My delusion is evidently widely shared: I did a google search for legalism. http://tinyurl.com/56n2m The first link, and many of the subsequent links, equated legalism with totalitarianism, or concluded that legalism resulted in totalitarianism.
Wow! A GOOGLE search did you say? Well I'm convinced.
When a provincial commander marched fresh conscripts from place A to place B, he would do it in the time alloted, and be there on the date specified, or the Ch'in emperor would cut his head off.
Well kind of. But even Qin Shr Huang Di knew that you couldn't force-march soldiers from Xian to Suzhou in 4 days. And the remotest parts of China at that time (the borders are far larger now, of course) weren't any closer than a month or two, no matter what the orders. (Qin Shr Huang probably was no idiot...if it was physically impossible then he could not gain power.)
It is the cut-his-head off bit, and the minute and overly detailed instructions concocted by a far away bureaucracy, that made it a modern totalitarianism.
You seem to be thinking that I am arguing that Qin Shr Huang was not a despot. However, comparisons to modern totalitarian states are filled with
Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, decentralized in that they had twenty thousand separate killing fields, but was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly centralized in that the man digging a ditch dug it along a line drawn by a man far away who had never seen the ground that was being dug.
Well, this was difficult given that there were probably a good number of Qin Shr Huang's 'subjects' that didn't even know they were subjects until well after Qin Shr Huang died. Camodia is just a TEENSY bit smaller than China.
Now the reason this excersize is not completely futile is that it's pretty clear that the notion of a "Despot" is very different from place to place. If push comes to shove, I of course will probabluy agree that most of the leaders you claim were despots probably were (though I'd bet my list is MUCH larger than yours). However, the nature, reasons, and byproducts of any particular instance of despotism very hugely...trying to pack them all into one simplistic grid is a formula for...Iraq II, come to think of it. Without understanding the details on their own terms, you're liable to get the locals a little upset with you if you try to force-fix their problems.
-TD
