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.

包弼德（Peter K. Bol）是美國哈佛大學東亞語言與文明係的查理斯•卡威爾（Charles H. Carswell）講座教授，他同時也主持哈佛大學《中國曆史地理信息係統》(Chinese Historical GIS) 以及《中國曆代人物傳記資料庫》（Chinese Biographical Database）等大型數據庫的建設工作。其著作包括 This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (1992，中譯本《斯文：唐宋思想的轉型》)，並閤編Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics (2006) 以及Confucianism and Ecology (1998) 等書。包弼德最近十餘年的研究專注於討論理學的曆史角色，以及從地方史的視角齣發探討中國社會文化的變遷。