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either they did one of the things said above [i.e., crying out against the Senate, running
tumultuously through the streets, closing shops, the whole plebs leaving the city] or they
refused to enroll their names to go to war, so that to placate them there was need to satisfy
them in some part. (D I 4.1)
Clearly, such an affirmation of popular authority and liberty is entirely alien to the thought of
Shang, who sought to suppress any ambition coming from society in order make the power of the
ruler as great as possible. The belief in popular participation in government and freedom from
domination, which arose only in the West, thus constitutes the most substantive difference
between our two political realists.
Controlling Officials
In any order larger than a face-to-face group, no ruler is capable of personally controlling all
the subjects. Instead, he needs to rely on a number of helpers, such as the vassals and armed
retainers of the Chou lords and the ministers and officials of the centralized state advocated by
Shang. In feudal arrangements, like that of the Chou, the vassal serves both his personal interest
and the lord’s personal interest, for instance, when keeping a share of the collected taxes while
remitting the remainder to the lord. In centralized states, in contrast, the officials are required to
exercise their function in an impersonal manner and solely for the sake of the public good, with
their personal interest being limited to receiving a salary and other rewards for the faithful
performance of their duties. But officials are mere men with as selfish a nature as all others, and
thus likely to lapse into abusing their powers for personal gain. As a result, using officials to
control the people entails the problem of controlling the officials.
Drawing on the Chou order, the Confucians sought to solve this problem by educating the
officials in an ethic that forbids selfishness and looks to the common good, such as the virtues of
Convention