Dingxin Zhao’s eight years of fearful silence as a factory worker and Maoist propagandist in the 1970s were no direct portent of his becoming Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. The explanations he offers for what one might call “the rise of China”—though in the case of The Confucian-Legalist State this begins with the nascence of Western Zhou in 1045 BCE—are more the result of hard thinking in the tradition of Michael Mann, John Hall, and Charles Tilly than a welling up of ideological doubts suppressed for the sake of staying alive. Yet, as a member of an official “writing group,” Zhao was placed as sentry on the wall of counter-criticism which the Communists thought could keep the more active doubters like Lin Biao out—partly by painting them as reactionary Confucians. The long book he has now written is about China’s historical resilience as a Confucian and legalist state-led society until 1911. As a propagandist, however, he was “unable to produce a sentence.”

Though silence was supposed to be safe for the regime and (conditionally) Zhao, it enabled a silent reading of the Chinese classics (Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Mozi, Xunzi, Guanzi, and Hanfeizi) and contemporary Marxist historians like Guo Moruo, Fan Wenlan, and Ren Jiyu. As the three youths of Yinchuan were forced to demonstrate, though the classics are treated as a repository of reaction under a communist regime, Marxist history itself becomes a sacral taboo; and both direct suppression and the sacralizing of a Party line expose officials at the borders of influences they are under orders to defend. Here, where presumably both doubts and fears were at their strongest, Zhao began to see both sides of the divide. This is the old failing Thucydides thought had led to his sacking by the Athenians as one of their Generals in the Peloponnesian War: any attempt at neutrality is hateful to partisans of all stripes—hence, really, most of the hostility directed towards Max Weber’s championing of ethical and political neutrality in social science. Seething opponents of China or the Communist Party, or of the Western and Japanese imperialists who undermined the Qing and gave the Communists their chance, will find little to excite them further in Zhao’s neo-Weberian theory of Chinese history.

The central portion of the book narrates the rise and fall of the dynasties ruling China since the Western Zhou. I cannot hope to summarize this story—even Zhao himself must compromise significantly in a work of nearly 500 pages. Almost 300 are devoted to the passing of the Mandate of Heaven between the Western and Eastern Zhou (771 BCE) and the resultant “war driven dynamism” which cultivated the Confucian-legalist state emerging with the Qin and Western Han (221-140 BCE). Remaining parts of the book chart the resilience of this structure down to the collapse ushered in by the wider world of 1911. It might have been longer had Zhao not decided to employ:

Now, one might wonder what an “epistemological criterion” not “regarding knowledge” would be; and its “ancient Greek origin” ought to have been identified (as with the identically murky allusion on page 24)—especially when Ockham’s 14^th century English razor is so conventionally to hand. Nevertheless, most of the book is composed as synthetic, plain-language history on a grand scale, interspersed with a valuable (though less plain) “explanatory apparatus.” And yet, The Confucian-Legalist State begins with an ambitious model of social change which might appear rather under-developed [29-48]—presumably the justification is ancient Greek—and it closes with some oddly schematic comments about the author’s desire to blend in his one person the virtues of the ideal typical Historian, Sociologist, and Anthropologist [376-379]. What loss would the book suffer if we were to chop these bits off?

Zhao employs an adjusted version of Michael Mann’s theory of The Sources of Social Power as fourfold: military, economic, political and ideological. He adds what he calls “competition logics,” inspired by evolutionary thought, to Mann’s framework:

Zhao notes that Mann “does not ignore the role of competition”; the complaint, rather, is that Mann is too apt to look for passively interactive processes which do not seem to explain the behaviour of pushy historical actors. The general point here is well taken and in line with recent discussions in evolutionary theory: Peter Godfrey-Smith shows that even with interactionist theories, explanation proceeds by showing which of the inter-actors make what difference. ^{Footnote 2} However, Mann says things like the following about modern states after 1870: “The West was a single ‘multi-power-actor civilization’ circulating cultural messages, goods, and services regulated by geopolitical rivalries, diplomacy, and war.” ^{Footnote 3} Pretty competitive, then: this is why Zhao needs to qualify his complaint. But the discussion of Mann’s work is too cursory to convince, and one would have thought mentioning their disagreement at all would oblige Zhao at least to offer some concrete examples of whatever it is he finds too passive in the details of The Sources of Social Power. For his proposed remedy, Zhao sees himself as relying as much on Spencer and Darwin as on Weber. He says just enough about these to bring his approach into doubt.

Pace Weber, historical rationality is advanced as an ideal type, but like Parsons and unlike Weber the method is deductive. Whereas Weber’s ideal types were heuristic and—as Carlo Antoni pointed out—often purely negative (in generating interpretative contrasts), Zhao employs historical rationality to characterize the lack of instrumental thinking in China which, he says, made industrial capitalism “impossible” as an endogenous development. People were apparently more interested in second-guessing the transcendental judgement of the universe than interrogating the real foundations of authority and the economy. This is partly what explains the historical depth of the study: Zhao thinks that the form of legitimacy provided by the Mandate of Heaven, first held by the Western Zhou well before Confucius, Du Fu, and even Homer, was a constant which gave effective rulers an additional veneer of transcendental approval.

One might wonder whether this is motivated more by (understandable) fascination with origins rather than a substantial explanatory rationale; it is as if one were to explain the industrial revolution in England—Zhao’s only comparative case is Europe’s dynamism—with reference to the religious beliefs of the Bronze Age charioteers in evidence recently unearthed at Must Farm, Peterborough. Even Alan Macfarlane, in the more misty-eyed bits of The Origins of English Individualism, only dreamt as far back as the pre-Great Migration Saxon forests. ^{Footnote 4} However, as Walter Scheidel has shown, this would be to ignore the greater continuity of development from the Eastern Zhou to the Qing than can be claimed for Roman Western Europe and thereafter, especially given the latter’s wholesale crumbling in the early 5^th century. ^{Footnote 5} In England, the collapse of Roman authority in 409 seemingly turned the province into a (nearly) blank slate for the adventus Saxonum half-way through the century—as we learn from Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. ^{Footnote 6} Here we have the beginnings of the “first great divergence,” with China much more able than Rome to sustain a single and significant imperium.

The written language of centralizing bureaucracy is symptomatic: successive dynasties administered their rule through a written language of characters which, while incorporating China’s rich phonetic variation without cultural stress, never encouraged the sort of competition for linguistic homogeneity which came with state- as opposed to empire-formation in Western Europe. ^{Footnote 7} (This can be placed in the late 1400s with the rise of Protestantism.) As Zhao tells in part three of The Confucian-Legalist State, nomadic incursions similar to those dispersing Rome were absorbed as a mere change of personnel in China. Previous comparative efforts, he says, like Victoria Tin-bor Hui’s War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe, tend to ignore the simultaneity of Chinese imperial unification, more like Rome, with the deepening of its bureaucracy through repeated warfare, more like early modern Europe. ^{Footnote 8} No single comparison is warranted and the story’s beginning with the passing of the Mandate of Heaven from the Western to the Eastern Zhou really does cast light and not a mystical aura on developments down to 1911.

The example of non-phonetic written characters exemplifies the Darwinian side of Zhao’s explanatory model which emphasises the role of competition—especially warfare. He doubts the capacity for genetics to shed light on human behaviour and emphasizes that cultural evolution is Lamarckian. That is to say, he thinks cultural change accumulates directly rather than via a gene-esque type of causal unit (like the “memes” about which WG Runciman is so insistent). However, the hominid gene-line does enter into Zhao’s fundamental thinking about how to explain changes using Michael Mann’s four-sources (iemp) framework:

Thus Mann’s four sources are motivated as Parsons-esque functional needs with evolutionary origins—but why? The general lesson is that “competition logics” are essential for explaining social change, and this focuses much of Zhao’s effort on tracing the effect of military engagements. He suggests that repeated warfare encouraged “public instrumental rationality,” galvanizing the feudalities of competing warlords for collective survival, as opposed to the “private instrumental rationality” he thinks economic competition engenders. (The thought would appear to be that common interests emerged in localities due to military as opposed to economic competition.) This would not work if everyone got killed the first time out; but there were repeated opportunities to adapt in different phases periodized by Zhao somewhat innovatively in terms of the Eastern Zhou era and the subsequent ages of Hegemons, Transition, and Total War. This gave rise to unification and bureaucracy, and a long-lasting federal resilience.

The effect of repeated competitive military interactions—battles—is one facet of China’s history that brings out Zhao the analytical social scientist from Zhao the erudite macro-historian. By collecting what he calls “war data,” Zhao is able to plot the frequency and distances of conflicts between particular city-states (which, from the book’s starting point, provide the basic political-military unit). As Zhao’s pages turn through China’s history we get snap-shots of webs connecting the weak to the strong, demonstrating the increases in “war distances” as the main centres of power were consolidated. While these webs are wonderfully illustrative of changing dispositions on the battlefield beneath the Great Northern Wall, one wonders whether the more detailed supplementary graphs are strictly necessary given that all this material really achieves is a charting of gradual and violent unification. The explanation for this process has to wait for Zhao’s more traditionally historical, interpretative erudition.

A facility with primary sources is what lets him make—for example—the crucial link between war and the forms of rationality that drove city-states towards bureaucracy. At one point, reference to Zuo’s Commentary provides a tincture of individual personality in Zhao’s otherwise fairly lofty and perhaps somewhat superficially formalized macro-history. From Zuo via Zhao we learn that, before engaging the Chu in 638 BCE, the Song Duke Xiang tells his men “Gentlemen do not kill the wounded and do not take prisoners with grey hairs”; Ziyu retorts: “If a wounded enemy combatant is still alive, why can we not kill him?” [130]. The more honourable but decreasingly functional attitude lost the Duke his battle and set the tone for a less ritualistic and therefore potentially more geopolitically significant attitude to warfare. Zhao treats this spiralling of violence beyond traditional limits both as having pushed China towards increasing centralization—eventually unification—and as having spread the papered veins required for its more complex administration.

The disagreement between Xiang and Ziyu is an example of the sort of consideration of human meaning which Zhao says is of limited use—but here it seems crucial. Without more of this sort of thing one might doubt whether his flagship ideal type—historical rationality—is really close enough to history to feature in the deductive model he says he has constructed. Instead, its real value might be more hypothetical, a spur to further and more detailed historical investigation aimed at understanding the actors Zhao himself complains that Mann neglects. (Even if one were to agree with Zhao about The Sources of Social Power, it would be interesting to know what he makes of Mann’s Fascists, The Darker Side of Democracy, or Incoherent Empire in this regard.) As Geoffrey Hawthorn argued in Plausible Worlds, this involves multiplying the possibilities facing historical actors in order to narrow the explanation down to just one—what actually happened, what people actually did. ^{Footnote 9} Using ideal types in the course of this procedure, rather than trying to box the Chinese in, would make Zhao more faithful to Weber than to Parsons. This would help him avoid making unnecessarily certain claims about the “impossibility” of an endogenous Chinese industrial capitalism. What is more, Parsons is curiously absent from Zhao’s bibliography; an appreciation of the difficulties involved in the former’s departure from Weber’s method is thus absent from his methodological thinking.

There is also a question about the extent to which the Spencerian or Darwinian parts of Zhao’s theory transmit into real explanatory pay-offs. His criticism of Mann’s reliance on more passive factors in historical change “unintended consequences” and “interstitial development”—serves to emphasize, in principle, the important role of competition in historical change. Fine; but does this really tell us anything about the nature of competition or help us to explain how it leads to particular consequences? In a previous volume of the Oxford Early Empires series in which Zhao’s book appears, Scheidel suggests that the more serious limit of Mann’s sociological theory is his claim that: “We can take for granted the motivational drive of humans to increase their means of subsistence. That is a constant”.

“But why,” Scheidel demands to know, “do humans seek to increase their means of subsistence?” Why do they engage in competition? Ignoring these questions “not only impoverishes our vision of human behaviour but effectively prevents us from understanding and explaining the recent history of our species.” Mann makes no attempt “to identify ultimate causes underlying proximate motivation,” which means he has no explanation for why people compete in the way they do. Zhao, in a similar way, may be read as only referring to “ultimate causes”—the deeper and more general evolutionary facts explaining why humans survive, and compete, in the ways they do. ^{Footnote 10} What this means is that unlike Scheidel—who attempts to integrate and thereby explain the logic of imperial expansion with males’ rational strategies for maximising reproductive fitness—Zhao draws no lines between these deeper wells of human behaviour and specific features of China’s history. His lesson is just that competition is generally important and that Mann’s iemp model does a good-enough job of summing-up the means. So, whatever the justice of his own complaint against the passivity of Mann’s explanations, Zhao’s model of change (whether one sees it as more Darwinian or Spencerian) is inertly general in having no detailed consequences for his explanatory project. We ought to adopt this principle: the explanatory power of an abstract and general sociological theory needs to be shown to be higher than that of simply getting on and telling the story. One wonders, then, at the purpose of Zhao’s sandwiching his forcefully clear tale between fifty pages of frustratingly loose theoretical remarks [3-48; 376-381]. Might these have been the more appropriate target for Ockham’s razor, or whatever?

Put the forgoing aside; even if the model is not as tight (or as necessary) as Zhao might think or wish, there is some value at least in having an author with his explanatory power and historical range reveal his own presuppositions—and limits. The Confucian-Legalist State tells a story which others will be invited to adjust and deepen, and a clunky “explanatory apparatus” could get in the way of their telling it too blithely. Past sinophobia is not remedied by its opposite. Michael Wood, for example, recently fell into almost tearfully enthusiastic propaganda for an English television audience in telling The Story of China as the formation of the Chinese as “one people,” the Han. This backward, Romantic evolutionism is pernicious when Uighurs delve and Tibetans spin (and burn) under Xi Jinping, whose regime has snatched British and Swedish citizens out of non-Chinese territory on the grounds of a racially defined competence for their Party—sorry, state. In one deeply ironic sense, of course, Wood’s naïve revival of the German organicist tradition is entirely appropriate and carries a terrifying air of prescience. Zhao, however, narrates a more impersonal continuity; as one of his maps shows—for example—the now squashed and incorporated Tibetan Kingdoms used to rival in extent, the territories of the Northern Song. No particular political moral can be drawn from this unrelenting conflict: