자본의 세기, 기업가적 자아와 자서전－1970년대 「재계 회고」와 기업가적 자아의 주체성 구성의 정치학－

Abstract

As an ideal model of economic men (homo economicus) in Korea, entrepreneurial autobiography were actively published and became popular in the 1990s, but the signs and rise of entrepreneurial autobiography trace back to the period of Park Jung-hee regime. Thus, this paper aims to investigate how economic egos were established through self-narrative writing, especially the series of ‘A Memoir of Financial Circles’ published in the 1970s. The entrepreneurial autobiography, in which the narration about self-life and narration about the expansion of capital proceeded simultaneously by coinciding with each other or being in disharmony with each other is also a style of literacy in which not only the life writing of an individual who is economically successful but also the competent grammar of the capital of the current era is carnificated and historicized. In the series, entrepreneurial writers’ desires for the pursuit of private profits were mixed with their planning to secure social legitimacy by substituting the public interest for their private profits. This paper intends to survey the coincidence and transparency and reveal the traces of rupture during the task of recognizing oneself as an economic human being in Korean society and creating a meaning of oneself. As the growth of companies under the government-led economic development policies was substituted for the growth of the very nation-state, the history of capital started to be combined with the history of the state during the period of the Park Jung-hee regime, and the process of creating common history of economic elites regarding capital accumulation and multiplication was nearly identical to that of naturalizing the combination of capital and authority in Korea. During this period, most entrepreneurial writers intended to define themselves as a subject of the nation-state community development, as demanded by both the upper and lower classes, and which they themselves called on while ruminating over and reorganizing their lives. At the same time, they started defining themselves as economic men who successfully accumulated private profits with their superior competency in a capitalistic society. However, these two different aspects did not always develop in a coincident direction. In such an entrepreneurial autography, their entrepreneurial egos as ‘a subject going through pioneering and critical events’ were either in harmony or disharmony with their other entrepreneurial egos as ‘a nation-state subject’. Such entrepreneurial authors attempted to define themselves as altruistic beings pursuing the public interest in a single nation-state boundary as well as economic men overcoming the boundary with their capital. During the process of harmony and disharmony, those self-narrative entrepreneurial autobio- graphies published through the planning of dehistoricization in the 1970s were success stories of those who had keen senses of economic reason in a capitalistic society on the one hand. On the other hand, they became positioned as autobiographies of 20th century capital that was gradually seizing hegemony within the national and social systems with funds accumulated as a substance.