Two Theories of Self-Determination: The Discourse of Democratic Peoplehood in Colonial Korea

• Published date: 01 February 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231185293
• Author: Chungjae Lee
• Date: 01 February 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231185293

Political Theory

2024, Vol. 52(1) 6 –33

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231185293

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Article

Two Theories of Self-

Determination: The

Discourse of Democratic

Peoplehood in Colonial

Korea

Chungjae Lee1

Abstract

This article examines two distinct ways in which anticolonial thinkers in

early twentieth-century Korea reconstructed their nondemocratic tradition

in an attempt to justify (rather than take for granted) the claim of self-

determination. The exposure to modern education and ideas of democracy

prompted these thinkers to critically engage their tradition in the struggle

for self-determination. That said, they could not simply abandon the cultural

foundation of their nation. Japanese colonial rule drew its legitimacy from

not only an assimilation ideology that the Japanese and Koreans shared

the same ethnic origin but also a developmentalist conception of the

colonized that they were premodern and incapable of self-rule. To reject

imperial domination, Korean anticolonial thinkers needed to invent out of

their country’s nondemocratic tradition (1) an unassimilable nation/people

(2) capable of self-rule. Drawing upon the political writings of two early

twentieth-century thinkers in colonial Korea, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950)

and Cho So-ang (1887–1958), I discover from their political thought two

nuanced approaches to this project of inventing “the people” in the colonial

world. I argue that while Yi succeeded in rebutting the colonial ideology of

assimilation, he fell into the trap of developmentalism. I contend that Cho,

1Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Chungjae Lee, GLAT 313A, Gettysburg College, 300 N Washington St, Gettysburg, PA

17325-1486, USA.

Email: clee@gettysburg.edu

1185293PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231185293Political TheoryLee

research-article2023

Lee 7

on the contrary, sidestepped this trap with his revisionist reading of the

Confucian past as a history of democratic transformation, thus providing an

immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty.

Keywords

self-determination, Confucianism, anticolonialism, the politics of founding

Introduction

The cultivation of democratic culture is of great urgency for any society

struggling to navigate the transition to constitutional democracy.1 The likeli-

hood of founding a stable democracy depends not only on the design of the

constitution itself but also on the process of democratic imagination that

enables those involved in the founding act, as well as those who were not, to

transform themselves into a collective body with both the privileges and

duties of sovereign authority that are entailments of self-governance. While

every democracy undergoes this transformative process, none does so in

either a teleological or a unilinear fashion. A democratic people cannot be

created ex nihilo; their self-constitution is always already conditioned by

what precedes their existence (Lee and Liou 2022; Olson 2016). In her com-

parative analysis of modern revolutions, Arendt ([1963] 1990) implies that

this path-dependent nature of democratic transformation is not necessarily a

point of concern to communities whose traditions are broadly compatible

with the culture of self-rule, as may have been the case of the American

Revolution. A natural extension of this position is that for others without such

a resonance between traditions and the founding act, the cultivation of demo-

cratic culture would be a puzzling, complex task.

Questions of culture and national aptitude are always trickier than ques-

tions of institutions and structures, and therefore they require a more nuanced

approach.2 Although it is important to take heed of the danger of reproducing

the hierarchical opposition between traditional, nondemocratic “others” and

modern, democratic “selves” (Klausen 2010), naïve romanticization of the

1. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Korean terms have been

Romanized in accordance with the McCune-Reischauer system throughout the

paper, except in cases of personal names where a preferred spelling is known.

2. I thank anonymous reviewers for helping me clarify this point.