Sung Ho Kim – författare

This book is an in-depth interpretation of Max Weber as a political theorist of civil society. On the one hand, it reads Weber's ideas from the perspective of modern political thought, rather than the modern social sciences; on the other, it offers a liberal assessment of this complex political thinker without attempting to apologize for his shortcomings. Through an alternative reading of Weber's religious, epistemological and political writings, the book shows Weber's concern with public citizenship in a modern mass democracy and civil society as its cultivating ground. Kim argues Weber's political thought, thus recast, was deeply informed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and other German political thinkers and also reveals an affinity to the liberal-republican tradition best represented by Mill and Tocqueville. Kim has effectively resuscitated Weber as a political thinker for our time in which civic virtues and civil society have once again become one of the dominant issues.

This book is an in-depth interpretation of Max Weber as a political theorist of civil society. On the one hand, it reads Weber's ideas from the perspective of modern political thought, rather than the modern social sciences; on the other, it offers a liberal assessment of this complex political thinker without attempting to apologize for his shortcomings. Through an alternative reading of Weber's religious, epistemological and political writings, the book shows Weber's concern with public citizenship in a modern mass democracy and civil society as its cultivating ground. Kim argues Weber's political thought, thus recast, was deeply informed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and other German political thinkers and also reveals an affinity to the liberal-republican tradition best represented by Mill and Tocqueville. Kim has effectively resuscitated Weber as a political thinker for our time in which civic virtues and civil society have once again become one of the dominant issues.

This volume records the perspectives of a highly diverse group of prominent individuals who met late in 1988 in an important international symposium concerned with the continuing conflicts in Central America. Included are presentations by leading conservative and liberal scholar-authors; high ranking diplomats from the governments of Mexico, the United States, and Nicaragua; directors of conservative and liberal think tanks; a spokesperson for a state governor opposed to Ronald Reagan's policy of sending National Guard troops to "train" in Central America; a centrally involved media practitioner; and a media critic. It also includes an unofficial translation of the final report of the International Verification and Follow-up Commission established by the Arias Peace Agreement. A preface and an introduction by the editors set this lively and historic debate in context.

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.

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.

What does it mean to say that it is 'We the People' who 'ordain and establish' a constitution? Who are those sovereign people, and how can they do so? Interweaving history and theory, constitutional scholar Chaihark Hahm and political theorist Sung Ho Kim attempt to answer these perennial questions by revisiting the constitutional politics of postwar Japan and Korea. Together, these experiences demonstrate the infeasibility of the conventional assumption that there is a clearly bounded sovereign 'people' prior to constitution-making that stands apart from both outside influence and troubled historical legacies. The authors argue that 'We the People' only emerges through a deeply transformative politics of constitutional founding and, as such, a democratic constitution and its putative author are mutually constitutive. Highly original and genuinely multidisciplinary, this book will be of interest to democratic theorists and scholars of comparative constitutionalism as well as observers of ongoing constitutional debates in Japan and Korea.