What Kind of Democracy Is a Confucian Democracy? A Response to Jeffrey Flynn

Jeff Flynn's comments on the author's methodological pluralism as well as the way he does political theory, namely explanatory evaluation, capture remarkably well what he struggled with most in writing Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice. As Flynn rightly notes, his research questions were inspired by actual problems with which contemporary East Asians (particularly Koreans) commonly struggle, and his goal was to derive philosophical inspirations from the actual social, cultural, and political realities of East Asia for normative political theory of Confucian democracy. To put this into a more personal perspective, his aim was to come up with a theory that would make sense to living East Asians (and I am one of them), as well as any ordinary people like his parents and grandparents who had only limited exposure to Western political philosophy but struggled for democracy and are now somehow practicing it.