The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and His Arthashastra

by Roger Boesche

The First Great Political Realist is a succinct and penetrating analysis of one of the ancient world's foremost political realists, Kautilya. Kautilya's treatise Arthashastra stands as one of the great political books of the ancient world, its ideas on the science of politics strikingly similar to those of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and even Sun Tsu. Roger Boesche's excellent commentary on Kautilya's voluminous text draws out the essential realist arguments for modern political analysis and demonstrates the continued relevance of Kautilya's work to modern Indian strategic thinking and our understanding of the relationship between politics and economics. Striking a balance between textual analysis and secondary scholarship, Boesche's work will be an enduring contribution to the study of ancient Indian history, Eastern political thought, and international relations.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy

142 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2002

About the author

Roger Boesche was an American political theorist.

Reviews

[Niyoti Khilare]

Reading commentary immediately after The Arthashastra feels like allowing somebody back into the room with a highlighter and a very specific argument.

Boesche frames Kautilya as an early political realist and places the text into conversation with ideas more commonly associated with later Western political theory. It is a useful lens because it makes the sophistication of Kautilya’s thinking about power, institutions, espionage, war and political survival difficult to dismiss as merely “ancient wisdom.”

I would still keep the distinction between Kautilya and Boesche’s interpretation of Kautilya firmly in view. But as a companion text, it helped clarify something the original makes abundantly obvious:

Human beings invented sophisticated political strategy considerably earlier than modern political science invented terminology for it.

[Ambrish Parmar]

Fantastic and fascinating read.

[Manjeet]

This book is an eyeopener about the Vastness of Mauryan Empire. With a population of about fifty million people, the Mauryan Empire was larger than the Mughal Empire two thousand years later and even larger than the British Empire in India, extending in fact all the way to the border of Persia and from Afghanistan to Bengal. Their capital, Pataliputra was probably the largest city in the world at that time, a city eight miles long and a mile and one-half wide, with 570 towers and sixty-four gates, all surrounded by a moat six hundred feet wide and forty-five feet deep. Also protecting the city were wooden walls—stone was very scarce—with slits to be used by archers. Pataliputra "was about twice as large as Rome under Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Amazing work. Thank you sir. Now I know why you were the favorite professor of Mr Barack Obama during his college days.

[Prateek Vasisht]

history and political theory