RCCHC "Science, Technology, Society and Culture" Talk Series 14 - The Problem of Measuring State Power in Warring States Legalism

Previous research on Warring States Legalism has primarily focused on political and ethical issues. In recent years, however, some scholars have advocated for reinterpreting Legalist philosophy as a form of “social engineering.” Meanwhile, the discovery of numerous Qin and Han administrative documents over the past few decades has offered deeper insights into how political reforms were implemented at the grassroots level. A striking feature of these practices is the obsessive emphasis on quantified assessment. Building on these insights, this lecture will revisit discussions in Legalist texts such as the Book of Lord Shang and Guanzi concerning the measurement of state power. In these texts, state power is rooted in land and human resources; the goal of measuring power is to optimize their allocation and maximize military effectiveness. A major challenge in this process is the difficulty of establishing a unified standard for measuring different types of resources. To address this issue, Legalist thinkers developed a classification system for resources and specified conversion ratios between categories, enabling the transformation of heterogeneous resources into comparable units.