Warring States Project
The Hundred Voices
An Intellectual History of Classical China
Centuries before the Empire, the Chinese state transformed itself from a small palace elite served by a small professional chariot force, into a large resource bureaucracy commanding a mass infantry army. Classical Chinese thought arose in response to that transformation.
Further, the famous names in classical Chinese thought did not say all that is now attributed to them. Mixed in with those sayings are later pronouncements and position papers that may have accumulated over centuries: the repositories of the various successor schools.
Finally, those schools themselves did not develop in mutual isolation, but rather in contact and argument with each other, in satire and counter-satire, in eloquent appeal and cynical rebuttal.
Very little of this lively interaction is visible in traditional or tradition-based accounts of the Chinese formative centuries. No such account was even possible until the dates, the attributions, and the interactions of the various texts had been evaluated, and the texts themselves had been put in true chronological relation to each other. Over several decades, Bruce and Taeko Brooks have accomplished a significant part of that philological task, and in the process have revealed with greater clarity the large movements that make up the background historical picture. When brought together in chronological sequence, and when read against that background, the impressive but sometimes opaque sayings of the philosophers, and the amusing but sometimes baffling tales told about the philosophers, become for the first time fully intelligible. The larger picture itself becomes for the first time coherent. Related events arise together, state and personal motives make sense, and the usual laws of historical gravity operate here as everywhere else on the planet.
The main lines of that picture are presented in a book which will be published on paper as The Hundred Voices. It will cover 630 years, from the fall of the Jou overlords in 0770, leading to the classical multi-state system, and in the end to the early years of the Han Emperor Wu-di (from 0140), under whom the question of the ideology of the unified Chinese state was finally settled. What view later China would take of that long evolution is another story. The story we are here concerned to tell is that of classical Chinese philosophy itself: in its own time, and on its own terms.
This work already takes us into the area of outreach. Still further in that direction is the next topic, an on-line resource and not a book:
3 Mar 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page
