안재홍의 신민주주의와 언론- 제헌 헌법 제정 정신을 중심으로

Ann Jai Hong was the top journalist in Korea during the Japanese colonial rule and the liberation period (1924~1950). His writings from the daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and books are still crucial reading today for understanding the whirlpool of imbroglio of the time. As a journalist, a political activist, and social theorist, Ann had an important role. The first Korean constitutional law of the democratic republic of 1948 contained a lot of his ideas, including neo-nationalism, which emphasized rational open nationalism, and neo-democracy, which held the position of equality for wealth, education, and power, especially including the stance that ʻʻall people must have a jobʼʼ, a popular leftist idea at that time. In this paper, I will compare Ann Jai Hong's theories and how they affected the creation of the first constitutional law. One of Ann's ideas was that freedom of the press could not be different from a citizens' basic rights in the Democratic Korean Republic. This was bigger than the Western concept of freedom of the press because of his left-leaning views on the general equality of neo-deomcracy and how this could also be applied to the press in a democratic society. Until now, no one has connected Ann and the first Korean Constitutional Law. As a political theorist, he participated in the legislative process of drafting that document, but at the time (1947~1948) he was also the highest Korean representative in the American military government. So in order to understand the first Korean Constitutional Law, we need fully to study Ann's ideas of neo-nationalism and neo-democracy.