My dissertation argues the virtue of state is a crucial form of the state’s power and, at the same time, constitutes the international order. The virtue of state confers power upon the state by making it a leader in cultivating collective attunement among the states. Simultaneously, it constitutes an order among the states by making them finely attuned to various social and natural forces, including the other states. It is particularly advantageous for weak states in a hegemonic international order as they can cultivate virtue even without extensive material power resources. The state cultivates its virtue through the dialectic of performance and evaluation among what I call the evaluative community. For the state to be able to cultivate its virtue reflexively, it needs fictional moral personhood. The moral fiction of state appeared separately in Warring States China and in early modern Europe before the two separate traditions merged in 19th-century East Asia. Three major fictions of monadic, sovereign, and liberal state defined the virtues of state in East Asian international orders and provided the ethical motivation for cultivating them.
I substantiate my argument by investigating the virtues of state defined by these three fictions. First, I analyze the virtue of the early modern East Asian states with its evaluative community of the shi and the monadic fiction. They used the rites and literary texts to incorporate the rhythms of imperial politics within the emotional calibration of their rulers and elites. Second, I trace how the international lawyers and East Asian scholars translated the legal conception of sovereignty into a state’s virtue in 19th-century East Asia. They cultivated sovereignty as a virtue to cope with the imperialist expansion. Third, I reconceptualize liberal internationalism as a state fiction, which has enabled the South Korean public and liberal internationalist networks to cultivate the liberal virtue. The theoretical and historical investigations of this dissertation offer an alternative conception of the state’s agency. Instead of the inefficacious pursuit of sovereignty, the virtue of state offers a flexible range of agencies that can suit each state’s material and normative conditions
