Abstract
Montesquieu wrote that “China is a despotic state whose principle is fear”. And indeed, in the early modern context in China, fear and despotism, on the one hand, were opposed to ziyou 自由 (“freedom”), on the other. These constructs created a discursive space in which theorists of the nation-state felt the need to articulate the complex relations binding despotism to fear. By contrast, during the early empires in China a different set of relations was imagined, wherein salutary fear was aligned against both despotism and freedom and, crucially, with according others a proper sense of dignity. For by the arguments of remote antiquity, “submission to instruction and fear of the gods” functioned both as a vital check on despotism and as the key barrier to the unchecked and unhampered self-assertion by subjects and rulers. Yet this notion of ritual operating within a circle of fear it helped to foster has so far escaped scholarly notice, perhaps because it does not square with the ritual theories that dominate our modern discourse and perhaps because such ritual fear has been dismissed easily as remnant, primitive superstition.
Highlights
Bo “did not think overmuch about Dao and De”, literally, the Way and its charismatic power (不思道德)? Is Ban Gu referring to Zhu Bo’s disdain for the Classics or something else?75 Judging from the rest of the Hanshu, Ban Gu thinks that Zhu Bo, as bureaucrat, had never learned to care for the “Great Way” or “Great Enterprise” or “Great Duty”, the “big picture” as we might call it.76 Certainly, Wang Chong 王充, author of Lunheng 論衡 (Discourses Weighed in the Balance) and student of Ban Gu’s father, thought that care of the “big picture” is what distinguished real classicists commanding the utmost respect from pettifogging bureaucrats who never discerned the “spirit of the law” underlying its letter.774
Before providing a sampling of the representative sources, we adduce one simple yet unambiguous story illustrating how this circle of fear we describe worked in the early empires, citing the sudden reversal and unexpected downfall of Ban Gu 班固 (32–92)
Turning to officials and the salutary fear they know when they have become sufficiently mindful of their duties, we find so many examples drawn from the Classics, masterworks, and histories that we hardly know where to begin
Summary
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