The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.32

c5.32

The traditional empire, then, fluctuates in the middle space between two diametrically opposed poles: on the one hand, the total dispersion of power throughout a segmentary and fluid concatenation where the political is completely merged into the social order; on the other, the far-out ideal of a universalistic polity where power is made independent from the social order and is administered according to fixed, transcendent rules.³⁰ The latter pole is in the literal sense transcendent in that it is beyond the limitations of actual society and can therefore possess ultimate legitimating force. It can only be imagined in an extrasocietal, never-never world such as Asoka's dharma empire, the *'umma*, the universal brotherhood of all believers, as the ideal Islamic polity,³¹ or the *universitas christiana*. It certainly has a strong attraction, but its mobilizing potential has to be spent outside or, at best, in the fringe of society which is, in Indian terms, in the sphere of world renunciation. If the pattern of dispersed power may be considered the poor man's solution to empire, the extrasocietal transcendent ideal may be called the poor man's dream of universal dominion.