Han Feizi c. 280 BC – 233 BC

Han Feizi was a 3rd-century BC Chinese political philosopher and one of the principal founding figures of the Legalist school of philosophy. Drawing on earlier Legalist thinkers including Shang Yang and Shen Buhai, he produced the most systematic statement of Legalist political thought in the book that bears his name. His political philosophy held that human nature is fundamentally self-interested and that effective rule depends on clear laws strictly enforced, the distribution of power through bureaucratic technique, and the cultivation of the ruler's authority. His thought decisively shaped the Qin state's unification of China in 221 BC and the subsequent administrative practice of every later Chinese dynasty. He died as a political prisoner of the Qin state, despite the king's admiration for his writings, after the intrigues of his former classmate Li Si. His thought has been compared with that of Machiavelli and Hobbes.

Han Feizi (c. 280–233 BC) was the most important systematizer of Chinese Legalism, the philosophical school that informed the Qin unification of China. Born a member of the royal family of the small state of Han, he is reported to have stuttered and to have been unable to gain audience with his own ruler; he poured his political-philosophical project into the fifty-five chapters of the Han Feizi text instead.

Han Feizi studied with the Confucian Xunzi but reached very different conclusions. He held that human nature is selfish and calculating; that effective government rests on clear laws (fa), administrative technique (shu), and the legitimate authority of position (shi) rather than on the moral cultivation of rulers; and that Confucian appeals to ritual and the example of the ancient sages are politically naive in the conditions of the Warring States. His framework drew on Shang Yang's earlier Legalist statecraft and on Lao Tzu's Daoism, particularly the conception of the ruler whose reserve of personal preference allows the impersonal operation of administrative principle.

Han Feizi was sent as an emissary to the state of Qin and was forced to commit suicide there in 233 BC, reportedly by his former classmate Li Si, who had become the Qin chancellor. The Qin unification under the First Emperor a decade later was the most spectacular political application of Han Feizi's framework — and its catastrophic short-term failure led the subsequent Han dynasty to rehabilitate Confucianism. The Legalist tradition continued to shape Chinese statecraft, but never again as official doctrine.