Ethical Foundations of Constitutional Order

Puruṣārtha Beyond Institutional Limits

Siva as Lord of the Dance, 11-12th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The New Digest is pleased to present an essay by Mr. Rohit Viswanath, who is Managing Trustee of the Nāṭyaśāstra Gurukulam, a centre for civilisational statecraft based in Navi Mumbai, India.

Modern constitutional democracies rely on institutional mechanisms to restrain political power. Yet these mechanisms presuppose forms of ethical restraint that they cannot themselves generate. Constitutional order, in this sense, depends not only on how power is structured, but on how human aims are ordered. Power (artha) and desire (kāma) do not become legitimate merely through institutional regulation; their legitimacy arises only when grounded in dharma, understood as an internalised principle of ethical order. In this view, dharma does not merely constrain political action but constitutes the conditions under which it becomes meaningful and stable. It operates not only as a restraint on wrongful action, but also as a positive source of orientation, enabling and inspiring forms of conduct aligned with ethical order.

Situating institutional design within a broader civilisational framework of motivation and restraint allows for a different understanding of constitutional order. It suggests a perspective that complements liberal constitutionalism while bringing it into dialogue with classical traditions of political thought. Durable constitutional equilibrium depends not only on institutional design, but on the orientation of the ends toward which power is directed. While constitutional forms may converge across societies, the ethical and ontological frameworks that animate them remain civilisationally distinct.

Limits of Institutional Design

Modern constitutional democracies rest on a foundational premise: that the concentration of political power can be restrained through institutional design. Mechanisms such as separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances seek to preserve liberty by distributing authority across competing centres of power. In the American constitutional tradition, this logic finds its most influential expression in the writings of James Madison, who argued that political stability depends upon structuring institutions so that ‘ambition counteracts ambition’. Institutional design operates at both structural and organic levels: the former through formal rules, procedures, and allocations of authority, and the latter through the evolution of norms, practices, and ethical dispositions that cannot be fully codified. While structural mechanisms can be deliberately constructed, their effective functioning depends upon organic conditions that sustain restraint from within.

This logic extends beyond political theory. As Adam Smith argued, competition in markets channels self-interest toward socially beneficial outcomes. In both political and economic domains, institutional design seeks to harness artha through structured rivalry.

This insight has shaped constitutional design across modern polities. Institutions such as the judiciary play a critical role in restraining power, deterring misconduct, and correcting deviations. These functions are indispensable to constitutional order. Yet even within the Western tradition, it has been recognised that institutional arrangements alone cannot secure durable equilibrium. Procedural forms are necessary, but not sufficient; their effectiveness depends on the ethical values that animate their use.

This limitation has become more visible as governance grows in complexity. Contemporary states operate through dispersed networks of authority comprising regulatory bodies, administrative agencies, and hybrid public–private arrangements, within which discretion is exercised at multiple levels. As institutional systems expand, the ethical conditions required to sustain them do not automatically keep pace. The result is a growing dependence on procedural mechanisms to manage behaviour that was once regulated by shared norms.

The problem, therefore, is not merely institutional but motivational. The question is not only how behaviour is constrained, but how it is oriented. Constitutional design presupposes forms of restraint that lie beyond its own capacity to produce.

Institutions can distribute power. They cannot determine the ends that power serves. This gap between structure and orientation defines the central problem of this essay.

Western Constitutional Thought and Its Constraints

The Western constitutional tradition has long recognised the dangers of concentrated power and the need to structure authority to prevent domination. From James Madison’s institutional pluralism to later reflections in European thought, the emphasis has consistently been on designing mechanisms that channel and constrain political ambition.

At the same time, this tradition has also acknowledged its own limits. Edmund Burke emphasised that political order rests not merely on formal arrangements, but on inherited moral traditions and social habits. Alexis de Tocqueville similarly observed that democratic stability depends upon civic norms that guide how freedom is exercised in practice. In the twentieth century, Michael Oakeshott distinguished between governance as rule enforcement and governance sustained by traditions of judgment.

These perspectives converge on a shared insight: institutions can structure power, but they cannot fully determine the motivations with which that power is exercised. This reveals a structural asymmetry: institutions regulate outcomes, but not motives, which depend on ethical and cultural conditions beyond formal design.

Liberal constitutionalism, in its dominant modern form, tends to bracket questions of ultimate ends, focusing instead on procedural fairness and the regulation of competing interests.

By contrast, many classical traditions in both Western and Indian thought have sought to embed political order within a prior account of human purpose.

What remains insufficiently theorised is the ordering of human aims themselves. It is precisely this question that the puruṣārtha framework addresses.

The Problem of Motivational Imbalance

These limitations become more acute in contemporary governance. Such systems extend beyond traditional institutional forms to include regulatory networks, public–private arrangements, and increasingly, algorithmically mediated processes. In such environments, the challenge is no longer merely the distribution of authority, but the diffusion of responsibility itself. As discretion becomes embedded across layered and often opaque structures, the capacity to assign accountability weakens, even as the scope of decision-making expands.

As a result, governance systems attempt to preserve order through external controls even as internal sources of discipline weaken. A purely restrictive model of governance seeks to prevent misconduct. A more complete framework must also enable right action by orienting motivation toward ethical ends. Three patterns frequently emerge: the expansion of rules to compensate for declining trust; the intensification of monitoring and enforcement; and the gradual erosion of institutional legitimacy. These developments reflect an increasing reliance on procedural mechanisms to manage behaviour no longer adequately regulated by shared norms.

The result is a structural paradox. Efforts to stabilise governance through procedural expansion often increase complexity while leaving underlying motivational imbalances unresolved. Institutional systems become more elaborate, yet more fragile, as the gap widens between formal regulation and the motivations it seeks to govern. The question, then, is not only how motivations may be constrained, but how they may be ordered. What we describe as motivation may be understood, at a deeper level, as the ordering of human aims.

What is required, therefore, is not merely a critique of institutions, but an account of how human aims themselves are ordered.

Puruṣārtha: A Framework of Motivational Order

The classical Indian framework of puruṣārtha is often described as a fourfold schema: dharma (ethical order and normative restraint), artha (power and material capability), kāma (desire and aspiration), and mokṣa (liberation or ultimate fulfilment). Yet this enumeration can obscure its deeper structure. These are not merely co-equal aims arranged within an external hierarchy, but a structure of dependence in which dharma is the generative principle that orders and legitimises the pursuit of artha and kāma, and thereby opens the horizon toward mokṣa.

Artha and kāma are frequently treated as the primary drivers of human action in political and economic life. Yet within this framework, their legitimacy is not self-grounding. Power and desire do not define their own limits. Their proper scope emerges only when they are situated within dharma, understood not merely as external rule, but as an internalised principle of order, proportion, and right relation. Within this framework, the pursuit of artha and kāma is legitimate only when aviruddha, that is, when it does not stand in conflict with dharma. This orientation reflects a deeper grounding in ṛta, an ontological order in which reality is structured and intelligible. Dharma, in this sense, may be understood as its normative articulation within the sphere of human action. If ṛta denotes the ground of order, dharma expresses that order in lived practice.

In this sense, dharma does not merely constrain artha and kāma; it constitutes them as meaningful pursuits. Without such ordering, power degenerates into domination and desire into excess. With it, both become capable of sustaining social and political equilibrium.

When artha and kāma are aligned with dharma, it contributes to a deeper reorientation through which individuals may come to glimpse, however imperfectly, ṛta, the underlying order of existence, and their place within it. Action is thus situated within a broader horizon, shaped not only by compliance with rules, but by an understanding of proportion and limit.

The framework is completed by mokṣa, which introduces a higher telos. Beyond the immediate pursuits of power and desire lies the possibility of a more fundamental realisation: that human dignity is not contingent upon accumulation, possession, or status. This paradox, of renunciation enabling true enjoyment, captures a deeper insight: one may ‘renounce and enjoy’, discovering freedom not through accumulation, but through detachment. Classical reflections, such as the non-dualist philosopher Ādi Śaṅkara’s Kaupīna Pañcakam, capture this intuition, suggesting that excessive accumulation may itself become a burden rather than a source of fulfilment. By relativising the ultimate significance of power and possession, mokṣa stabilises the ethical authority of dharma.

Even within modern psychological thought, there are gestures toward such an ordering. In his later work, Abraham Maslow extended his framework beyond self-actualisation to include self-transcendence, recognising that human fulfilment may ultimately lie beyond the satisfaction of individual desire. This insight parallels, in a different conceptual vocabulary, the orientation toward mokṣa.

Ethical restraint, in this view, arises not only from enforcement or social expectation, but from an understanding of limits grounded in a broader conception of human ends.

The puruṣārtha framework offers an integrated account of motivation, ethics, and purpose. It does not reject power or desire, but situates them within a structure that renders them compatible with stability.

