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...