National Spirit and the Conservative Politics of Korean Historiography

In recent decades, conservative intellectuals in Korea have frequently attacked nationalist historiography—the dominant paradigm in Korea up to the early twenty-first century—as a creature of the Left. However, the foundations of nationalist historiography’s hegemony were actually laid by conservative historians, whose influence in shaping mainstream historical narratives are still felt today. In contrast to the Left’s concern with socioeconomic class, which would merge with nationalist frameworks to produce histories centered on the struggle of the minjung masses toward their liberation, right-wing nationalist historians promoted what they called the “national spirit” (minjok chŏngsin), which was said to have coursed through the Korean people and guided their history for millennia. The national spirit was said to take form in Koreans’ enduring “spirit of independence” (tongnip chŏngsin) that allowed Korea to maintain its sovereignty for most of its history. Furthermore, given that the South Korean state was said to have inherited this national spirit, conservative historians’ focus on spirit was inherently a statist and anti-communist framework that advanced South Korea’s legitimacy at the expense of the North. Thus, spirit-centric nationalist historiography was inherently an openly political enterprise. It was only in the 1980s that leftist intellectuals revolted against this paradigm to appropriate nationalist historiography in a minjung-centric direction.