The 'Ancestors' Family Instructions': Authority and Sovereignty in Song China

[...]it also establishes a common ground between Chinese historiography and the ontological tradition of European social theory, which views the area of politics not simply as the aggregation of the behavior of individuals who are conceived as bounded and purposive actors, but the processes through which interrelated agents unfolded their understandings of the existential world. In brief, the Family Instructions were, they thought, part of the despotic policies that emperors promoted in order to meet their personal needs, and the political consequence for the empire was the debasement of administrative management with a resulting lack of innovation and reform.2 The merit of these early studies was to make known the existence of the "Ancestors' Instructions" in the political life of the Song dynasty and, more generally, to establish a clear linkage between this concept and family and kinship institutions. [...]we try to highlight two points: the emperor was charged with respecting the dynastic patrimony, and the legitimacy and power of the Song bureaucracy was grounded in its ability to keep the emperor accountable. Lü Dafang's 呂大防 (1027–1097) presentation of the Instructions during an audience at the court of Emperor Zhezong 哲宗 (r. 1085–1100) in 1093 was and still is frequently quoted by historians.4 Lü first emphasized the links between the respect emperors paid to the Family Instructions and the peaceful situation that had been sustained for the one hundred and thirty years since the founding of the dynasty.