Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era.

• Author: Richter, Matthias L.
• Position: Book review

Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era. By YURI PINES. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 2009. Pp. vii + 311. $55.

Yuri Pines described the purpose of his acclaimed first monograph Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722-453 B.C.E. (University of Hawai'i Press, 2002) as "to expose the roots of the Zhanguo intellectual breakthrough by exploring intellectual developments that preceded the age of Confucius" (p. 205). Consequently, the reader of this new book may expect that it seamlessly continues the author's analysis of Chunqiu political thought into the subsequent Warring States period, which indeed it does. Yet, Pines' second monograph is much more than a mere continuation of his first. Due to the influence of historical-critical methods of textual criticism and no less to the impact of new manuscript finds in the past decades, our view of early Chinese textual culture, the nature of the transmitted compilations of texts, questions of authorship and thus notions of intellectual traditions and their interrelatedness have been undergoing fundamental changes for some time now. Written in such a period, characterized by the deconstruction of old interpretive patterns, Pines' book is a milestone in the ongoing enterprise of developing new ways of reading early Chinese politico-philosophical literature and writing the history of political thought of that period.

The book is centered on one question of great consequence for our understanding of Chinese culture: what constituted the fundamental, consistent element in Chinese political culture throughout the Imperial era? In full awareness that Chinese history was nothing like the die-hard cliche of a continuous monolithic empire that lasted over millennia, the author sets out to explore the ideological forces underlying the actual, robust cultural continuity that led to the repeated resurrections of the Chinese empire after complete collapses and prolonged periods of disunity. As this consistent core of Chinese political ideology, he identifies the ideal of a unified empire under the rule of a monarch--a concept that enjoyed ideological hegemony throughout Chinese history and was "shared by every politically significant social group and even by its immediate neighbors." Accordingly, Pines names "identifying this common legacy within the diversity of Warring States ideologies" as the main goal of his book (p. 2).

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