Abstract
While most ancient polytheistic religions died out under the impact of monotheism, Hinduism stands out as a lively exception. Why was the Indian variety of polytheism more resilient than the Greek and Roman variety? This paper—the first to subject classical Hinduism to modern economic analysis—argues that the theological structure and the organization of priesthoods, which together determine the form of competition within the religious system, may help explain the different historical outcomes of these polytheistic systems.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Weber’s effort, which has been subject to extensive critique, was hampered by the limited knowledge at the time of India’s religious history, his own lack of access to primary sources of data, and his consequent reliance on inadequate secondary sources. In any case, Weber’s main focus was on economic ethics as a prerequisite for the (non)emergence of capitalism, while he never asked the question of Hinduism’s resilience which is the focus of this paper.
In a proximate field, McCleary and van der Kuijp (2010) provide an interesting analysis of the rise of the Geluk school into a natural monopoly in the religious market of Tibetan Buddhism.
As Cicero – himself a Stoic philosopher and at the same time an augur (a member of a priestly college of Rome) – famously put it (On the Nature of the Gods, book III), we know that there is only one ultimate principle in the universe and that all the stories about the gods and their myths are nonsense, but we should always honor them in public because people believe them – in short, because they are suitable for law and order.
Some of the elective cults that spread in the late empire, in particular Mithras’, claimed more of the feature of a considerate and merciful god who cared for his people, but these were “add-ons” to the underlying system and restricted to the sect members.
The holocaust, where the entire animal was burnt and nothing was consumed, was a rare form of sacrifice designed to pacify the gods and spirits of the underworld.
Exceptions include the handful of offices where holding another job was either prohibited (the Vestal Virgins, the Rex Sacrorum – a fossil from the monarchical period) or made impossible by behavioral restrictions (the Flamen Dialis, a priest of Jupiter), in which cases the state presumably supported them.
The college of pontifices in Rome stands apart from other priests as having broad technical expertise on matters of sacred “law” (about games, sacrifices, vows) as well as keeping the calendar, keeping a record of annual events, and supervising matters of family law including burials, wills, and adoptions. To this extent, they are an exception, but their part-time condition again makes it difficult to call it a profession.
Admittedly, even at points F or G the supplicant is worshiping both gods, though only one god in each field. As it stands, the model cannot handle complete dedication to one god in both fields, but it suggests how concave preferences can overcome divine rivalry, which is the essential point at issue. A way of rationalizing it may be to think of one of the gods as a junior partner in a sect devoted to the other god, with his own limited jurisdiction (see Sect. 2.1 above).
As we have seen in the previous section, in the Vedic ritual system priests were divided into distinct lineage-groups correlated with particular functions within the overall system (corresponding to the three Vedic oral canons, Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, and Sama Veda). Within the Shrauta system, they did not compete with each other but provided complementary services even though they did not perform the same ritual actions and recitations. The Atharvan priests were a separate tradition, only partially integrated (at a later stage), and they appear to have competed with the three Shrauta priesthoods as service providers to kings/chiefs and other elite patrons.
What would happen if the payoff to deviating from S were smaller than the payoff to coordinating? The game would be an assurance game with a payoff-dominant equilibrium and a risk-dominant equilibrium. Here too, the relatively closed nature of the Brahmanical priesthood would create more particularized trust among them while ritual purity might generate generalized trust leading to the payoff-dominant equilibrium. The very accommodation among GR priests and the lack of any focal ritual would have potentially an opposite effect in the GR world. However, we chose the prisoner’s dilemma version because we wanted to model the extreme case of large benefits to deviation. Thus, the model is hardwired with the sense that accommodating religions can bring large benefits to practitioners at the expense of systematic religions. If the systematic religion can survive this strong incentive to deviate merely strengthens our case.
The reliance on auditory fidelity (shruti) and a familial priesthood also created barriers to entry. This may be another way of thinking about why there were higher rents in the {S, S} equilibrium.
This inference is consistent with the idea that finitely lived agents with overlapping generations can achieve mutually beneficial equilibria if their life spans and overlapping generations are long enough (Kandori 1992). While actual life spans for Brahmins may be hard to know, the long apprenticeship within a familial priesthood common in the period we consider certainly suggests a more than usual “overlapping generation.” The overlapping generation aspect may be missing in the GR framework.
The Abrahamic religions offered a very personal kind of future certainty that was irrelevant to the priestly dilemma we develop here. Salvation may be eternal in the Abrahamic tradition; however, it is about personal faith and/or behavior and cannot be passed down a familial path.
This argument for the efficiency of an inter-temporally stable priesthood is rather similar to the argument for the efficiency of political parties that outlive their members in Brennan and Kliemt (1994).
See Ferrero (2013) for a model of theocracy with application to some historical evidence.
