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Castes and the Social Body

 The image of the State as a body made up of castes has both a dimension of euphemism of a narrative slavery technique of domination, and of genuine metaphysical belief. In Jainism, the cosmic system is organized according to a reincarnation plan that places each monad (Atman) in its rightful place in the Great Man within a supposed order, a primitive determination that served to structure the empire of Chandragupta Maurya. The genuine belief in a metaphysical system based on the corporation of the castes is perfectly understandable for the case of dominant social persons: the faith in the divine right to the dominion of others unites the caste and its actions. But the exercise of the domination of caste is also perfectly compatible from pragmatic and more or less disbelieving positions, as we read in the Artha Sastra. Its author, Kautilya, minister of the first Mauryan emperor, reconciles, without any problem, the primitive determinations of Jainism with a pragmatic approach to politics that anticipates Machiavelli by more than a thousand years. The religious vows of a king are his preparation for action, his sacrifices and ablutions are the distribution of offices, and his attention to the interests of the kingdom. In his analysis of the functioning of the ideal government, Kautilya offers a philosophical view of the structure of society in his time. His narration takes place at a time when Indian society is changing from the mythical-ritual narratives of the King-God to those of the plane of universal law, in which kings, as will be the case of Ashoka Maurya, are administrators of an objective order that has not been created by them and of which they are not their direct, but spiritual heirs. Kautilya's position epitomizes the priestly caste (to which he belonged) of service to the body of the State, in which gods, holy books, and rites, are but the mythical instruments for the technology of domination. The Artha Sastra takes the primitive determinations as parameters, that can be changed by other equivalents at a given moment, since the end of life is wealth, Artha, and the so-called spiritual and artistic ends are dependent on this economic foundation. The sense of Artha is equivalent to that of the will to power, exercised in all its power by the king and to a lesser extent, and as long as it does not unbalance the building of the State, by nobles and other free citizens. The good king makes his wishes coincide with those of his people (meaning people the three upper castes: priests, warriors and merchants), and not with his own wishes. The motive for action is not the moral principles of charity and love of the people, but the greater stability of such a form of government. In the Artha Sastra, we can observe the tension between the pragmatic needs of community organization and the economic burden that the otherworldliness of primitive determinations imposed on the development of more complex societies.

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