The minjung or “common people” movement was a left-wing group of intellectuals and students in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s that was a prominent part of the ferment that led to the country's transition to democracy in 1988. In this work, Namhee Lee presents a detailed biography of the movement, both its origins and evolution. Her emphasis is on the movement's role in shaping political culture, political ideas, and political discourse in a way that undermined the legitimacy of the various military and civilian authoritarian rulers in South Korea from 1971 to 1988.

Part I deals with the rethinking and rewriting of modern Korean history by the minjung intellectuals, centered on the idea of the “oppressed masses” or minjung. In Part II Lee shows how minjung intellectuals sought to change the terms of political debate on issues like worker rights and press freedoms. In Part III, she considers the issue of intellectuals representing “the people” and the contradictions that arose in this pursuit—not least with the workers themselves.

This book will be widely valued as the single best description of the minjung movement. It captures its essentially ideational nature—this movement was a struggle about “what to think” as much as “what to do.” The documentation is impressive. Lee has excavated the important ideational and intellectual crosscurrents in South Korean democratization that were found on the left wing of the country's politics. For a country too often treated in political economy terms, this is a welcome antidote.

Many of the minjung activists engaged in voluntary rustication to farms or to factories, just as the Chinese and North Korean states next door had forced this on their unwilling intellectual classes. The contradictions of the minjung movement's espousal of Marxism—demanding democracy and civil rights in the name of a doctrine that has never been friendly to such claims—goes largely unexplored. As Lee does note, however, the movement “was enchanted with Marxism-Leninism even as its emancipatory potential was becoming defunct in other parts of the world” (p. 296). As she shows, the movement never really embraced full-blooded Marxism—it retained the state and the nation as its operative concepts, and it downplayed anticapitalism given that export-driven capitalism was serving Koreans so well. The difficult course of critiquing nation and state while at the same time attempting to represent both is one of the best aspects of the book. Minjung intellectuals challenged rival critiques that favored Confucian capitalism and Confucian democracy. Nonetheless, the flirtation with Marxism and the admiration of North Korea by minjung intellectuals left a deep suspicion among ordinary South Koreans. Left-wing parties have been unable to win substantial numbers of seats in the country's National Assembly ever since.

Lee adopts the consciously normative style more familiar to those writing in the humanities and history, making clear that she is rooting for “progressive” forces and explaining their failures as a result of state repression. Her underlying assumptions about the goodness of Marxism, French postmodernism, and revisionist historiography create a narrative that does not distinguish between facts and values. The role of the United States in modern South Korean history is painted in unremittingly negative tones.

While admirable in its descriptive detail, Lee's interest in the movement is premised on a belief that it was “the driving force for the country's transition from an authoritarian military regime to a parliamentary democracy” (p. 1). Yet there is no attempt to show that this was the case. That the minjung intellectuals struggled mightily with such questions as the nature of Korean history, the relationship to North Korean communism, and the value of traditional Korean culture is clear—and the author's magical gift for complexity and narrative ensure that the unfolding of this drama is a great pleasure to read. The minjung intellectuals certainly managed to create radical critiques of the Cold War state in which they found themselves. But whether any of this mattered to South Korea's transition to democracy remains unclear. Democratization in South Korea has been ascribed variously to the rising middle class, restive industrial workers (the minjung themselves as opposed to the self-described minjung intellectuals), the pressures from U.S. President Ronald Reagan's administration after a sharp reversal of policy in 1987, the role of the Christian church, the breakdown of the developmental state alliance with the private sector, institutional considerations such as electoral systems and decentralization, rising popular protest movements, and leadership splits. There is no doubt that in important ways, the minjung intellectuals shaped the ideational atmosphere in which these multiple factors operated. But what causal significance to attribute to their efforts remains unclear.

Lee's book is a pleasure to read and to recommend. It is a reminder that politics is as much the source of culture as vice versa, and that cultural studies can appropriate political history for its subject matter just as political scientists can make use of culture in their explanations. The disciplinary differences between the two need not detract from the value of this study.