Rationality as Ideology

The intellectual appeal of the rational choice approach is its formal nature: the "individual" is postulated as having certain consistent preferences in the face of limited means to satisfy them. Efficient means to meet individual ends can (in principle) be objectively specified, allowing predictions of how the individual will act. The approach is concerned with form rather than content, so it says nothing directly about the real world. But the predictions generated from the abstract model can be tested against empirical reality, to see whether the actual outcomes correspond more or less with those predicted by the model. But however formal it may be in principle, rational choice also makes certain "anthropological" assumptions and carries certain normative implications.

Substantively, the assumptions underlying rational choice analysis have an affinity with what some consider the modern mentality, a way of understanding the world generated by and functional to modern society. In his early exposition of modernization theory, David Apter argues that modernization is a result of commercialization and industrialization. Its social consequences include a denigration of religion and superstition, family and church, mercantilism and aristocracy. Indeed, we have come to consider science as the antidote for faith, with Galileo as a kind of folk hero of modernization. His triumph is the triumph of reason, and reason as applied to human affairs is the foundation of modernity.⁷

This passage sets reason against authority. But those who persecuted Galileo offered arguments for what they did, and had or claimed to have sufficient reason for their actions. Rather, it seems that modernity is not defined in juxtaposition to reason, but in terms of a particular kind of reason. Our ends are given and in principle idiosyncratic, while means are rational if they help achieve those ends.

In this construction rationality centers on choice: "we" have alternatives to choose from, including alternative visions of the good.⁸ Apter distinguishes between "consummatory" and "instrumental" values, consummatory values referring to things valued in themselves rather than as means to other ends. These are "methodologically non-rational." They have "consequences that go beyond purely empirical ends." Reason is relevant to instrumental values, pointing to the effective or efficient way to achieve whatever it is we want. A system of instrumental value "may be identified in the widest context as command over resources."⁹ This may imply a certain rationality of ends, since probably any reasonable person would want to achieve command over as many "resources" as possible, as these are the means for achieving any other end. In context, resources would probably include money, power, reputation, status, what the Warring States Chinese discourse grouped as fame and profit.

Modernization theory implies an empirical hypothesis that social values will tend toward preferences for material comfort and security. This is suggested by the pejorative tone taken toward non-modern sources of information, guidance, or value (religion, superstition, family, aristocracy, mercantilism), this in the face of ample empirical support for the bromide that money does not necessarily buy happiness.¹⁰

In modernization theory this value choice is presented both as a consequence of social and economic modernization and also as a human universal, the choice anyone would make if only there were the opportunity to do so. This latter becomes an ideological argument, a way to validate the kind of society resulting from modernization. In an argument deserving wider appreciation, Winston Davis uses the concept of "embeddedness" to analyze differences in value: in some societies the market may be "embedded" in religious practice—that is, it operates within the scope allowed by the prevailing religious ethos. In modern liberal societies, religion is embedded in the market, functioning insofar as it does not interfere with getting and spending.¹¹ Other social orders may be as rational within their own scope, and allow as much for the exercise of rational calculation.¹² It is not that there are different instrumental rationalities but that different contexts imply different goals and different means of seeking them. This would seem to entail the soft version of rational choice, which is tautological in that by definition anything one does is self-interested, by the very fact that one does it. The theoretical interest is not in the tautology but in the specification of the circumstances, shi, that make sense of the action.

The rational choice model, particularly in its hard and more empirically meaningful form, is deficient as a substantive political theory, if not as a method of analysis, by its inability to specify an endogenous common good: within the model there is no way to go beyond individual interest. As a substantive theory it leaves gaps, pointing to outcomes contrary to fact and ensnaring itself in paradoxes. A certain sort of liberalism may identify the individual pursuit of fame and profit as itself the common good, attempting to squeeze out any public contestation of what Apter calls consummatory values.¹³ But since people are going to be concerned about these anyway, the appropriate political program is to structure the political or social system in a way that discourages their politicization. The Han Feizi postulates a public (or common) good independent of individual material interest extraneous to his general scheme, and tries to design political and social institutions such that this is achieved through the pursuit of individual material interests. In both cases, the argument first specifies that the world works in a certain way, and then endeavors to shape the world so that way is the way it works.

The Dialectic of Interest and Honor in Warring States Thought

The rational approach traces the motives of political action to a quest for individual benefit rather than to a sense of duty, honor, loyalty, sympathy, a concern for abstract justice or the common good—motivations the Confucian tradition groups under the concept of virtue.¹⁴ Modernization erodes the rational bases for such concerns (the sets of assumptions that, among other things, may accord authority to religion and "superstition," family and church). During the Warring States era (from roughly 400 BC until unification in 221 BC) there were social changes analogous to modernization in the Chinese cultural area. These centuries were a period of economic growth. A feudal system of land holdings by a hereditary warrior nobility was gradually replaced by one of unified territorial bureaucratic states financing themselves by taxing free-holding farmers.¹⁵ This period is often compared with the classical western antiquity of Greece and Rome, but on a political and social level a more relevant comparison is perhaps with post-Reformation early modern Europe.¹⁶ China had no equivalent of the fracturing of Christendom and the wars of religion, but the older religious and cosmological foundations of the social and political order were out of kilter with the social reality and were losing credibility. The "consummatory" values of the old elite (honor, pride in lineage) came to be displaced by instrumental rational considerations of utility, profit, interest, efficacy. As the Confucians ruefully noted, the ritual had been lost.

This was also the seminal period of Chinese thought, intellectual developments reflecting and reacting to the social, political, and economic changes.¹⁷ By the time of Confucius (ca. 550–470 BC) the well-born no longer held a monopoly on positions of political power. These were beginning to go to the new men, hired by local rulers according to their ability to do the job. Confucius himself contributed to this trend even while resisting it. One interpretation of his career is that he trained students for administration and diplomacy, regardless of their social origins, cultivating in them both literary polish and the proper internal attitude—in effect, hoping to "aristocratize" the parvenus. The old aristocracy was vanishing, its ethos becoming obsolete. Confucius attempted to preserve that ethos, in the process both generalizing it and idealizing it. So, sniffs Confucius, deprecating instrumental reasoning, a gentleman does what is right, while a little man does what is expedient.¹⁸

Han Fei came at the tail end of that process, asserting in effect that the expedient is all that counts. This polarity of the li (interest, profit, benefit, expediency) or yi (the right, honorable, or just) as goals or motives for human action was a major theme in Warring States discourse. A summary (necessarily simplified) of earlier positions locates Han Fei's opinions in their context.¹⁹ A point-counterpoint presentation must be overly schematic and begs linguistic and textual questions deserving of deeper inquiry if considered simply in themselves. Granting this, the issue of instrumental reasoning was a central one for Warring States thinkers, and in many cases those who came later were implicitly or explicitly responding to the ideas of those who came earlier.

