Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book on the compositional history of the Arthaśāstra and its philosophy of governance:
Mark McClish. The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 306 pages.
Summary:
The first half of the book presents a model of the Arthaśāstra’s textual development, arguing that the extant text is a 3rd century CE redaction of a treatise written
a few centuries earlier. This model is then used in the second half to demonstrate that the political theologies of varṇadharma and rājadharma exerted little influence on the original text, which was decidedly empiricist and pragmatic in character.
I argue that this disposition characterized the early statecraft tradition generally.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Arthaśāstra Historiography
3. The Resegmentation of the Arthaśāstra
4. Citation and Attribution
5. The Deep Structure of the Text
6. The History of the Arthaśāstra
7. The Politics of the Daṇḍanīti
8. Varṇadharma in the Arthaśāstra
9. Statecraft, Law, and Religion in Ancient India
All best,
Mark