11 - The Rhythms of Song History

Summary

The final chapter, “The Rhythms of Song History” demonstrates that the positive Taizu–Qingli–Yuanyou axis of political value and the negative “lineage of evil” axis fused to create an image of dynastic history as a perpetual oscillation between political and moral florescence and decline. This last chapter postulates that these undulating historiographical cycles reflect not the moral battles between Confucian good and evil but the truly historical, political struggles between two conceptions of the Song state, one a kind of technocratic patrimonialism, the other a Confucian institutionalism. Transitions between these two modalities of governance produced the historical revisionism that gave eventual rise to the grand allegory. These were the Qingli period, the Yuanyou period, the early (pre-Qin Gui) Shaoxing period (1131–1138), and the Jiading (1208–1224) period. All of these eras experienced either defensive or offensive wars that sparked domestic political upheavals, and these political conflicts then generated historiographical revisionism. This chapter, and the book, concludes with a one paragraph summary of the allegory written using the rhetoric of Song Confucianism and the same paragraph then translated into the language of modern social science. This juxtaposition demonstrates the continuing influence of the grand allegory until modern times.