Confucius, as his later Maoist critics noted, was moving against the tide of the times. The earliest criticisms of the Confucian vision came from two directions. One was from the trend that later generations grouped under the rubric of Taoism. In this conception, value is identified as human convention, social construction.²⁰ A less profound but probably older critique comes from the utilitarian perspective associated with Mozi (f. 473–438 BC). Mozi denies any difference between what is right and what is expedient or profitable: the humane person, the ren ren, is one who seeks to benefit others. The problems in the world stem from our preferring our own good to that of others: nobles love their own states, fathers their own families, and individuals their own persons. If we would all love others as much as we love ourselves, the difficulties of the world would vanish. We fall into this predicament not from a defect of character, since Mozi assumes that self-seeking is universal and spontaneous, but from failing to think things through: a broader consideration of our own advantage would lead us to a universal love for everyone.²¹ Mozi backed up his utilitarianism by a kind of theism. If we practice universal love (it seems) it is from a consideration of the benefit it brings. Heaven, however, genuinely loves all beings impartially and in a disinterested way. Heaven also obeys the rules of reciprocity: if we emulate Heaven, and love all persons impartially, Heaven will surely love us and bring us benefits.

The works of Mencius (371–289 BC) defend the Confucian vision against the Taoist and Mohist attacks.²² Mencius opens with a deceptively simple paradox, an account of Mencius's visit to King Hui of Liang. The King welcomes the Master politely, innocuously supposing that Mencius must "bring something to benefit (li) my state." Mencius indulges in a priggish snit: Why must the King speak of benefit (or interest, profit, expediency)? If the King seeks to benefit his state, the nobles will think to benefit their families, and individuals will think of how to benefit themselves. This focus on benefit leads (Mencius claims) directly to regicide. The King should not concern himself with profit, but only with what is humane and just (renyi).

Very high minded. But the passage has its subtleties. The sorites parallels that in chapter 15 of the Mozi, which demonstrates the expediency of universal love. Mozi assumes everyone is self-seeking and deduces that the most rational way to benefit oneself is to act to benefit the other. Mencius asserts, however, that if our premise is self-interest, we will never go beyond self-interest. If we love for the sake of profit, we will love only when love is profitable. What is "right" and what is "expedient" belong to different, incommensurable, although not always conflicting or mutually exclusive, categories. The argument implies that the real way to profit is not to seek profit, but rather to do what is right regardless of profit. But, of course, if we take this advice because we are still seeking profit, we fall back into self-interest, not "humanity and justice."

Mencius (and Confucius) would probably accept that the specific forms of morality are set by social convention. This social convention is included in the concept of ritual,²³ the standard for how human beings should treat and interact with each other. Mencius's reply to Taoism is that this ritual is not an arbitrary and external imposition. The forms of ritual may be arbitrary, but ritual itself is the outward expression of a moral sense inherent in "human nature," ren xing, xing referring to the inherent propensities of things, especially living things. The core virtues—humanity, justice, propriety (that is, ritual), and wisdom—"are not drilled into us from the outside. We originally possess them."²⁴ Because morality is innate, moral action is not an artificial distortion of the Way (Tao; dao); and human beings cannot attain full satisfaction solely through a pursuit of self-interest.²⁵

Han Feizi and the Pursuit of Profit

The Mencian tradition rejected the instrumental reasoning reinforced by the contemporary culture, asserting instead an objectively rational morality of virtue for its own sake—the virtue "deconstructed" by the Taoist and Mohist critiques. Han Feizi is the great synthesizer of the "Legalist" (fajia) tradition, finding political order not in any assumptions of human virtue or activity by rulers to make us virtuous, nor by any spontaneous option for altruism, but through laws and institutions. People acting on their own will not achieve the common good. The political task is to structure conditions (largely through schedules of rewards and punishments) so that a rational pursuit of individual self-interest results in the public good (gong).²⁶

Han Fei assumes self-interest as a dominant human motive, although he recognizes that sometimes people fail to act in terms of simple or straightforward self-interest. Unlike contemporary theorists, Han Fei's purpose is less analytic than political and normative. While he abounds in observations about how the world works, his aim is to see how the world can be made to work to assure order.²⁷

From Mencius to Han Fei: Xunzi as a Bridge

According to his biography in the Shi Ji (Ch. 63), Han Fei "traced his roots" to the Huang-Lao school,²⁸ but also studied with Xunzi (or Xun Qing) (fl. 298–238 BC), who asserted a Confucian counterpoint to Mencius's optimistic view of human nature. Xunzi argued that we are by nature evil, with any goodness the result of human activity (wei). By nature we seek profit, our concept of profit ultimately traceable to the desire for sensory satisfaction. We hate and envy those who stand in the way of our satisfaction or, perhaps, even those who seem satisfied when we are not. If we follow our natures, life consists of strife and rapacity, lewdness and licentiousness.²⁹ Xunzi agrees with Mencius that we have a moral sense, but that is itself evidence that we are bad. We desire what we lack. When we are hungry we want food, when poor we want wealth, when ugly we want to be good looking. Our attraction to the good indicates that we lack goodness. So teachers teach us what it means to be good, their lessons reinforced by law. The teachers learned about good from the "sages," who also shaped the laws. The sages of antiquity, knowing that man's nature is evil, that it is unbalanced and incorrect, that it is violent, disorderly, and undisciplined, established the authority of rulers to govern the people, set forth clearly propriety and righteousness to transform them, instituted laws and governmental measurements to rule them, and made punishment severe to restrain them.³⁰

These sages are not a higher order of human being. Their nature is the same as that of everyone else, and Xunzi agrees with Mencius that everyone has the potential to become a sage (although he also notes that potential is one thing, actuality another). The sages are different only in that they exert greater effort than the rest of us.

Greater effort toward what? Goodness, the rules of propriety (or ritual) and justice, are not inventions or arbitrary constructs of the sages, but more in the nature of discoveries. But a discovery of what? Xunzi, unlike Mencius, has no place for a Heaven as an embodiment or standard or source of the good. In an essay on "Heaven" (or Nature) Xunzi asserts that Heaven operates according to its own principles, independent of human action. If we pray for rain and it rains, that only shows it was going to rain anyway. "Heaven does not give up winter because people dislike the cold. Earth does not give up its expanse because people dislike distance."³¹ But while human beings cannot change nature, they have the intelligence to perceive nature's operations and can prosper by conforming to those operations. Xunzi says that the sages do not submit to nature but seek to control it; this control, however, comes from adapting to nature's ways and putting them to human use.

