How do South Korea’s developmental legacies influence its contemporary political economy? The discourse surrounding this question has tended to diverge over the extent to which South Korea’s state-led developmental model has been supplanted by a market-led, neoliberal mode of political-economic organization. Though this debate has indeed fostered many important individual contributions, it has also yielded a muddled and ambiguous theoretical landscape. To clarify this cluttered terrain, this paper draws from recent advances in the study of neoliberalism to establish critical points of consonance between statist perspectives on Korean development and neoliberalism. To this end, it identifies key threads of continuity binding South Korea’s developmental past with its neoliberal present. The paper finds that critical aspects of the developmental state’s interaction with society, from coercion to ideological suasion, furnished elemental building blocks to those actively constructing a South Korean neoliberalism. Thus, exploring these historical contours produces a fresh means for apprehending the interactions of enduring statist developmental legacies with contemporary neoliberal reforms, both theoretically and empirically. As such, this study yields an improved set of conceptual tools for grasping the complex empirical phenomena shaping the interplay of neoliberalism, developmentalism, and democracy within contemporary South Korea.

韩国的发展遗产如何影响其当代政治经济？围绕这个问题的讨论倾向于在多大程度上产生分歧韩国的国家主导的发展模式已被市场主导的新自由主义政治经济组织模式所取代。虽然这场辩论确实促成了许多重要的个人贡献，但也产生了混乱和模棱两可的理论景观。为了澄清这个混乱的领域，本文借鉴了新自由主义研究的最新进展，以确定韩国发展的国家主义观点与新自由主义之间的关键点。为此，它确定了将韩国的发展历史与其新自由主义现在联系起来的连续性的关键线索。该论文发现，发展型国家与社会互动的关键方面，从胁迫到意识形态劝说，为积极构建韩国新自由主义的人提供了基本的基石。因此，探索这些历史轮廓为理解持久的国家主义发展遗产与当代新自由主义改革之间的相互作用提供了一种新的方法，无论是理论上还是实证上。因此，本研究提供了一套改进的概念工具，用于掌握塑造当代韩国新自由主义、发展主义和民主相互作用的复杂经验现象。