About the Book

Harmony has become a major challenge for modern governance in the 21st century because of the multi-religious, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character of our increasingly globalized societies. Governments all over the world are facing growing pressure to weave together the myriad subcultures and the diverse components that constitute their modern pluralistic societies. This book examines the idea of harmony, and its place in politics and governance, both in theory and practice, in Asia, the West and elsewhere. It explores and analyses the meanings, components, dimensions and methodologies of harmony as a normative political ideal in both Western and Asian philosophical traditions. It argues that in Western political thought, which sees politics to be primarily concerned with resolving social conflicts and protecting individual rights, the concept of harmony has often been neglected. In contrast, harmony or ‘he’ has been a profound theme in Confucian thought since earliest times, and current leaders of a number of East Asian governments, including the Chinese government, have explicitly declared the goal of realizing a harmonious society as the aim of government. The book fully explores these issues, but also assesses how harmony is pursued, jeopardized or deformed in the real world of politics, based upon empirical analysis of a variety of different cultural, social and political contexts, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Denmark, Latin America and the Scandinavian countries. It shows how harmony as an organizing concept can help to promote new thinking in governance, and overcome problems of modern-day governance like distrust, adversarial conflicts, hyper-individualism, coercive state intervention, and free-market alienation. It also discusses the potential problems posed by the pursuit of harmony, in particular in the grave threat of totalitarianism, and considers how these risks can best be mitigated.