A Confucian Community and the State: A Korean Vision in a Comparative Perspective

This paper argues that Korean communitarianism can claim for its own identity a third way of conceptualizing political life between Western individualism and Western communitarianism. Korean communitarianism assumes that the family is the ideal type as well as the prototype of the state. In insisting that the state is a family writ large, one important aspect of essentially political life is overlooked: in modern society, each person has a category of interests, experiences and beliefs that can not be summarized as family life. Given social diversity and heterogeneity, this paper suggests that Korean family communitarianism should be ready to settle for less, asking that each recognize others as citizens, not as family members.