“The twenty first century will be the century of Gandhi.”    --Nelson Mandela

            In 1908 Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj, that modern “civilization” could not possibly last.  By  2008 it was increasingly clear to a growing number of people (although unfortunately not yet to everybody) that even though it had lasted a hundred years after Gandhi predicted its eventual collapse,  Gandhi was not mistaken when he wrote  that it could not possibly last indefinitely. 

In India , a spate of terror attacks (Mumbai most recently) raised the question whether the root cause is deeper, larger, historical anger, as did the persecution of Christians in Orissa.    

Are we destroying ourselves for the short term prosperity of a minority?  In India as elsewhere ordinary people were taking refuge in anti-modern fundamentalist religion, finding in an irrational faith a fount of meaning in a meaningless world; and in many cases finding in irrational faith a practical survival strategy in a world shredded by family disintegration, drugs, alcohol, violence, and poverty.

            The thesis of this book is partly that Gandhi correctly predicted that modern “civilization” would prove to be unsustainable.  Our thesis is also that he correctly identified the principal reasons why it is unsustainable.   Writing in the Gujarati language, he characterized modern “civilization” as adharma.   As without dharma.  We will be treating adharma modern thinking and modern institutions as equivalent to (or at least as closely intertwined with) economic thinking and today’s prevailing economic and military institutions.  Economics and power politics (what David Harvey calls the logic of accumulation and the logic of territorial control) can be regarded as the metaphysics or as the religion (or perhaps as the anti-religion) of what Gandhi referred to as modernity.

              In a paper probably written in 1933, but only published posthumously in 1998, the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan made a similar prediction for a similar reason.  “Liberalism” (a term that for Lonergan names the economic side of what Gandhi called “modern”) came to dominate western and then world institutions in the 19^th century.  It would necessarily self-destruct and would threaten to destroy humanity because in practice it neglected the inner discipline of the will.  Lonergan´s proposed “metaphysics of solidarity” like Gandhi’s truth and nonviolence envisions self restraint as a prerequisite to social transformation.  It warns that in the absence of self-restraint homo sapiens sapiens is not a viable species.

Lonergan attributed the extreme violence of the 20th Century to the liberalism of the 19th.  He characterizes the philosophical and literary mind of the 19^th century as for the most part centered on virtue and beauty, while in practice the mind of the age was dominated by political economy.    The mainstream of 19th century thought was a disastrous combination of good intentions and bad thinking, for which the 20th century paid a tragic price. 

Borrowing a distinction from Nietzsche, we regard Gandhi and Lonergan as among those who offer diesseits (this side) critiques of political economy, as distinct from jenseits (the other side) critiques of political economy.  The former critique its premises.   The latter critique its consequences.

Jenseits critiques are abundant in contemporary social science.   David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi, for example, bring to the analysis of contemporary history concepts of accumulation, of debt, of sales, of currency devaluations, of taxation, of markets and market dynamics, that derive from the institutional framework of the modern world-system.   Adam Smith and David Ricardo pioneered the mirroring of the liberal institutional framework in the premises of the classical political economy.    Karl Marx employed them even as he deplored the consequences he drew from them.    Today David Harvey analyzes many of the consequences of contemporary neoliberalism as “accumulation by dispossession.”    The dispossession of tribal peoples by flooding their lands when big dams are built, for example, is, on Harvey ’s view, a part of larger historical processes whose driving force is a combination of capital accumulation and power politics.

            Gandhi’s religious diesseits critique is not so much about what happens if one accepts the premises of economics as it is about what to do if one does not accept them.   If one does not accept as a premise what Nassau Senior says explicitly and many economists assume implicitly that accumulating wealth is the general motive of production; and if one instead supposes that shoemakers, farmers, and carpenters produce shoes, lentils, and houses for the use of others primarily  because serving others by meeting a specific need is their role in society, their calling, their dharma, even though they are indeed paid for what they do, then one will see society differently.  If one is like Gandhi, one will act differently, and one will recommend that others act differently.   

            Other premises make other worlds possible.  A diesseits critique opens up more possibilities than a jenseits critique because it treats more parameters as variable.

            It will not be easy for us to make our case.   Every word we use is subject to multiple interpretations.  Every claim we make is obviously false on some plausible assignment of meanings to our terms.   We know in our own minds what we mean, but that is cold comfort.   We want to persuade the world, not  privately to reaffirm our beliefs.   Even the most intelligent reader cannot read our minds to see what we mean by a word, and even the most charitable reader will  not agree with us when (as far as she or he can judge) the facts do not agree with us.

            Our strategy for communicating with readers in order to place before them what we mean and why we mean it, will be to imagine dialogues.  They will be dialogues not just with Gandhi in general but especially with the gems of insight we find in Gandhi.       We will take the reader over and over the same ground from different perspectives,  hoping that after multiple views from multiple viewpoints what we are saying will painlessly fall into place in the reader’s mind, as a crown for a tooth painlessly falls into the place prepared for it by a skilled dentist.     We will interpret Gandhi by comparison and contrast with perspectives suggested by selected other Indian intellectuals:  Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan, Tariq Ali, Vandana Shiva, Arundathi Roy, Amartya Sen, and Manmohan Singh. 

            Our Gandhi, unlike Plato’s Socrates, will sometimes be wrong.   It is far from our purpose to show that he was always right    It is close to our purpose to show that conversations with him facilitate finding solutions to problems (such as, for example, poverty, war,  financial crisis, inflation, environmental degradation …)   that are otherwise intractable. 

            If our strategy works then at the end of the book the reader will appreciate the underlying pattern of thought and action out of which we speak when we make the claims that (1) Gandhi correctly predicted the collapse of modern “civilization,” and (2) He correctly identified some main causes of its collapse.   If our strategy works then at the end of the book the reader will know that these claims are not pessimism.  They are guides to transformative action.  They can be put into practice; quite as Gandhi himself never remained at the level of unapplied thinking, but always acted on his ideas.