Report 14th Political Philosophy Workshop: "Why Political Meritocracy Failed in Western Europe?"

Dr. Susanne Beiweis

Professor James Hankins at Harvard University presented a paper on political meritocracy, starting with Roman and Greek Antiquity, through the Renaissance, and up to the comparison between East and West. He sees the rise of populism in Western societies as a crisis of the elite(s) grounded in the impersonal nature of constitutional democracy. And in the similar vein, reinterpreting Renaissance ‘civic humanism’ as a tradition of virtue politics, he argues that we need to reinvigorate the older Western traditions of humanistic meritocracy in which elite education was put forward for the acquisition of good character and political prudence. In various ways, his recovery of the humanistic meritocracy coincided with his interests in the school of Political Confucianism and its prospects for political meritocracy of a Confucian type.

Professor Jun-Hyeok KWAK, as moderator, called attention to the significance of Professor Hankins’s work with respect to the fallacies of currently dominant views on Renaissance civic humanism and brought up a set of clarification questions such as meritocracy, virtue politics, and the rule of law. Then, pinpointing the imperative of accountability in meritocracy, he expressed concern over the allegation that the demands of political accountability could be met by the moral requirements of humanistic virtue politics. The commentator Dr. Beiweis asked similar questions in relation to the gradation between being an active political participant and being a teacher of virtue politics. She also asked what might characterize such ‘moral excellence’ today, and is it conceivable that it can still be taught within existing learning institutions or would we need to liberate education? Furthermore, she asked why the civil-humanistic project of virtue politics failed?

The audience took great interest in the debates and questions, mostly with regard to the concepts used in the paper. Notably, the central questions asked concerned the following topics: a) clarification of the concepts of virtue (e. g., moral versus political), b) the reasons for the failure of ‘civic humanism’ and c) in terms of Confucianism, whether it would not be better to compare virtue/civic humanism with Mohism rather than Confucianism.

We thank Professor Hankins for sharing his paper with us and the inspiring talk.