Kautilya

Their big question

What does it take to hold a country together?

Kautilya wrote a book about power that does not flatter power, and that separates him from almost everyone else who has written about government.

The Arthashastra is a practical manual: how to collect taxes without emptying the countryside, how to build roads and settle new land, how to keep weights honest, how to manage a treasury, how to run spies, how to handle a neighbour who is stronger than you. The advice is often uncomfortable and always specific. He has no interest in pretending that rulers are better than other people; his question is what arrangements make a state survive anyway, including a bad ruler.

What makes him worth reading rather than just cataloguing is the standard he sets. In the happiness of his subjects lies the king’s happiness — which means the ruler’s own interest and the people’s well-being are wired together, not opposed. Famine is a security problem. Unfair taxes are a security problem. A king who governs without being seen to govern well is simply building the rebellion that will replace him.

He also thought hard about a problem that has never gone away: how do you run a large group of people without trusting anyone personally? His answer was systems — records, inspections, written rules, competing officials who check each other. That is recognisably the machinery of a modern state, written down two thousand three hundred years ago.

“In the happiness of his subjects lies the king's happiness; in their welfare his welfare.”

From the Arthashastra — a book that also contains cold advice about spies, which is why the line is worth reading carefully.

Three things worth knowing

• He is credited with helping a young ruler build the Mauryan empire, the largest state in Indian history at that point.
• His book, the Arthashastra, covers taxes, roads, mines, weights, agriculture, spies, diplomacy and the treatment of conquered peoples in about six thousand short rules.
• It is unusual among ancient books on government in admitting openly that a ruler's first concern is the ruler's own survival.

Try it — think like Kautilya

Invent a small country of ten people with one rule to keep it working. Now make it a hundred, then a thousand. Notice at what size your rule stops being enough, and what you have to add.

We have no portrait of Kautilya that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.