The new world of the eleventh century: 750 and 1050 compared. Foreign relations ; North and south ; Commerce and urbanization ; Social change -- Searching for a new foundation in the eleventh century. Literati opinion and the civil service examinations ; Taking apart the Tang model of antiquity ; The new policies : legislating a system -- The Neo-Confucians. Neo-Confucians and Confucians ; An external reading of the internal history ; Approaches and questions -- Politics. The question of autocracy ; The rhetoric of empire ; Neo-Confucianism and politics ; The Neo-Confucian mission and the literati ; The later imperial state and Neo-Confucianism : the significance of the early Ming -- Learning. Neo-Confucian learning as theory and practice ; Learning as the solution, learning as the problem -- Belief. The problem of judgment and motivation ; Unity as belief -- Society. Creating a choice in literati learning in Song and Yuan ; An alternative for the family in Song and Yuan ; Literati voluntarism and community in Song and Yuan ; From voluntarism to legislation : the Ming founding ; The great revival and the return of voluntarism.

PDF of table of contents Online.

"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."--Jacket.

Local access dig.pdf. [Bol-Neo-Confucianism.pdf]