(iPoster) Toward a Comparative Democratic Theory: Mou Zongsan and Democratic Renewal

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory III & Comparative Political Economy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory III

Abstract

Democracy’s contemporary crisis has generated a flourishing literature on democratic backsliding, resilience, and institutional repair. Yet many of the most influential proposals—procedural, deliberative, epistemic, agonistic, and realist—continue to face a stubborn difficulty: how to theorize democracy comparatively across civilizational traditions without either (a) treating Western liberal-democratic assumptions as the default conceptual baseline or (b) reducing non-Western resources to cultural “content” that can be appended to an otherwise settled procedural form. This paper argues that these difficulties are not merely methodological; they reflect deeper, often implicit ontological commitments about political agency, authority, and the moral–political relation.

To address this problem, I reconstruct a comparative framework from Mou Zongsan’s political thought, reading him not primarily as a “Confucian democrat” offering a compatibility argument, but as a theorist of the conditions under which democratic authority becomes institutionally sustainable. Mou’s contrasts—between shigong and shengxian/yingxiong political personalities, juti gan (sense of the concrete) and chouxiang gan (sense of the abstract), and zonghe (integrative) and fenjie (analytic) “forms of reason”—clarify why some political orders more readily institutionalize coordinated authority while others tend toward personalization or moral absorption of politics. I then reconstruct ziwo kanxian (self-limitation) as a generalizable mechanism of democratic renewal: political orders remain viable when they can generate and bind themselves to an internal counter-form that restrains their characteristic pathologies while preserving their moral motivations.

The paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it offers a more precise vocabulary for comparative democratic theory by showing how ontological assumptions shape what counts as “democratic” and what kinds of reforms appear intelligible. Second, it reframes democracy “under threat” as not only an institutional crisis but also a moment of conceptual self-clarification in which democracies can rebuild by engaging alternative civilizational resources as partners in democratic experimentation rather than as objects of assimilation.

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