Since JaHyun Kim Haboush's classic treatment of Confucian kingship in Chosŏn Korea, no monograph in English has revisited the topic until now. Christopher Lovins's portrait of King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800), a monarch celebrated as much as he is misunderstood, breaks this dry spell. Eminently readable for newcomers to Korean history, this book is also a welcome addition to the flurry of new scholarship on early modern Korea (roughly 1400–1800 in Lovins's preferred periodization).
The stark contrast between Chŏngjo's style and that of his grandfather and predecessor King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–76) is telling. Yŏngjo cultivated an image of moral perfection. With the “modesty” of a sage-king, Yŏngjo could wail during state rituals about how “his own lack of virtue brought disgrace on the royal line” to cajole his officials to submission. Chŏngjo instead demanded recognition of his “centrality” and required his officials’ “deference.” He even sought to ”overawe them with his mastery of Confucian rhetoric and classical writing style” (p. 129). Both modes could be understood as manifestations of Confucian ideology, but their distinctiveness shows that Confucianism can only explain so much. What Lovins shows is why and how Chŏngjo employed the specific strategies he did.
When it came to the persistent problem of court factionalism, Chŏngjo again diverged from his grandfather. Instead of employing “moderates unaffiliated with the existing factions. … and balancing their representation in the government,” Chŏngjo “sought to equate the king with the state,” establishing the monarch as one “who alone transcended factions” (pp. 59–61). In Lovins's treatment, this style of rule is absolutist, in which the king “went from a rival for power to a mediator between competing claims, a disinterested party who could establish and guarantee privileges” (p. 9). To assert this authority, Chŏngjo made several related ideological moves: establishing the ruler as Imperial Pivot (hwanggŭk) around which all political activity revolved (p. 35); promoting the doctrine of royal discretion (kwŏn) to allow him to veer from established precedents, whether classical or ancestral, as he saw fit (pp. 37–47); and arrogating the authority of classical interpretation as “ruler-teacher” (kunsa) (pp. 32–35). Becoming the master rather than the student of his learned officials flew in the face of the “minister-centered” neo-Confucian orthodoxy defended by Chŏngjo's chief supporters in the Noron faction. By arrogating the authority of classical interpretation, Chŏngjo was explicitly challenging the authoritative position of Zhu Xi and his interpretations. So much for the stereotype of Chŏngjo as a staunch neo-Confucian!
The discussion of absolutism suggests a way to think about Korean political history without reverting to the neo-Confucian stereotype. On this point, the book's comparisons with the baroque court of Louis XIV of France are instructive. Some readers may object to this comparative gesture, but it is effective in highlighting what Lovins means by absolutism. Like Louis XIV, Chŏngjo was still constrained through existing institutions. In practice, “absolute monarchy” was a “collaboration between the king and the elite,” in which the ruler worked to “assimilate the high nobility” through “balanced collaboration and coercion” (p. 9). Both the Bourbon-period aristocrats and Chŏngjo's yangban courtiers, especially those who had much to lose from rival groups, invested in the monarchy as a disburser of privileges and arbiter of disputes (pp. xvi–xvii, 143–47). A clear example of this dynamic is in Chŏngjo's personal epistolary exchange with his erstwhile political enemy Sim Hwanji (pp. 64–74), a complex dance involving much feinting, manipulation, and even coordination—all dynamics invisible in the official, public record of received history. Less compelling is the comparison between Chŏngjo and his contemporary, the Qing emperor Qianlong, which basically restates the point that Confucian monarchs behaved differently in different contexts, although for some scholarly audiences, the fact that China cannot explain Korea is a point still worth belaboring.
The focus on absolutism also makes an important historiographical point. Beyond illuminating key dynamics in the early modern Korean court for a broader audience, it sidesteps the anachronistic dichotomies that linger from older approaches that score Chŏngjo according to how he contributed to Korea's political, economic, and social “modernization.” Was he a “reactionary who tried to block the dawn of the modern age in Korea”? Or, at the other extreme, a creative “maverick” who, infused with “democratic consciousness,” freed himself from the “constrictive Confucian framework to undertake modernizing reforms” and “crush. . . . the stodgy old aristocrats” who stood in the way of efforts to “empower the people of the nation”? (pp. xvi–xvii). Lovins, building on newer scholarship that has emerged in Korea since the 2000s, finds not so much a middle ground, but seeks a third way. He historicizes Chŏngjo in terms of his own motivations and the challenges of rule he confronted.
