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. 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.