The Dilemma of Korean Conservatism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A paradoxical argument has been made repeatedly with regard to conservatism in Korea: “There is a conservative force, but no conservative philosophy in Korean politics. This is what I would define as the dilemma of Korean conservatism. Thus Koreansboth academic scholars and politicianshave been suffering from a perennial complex, this being the lack of a proper conservative political philosophy. However, this complex is derived from a misguided internalization of West-centrism, a phenomenon that is quite common in many contemporary Third World countries that have been spellbound by West-centrsim. When they consider conservative philosophy, they usually have a Burkean (or British) conservative political philosophy in mind. But the conditions that had led to the formation of such a conservative political philosophy have been utterly lacking in Korea. The fundamental reason for this difference is, of course, derived from the fact that the context of modernization in Korea, like many Third World countries, was radically different from that in England. Thus, I will first try to articulate the three causes for such this difference in the paper: the conservative monopoly of politics and political power, the original contradiction between political and philosophical conservatism, and the heavy dependency of Korean political theories upon outside (Western) sources for their formation and innovation. Thereafter I will suggest two strategies for nourishing philosophical conservatism in order to overcome this dilemma: one outlines a strategy of aligning political conservatism with the support for liberal democracy and the market economy more tightly, and the other is a strategy of taking advantage of traditional cultural resources such as Confucianism.

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