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

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Abstract

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—Bai Tongdong 白彤東, Daniel A. Bell, and Kang 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.

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Acknowledgment

I am especially grateful to Stuart White, Stephen Angle, and Nicholas Bunnin for their detailed comments on the early drafts of the article. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and editor-in-chief Yong Huang for their constructive feedback and support throughout the review process.

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  1. Department of Politics, Princeton University, 001, Fisher Hall, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544-1012, USA

    Yutang Jin

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Jin, Y. Classic Confucian Thought and Political Meritocracy: A Text-based Critique. Dao 20, 433–458 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-021-09789-6

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