Abstract
In most versions of its history, the Cold War ends with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. But on the Korean Peninsula, two states remain in a relationship of hostility that has resisted efforts to repair it. The North’s militarized and hereditary communist regime is the main obstacle to normal relations, eventual unity, and liberal democracy on the Peninsula. Nor is liberal democracy entirely secure even in the South, where questions persist about respect for individual rights, adherence to the rule of law, and the possible recurrence of authoritarian rule. South Korean politics is highly polarized, in part because of differences over how to manage its difficult neighbor. Cold War politics in Korea, then, is not only about relations between North and South but also about how the South can strengthen its liberal democracy while coping with a totalitarian North.
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Notes
Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism,’“ European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (2008), 47–48,
citing Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21–38.
Judith N. Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First,” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3 (1982), 17–27, at 1.
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 32–94, at 91–92.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Masses in Representative Democracy,” in Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 363–83. On the threats to liberty posed by great inequalities of wealth and the justification for an income floor or other policies addressing the needs of the destitute, see Michael Oakeshott, “The Political Economy of Freedom,” in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 384–406,
and F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 54–56.
Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, ed. Terry Nardin and Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006).
Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 304–05, n. 3.
Efraim Podoksik, “Anti-Totalitarian Ambiguities: Jacob Talmon and Michael Oakeshott,” History of European Ideas, vol. 34, 2 (2008), 206–19, at 207–08. Podoksik thinks Oakeshott was an optimist on the future of liberal society, Talmon a pessimist. But Oakeshott was not betting on its success any more than the pessimists (those in the “liberalism of fear” camp) were betting on its failure. All knew the costs of failure and therefore the importance of institutions that could prevent it.
Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1999), 143–72, at 149. One could challenge Berlin’s claim that arguments about means are “technical,” but that would only strengthen the point that politics presupposes the possibility of disagreement.
Even Popper, whose thinking in many ways displayed the rationalism Oakeshott criticized, found instrumental value in tradition. See Stuart Jacobs and Ian Tregenza, “Rationalism and Tradition: The Popper-Oakeshott Conversation,” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 13, no. 1 (2014), 3–24.
John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 369. Kennan’s remarks are from a National War College lecture on December 21, 1949.
Michael Oakeshott, ed., The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). The book went through several editions.
The essays are in Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). The “Tower of Babel” is the second of two essays that Oakeshott published under that title.
The point is powerfully made by Hannah Arendt in her discussion of the Nazi concentration camps, whose only intelligible rationale was total domination: “Pavlov’s dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model ‘citizen’ of a totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be produced only imperfectly outside of the camps.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 587. The theme was later taken up by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, among others.
Examples include Tan Sor Hoon, Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004);
Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006);
Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order, trans. Edmund Ryden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012);
Stephen C. Angle, Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012);
and Joseph Chan, Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Michael Oakeshott, “Talking Politics,” in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 443, and Michael Oakeshott, “The Vocabulary of a Modern European State,” in Michael Oakeshott, The Vocabulary of a Modern European State, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), 242;
for discussion, see Terry Nardin, “Rhetoric and Political Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott, ed. Efraim Podoksik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 188–91.
Noël O’Sullivan, “Visions of Freedom: The Response to Totalitarianism,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 84.
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Nardin, T. (2015). Introduction: Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism. In: Nardin, T. (eds) Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507020_1
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