ABSTRACT
There has been an upsurge of interest in the past few decades in the relationship between Confucianism and modernity in East Asia. This began in the arguments about “Confucianism and capitalism” which have sought to overturn Max Weber’s verdict on the incompatibility of Confucianism and capitalism and explain the exceptional economic success of the East Asian region in terms of certain “Confucian” values such as respect for authority and self-development through education. In the past few years this effort to understand the links between Confucianism and modernity has expanded to a much wider scope, as seen in the 1997 launching in South Korea of a new journal, Cho˘nt’ong kwa hyo˘ndae, whose inaugural issue was devoted to the question of “Confucianism and Twenty-first Century Korea.”1
