Chapter 80

The chapter describes a society and it is the only sustained description of one in the book. Let the state be small and the people few. Let there be tools for tens and hundreds of people and no use made of them. Let the people take death seriously and not move far away.

The details that follow are all of things present and unused. There are boats and carriages and no occasion to ride in them. There are armour and weapons and no occasion to show them. Neighbouring states are within sight, their cocks and dogs can be heard, and the people grow old and die without ever going back and forth.

The construction is important. Nothing has been destroyed and nothing is forbidden. The technology exists, the labour-saving tools exist, the transport and the arms exist, and what is absent is the occasion, which means the society described is not primitive but unmobilised.

The positive content is four short clauses about ordinary satisfaction: the people find their food sweet, their clothes fine, their dwellings restful and their customs a pleasure. Each is a claim about how a thing is experienced rather than about what it is, and none requires anything to be improved.

The one instruction that is not about restraint concerns writing. Let the people go back to knotting cords and using them, which names a method of record keeping said to have preceded characters, and it is the chapter's clearest signal that what is being described is a return rather than a reform.

Chapter eighty is difficult to place beside the rest of the book, and the difficulty is worth stating rather than smoothing over.

Most of the political chapters advise a sovereign of a large state. Chapter twenty-six addresses the lord of ten thousand chariots. Chapter sixty compares governing a large state to cooking a small fish. Chapter sixty-one works out how great states and small ones should deal with each other, and assumes the great one is the reader. Chapter sixty-two imagines the book being presented at an enthronement.

This chapter wants the state to be small and the people few, which is not advice a ruler of a great power can act on, and it is not obviously advice at all. It is a picture.

Two readings are common and both have support. On one, the chapter is nostalgic or utopian, describing a condition before the growth of territorial states and offering it as a standard against which the present is measured, which fits the book's habit of appealing to the ancients. On the other, it is the logical endpoint of non-action in government, showing what a population left entirely alone would settle into, which fits chapter fifty-seven, where the people become the uncut block by themselves.

Neither reading makes it a programme, and the chapter proposes no route from a large state to a small one.

Its influence has nonetheless been considerable, and later Chinese writing about withdrawal, self-sufficient villages and the good life outside the reach of administration returns to this chapter more than to any other in the book.