The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6: Chapter I. Comparative Politics from Hindu Data
The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6
- Language
- English
Contents
- c6.s1 Section 1. A Yugântara in Political World-View — 20 parts
- c6.s2 Section 2. The Instrument of Interpretation — 21 parts
Chapter I. Comparative Politics from Hindu Data
Section 1. A Yugântara in Political World-View
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A Yugântara in Political World-View.
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The world is moving fast. The accepted postulates of sovereignty, nationality and democracy have been undermined by the Great War. The doctrine of the will of the people as the basis of the state is no longer to remain a pious wish of Rousseauesque philosophers. Initiative, referendum and recall are on the fair way to ring out “representative” government and inaugurate once more an era of “direct democracies”. The quality of democracy itself is being powerfully affected by the advance of public ownership and municipalization, socialistic usurpation and communistic expropriation, as well as schemes for “progressive” taxation and repudiation of national debt. For, Mother Earth has commenced leavening the conventional “popular government” of the past three generations with the flesh and blood of the masses and manual workers, the real People in the human species.
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Nor is constitution-making untouched by the all-round creative urge that is stirring mankind to its depths. The idealists of Young Russia have embarked on an epochmaking experiment in the manufacture of a new type of *sva-râj* (self-rule). “Functional” (occupational) sovereignty, with its corollary of sovietic (conciliar) autonomy, and ethnic (linguistic) independence with its corollary of regional (territorial) freedom, are their watch-words in economico-political self-determination. Curiously enough, the city and clan republics of ancient Eur-Asia on the one hand, and medieval gilds and feudalistic decentralization or *laissez faire*, on the other, are thus being rehabilitated to the modern conditions of wireless telegraphy, air-navigation and long-distance phones.
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Naturally, therefore, the “monistic” theory of the omnipotent state, such as was conceived by philosophers from Bodin and Hobbes to Austin and Hegel, is being found to be too palpably inadequate¹ to explain the *Realpolitik* of numerous *de facto* sovereign *samûhas* or corporations that flourish within the body politic. A radical *critique* of the classical school of sovereignty is being sought in Duguit's *Les Transformations du Droit Public*. The actual federalization or pluralization of authority, i. e. the multiplicity of *imperia in imperio* in the alleged unitary state-systems of today is tending to "discredit" the state itself as an instrument of social well-being.¹ Nay, while the Lenins and Liebknechtites are *but* seeking to abolish property in order to usher in a new socio-economic order, in the enthusiasm of recent legal thought in France the state has *already* ceased to exist. And to crown all, the almost Messianic Bolshevism of November 1917, especially such as it has operated in international diplomacy and in the formulation of policy towards subject races and colonies,² quixotic although it may appear from the Bastille of orthodox politics, has pushed into the limbo of oblivion the messages of 1776, 1789 and 1848. Altogether, a momentous *yugântara* or transformation of the time-spirit is on in political *Weltanschauung*.
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¹ *Modern French Legal Philosophy* (Fouillée, Charmont, Duguit and Démogue), pp. XLV, XLVII, LXIII, 254, 339—344.
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¹ Barker's article on the "Discredited State", in the *Political Quarterly*, February 1915, pp. 107—110.
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² Proclamation of the All-Russian Congress of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, November 1917, announced by the Chief of the Oriental Division of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs; see text in the *New York Nation* (Dec. 28, 1918); Lenin and Trotzky's *Proletarian Revolution*, pp. 424—426; Programme of the "Communist International" in the *New York Nation* (Oct. 13, 1920).
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In the Orient as in the Occident, everywhere, futurists are voicing the discontent of Shelley, the arch-Bolshevist of all ages:
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"The world is weary of the past,
Oh might it die or rest at last!"
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The spirit of the abolition of the *status quo* is abroad. It is almost a sin today to talk of the days that are no more or wait to take a stock of the leavings of history. The greatest demand of the hour is an emancipation of the intellect from history, from tradition, from experience, from "social inheritance".
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This new scepticism of "searching and impetuous souls", the Browningite faith that "men seem made for something better than the times produce", could not but have invaded the systematized bodies of knowledge nursed by academies. A revision of encyclopaedias is, therefore, the order of the hour.³ But while all other social sciences have accordingly been undergoing a comprehensive *Aufklärung* owing to the impact of "intensive" studies in anthropology, the expansion of the bounds of psychology, and the materialistic conception (that generally passes for the "economic interpretation") in history, the science of oriental lore is still in its non-age. Scholars, both in the West and the East, still take their cue from pioneer orientalists like Max Müller and Maine, and are used to interpreting the Indian "view of life" in terms of other-worldliness and pessimism, and appraising India's social, juristic, political and economic existence as but a web of archaic institutions alleged to be essentially distinct from the western. The discrepancy between the retarded growth of *indianisme* and the "geometrical" progression in the advance of other human sciences is almost as wide as that between the moral and natural philosophies of today of which Korzybski with his rigorous logic of the engineer rightly complains in the *Science and Art of Human Engineering*.
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³ Current tendencies in intellectual *risorgimiento* may be watched in the following among other publications: Enriques' *Problems of Science*, pp. 29—46 (critique of the methods of the special sciences), 51, 163—166, 358, 359, 361—363, 385—387; Bertrand Russell's *Our Knowledge of the External World: as a field for scientific method in philosophy*, 26—29, 236—242; Rignano's *Essays in Scientific Synthesis*, 162—168, 197—205; Schiller's *Humanism*, preface, pp. 192—203, etc.; Dewey's "Need for a Recovery of Philosophy", in *Creative Intelligence*, pp. 5, 55—58; Hocking's *Human Nature and its Remaking*, pp. 26—28, 221—222, 225; Korzybski, pp. 15—23; Robinson's *New History*, pp. 17—18, 21, 24, 49—51, 65; Gomme's *Folklore as an Historical Science*, pp. 177—179; Boas' *Mind of Primitive Man*, pp. 17, 29, 122—123, 155—156; Wallas' *Great Society*, pp. 10, 11, 217—218, 221, 223, 225, 313, 339, 345; Hall's *Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology*, Vol. I, 54, 64, 154—156, Vol. II, 336—338, 358, 364—370, 702, 706, 716—731; Lowie's *Primitive Society*, pp. 432—440; Sarkar's *Positive Background*, Vol. II, pp. 1—2, 8, 12, 19, 28, 36, 45.
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But there is no longer any reason for clinging to the over-easy generalizations of the first *corpus* of comparative studies. A scientific history¹ of Hindu Napoleons and Frederick the Greats has been rendered possible in recent years through the wealth of epigraphic data and other archeological evidence, inadequate and fragmentary though they be. New resources to be exploited by social science have been thrown open by the discovery of old books like the *Artha-śâstra*² of Kautilya, the Bismarck of the first Hindu Empire (B. C. 320). These have been immensely multiplied indeed by the historical researches of scholars of the two hemispheres for about half a century. And they have already borne some fruit like the one expected by Herder from his researches in the German *Volksseele*. For, that last wave of "romanticism", the nationalist movement³ of Young India, which has won recognition as a worldforce in international politics since August 7, 1905, is receiving a conscious guidance and direction from the solid results of unquestionable antiquarian investigation. The sociological material is on the whole varied and copious enough to call for a philosophic handling, tentative albeit, in order that indology may be brought in line with the tendencies in other branches of modern inquiry.
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¹ Smith's *Early History of India* (First Edition 1904; third edition, 1914). For a general estimate of Smith's writings with especial reference to the *Oxford History of India* (from the earliest times down to 1911) see Sarkar's article on "An English History of India" in *Political Science Quarterly*, Dec. 1919.
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² Discovered (1904), edited and translated by R. Shamasastry.
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³ Rowlatt's *Report on Revolutionary Conspiracies in India*, pp. 15—19; The "Savarkar case" (France vs. Great Britain) in Scott's *Hague Court Reports*, pp. 275—283; Scott's *Survey of International Relations between the U. S. and Germany (Aug. 1914 — April 1917)*, p. 305; Reinsch's *Intellectual and Political Currents in the Far East*, 93, 105, etc.; Lovett's *History of the Indian Nationalist Movement*, Gilchrist's *Indian Nationality*, Maurice Bourgeois' „Le Mouvement National" in *Le Monde Illustré* (19 Feb. 1921), *Freiheitskampf der indischen Nationalisten*, Lajpat Rai's *Young India*.
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These secular achievements of ancient India, the Hindu political institutions and theories, are virtually new data of comparative politics. But they are not calculated to pin sociology down to the past. For, comparative politics is not necrology, — the science of dead matter and tombstones, not archeology, — the study of fossils and paleontological phenomena. It is the science of *l'élan de la vie*, that one touch of Nature which makes the whole world kin. Its material is "humanistic" and thoroughly vital, as it deals with the creative endeavors of mankind, — the organizations and ideals that the human will and intelligence have invented in different lands in order to promote social happiness. And its message is equally fruitful and life-serving.
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The conviction is forced upon us from a new angle that the behavioristic psychology of the races is essentially similar. Man as a political animal has responded to the stimuli of the objective universe in much the same way in the East and the West. The limits of social science are by such knowledge automatically enlarged; a phenomenal expansion of the mind is the inevitable consequence; and the prevalent notion about the Orient tends to find at last its proper place among the superficial body of unscientific *idolas*. In this wise, from an unexpected quarter, the Paracelsuses of today can discover fresh reasons for finding
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"No use in the past: only a scene
Of degradation, imbecility — —
The record of disgraces best forgotten,
A sullen page in human chronicles
Fit to erase."
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The new "enlightenment" and Renaissance, and the *Novum Organum* of the twentieth century can acquire therefore a significant impetus from studies in jurisprudence, public law, and political philosophy from the oriental world of experience. And social science, thus reconstructed, cannot fail to have a powerful bearing on the current problems of the contemporary world. For, the acknowledgment by scientists of the basic uniformity in the mental and moral make-up of humanity is the theoretical pre-condition for a peaceful understanding of the diverse peoples. Comparative politics will thus turn out to be a most helpful ally of practical statesmanship in the amicable adjustment of relations between Asia and Eur-America. It will give birth to a new internationalism quite in conformity with this era of transvaluation of values.
Section 2. The Instrument of Interpretation
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The term "comparative" is, however, glibly used in modern sociological parlance. But errors creep in probably almost unconsciously as soon as one proceeds to employ it. At best it is only a method; and unless used with discrimination, like statistics it can be made to prove anything one wishes to prove. In the manner of experiments in a chemical laboratory, the social comparisons should be instituted under definitely known conditions; and as in mathematics, the items to be compared should be brought to a common denominator. Obviously a hill cannot be compared with a river (except as mere terrestrial objects). Nor can mollusca be rationally compared with orchids (except as mere living bodies). Similarly, a fossil or a mummy must not be compared with organisms that can react to the environmental stimuli, nor a master be compared with a slave, — unless the basis of comparison be categorically stated and the conditions of comparison well defined.
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Now, the brightest period of Occidental civilization happens to be the darkest period of Oriental. And this, again, is the epoch of the political-*cum*-industrial domination of the East by the West. In the nineteenth century and during the first years of the twentieth it may almost be said that Asia was for all practical purposes lying dead. Howsoever resentful orientals themselves may feel in regard to the prevailing albinocracy, not even the blindest idealist among them can ignore or minimize the situation. For, in the conjuncture of world politics the Orient has for quite a long period remained veritably the "white man's burthen". Asia today is indisputably a continent of slaves, *de jure*, as well as *de facto* (albeit not everywhere *de jure*). And to add insult to injury, the new life which has of late been pulsating through Asian humanity and which has created for Japan a first class rank in the concert of world-powers, is due to the inspiration furnished mainly by Eur-America from Newton to Becquerel, from Washington and Rousseau to Mill and Treitschke. The inferiority of the Orient to the Occident in culture as well as in politics is thus from every side an established fact of modern history. The tragedy of Young Asia is complete.
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Under these conditions is it possible for Eur-American scholars to evaluate past Asian achievements in science, industry, politics, art and philosophy at their proper worth? Can it be conceived that dominant races should be able to appreciate the human values in the life-processes of emasculated slaves? Here is an elementary fact in the psychology of successful nations that is chiefly responsible for the current fallacies in comparative sociology. It explains why the comparative method is yet in its infancy, at any rate, the comparison of the claims of the Orient and the Occident to have contributed to the world’s scientific concepts and categories or to the building up of social and civic well-being.
