Schmittian Moments 11 (part 1)

Authoritarianism takes different forms. First, using a Schmittian lens and applying it largely to legal institutional frameworks, I look at how these differences might be understood. That will be the work of the first part of this excercise. After that I try and suggest what difference the differences make in the minds of those assessing them. That will be in part two.

I begin by looking at Xi and China's increasing interest in Confucianism as an alternative to the importation of Western style legal systems. The increasing invocation of Confucian thought by the Chinese Communist Party, particularly under Xi Jinping, has often been interpreted as a strategic appropriation of tradition, an effort to culturally legitimize authoritarian rule by cloaking it in familiar moral language. Yet this view presupposes a disjunction between Confucianism and authoritarianism, as though Confucianism were being bent or reinterpreted to suit the interests of an illiberal regime. A closer reading reveals something more troubling: the Party’s use of Confucian ideas is not merely instrumental or cosmetic, it is authentic. Confucianism, from its classical roots to its codification in imperial Chinese legal systems, is itself a deeply authoritarian doctrine. 

The Party’s Confucian turn is not, then,  a political deformation of a noble philosophy; it is a reactivation of a tradition whose core commitments, moral hierarchy, paternalistic sovereignty, and suspicion of legal equality, harmonize seamlessly with the structure of modern Chinese authoritarianism. This alignment is especially clear in Xi Jinping’s remarks on the relationship between law and virtue. “Law is a set of virtues in writing,” he declared in 2016. “Virtue represents the law in your heart.” The “rule of law and the rule of virtue,” he concluded, “must be balanced and coordinated.” This formulation mirrors closely the preface to the 653 Tang Code: “Virtue and morals are the foundation of government and education, while laws and punishments are the operative agencies of government and education… just as it takes morning and evening to form a whole day.” These statements are not simply echoes across time, they express a consistent and continuous political theology in which law is never sovereign but always subordinate to a higher moral-political order. 

Confucianism, as exemplified in both the Tang Code and Xi Jinping’s rhetoric, has always subordinated legal norms to hierarchical virtue, and this subordination is the hallmark of an authoritarian ideology. The Tang Code itself illustrates the Confucian fusion of morality and rule. It enshrined differential legal treatment according to one’s social role and familial position, with punishments scaled by rank and relational context. A son striking his father was punished more severely than a father striking his son; a crime against one’s parents carried heavier penalties than against strangers. This was not a deviation from legal justice; it was the Confucian ideal of justice. Law was not designed to be blind but to see clearly into the moral and social order, reinforcing it rather than standing above it. The sovereign, in this view, is not bound by law but is the apex of the moral hierarchy that law expresses. He rules not through impersonal procedure, but through cultivated virtue and discretionary judgment. Such an order does not merely accommodate authoritarian rule, it depends on it. 

Mencius, often miscast in modern discourse as a proto-democratic thinker due to his limited endorsement of the people’s right to depose immoral rulers, in fact provides one of the strongest philosophical foundations for authoritarian paternalism. His conception of the ruler is that of a benevolent father, governing by moral example rather than by legal contract. The people are likened to children: they are to be cared for, cultivated, and morally shaped by a ruler whose legitimacy lies not in popular consent or institutional restraint, but in his superior virtue. Mencius does not advocate for legal equality or political accountability; he affirms an order in which virtue flows downward from ruler to subject, mediated through rites, ritual, and hierarchical relations. His famous analogy of the child falling into a well illustrates his belief in innate moral intuition, but it is the ruler, not the masses, who must act on this intuition in a sovereign, fatherly capacity. 

This hierarchical moral order finds institutional expression in the doctrine of the Rectification of Names (zhengming), a cornerstone of Confucian political thought. Social roles and titles, father, minister, ruler, must align with their proper moral functions, and social disorder arises when these names no longer correspond to reality. This doctrine reinforces not only hierarchy but moral surveillance: each person must act in strict accordance with their role, and the ruler must ensure that all others do so. In political terms, the Rectification of Names supports an order where public law is always vulnerable to moral override. General codification is viewed with suspicion because it threatens to equalize relationships that are meant to be hierarchical and contextual. The very idea of a neutral, impersonal legal code is at odds with the Confucian belief that morality is relational, situated, and to be enforced by the wise discretion of the sovereign. 

