allows the people themselves to become virtuous so as to harmonize with one another. Accordingly, virtue and rituals enable the people’s self-rule, which is exactly what “power-to” means. However, generations of ambitious rulers constantly attempt to achieve political hegemony and hence bring “power-over” to the table, and their political success gradually culminates in the displacement of virtue-based legitimacy (the Sagely-Line) by force-based legitimacy that passes down through the bloodline (the Princely-Line). Accordingly, one may cast a very different light upon post-Qin Confucians’ endeavor to theorize power as responsibility: rather than standing their ground to defend “power-to”, they retreat from their initial emphasis and give in to “power-over” whenever hegemonic rulers forcefully assert their dominance.

Admittedly, this is a much less appealing way to interpret what these Confucians do than Kim’s interpretation, in as much as it portrays their endeavor instead as (a) an abandonment of the “rectification of names”, arguably the most important thing that Confucius himself urges his followers to do, and (b) a compromise with the status quo in a world where hereditary kingship eventually becomes an unchallengeable fact. What follows, then, is not the democratic implications of Confucian power but an exhibition of Confucians’ failure to resist both the lure and the intimidation of Legalist absolutism.

This is definitely not to say that the alternative interpretation above is more faithful to historical facts than is Kim’s. Nor is Kim unaware of alternative interpretations of the examined thinkers. Quite the contrary, he takes one such alternative seriously. In his discussion of imperial Confucianism through the lens of Dong Zhongshu in the third section of the essay, Kim mentions a conventional way to read the Han-dynasty thinker as “a Legalist posing as a Confucian” (36) and rejects it. This is a welcome rejection, but not much is said about alternative readings of other examined thinkers. Such silence, in turn, may give rise to new questions regarding his portrayal of them.

For example, in the fourth section, Kim examines Northern Song Confucian scholar-officials’ attempt to advance Dong’s project by claiming their shared responsibility with the emperors. In this examination, Kim invokes these scholar-officials’ practice of citing classical Confucian texts to boost their moral power and support their claim. Such a practice may appear to show that the authority of Confucianism is independent of the authority of the emperors, but Kim rightly pushes back by reaffirming that the scholar-officials’ quasi-constitutional claim is still based on their acknowledgment of the ruler’s undivided political power (43). Rather, the real breakthrough is better observed in Chŏng Tojŏn’s account later (52-56).

Yet Kim could have further emphasized some nuances in Northern Song politics, as doing so may cast a different light on those scholar-officials. Despite their significance, Confucian classics are just one source of scholar-officials’ authority. Northern Song is distinguished from almost all other Chinese imperial dynasties in its insistence on the authority of so-called zu zong zhi fa 祖宗之法, or a changing, vague, but still recognizable series of rules and instructions initiated especially by Taizu and Taizong, the first two Song emperors. By the time of Emperor Renzong, zu zong zhi fa already takes on a life of its own, potentially creating a conceptual and practical distinction between the monarchy and its incumbent monarch (hence something comparable to the famous problem of the King’s Two Bodies in medieval political thought).

In claiming their share of responsibility in ruling, Song scholar-officials often resort to zu zong zhi fa, even when it has become obviously inconvenient due to its conservative nature. In fact, the blind adherence to zu zong zhi fa is precisely a major target of Wang Anshi’s unsuccessful reforms during the reign of Emperor Shenzong. Accordingly, Song scholar-officials’ endeavor is perhaps less morally laudable than Kim shows: their motivation to participate in the process of ruling may be less “a sense of responsibility” to the wellbeing of the people (45) than an unreasonable devotion to past rulers’ hegemonic legacies, hence less a desire to endorse “power-to” than a desire to preserve “power-over”. At the very least, the line drawn between the two sides is more obscure than it may appear at first glance.

To be sure, it is in no way surprising that the same series of accurately portrayed historical facts may yield multiple competing interpretations, and asking an author to thoroughly reject all other possible interpretations before proposing one’s own is also an uncharitable demand. Nevertheless, I believe that some reasonable burden of proof still remains on the author’s shoulders to defend one’s interpretation not only on its own terms but also against its alternatives.Perhaps a more effective way for Kim to do so is precisely to reflect on the very beginning of his inquiry and argue that “power-over” is indeed more suitable than “power-to” and “power-with” as the starting point for his examination of the birth of power as responsibility. Doing so would spare him from the need to defend his interpretation of each examined thinker one by one. More importantly, it would allow him to assert that the implications of his Confucian theory of power are unmistakably, and even unavoidably, democratic. This is a stronger assertion than the one he has offered. It is also an assertion that contemporary East Asian societies urgently need.

REFERENCES

Deng Xiaonan, Invoking Imperial Ancestors’ Instructions in Early Northern Song Politics (Beijing: Joint Publishing, 2014).

This brief discussion of zu zong zhi fa relies entirely on the seminal work by historian Deng Xiaonan, Invoking Imperial Ancestors’ Instructions in Early Northern Song Politics (Beijing: Joint Publishing, 2014). She is particularly skeptical of Northern Song scholar-officials’ pronounced moralism in light of their factional conflicts that often revolve around zu zong zhi fa: “At that time, the moral depravity of any single scholar-official was often despised, but these scholar-officials’ collective moral depravity in political struggles was often hidden behind the banner of the absolute moral standard” (454).