This book has a long and complicated origin. After graduating from college,
I attended the Academy of Korean Studies, a national research center for
humanities and social sciences in South Korea, in order to further my studies
in Confucian philosophy and political thought, while improving my classical
Chinese. Although my original goal at the Academy was to study the modern
implications of Confucianism in relation to liberalism and democracy, I was
instantly drawn to the rich history of Korean Neo-Confucian political thought
during the Chosŏn 朝鮮 dynasty (1392–1910) and in the end decided to write
my MA thesis on the political conflict between two towering Korean NeoConfucian scholars in the sixteenth century – Yi Hwang 李滉 (1502–1571),
better known by his pen name T’oegye 退溪, and Cho Sik 曺植 (1501–1572),
also known as Nammyŏng 南冥. While writing my thesis (entitled “The Politics
of the Neo-Confucian Literati and the Confucian Scholars’ Charisma during
the Chosŏn Period”), which in part aimed to investigate the enormous moral
power held by the Korean Neo-Confucian scholars vis-à-vis the king from the
perspective of “moral charisma,” I realized that Korean Neo-Confucians had
been profoundly inspired by Mencius, especially his ideas of the “Great Man”
(da zhangfu 大丈夫) and “outstanding person” (haojie zhi shi 豪傑之士), and
this realization impelled me to develop my theoretical framework in reference
to Mencius’s moral and political thought (as well as Max Weber’s theory of
charisma). Shortly after, when I became a PhD student at the University of
Maryland at College Park (UMD), I took a course on Nietzsche and Freud
and decided to write for the term paper about Mencius’s political thought,
more precisely his view of a Confucian scholar’s moral charisma as a source of
political liberty, against the backdrop of the political psychology of Realpolitik
drawn from Nietzsche and Freud’s political and psychological insights. After
several years of revision, this paper was published by the journal History of
Political Thought and Chapter 4 of this book, though thoroughly revised and
substantially expanded, is based on this paper dating back to my second year
of graduate school at UMD.