Too Rational To Be Modernized? Confucian Rationality and Political Modernity in Traditional Korea

This essay argues that the unique mode of rationality in Confucian politics and its various ethico-political practices prevented the Korean Confucian state from becoming a western-style modem state. Drawing on Max Weber's sociology of ideas and ideal interests, I characterize the Weberian concept of rationality as a dynamic relation between ideas and interests and understand their relationship as mutually constitutive. I show how Confucian rationality became institutionalized through the tension between Princely-Line (monarchical power) and Sagely-Line (bureaucratic power) through various symbolic, rhetorical, and ritualistic practices, and how these practices reformulated their own cultural structure, making it viable, and thus preventing it from transforming into a qualitatively different form. In order to do so, the essay focuses on the politics of sagacity of King Jeongjo, eighteenth-century Korean monarch, and the religious persecution of 1801 that ensued after his sudden death.