China's Legalists: The Earliest Totalitarians and Their Art of Ruling

This text discusses the Chinese Legalists, an ancient school of Chinese philosophy which flourished during the Period of the Hundred Contending Schools (6th-3rd century B.C.E.) The school perfected the science of government and art of statecraft to a level that would have greatly impressed Machiavelli. This period and its personalities, as well as a taste of the style and spirit of the Legalists' discourse, are made accessible to the student and general reader, placing into focus the roots of the great Chinese philosophy-as-statecraft tradition. The Legalists - most famously Li Kui, Shang Yang, Shen Buhai, Shen Dao, and Han Fei - had a great impact not only on the institutions and practices of Chinese imperial tradition but also on the Maoist totalitarianism of the People's Republic of China.

Educated at Yenching and Peking Universities, Zhengyuan Fu has taught and done research at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of California at Irvine. He was named first Trustee Professor of Chapman University in 1994 and is concurrently a Research Fellow at the Asian Studies Center of The Claremont Institute. He is the author of Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1993).