Anthony Parel did significant work on Machiavelli before becoming a leading specialist in Mahatma Gandhi's political philosophy. His Gandhi scholarship includes his edited version of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj and Other Writings and his book Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony.Footnote 1 Pax Gandhiana is well written, meticulously documented with Gandhi's writings, forcefully argued, and a challenge and alternative to most of the vast Gandhi literature.
Pax Gandhiana consists of nine chapters. Several are previous publications, and most are reformulations of earlier writings. All together, they present an overview of Parel's career as a distinguished scholar of Gandhi's political philosophy. After an introductory chapter and a chapter on Gandhi's conceptual framework, the next five chapters focus on Gandhi's approach to the political end of life, with the last two chapters focusing on how Gandhi's political philosophy relates to the arts and to the influence of Thoreau.
This book is informed and structured by two major claims. First, Parel claims that Gandhi's most original and significant contribution to India and to the world is his political philosophy. Parel's focus is on Gandhi as a political philosopher, with Gandhi's focus on the life goal of artha (the political and the economic). Second, he claims that the key to understanding Gandhi's philosophy of life is his conceptual framework of the traditional Indian view of the four purushastras (the ends of life): artha (political power, wealth); kama (sexual desire, pleasure, the aesthetic); dharma (duty, the ethical); and moksha (spiritual liberation from cycles of rebirth).
Emphasizing artha, Parel correctly analyzes how Gandhi challenges much of the dominant Indian tradition. Gandhi does not embrace a sannyasi’s hierarchical view of renunciation, in which the political is treated negatively and the moral and spiritual person frees oneself from political and economic concerns. Not only does Parel's claim of the primacy of the political challenge positions of many Indian philosophers, Gandhi supporters, and critics, but he also distinguishes what he takes to be a fundamentally Indian Gandhian political philosophy from the motivations and ends of dominant, modern, Western political philosophy.
The key to understanding Gandhi and his political philosophy is his understanding of the confluence, positive interactions, harmonious relations, and coordination of the four canonical ends of life. Parel is correct in emphasizing that Gandhi offers an organic, holistic, and interconnected approach and, unlike many others, in contending that Gandhi embraces an underlying, unifying, and conceptual philosophical framework.
What is most controversial and unconvincing to this reviewer is the fact that Parel goes beyond these claims to argue that he is presenting Gandhi's own framework, Gandhi's own words, and Gandhi's own understanding. Only he presents the true Gandhi. Other approaches may have limited value or no value, but they are repeatedly dismissed as not Gandhi and his true political philosophy and conceptual framework.
Without providing Parel's detailed analysis or my evaluations, here are a few of Parel's major controversial claims about the true Gandhi that are often insightful but may reveal more about Parel's approach than a completely adequate formulation of Gandhi. Artha necessarily consists of the realistic recognition of our ego-oriented self-interest; violence; and desire for political power, profit, and wealth. That is why it must interact with other ends that temper it with some sense of cooperation, duty, and concern for the well-being of others. What Gandhi advocates is a reformed view of capitalism. What he wants is “to cure some of the pathologies of capitalism” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (pp. 113–14). It is clear that he was not promoting socialism, that he recognizes “the sanctity of the right to private property” (p. 123), and that his political and economic philosophy is expressed today in India in the work of NGOs and many wealthy capitalists. Gandhi's political swaraj, which is clearly distinguished from individual private swaraj (self-rule), was achieved by India in 1947. This achieved political swaraj is expressed as a limited, constitutional, and liberal republic with the need for a coercive state and based on the consent of the governed with an inclusive, pluralistic, and democratic civic nationalism.
Although no scholar can ignore the primacy of ahimsa (nonviolence) in Gandhi's life and writings, compared with most other scholars (and Gandhi, I would submit), Parel deemphasizes and often marginalizes Gandhi's focus on nonviolence. Nonviolence is only one of eleven civic virtues. Nonviolence is only a means to swaraj. Gandhi finally recognizes limited pragmatic “nonviolence as a policy” as appropriate for living in this world and for a realistic political philosophy, as contrasted with “nonviolence as a creed,” which is a “purely private virtue” and “virtually the nonviolence of the monk” (pp. 94, 97).
With few exceptions, Pax Gandhiana is Parel's interpretation and justification of his particular view that he understands the true, remarkable Gandhi, with almost no criticisms of how Gandhi was remarkable but also flawed and of how we are engaged in a process of selective and creative formulations and applications of Gandhi's philosophy and practices today. For me, the above controversial claims, and many others, are contradicted by thousands of passages in Gandhi's writings that Parel selectively devalues or completely ignores. On the other hand, a strength of Pax Gandhiana arises from the fact that Parel is so sure that he is presenting the exclusive “real Gandhi” with his dramatic claims. He challenges us to reconsider key contributions of Gandhi's political philosophy and some aspects of his conceptual framework that are usually ignored.
