Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs Behind the Man. (Book Reviews).

LEE KUAN YEW: The Beliefs Behind the Man. By Michael D. Barr. Richmond (UK): Curzon Press. 2000. xiv, 273 pp. [pounds sterling]40.00, cloth. ISBN 0-7007-1325-5.

This study by Michael Barr on Singapore's strongman Lee Kuan Yew is by far the best available political biography of Lee. Most biographies of Lee are either hagiographies or highly speculative considerations of his character and politics. There are some exceptions: James Minchin's No Man is an Island: A Study of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1986), provided useful psychological insights into Lee's character. Barr broadly eschews psychology and concentrates on Lee's political ideas. And in this he succeeds admirably.

The book begins with a short biographical sketch of Lee and proceeds to examine what he calls his "progressivism." That is, his belief that the future of civilization depended on continued progress, and that to maintain this progress was a difficult and ongoing challenge. There were constant temptations and threats to derail the march of social and material progress. Barr's central claim is that it is this progressivism that remains at the bedrock of Lee's political ideas and explains much of his authoritarian social and political program.

In later chapters, Barr adds to this core ideology an analysis of Lee's elitism and the way he has sought to justify this elitism. In particular, he examines the manner in which Lee saw a small core of leaders in the state at the apex of Singapore's social pyramid. These were the elite' to whom was entrusted the task of running Singapore. There was no place for politics in this view. This highly technocratic view of the government chimed in with the fundamental "progressivism" that Barr identifies in Lee's political cosmology.

Running alongside these elitist ideas is Lee's strongly eugenicist ideas. Not only did Singapore need to be ruled by a small elite, but this elite needed to reproduce itself if its overall quality was not to be diluted. Of course, these eugenic ideas lend themselves to Lee's often racist views of various ethnic communities. One of Barr's most intriguing and insightful chapters (chapter 6) is on the analysis of Lee's racial ideas and how these have influenced a range of policies and programs in Singapore. For example, Lee's attitude towards the undeniable educational disadvantage suffered by Malay students in comparison with Chinese students was that it reflected the innate cultural and ethnic inferiority of the Malays as against the Chinese.

This is only a very brief overview of what I think is a powerful and persuasive thesis about the intertwining influences of progressivism and elitism on Lee's political thinking. My only dissent here is that it might have been useful to explore the extent to which this belief in the often material benefits of modernity was at the same time conjoined with an equally strong belief in the coming into "being" of a suppressed or lost sense of national or ethnic origin. In this sense, a more radical modernism would differ somewhat from Barr's notion of progressivism in that it seeks to highlight the radical conservative nature of Lee's ideas. It is radical because it seeks to bring about a restructuring of basic social and economic institutions in order to return to a suppressed ethnic or national glory.

Conceived in these terms, Lee's reactionary modernism is both modernist and anti-liberal. It is these motifs that run right through from Lee's early Fabianism to his discovery of Chinese culture in later years. Indeed, put in these terms, it is a worldviews that also has much in common with AngloAmerican neo-conservatism -- reflected, for example, in Thatcherism -- which combines market ideology and social conservatism. It is exactly this conjunction of economic liberalism and authoritarian communitarianism that distinguishes the reactionary modernism of Lee Kuan Yew.

But these differences are minor quibbles about a well-argued and thoughtful study that those interested in the "Singapore model," cannot afford to ignore. For those teaching courses in Southeast Asian politics, this is mandatory reading in order to remind students that the "Singapore model" is not some technocratic panacea, but one that embodies the distinctive ideological beliefs of Lee Kuan Yew.