The first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning traces how debates over the relative value of cultural accomplishment and political service unfolded locally. Close readings and quantitative analysis of social networks consider why and how the local literati enterprise was built.

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 role of the middle period in China's history. The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible.

本书从思想史的角度出发，探讨理学产生的历史背景及其对中国历史走向所起的作用。与纯粹从哲学的角度研究理学以致无暇顾及历史背景的研究比较，此书为读者揭示了理学作为士人的一种选择如何产生并传播开来而成为思想界的主流。另外，与从社会史或政治史入手，探讨理学如何受历史进程的影响，却对其义理核心存而不论的研究比较，作者对哲学观念进行深入分析的能力，使得他能够说明理学家的社会改革方案为何会呈现如此的面貌，以及方案为何会被广大士人群体所接受。作者的研究成功地表明，缺乏对义理的认真对待，我们将无法真正理解理学家的政治与社会行为；而缺乏对理学家所生活的社会加以掌握，我们亦无法真正了解历史上的宋明理学之面貌。 作为欧美汉学中宋明理学研究的代表人物，哈佛大学大型中国研究数据库的主持者，《历史上的理学》（“Neo-Confucianism in History” ，Harvard University Press, 2008）是包教授十余年来在这个领域的最重要著作，而今年六月包弼德教授也因此书荣获哈佛大学的Walter Channing Cabot Fellow殊荣。

作者在考察唐宋士人从门阀士族向文官再向地方精英转型的基础上，以“斯文”为核心概念，围绕“学”在士人身份确认中地位的上升以及“学”的内涵由文化向伦理的转向，细腻勾勒了唐宋士人价值观演变的轨迹。