The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c15.s2.25

c15.s2.25

When one is adequately oriented to the diversities between the old and the new regimes in the institutional and other factual experiences of economic and social life one should be careful in establishing equations of the ancient and mediaeval Hindu categories (as of the ancient and mediaeval European) with those prevailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Naturally, therefore, the question of the Hindus (or of the Europeans) of yore as having "anticipated" the moderns ought hardly to be raised in strictly scientific discussions. For comparative politics we are likely to be within reasonable limits if we read the *dharma* and the *artha śāstras* in the main as embodying the ideologies of European thought down to the beginnings of the industrial revolution.