The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c16.s2.t2.3

c16.s2.t2.3

In Europe the idea or ideal of a universal empire took most definite shape towards the beginning of the fourteenth century “exactly when the actual development of the modern nationalities was rendering it practically impossible.”² This crisis and this transition in Western political thought are best represented in Bartolus (1314—1357), the “prince of jurists,” for he began³ by seeing a single universal empire, but he ended by recognizing a miniature empire in every *de facto* independent power. The same conception of a world sovereignty or a *federation de l’empire* is however as old in India as the political philosophers of the earliest Vedic period.