The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6.s1: Section 1. A Yugântara in Political World-View

The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6.s1

Language: English

Section 1. A Yugântara in Political World-View

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.

Linked texts (1)

Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra — Kauṭilya, Sanskrit