The Chinese state’s reluctance to embrace full legal codification, and its preference for flexible enforcement, are therefore not aberrations, they are authentic expressions of this Confucian legacy. Contemporary expressions such as “rules and regulations are dead, but people are alive” capture the ethos of Confucian legality, in which law must yield to moral discretion and human judgment. In practice, this justifies a legal culture in which rules are selectively enforced, exceptions are routinely made for the “greater good,” and personal loyalty, filial piety, and political conformity are valued above procedural fairness. This dynamic was clearly illustrated in a 2016 case where a young man stabbed a debt collector to death who had harassed and exposed himself to the young man’s mother. Initially sentenced to life in prison, the man’s sentence was later reduced to five years following public outrage centred on the perceived moral justification of his act as an expression of filial piety. 

The reduction was not a triumph of legal argument but a concession to Confucian moral sentiment. Here, legal culpability was subordinated to moral virtue, and the rule of law gave way to the rule of familial ethics. Such outcomes are consistent with a legal system that is not governed by abstract rights or formal codes but by living moral traditions interpreted by those in authority. 

This Confucian moralism appeals to the Chinese leadership for reasons both ideological and strategic. Liberal legalism, rooted in proceduralism, individual rights, and institutional separation of powers, threatens the unchallenged authority of the Party. Confucianism, by contrast, offers a framework in which obedience, hierarchy, and moral pedagogy are virtues rather than pathologies. It legitimates centralization, allows discretion without accountability, and provides a culturally resonant alternative to Western political models. Confucianism is not being instrumentalised to mask authoritarianism, it is chosen precisely because it justifies it. The Party presents itself not merely as a political body but as the moral sovereign of the people, a teacher-state charged with cultivating virtue and maintaining harmony through a deeply hierarchical order. 

In this context, law becomes not a constraint on power but a flexible instrument of moral governance. The ideal of rule of law, understood as legality, transparency, and impartiality, is systematically displaced by a Confucian logic in which legality is always subordinate to ethical role fulfilment, personal virtue, and sovereign discretion. The ruler is not first among equals but father of the people, and the legal system is not a framework for liberty but a mechanism of social correction. Thus, the use of Confucianism by the Chinese state is not a betrayal of Confucian values; it is a confirmation of them. It affirms what was always implicit in the tradition: that moral hierarchy trumps legal equality, that order is more important than rights, and that rule is justified not by law but by virtue. Far from offering an alternative to authoritarianism, Confucianism supplies its most enduring and coherent philosophical justification. The Chinese Party-state does not distort Confucianism; it fulfils it. 

So how does this map out onto the Schmittian landscape? It is clear that although both Confucian and Schmittian theories of law and political rule offer deeply illiberal visions of authority, legality, and order they do so from different civilisational and philosophical vantage points. Their respective commitments to hierarchy, the primacy of moral or sovereign authority, and suspicion of legal formalism invite comparison—especially in the context of contemporary Chinese legal-political discourse (and as we’ll see, perhaps in Modi’s India too), where echoes of both can be found. Confucianism, particularly in the Mencian tradition, places moral cultivation and hierarchical familial obligations at the core of legitimate political order. For Confucius and Mencius, law is never autonomous or self-justifying; it is an expression of moral order rooted in human relationships, especially the family. The ruler is not simply a legal executor but a moral exemplar, someone who governs by virtue and who harmonizes cosmic, familial, and political order. Mencius famously defended the right of the people to overthrow unjust rulers, as in the case of his endorsement of regicide in the example of the tyrant Zhou. But this was not a defence of democratic participation—it was rather a moral judgment that the sovereign had abdicated his status by ceasing to act in accord with moral propriety. Even the capacity to judge such dereliction, however, is left to sagely rulers or ministers rather than to the people as legal subjects. Law in this Confucian tradition is deeply embedded in ritual, relational duties, and social roles. The notion of “rectification of names” (zhengming) expresses this vividly: good government requires that words match realities, that the roles of ruler, father, son, and minister are not confused or dissolved. Legal codes must affirm, not undermine, the social and moral hierarchies that constitute proper order. 

The idea that law might challenge authority, whether of the ruler or the patriarch, is alien to the Confucian ethos. Instead, law serves pedagogically, instructing people in virtue through its symbolic force and its selective application. The suspicion toward public legal codification stems from this view: formalized law, universally applied, undermines the flexibility of sagely rule and the primacy of context-sensitive moral judgment. 

Carl Schmitt, writing in the early 20th century Weimar context, also rejects liberal legal formalism, but he does so not from a moralistic or familial vantage point but from a decisionist and political one. His core claim, that "sovereign is he who decides on the exception", locates authority not in law or moral virtue, but in the capacity to suspend the law in moments of crisis. For Schmitt, the essence of political authority is not the rule of law but the power to determine when the law no longer applies. He too is hostile to legal universalism and proceduralism, viewing them as obfuscations that render the state impotent in the face of existential threats. The sovereign must be able to decide directly, absolutely, and without mediation by abstract norms. 

Despite this radical difference in tone and justification, moral hierarchy versus existential decisionism, Confucian and Schmittian thought converge in their hostility to the liberal legal model. Both refuse to separate law from the person of the ruler; both see law not as a neutral mechanism but as an instrument of rule that must be subordinated to a higher form of order, whether moral or political. Neither permits the law to function as a space of independent critique or challenge to power. 

Contemporary Chinese legal discourse reflects elements of both. The moral rhetoric of filial duty and virtue, visible in legislation such as the 2013 Elderly Protection Law, draws clearly from Confucian tropes, while the actual functioning of law as a tool of executive rule and state security evokes Schmittian logic. The rule of law, in official Chinese political discourse, is always “ruled” by something else: virtue, the Party, the state’s mission. The suspicion of public legal codification, the privileging of unwritten norms, and the tendency to resolve contradictions through moral or political judgment rather than legal process all testify to a legal culture in which sovereignty is never fully delegated to institutions. The appeal of Confucianism over Western liberalism for contemporary Chinese leadership lies in this very structure. Confucianism provides a native, historically resonant theory of authority that sacralises hierarchy, denies the autonomy of law, and offers moral legitimation for paternalistic rule. Unlike liberalism, it does not require pluralism, rights, or the depersonalization of power. Like Schmitt, it sees sovereignty as indivisible and law as an instrument, not a constraint. But unlike Schmitt, Confucianism cloaks this in the authentically Confucian Chinese nativist language of harmony, virtue, and continuity, making it more palatable for long-term ideological rule. (This connects it with the use of Reformist urban Islamic institutional structures and ideology in post-colonial Islamic nation states. Drawing on nativist, authentic culture removes the humiliation of having to import western style legalism or revolutionary leftist Marxism and denigrate the indigenous cultures, something that many anti-colonialist theorists in the west seem to overlook .) 

Anyway, in short, both Confucianism and Schmittianism furnish conceptual resources for authoritarian rule. Their affinities, despite different metaphysical assumptions, point to a shared rejection of liberal legalism and a commitment to a substantive, unified, and hierarchical order. That the Chinese state turns to Confucius rather than Locke is not an act of ideological distortion but one of cultural authenticity. What we confront in Chinese legal-political ideology is not the corruption of Confucianism, but its realization. 

So what if we turn now to the new type of authoritarianism developing in the USA. Although Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are increasingly grouped together under the label of “authoritarian” leaders, the fundamental differences in how they understand and exercise authority reveal two very different political cosmologies. These differences are not merely stylistic but are rooted in profoundly distinct philosophical traditions, Trump in a Western, Schmittian logic of sovereignty as exception and will, and Xi in a neo-Confucian tradition of moral governance, ritual hierarchy, and virtue as the foundation of legitimate rule. 

Trump’s politics operates through disruption. His vision of leadership emphasises the personal assertion of power over institutional constraint, echoing Carl Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Throughout his presidency and particularly in this second term, Trump has treated legality as conditional on his interpretation of necessity. He issued sweeping executive orders that overturned long-standing policies, unilaterally restricted immigration, deployed federal agents to American cities in the face of protests, and attempted to subordinate independent agencies to executive loyalty. In the run-up to the 2020 and 2024 elections, Trump openly declared his willingness to sideline democratic institutions if they failed to serve his ends. He has pardoned political allies, undermined court rulings, and repeatedly framed his opponents as existential threats to the state, justifying extraordinary measures. In these moments, law becomes not a set of stable procedures but a pliable instrument of the sovereign will, subject to the exigencies of the moment. 

This logic is recognizably Schmittian: politics is defined by friend-enemy distinctions, legal norms are subordinated to existential decisions, and the leader embodies the unity of the people through decisive, extra-legal action. Trump’s version of authoritarianism is thus radically personalist, driven by affect, charisma, and performance. He does not appeal to a transcendent moral order or a traditional hierarchy of virtues. Instead, his authority emerges through the assertion of will against perceived enemies, immigrants, the deep state, left-wing cities, and courts, and through symbolic domination of the political stage. The institutions of liberal democracy are not reshaped or moralized in Trump’s hands; they are bypassed or delegitimized. 

Xi Jinping, by contrast, operates within a very different frame. His authoritarianism is not grounded in exception but in moral hierarchy. In speeches and writings, Xi consistently emphasizes that law and virtue must be harmonized, and that governance is legitimate only when it cultivates social morality and national unity through ethical guidance. He explicitly draws on ancient Chinese sources, most notably Confucius and Mencius, who saw the ruler not as an arbitrary decider but as a moral exemplar. Law, in this vision, is not sovereign but secondary, valuable only when it expresses the ethical order already embodied in the roles and relationships of the Confucian system. Xi’s claim that “law is virtue in writing” and his insistence that the “rule of law and rule of virtue must be coordinated” reflect this deeply ingrained belief. 

This worldview is profoundly different from Schmitt’s. It draws on the Confucian idea of the “moral sovereign,” whose legitimacy derives not from the ability to decide on the exception, but from the ability to embody and enforce social harmony. The moral sovereign rules not through disruption but through ritualized order, upholding the roles and obligations that maintain the family and the state in hierarchical alignment. Mencius’s writings offer famous examples of this orientation: when faced with legal or moral dilemmas, the priority always lies with preserving the familial and social order. The well-known case of a man saving his sister-in-law from drowning, even though it violated ritual decorum, is used to show that the moral imperative transcends formal law—but only in the service of restoring ethical harmony, not asserting personal will. 

As we’ve seen, this Confucian framework underpins key aspects of Chinese legal and political ideology today. Laws are enacted with explicit reference to traditional virtues: for example, the 2013 Elder Protection Law requires children to meet the “spiritual needs” of their parents. Courts have been lenient in cases where defendants acted in ways that display filial piety or protect family honor, such as the 2016 case of a young man who killed a debt collector harassing his mother. The moral code of Confucianism persists in shaping legal outcomes, not because judges explicitly cite Confucius, but because the state encourages this ethical alignment between legal procedure and traditional virtue. The idea of the “Rectification of Names,” a key Confucian doctrine, holds that social order depends on each person fulfilling their proper role, father, son, ruler, subject, with fidelity and deference. Law, in this view, is legitimate only insofar as it sustains these roles. 

