The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c15.50

c15.50

While “*l'état c'est moi*” embodied the prevailing bible of European despots from Alexander and Augustus Caesar to Louis XVI the political philosophers were adumbrating the gospel of justice, natural equality, and sovereignty of the people. Mediaeval political theory in the West, as one can gather from Gierke's and Poole's investigations and the more “intensive” researches of the Carlyles, Figgis and Woolf, was essentially a philosophy of “pious wishes”, no matter whether conceived by the Stoics, the Roman lawyers or “civilians”, or church fathers and canonists. It is interesting to observe that such “ideals” found expression also, though under different categories, in the *śâstras* on *nîti* and *dharma* from Kautilya to Bhoja.