The Korean Road to Modernization and Development (review)

86BOOK REVIEWS Not enough attention was paid to editorial matters and proofreading. On the spine, the title of the book is given as Religion and Politics in Korea Under Japanese Rule, whereas the title page gives it as Religion and Politics in Korea Under the Japanese Rule. On page x, the McCune-Reischauer system is called McCune-Reishauer. On page 53, the great temple in Kyoto, the Higashi Hongan-ji, is called the Higashi Hongwan-ji, but on page 54 it is called simply Hongan-ji. This would lead the ordinary reader to assume that two different temples were being mentioned. Later in the same paragraph, the sect associated with this temple is called the Honpa Hongway-ji Sect. In footnote 23 on page 104, the Chogye sect is referred to as Chogyo in one line and Chogye in the next. These are not isolated instances. There is also the matter of the names of temples founded by Japanese groups in Korea. On page 55, the Kongo-ji temple in Pusan is mentioned. The name of this temple ought to have been given according to the Korean pronunciation , with the Japanese pronunciation given in parentheses, or the other way around. The impression is given that the Japanese pronunciation was the name by which it would have been known to Koreans, which was probably not the case. In the chapter on Christianity the author quotes liberally from the comments of missionaries and mission board secretaries about the religious situation in Korea under the Japanese. Frequently the quoted speaker is not identified in the text, and in some cases not even in the footnotes. Thus I cannot recommend the purchase of this book for either personal or library use. It does not cover its assigned area in any depth, is filled with far too many errors of fact, and was poorly edited and proofread. James Huntley Grayson University of Sheffield The Korean Road to Modernization and Development, by Norman Jacobs. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Much has been written about Korean economic development, but few systematic studies have been made of the social and cultural dimensions of rapid economic change. The Korean Road to Modernization and Development is a novel sociological analysis of the meaning of modern social transformation in Korea, and makes a welcome addition to this skewed literature on Korean development . The book offers a first-rate, sophisticated analysis of Korean institutions and their modern transformation. It presents a provocative thesis at the outset and pursues it with thoroughly researched materials and thoughtful theoretical reasoning. The scholarship put into this book and the erudition the author demonstrates are quite impressive. It seems that the author has read almost all the materials written in English on Korea plus some additional Korean and Japanese source materials. The main thesis of the book is that, historically, Korea is a patrimonial society and that it is the patrimonial order of the society that has shaped and reshaped the processes of Korean modernization. Despite so much change, BOOK REVIEWS87 therefore, Korean society today is as patrimonial as it was in the past. From a more theoretical standpoint, Jacobs uses the Korean case to refute both an evolutionary model of development and a newer dependency perspective. Against the predictions of these models, he argues that modernization processes in patrimonially oriented Oriental societies are qualitatively different from the Western pattern, and that it is internal institutional factors rather than external influences that determine the direction of socioeconomic change in these societies. The main thrust of the book, therefore, is to demonstrate how patrimonial institutional structures, goals, and procedures established earlier in Korean history have guided modern economic and social change within the bounds of this institutional structure. The study takes an institutional approach, and examines several institutions such as government bureaucracy, agriculture, commercial and industrial economy, occupation, social stratification, kinship, and religion. Each chapter is filled with informative descriptions and many insightful arguments. It is very rewarding to read these substantive chapters. One learns a lot from them about what is unique about Korean society and how pervasive has been the influence of a patrimonial element on Korean behavior and approaches to social change. Here...