Where in my post did I say Mandate of Heaven was not a thing before the Qin unification?
You didn't. As you restated in this latest post, you said that it had "as much merit as the Holy Roman Emperor's claim of being the universal monarch". And I dispute that view. No European monarch ever claimed to be the rightful ruler of all Europe in both theory and (desired) practice, and there was certainly no situation whereby various (or even all) major European monarchs made that same claim in competition. Both were true for China, however. Nor is it the case that all European states felt themselves part of a European culture (beyond 'Christendom', no such unifying culture had formed).
I only said that it's as little respected by the rulers of Chinese states as various princes of Europe did towards the HRE.At the very least in the case of Europe,there existed a period where much of Europe was fully controlled by the Roman Empire.
At no point did either of these polities unite Europe; both left vast portions outside their control. There has simply never been a single unifying hegemony over all Europe. No imperial crowen can claim that legacy. The Chinese Warring States considered themselves just that:
Chinese Warring States, each eventually claiming absolute hegemony. In Europe, conversely, it was about order of supremacy within Christendom, but the various monarchs did not claim to be the madated rulers of all Europe, nor to represent a hypothetical all-European culture.
In China however,the control of the Zhou rulers,the Shang rulers and the predecessors was extremely loose,and often never amounted to anything other than symbolic deference.
I am not disputing this loose arrangement: it has no bearing on the discussion. The fact remains that however losse it was (at times) in practice, the priciples on which Chinese hegemony was based ware different from the principles on which, say, the HRE based its claim of being the foremost monarchy in Chistendom. That is: anyone claiming the Mandate of Heaven is, at least in theory, claiming that all other monarchs exist as vassals to him, within his empire. The Holy Roman Emperor does not claim to rule Poland. He merely asserts that as Emperor, he is the foremost of the temporal princes of the earth, and thus enjoys primacy over all peers. But he does not extend the hypothetical boundaries of his domain to cover their kingdoms.
To say that China before the Qin unification is less culturally divided as Europe during the Middle Ages is definitely a lie.
It's really not.
Most of the states used different scripts and had widely separate cultural customs.The people of Qin,Chu,Wu and Yue were for example commonly seen by the people of the Central plains as barbarians.
Different variant scripts for the same fundamental language. Certainly there were regional variants in culture; there will always be. That does not make China more culturally divided than Europe during the Middle Ages. We are looking at a bunch of Chinese states that all derive from one fractured empire. Europe, contrarily, unites vastly different areas, many of which (Germans, Balts, Slavs, Scandinavians, Hungarians) were never part of the Roman Empire.
If you want an analogy for "barbarians" being absorbed into a culture, you need to look at Han dynasty China absorbing the Hundred Yue. Incidentally, they did a much more thorough job absorbing them into Chinese culture than Christendom ever did of foring a single European identity out of all those many ethnicities in Europe. Might that have something to do with the fact that there
was such a thing as coherent Chinese culture, whereas European culture is more of an amalgation?
The Holy Roman Emperor definitely claimed that he was a universal ruler.The Pope as well saw himself as the head of all the secular princes.Similarly,there were bitter contests between the HRE and the ERE over who was the true emperor,due the belief that the emperor was the rightful ruler of all Christendom and the world.The Church in particular had more of a presence and influence in various Christian states than the Zhou monarchy and their predecessor ever did in their vassal states.
I already went into that claim about the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope is another matter, and some kind of super-papacy that achieves temporal power over all Europe under the aegis of a pope-emperor is probably the closest equivalent to the Mandate of Heaven you can get. Do not that no such thing existed in OTL. (Nevertheless, I'd love to see it explored!)
Then there's the contestation between the HRE and the ERE over who was the true emperor. This was again over primacy, rather than power. They both wanted to be recognised as the true heir to Rome, and thus the true foremost Christian monarch. But neither attempted to annex the other, nor did they pretent that their decrees had power in each others' territories.
In conclusion, while similarities can of course be seen, and analogies drawn, too much equation of Europe in the Middle Ages and China in the Era of the Warring States remains unwise. There are fundamental differences, and when attempting to create a European analogy for a historical Chinese philosophy, those differences must be taken into account. European history will not, and
cannot, follow the exact same pattern as Chinese history did.
We may need to consider here that philosophy of the feudal period in Europe was heavily influenced or not totally separable from Catholic religious thought.
When we discuss feudalism conventionally we discuss the 9th to 15th century, and even a work like The Prince only enters the stage of history in the 16th century, which is quite firmly in the early modern period, where there are much different states and the role of the church, as against literate individuals unaffiliated with the church, in production of political thought is much different.
So we would have to consider the extent a legalism like philosophy is compatible with clergy who are producing work that is compatible with Catholic theology, or whether the base assumptions about "human nature" and so on are too divergent.
I suspect that the 16th century is pretty much the earliest you're likely to see this kind of thing, honestly.
Also note that the period in China that produced legalism also produced theories on a right to depose unfit and cruel monarchs, and such things. In some ways, you might see Locke's reaction to his circumstances as much reflected in Chinese thought as Hobbes' reaction to those circumstances. One might go into a whole hypothesis about how certain situations often tend to produce certain types of intellectual responses. I for one subscribe to such a view. Yet as I mentioned above, there are also differences between China and Europe that cannot be discounted. China had a 'universal hegemony' precedent to an extent that Europe did not. As such, the idea of a strong, centralising ideology just emerging
without such a precedent to legitimise it... is difficult to see.
Rather, the same sort of developments that inspired
The Prince and
Leviathan in OTL should be looked for as the impetus for such an emergence.
That, or we're back to the the whole "super-papacy that achieves temporal power over all Europe under the aegis of a pope-emperor becomes a European equivalent to the Mandate of Heaven"-idea. That simply makes the political realities of Europe more like those of China, and if that Holy European Empire then falls apart, you basically just get "Warring States Period: European Edition". Which is cool, but a bit beyond the scope of the OP, I guess.
I cannot speak for Hobbes as i haven't read him, but i have read Machiavelli. The whole point of his philosophy is doing that which is necessary to secure stability, and thereby liberty. Some may be surprised to learn, but niccolo was in fact a Republican. He was such a big fanboy of the Roman republic it actually kinda gets ridiculous in his 'art of war'.
At any rate, he placed importance on having a republic that works for the common welfare of the people, and viewed the sociopolitical struggle of the commoners with the aristocrats in rome as vital in its process of becoming more perfect in being able to do so. This is, as far as I know, very much opposed to the fundamentally autocratic nature & source of chinese legalism.
And reguards to harshness, Niccolo is very clear that, while being feared may be usesful, one should avoid being hated and too harsh.
"He ought to be slow to believe what he hears and slow to act. Nor should he fear imaginary dangers, but proceed with moderation, prudence, and humanity, avoiding carelessness born of overconfidence and unbearable harshness born of excessive distrust"
Or
"[One] should make himself feared in such a way that, though he does not gain love, he escapes hatred"
You're not wrong. Hobbes is really the better analogue for the more typical Legalist view, which is why I qualified my citation of Machiavelli as "being this,
to some extent". That said, Legalism itself could be interpreted in various ways, and to a certain extent also aimed at bettering the lives of the people. Nor did it explicitly encourage cruelty. It advocated for strong, central government as the cure for chaos and division. The problem is that such strong, central government must typically be imposed by force. The one who enforces it often tends towards a certain harshness, as the First Qin Emperor did. As I said: that then causes trouble of its own. One mellows out, or one faces intense backlash.
Could go either way.