Lord Shang Revisited 6

8. What Do We Learn From This View of SJS?

Proceeding in this way, one can put together a model of the evolving SJS. Details are still being worked out, but the general form of the model seems to be the following:

• an early middle, to which
• additions are made at both ends, with the late additions being made mostly at the tail,
• but in one case by adjustment to the early middle chapters, and then
• a final framing device encloses all earlier material.

I now reinstate Duyvendak's claim in slightly more modest form. From that model, one can get an idea of what the SJS version of Chin statecraft theory was like at its beginning, what ideas it added as it went along, and where it stood vis-à-vis the foreign doctrines which, especially from the mid 03c onward, were clearly present and even influential in Chin.

I have time for only a general comment about that history, plus one specific example.

The general picture, which is very crudely sketched in on the left side of p7 of the handout, is that the SJS line of thought begins with the idea of shaping society. Rewards and punishments, the basic Pavlovian toolkit, are present from the beginning, but the basic thought is the redirection of the people's already aggressive instincts. The prospect of preparing an already turbulent state for war, and directing a rowdy people's energies toward war, is not a very drastic one. Social engineering, appropriately, is at first seen by the text merely a matter of regulating opportunities: opening some options for success (essentially, merit earned in battle) and closing others.

The theory gradually grows more harsh. Confucian concepts begin to be heard from, with their focus on virtue as a qualification for office, and those concepts are strongly resisted. Toward trade, the SJS tradition is ambivalent. At times it is designed into the system; at other times it is seen as a corruption of the system. The Spartan Chin Legalists (one imagines) were temperamentally opposed to wealth, and thus to trade, but they also saw that weapons are the sinews of war, and that people need to be paid to make weapons. Here is a theoretical anomaly. We can see this anomaly somewhat resolved in the Shweihudi laws, where weapons procurement is linked to the civil penalty system, and fines are assessed in terms of suits of armor.

 

17 Sept 2022 / Contact The Project / Exit to Lord Shang Index Page