Bai Tongdong delivered the 15th Giri Deshingkar Memorial Lecture on ‘Liberal Democracy and Confucianism: Creating a Hybrid for the 21st Century’. It was chaired by Ravi Bhoothalingam. The lecture was jointly organized by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi.
There are a number of problems with liberal democracy, especially the institution of one person one vote. Many democratic and liberal thinkers understand them and try to correct them from within. The speaker however argues that such revisions are fundamentally inadequate to address the problems. A sounder political arrangement could emerge from conceptualising a hybrid regime that contains both democratic and meritocratic elements, which is what a Confucian would propose. The speaker illustrates the basic arrangements of such a regime, and argues why it can not only deal with the extant problems but also why it is superior to contemporary democratic regimes.
Tongdong Bai is the Dongfang Chair Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University in China, an Adjunct Professor at NYU-Shanghai, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests include Chinese philosophy and political philosophy. He has published two books in English: Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case (Princeton University Press, 2019) and China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (Zed Books, 2012). His books in Chinese include A New Mission of an Old State: The Comparative and Contemporary Relevance of Classical Confucian Political Philosophy (Peking University Press, 2009), Tension of Reality: Einstein, Bohr and Pauli in the EPR Debates (Peking University Press, 2009) and Tian Xia: Five Lectures on the Mencius (Guangxi Shifan University Press, 2021).
Wednesday, 6 September 2023, 6 pm, Zoom https://bit.ly/GDML2023
