Another book about Gandhi! With so many books and articles already written about Gandhi, one might think it unlikely that anyone could add anything important to what has already been said.

 

Nevertheless, I think I have a new way of understanding Gandhi. Although I admit that I do not have anything new to say about him, I think I have a new way of fitting the pieces together. Gandhi’s anti-modernity has usually been understood as primarily protest against industrial society, against machines, against large-scale production, although it has usually been recognized also that, especially as he grew older, Gandhi was open to the wise use of almost any machine. I propose to read Gandhi’s anti-modernity as primarily a protest against modernity’s relative lack of community bonds. In Gandhi’s terminology, modernity is adharma. In Karl Polanyi’s terminology, economic relationships are disembedded from social relationships generally. In Marxist terminology, Gandhi protests against the global extension of the rules that govern capitalist circulation, the ones that Marx described in Capital as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man.” Freedom, property, contract, and Bentham.

 

I see circulation in modern society as driving production. Exchange value dominates use value. Accountants govern engineers. Therefore, modern society is more primarily market society than it is industrial society. The protests of Gandhi, John Ruskin, and other anti-modernists are better read as protests against the truncated ethics of market society than as protests against modernity’s technologies. The former (the market) causes the latter (the technology) more than the latter causes the former. The state capitalism of the former Soviet Union, where a supposedly non-market society was still what Raymond Aron and others called industrial society, with some characteristics similar to those of the industrial societies of the capitalist West, was not proof to the contrary. Admittedly, I am here sliding from proposing a way to read Gandhi to proposing a general way to interpret the world, and to change it, which I think Gandhi’s best insights support.

Part of my intention is to encourage liberal religion, which I see as building necessary bridges between the best of modernity and the best of ancient traditions, and of which I see Gandhi as a paragon. Reading Gandhi this way, I claim that he shows the way to the kind of culture shift that is needed. Without a culture shift--not just a new set of policies, not just a new economic model, but a shift in way of life, a shift away from the categories and paradigms that have become so entrenched in modern society that economists and lay people alike take them for granted-- there is no prospect of satisfactory physical adjustment of human beings either to each other or to the biosphere. I am trying to recruit Gandhi for the Gramscian task of adjusting culture to physical function. The task of moving from common sense to good sense.

 

While praising Gandhi as an experimenter with truth, who discovered just what we today need to know, I will criticize him for some of his contradictions, even while acknowledging that his willingness to contradict himself was one of his charms and part of his honesty. The contradictions I will complain about separate Gandhi as saint from Gandhi as lawyer.

 

In many of his weekly writings published in Young India (in English) in Harijan (in Hindi) and Navajivan (in Gujarati) Gandhi functions rather like an appellate judge. He responds to letters from readers by making rulings on cases. He writes his opinion on the right thing to do in the fact situation posed by the reader. There would not be a question about the right thing to do if what one ought to do were obvious. Gandhi reviews each case as an expert able to guide the perplexed soul even where the right path is not obvious, and as a defender of his own philosophy of truth, love and nonviolence (three terms which turn out in the end to have overlapping if not synonymous meanings). Gandhi’s philosophy leads to uncertainties, dilemmas, or paradoxes, which perplex readers who write to the Mahatma for guidance. Gandhi is qualified to give an expert opinion as the author of the philosophy and as an especially well-known and experienced seeker of truth. But it happens that Gandhi also has a mind shaped by the study of law.

 

This personal circumstance of a scantily dressed man sitting at a big wooden desk in the open air facing the River Sabarmati writing his weekly columns reflects a profound tension, a profound contradiction, in world civilization.

 

Gandhi was not alone in failing, in my opinion, to understand the profound contradictions between religion and the modern civil law that, due to European expansion; the entire world has inherited from revisions of Roman law. His failure to understand what it would mean to have jurisprudence consistent with nonviolence has been the whole world’s failure. His great achievement was to articulate an almost coherent alternative to the commercial modernity which the British, and the general trend of world history, were imposing on India.

 

The unresolved and unresolvable problem, the unsquared circle, is making the legal framework of modern commerce, which Gandhi learned at the Inns of Court in London, compatible with what deserves to be kept from ancient wisdom. Seeing Gandhi’s projects and dreams in the light of this conflict between the legal framework of modern life and the ancient norms of solidarity that are still alive in the midst of modern life, goes far to explain Gandhi’s frustrations. And everyone’s frustrations. The viewpoint that Gandhi’s critique of modernity was primarily ethical, leads directly to a focus on this tension between the religious ideals Gandhi imagined as governing rural India in the past and the laws that govern the modern global economy. Such considerations will illuminate, I hope, my discussions of how the Gandhian heritage has been reworked since his death by some of the luminaries of post-independence India, including Jawaharlal Nehru, J.P. Narayan, Tariq Ali, Vandana Shiva, Amartya Sen, Arundhati Roy, and Manmohan Singh. If my proposed way of reading Gandhi fails to contribute anything new or important, then perhaps my comments on how he has been interpreted by these diverse figures may serve as a fallback excuse for writing yet another book about him.