A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c8.s3.122

c8.s3.122

What, then, are the services rendered by the early Arthaśāstra to the cause of Hindu political ideas ? We think that the Arthaśāstra represents the grand formative stage in the evolution of these ideas. To the authors of the Arthaśāstra works belongs the credit of emancipating politics from the tutelage of theology and raising it to the dignity of an independent science. They made political speculation occupy itself, for the first time so far as we are aware, with the phenomena of abnormal States as well as the normal monarchic State. The criterion which they applied to their rules of public policy was, as we have seen, the interest of the king and in one case even that of the individual minister. This led them often to sacrifice the cherished principles of morality with an almost callous indifference. All these ideas and notions were bequeathed by the authors to the later times and built up, as we hope to show presently, first by Kauṭilya and afterwards by the Brāhmanical canonists into a system.∗