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Human memory, again, is very short. It does not go even so far back as one generation. It is impossible of course to call to one's mind the days of pre-steam industry. And the discoveries relating to the radium group are bidding fair to throw into the shade even the marvellous technological power of the energies that underlie contemporary life and efficiency. And yet how old are these achievements?¹ And scientifically speaking, how many are they in number? The "pragmatic" answer lies in the history of Japan. This Asian country did not take more than twenty-five years (1880—1905) to exploit the whole of western culture in order to triumph over a great European power and be invited by America to dictate terms to the vanquished foe.
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¹ Routledge's *Discoveries and Inventions*; R. Mackenzie's *19th Century*, pp. 181—206, 289—315, 429—432; Price's *Political Economy in England*, pp. 5—7; Weir's *Historical Basis of Modern Europe*, pp. 315—469.
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Historically considered, some of these achievements are fifty years old, others seventy-five, almost none above a century. The steam engine was first applied to cotton manufacture in 1785. But it did not come into general use before the third decade of the nineteenth century. Let Americans try to visualize the life and conditions of those "Pioneers" immortalized by Walt Whitman who a few generations ago had been laying the foundations of the Middle West and the Farthest West. It is also fair to recollect the social and industrial position of Germany in the days of Goethe, the educational condition of the people of France about the time when Arthur Young was touring in that country, and the condition of the working classes and the female sex of England at the time of the Napoleonic wars.²
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² Chapter on "Weimar in the eighteenth century" in Lewes' *Life of Goethe*; Young's *Travels* in France (Miss Bethan-Edwards’ Introduction); Compayré’s *History of Pedagogy* (vide Guizot’s Educational Commission in 1833); Toynbee’s *Industrial Revolution*, pp. 60—61; Traill’s *Social England*, Vol. V, pp. 346—347, 453, 455, 601—604; Vol. VI, 69—70, 620—30; Chapter on "social movements" in *Cambridge Modern Hist.*, Vol. XII, pp. 730—731, 761—762; Calhoun’s *Social Hist. of the American Family*, Vol. I, 83—127, 245—258, Vol. II, 80—101, 171—199.
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Coming specifically to politics, it has to be admitted that, strictly speaking, modern Europe and America do not date back earlier than 1866-1870. Europe was feudal and mediaeval almost down to that time. The political boundaries¹ were then almost as flexible as in the days of Charlemagne or the Guelphs and Ghibellins. America’s freedom was threatened in the second war with England (1812), and integrity jeopardized by the Civil War, of which also her old enemy England tried to take diplomatic advantage. Nationality existed only in limited degree before Mazzini and Bismarck; the dignity of labor was not recognized before Karl Marx and Louis Blanc; "popular" parliamentary institutions were all but unknown before the first Reform Bill of England; and the right of the masses to elementary education, the sole pre-condition of a real democracy, was not really a question of practical politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.
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¹ A. J. Toynbee’s *Nationality and the War*, pp. 9—15; See "The Congress of Vienna and its Legacies" in Phillimore’s *Three Centuries of Treaties of Peace*; Guyot’s *Causes and Consequences of the War*, pp. 207—211, 222—226.
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Every student of political institutions and theories must have to remember this background of Eur-American life while trying to understand the civic and social achievements of Asians. Judged by the triumphs of today, the western people even of the first half of the nineteenth century were "unfit" for self-government. Especially was continental Europe anything but democratic, without national consciousness, and devoid of the sense of the rights of citizenship. Far worse of course were the earlier epochs.
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"Then came those days," as Macaulay describes the Restoration in his *Essay on Milton*, "never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot and the slave. The King cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed with complacent infamy her degrading insult and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the state. The Government had just ability enough to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch, and England propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children.”
