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Dissertation Information for Benjamin A. Elman

NAME:
- Benjamin A. Elman

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of Pennsylvania (USA) (1980)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: THE UNRAVELLING OF NEO-CONFUCIANISM: THE LOWER YANGTZE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

Abstract: Before the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the most compelling ideal that motivated the greatest Chinese scholars was the cultivation of moral perfection. By 1750, however, the heirs of these fervent coteries of Neo-Confucian masters and disciples had become members of a secular academic community, which encouraged, and rewarded with livelihoods, orginal and rigorous critical scholarship. Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911) scholarship represented a new and irreversible transition in traditional Chinese intellectual history. The tradition of evidential research (k'ao-cheng ), which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century textual scholars(' )(, ) created, initiated an intellectual crisis from which the imperial Neo-Confucian orthodoxy entrenched in official life never recovered.

In my dissertation, I describe the intellectual community in which the Ch'ing evidential research movement took hold. One of my principal conclusions is that a unified academic community existed in the Lower Yangtze Region of China before its dissolution during the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). Members of this community of scholars were bound together by associations and institutions for the propagation of knowledge. A consensus of ideas about how to find and verify knowledge was the result. My contention is that evidential scholarship was a sum of linguistic practices that revealed rules for the formation of concepts and their modes of connection and coexistence, what Michel Foucault describes as a "discourse."

Beginning with chapter 2, I evaluate a wide variety of scholarly writings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, outline the nature of the intellectual order within those materials, and finally discuss the social and institutional setting within which those materials were produced. In chapters 3 and 4, in particular, I describe the social and institutional patterns of organization that made a k'ao-cheng community of scholars possible. The institutional and intellectual context for the emergence of specialized scholarship in Lower Yangtze urban centers such as Soochow and Yangchow marked what I call the "professionalization" of academics in late imperial China. In these chapters, the roles of scholarly patronage, academies, libraries, and the publishing industry in the eighteenth century are given special attention.

The individual evidential research scholar by the eighteenth century was part of a dynamic and evolving scholarly environment, which I analyze in chapter 5. Through the concentrated efforts of trained specialists, who were bound to the past by building on accumulated knowledge and who systematically employed precise procedures of inquiry, an almost autonomous subsystem of Ch'ing society, with its own rubrics of status evolved in the Lower Yangtze Region.

Although the academic community upon which the k'ao-cheng movement in the Lower Yangtze depended perished during the Taiping Rebellion (described in chapter 6), its intellectual legacy did not. The appeal to empirical methods of exact scholarship initiated the gradual unravelling of the Neo-Confucian tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

MPACT Scores for Benjamin A. Elman

A = 9
C = 7
A+C = 16
T = 9
G = 1
W = 9
TD = 9
TA = 0
calculated 2009-01-25 11:30:20

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