Legalist school
The only way to save the world is inaction, that is, the idea of "inaction". The three schools have a heated debate, but they all advocate going back to the past. At this time, legalists who advocated facing the future were born. The representatives of Legalists are Shang Yang and Han Fei in the Warring States Period. On the political system, Legalists advocated the county system. In the ruling ideology, legalists advocate ruling the country by punishment and political skills.
Historical influence: Legalists' theory of rule of law played an important role in the feudal reform during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. Even Qin Shihuang unified the six countries and established a centralized and autocratic feudal country, which became the ruling ideology of the Qin Dynasty. After the Western Han Dynasty, the independent legalist school gradually disappeared, and its thought of rule of law was absorbed into the Confucian system. The combination of morality and punishment became a powerful tool to maintain the dictatorship of the landlord class. However, the pre-Qin legalists still had some influence on some later materialists and progressive thinkers.