Arthashastra by Kautilya
Published -300 · 180,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Political Philosophy, Classical Literature, Nonfiction
How hard is Arthashastra to read?
Arthashastra scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 86 out of 100
- Administrative Sanskrit with hundreds of technical terms for offices, taxes, weights, land classes, and categories of spy, most with no English equivalent.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Terse sutra-style prose in numbered rules, easy sentence by sentence and punishing in accumulation.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- The theory of the mandala of states, of the seven constituents of sovereignty, and of when danda is justified is argued at a high level of generality.
- Information density: 95 out of 100
- Fifteen books cover mining royalties, fort design, poison antidotes, brothel licensing, famine relief, crop yields, and assassination technique, at manual density.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- There is no narrator and no concealment; the text states what a king should do in the plainest available form.
- Symbolic density: 26 out of 100
- Almost no figurative language; the mandala of concentric friendly and hostile states is the one governing image.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- The absence of irony is itself the effect: instructions for poisoning a rival sit between paragraphs on irrigation dues without a change of tone.
- Resolution withholding: 36 out of 100
- Every rule is stated and settled; what is withheld is any moral frame for the whole.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Fifteen books of 150 chapters compiled in layers over centuries, with later material folded into an older core.
How Arthashastra is regarded
Arthashastra holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.