For nearly two decades, a first edition of J.J.L. Duyvendak's The Book of Lord Shang: A Classic of the Chinese School of Law has occupied a revered space on my bookshelf. Though its blue binding is worn and scratched, and its rough cut pages filled with my own commentary and illuminated with colorful sticky notes, the book served me well throughout the writing of my master's thesis and doctoral dissertation. There are two main reasons for the continued relevance of Duyvendak's translation since its initial publication in 1928. The first is the quality of analysis and translation. Working within the limitations of his time, Duyvendak managed to produce an erudite study of a much neglected philosophical text by drawing upon the “latest” advances in the linguistic approaches to textual analysis. The second reason is the overall lack of scholarly interest in Shang Yang and the text attributed to him. Throughout much of China's long history texts ascribed to “Legalists” and “Legalism” were often shunned in favor of texts boasting a Confucian or Daoist pedigree. Thus, while Duyvendak's translation has served as the English-language translation for nearly a century, other texts such at the Analects and Daodejing have been subjected to numerous translations, analyses, and reinterpretations. After centuries of neglect, Shang Yang now has a new champion. Yuri Pines, known for his work on the philosophical traditions in pre-imperial and early imperial China, has published The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China (2017), a text that brings the study of Shang Yang, Legalism, and the Shang jun shu into the twenty-first century.

As a testament to the continued influence of Duyvendak's original work, Pines's own text is similarly divided into two large sections. The first section, comprised of four chapters, provides the necessary context and analysis for understanding textual history of the Book of Lord Shang and its putative author. The initial chapter, “Shang Yang and His Times,” takes a critical approach to traditional biographical information relating to Shang Yang and combining the more reliable elements of such histories with recently discovered paleographic evidence. In doing so, Pines attempts to “reconstruct the factual skeleton of Shang Yang's career” (7). In Chapter Two, “The Text: history, dating, style,” Pines attempts a “largely technical” (25) discussion on the composition and dating of individual chapters of the Book of Lord Shang. A key issue with any pre-Qin text is the authenticity of its component sections. From some of the earliest analyses of textual histories dating from the Han dynasty to the more recent discovery of numerous excavated manuscripts, it is now clear that “books” were not necessarily static texts in early China and components could be rearranged, added, or excised over centuries. Bernhard Karlgren's work on employing linguistic indicators to date early Chinese texts largely influenced Duyvendak's dating of individual chapters of the Book of Lord Shang (40). Following the recent works of Chinese and Japanese scholars, Pines attempts to move beyond Duyvendak's more simplistic dating methodology. To do this, Pines considers historical references throughout the text's components (i.e., references to events which are known to have occurred at a specific time), linguistic features of individual chapters, interrelations among chapters, and intellectual/stylistic consistency within chapters. In doing so, Pines believes that while it might not be possible to attribute all the book's chapters to Shang Yang, one can argue that the Book of Lord Shang “was produced before the imperial unification of 221 B.C.E” and that the “text's lexicon suggests that the bulk of it came from the fourth century B.C.E.” (51). In Chapter Three, “The Ideology of the Total State,” Pines argues for a core philosophy within the text of the Book of Lord Shang and attempts to outline its contents. This philosophy includes the understanding that population growth necessitates the development of alternative forms of governance, that to be efficacious laws must reflect changing social conditions, that an orderly state is one in which the government expands its control and invasiveness into the private sphere, and the steady bureaucratization of state administration. Much of this has been covered in previous works, yet Pines does an admirable job synthesizing this material and contextualizing it. The final chapter of section one, “The Text's Reception and Impact,” examines the legacy of the Book of Lord Shang. Here Pines attempts to eschew the standard narrative that sees the steady decline in “respect” for Shang Yang's legacy, the rapid upswing of interest during the Mao era, and the subsequent return to scholarly neglect. Despite Shang Yang's historical vilification, Pines demonstrates that the Book of Lord Shang continued to influence political, legal, and even military debate and discourse for over two millennia.

The second half of the book is dedicated to the translation of the Book of Lord Shang. Pines opens with an introduction outlining his methodology for translation in which he stresses a desire to “avoid excessive adornment of the text” (118). This allows the translation to better convey the text's characteristic “minimalism, simplicity, and straightforwardness” (118). Indeed, historically the Book of Lord Shang has been criticized for its “poor” grammatical forms and language use. For example, my wenyan teacher in Taipei refused to teach the text because its language “lacked the elegance of its contemporaries.” Pines should be lauded for following the textual and linguistic “tone” of the work.

Each chapter of the text is presented with an initial introduction by Pines. These mini-intros outline the contents and often pick up on specific issues, debates or controversies within the chapter. After this introductory section the main text of each chapter is broken up into individual paragraphs or zhang (章). The text runs uninterrupted by footnotes which allows the reader to focus on the flow of text without being bogged down by half page footnotes, etc. The endnotes section is quite extensive at approximately 120 pages! Here the new translation demonstrates a clear advantage over Duyvendak's text. Pines relies upon up-to-date information available from a vast array of excavated materials. Terms and phrases for which we find little evidence or understanding from received texts can now be analyzed in conjunction with excavated manuscripts written in the language of Qin.

In all, Pines has brought the Book of Lord Shang into the twenty-first century with a well-researched and carefully translated modern edition. Students will find the new translation accessible and the analysis useful for unravelling the philosophical threads woven into the text. Scholars will likely find ample room to engage with Pines's copious notes, as well as some of the translations proffered. Personally, for this reviewer, Pines's work is a welcome shelf-mate to Duyvendak's translation.