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Phan Chu Trinh's Democratic Confucianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2019
Abstract
A consensus on three claims has emerged in literature that explores the relationship between Confucianism and democracy: democracy is not the exclusive property of Western liberalism, Confucianism and liberalism are opposed, and democracy in East Asia would be best buttressed by Confucianism, not liberalism. Why, then, does Phan Chu Trinh (1872–1926), Vietnam's celebrated nationalist of the French colonial period, argue that liberalism and democracy are Western creations that cannot be decoupled, and, if adopted by the Vietnamese, will allow Confucianism to find its fullest expression? The answer is that Trinh ignores liberalism's individualism while celebrating other aspects of liberalism and Western civilization. Trinh's interpretation of Western ideas, although naive, is a creative one that offers political theorists a lesson: it may be useful to view foreign ideas as foreign, to interpret them generously, and to import the creative distortion to revive our own cherished, yet faltering, traditions.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019
Footnotes
Versions of this article were presented at conferences at UC Irvine and the French Network for Asian Studies in Paris, in 2017. I would like to thank Farah Godrej, Georgia Warnke, Daniel Brunstetter, John Medearis, John Christian Laursen, and the reviewers of the Review of Politics for their feedback.
References
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