Peter K. Bol describes his book as “an interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as a social and political elite, with local society, and with the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties.” The first half surveys the emergence of “Neo-Confucianism” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and subsequent developments into the sixteenth century. The book examines the “Ancient Style” movement of the late Tang and its quest to revive the values of the ancient sages by internalizing the modes of literary expression found in the Classics. Bol discusses the ways in which Song Confucians continued the Ancient Style revivalist agenda but shifted to understanding the Way of the sages through illuminating coherence immanent in all things in order to morally transform society. He situates the origins of Neo-Confucianism in a reaction to the intrusive political reforms of Wang Anshi's New Policies, primarily in the south, away from the capital.
The second half takes up four major themes of Neo-Confucianism in history. Chapter 4 examines the concern for the moral transformation of society at the local level through literati-led voluntary associations rather than through the central court's legislative authority. Chapter 5 discusses the theory of the underlying coherence of all things through li (principle). Possessing the innate endowment necessary to apprehend the coherence of li in things, the ancient sages created civilization by giving cultural form to li, and transmitted their insights in their teachings. Chapter 6 analyzes Dao Learning's (Daoxue) faith in the unity of the cosmic order attributable to li; in a single correct doctrine enunciated by the ancient sages and transmitted among Confucian literati who followed the proper path to understand it; in the perfect integration of the human world built by the ancient sages; and ultimately in the mind's innate capacity to apprehend the coherence of all things and thereby act morally. Chapter 7 examines the creation of the Dao Learning curriculum, which aimed at the student's moral cultivation, and private academies, which offered a locally generated alternative to the examination curriculum taught in state schools. This chapter also considers locally maintained private academies, which stressed moral cultivation over examination success, and community compacts, which fostered moral action and managed local resources through granaries and low-interest loans.
The book's thesis is that, beginning in the Song, Confucians worked to transform the world by concentrating their efforts on local society. In contrast to historians who focus on Dao Learning's role in the formation of imperial orthodoxy, Bol stresses the concern for fostering local and community alternatives to imperious New Policies. The ideas of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi figure prominently throughout the book and constitute a matrix from which subsequent Neo-Confucian learning developed. Bol superbly captures Cheng's and Zhu's urgent reactions to New Policy excesses as they developed a theory of communal action.
By configuring “Neo-Confucianism” as an essentially localist reaction to an activist state, Bol effectively writes out of his story generations of Zhu Xi's champions who sought to effect moral governance through imperial institutions. Neo-Confucianism in History ends with Wang Yangming's followers and leaves out late Ming and Qing figures. It remains unclear how to reconcile this localist orientation with the Donglin movement, whose members, Bol acknowledges, were active both at the local level and at the court, or with Cheng-Zhu stalwarts at the Kangxi court, such as Xiong Cili (1635–1709) and Zhang Boxing (1652–1725). Bol's configuration tends to flatten out the internal complexity of Neo-Confucianism when Zhu's advocates acted on the conviction that the court could transform the world, even while others deployed localist strategies.
Largely in response to the New Policies debacle, Bol argues, Zhu Xi and his followers bifurcated moral and political authority. They in effect removed the emperor as a necessary element in the moral authority of an age and stressed instead the primacy of literati who practiced and transmitted the Dao. In Bol's history, proponents of Dao Learning abandoned the court as a viable arena of moral action and authority, and worked to transform local society. One wonders, though, whether the specter of Wang's excesses in the collective memory of Zhu's later advocates had diminished considerably by the Ming, if not before. Evidence suggests that they worked even during the reigns of such autocratic sovereigns as Hongwu (1368–98) and Jiajing (1521–66) to realize a universal moral order centered on the court. Song and Ming sources abound with court debates on the emperor's sacrifices at the Altar of Heaven—often invoking Zhu's writings—in order to perfect a ritual that lay at the heart of the emperor's moral-political authority. The dilemma between serving the emperor or withdrawing from the court—the bifurcation of moral and political authority in a corrupt age and the remerging of them under an enlightened lord—encompasses a spectrum of moral action that has defined what it meant to be a Confucian from Confucius to Dao schoolmen.
This book is less of a “polemical” engagement with existing interpretations of Neo-Confucianism than a formulation of an alternative thesis. Much of Bol's polemics—his critique of other accounts—is relegated to footnotes, which leaves little room for him to develop his criticisms of alternative views. How might Bol's account of intellectual conformity in Ming examination culture be reconciled with Benjamin Elman's analysis of cognitive virtuosity in composing the eight-legged essay? (see A Cultural History of Civil Examinations [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000]). Developments in Cheng-Zhu thinking articulated in examination essays during the Ming and Qing belie a profound commitment to the court's moral authority.
Neo-Confucianism in History presents a provocative, often compelling approach to the history of late imperial Confucianism. “Neo-Confucianism” here is neither bound to the court nor guided by metaphysical speculations motivated by internal debate or argument with Buddhism. Bol demonstrates that Zhu Xi and his followers were deeply engaged in society and politics. Bol's analysis of the many forms of local activism from Zhu through Wang Yangming's radical followers offers a convincing alternative to reductionist Marxian analyses that view Neo-Confucianism as a tool of state power. A question that remains unresolved, though, is how the changing nature of Dao Learning in the last five hundred years of imperial China, when many of its proponents ardently served at court as a proper venue for moral action, challenges the localist thesis that informs Neo-Confucianism in History.
