EPILOGUE
The Complexities of Korean
Confucian Statecraft
This book has been devoted to a study of Confucian statecraft in the last half
of the Choson dynasty with respect not only to its ideas, but to its relevance to
government policy and action. The material presented in the text reveals that it
is very difficult, if not impossible, to define Confucian statecraft in action in
simple terms for a number of reasons. The ideas that constituted the Confucian
statecraft tradition were not always internally consistent. The conflict between
historical contingency and ideal Confucian objectives inhibited or obstructed
the achievement of those objectives; antinomies within Confucian thought and
practice guaranteed conflict over the definition of goals and priorities; and the
impossibility of recovering the ideal norms of classical antiquity because of the
irreversibility of the transition from the Chou feudalism to Ch'in centralized
bureaucracy meant that difference of opinion was unavoidable over the crucial
question of compromise between the ideal and the real. For these reasons, the
statecraft thought ofYu Hyongwon, which has constituted the focus of this study,
cannot be taken as the only, the best, or the most representative example of Korean
Confucian statecraft thought in Korea. Some of his ideas were truly unusual and
some were acceptable to most Confucians, but others were rejected as unwork-
able, even by those who regarded themselves as his intellectual disciples. The
reason why I chose him as the focus for this study was because he was the first
Korean scholar of the Choson dynasty to write a thorough and comprehensive
analysis of the deficiencies of his society in the seventeenth century, providing
us with an excellent entree into statecraft writing and the nature and complex-
ity of a Korean Confucian society under stress. His scheme for the rectification
of institutions provides a template for us to compare the ideas and policies of
both scholars and officials involved in the contemplation of policy to the end of
the dynasty.
THE INCOMPLETENESS OF THE CONFUCIAN TRANSFORMATION
At the beginning of the Choson dynasty, there were very few people in Korean
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