ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Despite the classical value of Max Weber’s Protestant studies, his Confucian studies have become the subject of intense debate in the course of East Asian modernization. On the occasion of the Centenary of Weber’s death, to overcome the limitations and misunderstandings of his Confucian theory, this paper carried out the following research. First, Weber’s world religion research project was carried out in accordance with the purpose of explaining the results of his Protestant ethic in universal history. As a result, his study on China and Confucianism, conducted as part of the study of world religion, was bound to have limitations. If the relationship between Protestant Ethic and Confucianism and Taoism is reset equally, Weber’s historical and sociological methods and conclusion are still valid as a starting point for Confucian studies. Second, the academic discussions of East Asian modernity in the last century were in the search for functional equivalents of Western Protestantism. Confucian capitalism theory was a discourse that synthesized these critical processes, but it did not overcome Weber’s thesis internally. In order to overcome Weber academically, this paper reviewed two concepts, Peter Berger’s ‘post-Confucian ethic’ and Robert Bellah’s ‘bourgeois Confucianism’, and sought the possibility of innovation of Confucianism as an ethical religion through Bella’s final exploration of Confucian transcendence of secular world and Park Young-shin’s reflections on Korean society as ‘bamboo cage’.

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