This is a book about state institutions, political ideology, and the patterns of interaction between the two. It argues, first and foremost, that ideological belief systems imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final two centuries of China’s imperial history. These ideological constraints explain many of the Qing Dynasty’s unique fiscal weaknesses, which eventually had ruinous sociopolitical and economic consequences. Scholars of economic and institutional history have, for the past several decades, distanced themselves from cultural and ideological analysis, but some core features of late imperial Chinese fiscal history cannot be plausibly explained without it. The challenge here is to reintroduce ideology in such a way that makes sense of the Qing’s political and intellectual idiosyncrasies, relative to both other Chinese dynasties and other early modern Eurasian regimes, while also fluidly interacting with the numerous nonideological forces at work in its fiscal politics and institutions.

Chapter 7 discusses the potential theoretical ramifications of this ideological narrative. It begins by discussing some of the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of ideological analysis, seeking to identify a number of methodological “best practices.” From there, it considers whether the distinctions and interplay between normative and empirical elements of ideological worldviews studied here shed any light on the theoretical analysis of other major ideologies, or of paradigmatic changes in modern politics. The creation of a descriptive and ostensibly empirical social theory to support normative positions is, of course, commonplace, but what is perhaps more interesting is that those empirical theories often develop an intellectual identity and sociopolitical lifespan quite separate from their original normative foundations. As the example of Qing fiscal policy demonstrates, empirical beliefs can often be more influential than normative ones. This has important ramifications for our general understanding of how political ideology affects legal and political institutions. In particular, it highlights and questions the role that the state plays in certifying and “discovering” politically relevant information, and how the state-driven centralization of information is as important a tool of ideological entrenchment as more normative kinds of state action, such as lawmaking.