Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918-1170

This book offers no less than a radically different view of the Koryo state. Until now scholarship failed to recognize the complicated historical descent, byzantine international relations and multiple incommensurable worldviews of the early Korean Koryo state (918-1170). Instead, it subjected these to reductionist categories favouring reified particulars over broader views. Asking how Koryo meaningfully dealt with its environment, Remco Breuker rejects the reduction of Koryo intellectual abundance to analytical categories, and emphasizes the functional importance of Koryo's pluralism in allowing the notion that realities were scattered, inconsistent and plural. Here is a convincing argument that Koryo's pluralism decisively contributed to the formation of a region-transcending communal identity that enabled Koryo to engage in a civilizational competition with neighbouring Chinese and Manchurian states, while maintaining a dynamic but stable society domestically.