Chanakya’s Politcal Doctrine of Matsya Nyaya

Chanakya

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are regarded as the original philosophers of the ‘state of nature.’ But about 2000 years before these three philosophers, this theory was first propounded in India by the Mauryan era political thinker, Chanakya (Kautilya, 375–283 BCE), in his Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra.

Chanakya posits that in the beginning human beings lived in the state of nature, as there was no concept of government. In some cases, people managed to live happily and peacefully in small groups. But the peace and happiness did not last because some people became wicked and started suppressing and exploiting the weak ones. There were no political institutions to control the wicked, and might alone was right. The state of nature society collapsed, and people suffered due to anarchy, lawlessness, and misery.

In the Arthashatra, Chanakya has coined the term ‘Matsya Nyaya’ (the law of the fish) to describe a state of nature society that is being destroyed by the rise of wickedness. Matsya Nyaya is the principle of a lawless pond in which the big fish devour the small fish. Chanakya posits that in the absence of ‘danda’ (strong stick of the law) society will be ripped apart by Matsya Nyaya, and that a strong government is critical for the maintenance of peace and stability.

The Arthashastra offers a surprising modern conception of governance. Here’s the Arthashastra’s verse 1.4.13-14:

अप्रणीतः तु मात्स्यन्यायं उद्भावयति ।

बलीयान् अबलं हि ग्रसते दण्डधराभावे ।

Translation: But when the law of punishment is kept in abeyance, it gives rise to such disorder as is implied in the proverb of law and order of fishes (matsyanyaya udbhavayati);

for in the absence of a magistrate (dandadharabhave), the strong will swallow the weak; but under his protection, the weak resist the strong.

The Right Response to Old Slogans

What is the right response to the proclamation “the king is dead”? Long live the king. 

What is the right response to the Nietzschean observation “God is dead!”? Now everything is allowed and nihilism reigns.

What is the right response to Rousseau’s slogan “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains”? Man is condemned to be free.

Civilization Versus the Noble Savages

The words “polite,” “politics,” and “police” are derived from the Greek word “polis,” which means city-state. This implies that a polite society stands on two legs: a good political establishment and an efficient law enforcement (policing) system. The Latin equivalent of “polis” is “civitas,” from which the words “civic,” “civility,” and “civilization” are derived. 

The suppression of base instincts and freedoms is a necessary condition for the creation of a powerful society or civilization. The civilized men, those who live in a powerful society, can never be free. They must live within the framework of laws passed by the political establishment and enforced by the system of policing. The bigger or more powerful the society or civilization, the more numerous are the regulations and restrictions, the more efficient is the policing system, and greater are the constraints imposed on the citizens. 

The notion that our ideal of liberty is the product of the “people of the polis,” or the civilized people, would have surprised the Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau—they believed that the savages (the noble savages) enjoyed the greatest liberty.

Four Philosophers: Four Views of the State of Nature

Hobbes was horrified by the idea of life in the state of nature. He depicts the state of nature as an environment in which there is no property, no security, no possibility of practical arts; where man’s life is marked by violence and fear, and is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” 

Half a century after Hobbes came Locke, who discovered a different kind of state of nature, in which people possessed natural rights, and their property was secure, because agricultural land belonged naturally to the man who did the farming. Another half a century passed, and along came Montesquieu who philosophized about a state of nature where men were a timid lot, so timid that they avoided war and violence. And finally, there came Rousseau, in whose writing the state of nature becomes a sort of Eden of liberty—a place where man is endowed with natural rights and is free.

In a span of three hundred years (sixteenth century to eighteenth century), four major philosophers have presented four different conceptions of the state of nature. What was dystopia for Hobbes got transformed, as if by the magic of philosophy, into a utopia by the time Rousseau had finished his work.

Rousseau and Natural Rights

When intellectuals talk about natural rights, they are following Rousseau’s famous line in The Social Contract: “Men are born free but everywhere are in chains.” They identify natural rights as a political empowerment that is available to every man in all parts of the world, and the chains as the political, intellectual, and cultural constraints imposed by society. All this is nor logical. Men are not born free—they are highly dependent when they are born and when they are in the stage of childhood; and everywhere men are not in chains—the world has a few semi-free societies, where some rights exists due to the political system and culture, while most societies are unfree, as their culture does not allow a rights-based political system. There is no social contract between men, and there are no natural rights. All rights are man made.

The Search for the God of Atheists

The western atheists, armed with Enlightenment intellectualism (which smacks of scientism) and Jacobin revolutionary zeal (which seeks to spill rivers of blood for creating a utopia), abandoned God in the eighteenth century. Since then they have been trying to find someone that they can put in God’s place. In the eighteenth century, they tried Voltaire, Rousseau, and Robespierre. In the nineteenth century, they tried Hegel, Marx, and Engels. In the twentieth century, they tried Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. But these human gods failed to serve as a replacement for the god of paradise. Now we are in the twenty-first century, and the atheists are still questing for an answer to the eighteenth century question: “Who will occupy the space vacated by God?”

