The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c11.t22.1

c11.t22.1

It is not difficult to explain why the imperial structures of the Hindus should have been heavily assessed organizations. The reasons are to be sought in the great variety and quantity of the state's "consumption". They are essentially identical with what economists like Nitti and Leroy-Beaulieu¹ have traced in the growth of public expenditures in modern times. The functions of Hindu governments were manifold. Consciously or unconsciously, whether backed by a definite theory of *nîti* (statecraft) like the late German empire or not, every state in India was a *Kulturstaat*. The invariable end of all Hindu politics was the protection and development of *dharma*. Like *Kultur* and Arnoldian "culture", *dharma* is a very comprehensive category. Exceedingly elastic in its significance, again, like the English term "law", the concept of *dharma* is the basis of distinction, the *fundamentum divisionis* between man and the brute. *Dharmena hînâh*, says the *Gîtâ*, *paśubhih samânâh*. In *dharma*, the analogue of the "virtue" in Plato's *Republic*, is to be found the *differentium* between the human world and that of *paśu*, or "beasts and birds" as Hobbes would have it. An agency for the promotion of humanism, i. e. for the advancement of all that lets "the ape and tiger die" and develops the people's material and moral interests, of anything, in short, that is conducive to national well-being was necessarily a multi-functional corporate organism. The *dharma-staaten* of India had therefore before them an almost unlimited range of what in scientific parlance is known as "developmental" activity. Not of an Arcadian character could thus be the "appropriations" of the Hindu empires.