“It may be that the message which he [Gandhi] embodied will be understood and acted upon more in later years than it is today.”

--Jawaharlal Nehru, 1951 (1)

 

The modernity that Gandhi criticized in Hind Swaraj can be defined as a simplification of ethics. Monetary transactions replace kinship and community with what Georg Simmel called, “…a unity which eliminates everything personal and specific.” (2) The normative framework of commerce replaces dense networks of subtle interpersonal obligations with a few relatively clear and relatively simple rules. Protect property rights. Comply with contracts. Castes, tribes, and patterns of feudal allegiance, are replaced by the new dominant organizing principle of social relationships: the market. Its principle is buy cheap and sell dear. Caveat emptor. Because of the market’s simplified ethics --an ethics stripped of personal relationships, entzaubert— Gandhi could call modernity adharma. The best known paradigm of the coming of modernity to Europe is the enclosure movement of 17^th century England It evicted the yeomanry from their common lands, establishing by force the rights of landowners. It created a landless proletariat. It transformed the meaning of the land, separating its traditional tillers from it, making it into fixed assets on the account books of businesses. The enclosed and rethought land became a factor of production, producing wool to be exchanged for money in distant markets. Modernity’s most famous ideology is the definition of la liberté given by Denis Diderot in the Encyclopedie of the 18^th century French philosophes: freedom means that whatever the law does not forbid is allowed.

 

All this is not to deny that modern society is capable of endless complexity. On its simplified and weak foundations rambling and towering edifices have been built. In a society whose basis is commodity exchange, governed at first and in principle by simple laws of private property and private contracts, public law becomes a frail addendum and a dubious superimposition; public law ultimately becomes a towering and tottering edifice endlessly complicated by efforts to achieve the goals of public policy in a world where the exercise of private rights perennially thwarts them – for example through tax evasion, and, for another example –a famous one in India-- the evasion of land reform legislation. State (public life) is distinguished from society (private life). There are interminable deliberations about the interactions of the two halves of this socially constructed dichotomy, for example about when and whether the government should intervene in the market. The contract -- most importantly in the form of contracts of exchange by purchase and sale – confers legitimacy by consent; and in a society where contracts of purchase and sale have become the central practice used to organize how things relate to people, there is a tendency to make consent the only principle of legitimacy. There are endless complex debates about what is and what is not consent.