It is often remarked that East Asian polities have been hierarchical and the “elite” category continues to figure prominently in works on Chinese society and politics.1 Many scholars believe that hierarchy and elitism are deeply rooted in Confucianism, which served as the state orthodoxy in imperial China and provided the “psycho-cultural construct” of the way of life in other East Asian cultural
... [Show full abstract] communities as well. It is therefore not surprising that some should believe that if modern Confucian societies are to be democratic at all, elitism must be reconciled with democracy. In contrast, elitism is commonly a pejorative term in liberal democracies today, especially the United States, notwithstanding the portrayal of these polities by political scientists as cases of “democratic elitism.”2 Presenting “democracy with Confucian characteristics” as elitism, therefore, highlights its challenge to liberal forms of democracy. Taking elitism seriously, Daniel A. Bell, in his Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context, offers us an institutional arrangement that combines what he sees as an elitist Confucian rule of virtue with a transparent and accountable democratic government that would check abuses of power.
I shall first consider in what way Bell’s proposal is an alternative to liberal democracy, and then explore theories of elitism for a better understanding of why elitism is usually seen to threaten or undermine democracy, whether liberal or otherwise. These two sets of theoretical explorations will provide the basis for evaluating whether Bell’s proposal could realize the purposes and values of both Confucianism and democracy. I shall argue, contra Bell, that the community ideal of Confucian democracy, if it is to work in East Asia, would do better to eschew elitism for historical as well as pragmatic reasons.
The democratic value most directly threatened by elitism is not liberty but equality. Ironically, one view is that “just as elites inaugurated the age of equality, the age of equality brought forth elitism.”3 Until equality came to be taken seriously as a value, the domination of societies by a select minority—that is, the existence and importance of elites—was taken for granted and did not need justification. Elitism as a political philosophy asserts that those who distinguish themselves by occupation or special knowledge or some other valued ability can make better decisions and should decide for the less able; it attempts to explain or justify elites and their roles in society.4 In doing so, elitists have only to deny a practical equality of competence between elites and other people; they can believe in fundamental or innate human equality, which has been associated with some classical liberal political philosophies such as John Locke’s. Despite this association between liberty and equality, in practice there is often a tension between these two values, so sometimes liberalism can be found on the side of elitism. Nineteenth-century classical liberals believed that the leadership of moral and intellectual, as well as technical, elites is required for any liberal order to flourish. More recently, sociologists G. Lowell Field and John Higley even have considered elitism an obligation for those who hold liberal values; they see nearly all features of modern liberal democracies as “instrumental liberal values which under certain circumstances may provide or promote ultimate liberal values.”5 They argue that the “failure of liberal thinking to understand the elitist character of legally and constitutionally established representative government was largely responsible for liberalism’s failure to expand its effective influence in the world after 1900.”6
Bell intends his Confucian institutional innovation to be an alternative to liberalism, but no less a liberal than John Stuart Mill declares:
No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except insofar as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.7
Bell would probably disagree with Mill that the democratic masses, even at their...
