Is it better for a ruler to be feared than loved?

“It is better to be feared than loved” is one of the most quoted lines in political thought, and one of the most often cut short. Machiavelli wrote it in The Prince, written in 1513 and first printed in 1532, five years after his death. The full passage gives the answer a condition and a limit, and both change what it means. The Arthashastra, the Indian treatise on statecraft traditionally attributed to Kautilya, asks the same question about punishment and answers it differently. Here are both, in their own words.

Quotations are from W. K. Marriott's translation of The Prince (1908) and R. Shamasastry's translation of the Arthashastra (1915), both in the public domain.

What does Machiavelli actually say?

That a ruler should want both. Chapter XVII, on cruelty and clemency and whether it is better to be loved than feared, begins from that. Only when a ruler cannot have both does Machiavelli choose: “it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.”

His reason is a view of people. Love, he writes, “is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage”. Fear holds because people dread punishment, and that dread does not fail. He ends the chapter on the difference: people love at their own will, but fear at the will of the ruler, so a wise ruler builds on what is his to control.

What is the limit?

Hatred. The sentence that is usually left out comes straight after the famous one: “Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated.” Machiavelli says how a ruler stays behind that line: by keeping his hands off the property of his citizens and subjects, and off their women.

So the advice is not cruelty without end. It is fear held short of hatred, and Machiavelli names what crosses the line.

Why judge a ruler by results?

Because a ruler who keeps to private virtue in everything, Machiavelli argues, will lose his state. Chapter XV says so plainly: “Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong”, and to use that knowledge as necessity requires. Chapter XVIII gives the image he is best known for. A ruler must sometimes act like a beast, and then he “ought to choose the fox and the lion”: the fox for cunning, the lion for strength.

This is why The Prince is read as judging politics by what it achieves rather than by the morals of private life. It is also why the question in the title is a GS Paper IV question as much as a PSIR one: it asks whether a public duty can justify what private ethics would forbid.

How much can a ruler control?

About half of what happens, by Machiavelli's estimate. In chapter XXV he grants that “fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.” He compares fortune to a river in flood, which no one can hold back once it rises, though defences built in calm weather can contain it. Fortune, he writes, “shows her power where valour has not prepared to resist her.”

The chapter is read as Machiavelli's contrast between fortuna, chance, and virtù, the foresight and energy a ruler brings against it. Fear, on this view, is one of the defences a ruler builds before the flood.

How did Kautilya answer?

With a measure rather than a preference. In Book I, chapter 4 of the Arthashastra, Kautilya takes up his teachers' advice that a king should always keep the rod of punishment raised, and replies: “‘No,’ says Kautilya; for whoever imposes severe punishment becomes repulsive to the people; while he who awards mild punishment becomes contemptible. But whoever imposes punishment as deserved becomes respectable.”

He does not doubt that punishment is needed. Without it, he says, comes the disorder of the proverb of the fishes, the big eating the small: “in the absence of a magistrate (dandadharabhave), the strong will swallow the weak; but under his protection, the weak resist the strong.”

Nor does he leave the purpose of power to the king's taste. Book I, chapter 19, on the duties of a king, says: “In the happiness of his subjects lies his happiness”, and tells the king to count as good not what pleases him but what pleases his subjects.

That does not make Kautilya the gentle one. Book VII, on relations between kingdoms, begins its rules for peace and war with this: “Whoever is inferior to another shall make peace with him; whoever is superior in power shall wage war.” Like Machiavelli, he judges a policy by what it secures. Where they part is at home: Machiavelli leans towards fear, Kautilya towards a punishment that fits.

Machiavelli and Kautilya, side by side

Neither is presented here as right. They write for different readers: Machiavelli dedicated his book to Lorenzo de' Medici, ruler of Florence from 1513; the Arthashastra sets out the whole government of a kingdom, from its laws to its wars.

Where does “as deserved” show up in Indian law?

In the rule that a punishment must be proportionate. In Ranjit Thakur v. Union of India (1987), a signalman had been sentenced by a summary court-martial to dismissal from service and a year's rigorous imprisonment for refusing a lawful command to eat his food. The Supreme Court held that even a court-martial's sentence must suit both the offence and the offender, and that a sentence so out of proportion that it shocks the conscience is itself evidence of bias.

The principle is the one Kautilya's “as deserved” names: a penalty should be no more than the wrong calls for, and no less.