ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an auto-biographical review of Hyun-Chin Lim journey into the intellectual and social-political contexts. It is divided into five parts: Hyun's motives for studying sociology; his personal experience as a student at a Korean university; studying abroad in the United States and how his academic interests changed; the agony of an intellectual in a situation of peripheral underdevelopment; and conclusion. Hyun's sociological concern has focused on how to make South Korean society more democratic. As a sociologist who has tried to combine theory and practice, he had done research to analyze the dynamics among political power, capital accumulation, and class relations in South Korea from a comparative perspective. South Korea's market economy is now one of the ten largest in the world, and its political democracy continues to become stronger. However, only forty years ago, South Korea had yet to undergo industrialization and democratization; it was a poor and oppressed third world nation in every aspect.
