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Choi Chae-hŭi’s Personalist Liberalism and Its Anti-feudal Modernity in the Immediate Post-War & Post-Colonial Days

Im Chong Myong 1

1전남대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In the immediate post-War & post-colonial days, Choi Chae-hŭi, worked as a professor of Western philosophy and also as an official in charge of editing civic school textbook. Based upon his thought that liberalism had the superiority over other ideologies in terms of social progressiveness and systematic organization, he articulated the theory of his liberalism, and propagated it in the contemporary South Korean discursive space. While developing his own theory of liberalism, Choi identified individual as a modern sovereign subject, defining his liberalism as personalist liberalism. And he argued for the contemporary anti-feudal reforms as in land reform and superstition abolition, which was geared to represent the anti-feudal modernity of his liberalism, and thus to substantiate his claim for liberalism in the contemporary Korean society. In this way, he constructed his own personalist liberalism. This shows that his liberalism was a modernist project. Despite of his theoretical articulations, however, he had to face the implosions of his theory of liberalism, for an example, the mutual conflict between imagined individuals such as ‘empirical individual’ on the one hand and as ideationary one on the other. Choi’s liberalism was a kind of index of historical change between the time of the World War Ⅱ, and the post-War period. That is, the liberalism showed that, in the post-War days, unlike in the preceding ones, liberalism and Western modernism got rehabilitated. At the same time, Choi’s liberalism worked as a momentum which promoted the Koreanization of politically hierarchical Western modernism. These constituted the historical implications of Choi’s liberalism in the post-War and post-colonial South Korea.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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