Of Certain Dreams
Anchita Ghatak Shahid Smriti is a slum in Calcutta and we – the team from Parichiti – work there with women domestic workers and adolescent girls. The idea of working with girls is to get them to speak out and stand up for their rights. We now meet a group of 18 girls on Mondays and Wednesday every week. On Mondays, trainers from Kolkata Sanved work with the girls on techniques of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT). The idea of DMT is to enable participants understand the joy and power of physical exercise and experience the connectedness between the mind and the body. Different things happen on Wednesday. Maura Hurley of Shikshamitra and her assistant, Jahangir visit Shahid Smriti on alternate Wednesdays with a music system and a boxful of art and craft materials. The idea is to get the girls talking about their lives and also introduce new skills and ideas and have fun while we learn. Of the 18 girls we meet on a regular basis, all but one goes to school and they are between 12 and 18 years old. A few weeks ago, on a Wednesday evening, we had a discussion with a group of 8 girls on why it was important to go to school. “We go to school to learn so that we may realise our dreams,” said a 15 year old. “What are these dreams?” I asked. Two of the girls said that they would like to become police officers. “Why?” I asked. “Don’t you think people in slums have more to lose than gain from the police?” “The police are there to help people,” said Shivani. “We would like to be officers who help people, that is, do what they’re meant to do.” One girl said that being an IPS officer meant that she could do things for people. Quite impressed to find a young girl knowing about ‘IPS officers’ we asked what they knew about the IPS or Indian Police Service. A few of them said that they had heard about ‘IPS officers’ on TV. This was a time when Damayanti Sen, an IPS officer, then Joint Commissioner of the Detective Department, had been in the news for working to get justice for a woman who had complained of rape in what has now gained notoriety as the Park Street rape. The girls, very bright and lively, did not seem to have heard of Damayanti Sen. We learnt that these girls did not read newspapers regularly and neither were they in the habit of listening to the news on TV. We carried on the discussion about ‘dreams’, which focused on career plans that the girls had. It was exciting for us to note that none of the girls said she had no career plans. Two girls said that they wanted to become lawyers, some said they wanted to be teachers, one said that she wanted to become a nurse, another said a doctor. “I love dancing. I want to be a dancer and a teacher,” said 12 year old Puja Baidya, excitedly. In this discussion about the future, we touched on the topic of marriage – a threat, that we in Parichiti feel, hangs over girls in this country. Our experience tells us that despite the fact that the legal age for marriage of girls in India is 18 years, marriage before they attain legal majority is a reality for many girls in India, especially if they belong to poor families. The 2001 Census reported that the average age of marriage of females in India was 18.3 years, yet there is enough evidence to show that a large number of girls get married before they turn 18. The girls in Shahid Smriti said that they were not going to get married before they completed their education. They said that they knew that it was important to get proper education and training if they were to realise their dreams. They spoke of the efforts they were making to bring their friend, Pinky, back to school and books. Pinky is in Class X and had got married some time ago, maybe when she was 14 or 15, to her boyfriend. Her friends were explaining to her that she should continue living with her parents, go back to school and prepare for her Madhyamik exams. As I write this, Pinky is back in school and also participating with her friends in Parichiti activities. It is evident that girls in Shahid Smriti, like in most homes in India, irrespective of class, need an atmosphere that will enable them to speak frankly about sex, sexuality and marriage. A tolerance of sexual experimentation amongst young people will also go a long way in curbing a tendency to run away and get married the moment a young boy and a girl feel attracted to each other. However, all of us know that is easier said than done. The girls in Shahid Smriti are excited about the possibilities their engagement with Parichiti might bring. As we talked about career plans, the girls said that they had seen or met women who were teachers, nurses and doctors. They had never met women who were either lawyers or police officers. Also, they were not very sure what exactly being in certain professions entailed – for example, what was the difference between a doctor and a nurse, what did a lawyer do? We concluded the evening with the decision that Parichiti will organise women from different professions to come for discussions with schoolgoing girls from Shahid Smriti. The girls said that these sessions would enable them to plan their lives. —————————————– Anchita Ghatak is a development professional and a women’s rights activist. She works on issues of poverty, development and rights. She is the Secretary of Parichiti, an organisation working for the rights of marginalised women and girls, especially domestic workers. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Moral Economies of Wellbeing
