Without an authority able to punish, the strong consume the weak, which is the argument for having a state at all.
The Arthashastra states that when the rod of punishment is not wielded, it gives rise to the law of the fishes, for the stronger swallows the weaker. The conclusion is structural rather than moral: danda, the authority to punish, is what prevents it. The argument arrives at Hobbes's state of nature by the same route and around two thousand years earlier.
In practice
- A market with no enforcement is not a free market but the strongest trader's market.
- A neighbourhood whose disputes nobody adjudicates is governed by whoever is least reluctant to threaten.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is structural rather than psychological: without an authority able to punish, promises between unequal parties are unenforceable, so the stronger party has no reason to keep them.
- In its favour
- It is the same argument later made by Hobbes, and the modern evidence from state collapse supports the general shape: where enforcement disappears, predation rises.
- Against it
- As a defence of authority it proves too much, since it gives no account of who restrains the punisher, and Ostrom's work shows communities enforcing rules without a sovereign.
- Standing
- The Arthashastra's date and authorship are disputed; the text was compiled and redacted over several centuries, so the doctrine is securely ancient and its attribution to one author is not.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works