The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c16.s2.t1.27

c16.s2.t1.27

The opinions adumbrated in the *nîti-śâstras* are in any case neither exclusively oriental nor exclusively medieval or primitive. Nor need they be dubbed exclusively Machiavellian. For, has not the *Prince* furnished the fundamental logic of statesmen from the Athenian Pericles and Macedonian Philip down to the Metternichs, Bismarcks and Cavours of our own times? "Also it must be recognized", as Figgis, justifying the methodology of Machiavelli, says in his volume on political theory, *From Gerson to Grotius*,¹ "that in a state of things like international politics, where there is no recognized superior, and even International Law is but the voice of public opinion, the condition of affairs is very much more nearly akin to the state of nature as imagined by Hobbes than it is in the relation of individuals". It is on such considerations that, like Machiavellism, the doctrine of *vijigîṣu* maintains its legitimate place in a theory of international relations. It provides an unvarnished statement of the only hypothesis which can satisfactorily explain the innate militarism that the human world inherits from "beasts and birds".