VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 1

VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 1

Starting from a Name

This section starts from a name given to a three-year-old child. Something as small as that holds the first position this whole volume needs to set. In one class we will take those frightening words, political institution, all the way down to the plainest ground, and set up a single sentence: political institutions are institutions of enfeoffment.

Begin with a small picture. Guangzhou, the nineteen sixties, a kindergarten classroom. A father surnamed Lei brings his son, a little past three, through the classroom door for the first time. The teacher, without ceremony, gives him a name to be called by, Little Lei. From that day people call him that. Decades pass, and the people who know him call him that still.

In that moment, the three-year-old felt what enfeoffment is. No book, no written word had told him what the thing means. He simply felt it. A name is given by a group of people together. The day that group stops calling it, the name is gone. Hold on to that plainest of feelings. It is the starting point of the entire volume.

Now put the sentence out in front, bare. In all of world history, there has only ever been one kind of political institution, and it is the institution of enfeoffment. Political institutions equal institutions of enfeoffment.

Before we can say that, the word has to be cleared of the insult it carries. In everyday speech enfeoffment comes wrapped in scorn, a thing backward and decayed, so that the moment you hear it you have already picked a side. The enfeoffment meant here is the neutral one. It describes a fact: how a living group lifts its front-most position onto one person, or a few. A beehive has such a position. A pride of lions has one, a troop of monkeys, a family, a company, every political body there is. The forms differ. The skeleton is one and the same. Set down the scorn, follow along, and by the end it will be plain that this word, wronged for so long, was neutral all along.

Someone who states it this bluntly, drawing an equals sign between political institution and enfeoffment, is hard to find. From the oldest inscriptions to today's political science, from ancient Greece to modern philosophy, you will not find the many thousand kinds of institution cut down to one and tied together with a single equals sign. The ancients did not use equals signs, that is a modern mark. But set the mark aside and even the flat, unhedged claim is hard to trace. This particular way of seeing it grew up in a child, naturally, long ago. Yet the ancestors said something close in other words. Han Feizi, over two thousand years ago, taught that a position is set up by people, that it does not fall from the sky. Guanzi, some twenty-seven centuries ago, taught that a politics thrives when it moves with the will of the people, and withers when it moves against it. Positions set by people, and rule that must follow the people: the ancestors had already touched several faces of enfeoffment. The bamboo-strip age simply did not draw the line with an equals sign, and said its things gently, scattered across many books. To write that layer down today with one equals sign is only to carry what the ancestors said, scattered, one sentence further.

Pull the camera back from that classroom to a stretch of African grass. A pride of lions lies under a tree, the females in a ring, cubs climbing over their bellies. Away under a taller tree, a larger male lies quietly. The narrator on the screen calls him the king of this pride.

A child watches a long while, then turns to his father and asks: who chose the lion king? It sounds like a child's innocence. It is in fact the deepest layer of all. Where does a position come from?

The narrator says this king has held for four years. Four years ago he came in from another pride, and before that he was a young male driven out by his elders, because a pride does not let grown sons stay. He wandered, met this pride, fought the standing king, won. The old king left. He stayed. And if he had lost? The answer: he leaves, or he dies.

Inside that small exchange sits the deepest layer of politics. The lion king did not declare himself. No one handed him a certificate when he won, no one set a crown on him. Nor was he born to it. Nothing at his birth marked him for the seat. The lion king is accepted by this pride. The moment the females accept him, he holds the position. The moment they stop, he holds nothing. This is enfeoffment, running from below to above, never the reverse. The day every female at once withdraws her acceptance, he cannot last a second. The day a stronger male comes in and he loses, he is king no longer. That position, every second of it, is held up by the pride's continuing acceptance.

Watch a little further. Years pass. The king ages, his mane thins, he no longer leads the hunt. At the edge of the grass the young males are already waiting. One day one of them comes in. Two lions fight, and when the dust settles the old king is down, fled with his wounds or dead. The new king walks into the pride and does the first thing a new king does, and it is to end every nursing cub of the old king, not one left. The females mourn briefly, then in time carry the new king's young. And the sons the old king raised? Driven out before they grew, to win a pride of their own or to die alone on the grass. The old king never once groomed a successor. He taught no son to be king, chose none in his age to follow him, handed the seat to no one while he still could. He could do none of it, because he is not a man. He is not retired, he is beaten. His position can only pass, through a fight, to a wholly unrelated young male who came in from outside. This is the enfeoffment of the animal world: only replacement, never succession. The pride walks this circle every few years, badly weakened for months, then slowly recovers, and waits for the next turn.

Cut to a troop of monkeys in a forest. The monkey king is fought for too. A young male grows, and either leaves or challenges the sitting king. Win, and he is king. Lose, and he takes the bottom rank or is driven out. The old king, aged, is pulled down by the young in the same way. No monkey king teaches a young one how to be king. Monkeys groom no successor either.

Cut again to a hive. The queen does not gather nectar, does not guard. Her one task is to lay. Her food comes from the workers, her position is kept by the whole hive. She looks like the most important bee in the hive, and she is in fact the most dependent. Let the workers stop feeding her and she lives only days. Let her laying fail and the workers raise a new queen, and the old one leaves or is balled up and smothered by their heat. The hive decides the queen's succession. The queen herself takes no part in the decision.