Both human beings and human society are part of nature, and like other natural phenomena operate according to relatively fixed objective principles. The rules of propriety (and, by extension, justice) serve as "marks" (or indicators: zhi, that is, fingers³²) of the principles of human society. They are, in effect, a formalization of the ways that allow people to live together in relative harmony. The role of the sages is to discover those rules and set up indicators to them, phrasing them in terms of general principles. By nature we are anti-social, but human life is possible only in society. Goodness or virtue becomes that set of qualities and practices, which allow selfish beings to live together in relative peace and to their mutual benefit.³³

Xunzi, like Mencius, finds an objective morality independent of human self-interest, even if he does not ground it in human nature. As morality is not natural to us, Xunzi's thought is more authoritarian than that of Mencius, and more legalistic—with proper behavior more nearly approximating following a set of rules. Han Fei is said to have studied under Xunzi, although the book bearing his name does not explicitly acknowledge any relationship.³⁴ Still, Xunzi may be treated as a bridge to Han Fei. Xunzi has us overcoming our natural selfishness by internalizing virtue; and once we are virtuous, we can live in and serve society. Han Fei also believes human beings are self-centered and driven by profit (without seeing a need to pronounce this "evil"), but in effect eliminates the middle man: selfishness can be countered through an effective program of rewards and punishments, without any need for virtue. The world and human society operate according to regular principles. For social control there is no need to worry about virtue—indeed, virtue may even hinder social control. Social control is achieved, rather, by shaping the environment so that it is to everyone's benefit to keep social order.

Han Fei and the Role of Interest

Han Fei takes interest (li: profit; advantage; expediency) as the mainspring of all human action.³⁵ We value what contributes to our survival and our well-being. Anticipating some of the reflections of Adam Smith, Han Fei says that a chariot maker wants people to prosper, because they will then buy chariots; a carpenter, however, hopes for a high death rate, creating a demand for coffins. Chariot makers are not necessarily nice people, he says, nor are carpenters necessarily mean: each responds to his own interest. Eels resemble snakes and silkworms look like spiders. People are afraid of snakes, and spiders make your skin crawl. But women pick up silkworms and fishermen grab hold of eels. Wherever there is profit we forget our visceral dislikes and become as brave as any hero.³⁶

All behavior reduces to questions of interest.

As it is impossible that everyone's interest can be simultaneously satisfied, there is constant strife. The function of government is to bring order from this strife by generating a public interest in order. People will keep order not because of any goodness of nature or sense of duty (yi), but because they have acquired an interest in doing so: So the Way of an intelligent ruler... is to enable the people to get what they desire by eliciting results from them. Therefore he encourages them through honors and rank. He exposes the people to what they hate in order to deter evil. Therefore, he threatens them with punishments and fines. If the ruler can get results from his officials, they will not contemplate doing him harm. Even if they are evil-intentioned, what does the ruler care? The officials will exert full efforts to sell themselves to the ruler, while the ruler sells himself to the officials through rank and honors. The boundary between ruler and official lacks the intimacy of that between father and son: it is based upon calculation. If the ruler follows the Way the officials will exert full effort and evil will not appear; without the Way officials will block off the ruler's light and seek private advantage.³⁷

Position and Circumstance: The Parameters of Interest

Interest in the Han Feizi does not function in the abstract. It is rooted in our general desire for comfort and security, but the means to satisfy this desire are structured by the shi—circumstances, position, propensity, purchase (that is, leverage), power, the mutable tendencies inherent in the world and in things.³⁸ For the ruler to make it in the interest of those he rules to keep order, he must control the shi upon which interest is contingent. The term shi originally referred to terrain, as applied to military operations.³⁹ In contemporary Chinese it can mean circumstances or force. In the Han Feizi it is a general term for the conditions relevant to a particular position or action. Given the book's political thrust, it refers most prominently to the power or authority inherent in an institutional office. Its meaning is hard to capture in a stipulative or even operational definition, and it is best discerned through a congeries of family resemblances perceived from context.

The chapter "Difficulties of Shi" dissects the concept.⁴⁰ A thesis is attributed to Shen Dao, an earlier Legalist thinker: The dragon rides the shi of the clouds; without the clouds, a dragon is no better than a worm. The Sage Rulers of old could bring peace to the world because they held positions of authority; and by the same reason the famous tyrants of the past could throw the world into disorder. Either would have been helpless without such positions. This shows that shi (here, institutional position) is the main source of order, and personal talent or virtue (xian: dictionary translation: worthiness; but a general term for human moral and intellectual excellence) is irrelevant.

A "critic" replies: Of course the dragon needs the clouds; but even with the clouds, a worm remains a worm. Similarly, even with authority, one without talent or virtue is incapable of bringing order.

The synthesis, presumably representing Han Fei's position, is that there are two kinds of shi: that amenable to human control and that which is not.⁴¹ The only shi worth discussing (because it is the only thing you can affect) is that amenable to human control. How much talent or virtue one has is beyond control; and if there is a way to order, it is impractical to rely on talent and virtue. A ruler with natural authority perhaps does not need law and technique, and a great tyrant would not use them anyway. A sage will be good whether rewarded or not, while an audacious villain isn't afraid of punishment. But most rulers are neither outstandingly good nor tyrants; and most people are neither sages nor villains. Effective rule addresses itself to the ordinary, adapting to what is not within human control and controlling that which is in a rational manner.

Not everyone, then, acts on the basis of calculations of cost and benefit, at least as they are normally defined. Those who do not calculate are not reliably amenable to social or political control. Han Fei also at least implicitly recognizes that we accord moral superiority to those who do not accede to social control—especially good people, but perhaps even, grudgingly or secretly, bad people as well. Han Fei tacitly accepts at least some of the Mencian view that we have a moral sense—not necessarily inborn, but the result of an evolutionary lag.

Interest, Virtue, and the Shi⁴²

The western theorist closest to Han Fei is Thomas Hobbes, himself a progenitor of the rational choice approach to politics.⁴³ Hobbes traces political order to a social contract. Some students have wondered how people so poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short could muster up sufficient trust to enter into such a contract.⁴⁴ A possible solution is that at least certain individuals manifest qualities of honor or magnanimity, and that a sufficient number of others are able to respond to such qualities, such that individuals feel sufficiently confident to take the risk of entering into the contract that will render these qualities superfluous.⁴⁵

Han Fei does not have to deal with this "start-up" problem. Rather than postulating a social contract, he has an evolutionary theory of social and political development.⁴⁶ Han Fei takes individual self-seeking to be a constant: people respond to rewards and punishment, to negative and positive "reinforcement."⁴⁷ What is reinforced, though, and what people count as reinforcement, varies with the social context. Han Fei elaborates what amounts to a theory of moral and political evolution (or devolution).

Han Fei's "high antiquity" is not quite as dangerous and unpleasant as Hobbes's state of nature. In those days people were few and animals numerous. Some "sage" showed people how to remain safe by building nests in the trees, and in gratitude the people made him king. People ate raw meat and plants and suffered frequent digestive trouble. Another sage discovered fire and taught the people how to cook; and he, too, became king. As people were few and resources plentiful, people did not have to compete with each other, and love and justice (renyi)—the prime Confucian virtues—prevailed.

By late antiquity rule was no longer based upon consensus and consent but on force and conquest. Bad kings tyrannized over the people and good kings came to the people's rescue. The good kings could still afford to show love and justice, but their rule actually rested upon superior force. Now, Han Fei says, anyone in late antiquity who advocated building tree houses or who found cooked food a great marvel would be considered a fool, not a sage. And the same is true today of anyone who hopes to build political order on the basis of love and justice. "Olden times and today differ in customs, so there must be differences in how to respond." In high antiquity people could vie (for competition of some sort is a constant) in moral behavior, in late antiquity in wisdom and strategy. Today competition is in energy and force.

Human behavior, therefore, changes with the shi, in overall social evolution, with the ratio of population to resources. Behavior responds to the shi, "rarely" to justice or honor (yi). Confucius was (no doubt) a great sage, but the force of his honor was sufficient to persuade a mere 72 students. Confucius's overlord, Duke Ai, was an inferior ruler, but no one in the state of Lu, Confucius included, dared disobey him. Confucius did not necessarily respect the righteousness, justice, or honor (all yi) of Duke Ai, but he obeyed his authority. And if this is how things were for Confucius, how much more for everyone else.

And yet, the scholars (ru—"Confucians") and Mohists praise the ancient kings and urge rulers to treat the people as their own children. Their advice assumes that there is always order and harmony in the family, which is not the case; and even it were, the state is not the family, and ruler and subject do not share the same kind of sentiment as parents and children. It is common for a ne'er-do-well to defy the love of his parents and the wisdom of his teacher, but shape up when the police are called in. An intelligent ruler will use clear laws and strict punishments. Rewards will be generous and reliable, punishments severe and certain. Under these conditions (shi), both the virtuous and the not-so-virtuous will exert themselves to the fullest in the gong, the public interest or good.

But, Han Fei complains, that is not how things are done today. People look down on public office (he claims) and those who defy the law are considered brave. Confucian scholars throw the law into chaos with their learning while roving swordsmen (who, like the scholars, wander from country to country seeking employment) defy the ruler by force of arms. Under these conditions the Yellow Emperor himself, the founder of political society, would not be able to govern effectively.

At this point, though, Han Fei's argument seems to run into a contradiction, or at least a paradox, and points to a limitation of an interpretation of politics solely in terms of individualistic instrumental rationality. One criticism of the secular liberal model of modernity is that the style of politics associated with it probably does handle as well as possible differences in material interest, but is less successful in dealing with the deeper and more basic differences (in "consummatory values," say).⁴⁸ One solution is to exclude these concerns from political contestation (an effect being to "privilege" certain values by default). Han Fei divides the shi into that subject to human control and that not subject to human control, and wishes to expand as widely as possible that part subject to human control, centralizing that control in the ruler. The shi outside human control includes not only factors such as climate or geography, but also aspects of human character: there are persons, maybe not very many, who for whatever reason will not deviate from their visions of what is good or proper, or who will preserve their personal integrity, regardless of concerns for material comfort and security. Han Fei's recommendation is to somehow force as much human behavior as possible into a quest for material comfort and security, and to negate the effects of behavior that cannot be so forced.

The reader, though, wonders what accounts for the perverse approbation today's rulers accord to behavior appropriate to antiquity. For rulers, according to Han Fei, not only admire behavior that disdains material comfort and security but shower rewards even on those who convincingly counterfeit that disdain. Again, Han Fei tacitly recognizes the complexity of human motivation. We are, perhaps, not completely comfortable thinking of ourselves as always having an eye for the main chance. We retain a sense that an integrity not subject to outside control is somehow admirable and noble, in ourselves and in others. This represents for Han Fei one more private satisfaction, even if we couch our own resistance to authority in terms of the public good, and so potentially harmful to order. And such behavior persists because it is rewarded.

Thus, the student of literature (wenxue) seeks glory as an exemplar of righteousness, and the ordinary person (pifu) sees scholarship as a way of getting ahead. It is certainly easier than agriculture or war, activities that actually do benefit the state. If the ruler values heroes and scholars, there is no profit in doing what is useful and what does bring profit has no use. It is no mystery, then, that the scholars and heroes persist in their antisocial behavior; the anomaly is that the ruler indulges them.

The Despot's Dilemmas

Much of the book Han Feizi is in the form of (often sarcastic) advice to rulers, presumably to Han Fei's own relative, the King of Han, imploring the rulers to adopt a manner of rule based on law and technique, thereby serving the public good. The public good is damaged when political power is diverted to private aims. Han Fei would not say the rulers do not know their own interest: each of us obeys self-interest pretty much as a matter of course, without any special thought. But the interest we, rulers as much as the rest of us, are inclined to follow is personal and individual, not "public."

The paradoxes that arise in Han Fei's general plan come from the difficulty of fitting a concept of the public good into a vision focused entirely on individual advantage. There is an analogous issue in the liberal version of rational choice, although Han Fei, perhaps inconsistently, unlike contemporary theorists, does not have a problem identifying a public good independent of individual interests.⁴⁹ Han Fei identifies the public interest with the wealth and power of the state. It is not the interest of the ruler as an individual person, but his interest in his capacity as a ruler, much in the way that Samuel Huntington reduces the public interest to the interest of governmental and political institutions.⁵⁰ There is, of course, overlap between the ruler's interests and the good of his state. He wants his state to be strong and secure so that it is not at the mercy of outsiders. He wants his rule to be effective and the society over which he rules to be stable so that his own position, with all the benefits attending it, is secure. He wants society to be prosperous, to the extent that prosperity does not endanger stability or his own supremacy, since some of society's wealth can be extracted for his personal use and the use of the state. But other "satisfactions" sought by the ruler run counter to the interests of the state: a desire to be admired and loved; a delight in being able to meet the needs and desires of others or, if he is that kind of person, to thwart such needs and desires; comfort, pleasure, leisure; the reinforcement of his vanity and the assurance he somehow merits the privileges he enjoys; any other tastes or inclinations he has as a regular human being that might distract from his control over the state. Han Fei has no illusions about any mystique adhering to kingship or anything else implying that rulers are other than frail human beings.⁵¹ Sometimes the Han Feizi even implies that a fully developed rule of law should operate on its own as a kind of artificial analog of the Tao: as Jullien puts it, "Human law, in becoming inhuman, takes on the characteristics of natural law."⁵² The ruler allows the Law, artificial Tao, to function by its own logic, while he harmlessly indulges himself in his personal hobbies or vices.⁵³ Less radically, there are hints in the Han Feizi of an institutional approach: officials mechanically implement the law, the ruler focusing on controlling the officials and otherwise keeping out of active affairs. The problem is that the system still needs a political center, a person or group to decide what policies should be enacted in law, select those who will implement the law, and hold those who implement the law accountable through reward and punishment. There is no obvious way to guarantee this center will act in the interests of the society and state, or even in the interests of its own continued supremacy.

