Abstract

As Sungmoon Kim points out, contemporary Confucian studies has been disproportionately focused on the ethical side of the tradition. In this regard, Kim’s book, Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics: The Political Philosophy of Mencius and Xunzi, makes an enormous contribution to the field of Confucian political thought. What makes his project even more valuable is that he goes beyond the textual analysis of political concepts and ideas in classical Confucian writings and builds them into a coherent and systematic political theory.In what follows, I will examine Kim’s reconstruction of the Confucian political theories of Mencius and Xunzi. However, rather than taking issue with whether his reconstructions are true...