The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c15.s2.29

c15.s2.29

And here it is possible to adduce facts from extra-Indian culture-zones also. It is interesting that Meinecke in his *Idee der Staatsräson*¹¹ should come to the conclusion that during nearly two thousand years certain leading thinkers were expressing essentially the same ideas. "Cicero, Aquinas and Frederick the Great would have understood one another," says he, "because all three spoke the easily comprehensible language of natural law." The entire work is, besides, a testimony to the profound ideological reality that from Machiavelli to Treitschke European political philosophy has traded in two fundamental categories. One has reference to *Staatsräson*, which we may call *śaktiyoga*, i.e., *Machtpolitik*, the doctrine of power or force, and *daṇḍa* (punishment, sanction 'etc.). The other points to *Sittlichkeit* (morality), *Rechtlichkeit* (law), corresponding to the Hindu doctrine of *dharma*, i.e., law, justice, etc. It is the permutation and combination of these two eternal polarities, marked often by the emphasis on one to the exclusion of the other that constitutes virtually the entire encyclopædia of political philosophy as exhibited in this work. This is a very instructive and eminently acceptable generalization. We understand that changes in space and time do not after all invariably engender profound variations in the theories of the state, law, diplomacy, societal organization etc. In social affairs, statics is no less profound than dynamics.