Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

REMOLDING THE RULING CLASS 169

Yu based his reforms not on any value-free study of methods that might achieve
results without concern for the moral edification of the population; to the con-
trary, he placed heavy emphasis on the moral knowledge of traditional Confu-
cian standards, the application of that knowledge to action to produce perfected
human behavior, and the selection of those who were most adept at it for office.
In fact, one could say that his main goal was to replace the current, morally imper-
fect, hereditary yangban with his morally instructed and perfected scholar-offi-
cials (sadaebu), drawn more broadly from the population at large.