More on the Legalists

Lord Shang Yang of the Qin (mentioned in an earlier post) was an early advocate of legalism. Apart from setting up his 31 Xian, Shang also abolished serfdom and gave incentives for people to settle in his lands. He saw in the Xia, Shang and early Zhou dynasties excellent models of the centralised form of rule he encouraged the king of Qin to adopt. Shang’s words have come down to us today in an eponymously titled collection of writing. He proposed that wise men could produce good laws and was certain that then the less wise must then follow them unquestioningly. He was less certain (in a twist reminiscent of the Gnostic-style ideas of various religions) that wise men should equally be required to abide by these laws.

The other major legalist well known today was Han Fei Zi (also mentioned in an earlier post). He had begun as a pupil of Xun Zi but eventually opposed his Confucianism. He thought rulers who trusted their subjects were foolish and that rulers also needed to be devious in order to keep the upper hand. They should manipulate the competition of their underlings specifically in order to keep them weak (i.e. adopt a ‘divide and rule’ strategy). Much of this is actually not out of keeping with the less humanist Confucian ideas of Xun Zi. He broke with him especially in that while he recognised the value of ritual in the past he now saw it as less relevant.

When it came to ordinary subjects, love was also the wrong emotion to either feel for them or inspire in them for you (but also paradoxically less deviousness and thus more lovely behaviour was called for in actual law-making (as I discussed in an earlier post). The law had to be crystal clear at all times, no exceptions). Ordinary people are lazy, stupid and like children, he argued. Only fear of the certainty of terrible authority was what worked. The law should therefore be clear, codified, certain, simple and simply inflexible. Nothing short of complete loyalty to the sovereign from these 'children' was acceptable. An aspiring hegemon required, in addition, a strong army to first gain and then retain hegemony.

This schizophrenic and psychopathic view of politics is clearly quite limited but many of the psychopaths who ruled in the China of Han’s day approved of it. One can easily imagine the bitter arguments Confucians would have had with this view. They might for example suggest politely that a king might allow himself to experience the back-breaking work and limited calorie intake of a peasant and see if he too didn’t feel a little ‘lazy’ sometimes.

The essential view was that peace and order were achieved by violence (of one sort or another – like fucking for virginity?) Han simply held that strong rulers made stronger states than good rulers did. He saw ‘slanders’ against kings everywhere in the political context of his day and thought that kings ought to brook or have truck with none of it. In Five Vermin, part of the Han Fei Zi, his exposition approaches its zenith in its erudition.