Where does Neo-Confucianism—a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to it—fit into our story of China’s history?This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle
Where does Neo-Confucianism—a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to it—fit into our story of China’s history?This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in China’s history. The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible.
^Peter K. Bol (2010). Neo-Confucianism in History (Harvard East Asian Monographs), Harvard University Asia Center. Amazon. ISBN 9780674053243 (revised Mar 2016)
For a long time students of Neo-Confucianism are yearning for a thorough examination on and fruition of research in recent decades in English world on Neo-Confucianism transcending the traditional narrative. Bol's lucubration tentatively quenched their thirst. Neo-Confucianism in History, based on 500-odd materials (in which roughly one fifth are original materials), vivified via a distinct perspective the Neo-Confucianism trend as an active engagement of intellect..
