Legalism

“Legalism” (法家,Fajia) is a name that came to be applied to a set of ideas and practices associated with the rise of the Chinese imperial bureaucratic state in the third and second centuries B.C.E. They key term in this name, fa, refers to several ways in which state power could be organized and exercise: through laws and punishments, administrative and military systems, policy planning, statecraft, or methods of personnel management. Although comparatively late in developing a systematic doctrine, the Legalists– as they would become known– while not actually a formal school , had unquestionably the greatest influence of any upon the political life of the time. Typically proponents of these ideas were practicing statesmen more concerned with immediate problems and specific mechanisms of control than with theories of government. Indeed, some of them were strongly anti-intellectual and evidenced a special hostility toward the “vain” talk of philosophers.                                                   

                      –William Theodore de Bary, editor of Sources of East Asian Tradition, V1.

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Han Feizi     Shang Yang