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lisation and increasing criminalization and impersonalization in the spheres of social relationships of man. At the personal level also, a sense of meaninglessness or purposelessness of life has started grow. ing out of proportions which is not merely a cost of progress, as was generally conceived by the positivist social scientists, but symptoma. tic of some serious lacunae endemic in our perception and construction of social reality.
The present paper aims at highlighting this issue with reference to the prevelant notion of social development which is a predominan. tly hedonistic-econocentric concept of technoeconomic growth. Generally sociologists who venture to make a swing in sociologizing this 'econocentrism' also generally land on the institutionalisticcollectivistic dimension of social reality which is another version of 'econocentrism' for they have no other alternative model of human development' except the econocentric-hedonistic one. They almost forget to look to the undercurrent of human consciousness-a phenomena constituting the most vital and key component of the tota lity of human reality. The image of man in sociology has by and large suffered from an excessive preoccupation with sociocentrism; this needs a serious review and a re-orientations so as to envisage man as a concrete human being central to all social concerns. James Degenais draws our attention to the fact that the origi gramme of sociology which was initiated to cure the evils of society caused to men gradually turned into the task of curing the "evils” which men caused to the society. This inversion of the original approach of sociology is a natural out-come of the mechanomorphic view of man nature and society and needs a new approach to revitalize the humanistic perception of reality and to formulate a suitable concept of social development capable of having insight into the future course of history also. With a view to conceiving of man in his existential totality and social development as a concomitant process ot' societal change commensurate with the growth of man's authentic subjectivity, this paper seeks to highlight the need for an integral perspective where the concept of man and the concept of development could be appropriately synthesized and articulated.
In this perspective instead of conceiving man as a one dimensional horizontal being, we could conceive him as being endowed with two important dimension of his being, viz, to use Hannah Arendt'sa phraseology, "vita-activa" and "vitacontemplativa". While the vita-activa or the horizontal dimension relates and commits man to worldly activities or the praxiological dimension, the ytta-contemplativa sees him with-drawn from the field of action in the aspect of becoming, in the contemplative or the centroverted aspect of his
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