Gandhi – a small government libertarian? – Part 1
“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
“It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and will fail to develop non-violence at any time. ”
“I look upon an increase of the power of the State with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.”
“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.”
“Men … should do their actual living and working in communities … small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise. The larger (structurally) a democracy grows, the less becomes the rule of the people and the smaller is the say of individuals and localised groups in dealing with their own destinies. Moreover, love and affection, are essentially personal relationships. Consequently, it is only in small groups that Charity, in the Pauline sense of the word, can manifest itself. Needless to say, the smallness of the group, in no way guarantees the emergence of Charity. In a large undifferentiated group, the possibility does not even exist, for the simple reason that most of its members cannot, in the nature of things, have personal relations with one another”
“Good government is the most dangerous government, because it deprives people of the need to look after themselves”
Of course, we all knew that Gandhi was anti-state. After all he was strongly influenced by thinkers like Thoreau and Tolstoy. He was an inveterate votary of individualism but of the spiritual variety. His individual was oriented more towards frugal life style. His individual was not much motivated by the pleasure-pain principle but by the good and evil priniciple. That is why he was not sympathetic to the market principle which caters to greed and desire.
While this interpretation locates Gandhi is in the tradition of rishis and saints in search of truth, Gandhi was also a firmly rooted in politics. Some of his admirers regard his politics as leaning towards socialism and read Gandhi as somebody who rejected the idea of private property. This interpretation would go on to infer that Gandhi was indeed a socialist who inverted Marx’s ends justify means materialism.
I think that such inferences are not valid. Gandhi always held that individuals should voluntarily constitute the social by coming together of their own volition. A society would be good if individuals constituting it become good and ethical persons. He recognised that in practice the social constrain individuals and his politics was all about liberating individuals from the yoke of the social.
I am keenly awaiting the second part of this terse note.
Thanks
@M N Panini
Thank you for your detailed comment.
I think it is safe to say that Mr. Gandhi’s core philosophy was non-violence. Therefore, as you rightly say, although he did favor egalitarianism in an abstract sense I am sure he would never have favored coercion to achieve that aim (redistributive taxes etc.). He (and some of his truer followers like Vinoba Bhave etc.) would have preferred voluntary charity to be-generous-else-be-jailed attitude.
On a slightly different note, and this is what I was thinking about next w.r.t. Gandhi and libertarianism, is the very interesting analogy between Gandhi/Nehru and Jefferson/Hamilton as political couples.
Gandhi was against massive industries (again, that does not mean that he would have taxed/regulated them out of existence – just like I could be against smoking without wanting to ban it). Jefferson too was an agrarian.
On the other hand, we had the “rationalists” and “progressives” in Nehru/Hamilton. No time, these folks had, for dogma like spiritual individuality/natural rights in its true sense. Fiat money, protectionism, central planning – you name it – they were ready to it in the name of scientific and economic development.
But the very aims they wanted – prosperity for all – were ultimately achieved by the methods of those “crazies” – Gandhi/Jefferson. That is, individual rights should dominate and a big government should recede.
Hence those who call their economics Gandhian – and here both the BJP and the Congress are responsible – need to reconsider their nomenclatures, and stop degrading the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – a man who was instinctively better at economics and philosophy than many so called giants in that field (Sen, Rawls)