Inventing “the People”: The Discourse of Democratic Transformation in Early 20th Century Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea

Democratic peoplehood is the foundation of constitutional institutions, but it is not necessarily “always already” available to nascent polities seeking to transform themselves into constitutional democracies. This means that people living under a nondemocratic regime must first develop a collective identity as the sovereign and then authorize themselves as capable of practicing self-governance. Only through such a transformation can they come to realize and embody both the privileges and duties of their sovereign authority that are entailments of the act of self-governance. While this topic has been amply explored in Anglo-American contexts, relatively little attention has been paid to moments in East Asia in which ordinary people were called upon to transform themselves into “the people.” My dissertation seeks to contribute to this scholarship by presenting Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948) and Cho Soang (1887-1958) as two noteworthy political theorists for thinking through the issue of democratic transformation at the moment of founding. For this purpose, Chapter 1 surveys the scholarship on democratic founding. Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of this vast field of intellectual inquiry, I specifically focus on demonstrating how the recent literature in the field has so far undertheorized the socio-cultural dimension of democratic founding. Chapter 2 briefly discusses the methodology of this dissertation by reexamining Quentin Skinner’s contextualist approach to the history of political thought. In doing so it critically engages the issues of historical contextualism, incommensurability, and translation. Chapter 3 presents Minobe’s emperor organ theory as a notable approach to the issue of democratic transformation. I argue that emperor organ theory illustrates a model of democratic transformation in which the subjugated people transform themselves into “the people” through the incremental process of political representation within the existing constitutional order. Chapter 4 investigates a theory of democratic transformation developed by Cho during one of the most troubling times in Korea’s modern history. This model conceptualizes democratic transformation as a temporally-extended process of actualizing the principle of non-domination, one that seeks to harmonize self-determination with equality. In my view, although these two models do not solve every practical and theoretical problem the transition from a nondemocratic form of government to the establishment of a constitutional democracy entails, they at least provide new conceptual and practical resources for us to reimagine democratic founding as an ongoing process of dynamic transformation