Any good books on Chinese legalism?

by George_Joestar
Professional-Rent-62

Not really. The introduction to the Yuri Pines translation of the Book of Lord Shang is probably your best bet for a short summary. The problem is that recent work tends to see the Warring States-Han thinkers as being much more mixed than older works did. Not that earlier people did not realize that these people influenced each other, or did not know that labeling them as members of discrete schools only came in the Han, with Sima Qian. They did. But scholars like Graham and Schwartz would at least divide their books into sections labeled “Legalism” or whatever. More recent things, like Pines’ own work, or Mark Edward Lewis tend to be more thematic. (Check the titles and the tables of contents on Amazon). This is because of changing intellectual fashion, but also because we are always finding more texts (or bits of texts) and archeological evidence. Graham was working from the received texts, so it made sense to see things as a debate between discrete thinkers, usually represented by one, mostly unproblematic text that represents their thought. Lewis (who is my favorite read out of all these) is working from a much broader set of texts and evidence, and so he is much less interested in trying to figure out if someone fits under the “Legalist” label or in defining Legalism.

Graham, A.C. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. Open Court, 1999.

Lewis, Mark Edward. Sanctioned Violence in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

———. The Construction of Space in Early China. State University of New York Press, 2006.

———. Writing and Authority in Early China. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Pines, Yuri. Envisioning Eternal Empire : Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era. Honolulu, HI, USA: University of Hawaii Press, 2009.

_______. Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period (722-453 B.C.E.). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.

Schwartz, Benjamin I. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985.

Shang, Yang. The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China. Translated by Yuri Pines. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.