Kautilya and Machiavelli on Justice, Prosperity and National Security

摘要

As soon as Kautilya’s Arthashastra was translated into English in 1915, its comparison with Machiavelli’s Prince, particularly by the western Indologists, started in earnest. Their main goal has been to show that Machiavelli’s Prince was pale in comparison to the ruthless realism in Kautilya’s Arthashastra. Several user-friendly tables are constructed from the texts in The Arthashastra and Prince to i) strongly refute and correct such distortions and misrepresentations of Kautilya’s ideas, and ii) show Kautilya had much deeper understanding of the issues than Machiavelli. Interestingly, a closer look reveals that Machiavelli, although far less than Kautilya, but had deeper insights into economic issues than Adam Smith. It is also indicated that Kautilya, just with one sentence, captured the essence of liberty as empowerment of the weak against the powerful, Mill could not do that with his whole book on Liberty.