The Thought Of Rule By Law Of The Legalists And The Enlightenment To Rule The Country By Law In Modern China

With the decline of the royal power and the contending for hegemony of lords in Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods of China, the rites collapsed and the music disappeared, and the social contradictions were unusually sharp, so the intellectuals who represent the interests of the different classes had put forward their own theory of state-governing and salvation. In the famous four school of the society,the Confucianist proposes kindness and self-discipline fulfils the rites, and the Mohist promotes universal love and fighting against offensive, and the Taoism advocates inaction management, however, none of them successfully make the society free from the fragmented social situation. Considering the social situation at that time, the legalists proposed the theory of rule of law, enriching the country and increasing its military force,which complied with the trend of historical development and with this theory, unification of the country had been realized and the first centralized system of feudal monarchy country in China had been founded. With the destruction of Qin Dynasty in its second generation, the legalist school of thought collapsed. However, from Emperor Wu of Xihan, the Legalists’ rule by law continuously mixed with Confucianism during the federal rules of more than two thousand years and built the political system framework of the Confucian in appearance while the legalism in nature and using Confucian and legalism simultaneously, decorating the thoughts with ethic in Confucian and controlling politics with severe law in legalism, which has become one of the two main methods to govern the ideology in federal China and control the politics of imperial power. However, since Han Dynasty, the legalists’ rule by law and its realistic value were veiled for long time and sometimes were even excluded and rejected completely. The weak legal accomplishment and legal consciousness even affected the historical process of ruling country by law in modem China. At present, our legal construction has gained great success and basically realizes the organic unity and joint development of leadership of the Party, the people as the master of the country and rule by law. However, the legal construction is a complicated and long project, especially in a developing country like China with respectively backward economy and culture and lack of legal consciousness and legal accomplishment. With the development of economy and society, the problems and conflicts in deep level that the legal construction has to face will become more and moreobvious.First of all, in order to have an essential understanding of the Legalists and their thought of rule by law, we make a general overview of the emergence and development of the Legalists, and the theoretical basis and main content of their thoughts of rule by law. On the basis of that, we analyze the main characteristics of the Legalists’ thought of rule by law from two aspects of value and limitations. Finally, we put forward the enlightenment to rule the country by law in modern China. It has significant theoretical and practical significance to comprehensively implementing the rule by law to build the socialist country ruling by law to recognize and analysis the legalists’ rule by law thoughts comprehensively, objectively and historically based on the reality and facing the future, and to explore the ways to advance the modernization of Chinese traditional rule by law thoughts standing on the strategic height of overall development of Chinese rule by law.