The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea ed. by Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel, and: Reassessing the Park Chung Hee Era, 1961–1979: Development, Political Thought, Democracy, and Cultural Influence ed. by Hyung-A Kim and Clark W. Sorensen (review)

Thankfully we appear to have reached a time when English-language scholarship has begun to reflect the vigorous and often vociferous discussions in South Korean public life on the historical meaning and ongoing influence of Park Chung Hee (Pak Chŏnghŭi) and his era (the 1960s and 1970s). This has come in response to growing nostalgia for his rule and to the concomitant political rise of Park Geun-hye (Pak Kŭnhye) over the past fifteen years or so. The early stages of her presidency have already generated enough controversy to fuel further attempts to decipher the broader legacy of the elder Park, including its embodiment in his daughter. The two books reviewed here offer, then, a valuable overview of some of the scholarship that has emerged in this arena and help set the framework of future debate.

The more impressive feat is The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea (Harvard University Press, 2011). Formally the book is edited by both Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra Vogel, but as the acknowledgments make clear, this was a project conceived and led by Kim. (“This is really his book.”) As the contributor of two chapters and the author of the introduction and conclusion, Kim notes that this publication project aimed to offer an “objective scholarly evaluation” (p. 737) of Park and his era to counter the generally negative judgments in the prevailing (South Korean) scholarship.¹ For the most part, the book reads—and reads well—as a balanced treatment with very serious criticism of Park, but some readers might detect the impulses of the New Right scholarly movement over the past decade that has targeted what it sees as the unrelenting leftist domination of South Korean scholarship since the 1980s.

Be that as it may, any sense of a concerted agenda proves difficult to sustain in a volume of such heft (nearly 750 pages) with over twenty authors. The complexity, unpredictability, and inconsistency of inputs and outcomes of the Park era are matched by the wide range of possible interpretive angles, which seems to be the point. The editors have valiantly tried to avoid repetition, though this is not always successful. One is, in fact, tempted to treat the book as an encyclopedia, given the proliferation of detail regarding policy decisions and implementation, particularly in the chapters of “Part Two: Politics.” Likewise, the book’s coverage is extensive, as reflected in the enormous quantity and variety of both primary and secondary sources deployed. Unfortunately there is no bibliography, no glossary of the countless acronyms, or even a topic index, all of which would have been of enormous help.

What brings the many parts of The Park Chung Hee Era together is the resolute orientation toward a conventional study of political economy, as suggested right off the bat in the introduction, “The Case for Political History,” but also toward the Great Man in History perspective. Indeed this book appears determined to center the analysis on Park himself—his background, relationships, proclivities, outlooks, policies, plans, dreams, even his “inner world” (ch. 4)—an approach that seems oblivious to other recent studies that find Park dependent upon and limited by larger intellectual and geopolitical forces.² While the editors are aware of the need to balance human agency with structural factors, the book leaves the impression that this tension proved fruitful, and Park appears clearly as the driving force behind the major changes of this era; so much...