From the truly astounding World Politics substack (don't let the name of the blog fool you), March 20, 2026:
Kautilya made Machiavelli look naive
In the closing decades of the fourth century BC, in the city of Pataliputra on the Ganges plain, a man named Kautilya composed a text on statecraft, economics, and political strategy whose ruthlessness, comprehensiveness, and analytical intelligence have no parallel in the political literature of the ancient world.
The Arthashastra (the Science of Statecraft) is a treatise organised into 15 books – with subjects ranging from the organisation of the king’s daily schedule and the architecture of the royal palace to the administration of agriculture, mining, and commerce; the management of the treasury and the army; the conduct of diplomacy and espionage; the waging of war; and techniques for eliminating rivals.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince is the Western political tradition’s most powerful exposition of strategic realism; it amounts to about 70 pages. Kautilya wrote several hundred, addressed them to a far broader range of political problems with greater analytical precision, and did so eighteen centuries before Machiavelli was born. The consistent verdict of scholars who have read both carefully is that, for all his genius, Machiavelli worked in a shallower analytical tradition and addressed a narrower set of problems than the Indian whose work he never knew existed....
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The starting point:
