- Length
- 320 pagesWatson, Han Feizi: Basic Writings, Columbia, 2003 - selections
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Han Feizi
The coldest book in classical philosophy and one of the most influential, written by a stammering prince who could not speak in public and who was forced to kill himself by a fellow student of his own teacher. Its argument is that a state should be built so that it does not depend on anybody being good.
- Date
- c. 240-233 BC
- Author
- Han Fei and later compilers
- Region
- The states of Han and Qin
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1939 English, W. K. Liao Complete but unreliable; partly out of copyright Consensus
- 1964 English, Burton Watson Selections; long the standard English, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
Openly detested and quietly used for two thousand years: no dynasty professed Legalism after the Qin and every dynasty governed with its instruments.
What the book says
Fifty-five essays on how to run a state given that nobody can be trusted, least of all the people closest to the ruler. Han Fei's starting point is that everyone acts from calculation of advantage - the carriage maker hopes people get rich and the coffin maker hopes they die early, and neither is wicked - and that a system relying on the goodness of officials will fail whenever goodness is expensive. What works instead is a machinery with three parts. Law must be published, uniform and known to everyone, so that nobody depends on an official's judgement of them. Technique is the ruler's own practice: keep your preferences hidden so ministers cannot flatter them, hold each officeholder to exactly the duties of his post and neither more nor less, and let performance be compared with what was promised. Position is the authority the office carries independently of the man in it - a mediocre ruler with real power governs better than a sage without it. The two handles are reward and punishment, and the ruler must never let anyone else hold either. Throughout, the Confucians are attacked as sentimentalists whose model rulers were freaks of history, and the argument is illustrated with a great many hard, dry stories.
What it argues
That government is an engineering problem rather than a moral one. Since officials pursue their own advantage, the design question is how to arrange incentives so that pursuing their advantage produces what the state needs, and the answer is published law applied identically to everyone, with rewards and punishments as the only levers and the ruler holding both. Han Fei's most striking rule is that an official should be punished for exceeding his duties as well as for failing them, since a man who does another's job well is a man who has escaped the system. Moral exhortation is dismissed not as wrong but as ineffective at scale: relying on it is like refusing to build a road because a few people can climb.
What it answered
Xunzi's remedy, and Confucian political thought generally. The argument against the Confucians is that their whole programme rests on examples - the sage kings - who were rare to the point of uselessness, and that a doctrine which requires an exceptional ruler is no doctrine at all. He is equally hard on the idea that antiquity is a guide: circumstances have changed, populations have grown, resources have not, and applying old measures to new conditions is like the farmer who saw a hare break its neck on a tree stump and gave up farming to watch the stump.
How it argues
By argument and by anecdote in about equal measure, and the anecdotes do most of the damage. Han Fei collects hundreds of short historical stories, most of them about a ruler who trusted somebody and lost, and arranges them by the lesson they teach. The prose is lucid and unsparing. He also gives the first sustained Chinese commentary on the Daodejing, reading its recommendation that the ruler do nothing as advice to stay unreadable so that ministers cannot anticipate him.
The moment
The last decade before unification. Han Fei was a prince of the small state of Han, which Qin was about to swallow; he wrote to persuade his own ruler and was sent as an envoy to Qin, where the king - the future First Emperor - is said to have read the essays and wanted the author. Li Si, who had studied under Xunzi alongside him and was by then Qin's chief minister, arranged his imprisonment, and Han Fei died by poison in 233 BC. Qin unified China nine years later using his methods and collapsed within a generation.
How it travelled
Continuously and dishonestly. After the Qin collapse, Legalism became the thing every dynasty denounced and none abandoned: the Han settlement is usually described as Confucian in language and Legalist in machinery, and the phrase covers two thousand years of practice. The text was never suppressed, never lost, and rarely praised. In the twentieth century it was read politically - by reformers looking for an indigenous statecraft, and later during the Cultural Revolution, when a campaign praising the Legalists and attacking Confucius made the book briefly and unhappily topical.
The strongest objection
That it cannot explain why anyone should obey the ruler either. Han Fei dissolves every relationship into calculated advantage, and then requires the ruler to sit outside the analysis as the one figure whose interests are identical with the state's and whose commands carry authority. Nothing in the argument secures that: on his own premises the ruler is another self-interested actor, and the system he describes offers no lever against him at all. The Qin experiment supplied the practical version of the objection within fifteen years of unification.
Why read it
Because it is the most clear-eyed book about power written before Machiavelli and considerably more systematic. The stories are worth the price on their own. Read it after the Xunzi, where its premise comes from, and read it knowing that the author was destroyed by exactly the kind of court manoeuvre he spent fifty-five chapters warning about.
- First printed
- 1165
- First in English
- 1939
- Digitised
- Yes
The collection was assembled after Han Fei's death and includes material that is not his. Wang Xianshen's edition of 1896 remains the scholarly basis.
Liao's complete English of 1939-59 is dated and partly out of copyright. Watson's selections and Harbsmeier's and Goldin's studies are in copyright.
Where it stands
Historical as a doctrine and permanently interesting as a description. Nobody defends the programme, and the analysis of how bureaucracies fail, why rulers are systematically misinformed and why impersonal rules beat good intentions is read by political scientists who have no interest in the third century BC.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain; the usable English is in copyright and the older complete version is unreliable. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Several chapters are not by Han Fei, including two that argue for positions he attacks elsewhere, and the extent of the interpolation is disputed. Whether Legalism is a school at all, or a label applied retrospectively by Han bibliographers to a group of unconnected writers on statecraft, is a live question. The account of his death comes from Sima Qian a century later and cannot be verified. And how far the Qin actually governed by his prescriptions, as opposed to being described that way by the dynasty that replaced it, has been substantially revised by the excavated legal documents recovered since the 1970s.