This also explains why the Chinese leadership has historically been suspicious of Western-style codification, proceduralism, and adversarial law. Public legal contestation threatens the moral-political unity of the state. Instead, law must be interpreted flexibly to reflect the particularities of social and familial relationships. The modern Chinese saying “rules are dead, but people are alive” captures this sensibility: moral context trumps formal procedure. The family remains prior to the law, and sovereignty is justified not through coercion or exception, but through the claim to maintain harmony and cultivate virtue. Thus, while both Trump and Xi pursue authoritarian politics, they represent radically different models. Trump exemplifies the Western tradition of the wilful sovereign, defined by power, disruption, and the suspension of law. His authority is grounded in the moment of decision, in spectacle, in the personalization of state power. Xi represents an older, non-Western model of sovereignty rooted in moral pedagogy, ritual authority, and social harmony. His leadership is justified not through emergency, but through the claim to guide the people in accordance with Confucian virtue. The appeal of Confucianism to the Chinese leadership is precisely that it provides an indigenous, deeply historical framework for legitimizing centralized rule without resorting to the violence of Western political theology. It allows law to be treated as flexible and instrumental while maintaining a language of morality and harmony. 

The comparison reveals that authoritarianism is not a monolith. It can take the form of personalist disruption or ritualized virtue, exceptional violence or hierarchical order. Trump and Xi exemplify these two poles, one Schmittian, the other Confucian, and their differences help us understand not only their own regimes but the broader diversity of authoritarian rule in the 21st century.

Mind you, Putin’s authoritarianism is neither Xi-like nor Trump-like in its entirety. Russia under Vladimir Putin today presents a legal system that operates with a veneer of formal structure, but in reality is deeply shaped by authoritarian imperatives, though the style of that authoritarianism is distinctively neither fully Schmittian nor Confucian, yet shares elements of both, and diverges in important ways from Trump’s and Xi’s models. 

On paper, Russia claims a rule of law: a 1993 constitution guarantees rights and structures the government, and a revised criminal-procedure code, adopted under Putin, strengthened certain procedural protections: police may not arrest without risk of detention; judges oversee search warrants and detentions; and jury trials were introduced. The state consistently pays fines imposed by the European Court of Human Rights, suggesting a formal respect for legal norms. 

But the practice is otherwise. Courts and prosecutors operate under the Kremlin’s control. High-profile political trials, such as the detention of journalist Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges, follow predetermined verdicts and serve political objectives. Judges act as instruments of the state, especially when rulings clash with Kremlin interests. The 2020 constitutional changes further strengthened presidential power: Putin engineered a reset of term limits, augmented power over judicial appointments, and expanded the reach of federal institutions into regional governance. Repressive “foreign agent” and “disrespect the state” laws, harsh “fake news” statutes, and media regulations banning independent reporting on Ukraine all curtail dissent and civil society. The Kremlin controls media, silences opposition, and suppresses civil liberties, banning NGOs, jailing protestors, and labelling critics as terrorists or traitors . 

Putin’s blend of constitutional manipulation, political trials, and nationalistic law enforcement fits a distinct form of authoritarian statecraft. It is not Trump‑style chaos, nor Xi’s Confucian hierarchy, though both appear in the shadows. When compared with Trump, Putin echoes the Schmittian sovereign, but with less overt theatricality. Putin centralizes authority, shapes the “state of exception” through constitutional and legal mechanisms, and ignores legal restraints when politically convenient. Unlike Trump’s dramatic confrontations with institutions, Putin embeds exceptionality within the system, through legal reforms, presidential domination, and governing bodies aligned with his will. Power is exercised through the institutional architecture, not through personal unpredictability or spectacle, though it can surface unexpectedly via political trials or crackdowns. 

Compared with Xi, Putin shares the use of legal codes to uphold regime legitimacy. But unlike Xi’s Confucian moralizing, Putin’s policies lean on nationalist-militarist narratives, state propaganda, and ideological unity. Instead of hierarchical moral pedagogy, Putin frames his legitimacy in terms of historical destiny, imperial restoration, and security, criminalizing dissent in service of national resilience. Where Xi emphasizes virtue and ritual, Putin emphasizes power and unity. 

