Tongdong Bai, Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University

The Adrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy

Thursday, November 21, 2024 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Online event -- Zoom
Click link below to register

Registration required: click here to register 

There are four problems with democracy, especially the institution of one person one vote. These include an inherent anti-elitism; a failure to consider nonvoting stakeholders; a bias toward the interests of powerful interests; and individual voters' difficulty to judge their own interests. Many democratic thinkers understand them and try to correct them from within a framework of liberal democracy. Tongdong Bai, Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University, will argue that these revisions are fundamentally inadequate to address these fundamental problems of majoritarian democracy. A better political arrangement is a hybrid regime that contains both democratic and meritocratic elements, which is what a Confucian would propose. Professor Bai will illustrate the basic arrangements of this regime, and show why it can deal with the aforementioned problems -- and thus why it is superior to today’s democratic regimes. 

Event moderated by Joshua Freedman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China.

Professor Bai's talk will be heavily based on chapters 2-4 of his book, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case. The file is attached below.

--

Dr. Tongdong Bai, born in Beijing, China, is the Dongfang Chair Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University, Global Professor of Law at NYU’s Law School, and adjunct professor at NYU-Shanghai. He held a bachelor degree in nuclear physics and a master degree in the philosophy of science from Peking University, and a doctoral degree in philosophy from Boston University. He was a tenured associate professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati before he moved to Fudan in 2010. In the academic year of 2016-2017, he was a Fulbright Scholar and a Berggruen Fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

His research interests include political philosophy and Chinese philosophy. He has two books published in English: China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (Zed Books, 2012), and Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case (Princeton University Press, 2019); he also has three books published in Chinese, 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).

He is now working on the philosophy of Han Fei Zi (circa 250 BCE), a “Legalist” and a harsh critic of Confucians, as well as a real-life princeling who is often compared with Machiavelli and Hobbes. He is also the director of an English-based MA and visiting program in Chinese philosophy at Fudan University that is intended to promote the studies of Chinese philosophy in the world. These and other academic and social activities in which he is involved are all aimed to introduce new political norms that draw their inspirations from traditional Chinese philosophy and are informed by comparative philosophy and political theories.