Is “Progressive Liberalism” in Korea Progressive Enough? An Essay on Social Democracy as a Progressive Alternative

To function properly in the real world, an ideology is expected to provide a methodological implication for policy guidance. This is because a political economy, far from being an abstract mixture of varied policy lines, involves a series of crucial choices in the real world in relation to values and policies. This essay assumes that the idea of progress involves a method of reform to organize/mobilize the below as a collective unit in order to narrow the gap between the formal provisioning of basic rights and the virtual denial of the material means deemed necessary for transferring these rights into actual action. If not, it stops at being a discourse and can neither function as an alternative model nor create a new one. This is why the term “progressive liberalism,” which has been gaining force as an alternative philosophy in Korean academia, is a little too relaxed, and may even be an improper expression. Social democracy starts with institutionalizing the minimum level of counter-balance for the class powers in both the state and the market in order to politically create the social conditions necessary for the effective enjoyment of basic rights. At least at a methodological level, paradoxically, social democratic imagination seems inevitable in realizing within the actual world those values contained in the discourses of liberalism or “progressive” liberalism.