the city-states were undergoing major struggles over the establishment of
democracy, and in which “tyrants”—who included a number of the “Sages”—
played a role as arbiters, lawgivers, and setters of precedents. Thales seems to
have played this role in Miletus. His special eminence in what became known
as “philosophy” may well be due to the fact that he had some connection with
Anaximander, the first writer of a book on cosmology, and he in turn with a
third-generation thinker, Anaximenes.
Thales does not pose a serious problem since he is only a secondary figure
by the long-term criterion of how much attention he gets in later histories;
Anaximander, by contrast, is at least a borderline major figure. Confucius is
perhaps more seriously overestimated. Along with Chu Hsi, he is the dominant
figure in terms of attention received across the whole of Chinese thought. Much
of his fame is as a cult figure, rather than for the content of what he actually
taught. Confucius made an important breakthrough with his doctrine of how
individuals should behave and states should be ordered by deference to tradi-
tional rituals and documents. But it is clear that “Confucianism” as a sophis-
ticated position about human nature, moral issues, rationality, and cosmology
was created by later philosophers of much greater intellectual complexity such
as Mencius, Hsün Tzu, and Tung Chung-shu, not to mention the still greater
metaphysical departures of the Neo-Confucians. What stuck to Confucius’
name was primarily the ideology of attributing all intellectual virtue to the
past, initially to the old documents themselves, and gradually to Confucius and
eventually a canonized Mencius and even Chu Hsi.^17 It is clear that without
the much later successes of the Confucian school, Confucius himself would
have figured as of no greater importance than Mo Ti, or even Yang Chu or
Shang Yang.
Mo Ti is probably overrated in the same sense; though he made an impor-
tant new departure with his utilitarianism and ethical universalism, he is prob-
ably of greatest importance in having founded an organization which gradually
turned from military to intellectual activities. The lesser-known figures who
perfected Mohist logic four or five generations after Mo Ti are probably re-
sponsible for his position as a major figure in a long-term view of Chinese in-
tellectual history. In the West a comparable case might be Pythagoras, perhaps
most important as a founder of an organization which built up philosophical
and mathematical doctrines to a high level, reflecting back retrospective glory
on the founder.
What do such cases do to our overall assessment of network patterns? In
my opinion they do not shake the theoretical results, and even reinforces them.
Perhaps we should lower the ranking of some of these figures. But since they
come early in the charts, and hence lack eminent predecessors (although Mo
Ti and Pythagoras seem to be connected via minor or incidental figures to
70 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory