Chinese political culture, long associated with Confucian ideology, which preached personal example and government by virtue, actually pioneered the development of impersonal and automatic methods of establishing order in the cosmos, the empire and daily life. This fact, hitherto largely concealed but repeatedly confirmed by recent archaeological discoveries, invites us to sketch a new general history of the Chinese state. It must be understood, however, that what we understand by "laws" and "numbers" in European societies only partially corresponds to the instruments developed in China, since numbers there are not reduced to quantities and laws are detached from any notion of law. Drawing on traditional and previously unpublished sources from the fields of mathematics, divination, spiritual exercises, penal codes, poetic fictions of Taoism or the art of war, Romain Graziani presents the theoretical forms and concrete developments of this Chinese logos.
Starting from the "juridical experience", he traces the process of depersonalization of authority that leads to the experience of the total state and shows how this paradigm based on laws and numbers has had a lasting impact on the experience of time, mobility in space and the notion of sovereign authority in Chinese society; how it helped to redefine the concept of labor and the relationship of the individual to himself; and finally, how it enabled the very early formulation of a social project structured by information, surveillance and security technologies.
At the extreme end of this path, which connects the Bronze Age with the digital age, the millennia-old endeavor to "number" the world now culminates in the restoration of the ancient cult of the One. (Publisher)