Ordering Society through Confucian Rituals

Sima Guang, leader of the faction advocating enhancement of bureaucratic power, authored a Confucian family ritual manual. He believed in the moral reformation of society through the dissemination of Confucian ritual norms and maintained that rituals were the locus in which the hierarchical social order could be manifested according to official rank. He especially objected to lavish burials performed by wealthy people in the belief that such burials implied a social imaginary of the wealthy where status could be improved by material investments in ritual performance. Sima Guang’s conception of ritual testifies to his vision of society or social imaginary in which official ranks are the fundamental basis of social hierarchy.

Bureaucracy · Hierarchy · Political science · Power (physics) · Psychoanalysis · Social hierarchy · Social order · Social science · Sociology · The Imaginary · Chinese history and philosophy · Law · Psychology