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Having observed that initiation into the institutions of global commerce was generally imposed by force in the 16th through 19th centuries, I should also observe that when the peoples of Africa and Asia emerged from colonialism after World War II their leaders generally—Gandhi being one of the notable exceptions—did not propose to go back and pick up the threads of their interrupted traditional ways of life. They aspired on the whole rather to transform their nations into prosperous social democracies along Scandinavian or British lines. Why their nations ended up neither with a culturally appropriate version of Swedish social democracy, nor with a culturally appropriate version of networks of Gandhian villages; but instead with regimes marked by corruption, persistent social problems, and persistent violence, I will try to explain, in part, by arguing that Gandhi´s message has not been sufficiently or properly understood.
My argument about Gandhi’s message is about the ideal traditional Indian village, even though I thought it necessary to mention the real traditional Indian village that lent credibility to it. My argument may, of course, be mistaken. It may be:
that Gandhi has not been misunderstood, but that instead on the whole subsequent Indian thinkers have understood him well enough, but have sometimes disagreed with him and sometimes agreed with him;
or it may be that Gandhi´s alleged hitherto insufficiently understood concepts are in fact false, in which case nothing has been lost by misunderstanding them;
or it may be that I will be reading concepts into Gandhi’s texts that are not there;
or it may be that the failure of Gandhi’s projects was not at all due, as I shall be claiming, to the legal framework of modern society of which Gandhi was insufficiently critical, but due entirely to some other cause or causes, and, finally:
It may be that even if Gandhi had been properly understood, and corrected by implementing the necessary transformation of jurisprudence, it would have made little difference. Gandhi’s thought might still have been overwhelmed by other factors – say, population growth, the influence of international aid agencies exacting ideological conformity as the price of funding, the inherent selfishness of human nature, great power imperialism, the laws governing capital accumulation, the partition of India and the ensuing arms race with Pakistan, the irresistible appeal of automobiles and other modern consumer goods …and so on… – so that in the end Indian history since Gandhi would not have been better.
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