Sungmoon Kim’s book is an important contribution to constitutional scholarship. It is as important for what it does as much as for what it says. The book is amongst the first to combine Asian and Western meditations on state governance. Kim has a deep and broad understanding of both Confucian traditions and liberal traditions, in particular, that centered around John Rawls. His book is an object lesson in the value of exchange between traditions. For those within Western constitutional traditions, Kim’s book proves how much there is to learn from Confucianism—and, indeed, from other Asian traditions too. For those within Confucian traditions the converse may be true; each has something to learn from the other. Kim’s willingness to engage and combine these differing approaches guides us toward a form of constitutional scholarship that is unafraid of, and draws strength from, cross-cultural engagement.
N. W. Barber (Mon,) studied this question.