|
Gandhi-Chapter I: Mohandas K. Gandhi |
|
|
|
|
Page 1 of 17 I. Mohandas K. GandhiI.G. Patel, a distinguished Indian civil servant, once remarked that economics always overtakes cleverness in real life. (1) One might be tempted to suspect that Gandhi could have been one of the clever people Patel had in mind. What has triumphed in India has been economics, while what has been discarded has been Gandhian thought. The success of neo-liberal nuclear-armed India, boasting an 8% annual growth rate, might be regarded as proof that Gandhian ideas do not work, while economic orthodoxy does. I shall be arguing, to the contrary, in favor of Aldous Huxley’s assessment of Gandhi: “Sooner or later it will be realised that this dreamer had his feet firmly planted on the ground, and that the idealist was the most practical of men.” (2) There is something that does work in Gandhi´s critique of modernity which sooner or later must be acknowledged and acted upon, as humans work persistently to find sustainable solutions to the intractable problems that plague modern commercial societies. Gandhi is sometimes given credit for having been right in ways different from what I have in mind. He is said, for example, to have anticipated what is now a standard teaching of development economics: where labor is abundant and capital is scarce, labor-intensive technologies should be preferred over capital-intensive technologies. (3) Perhaps it is true that Gandhi was in this respect an early proponent of ideas that others accepted later. But to look at his advocacy of labor-intensive technology as a precocious discovery of an economic theorem is to overlook that it was part and parcel of a normative framework quite different from the normative framework in which economics lives, and moves, and has its being. Gandhi´s premises were different, even when his conclusions were the same, as those of an orthodox economist. Gandhi was an outsider with respect to the social framework of economics. His thought is important mainly because he carried out a fairly consistent critique of that framework. Perhaps because he was an outsider all or most of his practical dreams and projects are not feasible. They are too far out of synch with the institutional framework which, for better or worse, has constituted today’s social reality. But just because his is a body of thought which denies the premises of the mainstream, modernity can turn to him for keys to problem-solving that it cannot obtain from any of its insiders. |
