조선 초기 신분 제도의 사회적 위상과 관념적 구조

Abstract

This article analyzes the estate system in Early Jo-sun society focusing on its societal location and ideal structure, especially in relation to its influence on modern South-Korean legal culture. In early Jo-sun Society, the division of estates among the people was made mainly by customary-or-written public law. And the differentiation corresponding to estates was made mainly in the public sphere of social life, by the laws of the land, conventions of the society, or arbitrary and individual volitions among the people. The ideal structure of the system took the form of somewhat Confucian conceptions of people, of state, and of society, but not fully. In the estate system in early Jo-sun Society or from the Confucian viewpoint to people and public society, all the people each should have economic occupation in the private sphere of life and serve for the state or the country with service of office or and personal corve in the public sphere, in principle. In such a system or conception, the people were regarded and treated as passive beings, and moreover the private sphere and the public sphere of social life couldn’t form a pertinent and proper relationship. The historical experience under such a system seems to have made some negative influences on modern South-Koreans in realizing or actualizing democratic legalism.