Reframing Constitutional Order Through Puruṣārtha

Viewed through the lens of puruṣārtha, modern constitutional systems can be understood as attempts to regulate artha through institutional design. Mechanisms such as checks and balances distribute authority across competing actors in order to prevent domination. Yet the principle that ambition must counteract ambition presumes an ethical substratum. Where artha operates without the ordering influence of dharma, institutional rivalry risks degenerating into competition for power rather than equilibrium.

Similarly, kāma, expressed through interests, preferences, and democratic responsiveness, plays a central role in political life. Yet when unbounded by ethical considerations, it can produce short-termism, populism, and the erosion of norms.

From this perspective, constitutional design addresses only part of the problem. It structures interaction, but not orientation, and does not ensure alignment with ethical order. Constitutional order ultimately depends not on the regulation of power alone, but on the prior ordering of human aims. In the puruṣārtha framework, it is the pursuit of dharma that makes the pursuit of power (artha) and desire (kāma) compatible with stability, and that alone renders mokṣa intelligible as a human end.

Power Without Ethical Anchoring

A contemporary illustration clarifies this structural limitation. The widely discussed case of Jeffrey Epstein did not occur in the absence of legal frameworks or oversight mechanisms. It unfolded within systems that were procedurally elaborate and formally compliant.

Legal processes, negotiated settlements, and jurisdictional arrangements operated, in many respects, as designed. Yet at critical junctures, these mechanisms appeared to accommodate concentrations of power rather than constrain them. What becomes visible is not merely a failure of enforcement, but a deeper structural vulnerability: institutions can regulate the distribution of authority, but cannot, by themselves, discipline the motivations that animate its exercise.

Viewed through the lens of puruṣārtha, this reflects a condition in which the pursuit of power (artha) and desire (kāma) operates without sufficient anchoring in dharma. Where such anchoring weakens, procedural safeguards become instruments through which power negotiates its own limits.

A contrasting illustration may be found in the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Confronted with the immense artha and kāma embodied in the British Empire, the Mahatma did not rely on countervailing institutional power alone. Instead, he mobilised a form of ethical force grounded in dharma, reordering both action and motivation. This orientation went on to inspire figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, illustrating that ethical anchoring can generate forms of power that institutional design alone cannot.

Taken together, these contrasting illustrations reveal a common structural insight: where artha and kāma operate without anchoring in dharma, institutions become vulnerable to distortion; where action is grounded in dharma, it can generate forms of power that exceed the limits of institutional design.

Toward an Integrated Constitutional Ethic

In this context, dharma does not denote a sectarian doctrine, but a structural principle of ethical ordering. The foregoing analysis suggests the need for an integrated approach to constitutional thought, one that brings into dialogue the structural insights of Western political theory and the ethical frameworks of classical traditions. The question is not whether institutions or ethics matter more, but how their disjunction produces instability.

A partial parallel may be found in the ethical thought of Aristotle, particularly in the concept of eudaimonia as human flourishing through virtue. Yet a fundamental distinction remains. While Aristotelian ethics seeks fulfilment within the horizon of political life, mokṣa introduces a more radical orientation that ultimately transcends it. This gives the puruṣārtha framework a deeper account of restraint: not merely the moderation of desire, but the possibility of detachment from it.

Such a framework does not collapse traditions into one another. Rather, it allows them to illuminate complementary dimensions of a shared problem. Institutional design provides the external structure of order; ethical frameworks provide the internal discipline that sustains it. Durable constitutional systems depend on both.

Conclusion: Ethical Order and Constitutional Stability

Modern constitutional democracies have achieved remarkable success in designing mechanisms to distribute and constrain power. Yet their long-term stability depends upon conditions that lie beyond institutional design.

Constitutional order rests on a dual foundation: the external structuring of authority and the internal disciplining of motivation. The former can be specified through rules and procedures; the latter depends on ethical orientations that cannot be fully codified.

The puruṣārtha framework provides a language for understanding this relationship. By situating power and desire within a broader ethical horizon, it clarifies the conditions under which their pursuit remains compatible with stability. It does so not by replacing institutional reasoning, but by clarifying the conditions under which it can succeed.

For contemporary governance, the implication is clear. Strengthening institutions cannot rely solely on procedural refinement.

It must also attend to the ethical frameworks that shape how authority is exercised.

Where dharma no longer orients the pursuit of power and desire, constitutional order may endure as structure, but it risks losing its ethical core, the animating principle that gives it coherence and direction.

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