The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c11.s1.t5.12

c11.s1.t5.12

At the University of Rome a lecture was delivered by Carlo Formichi in 1914. It was published in the *Rivista Italiana di Sociologia* for March-April of the same year under the title "Pensiero e azione nell' India antica" (Thought and Action in Ancient India). The prejudice among Western nations against the Hindu character as being devoid of force and vitality was due to a hasty generalization, said he. But he believed that by the discovery of *Arthaśāstra* the prejudice was demolished. He believed that this discovery would lead in Italy to a revival of studies in Machiavelli. As a student of *nītiśāstra* Formichi had taken a humanist and cosmopolitan view in his *Salus Populi* or "Welfare of the People" (Turin 1908). There he sought to establish the identities in the political ideas of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kāmandaka. On certain aspects of the Kauṭalya question Formichi took a very conventional view, however. For instance, writing subsequently in 1924 on the *Arthaśāstra* he observed that the treatise failed to furnish ideas of a great national state. Nothing more than a picture of *piccoli* *stati* was to be seen in Kauṭalya's book. The *Arthaśāstra* was alleged to mirror forth the political condition of India before and after the glorious parenthesis of the Maurya Empire. But still he believed that Kauṭalya was a man whose whole life and talent were devoted to moulding *le base d'un impero in India* i.e. the foundations of an Empire in India.