How and why did late eleventh- and early twelfth-century court politics lead to the intensification of factional conflict? Divided by a Common Language approaches this question in two ways. It offers a chronological narrative of late Northern Song court politics with an emphasis on the rise and fall of contending factions. It also proposes that language—specifically, factional rhetoric—offers an explanation for the lack of public acknowledgment of the legitimacy of factions in imperial Chinese politics.

At a time when political history is largely characterized either by absence or by desperate attempts at redefinition, this work presents itself as the first English-language study of the politics of the late Northern Song era. This period is commonly associated with the state activism of the New Policies advocated by Wang Anshi and those he inspired, and the later shift away from court-centered elite strategies. In the skillful hands of Ari Daniel Levine, chronicles of court history (predominantly Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian, a favorite among Song political historians) are transformed into a captivating narrative of mutual condemnation and the resulting vicissitudes of court politicians. Chapters 4–6 chronicle the ascendancy of Wang Anshi over those questioning his radical reforms (1069–85), the brief return to power of the antireform coalition and its splintering into regional factions (1085–93), and the restoration of the New Policies regime (1094–1104) at the cost of the blacklisting and exile of hundreds of men associated with the previous Yuanyou reign, the so-called Yuanyou faction.

Interwoven with the chronological narrative is the author's larger design to “reconstruct the linguistic rules and intellectual assumptions that shaped faction theory and factional rhetoric … and that prevented ministers from publicly acknowledging the existence of their own factional affiliations, while they simultaneously accused their adversaries of factionalism” (p. 17). The author explicates these rules and assumptions to a certain extent in chapter 2, where he discusses classical and historical references occurring in discourses on factions and interprets them as a closed system determining what could and could not be articulated. The following chapter demonstrates the use of such references in expositions on factions (faction theory) and also argues that, despite differing takes on the legitimacy of factions, Song politicians uniformly utilized a court-centered model of authority that turned the emperor into the final arbiter between morally superior and inferior men.

Few will dispute the divergence between imperial Chinese and early modern English attitudes toward factions (hinted at in the colophons to the conclusion, p. 161), but the methodological choices made in this analysis of the role of language in politics raise problems. The linguistic rules of factional rhetoric are mostly left implicit in translations of passages of mutual denunciation. Chapters 3–6 document the wrangling in polished translations—the author occasionally adds extra effect (e.g., by having Emperor Huizong discuss “the strategy for separating officials” or demand a “public” rejection of officials, where no such language appears in the original, p. 146). Given its focus on the use of terminology for factions (dang, pengdang, wudang), this work would have benefited from methodologies developed in corpus linguistics allowing for a systematic analysis of the frequency of terms and their collocates (patterns in which they tend to occur). Such methods, conventionally ignored by historians, in this case would have led to more precise estimates of frequency and more persuasive interpretations of changes in usage over time. The claim, for example, that wudang (translated as “our faction,” but often better translated as “we”) makes “extremely rare appearances” in the oeuvre of Northern Song authors but occurs “at least a dozen times” in Zhu Xi's letters (p. 170) is not borne out even by a simple search in the electronic version of the Wenyuange siku quanshu (it occurs there ninety-seven times in Northern Song collected writings and in one such work eleven times). Similarly, a more fine-tuned analysis of the contexts of particular usages may have led to a better sense of the illocutionary force of factional rhetoric and less consternation over the apparent misreadings and anachronisms (pp. 30, 36) and perceived inconsistencies (pp. 54–56) in the writings of Song politicians.

Divided by a Common Language introduces English readers to an influential chapter in imperial Chinese political history and to features of a political discourse that polarized politicians into opposing communities of legitimate and illegitimate ministers of the court. Its singular focus on the latter argument, however, underscores the need for more research into the ways in which language shapes and is shaped by politics and conflict, as well as alternative ways in which political networks were created and maintained both discursively and practically in imperial China.