Confucian Meritocracy and Passive Virtues

Sungmoon Kim is Chair Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy at the City University of Hong Kong. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Maryland at College Park and taught previously at the University of Richmond and Yonsei University. His research interests include Confucian democratic and constitutional theory, East Asian political thought, and comparative political theory, and his essays have appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Constellations, Contemporary Political Theory, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, European Journal of Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Politics, Law & Social Inquiry, Philosophy East and West, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and The Review of Politics among others. Kim is the author of six books -- Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Democracy after Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics: The Political Philosophy of Mencius and Xunzi (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Im Yunjidang (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2023). In 2016-2017, Kim was a Berggruen Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.