The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6.s2: Section 2. The Instrument of Interpretation

The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6.s2

Language: English

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 (1)

Mānava Dharmaśāstra — Manu & Bhṛgu, Sanskrit