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Nor in Louis XIV *le grand monarque’s* psychology was there any respect for the rights of the people. He acted on the creed of absolutism, viz., *L'état c'est moi.* Besides, his high-handed measures at home and his unjust wars of aggression constitute a reflection on the political institutions and international morality of the times. Not less “characteristic” of occidental development are the horrors of judicial torture and inhuman penal legislation, both secular and ecclesiastical, which prevailed in Europe from the revival of Roman law in the thirteenth century to the epoch of reform initiated, at any rate in so far as the ideal is concerned, by the Italian jurist Beccaria in his *Crimes and Punishments* towards the end of the eighteenth.¹
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¹ Lea’s *History of Inquisition*, Vol. I, pp. 234—236; Vol. III, 300, etc. 421—423.
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The scientific method consists in proceeding from the known to the unknown. Students of comparative politics ought to approach the political literature and institutions of Asia with a full knowledge of this tradition of despotism in European history. It is as unjust to compare ancient and mediaeval Asia i. e., the Asia of the Asians, with the Europe and America of the twentieth century, as to compare the latter with the Occident previous to the “industrial revolution”. Unbiased investigators will find in Asian history the same struggles and tribulations through which European humanity has passed. It is impossible to mention a single institution or ideal in the Occident for which a parallel or replica is not to be found in the Orient. And no political weakness can be cited in Asia of which there is no double in Eur-America. But in order to avoid superficial analogies² what is required of scholars is: first, to practise scientific detachment from the conditions of life in which they are living today; secondly, to master the actual facts of political development and speculation in Asia; and thirdly, to place them in the perspective of occidental *Realpolitik* and “pious wish”, epoch by epoch, area by area, and item by item.
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² *Vide* the sections on the “comparative method” and the “age of modernism” in the author's article on the “Futurism of Young Asia” in the *International Journal of Ethics*, July, 1918.
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The “superior races” of the last hundred years have been misled by their fact of success to postulate the whole development of Asian polity as nothing but an unchanging record of semi-savage, i. e., almost un-political or pre-political group-life, and the entire literature of oriental political thought as at best but commonplace speculation pervaded by theocratic ideas. Thus has been engendered a monumental *idola* in the realm of social science. They manage to forget that the superior races of the ancient and mediaeval world were not Europeans but Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Mohammedans and Buddhist-Shamanist Tartars, whether in the strength of arms or in the “more glorious victories” of peace. Down to the second siege of Vienna in 1699 it was the historic role of Asia to be always the aggressor and of Europe to be on the defensive.
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On the other hand there is a class of Oriental scholars, among both Indian nationalists and leaders of the Chinese revolution, who try to demonstrate the existence of every modern democratic theory and republican institution and perhaps also of sovietic communism in the experience of ancient and mediaeval Asia. There is an attempt on their part to trace the latest Eur-American phase of the art and science of government in the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, Śukra and Manu, and in the clan-republics and village-commonwealths of the Orient.
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Both these attitudes must be set aside as superficial. It is not necessary to claim extraordinary achievements for Orientals in order to prove their political *viriya* and administrative *śakti* (genius). Nor again is it permissible to read modern ideas into the “liberties” of Athens and Rome or forget the limitations of feudal and Hapsburg Europe or be blind to the two thousand years of occidental autocracy from Alexander to the end of the *ancien régime*.¹
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¹ Cf. the author’s “Democratic Ideals and Republican Institutions in India” in the *American Political Science Review* (Nov. 1918), pp. 581, 587–588, 592, 596, 605–606, and “Democratic Background of Chinese Culture” in the *Scientific Monthly* (January, 1919), pp. 58, 62, 65. See in this connection Montesquieu's *Lettres Persanes* (1721).
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What is urged here is that it is unfair to compare the East in its worst and most degraded condition with the West in its best and most prosperous stage, and that it is a vicious practice to try to understand Asia such as she was as the leader of humanity’s progress from the servile and degenerate Asia of today, the Asia that is facing annihilation. Justice and science require that Asia and Europe should be tried in the balance “under the same conditions of temperature and pressure”, i. e., under conditions of absolute freedom and mutual respect.
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Such is the instrument of interpretation that we propose to apply to the epochs of Hindu polity roughly synchronous with European development from Pericles to Dante.
Linked texts (2)
- Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra — Kauṭilya, Sanskrit
- Mānava Dharmaśāstra — Manu & Bhṛgu, Sanskrit