This is the ninth book of our new course on 100 Great Books. You can read the brief about why the course exists and check out previous editions.
Before we dive in, here is an interesting weekend debate for you.
The Arthashastra: The World’s First Treatise on Power
Composed around 300 BCE by Kautilya, an advisor to Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of India’s first great empire, it is the earliest comprehensive text on statecraft, economics, and realpolitik, predating Machiavelli's "The Prince" by nearly two millennia.
Written in terse Sanskrit prose across 15 books containing over 6,000 sutras (aphorisms), it reads like a CIA manual crossed with an MBA textbook, filtered through the mind of a sage who has seen republics collapse and knows that idealism without infrastructure is merely postponed catastrophe. It is ruthless, pragmatic, and philosophically coherent. Power, it claims, is a necessity made operational.
Where the Mahabharata dramatizes dharma’s ambiguities, the Arthashastra codifies them into policy. Kautilya constructs a theory of the state as a living organism that must grow or die, trade or starve, spy or be subverted.
It offers a non-Western theory of power that takes human weakness as axiomatic and governance as a tragic necessity. It is Hobbes without the social contract, Machiavelli without the prince’s charisma, and Kissinger without the Cold War, distilled into maxims that feel ancient and alarmingly contemporary.
The Big Questions Arthashastra Tackles
What is the purpose of the state: prosperity, security, or moral order?
When is deception permissible?
Can statecraft be ethical?
How does one prevent internal subversion without becoming a tyrant?
What role do spies, assassins, and propaganda play in legitimate governance?
The Story in Three Tweets
A king’s duty is not to be good but to be effective.
The state is an organism that requires constant feeding: revenue systems, espionage networks, military preparedness, and psychological control of the populace.
Power operates in a separate sphere where the survival of order justifies methods that would destroy individuals.