← All schools⚖️ 4th – 3rd century BC
Legalism
Expect nothing of human goodness; design institutions in which even the wicked cannot do harm — the operating manual of the Qin empire.
Han Feizi took Xunzi’s premise that human nature is bad and walked to a conclusion his teacher would not: if people merely chase gain and flee harm, statecraft should drop the talk of virtue and hold two handles only — reward and punishment. Law (public statute), technique (the ruler’s management of ministers) and positional power fuse into the first fully de-moralized theory of the state. Qin used it to unify China and collapsed by it within fifteen years — and for the next two thousand, the formula was Confucian on the surface, Legalist in the ledger.