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,...
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