How Governing a Family is Connected with Ordering the World

Abstract: Luo Zenan and Guo Songtao’s academic works, Liu Rong’s letters and Zeng Guofan’s practice and propositions of relying on lixue (礼学) to govern a family and to order the world all contributed to an interrelated and even continuous thinking process of Hunan Neo-Confucians in late Qing Dynasty. Luo, Guo and Liu argued that political leaders could establish moral authority in societyand cultivate leadership skills by managing relationships in the domestic sphere, or could enhance exchanges of emotions and thoughts with their colleagues by treating them as family members. They all believed that Confucian morality should be first nurtured in the domestic sphere. On this basis, Zeng Guofan further proposed that the idealized Confucian family could be used as a model for leading a state or an army. His special contribution lies in considering how to implement the universal moral values ​​demonstrated by Chengzhu Neo-Confucianism in specific historical situations.To this end, he did not confine himself to the study of moral philosophy, but advocated the more comprehensive lixue, looking for resources from the entire tradition of classical Chinese scholarship: his exploration of li (“礼”) as the basis of moral (and political) practice clearly exceeded the boundaries of various branches of the Confucian scholarship, such as Neo-Confucianism and the kaozheng (“考证”, evidential research) movement.