Habermas and Confucius

In December 1992 I was invited by Jürgen Habermas for a one-to-one meeting in his office at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. This conversation quietly influenced the direction of my later research on deliberative democracy in China (along with James Fishkin, Robert Luskin and Alice Shu). I introduced the Chinese philosopher Liang Shuming and asked about the relationship between Liang’s moral conception of communication and Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. Habermas listened carefully, asked about Liang’s intellectual background, and then explained why he regarded his own theory as more systematic and procedural. My later meeting with sinologist Dr. Heiner Roetz reinforced this point. Roetz explained how Confucian ideas such as ren (humaneness), yi (rightness), and shu (reciprocity), could provide moral resources for democracy. He rejected the assumption that Confucian political thought is inherently authoritarian and argued that it contains resources for public reasoning, criticism of political power, and universal standards of justice. During his visit to China in 2001, Habermas acknowledged that he was not a specialist in Confucian thought, although he suggested that Mencius (a disciple of Confucius) might offer resources for thinking about moral autonomy and public reason.

Habermas’s interest in Chinese democratisation remained with me. During fieldwork on village elections in rural China in 1995 and 1996 I encountered the practice of ‘heart-to-heart talks’ among villagers. These conversations reminded me of both Liang’s account of moral communication and Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. Liang had imagined rural governance as a practice of dialogue, community participation, ethical cultivation, and collective problem-solving. The deliberative experiments that emerged in rural China during the 1990s and 2000s were not direct implementations of his programme, but they can be understood as partial echoes and contemporary adaptations of it.

This position differs from approaches that give sortition a more constitutive role. James Fishkin’s Deliberative Polling, introduced in Zeguo Township in 2005, selected citizens randomly to consider local budget priorities. Sortition created a socially diverse body whose members could receive information, question experts, exchange reasons and form considered judgements. Fishkin treats random sampling as indispensable because it allows the forum to approximate an informed microcosm of the citizenry (Fishkin et al. 2010). Habermas places greater weight on the quality and circulation of communication throughout the political system. Hélène Landemore (2020) similarly assigns a more central democratic role to inclusive forms of citizen selection than Habermas does.

Looking back, the value of my 1992 encounter with Habermas lies less in any settled conclusion than in the questions it opened. Four remain especially important to my work: how communication can cross philosophical and civilisational traditions; whether random selection strengthens democratic legitimacy; how collective decisions should be made when deliberation does not produce consensus; and whether public reason can survive its growing mediation by digital platforms and artificial intelligence.

Habermas has left us, but the questions at the centre of his philosophy have become more urgent. In a world divided by war, geopolitical rivalry, digital fragmentation and algorithmic power, can people continue to resolve common problems through public reasoning rather than violence or coercion? His answer was to continue the conversation. Experience suggests that dialogue also requires fair institutions for representation, decision, accountability, and revision. The enduring task is to hold these elements together without surrendering the hope that people can still listen to one another, learn from disagreement, and act on reasons they can share.

Read the full paper here.