{"id":148371,"date":"2019-11-25T12:01:14","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T12:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=148371"},"modified":"2019-12-02T11:24:11","modified_gmt":"2019-12-02T11:24:11","slug":"pax-gandhiana-the-political-philosophy-of-mahatma-gandhi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/11\/pax-gandhiana-the-political-philosophy-of-mahatma-gandhi\/","title":{"rendered":"Pax Gandhiana: The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pax Gandhiana<\/em><\/strong>: The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi<\/em>, by Anthony J. Parel, Oxford University Press, Aug 2016<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>In a world where mainstream studies of peace and politics are dominated by what passes for realism and what passes for world order, the distinguished Gandhi scholar Anthony Parel has derived from a close study of Gandhi\u2019s works a political philosophy that promises in the long run to be more realistic than the so-called realists.\u00a0\u00a0 It rests on a deeper order, an order in the human soul, than the global political and economic order established after World War II whose current disintegration mainstream scholars are now lamenting.<\/p>\n

Fareed Zakaria has in recent years written a series of elegant polemics against \u2018illiberal democracy,\u2019 updating in many ways the older arguments of the classics of liberalism and of Karl Popper that if we desire, as most of us do and all of us should, civilized human relations, we must steer clear of what Popper called \u2018tribalism\u2019 and von Hayek called \u2018fatal arrogance.\u2019 \u00a0We must avoid mixing true liberal capitalism with socialism, populism, religion, economic nationalism, personality cults, and\/or ethnic identity.<\/p>\n

There have been any number of works on one or another \u2018crisis of governability.\u2019 Most of them hold, for example Norberto Bobbio\u2019s The Future of Democracy<\/em>, that if democracy is to survive it must limit its ambitions to what can be accomplished within the framework of the currently dominant basic cultural structure.\u00a0 The World Economic Forum recently concluded its 2019 annual meeting announcing a series of initiatives under the heading \u2018Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution<\/a>.\u2019<\/p>\n

Although all of the above can be mined searching for points of light pointing toward necessary fundamental cultural change, on the whole they mostly remain in a broad sense within the confines of what Anthony Parel, in an earlier work defined as \u2018the Machiavellian cosmos.\u2019 \u00a0This earlier work was not just a scholarly study of Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli (1469-1527).\u00a0 It traced the hegemony of themes typical of that thinker in modern life.\u00a0\u00a0 As such, it provides a foil for his studies of the very different cosmos in which Mahatma Gandhi lived and moved and had his being.<\/p>\n

Even human rights, which are commonly construed as the antithesis of Machiavellian thinking, can be read in more than one way.\u00a0 We would suggest that one of them is Machiavellian in Parel\u2019s sense. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights can<\/u><\/em> be read as the normative basis of the Post World War II global order that promised social democracy but could not deliver it.\u00a0 Instead, that promise transmuted itself into neoliberalism.<\/p>\n

In its present form the post-world war II global order is now challenged by massive social conflicts almost everywhere \u2013 obviously but not exclusively in Algeria, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,\u00a0 China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, India, Iraq, Lebanon, Mozambique, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria,\u00a0 the United States, \u00a0Venezuela, and Yemen.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s context, human rights can also<\/em><\/u> be read <\/em>as primarily and fundamentally the four first-generation rights of 1789 (liberty, property, security, and the right to revolt); while the social rights of 1948 are read juridically as merely aspirations<\/em>, and read politically, again echoing a consensus of scholars including Bobbio, as unrealizable<\/em>. \u00a0This second reading of human rights, so prominent in our challenging times when the very survival of humanity and the biosphere requires fundamental change, fits the pattern of what Parel calls the Machiavellian Cosmos as we understand it.<\/p>\n

Parel\u2019s writings on Gandhi, including Pax Gandhiana<\/em>, are clearly intended to offer an alternative to humanity\u2019s current impasse. Parel clearly takes his stand, as a Gandhi scholar, in another cosmos, another way of reading reality and of reading what it means to be human, calling for a new civilization with ancient roots.\u00a0 Key terms of its discourse are dharma<\/em>, artha<\/em>, kama<\/em> and moksha<\/em>. (Simplifying:<\/em>\u00a0 virtue, order, shared prosperity, spiritual transcendence).\u00a0\u00a0 As Gandhiji once said, clearly separating his views from the dominant ones now failing us, ahimsa\u2019<\/em>s first premise is seeing every person, not just as an abstract idea but as a passionate conviction, as a soul<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Pax Gandhiana <\/em>is about the Gita<\/em> teaching of renunciation of the fruit of one\u2019s actions, while immersing oneself in politics and economics. It is about swaraj<\/em> and swadeshi<\/em>. Simplifying again<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0 One key kind of swaraj, <\/em>spiritual swaraj<\/em> means freeing oneself from internal bondage through spiritual self-discipline.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Swadeshi <\/em>is local self-reliance.<\/p>\n

Gandhi reframed and subordinated the prevalent profit motive of economics and employed benevolence and social affection as fuel to increase the economic growth of a nation. According to him, the wealth of a nation consisted more in persons who enjoyed a good quality of life both materially and ethically than in possession of goods. \u00a0He never considered the right to private property as absolute. Practically, property was subject to the condition of meeting legitimate needs of the political community in which one lived. Regarding the use of one\/s property, Gandhi proposed his well-known theory of trusteeship, a theory that (consciously or not) echoed Christian doctrines of stewardship and servanthood.<\/p>\n

Parel does not argue that Gandhi\u2019s path is the one and only path to peace.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Pax Gandhiana<\/em> should be read as articulating, speaking from a Gandhian tradition, the same sort of down to earth ethical message that Pope Francis articulates so eloquently speaking from a Christian tradition.\u00a0\u00a0 Many others articulate similar messages of salvation speaking from many other traditions.<\/p>\n

Neither does Parel represent Gandhi as infallible.\u00a0 Gandhi himself described his life as a series of experiments with truth.\u00a0 But every experiment runs the risk that the hypothesis it is testing is false, and indeed, Gandhi frequently changed his mind (see, for example, the third page of Chapter 5 of Pax Gandhiana<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Gandhi also described himself as a servant and his life as a series of opportunities for service.\u00a0\u00a0 But every would-be servant of humanity (or would-be Samaritan serving one particular person in need) runs the risk of doing harm intending to do good. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In this respect every conscientious human being, speaking and acting from any tradition whatever, or from no tradition at all, is fallible.<\/p>\n

In tracing the development of his political philosophy, Pax Gandhiana<\/em> portrays Gandhi as an exemplar of a human being persistently trying (and sometimes failing and learning from failure) to do the right as God (or \u2018Truth\u201d) gave him the light to see the right.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Anthony J. Parel<\/em> is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Calgary.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Prof. Howard Richards now teaches at the University of Santiago and the University of Cape Town.\u00a0 He is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. He was born in Pasadena, California but since 1966 has lived in Chile when not teaching in other places. Professor of Peace and Global Studies Emeritus, Earlham College, a school in Richmond Indiana affiliated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) known for its peace and social justice commitments. J.D. Stanford Law School, MA and PhD in Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara, Advanced Certificate in Education-Oxford,\u00a0 PhD in Educational Planning from University of Toronto. Books:\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Dilemmas of Social Democracies\u00a0with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>Gandhi and the Future of Economics\u00a0with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>The Nurturing of Time Future, Understanding the Global Economy\u00a0(available in PDF on line),\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action, <\/em>Following Foucault:The Trail of the Fox (with Catherine Hoppers and Evelin Lindner),\u00a0 <\/em>(on Amazon as an e book), Unbounded Organizing in Community (with Gavin Andersson, also on Amazon),\u00a0 Rethinking Thinking <\/em>(with Catherine Hoppers),\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Hacia otras Economias\u00a0with Raul Gonzalez, free download available at\u00a0<\/em>www.repensar.cl<\/strong><\/a><\/em>.\u00a0<\/em>Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia: conversaciones sobre el socialismo en Rosario, Argentina.\u00a0<\/em>Available free on the blogspot lahoradelaetica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a world where mainstream studies of peace and politics are dominated by what passes for realism and for world order, the distinguished Gandhi scholar Anthony Parel has derived from a close study of Gandhi\u2019s works a political philosophy that promises in the long run to be more realistic than the so-called realists. It rests on a deeper order, an order in the human soul, than the global political and economic order established after World War II whose current disintegration mainstream scholars are now lamenting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":148372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,59,67,208],"tags":[812,524,260,642,444,109,870],"class_list":["post-148371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","category-nonviolence","category-reviews","category-literature","tag-ahimsa","tag-gandhi","tag-history","tag-literature","tag-nonviolence","tag-politics","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}