18 INTRODUCTIONfrom the weakness of domestic institutions and the growing threat from Japan,
but most of the public was complacent. Once the invasion hit the country, how-
ever, everyone was aware that Choson institutions were at fault, and that some-
thing had to be done to prevent a recurrence of disaster in the future.
What might have been called to task to atone for the disaster were some of
the fundamentals of governance: the monarchy, inherited privilege and slavery,
and Confucian ideology. King Sonjo could easily have been held responsible
for failing to foresee the Japanese threat and strengthen defenses. Inherited priv-
ilege could have been identified as the reason for the incompetence of the bureau-
cracy and for the evasion of tax and service by the yangban. Confucianism might
have been held responsible for its inability to stem the deficiency of morale, the
loss of bureaucratic honesty and devotion, the loss of revenues and service, and
the inefficiency of government. But because the invasion was sudden and
descended on the people like a natural disaster, neither king nor monarchy, nei-
ther inherited privilege nor slavery, and neither Confucian philosophy nor Con-
fucian statecraft were held responsible.
Leszek Kolakowski, in attempting to explain why the Communist system in
Russia and East Europe did not collapse long before 1989, remarked that sup-
posedly objective measures of decrepitude like economic inefficiency and
wartime disaster were not sufficient to overthrow a regime without the mental
readiness of the population for it. "As with most closed ideological systems, com-
munism was for a long time immune to criticism, and no empirical evidence to
the contrary made a difference, since the ideology could easily absorb any facts
that seemed to falsify it and dismiss them as irrelevant." The same statement
could be applied to Korean faith in Confucian ethics and statecraft in the sev-
enteenth century. What chance could there have been for the overthrow of Con-
fucianism and the institutions of bureaucratic monarchy when there was no
observable challenge to its monopoly over the Korean mind at the time? There
was no equivalent to the "slow but inexorable erosion of Communism as a liv-
ing faith" in Choson Korea in that period. 15
Seventeenth-Century Reconstruction
Since the evidence of failure did not provoke an attack on the ideological beliefs
and institutional arrangements that produced it, the survivors of the Imjin War
set about searching for ways to remedy the major problems without a revolu-
tionary abandonment of these impedimenta. Yu Hyongwon was also captive to
this general mood, for he spent most of his adult lifetime in a search through
the materials of his beloved tradition for solutions to institutional breakdown.
He was convinced that it was not the Confucian tradition that was at fault for
Korea's problems, but the misguided way that it had been applied.
In the half century before Yu Hyongwon took up his pen, change began to
appear in Choson institutions, some initiated by reformist officials, others as
manifestations of trends beneath the surface but under way for over a century.