272 SOCIAL REFORMcurrent changes to the distant future by using rational efficiency, free choice,
and practical knowledge as the sole basis for the reform of society. On the con-
trary, he returned to the traditional sources of wisdom of his highly Confucian-
ized society, the Chinese classics and the giants of Nco-Confucian intellectual
and statecraft thought and policy in the Sung dynasty.
His social vision consisted of the transformation of the hereditary yangban
to an ethical elite ruling over a country of commoner peasants with a marginal
number of merchants, artisans, and slaves, and the abolition of hereditary slav-
ery by converting them to commoner smallholders, tenants, or hired laborers
free of the exploitation and degradation of servility. He did not mean to cast off
Confucian norms and values in a time of utmost adversity, but rather to recon-
firm them in new institutions, inculcate them in the new elite, and make Choson
Korea a truly moral society.
Although his ideas became widely known by the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, it is difficult to argue that he transformed the way of thinking of the gov-
ernment leaders or the public, especially since scholars who counted themselves
his intellectual heirs and disciples thought his proposals for slave reform were
too radical. Nor wcre most of the educated yangban whether in or out of office
ready to jettison the privileges of their class, or scuttle thc examination system
that had provided them entre to the highest levels of government power.
Some contemporary scholars think that Yu and other members ofthe so-called
school of practicalleaming were responsible for aiding and abetting the posi-
tive changes that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it
is true that Yu's rationale for bringing hereditary slavery to an end probably had
some influence on the decision to abolish official slavery in 1801, if not the final
adoption of the matrilineal succession law for mixed commoner/slave marriages
in 1730. But it was neither the intellectual arguments nor the development of
entrepreneurial peasants that best explain the rapid decline in the slave popula-
tion after the late eighteenth century; it was the action of the slaves themselves,
who took advantage of a demoralized and corrupted bureaucracy that lost the
will to round up the runaways and "voted with their feet" by running away in
large numbers. No matter how enterprising or capitalistic some of the outside-
resident slaves may have been, as some scholars have argued, very few were
ahle to buy their way out of slavery because the cost was prohibitive.
The exclusivity of yangban domination in Korean society was also challenged
by late Choson social trends as more and more people bought titles, evaded taxes
and service, and falsely registered themselves as students and scholars. Many
have taken this phenomenon to indicate rapid upward mobility spawned by a
new class of entrepreneurial rich peasants, but the facts reveal a narrowing of
the core of yangban families that were able to dominate the examinations and
the upper levels of the central bureaucracy, and very few newcomers from the
peasantry. The examination system remained intact, the official school system
was not reestablished, and the private academies were corrupted by the accu-
mulation of estates and the growing connection with political factions. It was