UCLA 한국학 교수 Duncan의 글로 유교근대성에 대한 고민을 마무리하도록 하자.


"It seems to me that the best way to establish the possibility of some sort of Korean equivalent to “civil society” or the “public sphere” is to demonstrate that there was in the Chosŏn some process of social differentiation analogous to that which took place with the rise of the market economy in Western Europe, a process that both leveled status differences and provided individuals with independent livelihoods that were not dependent on political power and patronage. The arguments advanced by South Korean internal development theorists regarding the “dissolution of the feudal system” and the “sprouts of capitalism” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries notwithstanding, I am not sure that any such process began in Korea until after the opening of the country to the outside world in the late nineteenth century. To the contrary, as James Palais has argued, the Chosŏn appears to have been a state and society dominated by an aristocratic landlord class, the central yangban or pŏryŏl, until after Korea was forced open in 1876."

"Finally, let me note that one of the underlying issues that has motivated my argumentation throughout this chapter is a concern with the use of historically specific and highly idealized Western models to interpret Korea’s past. It is not that I consider the Western experience to be somehow inherently superior to the East Asian or Korean experience, or that Western models represent an advanced level of social and political development to which non-Western societies simply cannot aspire. To the contrary, it is because I feel that the unconditioned, nonreflexive use of Western models privileges the modern Western experience and relegates countries like Korea to a kind of enduring subalternation, not only for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western powers dominated the world, but also (as applied to earlier centuries) retrospectively for an historical era when countries like Korea and China were arguably more “advanced” in many ways than countries of the West"

출처: Duncan Duncan, John (2002), The problematic modernity of Confucianism: the question of “civil society” in Chosŏn dynasty Korea, in: Armstrong, Charles K. (ed.) (2002, 2nd ed.), Korean Society. Civil society, democracy and the state. London et al.: Routledge, 48쪽 이하.