sive, went on largely as a matter of practical conformity; occasionally philoso-
phers such as Anaxagoras and Socrates were attacked by political enemies on
the excuse of offending against the cults, but the prevailing attitude of intel-
lectuals down to the Roman Empire seems to have been that religious tradition
was irrelevant to their concerns. For this reason, ethical issues in Greek
philosophy hinge almost entirely on the actions of the individual; even the
advocates of political participation saw this largely as an issue of how the
individual should behave, not a question of what was best for the state.^7
The similarities between Greek and Chinese philosophy are at the inner
level of structural relationships within the intellectual community. The early
generations in each place stand in structural parallel. Thales, Solon, and the
other “sages” of the founding generation were politicians known for their pithy
sayings and their lawgiving; they were leaders in the period of political reform
brought about by the overthrow of the old aristocracy (and of the associated
monopoly of the state cults by priest-kings). These Greeks are parallel to
Confucius and his students, and to such early “Legalists” as Shen Pu-Hai and
Shang Yang, whose overriding concern was political reform. The changes in
Chinese political structure followed a different path than in Greece—crucially
lacking the democratic revolution within the decentralized state system—but
reflections on political disorder and religious change are common to both. Mo
Ti’s disciplined organization, which proposed to take political matters into its
own hands, is parallel to the Pythagorean brotherhood, which won political
power in some cities of the outlying colonies. Differences in the external setting,
its politics-religion nexus, started off the Chinese and Greek intellectual worlds
with different problems; these heritages of cultural capital were elaborated
along divergent tracks even as the networks developed in structural parallel.
Both external and internal social conditions affected the contents of Chinese
and Greek ideas; the external setting the topics and the internal driving the
turn toward logic, argumentative technique, and conceptual abstraction which
would go on in both places in the next period.
In Greece the decentralized situation of warring states continued down to
the final Roman conquest about 85 b.c.e. Even then Rome never monopolized
intellectual life the way the centralized Chinese dynasties would from the Ch’in
and Han onwards. The resemblance is most striking between China from about
335 to 235 b.c.e.—the three generations from Hui Shih and Mencius, down
to the Mohist Canons, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu—and the five or six
generations in Greece between 500 and about 300 b.c.e. Intellectual life in
both places hinged around the emergence of what we might call “sophists,”
or professional debaters. A network of argument gave rise within a couple of
generations to logicians and epistemologists, making discoveries about the
nature of inferences and ideas. Contemporaries experienced the initial phase
148 •^ Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths