Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2020 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2020 The Incomplete Social Contract: Elites and Ideals in the England of John Locke (1632~1704) and the Korea of Jeong Dojeon (1342~1398) and Heo Gyun (1569~1618) Jihyeong Park Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020 Part of the Asian History Commons, European History Commons, and the Intellectual History Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Park, Jihyeong, "The Incomplete Social Contract: Elites and Ideals in the England of John Locke (1632~1704) and the Korea of Jeong Dojeon (1342~1398) and Heo Gyun (1569~1618)" (2020). Senior Projects Spring 2020. 106. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020/106 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Incomplete Social Contract: Elites and Ideals in the England of John Locke (1632~1704) and the Korea of Jeong Dojeon (1342~1398) and Heo Gyun (1569~1618) Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Jihyeong (Jonas) Park Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2020 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my Senior Project Advisor Gregory B. Moynahan for giving me helpful advice on how to use John Locke’s social contract and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s concept of human beings’ progress toward consciousness of freedom to explain how historical figures such as Jeong Dojeon and Heo Gyun of the Joseon dynasty in Korea, an East Asian nation, serve as an example of progress in the consciousness of freedom when they rebelled against their greedy, tyrannical government in the spirit of Mencius’s “right of revolution.” During last semester’s Midway Conference, Robert J. Culp suggested I use Mencius’s political theories in my senior project on Korean social contract, and his suggestion helped guide my paper in a clearer direction. I would like to thank my former Anthropology instructor, Gregory Morton, for his support throughout my senior paper writing process. Without his ideas on how to explore Heo Gyun in the context of social contract, I would not even have dared to continue my journey to complete my senior project paper. I personally thank Daejeon Hanbat Library, Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics, and the National Library of Korea for their middle Korean to modern Korean translated primary and secondary sources on the history of Joseon dynasty. If I did not have an opportunity to learn of their sources last summer in 2019 when I paid a visit to South Korea, I would not even have dared to take a look at primary sources in the middle Korean language and start the first page of this senior paper. I thank the library staff of Bard Stevenson Library for providing a senior paper format and giving suggestions on how to cite a paper in a proper format. Without proofreading help from my younger brother Chae and Sedonia Guillone, I would not have been able to check grammar and sentence structure errors in my senior project. Last but not least, I could not have completed this project without support from my family, my suitemates, Alec Simmons and Ari Mackoff, and best friends, Jason Yu Junsang, Andrei Cotoi, and Olivia Berlin. Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................... 28 Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................................... 55 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 85 Appendix ................................................................................................................................... 88 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 94 1 Introduction When German philosopher Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued in Lectures on the Philosophy of History in 1805 how political freedom has three different stages: one person knows who is free, some people know who is free, all people know who is free, he meant that one person’s freedom existed as despotism in the East, some peoples’ freedom existed as a democracy and an aristocracy in the Greek and Roman World, and all peoples’ freedom existed as a monarchy in the Germanic world. Hegel summarizes his view on knowing political freedom as follows: World history is the discipline of the wilderness of the natural will to that which is general and to subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows only, that one is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some is free; the Germanic world knows that all are free. 1 So, why did Hegel believe that the East only knew “that one is free”? Terry Pinkard, writer of Hegel: A Biography, argues that Hegel was afraid that the East could be “the dangers to which a contemporary European shape of life might succumb.” 2 Thus, Hegel argued that the East or the 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (version Amazon Kindle). Translated by John Sibree and Ruben Alvarado. (Aalten, Netherlands: WordBridge Publishing, 2013), https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Philosophy-History-G-W-F-Hegel- ebook/dp/B0050IODB4/, pp. 95. 2 Terry Pinkard, “Hegel’s False Start: Non-Europeans as Failed Europeans.” In Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice, 1st ed., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n2tv25.6, pp. 2. 2 Asian country had one person who knew political freedom, so he could portray that European nations such as Germany had a successful “development” of political freedom in all people. However, is there a European nation that shares similarities with the Asian nation on knowing political freedom? England and Korea both used John Locke’s concept “social contract” to define a relationship between a ruler and a ruler’s subjects. Even though some European scholars such as Hegel viewed that Asia and Europe as “world apart,” regardless of sharing the same Eurasian continent, largely due to possible differences in understanding meaning of political freedom, this essay will argue that precisely in the concept of the social contract there was at least in one region, Korean peninsula, a profound similarity between Europe and Asia. John Locke’s social contract has been widely used by contemporary scholars to explain European political theory and cultures in the early modern period. It could also be used as a parallel concept to the theories of the Joseon dynasty’s scholars Jeong Dojeon (1342~1398) and Heo Gyun (1569~1618) in the early modern period. So, how could a social contract, a theory presumed to be first introduced by European early modern scholars such as John Locke, have also appeared in the Joseon dynasty under two Korean scholars Jeong Dojeon and Heo Gyun? It is important to note there are political similarities between John Locke’s England and Jeong Dojeon and Heo Gyun’s Joseon dynasty. Religious and economic differences existed in England and the Joseon dynasty since people of the English kingdom believed in Christianity as a state religion had a mercantile market economy from a feudal structure, and the Joseon kingdom believed in Confucianism as a state religion had a physiocratic agricultural economy. 3 However, England and Joseon both had a group of appointed elite royal court members who were qualified for government jobs to function as a legislature and to convince the king to pass laws favorable to common people who were not qualified for government jobs that would stabilize the common peoples’ livelihood by protecting their wealth and right to earn a living. This group of court members was responsible for collaborating with the peoples’ rulers or kings to help the common people enjoy their political freedom without their possessions and persons being exploited by their government. Also, both the English and Joseon kingdoms were built on the emphasis on free peoples’ political freedom to have the protection of public welfare from government on tax-related issues such as debt and fines. John Locke’s concept of political freedom mentions the protection of the peoples’ wealth in The Second Treatise of Government as follows: TO understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature,