""Privatized" Civil Religion After Rousseau" [presented in 2025 MPSA]
Modern scholars have sought to preserve the advantages of civil religion—its capacity to foster civic virtue and patriotism—while maintaining individual rights within the modern republic. However, since Rousseau, the concept of civil religion has undergone increasing privatization. Whereas traditional civil religion aimed at a “public” good beyond the individual, in today’s pluralistic twenty-first-century society, it has become more internal and individualized. The form of civil religion envisioned by Rousseau thus appears incompatible with late modernity. This article applies the notion of "privatized" civil religion to recent developments in the United States, illustrating how its contemporary form unfolds. Through this analysis, I argue that although civil religion has not entirely disappeared, its original function has been distorted—reduced to a mode that serves individual preferences rather than cultivating a shared moral foundation.
"Making the Large Small: Rousseau’s Radical Vice and the Institutional Smallness in the Government of Poland" [presented in 2024 SPSA]
In The Government of Poland, Rousseau identifies the very size of Poland as its “radical vice,” a structural pathology that renders civic life incoherent at scale. Rather than offering moral exhortation, he proposes political engineering: institutional designs that make a large state operate as if it were small. Domestically, this includes frequent Diets, a mediating Senate, and empowered local Dietines to enhance civic visibility and participation. Externally, Rousseau recommends a confederative system to safeguard liberty amid threats. Together, these internal and external mechanisms form a dual architecture of institutional smallness and federative resilience, which adapt the moral ideals of the small republic to the constitutional needs of a large state.
“A Reconsideration on Hannah Arendt’s Criticism of Rousseau: A Focus on the Idea of Compassion and General Will.” [presented in 2019 Korean Political Thought Association: Graduate Student Presentation]
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution criticizes Rousseau’s political theory for its ambiguous distinction between the public and private realms, using this critique as a foundation for her argument. However, this paper argues for a clearer distinction between the concepts of conscience and compassion, and reexamines the Arendtian notion of the public realm within Rousseau’s idea of the general will. It challenges Arendt’s interpretation that Rousseau sought to address social problems through compassion and that the absolute power of the general will undermined pluralistic political community. Instead, this paper suggests that Rousseau’s dynamic between authority and autonomy provides a theoretical basis for participatory democracy.
“Reinterpreting Rousseau’s International Political Thought: Politics of Survival in Emile.” Seoul National University Master’s Thesis, 2019. [presented in 2019 MPSA]
This article attempts to take an integrated work in between the idea about ideal state in domestic politics and realistic international politics in Rousseau’s International Political Thought. To apply consistent perspective on understanding Rousseau through his political related works, this paper focused on his book, Emile. Emile shows how humans make a community to achieve a goal of self-reservation with a sense of international politics. This article argues that Rousseau’s international political thought can be framed around the concept of survival, understood through a harmonized interpretation that bridges realism and cosmopolitanism, and through a holistic consideration that spans from the individual to the national and international levels.
“Preliminary study on the solution for the Religious Liberty debate”
“Classical Realist Reinhold Niebuhr’s criticism of Liberalist John Dewey: focusing on Criteria of Individual, Society, and Individual-Society Relationship”
"Why Happy Troglodytes and Happy Savage Man Became Unhappy?: Virtue and Government in Montesquieu"
“Aristotle and Rousseau’s Solutions for the Self-love Problem: Civic Friendship of Utility and the Good”