Neo-confucianism in history / Peter K. Bol.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bol, Peter Kees, author.

Series:

Harvard East Asian monographs ; 307.

Harvard East Asian monographs ; 307

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Neo-Confucianism--History.

Neo-Confucianism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 366 p., 2 p. of plates :) col. maps ;

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London : Harvard University Asia Center, [2008]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Neo-Confucianism in History

The New World of the Eleventh Century: 750 and 1050 Compared

Searching for a New Foundation in the Eleventh Century

The Neo-Confucians

Politics

Learning

Belief

Society

China's History and Neo-Confucianism

Notes

Bibliography

Character List

Index

Harvard East Asian Monographs.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-68417-480-5

OCLC:

1132225418

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9781684174805 DOI