References
Basuchoudhary, A., & Razzolini, L. (2018). The evolution of revolution: Is splintering inevitable? The Economics of Peace and Security Journal, 13(1), 43–54.
Berger, P. L. (1969). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City (NY): Anchor Books.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2009). Culture and the evolution of human cooperation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1533), 3281–3288.
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J., & Henrich, J. (2011). The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(Supplement 2), 10918–10925.
Brams, S. J. (2002). Biblical Games: Game Theory and the Hebrew Bible. Revised edition. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Brennan, G., & Kliemt, H. (1994). Finite lives and social institutions. Kyklos, 47(4), 551–571.
Bronkhorst, J. (2011). Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism. Leiden: Brill.
Bronkhorst, J. (2016). How the Brahmins Won. Leiden: Brill.
Ferrero, M. (2013). The rise and demise of theocracy: Theory and some evidence. Public Choice, 156(3–4), 723–750.
Ferrero, M., & Tridimas, G. (2018). Divine competition in Greco-Roman polytheism. Homo Oeconomicus, 35(3), 143–166.
Fisher, E. (2017). Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Flood, G. (1996). An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gill, A. (1998). Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Iyer, S. (2016). The new economics of religion. Journal of Economic Literature, 54(2), 395–441.
Jamison, S., & Brereton, J. (2014). The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jelen, T. G., & Wilcox, C. (2002). The political roles of religion. In T. G. Jelen & C. Wilcox (Eds.), Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, The Few, and The Many (pp. 314–324). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kandori, M. (1992). Repeated games played by overlapping generations of players. The Review of Economic Studies, 59(1), 81–92.
Kulke, H. (1993). Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia. New Delhi: Manohar.
Lubin, T. (2005). The transmission, patronage, and prestige of Brahmanical piety from the Mauryas to the Guptas. In F. Squarcini (Ed.), Boundaries, Dynamics and Construction of Traditions in South Asia (pp. 77–103). Firenze: Firenze University Press.
Lubin, T. (2013). Aśoka’s disparagement of domestic ritual and its validation by the Brahmins. Journal of Indian Philosophy, 41(1), 29–41.
Lubin, T. (2015). Writing and the recognition of customary law in premodern India and Java. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 135(2), 225–259.
Lubin, T. (2018a). The Vedic student: brahmacārin. In P. Olivelle & D. R. Davis (Eds.), Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmaśāstra (pp. 98–112). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lubin, T. (2018b). Towards a South Asian diplomatics: Cosmopolitan norms and regional idioms in the use of documents. In S. Cubelic, A. Michaels & A. Zotter (Eds.), Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India (pp. 37–84). Documenta Nepalica, 1. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing / Kathmandu: National Archives.
Lubin, T. (Forthcoming). Sources of authority. In A. Sathaye (Ed.), A Cultural History of Hinduism in the Classical Age. London: Bloomsbury Press.
McCleary, R. M., & van der Kuijp, L. W. J. (2010). The market approach to the rise of the Geluk school, 1419–1642. Journal of Asian Studies, 69(1), 149–180.
Nicholson, A. (2010). Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History. New York: Columbia University Press.
Olivelle, P. (Ed.). (2019). Gṛhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Oslington, P. (2009). Deus Economicus. Australian E-Journal of Theology, 13(1).
Salmon, P. (2009). Serving God in a largely theocratic society: Rivalry and cooperation between Church and King. In M. Ferrero & R. Wintrobe (Eds.), The Political Economy of Theocracy (pp. 57–80). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Soper, C., & Fetzer, J. (2002). Religion and politics in a secular Europe: Cutting against the grain. In T. G. Jelen & C. Wilcox (Eds.), Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, The Few, and The Many (pp. 169–194). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thapar, R. (2002). Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. London: Penguin.
Warner, S. R. (2002). More progress on the new paradigm. In T. G. Jelen (Ed.), Sacred Markets, Sacred Canopies: Essays on Religious Markets and Religious Pluralism (pp. 1–29). Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Weber, M. (1958). The Religion of India. The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Translated and edited by H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale. Glencoe (IL): The Free Press.
Young, L. A. (Ed.). (1997). Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment. New York: Routledge.
Acknowledgements
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the European Public Choice Society (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, April 1–4, 2019) where participants provided interesting discussion. The authors are indebted to Mukesh Eswaran, Jerg Gutmann, Eric Rasmusen, George Tridimas, and two reviewers and the editor of this Journal for helpful comments. The third author gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Lenfest Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Basuchoudhary, A., Ferrero, M. & Lubin, T. The Political Economy of Polytheism: the Indian Versus the Greco-Roman Religions. Homo Oecon 37, 183–211 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41412-020-00102-z
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41412-020-00102-z