Supriya Chaudhuri For reasons still unclear to me, I was asked to speak at a research workshop at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, on ‘Moral Economies of Wellbeing’. Neither a historian nor an economist, I was ill-equipped for the exercise. I undertook it in the belief that every individual, however unpracticed in the disciplines of the social sciences, should be possessed of an opinion as to what constitutes a moral economy and what is implied by well-being. It is a part of morality to think about these issues, though it may not add to general profit or wellbeing for me to hold forth on them. My reflections are partial and open to revision. The phrase ‘moral economy’, in the specific context of ‘the moral economy of the poor’, was put into circulation by E. P. Thompson in a famous essay published in Past and Present in 1971. As we know, it was immediately applied to a quite different, non-European setting by James C. Scott in his 1976 book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), and it became one of the principal terms in a still-inconclusive debate about the motives of action in market- and non-market economies, as illustrated in a much-cited article by William Booth, ‘On the Idea of the Moral Economy’ (American Political Science Review, 88 (1994) 653-667). It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that the confidence with which Thompson used the phrase was bred of a conviction both that we would understand what he meant by it in his special historical instance, and what it might mean as a term in ethics. Twenty-one years later, at a conference in the University of Birmingham (1992: see E. P. Thompson in Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority, 2000) Thompson was unable to locate the origin of the term from his notes, but felt convinced that he had coined it as the opposite of ‘market economy’. Yet it had appeared long before, in the title of a book by the American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy, published in 1909. Perry, who later came to be known for his support of the interest theory of value, offers in this early work a largely Aristotelian account of the moral organization of life, an ideal oikonomia based on ethical principles, and upon an idea of justice arising out of the reconciliation of the widest-possible range of interests. It may indeed be suggested that our theme today, the moral economy of wellbeing, is sited in the space between philosophy and economics, between Perry’s philosophical account of the good life, eudaimonia, and Thompson’s social-historical examination of the rationale for a form of economic action, the food riots of eighteenth-centuryEngland. It may be recalled that the controversy around Thompson’s article largely centred on his presumed hostility to the free-market doctrines of Adam Smith, the most important economic theorist of eighteenth-century England, and in fact it is this opposition, between moral economies and market economies, that has largely sustained the debate till the present day. Booth’s article on ‘The Idea of the Moral Economy’, for example, criticizes the notion of ‘embeddedness’ attributed to pre-market economies by Karl Polanyi (in The Great Transformation, 1944), and argues that the principles of contractual exchange in market economies have an equally embedded and moral character. Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness made much of the presumed network of rights and obligations in an agricultural economy where food production and food entitlement, for example, were linked. Booth argued that market economies also have an inbuilt structure of contractual obligations. What is at stake in much of this debate is a certain notion of distributive justice, of justice as fairness: which is why other sections of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice than the one in your reading file (for example, the section on equality and liberty) might have been relevant to this problem. In this respect Sen’s idea of justice owes something to Rawls, whose pupil he was, but it is he who of all modern economic philosophers has attempted most consistently to reconcile justice with happiness. Justice requires, one might say, that a moral economy be directed towards, and be capable of achieving, wellbeing. I will begin by briefly considering some points in the discussion of justice in Book V of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1129b 3-5) that may have a bearing upon market economies. Aristotle is at this place talking about particular justice and injustice, that is, justice exercised as one virtue among others by individuals with respect to goods such as honour, money and safety. Aristotle makes it clear that in such cases, injustice (adikia) is rooted in greed, the desire to have more than others (pleonexia). If one knowingly contrives an unjust distribution out of a motive of gain, one is adikos and pleonektes, and a society ruled by greed and competitiveness is therefore likely to be an unjust society. Yet it as Bernard Williams notes (in Moral Luck, Cambridge UP 1981, 92-93), Aristotle does not sufficiently characterize pleonexia here: it is, we can see, not in itself a motive, but a product of desire for specific goods, such as honour or fame on the one hand, and money or property on the other. Williams finds Aristotle’s identification of injustice with pleonexia inadequate and wrong (‘a mistake, one which dogs Aristotle’s account’), but it is worth our asking whether this brief discussion does not point the way to a deeper understanding of justice as fairness, and of the distribution of goods as key to our perception of a just society. The point is relevant to a contrast between moral economies and market economies, though there is, regrettably, no universally accepted definition of the moral economy. If it is a system in which moral predispositions, norms and habits guide economic choices and behaviours, it could be argued (as by Russell Keat and Andrew Sayer) that