Come back now to the classroom. The moment a three-year-old is given a name, the direction of enfeoffment, its shape, the relationship it rests on, are the same as in the pride, the troop, the hive. Enfeoffment runs from below. The position is lifted up. That three-year-old felt this layer directly.

Now turn from the animal world to the human. People too walked out of that world. The earliest human groups were no different in root from a pride or a troop. The leader was pulled down by the young, the position won by force, the weak tribe swallowed by the strong. This is very early human enfeoffment, almost the same as the pride.

But people found one thing the pride never had: succession. A father, grown old, can let a son take over, and before that, teach him how to handle affairs, how to hold the ministers together, how to meet an enemy. The father need not be beaten. He can step down, and grow old in peace. The son need not seize the seat by force. He need only wait for the day his father steps down.

Succession looks simple, and it is the doorway by which human politics stepped out of the animal world. With it, people could do several things a pride never can. First, spare each generation its bloody turnover. The father hands to the son without a fight. A pride runs the circle every few years. A human dynasty can run one or two centuries between them. Second, store up knowledge and experience. What passes is not only the seat but the wisdom of governing, the rules, the records. The son stands on the father's shoulders and need not grope from the start each time. Third, let the group grow. No longer gutted every few years, it can go on gathering people, wealth, and culture, and only then can there be a civilization. The ancestors saw the doorway clearly, from the abdications, Yao to Shun, Shun to Yu, to the day the son of Yu took the seat, to the Zhou setting down the rules of lineage in writing so that a position had a clear order in the bloodline and brothers need not fight over it, and on to naming the principal heir and the eldest, the crown prince. Every generation made the method of succession finer, over thousands of years, each step to steady the handover, to spare the group the pride's bloody circle.

So did succession lift people out of the pride's cycle? It did not. Not one Chinese dynasty escaped the round of founding, succession, decline, turnover. Qin and Han, Sui and Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, no exception, an average life of two or three centuries. Every collapse returned to the shape of the pride. The old house falls, a new one rises, tears out the old line by the roots, and builds its own. Human succession does not end the cycle. It slows it. The pride's cycle is years. The human cycle is centuries. The cycle itself does not go away. Why can it not be ended? Because what passes down is the position, not the ability, and the next generation may not have the last one's gift. Because the rules of succession get broken, and once broken are hard to restore. Because even the best succession meets, at last, a generation that cannot hold, and there the line snaps. This is the deepest face of enfeoffment. People walked one step further than the animal, they added succession, and still they did not step out of the animal world's cycle. They only drew it longer. And when that enfeoffment turns unstable, something worse than internal turnover arrives, conquest from outside. The Western Jin swayed in its own infighting, and northern peoples poured in, and the central plain bled for decades. Across the centuries of modern colonial conquest, ancient political bodies across the Americas, Africa, and Asia came apart under foreign guns. The regularity surfaces on its own. When enfeoffment is unsteady and a shock arrives, the whole group, people and institutions together, is torn up by the roots, back to the bloody circle.

Come back to the sentence we started with. Political institutions are institutions of enfeoffment. The lion king, the monkey king, the queen bee, the animal world's enfeoffment, replacement only, no succession, a cycle of years. The chief, the king, the emperor, the president, the chairman, the chair of the board, the head of a household, the human world's enfeoffment, with succession added, a cycle of centuries, and still no escape. One skeleton, and the only difference is that slowing device called succession, whether it was fitted, and how steadily. This skeleton has a name, the institution of enfeoffment. Take the parts of that name apart. To enfeoff is to hand a position of power to one person, or a few, to carry the front-most place in the group. The one enfeoffed occupies a position, and that position is the pivot on which the whole group turns, resources and decisions and defense all circling it. Around that pivot a whole structure is built, layer upon layer of cooperation, up and down and across, and into it humans fitted one more thing, succession, writing the rules of the handover between generations into it. And when the whole structure holds a stable shape over time, that is what we call the political institution. So the institution of enfeoffment is not one kind of political system. It is the shared underlying skeleton of them all. The seven or eight categories political science names, autocracy and democracy, monarchy and republic, centralization and its opposite, are all different forms of this one skeleton. Enfeoffment of land, of office, of the electorate, of the army, of the party, of the bloodline, a thousand differences of form, one skeleton beneath. How each of those works is what the next classes pull apart, one at a time. This section only sets the whole skeleton down.

So here is the position this section lays down. Political institutions are institutions of enfeoffment. We started from a name given to a child and saw that enfeoffment is a thing the many lift up, from below. We walked into the pride, the troop, the hive, and saw that the animal world's enfeoffment is replacement only, no succession, the position held up by the group's acceptance every second. We came back to the human world and saw that people added succession, slowed the cycle, and still did not escape it, that every regime meets its turnover in the end, and that when enfeoffment is unsteady, a foreign shock tears people and institutions up together. Then we took the name apart and saw it is the skeleton every political institution shares. This is the first brick of the whole volume. Political institutions are enfeoffment, enfeoffment runs from below, the position is lifted up by the group. Set that layer firm, and every discussion after it has common ground to stand on.

But then, why him and not another? The position is lifted up by the group, so what, exactly, is that lifting? The next section walks back onto the grass and looks at the lifting itself, layer by layer.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

Section Two. The lion king and the pride, a position the group lifts up