TITLE:
Kautilya and Machiavelli on Justice, Prosperity and National Security
AUTHORS:
Balbir S. Sihag
KEYWORDS:
Child Labor, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Kissinger’s World Order, Machiavelli’s Prince, Mill’s Liberty, Sexual Harassment, Smith’s Wealth of Nations
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.7 No.3,
March
31,
2017
ABSTRACT: 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.