386 LAND REFORM
reformist scholars as well as officials and kings were forced to make conces-
sions to the dominant power of the landlords and the sanctity of private landown-
ership, if not capitulate to it altogethcr. Thc only exception was Tasan's first plan
for collective ownership, but even he was forced to commit apostasy - for his
political and economic as well as his religious beliefs.
Yet retreat and accommodation did not mean that reformers abandoned their
ideal; they still sought to work toward the well-field ideal of state ownership,
collective organization, and egalitarian redistribution by devising some method
that would overcome landlord interests without challenging them directly.
Whether they emphasized rational management and productivity as part of their
plan, as Tasan and So Yugu did, or Yi Ik did not, was beside the point, because
the telos of their plans was not the supposed goal of free market capitalism,
the liberation of the individual from state control, the defense of private prop-
erty and private profit, but rather the apotheosis of state control of private inter-
ests in favor of the public welfare and the achievement of a more equitable
distribution of land and wealth. In short, their ultimate goal remained the same
as that ofYu Hyongwon, except that they were forced to admit that no king was
likely to appear who would summon the resolve to strip the landlords of their
property. And they did not dare advocate a political plan to overthrow the dynasty
to carry out their objectives as another Nco-Confucian, Chong Tojon, had done
at the end of the Koryo dynasty.
THE RULING CLASS
Yu Hyongwon sought to create a system of land distribution by which the rul-
ing class of his society, defined as a select group of eminently moral men, would
be provided support by the state in proportion to their official ranks or schol-
arly positions, which would ideally correspond directly to their moral capaci-
ties. His purpose in eliminating purchase and sale and private ownership was to
eliminate the possibility that contingency or chance could play any role in the
distribution of wealth and income. Those reformers who lived after him, by com-
promising with his goal of nationalizing all landed property, generally modi-
fied Yu's vision to create a perfect system of distribution according to moral
capacity by yielding to the reality of private ownership. Their goals were far
more modest, simply the limitation of ownership to provide some land for the
ordinary peasant smallholder, landless tenant, or laborer.
The' most significant development in thought about the nature of the ruling class
after Yu's time was probably Tasan's first plan to shift the pattern of distribution
from either rank or office, or from Yu's criteria of moral capacity, to new crite-
ria of efficiency and productivity - which is one of the reasons why Kim Yongsop
labeled Tasan a more progressive thinker than his predecessors. Keep in mind,
however, that his progressivism would have to be based on the view that effi-
ciency and productivity were more important because they contribute to the growth
of material life rather than than to the maintenance of traditional Confucian moral