성호 이익의 유통․상업관 연구- 星湖僿說과 藿憂錄을 중심으로 -

Abstract

YI Ik, whose pen name is Seongho, was a Confucius scholar in the first half ofthe 18th century in Chosun Dynasty. In this paper, the author made an attempt tosummarize Seongho's Views on Distribution and Commerce by analyzing his booksSeongho Saseol(Seongho's Memoirs on Many Subjects) and Kwakwurok(On Caring People'sLiving). Seongho YI Ik regarded his times as the age of Crisis like "the ship inturbulent rapids." He considered that the social custom declined badly and thepeople fell into poverty. According to this views, the main root of these terriblesituation was extravagance by which the farmers were went bankrupt due to losingtheir farmlands. YI Ik supposed that food, clothing and shelter are the mostimportant things for the people to live, and stated that the extravagance excludingthe purpose for these 3 things should be restrained. He claimed that money mightor could be eliminated to suppress extravagance. But he admitted that it is actually difficult to remove money, proposed that itneed to introduce high-valued currencies such as silver bar and 50 Jeon(錢) fordecreasing the circulation of coined money. Furthermore, YI Ik proposed to decreasethe number of public markets and to limit the business hours for reducing theextravagance. As summarized the above, Seongho YI Ik sticked to his views ofanti-commerce through his life. But he conceded the existence and the role ofmerchants in society, and realized the advantage of large-scale means oftransportation such as horse, cart and ship.