Han Fei · Politics
Han Fei’s founding move: because people are not naturally good and wise sages are vanishingly rare, a state cannot be run on the ruler’s moral example. It must be run by clear, public law (<em>fa</em>) that works on ordinary people - and it must stop trying to govern the present with the golden-age methods of the past.
You learned that Han Fei rejected rule by moral example: human beings are not reliably good, sages are too rare to build a state on, and conditions change, so government must rest on impartial public law rather than on the ruler’s virtue or on the imitated ways of antiquity. Explain the argument, and the point o…
Leads to Confucius.
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