For better or worse states are ruled not by the Tao but by human beings, and human relations rest upon mutual advantage. The ruler, because of his position, shi, is able to benefit his subjects; and subjects will seek these benefits by attempting in their turn to give the ruler what he wants. The ruler is inveterately caught in what contemporary students of organization who adopt the rational choice approach call the principal-agent problem:⁵⁴ Rulers and ministers have mutually different interests... The sovereign benefits from appointing able men to office, while the minister is interested in office itself, whether he has ability or not. The sovereign is interested in rewarding achievement, while the minister is interested in reward, whether or not he has achieved anything.⁵⁵

Officials will try to figure out the ruler's likes and dislikes, both personally and in policy, and will tell him what he wants to hear. As a general rule, people who like and dislike the same things get along with each other, while those who vary in opinion or preference do not. The ministers praise what the ruler desires... and they disparage what he rejects... I've never heard of a case where people who are in agreement with each other fail to get along. This is the way officials get to be trusted.⁵⁶

To avoid being deceived, an intelligent ruler avoids personal entanglements and plays it close to the vest, expressing no preferences concerning policy.⁵⁷

The Confucians and the Mohists do not prey on the ruler's more obvious vices or frailties, but offer irrelevant advice that, if taken, would lead the ruler to act in accord with abstract principle rather than the interest of the state. The danger is that the ruler will listen to this advice, satisfying his personal interest in a reputation for being benevolent, wise, a patron of scholars.

The normative focus of Han Fei's analysis is a public good, achieved through the strength and power of the state. But the interest of each individual can, by definition, be only individual and personal. A theme running through the Han Feizi is frustration with rulers' preferences for short-term personal interests over this public good. The essay "Solitary Indignation" is a particularly heartfelt complaint on how the humble and public-spirited proponents of law and technique, those who understand the proper methods of government, never have access to the ruler, while those who echo the ruler's opinions, cater to his desires, form cliques to give each other mutual support, or serve powerful foreign sponsors bask in his favor. When good advisors, by some fluke, do manage to get a hearing, their plans are referred to the judgment of the ruler's personal entourage, selected on the basis of the ruler's personal likes; and these are as likely as not to be thugs or fools.⁵⁸ But if this is the way things are, how is the ruler to distinguish or trust these self-proclaimed "proponents of law and technique"? Why should he not assume that they, as much as anyone else, are out for themselves?⁵⁹

The advice the ruler needs most may be that he least wants to hear. Loyal words, says Han Fei, coining a phrase, grate upon the ears. The loyal minister must, then, somehow induce the ruler to do the right thing, often against the ruler's desires. One who would influence policy must be able to strategize. The problem of advocacy, Han Fei says, generally is neither lack of knowledge of the facts nor lack of skill in argumentation. Rather, it is in knowing the heart of the one you wish to persuade, particularly his unspoken desires. The job (wu), then, is to embellish what the ruler can be proud of (shi suo shuo zhi suo wu) while distracting him from his shame. If he has private needs, show him how they accord with his public duty. If he has high aspirations but no ability to attain them, point out the problems that would be caused if he should achieve his aspirations. Now the dragon is a worm: when he's in a good mood you can approach him and ride him. But beneath his throat there are transverse scales a foot long, and anyone who touches them dies. The Lord of Men also has transverse scales. Anyone who offers advice should avoid touching them: that's the whole trick.⁶⁰

This essay accords well enough with Han Fei's general view of human relations and motivations, but it subverts his program. Influencing the ruler is a skill or a technique, and good officials must use the same techniques Han Fei rails against in the bad. The effective ruler does not act on his private desires but rules through law and technique. Rulers are unlikely to do the right thing spontaneously, but they can be induced—seduced—into doing so, through techniques appealing to private desires, if only the counselor has the wit to perceive these desires (which, elsewhere, the ruler is advised to conceal).

In his discussion of shi Han Fei coined what was to become the standard Chinese term for contradiction—maodun, "spear and shield." A weapons maker, advertising his wares, boasted of making both a spear that could pierce anything and a shield that nothing could pierce. Han Fei points out it may be possible to have one or the other, but not both. He purports to show that since shi controls all things, there is no room for any individual virtue or worth that is beyond the control of shi.⁶¹

Han Fei's own argument gets caught between the spear and shield. His rather sudden suggestion that shi does indeed control everything is probably a tautology, covertly using shi to denote the sum of causal and controlling connections. The tautology may retain some analytic strength if we revert to the distinction between shi amenable to human control and that beyond human control. In that sense, superlative virtue is itself part of the shi beyond human control, which cannot be put to the service of the state.

The key to good government is to take hold of all the shi that is subject to human control, concentrating it so that it can be controlled only by the state or its ruler. Public order requires the ruler to control and not be controlled; there is no reason to think the good of the ruler, as the ruler perceives it, will correspond with the public good, the requisites of order; so the ruler must be controlled, induced to choose the public good as his own good.

Rationality and Political Analysis

Rationality, even in the modern instrumental sense, depends on circumstances. It does not operate in the abstract. The neo-institutionalist school stresses how social structures shape the rules by which our various inter-personal games are played, shaping what counts as rational in the particular circumstances. Masahito Aoki explains: An institution is a self-sustaining system of shared beliefs about how the game is played. Its substance is a compressed representation of the salient, invariant features of an equilibrium path, perceived by almost all the agents in the domain as relevant to their own strategic choices. As such, it governs the strategic interactions of the agents in a self-reinforcing manner and in turn is reproduced by their actual choices in a continually changing environment.⁶²

Institutions are part of the shi, and shape the shi. At a general level, the "institution" may be the cultural system itself, setting out parameters defining the rules those living in the culture must follow in order to survive and prosper. Values (and the vision of the world that underlies them) vary from culture to culture, within culture, from situation to situation, and among individuals according to personality, taste, or principle. The goals people seek turn on these differences.

In its most straightforward versions rational choice theory seems to describe politics most directly in two different situations, two configurations of the shi. One is a liberal politics of interest, in which there is sufficient consensus on the "background" values (or the structure of power rationalized by those values) that they never come into question. Politics consists of squabbling at the margins over who gets what, why, and how. Paraphrasing the old criticism of the pluralist approach, basic issues do not reach the agenda; nor does the agenda call for debating whether to expand the number or type of players squabbling at the margin.

Alternatively, individualist instrumental considerations may come to constitute nearly the whole of politics in circumstances when there is no socially credible theory of a common good—to a limited degree in international politics, or perhaps in conditions of social change, or maybe modern society generally, when there seems to be no credible trans-subjective rational foundation for what Apter calls consummatory values.

In its liberal applications rational choice assumes that there are diverse and conflicting ends in society, with institutions providing a means to navigate through these (although an institutional framework may itself impose its own ends). Han Feizi describes a malign operation of rational choice. In the Warring States any sense of moral consensus (certainly among states, but within states as well) had eroded to the point where political conflict was governed by the logic of the struggle itself, with survival trumping any other political values. This condition (shi) becomes self-reinforcing—those caught up in the naked struggle for advantage have (in effect) no choice but to comply with the general style.

