Another Cold War Liberalism : Freedom and Democracy in South Korea

This Element revisits the conceptual history of freedom and democracy in Cold War South Korea. Cold War liberalism is usually told as a North Atlantic story of defensive anti-communism, the 'liberalism of fear', and pluralist scepticism towards mass politics.

This Element revisits the conceptual history of freedom and democracy in Cold War South Korea. Cold War liberalism is usually told as a North Atlantic story of defensive anti-communism, the 'liberalism of fear', and pluralist scepticism towards mass politics. Yet behind that veneer lay another face - the technocratic administrative state - that became dominant once Cold War liberalism reached the decolonising periphery under the rubric of 'modernisation'. Through a conceptual historical analysis, this Element traces how freedom and democracy were continually recombined with nationalism, developmentalism and diverse moral-economic registers, generating conceptual problematics the metropolitan tradition had rarely been compelled to confront. From the Founding Constitution through 'Korean-style democracy' to the minjung turn and democratic transition, Cold War Korea emerges not as belated reception but as a vantage from which liberalism's constitutive tensions become visible.