 Legalism is at times compared with modern social sciences (Schwartz 1985), and this comparison grasps well some of its characteristics. Angus C. Graham (1989: 269) notices that Legalists are the first political philosophers in China “to start not from how society ought to be but how it is.” Indeed, this was the most practical-oriented of all preimperial intellectual currents. Its proclaimed goal was to create “rich state and powerful army” (fu guo qiang bing  富國強兵),[2]  which would be the precondition for future unification of the entire subcelestial realm. The thinkers’ focus was on how to attain this goal, and less on philosophical speculations. Consequently, their writings are generally devoid of overarching moral considerations, or conformity to divine will—topoi which recur in the writings of the followers of Confucius 孔子 (551–479 BCE) and Mozi 墨子 (ca. 460–390 BCE). Cosmological stipulations of political order, which became hugely popular after the Laozi 老子 (fourth century BCE) are of slightly higher importance for the Legalists than morality or religion: they are referred to in some of Shen Buhai and Shen Dao’s fragments and, more notably, in several chapters of the Han Feizi. Yet these speculations are not essential for these thinkers’ arguments: hence, pace attempts to consider cosmological digressions of Han Fei as foundations of his political philosophy (Wang and Chang 1986), it would be more accurate to see them as argumentative devices that were “not fully assimilated” into Han Fei’s thought (Graham 1991: 285; cf. Goldin 2013:  14–18).[3]  Generally, Legalist thinkers display considerable philosophical sophistication only when they need to justify their departures from conventional approaches of other intellectual currents. In this regard their views of historical evolution and of human nature are highly engaging.