VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 3
Guanzi, the Same Position Set Two Thousand Years Early
Start with a man three days without food. Sit him down and talk to him of propriety, of honor, of shame, and he cannot take one word of it in. This is not because he is bad. It is because his body will not let him. That plain fact is where this chapter begins, and it is the whole of what the chapter is built to prove, that the order runs matter first and mind after, food first and morals after, and that this order was set down clean, in a handbook for governing a state, in the state of Qi before the common era. The first ancestor to take the stage in this volume is Guanzi, put at the very front not because his name is loudest but because the positions that later economics keeps returning to feel for, he had already laid down more than two thousand years ago.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section gets to know the man and the book, and then sets out his most famous line. The book called the Guanzi goes under the name of Guan Zhong, minister to Duke Huan of Qi, who died in 645 before the common era, though the book itself is a collection edited together by many hands across several centuries. What matters is the subject. Guanzi does not talk about the things above form, he talks finance and granaries and currency and population, which is why he belongs at the same table as Smith and Marx and Keynes, and not at the table with Aristotle. His eight characters run, when the granaries are full they know propriety, when clothing and food suffice they know honor and shame. Matter first, mind after. Twenty four centuries later, in 1859, Marx said a thing built the same way, that it is not consciousness that determines existence but social existence that determines consciousness. One position, felt out by two men more than twenty four centuries apart. The section marks the difference plainly and evenhandedly. Guanzi stopped at the observation of governance, and Marx walked one step further and pushed it into a staircase of stages, which is named as his border and not his right or wrong, his theoretical work counted as a heavy merit of his trade. And it points at one dislocation worth correcting, that historical materialism is taught for decades as though it were born in a London reading room in 1859, when it had long since been written into a Chinese handbook of statecraft.
The second section is Guanzi’s second position, and its tone is the thing to notice. In every way of governing a state, he says, the first thing is to make the people rich, for rich they are easy to govern and poor they are hard to govern. He does not call this benevolence, does not call it what a ruler ought to do. He says one cold accounting line, poor and the state is hard to govern, and by saying it cold he guards people best, because a moral plea can be ignored on a bad day and a rule of arithmetic cannot. He nails making the people rich onto the self interest of the ruler, so that it no longer leans on anyone’s conscience but on the position itself. And the position runs unbroken for two thousand years, through Confucius saying enrich them and then teach them, through Mencius and his steady holding, through the later call for light corvee and light taxes, down to the political scientists of today who check the same tie with the regression of dozens of countries across dozens of years and come out at the same direction. Then it turns the line onto today. The man with the thirty year loan is not rich in Guanzi’s sense, whatever his wage, because rich is not how many coins are in the hand but how much room is left in it, and room is whether a person still dares to say no.
The third section follows Guanzi past the slogan and into the workings, because making the people rich runs straight into the question of where the money comes from. He wrote the grain market out of balance without flinching, the fat year so glutted that pigs and dogs eat human food, the lean year so dear that people starve along the road, the same grain in the same place a few years apart. The market is not evil, it simply does not mind whether a person lives or dies, it knows only that more is cheap and less is dear. His remedy is to buy in during the fat year and sell out during the lean, the strength of the state run against the cycle of the market, shaving the two sharpest points without abolishing the market at all. This has a name, light and heavy, and the reserve behind it a name, the state store, and it was no paper notion but a machine that truly ran, from Li Kui to the ever normal granary of the Han and on to the Qing, two thousand years and more. Twenty five centuries later Keynes wrote the same counter cyclical logic into a formula, and the volume holds him in full respect for the real professional work of theorizing it, while pointing out that the logic itself was not first his. The chapter closes on its true thesis, that the ancestors took the economy not for a doctrine or a slab of iron but for a tunable, manageable set of workings, and that to shout a dispute over workings into a dispute over doctrines is one of wei’s quiet successes. And it adds the hard line, that the same machine can guard the farmer or wring him dry, because the art of light and heavy is wei, neutral, and the responsibility sits in the hand that works it.
That is the method this chapter hands you. Do not read the signboard an institution hangs out, market or plan, this ism or that. Read what it does when it comes down onto the person at the very bottom, whether it lifts him up or presses him under. What you carry away is a pair of eyes that looks past the label to the empty store underneath, past the thief to the hunger, past the doctrine to the machine, and asks of any arrangement the one question Guanzi asked, does it turn, and can it let people live.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. When the Granaries Are Full They Know Propriety, Matter First
SECTION 2. First Make the People Rich, the Regime Hangs on the People’s Belly
SECTION 3. Light and Heavy, the State Store, the Economy Is a Tunable Manageable Set of Workings
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1. When the Granaries Are Full They Know Propriety, Matter First