In late November 2012, I was delighted to receive an invitation, out of the blue, to deliver a paper at a small conference at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, in the Republic of Korea, on Friedrich Hayek. Hayek is someone who, some American conservatives apart, does not currently generate all that much interest. As I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Hayek, and am currently editing his Law, Legislation and Liberty for his Collected Works, I was delighted to accept. The Asan Institute were publishing a Korean edition of an introductory book about Hayek, written by Adam Tebble from Kings College, London, and the occasion involved a one-day seminar at which papers were given about Hayek and discussed – five by Western scholars, and one each by a Korean and a Japanese economist – followed by the book launch.

Jeremy Shearmur at The Asan Institute for Policy Studies

The story behind this occasion was that those running the Asan Institute were concerned that, while Korea has a flourishing market-based economy and now has many liberal features to its social organisation, there is a certain hostility towards capitalist and liberal ideas in Korea.  Inspired by a paper on ‘Cold-War liberalism’ by the Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Mueller (who also participated in the discussion), the Asan Institute decided to translate a series of books and also to have a series of one-day conferences on their work, to generate discussion in Korea of issues relating to liberalism and a market economy. The Cold-War theme was also judged to have a certain continuing relevance in Korea, too!

So far, they have had meetings on Isaiah Berlin and Michael Oakeshott, and at the meeting that I attended, there was discussion of Hayek. I was delighted to discover that their next meeting would be on Karl Popper – with whom I worked, and whose After the Open Society, a collection of previously uncollected and unpublished material from the archives, Piers Norris Turner and I published in 2008. I have just been asked if I would be able to participate in, and to give a paper at, that meeting, too, and, indeed, to edit the volumes coming out of both the Hayek and the Popper meetings. There will subsequently be meetings on Hannah Arendt, and on the Japanese scholar Masao Maruyama

The Hayek meeting (under the academic chairmanship of Kim Sung Ho from Yonsei University) was lively and most stimulating. In addition to myself, scholars from the United States (James Murphy from Dartmouth, David Schmidtz from Arizona, and Peter McNamara from Utah State), and also Andrew Gamble from Cambridge, initially gave papers on Hayek. There was an interesting mix between critical engagement and papers which were more positive. This was followed by Hong Hoon from Yonsei University, and Itaru Shimazu from Chiba University in Japan, looking at Hayek in an East Asian Context. The presentation by Adam Tebble at the book launch was also most interesting, in that he advanced an argument that Hayek – who is often seen as an outsider in terms of contemporary political philosophy – in fact has most important things to say to those concerned with the kind of questions about the justice of social arrangements which have been widely engaged in recently, particularly under the influence of John Rawls. I thought that Tebble’s argument was interesting – but it has inspired me, on my return, to try to develop an account of what Hayek was actually doing, and why it is to be preferred to a Rawls-inspired enterprise!

It was fascinating to visit Korea; the Hayek meeting was most stimulating, and I am delighted that I have also been invited to attend the Popper meeting. I am most grateful that the Asan Institute organised this program, and for having given me the opportunity to participate in it. I was left wondering if they will also run a series on contemporary liberal theorists, too.

Jeremy Shearmur is a Reader in Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, RSSS.  He previously taught political theory in the Department of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts at ANU. He has published on issues in the philosophy of science and social and political philosophy, and is the author of The Political Philosophy of Karl Popper, and Hayek and After. In addition to his edition of Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty, he is currently just completing his edition of Larry Briskman’s Problems and their Progress, and – with Geoff Stokes – the editing of The Cambridge Companion to Popper. He is also working on two books, Living with Markets and Hayek.