(with Charles Lesch)

Juche (roughly translated as “self-reliance”) is the official state ideology of North Korea, used both in shaping propaganda and for publicly justifying all matters of North Korean policy. Yet while Juche functions as North Korea’s public philosophy, there have been few studies of its conceptual origins. We aim to fill this lacuna by examining the works of Hwang Jang-Yop, a longtime advisor to North Korea’s founding leaders and Juche’s most important architect and rhetorician. We argue that through Hwang, Juche was shaped not, as might be expected, by the Marxist ideologies of North Korea's immediate political allies, but instead by a modified Hegelianism. The Hegelian influence on the formation of Juche, in turn, carried important implications for the shape of North Korea’s social structure and political culture. 

Despite the nation’s perception of itself as realizing a Marxist vision, Hwang’s attempt to inaugurate a genuinely “human-centric” philosophy represents a conservative turn against Marx and back to Hegel. Hegel was perhaps the most important intellectual influence on Hwang during his formative years as a philosopher. We show that the body of Hwang’s work arises from a particular reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history, one that aims to remove from it all traces of mysticism. In place of Hegel’s Geist, Hwang substitutes an idealized conception of the human being. The resulting vision is a celebration of history without end, a conception of humanity that has no limits, in principle, to its potential progress. While such a worldview appears optimistic, the consequence is ultimately one in which there is a constant disjuncture between reality and imagined human potential. What therefore begins as an attempt at demystifying history ends with a novel mythology of the human being. This analysis, we conclude, sheds light on some of the more puzzling features of North Korean state ideology, and offers broader theoretical insights into what happens when politics itself serves as a religion.

presentations:

• upcoming: Association for Political Theory annual conference - Boulder, CO, October 2015