The ennobling vision of modernity asserts that the benefits of identifying individual citizens as subjectivity are realized only when each subject is aware of the self as free in decisions and actions. Modernization through industrialization and urbanization has been seen as a means by which society can, through market contractual relationships, allow each citizen to become a self-determining subject. In Korean society this self-awakening has already set in and ought to deepen through dynamic economic growth. However, the authoritarian political power combined by technocracy obstructs the emergence of mature subjectivity. This is what can be called a phenomenon of counter-modernization. Citizenship training through philosophical dialogue may find ways to resolve this impasse by reconceptualizing modernity’s goals and means in terms of enabling the potentiality inherent in subjectivity.

The author discusses some aspects of the problem how to transform the former socialist into democratic states. In the first part he argues that the ‘socialist societies’ were not societies in the modern sense but organized in the way of traditional community without (civil) society---with the absolute domination of politics over all spheres of societal activities, in which the only permitted (Communist) Party, mostly reduced to the power of the secretary general, used to decide over almost everything. The psychic functional basis of socialism was happy consciousness and collective narcissism. In the second part the author warns that the realization of the “European way of Iife,” as a basic program of changes in Europe in 1989, was misunderstood because it was conceived as a fixed content and not as a procedure of attaining agreement. In the third part he concludes that nationalism and fervent religiosity, which predominate in several ex-socialist countries, are main obstacles of the transformation of the former socialism because of their exclusion of the different. This tends to continue the societyless community, filled with again absolutized (national or religious) contents, namely with new forms of collective narcissism.

The paper begins by raising some doubts concerning the appropriateness of the phrase, ”after Marxism,” despite current sociological realities which point to its accuracy. It then discusses a certain “pathology” that may be intrinsic to the combined theory and practice of political philosophy; some examples are offered. Next, it is suggested that the discourse of contemporary European political philosophy suffers from the absence of certain Marxian notions, especially that of ideology. Some current trends---postmodernism, nationalism, critical theory, and religious thought---are then briefly explored . It is contended that none of them by itself is adequate for developing the kind of global worldview which, malgré tout, seems needed to counteract the increasing hegemony of the “Coca-Cola cuIture” of the present day. The paper concludes by raising questions about the possible role, at best an awkward one, of American philosophers in this enterprise.

While neither Hegel nor Marx can be called “ecologists” in any strict sense of the term, they both present views of the human-nature relationship which offer important insights for contemporary debates in philosophical ecology. Further, while Marx and Engels began a tradition of sharply distinguishing their own views of nature from those of Hegel, careful examination reveals a substantial commonality of sentiment. The essay compares Hegel and Marx (and Engels) in terms of their basic conceptions of nature, their critiques of Romanitic nature-worship, their notions of how a meaningful unity with nature requires the act of socially transforming nature, their respective calls for a new science of nature, and their attitudes towards technology. I argue that we can uncover a largely shared humanistic orientation toward nature, and I situate this view within contemporary debates about the anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric foundation of ecological thinking.