The latest of Mark Edward Lewis's thematically organized monographs, Honor and Shame in Early China, offers an intriguing survey of the culture of recognition in pre-Qin and Han China, addressing the complex relations between state- and non-state-based social models. It should find a welcome place in studies of early Chinese intellectual history, comparative empire, and even later East Asian popular literature, which often depicts the historical contexts that Honor and Shame addresses.

After a characteristically erudite introduction, Lewis's first chapter, “Honor and Shame of the King and Warrior,” delves into the Zuozhuan, purported to represent the time from 770 to about 500 BCE (p. 17). During this era, Lewis argues, an intensely hierarchical model of hereditary nobility coexisted with a standard of behavior based on “martial prowess and manliness” (p. 22) that let individual elites accrue honor outside the strict confines of heredity. The famous “great services of the state” (p. 19)—offerings and war—thus manifested separate models of honor that mitigated “tension between formal state organization and martial valor” (p. 23). Political reformers, he suggests, tapped into the second, less restricted model and its ceremonial apparatus to help implement their programs (pp. 43-44).

Against this background, the following chapters explore how political and demographic changes during the Warring States period (ca. 500–220 BCE; p. 47) reshaped framings of honor and shame. The second chapter, “Acquired Honor in the Warring States,” considers new models of identity that emerged within Warring States polities: from groups of “bravoes” (xia 俠) (p. 47), to the shi-retainers with whom rulers staffed their governments (p. 48), to rulers themselves, framed as qualitatively different from everyone else (p. 49). Drawing chiefly on the Analects and the Mencius, Lewis links models of honor and shame among scholars to the need for new bases for social ties in an unstable environment (p. 84). The third chapter, “State-Based Honor in the Warring States,” looks at efforts to normalize models of status based entirely on service to the state. Lewis links the moral universalism of the Mozi, the instrumentalism of the Shang Jun shu and the Han Feizi, and the strategic exigencies of the military treatises as facets of a push toward centralized state arbitration of status. The later portion of the chapter considers how states engaged alternate models of honor without capturing them entirely, setting a precedent for the role of public intellectuals in the Han dynasty (pp. 109–10); it also adduces the Xunzi as a locus of contact between independent standards of honor for scholars and recognition of the value of state power (pp. 111–14).

For the rest of the book, Lewis ranges widely across early imperial sources, considering the dynamics of centralized versus local power and their effects on honor and shame. The fourth chapter, “Honor of the Imperial Officials,” looks at Western Han models of the ideal official. Adducing Jia Yi (p. 127), Lu Jia (pp. 137–38), and other sources, Lewis considers how identifying with the intellectual heritage of earlier Zhou aristocrats helped Han officials stand apart from the commons; yet the language skills that went along with classical study afforded a type of official prestige that was easily separated from actual power, accommodating the roles of affines and imperial intimates in state affairs. In the fifth chapter, “Honor in Local Society in the Early Empires,” Lewis looks at two Han social groups external to yet connected with state affairs. Bravoes , he suggests, eventually came to encompass all who built local relationships through unorthodox behavior (p. 157). In the meantime, local family units, grown in significance by the Eastern Han, fostered models of honor based on devotion to mothers, local communities, and, in some cases, eremitic ideals, as seen through funerary inscriptions. The sixth and final chapter traces the emergence of skill at writing as a source of honor and a basis for parallel social networks. Lewis shows how eminent figures such as Yang Xiong (pp. 188–91), Huan Tan (pp. 192–93), Wang Chong (pp. 198–204), and others tied personal literary attainment to public reputation. By the Eastern Han, he shows, academic activities had become a basis of erudite “factions” (p. 186) that fostered opposition to eunuch power in the late Han state.

Honor and Shame in Early China touches on some of the most fundamental issues in early Chinese history. Its focused theme, however, lets it offer insights into these problems without undermining its firm grounding in textual interpretation. The book's weakest points come when it proposes a sequence of political and intellectual history covering the early Bronze Age—I do not share Lewis's skepticism about the role of inscribed bronzes in Western Zhou society (p. 35), for example. Such assertions make up very little of the book, however; overall, it is cogent, insightful, and pleasant to read. It will of course interest scholars of early Chinese history, but since it evokes major Han thinkers and sources in focused and well-contextualized ways, readers interested in the broader discourse of honor and shame should find it valuable as well.