[Citizen College Season 6] #8 Politics and Political Science Understood through Fiction

On December 1, 2022, the Peace and Democracy Institute and the Seongbuk District Office held the eight final lecture of the Citizen College Season 6  “Politics in Everyday Life.”  In this lecture Dr.  Gyu Jeong Lee, Senior Researcher at PDI, talked about “Politics and Political Science Understood through Fiction.”

This lecture dealt with the understanding of politics through representative Korean novels and novelists. The novel Our Twisted Hero written by Mun-yol Yi  in 1987, vividly describes how “authority” is born – a subject of much interest in political science for a long time. Authoritarianism is a form of politics characterized by strong central government and limited political freedoms. Max Weber classifies authority into three types: traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational. When transitioning from a feudal society to a modern society, authority changes from traditional authority to legal-rational authority. Based on this framework, the participants discussed Korean politics seen through the lense of Korean novelists.