f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] The Book of Lord Shang. a Classic of the Chinese School of Law. [Author] Shang Yang [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2008/01/01 [Review] 
The Book of Lord Shang was very hard for me to read: there is something sublime about it, in the old sense of “terrifying” - the policies and reasoning laid out are a systematic crushing of anything that might oppose the State and its goals. It feels inhuman, mechanical, and all the more so when you know that these sort of policies were how the Qin crushed all their opposition - including those states espousing the other Hundred Schools of Thought like Mohism & Confucianism - and that the 20th century affords further examples of how these policies proved themselves in practice (unlike the former Schools). It’s no wonder that there are so many negative reviews on the other copies here at Goodreads: you might as well ask your normal liberal Western to drink rat poison as read The Book of Lord Shang & try to fairly evaluate it. Even if they’ve read their share of Chinese classics & philosophy, they wouldn’t want to understand it, just like modern readers don’t want to understand the Unabomber’s philosophy. (The version I read was an ebook version of Duyvlord.)
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