A relatively rigorous use of rational choice-style reasoning as a descriptive theory is perhaps best used not as a description of what happens but as a source for insights into what is to be expected when the canons of rationality are disregarded.⁶³ The Han Feizi contains a chapter, "Portents of Ruin" (Wang Wei⁶⁴)—portents referring to actual political or social situations rather than comets or other astrological phenomena—listing 47 propositions that could be recast as testable probabilistic hypotheses: if the land under the ruler's direct jurisdiction is smaller than the fiefs of his vassals, ruin is possible; if the ruler is greedy and overly fond of gain, ruin is possible; if the ruler counts on aid from distant outside powers, ruin is possible; if the ruler bases his decisions on comets or other astrological phenomena, ruin is possible; and so on. Han Fei even hedges: "Portents of ruin do not imply certainty of ruin, but liability to ruin." Material instrumental rationality is here treated as a default or null hypothesis; and since rationality is not always followed, substantive hypotheses should be introduced to explain deviations from the rational.

But at the same time this is one more recognition that the instrumental individualistic rationality does not in fact encompass the totality of human motivation. In certain circumstances political conflict can be reduced to contests over pure personal material benefit. This entails a very narrow vision of human motivation: there is on the part of neither rulers nor ruled (in a democracy these would be the same people) of any sense of justice, duty, honor, empathy, respect for customs or institutions, concept of a common good.⁶⁵ Han Fei is possibly correct to assert that these elements perhaps do exist, but that it is not expedient to count on them. Yet such sentiments are perhaps more common in daily life than the abstract theory would allow.⁶⁶ In the end, Mencius may be more psychologically sound than Han Fei, even if Han Fei may make the more reliable mini-max calculations.

Even if we specify personal material benefit as the objective, we move away from a purely abstract instrumental rationality. We are stipulating a particular good or end, offering a hypothesis that politics is not simply a process of decision-making but is about something—in this case, material benefit. And we also know that sometimes this is the content of politics and sometimes it is not. Whether it is or not depends on the shi, the "conditions," including the institutional structure and the cultural setting.

Rational choice reasoning is more relevant to the conduct of politics than to its content. It is a powerful tool of analysis, but not by itself a satisfactory political theory. And when taken as a political program it becomes a charge to those with the position (shi) to do so to shape the general context (shi) in such a way that its theoretical underpinning (individualistic instrumental rationality) is made valid as an adequate account of human motivation. The content of politics is shaped by the shi—some under human control and some not. Politics also helps shape the shi. Rational choice helps us understand political tactics and goals, given a particular shi. But to understand the shi requires insight into culture, history, institutions, and the specifics of specific cases. We buy our shoes to fit our feet, not the pattern; the pattern is useful only insofar as it matches our feet.

Notes

¹ Han Feizi, "Outer Congeries of Sayings, Upper Left"; Han Feizi, annotated by Zhang Jue (Taipei: Taiwan Gujie Chubanshe, 1996), 701 (the citations to the Chinese refer to this edition); W. K. Liao, Han Fei Tzu: Works from the Chinese, Volume II (London: A Probstain, 1959), 50–51. Han Fei's specific reference is to those who rely on the model of the "former kings."

² Some would have rational choice as a general field theory for the social sciences. A Not-So-Dismal Science: A Broader View of Economics and Societies, ed. Mancur Olson and Sata Kähkönen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a general critique of the approach, see Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

³ See, however, Robert Bates, "Comparative Politics and Rational Choice: A Review Essay," American Political Science Review 91 (September, 1997), 699–704.

⁴ Chalmers Johnson, E. B. Kahn, "A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies," National Interest, 36 (Summer, 1994): 14–22.

⁵ His surname was Han, and Fei his personal name. The zi, "Master" or "Teacher," is an honorific. In dealing with works from this period it is perhaps technically more accurate to ascribe ideas to the work bearing the name of the supposed author name rather than to the author as a person, since for most Warring States era Chinese works there are disputes about how much, if anything, was actually written by the person for whom the work is named. The question of authorship, however, is not relevant to the argument developed here, and for stylistic convenience Han Fei, Han Feizi, and the Han Feizi are used interchangeably.

⁶ This may be at the heart of the coldness of much rational choice theorizing toward explanations based on political culture. Bertrand Badie, The Imported State; The Westernization of Political Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) comments that in the western "construction," culture is something that non-modern states have. In the modern west, culture is replaced by "reason": "the force of cultural explanation fades before an analysis in terms of the universal" (51).

⁷ David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 73. Apter, of course, is taking his cue from Max Weber's classic study of the different modes of authority.

⁸ Apter, Politics of Modernization, 10. For a criticism of conceiving democracy (and, perhaps by extension, all politics) in terms of choice, see Emily Hauptmann, Putting Choice Before Democracy: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). But to some extent her criticism amounts to pointing out that rational choice theory exposes fallacies or gaps in less cynical theories of democracy.

⁹ Apter, Politics of Modernization, 250.

¹⁰ Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 66. Lane argues that money in American society is valued not simply for what it can buy, but also for its "symbolic value": we value making money in part because the general culture accords worth to those who are able to make money.

¹¹ Winston Davis, "Religion and Development," in Understanding Political Development: An Analytical Study, ed. Samuel P. Huntington and Myron Weiner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 221–80.

¹² For the overall Chinese rational choice tradition, see Alastair Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

¹³ For the historic context that made this view plausible and attractive, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)—in effect an elaboration of Samuel Johnson's observation that a man is never so innocently occupied as when he is making money.

¹⁴ Virtue, de, is a multivalent concept in Warring States discourse. In very early usage it apparently referred to the ability of one in a superior position to do favors for his subordinates. In Taoist thinking it refers broadly to power (especially as manifested without force or violence) or efficacy; in Confucian thinking it refers mostly to moral virtues or character. But the meanings and usages also overlap with each other. For a general discussion, see Sarah Allen, The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). The Han Feizi tends to use the term in the Taoist sense, except when criticizing the Confucian usage.

¹⁵ Hsu Cho-yun, Ancient China in Transition: An Analysis of Social Mobility, 722–222 BC (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965). For more socio-political context, see Sa Mengwu, Zhongguo Shehui Zhengzhi Shi (Social and Political History of China), (Taipei: Zhengzhong Shuju, 1962), vol 1, ch. 1; Bai Gang, Zhongguo Zhengzhi Zhidu Tongshi (General History of China's Political Systems) (Peking: Renmin Chubanshe, 1993), vol. 1, 47–123.

¹⁶ Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

¹⁷ For ongoing research and thinking on the relationship between social and economic developments at this time, see the Warring States Project website, convened by Bruce and Takeo Brooks at the University of Massachusetts (http://www.umass.edu/wsp/). The project, it might be noted, is not without its tendentious or dogmatic aspects.

¹⁸ On the avoidance of calculating, profit-motivated behavior as a Confucian norm, see Robert Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 125.

¹⁹ The best recent overview of Warring States thinking is perhaps Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

²⁰ Zhuangzi, "The Equality of Things": A road (or the Tao) is made by walking. Our reality is constructed by language, with differences in value a result of different labeling. Freedom comes with the ability to fall back into the unconstructed reality-as-it-is.

²¹ Mozi, Ch. 15. Mozi's take, however, seems to be vulnerable to the free-rider dilemmas identified by Olson: In the best of all worlds I do exactly what I please while everybody else loves me. But this little twist, of course, will simultaneously occur to everyone else. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: A Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

²² Mencius 3B:9 claims he does not like to argue (and, from a technical perspective, he is indeed not very good at it), but is forced into it by the pervasive influence of the erroneous teachings of Mozi and Yang Zhu, presented as Mozi's contrary, an extreme egotist: I wonder, though, whether Yang Zhu may be a stand-in for the Taoist thinker Zhuangzi, a contemporary of Mencius. A.C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981) classifies several chapters as works of the "Yangist" school.

²³ The term conveniently translated as ritual is also pronounced (and romanized) as li, but is an entirely different word from the homophone li meaning benefit. One connotation of the term ritual is reciprocity without calculation. In the words of the song: "Throw me a quince, I'll requite it with a beryl: not an even swap, but to make love last forever." Michael Nylan, The Five "Confucian" Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 18.

²⁴ Mencius 6A:6.

²⁵ Or, Mencius would say, if one can, that shows that one has ceased to be human (fei ren ye), that if we lose our moral sense we are "dehumanized."

²⁶ The term gong originally meant duke (the conventional translation of the highest ranking set of vassals under the king); by extension, it came to mean public (the public, that is, belonging to the duke). Han Fei's concept of gong is unambiguously statist. The Confucian school uses the same term, but its import there is more social than political. The English term public carries similar ambiguities. Compare Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

²⁷ For compilations see Han Feizi Jiaoyi (Annotated Commentary on the Han Feizi), ed. Chen Qitian (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1969); Han Feizi Yizhu (Translated and Annotated Han Fei), compiled by Cao Daoheng, Shen Yucheng, Guo Yongzhi (Taipei: Jianan Chubanshe, 1997); Han Feizi, annotated by Zhang Jue. The Chinese citations are from this last edition. These all include discussions of the authenticity of the various chapters. See also Zhang Xincheng, Wei Shu Tong Kao (General Examination of Apocryphal Works) (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1970), 781. For an English translation, see Liao, The Complete Works of Han Fei-tzu. For an English language study, see Wang Hsiao-po and Leo S. Chang, The Philosophical Foundations of Han Fei's Political Theory (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986).

²⁸ Legalism as a school of thought has strong intellectual affinities with Taoism. The Shi Jiputs Han Fei's biography in the same chapter as those of the Taoist thinkers Laozi and Zhuangzi, and the Han Feizi contains the first known commentary on the Dao De Jing (this is also the earliest known commentary on any Chinese classic text) although the analysis tends to "demystify" the Tao. The Huang-Lao school, what Schwartz (The World of Thought) calls instrumental Taoism, is a later ideologized combination of elements of Legalism with Taoist concepts and the theory of cosmological correspondences. The Shi Ji association of Han Fei with Huang-Lao is probably anachronistic. While it is highly likely that Han Fei's thinking was influential in the development of the Huang-Lao tradition, important elements of it, such as its cosmological reasoning, are foreign to him. For differences between the Han Feizi and Huang-Lao thinking, see R.P. Pereenboom, Law and Morality in Ancient China: The Silk Manuscripts of Huang-Lao (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 140 (but for a contrary analysis, compare Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: SUNY, 1999), 34–39). The relationship among Legalism, Taoism, and the Huang-Lao tradition is complex, controversial, and fascinating; and there is no opportunity here to develop the theme.

²⁹ Xunzi, Ch. 23. For a translation of this chapter, see Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 128–35.

³⁰ Chan, Source Book, 131. Xunzi's thesis here could be recast in terms of social evolution, better to fit the contemporary idiom (instead of his own idiom of sages) without losing analytic force. Han Fei implicitly takes this tack.

³¹ The passage concludes: "The gentleman does not give up good conduct because the little man rails at him." The educated and socialized person will behave properly as spontaneously as the operations of nature, and with as little regard to efforts to make him do otherwise. While goodness is not innate to us, the principles governing goodness have as much objective foundation as the principles of the natural world. Xunzi, ch. 17. Chan, Source Book, 119.

³² See Chan, Source Book, 238. Zhi, finger, in Warring States discussions of language, at a minimum means the word used to designate a concept: the name points to a thing, the "finger" indicating (as it were) the name as a name. Chan comments, though, that the term is sufficiently vague that it is easy for commentators, ancient or modern, to read their own predilections into the concept.

³³ Xunzi rejects Mozi's narrower utilitarianism as an inadequate accounting of human needs, which are aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual as well as material. Also, and here Xunzi and Mencius agree, an appeal simply to benefit will never develop beyond benefit. We must be educated to become truly moral persons, behaving in the proper way because it is the proper way, not because we think it will pay.

³⁴ The Han Feizi may have only one direct mention of Xunzi, Xunzi figuring as one of many different interpreters of Confucius. Zhang, Han Feizi, 1189; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol 2, 298. The reference is to "Ru [that is, Confucians] of the Sun school." At some point during the redaction of the Han Feizi, Xun had become taboo as part of the personal name of a reigning emperor, and the conjecture is that the word Sun served as a substitute; but commentators are divided on whether the reference is indeed to Xunzi or to Gongsun Ni, one of Confucius's own disciples. The point of that passage is to show that since there are so many different schools within Confucianism, there is no reliable way to know what Confucius himself actually said or meant, and so no sense in taking him too seriously as a teacher or sage.

³⁵ Xie Yunfei, Han Feizi Zhe Lun (Analytic Discussion of Han Feizi) (Taipei: Donghai University Press, 1989), esp. 143–79.

³⁶ Zhang, Han Feizi, 541; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol I, 303.

³⁷ Zhang, Han Feizi, 890–91; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol. II, 145–46.

³⁸ Dictionary translations: power, force, strength, influence (whether of human beings or other things); or: aspect, circumstances, condition.

³⁹ François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 27. Also Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983). Ames, Art, 91, stresses Han Fei's juxtaposition of rule through shi with the (Confucian) rule through virtue, although, as demonstrated below, Han Fei subsumes virtue under a certain kind of shi. Hsiao Kung-chuan, A History of Chinese Political Thought, Volume 1, translated by F. W. Mote; (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) equates Han Fei's usage with "power." This covers much of Han Fei's shi under human control, but not the full range of the term.

⁴⁰ Zhang, Han Feizi, 991–1006; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol II, 199–206.

⁴¹ The distinction here may reflect an unattributed influence of Xunzi, one of whose contributions to philosophy was to make explicit the distinction between the human and the natural. Sarah Allen, The Way of Water, 147. Han Fei does not, however, use the same terminology as Xunzi.

⁴² The following discussion is drawn generally from Han Fei's chapter "Five Vermin" (Zhang, Han Feizi, 1143–1186; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol II, 275–97), with the order of Han Fei's argument sometimes varied for the sake of exposition. In addition to scholars and swordsmen, the vermin, bugs that gnaw away at the foundations of the state, include courtiers, merchants, and diplomatists (specialists in foreign policy who argued the security of the state lay in alliances, the balance of power, and the like).

