Theorizing the Park Chung Hee Era

The purpose of this critical review is to seek the possibility of theorizing the Park Chung Hee’s era by responding to two recent publications, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea by Carter J. Eckert and The Rise and Fall of Korea’s Economic Development by Sung Hee Jwa. Eckert puts Park Chung Hee’s ideology and policies in the broad contexts of East Asian modernity and Jwa tries to extract a coherent principle that can explain not only the economic performance under the Park Chung Hee’s leadership but also the logic of economic development in general. This critical review paper engages with two authors by emphasizing the role of modern nation-state that have been relatively neglected in their works and conjectures the possibility of interdisciplinary studies on the Park Chung Hee era.