Kautilya

Kautilya (also Kauṭalya, and sometimes called Vishnugupta) is the name the Arthashastra gives for its author or compiler. Indian tradition identifies him with Chanakya, the Brahmin adviser said to have helped Chandragupta Maurya found the Maurya empire in the late fourth century BCE. The text itself never uses the name Chanakya, and most modern scholars regard that identification as a later tradition.

Philological work since the twentieth century has shown the Arthashastra to be a layered text with several authors and redactors. Patrick Olivelle places its oldest source layers between about 150 BCE and 50 CE, the Kautilyan recension at about 50–125 CE and the final redaction at about 175–300 CE; other scholars have proposed other dates, and the traditional Mauryan date still has defenders. The work was largely unknown to modern scholarship until a manuscript was identified by R. Shamasastry in 1905; his English translation appeared in instalments and in full in 1915. The entry therefore describes the thought of a text and its tradition rather than the biography of a person, and no birth or death dates can be given.

Artha means material well-being and, by extension, the science of acquiring and protecting territory and wealth. The Arthashastra is a manual for a king in fifteen books and 150 chapters, ranging from the training of the prince to the capture of fortresses.

• The state as a system. The text analyses the kingdom as a set of constituent elements, conventionally listed as the ruler, ministers, countryside, fortified city, treasury, army and ally. A weakness in any element weakens the whole.
• Administration. Book 2, the longest, describes superintendents for mines, forests, trade, weights and measures, the mint, agriculture, liquor and much else, with detailed rules on prices, wages and fines. It reads as an early handbook of a bureaucratic state.
• Corruption and control. Ministers are selected for proven ability and tested secretly for integrity, and the text catalogues ways in which officials embezzle revenue. A network of spies watches officials, subjects and neighbouring courts.
• Welfare and legitimacy. The king is told that his good lies in the good of his subjects. In famine, epidemic or war he should provide relief, build public works and remit taxes. Order rests on danda, the rod of punishment, used neither too harshly nor too leniently.
• Foreign policy. Book 6 sets out the 'circle' (mandala) of states, in which a neighbour is a natural enemy and the neighbour's neighbour a natural ally, and Book 7 discusses six measures of foreign policy, from peace and war to alliance and 'dual policy'. War is to be avoided where the same ends can be reached by other means.

The Arthashastra matters for governance design less as a model than as one of the oldest systematic descriptions of how a revenue-collecting state can be administered and policed. Its concern with internal controls — testing officials, rotating and auditing them, using informants, setting penalties in advance — anticipates modern discussions of principal–agent problems and anti-corruption design. Its welfare provisions show that ancient statecraft theory treated relief and public works as conditions of stable rule, not only as acts of charity.

Max Weber, in 'Politics as a Vocation' (1919), called the Arthashastra a classic expression of 'really radical Machiavellianism', in comparison with which Machiavelli's Prince is 'harmless', and the comparison with Machiavelli has shaped its reception. In India the text is invoked in debates on strategic culture and foreign policy, and Kautilya is often presented as a founder of political realism. Historians caution that such uses can be anachronistic: the text assumes a monarchy, a hierarchical social order of varnas and a world of small competing kingdoms.

• Instrumental ethics. The text recommends espionage, deception, assassination and the manipulation of religious belief when they serve the king's interest, which has led many readers to treat it as amoral. Others note that it embeds these techniques in a framework of dharma and of the subjects' welfare.
• Surveillance state. Its picture of order rests on pervasive informants and secret tests, a model at odds with privacy, due process and freedom of association.
• Hierarchy. The social order it defends is one of hereditary varna status and unequal legal treatment.
• Textual uncertainty. Because the work is composite and its dating disputed, claims about 'what Kautilya thought' or about Mauryan practice rest on uncertain foundations; the text may describe an ideal rather than an actual administration.

• Arthashastra — Patrick Olivelle (trans.), King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra (Oxford University Press, 2013); R. Shamasastry's earlier translation (1915)
• Overview: 'Arthashastra', Wikipedia
• Reception: Max Weber, 'Politics as a Vocation' (1919), in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber (1946), pp. 123–124