⁴³ Thus, Leo Strauss famously identifies Hobbes as the fount of the "bourgeois" approach to ethics. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

⁴⁴ This is a manifestation of the collective action problem. Compare Olson, The Logic.

⁴⁵ For example, Annette C. Baier, "Commodious Living," Synthese, 72 (August, 1987): 157–82. Hobbes's most detailed discussion of the virtues is in Leviathan, ch. 6.

⁴⁶ Han Fei's general view is that of the ancient Taoist tradition, although his articulation of it is unusually systematic. In outline it is surprisingly similar to that of Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972).

⁴⁷ For a comparison of Han Feizi and Skinnerian behavioralism, see Peter R. Moody, Jr., "The Legalism of Han Fei-tzu and Its Affinities with Modern Political Thought," International Philosophical Quarterly, 13 (September, 1979): 317–30.

⁴⁸ Theodore Lowi, in the Foreword to Social Regulatory Policy: Moral Controversies in American Politics, ed. Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes (Boulder: Westview, 1988), xii, labels these "radical politics," indicating, whether in fact or in the opinion of commentators, a kind of politics disruptive of the established system.

⁴⁹ Thus, Arrow's voting paradox follows from the assumption that there can be no common interest apart from individual preferences, namely the Pareto optimum, wherein it is impossible to improve the position of any particular person without making someone else worse off. Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1963). Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957), purports to demonstrate that his democracy is highly unlikely to achieve a Pareto optimum, since at any equilibrium it is probably possible for a ruling party to increase its vote by taking away from some and giving to others. Much rational choice theorizing in political science shelves the concept of a common good in favor of identifying only relative gains and losses of particular actors. A not completely satisfactory normative response may be to find the common good in the process itself: a proper outcome is that which results from following the relevant decision rules. For a general discussion, see Gerald Mackie, Democracy Defended (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Strictly speaking, though, it may not be rational even to follow the procedure. For example, the minimal effort needed to cast a vote may not be worth the even more minimal expected value of that vote. Downs, Economic Theory, winds up simply stipulating, against the evidence, that voting is rational, since voting is necessary for the system to function in the first place (45 n9). For extended discussion, see André Blais, To Vote or Not to Vote: The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Alexander A. Schuessler, A Logic of Expressive Choice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

⁵⁰ Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

⁵¹ On Han Fei's disdain for "charisma" and the paradoxes inherent in his treatment of authority, see Schwartz, The World of Thought, 340–42.

⁵² Jullien, Propensity, 51.

⁵³ See, for example, the chapter "General Summary" (Zhang, Han Feizi, 527–33; Liao, Han Fei-tzu, vol I, 278–80—although Liao considers the chapter an interpolation). The stress on the possible automatic operation of the law is perhaps stronger in the earlier Legalist work, the Shang Yang Shu.

⁵⁴ "The agent has is own interests at heart, and is induced to pursue the principal's objectives only to the extent that the incentive structure imposed in their contract renders such behavior advantageous." Terry M. Moe, "The New Economics of Organization," American Journal of Political Science, 28 (November, 1984): 237–77. Unlike Han Fei, Moe does not consider whether the principal's interests will coincide with those of the organization he heads.

⁵⁵ Zhang, Han Feizi, 189; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol I, 104.

⁵⁶ Zhang, Han Feizi, 219; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol I, 117.

⁵⁷ Ronald Winthrobe, applying rational choice reasoning to despotisms, offers as one of his conclusions that "on perfectly rational grounds, the characteristic personality trait of dictators is paranoia." The Political Economy of Dictatorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39.

⁵⁸ Zhang, Han Feizi, 189; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol I, 104. A philological difficulty, not relevant to the substantial argument, is that the use of the term da wang ("great king") implies the essay is addressed to the King of Qin; but it seems psychologically more plausible that the person addressed is the King of Han, Han Fei's blood relation.

⁵⁹ Han Fei's response is that the ruler should judge the quality of the advice, not react to the personality or motives of the advisor. But it seems that if the ruler were qualified to judge the advice, the problem of listening to the wrong people would not arise. Gary J. Miller, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 104, and 189–95, shows how it can be in the interest of subordinates to cooperate with each other to hold down the amount of work done, even if each would benefit as an individual from doing more work. Han Fei wishes to minimize the incentive and opportunity for subordinates to cooperate with each other. Rather than have the ruler assign tasks to subordinates, Han Fei would have subordinates propose their own tasks and be held strictly accountable for their performance. He would have the ruler in effect be indifferent to particular policies, as long as they serve to secure his position. This seems a good rule for a traditional kingship, but would perhaps be perverse in a modern democratic polity, and probably as well in a modern business firm. For an argument, though, that power in "Asian" polities is not adequately measured by the pluralist focus on influence on decision-making, see Lucian Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University, Belknap Press, 1985).

⁶⁰ Zhang, Han Feizi, 195–200; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, 106–13.

⁶¹ Zhang, Han Feizi, 999–1000; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol 2, 209.

⁶² Masahito Aoki, Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 26.

⁶³ William Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), shows it is rational to seek to form minimal winning coalitions, but also argues that because of lack of knowledge of what is the minimal winning size actual coalitions will tend to be larger. The theory is intrinsically unfalsifiable; but it may allow (probabilistic and contingent) predictions about what happens when winning coalitions are larger than the minimal winning size.

⁶⁴ Zhang, Han Feizi, 246–49; Liao, Han Fei Tzu, vol I, 134–42.

⁶⁵ These sentiments may perhaps be built into the rational choice model, although this would entail a watering down of the approach, making it less rigorous and perhaps in the end somewhat gratuitous as an explanation. Alexander A. Schuessler, A Logic of Expressive Choice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), explains that we vote not because we think our vote will have a personal material payoff, but because voting is a way to express an opinion or perform a duty. Politicians and advertisers can also appeal to our desire for expression, turning it to their own advantage. Compare also Thomas Clay Arnold, "Rethinking Moral Economy," American Political Science Review 95 (March, 2001): 85–95, addressing "social goods" which "establish and symbolize important senses of self. They reflect a matter of individual and collective identification" (88, 90). His main example is rice in Japan, which is probably valid enough, although Japanese rice politics also touch on crass if convoluted material interests as well. Analogously, the Confucians and Mohists in effect appeal not to the ruler's desire for comfort, physical satisfaction, leisure, power, or wealth, but to his desire for expression. All of this can perhaps be reduced, should we make the effort, to personal utility, although utility clearly is not entirely material in its composition; and it may be more direct simply to acknowledge that the examples show the inadequacy of instrumental rationality as a full explanation of human motivation.

⁶⁶ It is certainly relevant that, contrary to the general opinion, not even the Qin empire was a purely Legalist state. Rather, the rationale for state power was traced to Huang-Lao cosmological foundations. Karen Turner, "War, Punishment, and the Law of Nature in Early Chinese Concepts of the State," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53 (December, 1993): 285–324.