Thesis The fall of Qin refutes Legalism itself, not merely its excesses

I read Han Feizi mostly to understand why the most effective political theory of early China produced the shortest-lived dynasty.

The Legalist tradition, from Shang Yang's reforms in the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE to Han Feizi's synthesis in the third, starts from a simple observation: people pursue advantage. So do not build a state that depends on virtuous rulers or virtuous subjects. Build institutions that work with people as they are: clear published law (fa), uniform punishments and rewards, techniques for controlling officials, and the authority of the ruler's position. Qin did this more thoroughly than any rival, unified China in 221 BCE, and collapsed by 206 BCE.

The usual defence is that Qin overdid it, or that the Second Emperor and his ministers were simply incompetent. I want to argue that the failure belongs to the doctrine.

Legalism holds that legitimacy comes from the order a state produces. Nothing in the framework limits what the law may require, and no standard stands above the ruler's law. So when the person at the top was foolish or captured by a schemer, the system had no brake. It amplified the error, because the machinery that made Qin strong was the same machinery that made dissent impossible. The early Han writer Jia Yi, in his essay on the faults of Qin, put the failure down to Qin's not practising humaneness and rightness once it had won. That is a criticism of the theory, not of its application.

Han Feizi's own death in a Qin prison, in Sima Qian's account engineered by Li Si, his former fellow student under Xunzi, feels almost like an argument.