Author: Narendra Nath Law

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780331726756

Excerpt from Aspects of Ancient Indian Polity, Vol. 1 The subtle and profound spirit of India, which finds its fullest expression in the absolute idealism of the Vedanta of Sankara and the sceptical nihilism of Nagarjuna, is alien to the conception of man as a political organism, whose true end can be found only in and through membership of a social com munity. Hence India offers nothing that can be regarded as a serious theory of politics in the wider sense of that term. But there was intensive Study of the practical aspect of government and of relations between states, and these topics were subjected to a minute analysis by writers on politics, who carried out their work with that love of subdivision and numerical detail which induces the authors of treatises on poetics to vie with one another in multiplying the types of hero or heroine or of figures of speech. Pedantic as is muchof this work, it would be an error to ignore the acuteness of observation which it involves, or the practical, if narrow, prudence of many of the maxims laid down for the guidance of rulers. The topic has also the interest that it presents India to us from a point of view less completely Brahmanical than is usual in the literature of India. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.