VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 12
Against Five Hundred Years, the Difference in Range of Sight
The first three Parts finished enfeoffment, the examination, and centralized authority. How a position exists, how the person in the position is selected by merit, how the decision-center runs: all of it has been set firm, and the last chapter joined the three root structures together and closed them off. This Part answers a fair question. What this book says, where does it actually stand in the history of human political thought? Is it new, or old? If the great thinkers of five hundred years already said it all, this book is only copying, better left unwritten. If it differs, it has to say clearly where. This chapter starts from the difference in range of sight. Three sections: one sets out those who came before, one compares the range of sight, one comes down to the claims.
Section One sets out the abundance of five hundred years of political thought, a company of deep thinkers, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, Weber, every one of them given honorifics and credit. Their work is a resource any political study today must face squarely. At the same time it notes objectively that across five hundred years their core predictions have mostly not come fully to pass, and the several structural limits behind that. Locke held for limited government, yet the government of developed countries today has grown ever larger instead. Rousseau's general will has never been truly realized in any country in two hundred fifty years and more. The limits are four: a range of sight centered on Europe and America, a standard set by their own age, a standpoint and a leaning, and confinement to the domain of politics. This is not to say the great thinkers were wrong. It is to say any thinker unavoidably has limits of their own, and later researchers can make a new integration on the base of those before.
Section Two covers the most root difference, the span of the range of sight. How large a picture a researcher sees decides what kind of claims they can put forward. Machiavelli looked mainly at the Italian city-states of the Renaissance plus ancient Greece and Rome. Montesquieu took Eastern despotism as a system of contrast, but what he relied on was secondhand material plus inaccurate missionary reports. The range of the great thinkers of five hundred years was mainly five hundred years plus a European and American center. The range this book tries is four thousand years, with China's twenty-two-hundred-year tradition for its root. Count back, and there is ancient Egypt unifying upper and lower Egypt, there is the Qin unifying China about two hundred twenty-one before the common era. Widen the range, and the picture changes. In the picture of five hundred years, democracy is the ultimate goal of human politics. In the picture of four thousand years, every political institution begins from enfeoffment, and the progress since the Western Enlightenment is only one brief stage among them. This is not the great thinkers' fault. It is the objective limit of historical conditions.
Section Three lays the core claims of this book's first three Parts, enfeoffment, the examination, and centralized authority, one by one against the great thinkers of five hundred years. On where politics comes from: Locke said natural rights plus the social contract, Weber said the legitimate monopoly of violence. Marx said politics is the superstructure of the economic base, and this line itself is an excellent plain saying, the same principle carried further down from what Guanzi taught, that when the granaries are full people know rite and restraint. The great thinkers answer why. This book answers what structure: any politics in operation necessarily has positions, and the granting of a position is called enfeoffment. On selecting people: Weber studied the Chinese examination, but took it as a sample of traditional authority. This book says the examination is a merit-selection law crossing ages. On centralized authority: in recent years some scholars have done cross-domain study, but they still did not take in small organizations like the family. With the three comparisons laid out, one thing is clear. This book does not overturn those who came before. It enters from a different angle, from the root structure of politics.
This chapter pins down one line: the span of the range of sight is the starting point of any study, and standing a little farther and seeing a little longer, the picture is naturally different. In this chapter you will see clearly that this is not a contest with the great thinkers. It is an honest placing of this book inside the coordinates of five hundred years, letting the reader judge for themselves whether it is worth handing down. Of the seven core claims, this chapter compares only the first three. The next chapter goes on to compare the last four, among them one iron law that carries the ancestors forward, to leave the people is to perish, and then opens out a vision this book puts forward on its own.
Chapter contents
Section One. The abundance and the limits of five hundred years of political thought
Section Two. Four thousand years against five hundred, widen the range and the picture changes
Section Three. Seven core claims, part one, enfeoffment, the examination, centralized authority
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. The abundance and the limits of five hundred years of political thought