Yu's COMMUNITY COMPACT REGULATIONS 761literature that its authors were motivated by any attempt to reorganize society
in a way that would promote the expansion of production and commerce, let
alone capitalism, because the method and the content of these compacts and
their early Chos6n predecessors were quintessentially devoted to the realization
of Confucian norms of respect and social behavior.
Every advocate of community compacts, including Yu, believed that the com-
munity compact association had the duty to oversec and investigate every detail
of personal behavior in daily life and mobilize the entire community to enforce
conformity to Confucian norms. This was to be implemented first by education
and persuasion, but if that did not succeed, then by ostracism and punishment,
methods that were antithetical to the Western notion of the right of individuals
to protection from the state. As liberal as Yu Hyongwon may have been on the
question of freedom from social discrimination based on inherited status, he was
an unshakeable conservative on the question of free inquiry and expression
because his aim was to achieve realization of Confucian ideals in full, not the
abandonment or destruction of those ideals.
The community compacts were designed to rectify thc obvious and periodic
decline in popular mores that had occurred over the years. such as an increase
of banditry and thievery, overt signs of disrespect for parents. elders. landlords,
masters, and husbands, and arguments, fights, and even murder of close rela-
tives. Most of the proponents of the compacts believed that moral education,
persuasion, and group pressure were essential to create the mood necessary to
restore harmony to society because the apparatus of state power was ineffective
or easily subverted by the private and corrupt motives of many officials and most
clerks. Yu Hyongwon shared the sentiment of the moralists of the sixteenth cen-
tury that a more inclusive network of community organization and control was
needed to enforce moral standards.
In the end the community compact movement was a total failure. Only the
Taewongun's adoption of the village granary system in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury could be regarded as a successful fruition of the long history of ideas about
the virtues of local self-government, and even that experiment was mitigated by
the charging of interest for central government finance. Instead, the loss of inter-
est in community compacts by kings and active government officials reflected
the long-term decline in morale that generally accompanied a political and social
regime that doggedly preferred to preserve the position of the elite rather than
break the bonds that tied men down.