The Philosophers and Their Methods of Philosophizing

Philosophers use various methods to express their philosophy. The dialogue is the oldest method, used by the ancient Greek thinkers like Socrates and Plato. Aristotle does not use the dialogue method—his philosophy comes in the form of lecture notes. Several works of Hegel and Heidegger are in the form of lecture notes. Parmenides and Lucretius use the poetic method. Descartes and Spinoza use the mathematical method. Augustine uses the autobiographical method. In the modern age, some philosophers have devoted years, or even decades, of their life to develop a system of philosophy. Kant’s three Critiques and his works on ethics constitute a philosophical system. Hegel has produced systematic philosophy through multiple works. Schopenhauer devoted much of his life to producing a single work of systematic philosophy, The World as Will and Representation. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness too is a work of systematic philosophy. Cicero, Aquinas, Bacon, Machiavelli, Leibniz, and Rousseau have produced long essays and books, but their work is not systematized—the same is the case with the works of philosophers like MacIntyre and Strauss. Seneca, Aurelius, Voltaire, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Russell, Wittgenstein, Camus, Derrida, and Foucault have philosophized through long and short essays. Several incomplete philosophical works have become immensely influential: for example, Plato’s Critias, Pascal’s Pensées, Marx’s Capital, Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Rousseau, Napoleon, and the Politics of Religion

Early in his life, Napoleon was influenced by Rousseau’s teaching that religion is dangerous since it exists in competition with the state—religion promises happiness in the other world when the state is responsible for providing the means of achieving happiness in this world. At the beginning of the French Revolution, Napoleon, then a young artillery lieutenant, wrote, “Dear Rousseau, why was it necessary that you have lived only for sixty years! For the interest of virtue, you had to be immortal.” Napoleon was as much influenced by the atheistic and anti-tradition political thought of the Enlightenment as the Jacobins were. After Napoleon acquired power, he had a change of heart. He realized that if he tried to suppress religion, he would lose support of the people and then his government might be overthrown like the government of the Jacobins was, so he allowed the traditional practice of religion. Jean Chaptal, Napoleon’s minister for Internal Affairs said: "The boldest operation that Bonaparte carried out during the first years of his reign was to re-establish worship upon its old foundations.”

England’s pro-England Moral Philosophers

The moral philosophers in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were pro-England. They mostly preached in favor of the status quo (Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Smith, Burke, and others). In France and Germany, during the same period, the moral philosophers were anti-France and anti-Germany (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant, Rousseau, and others) and they mostly preached against the status quo. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England attained great economic and political success—the industrial revolution led to an unprecedented growth in its economy and it became the empire on which the sun never set. France and Germany in this period remained mired in a multitude of political and economic problems. Even in the twentieth century, England has fared better than France and Germany. The lesson to be learned from this is that a nation in which the moral philosophy is dominated by nationalistic philosophers has a better chance of making progress.

On The Self-Love Of The Libertarians

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has described two kinds of self-love: amour de soi (self-love based on the desire of preserving the self) and amour propre (love of self as it is seen by others that has the potential for leading to envy, vice, and misery). I think that amour propre is the right term for describing the self-love that the libertarian intellectuals feel for themselves.

The libertarians are narcissistic—they are convinced that their solutions for political, economic, and moral problems are always moral and correct. When they look into the mirror, they imagine a halo of saintliness on their head. Many libertarians seem convinced that others see them as they see themselves, and if there is a person who does not believe in their perfection, then there must be something wrong with him, either he is ignorant or irrational or both.

Every libertarian intellectual yearns for the approval of other libertarians. It is praise of the peers that they value more than anything else. They have no time or energy to try to understand the concerns that are driving the political opinions of vast majority of people in their country who are not libertarians. They are often clueless about what is really going on in their country.

Strauss On Rousseau’s View of Man

Leo Strauss sees Rousseau as a modern Epicurean, an atheistic and materialistic thinker. On Rousseau’s Second Discourse (The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality), Strauss makes the following comment in his book Natural Right and History (Chapter 6: “The Crisis of Modern Natural Right”):

"The Second Discourse is meant to be a “history” of man. That history is modeled on the account of the fate of the human race which Lucretius gave in the fifth book of his poem. But Rousseau takes that account out of its Epicurean context and puts it into a context supplied by modem natural and social science. Lucretius had described the fate of the human race in order to show that that fate can be perfectly understood without recourse to divine activity. The remedies for the ills which he was forced to mention, he sought in philosophic withdrawal from political life. Rousseau, on the other hand, tells the story of man in order to discover that political order which is in accordance with natural right. Furthermore, at least at the outset, he follows Descartes rather than Epicurus: he assumes that animals are machines and that man transcends the general mechanism, or the dimension of (mechanical) necessity, only by virtue of the spirituality of his soul. Descartes had integrated the "Epicurean" cosmology into a theistic framework: God having created matter and established the laws of its motions, the universe with the exception of man's rational soul has come into being through purely mechanical processes; the rational soul requires special creation because thinking cannot be understood as a modification of moved matter; rationality is the specific difference of man among the animals. Rousseau questions not only the creation of matter but likewise the traditional definition of man. Accepting the view that brutes are machines, he suggests that there is only a difference of degree between men and the brutes in regard to understanding or that the laws of mechanics explain the formation of ideas. It is man's power to choose and his consciousness of his freedom which cannot be explained physically and which proves the spirituality of his soul."

Like Lucretius, Rousseau viewed man as naturally independent, self-sufficient, limited in his desires and, therefore, happy. He saw society as the creator of all the artificial desires and false opinions which gave rise to conflict and misery. Both Lucretius and Rousseau had a non-teleological view of man’s passage from nature into history.

Nature and man can never be fast friends

Philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau have argued that man can only be happy if he lives in harmony with nature. Matthew Arnold disagreed with this point of view—in his poem, “In Harmony With Nature” (written in the 1840s), he notes that nature is cruel, stubborn, and fickle, and that nature and man can never be fast friends.

Here’s Arnold’s poem, “In Harmony With Nature”:

"In harmony with Nature?" Restless fool,
Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee,
When true, the last impossibility—
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool! 

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore; 

Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;
Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave;
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; 

Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!

I think Arnold had a better understanding of man’s relationship with nature than any modern environmentalist.