World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 224

uncontrolled and unregulated 'actual man' played havoc. As stated earlier the Christian sins gluttony, pride, selfishness and greed that were disapproved even with Protestant ethics surfaced soon with all possible ugliness. Gandhi visualised the havoc created by this Frankenstein and hence rejected the 'Economic Man' in favour of a 'Moral Man'. Gandhi is advocating ethics precisely for 'this worldly affair' that are economic and visualises man who is self discipline. It is important here to mention that the sant sanskriti to which Mashruwala makes a reference is not religious in the sense of 'other worldly' but it is the attitude towards need for material prosperity and progress for decent survival. In Sant Sanskriti it is Moral Man.
The first premise we need to understand in the sant sanskriti is that the requirement of human beings for survival has to be regulated one. We have to start with the treatment of wants. Why did Gandhi suggest control on wants? He did so because he understood that human wants given the freedom of choice were insatiable. The modern economic thought accepts the insatiability of human demands and then suggests ways and means to deploy resources for production. Edgeworth averred more than a century ago that the first principle of economics was that every agent was actuated only by self-interest. From there arises the maximisation behaviour. It is here that the 'economic man' was born.
This 'economic man' is unacceptable to Gandhi. It is here that he fundamentally differs from the modern economic thought. According to Prof. Ajit Dasgupta, it is Gandhi's conviction that one's behaviour as an economic agent cannot be isolated from one's behaviour as an autonomous moral agent. In this context, Gandhi brings in the concept of self-restraint. Then he talks about limiting one's wants. In his scheme, wants cannot be unlimited and hence they would have to be controlled. Those who have should not be aspiring for more and more. The economic man and the economic society are so defined that one always feels poor, no matter how rich he or she is. The core of this contradiction lies in the consumption and not in production. Let us remember what Marshall, the master craftsman of the consumption theory had to say, "Although it is man's wants in the earliest stages of his development that give rise to his activities, yet afterwards each new step is to be regarded as the development of activities giving rise to new wants rather than of new wants giving rise to new activities". Despite this clear understanding that Marshall displayed with respect to contrived demand dominating the consumer's behaviour, economists continue to accept the thesis of consumer being the most superior. Marshall has not been alone in this. But the great economist Keynes also had realised the problem. "Now it is true that the needs of human beings may be seen to be insatiable. But they fall in two classes: those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation or our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us
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