Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Ho Kong Chong, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Although there is no record of a meeting between the late liberal theorist John Rawls and the late Lee Kuan Yew, first and long ruling Prime Minister of Singapore, they could have met in Harvard in the late 1960s, where Lee was on a political sabbatical and Rawls was developing his liberal Theory of Justice, which first published in 1971. Central and essential to Rawls’s theory of justice is the idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’, meaning the wide distribution of productive property among the citizenry in order to provide the economic security for individual citizens to fair exercise of political rights and equal opportunity to public office. Productive property includes both hard property as in homeownership and ‘soft’ property as in knowledge and skills. By that time, the PAP government, under Lee Kuan Yew, had already initiated the national public housing program, which will eventually widely distribute hard property to the entire nation and instituted free public education. Had the liberal theorist met the political pragmatist, Rawlsian theory might have gained more realism and Singapore polity might be less authoritarian or more liberal. In this seminar, in contrast to conventional critique of illiberalism of the Singapore government, I would like to turn the question of whether liberal Rawls would be happy with the ‘property-owning democracy’ of Singapore.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Chua Beng Huat is Professor of Urban Studies at the Yale-NUS College and Professor, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Singapore. Professor Chua received his PhD from York University, Canada. He has previously served as Provost Chair Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Science (2009-2017), Research Leader, Cultural Studies in Asia Cluster, Asia Research Institute (2000-2015); Convenor of Cultural Studies Programmes (2008-2013) and Head of Department of Sociology (2009-2015), National University of Singapore. His publications include: The Golden Shoe: Building Singapore’s Financial District (1989), Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (1995), Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore (1997), Life is Not Complete without Shopping (2003), and as editor, Singapore Studies II: Critical Studies (1999). Beyond Singapore writings, he has edited several volumes on cultural politics in Asia, including Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities (2000), Communitarian Politics in Asia (2004), Elections as Popular Culture in Asia (2007). His most recent book, Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore (2017), was on the list of Best Books of 2018 by Foreign Affairs journal. He is the founding co-executive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

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