ABSTRACT
“The Middle Ages had developed out of raw primitiveness. It had done away with the old civilization, old philosophy, politics and jurisprudence, in order to begin anew in every respect.” The practice of research on Middle Ages, however, has been to take the rise and fall of dynasties as the main process to be observed. Giambattista Vico’s logic had its historical sense, since in Europe autocracy was a kind of transitional form that led many countries out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, and there was a certain necessity about it. Yet the logic of research demands that it be overstepped by both groups, even if this takes place mainly on the level of reflection. The “proscribed party” of Eastern Han scholars, those who participated in the imperial student movement in the two Song dynasties, members of the Donglin Society in the late Ming, and those who were part of the resistance movement in the early Qing are counterexamples.