Philosophically, Putin’s system blends two traditions. Like Schmitt, he positions himself as the ultimate legal decider, the driver of constitutional resets under the guise of legality. But unlike Schmitt’s clear exceptionalism, Putin works within a legal-institutional framework he shapes from within, an adaptive, evolving authoritarianism. At the same time, he retains a sense of moral-political sovereignty akin to Confucianism, but stripped of virtue and replaced by security nationalism. Russia's familial morality or filial ritual does not substitute law here; instead, the hierarchy is party-state unity, and law serves its preservation. 

In the final analysis, Putin’s system is authoritarian legalism: he does not suspend law but appropriates it, reshaping its boundaries and enforcing its limits to serve political objectives. His model is not Trump, who shatters norms personally, nor Xi, who moralizes governance. Putin is something else: a sovereign who technologically captures legality, marries it to authoritarian nationalism, and uses it to stabilize his rule within a facade of constitutional and institutional normalcy. 

Finally we can look at how Modi fits in with this analytic approach. Narendra Modi’s approach to governance and legal politics presents a distinctive form of authoritarianism that both overlaps with and diverges from the models exemplified by Xi , Putin , and Trump. While all four leaders exercise varying degrees of centralized control and undermine institutional checks and balances, their ideological foundations, methods of rule, and relationships to law reveal significant contrasts that explain why their authoritarianism looks so different in practice. 

Since Modi’s rise to power in 2014, his government has focused on consolidating power through a mix of legal manoeuvres and ideological transformation rooted in Hindutva nationalism. Modi’s strategy involves reshaping India’s constitutional framework and institutions to centralize authority in the Prime Minister’s Office while co-opting the judiciary and bureaucracy to support a majoritarian Hindu nationalist agenda. Landmark moves such as the revocation of Article 370, which stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special autonomous status, were carried out with little political consensus and accompanied by heavy security measures, demonstrating a willingness to override democratic pluralism. Similarly, laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and proposals around the National Register of Citizens (NRC) signal a redefinition of citizenship along religious lines, intensifying social divisions and targeting minorities. 

Modi’s approach embeds authoritarianism in a moral-nationalist vision that fuses culture, religion, and law, shaping legal institutions to enforce a particular vision of social order. This strategy shares parallels with Xi Jinping’s governance, which is deeply informed by Confucian ideas of hierarchical social order, moral virtue, and collective harmony. Modi’s authoritarianism, while also centralized and repressive, is more institutionalized and culturally anchored than Trump’s. Modi’s government rarely confronts institutions head-on; instead, it reshapes and co-opts them gradually, aligning legal norms with a Hindu nationalist moral vision that claims to restore India’s civilizational greatness. Courts have often validated or tolerated these shifts, as seen in rulings like the Ayodhya land dispute case, which reflected majoritarian interests. The legal system under Modi operates not by overtly breaking rules but by subtly bending them to reinforce ideological dominance and social hierarchy. 

As we've seen, Xi’s Confucian-inspired model emphasizes harmony, hierarchy, and moral governance, with law serving as an instrument for social order rather than individual freedom. Modi’s approach similarly privileges a moral-nationalist ethos, though rooted in Hinduism rather than Confucianism in contrast to Putin’s governance that prioritizes pragmatic authoritarian legalism under a nationalist-imperial rubric and Trump’s mode characterized by Schmittian exceptionism and personalist sovereignty, openly flouting institutional norms. 

These differences explain why authoritarianism under Modi appears more culturally coherent and institutionally embedded than Trump’s  chaotic and confrontational approach and Putin’s formalistic and security-driven one. It does seem closer to Xi’s in being ideologically moralistic and hierarchical. Modi’s hybrid model combines moral nationalism with tactical legal manipulation, creating a unique authoritarianism that exploits India’s complex social fabric and democratic legacies. Together, these comparisons reveal how authoritarian rule can take diverse forms shaped by differing relationships to law, culture, and institutional power.