Spinoza, Bayle, Socinians
Russ Leo (Review of Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750. Oxford University Press, 2002. 832 pp. ISBN 978-0199254569. Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. Oxford University Press, 2006. 983 pp. ISBN 978-0199279227) In her study $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), A. Kiarina Kordela reads Jonathan Israel alongside Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt as proponents of “Neo-Spinozism” in contemporary philosophy and political theory. While offering scant praise for this “Neo Spinozist” camp Kordela recognizes Israel’s intervention beyond the field of intellectual history. Of Israel in particular she writes, “To praise Spinoza as the most philosophical force of secular modernity on the ground of arguments such as [in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (2001)] only makes one wonder whether it would have been better to have left him in quasi-anonymity.” In other words, she recognizes the importance of Radical Enlightenment (and subsequently Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (2006)), the extent to which both works argue for a certain modernity as well as a revised history of modernity. Kordela’s treatment of Israel exemplifies the degree to which the concept “Radical Enlightenment” currently enjoys cross-disciplinary vogue. It provides a useful point of entry into Israel’s attempt to retrace the Enlightenment, an attempt that is as much a critique of reigning forms and fantasies of modernity as it is an historical corrective. For Israel, Benedictus de Spinoza is the intellectual progenitor of “the only kind of philosophy which could (and can) coherently integrate and hold together such a far-reaching value condominium in the social, moral, and political spheres, as well as in ‘philosophy’” (EC 867). It is Spinoza and Spinozism which promotes the adoption of secular reason and government, universal toleration and shared equity among all men, personal liberty, freedom of expression, and democratic republicanism. Israel’s vision of modernity, grounded in his reconfigured Enlightenment history, is a polemical statement buttressed by an historical archive – one which critics and philosophers across disciplines, including Kordela, seem interested in recruiting or dispelling. Given the scope of his archive as well as his argument, the appeal of Radical Enlightenment is perhaps unsurprising. In both Radical Enlightenment and its companion text Enlightenment Contested Israel challenges existing approaches to and histories of the Enlightenment based on his identification of a single, coherent and continuous “radical” stream of thought. This radicalism emanates from Spinoza and his Dutch circle during the mid-seventeenth century. Israel takes issue with national histories of the Enlightenment and claims to multiple Enlightenments as well as with unsophisticated and insular histories glorifying later eighteenth-century French and/or English innovations. In their stead he introduces a single history of Enlightenment marked by three competing trends or forces – those of Radical Enlightenment, Moderate Enlightenment, and Anti Enlightenment, all of which are set to work as early as 1650. Radical Enlightenment ideas cut across national, regional and confessional lines as their Spinozism takes shape (much earlier than has been accorded by historians of the Enlightenment) throughout Europe as the most thorough, systematic, and rigorous critique of the “shared core of faith, tradition, and authority” of the Middle Ages and Early Modernity (until around 1650) (RE 3). Illustrating Moderate and Anti-Enlightenment trends, Israel identifies numerous reactionary movements working to stop the torrent of Spinozistic claims and illegal texts. These reactionary movements understand Spinozist claims as anarchic and atheistic innovations that quickly breach the limit of what is necessary to maintain order and morality in a civil (and religious) society. Israel’s is a history where radical philosophers stand at odds not only with absolutism, tyranny, superstition, and intolerance but with an emergent Moderate Enlightenment as well. Here we encounter an apologetic and ultimately conservative philosophical cohort working to reconcile philosophy and reason with faith, including such hallowed figures as Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire. For Catholics, Protestants, monarchs, limited-republicans, humanists, scholastic philosophers, and philosophers of the Moderate Enlightenment alike it is the spread of Spinozism that marks the greatest threat to a well-ordered, pious, and increasingly-rational European world. Israel’s determination of Spinoza and Spinozism first takes shape in Radical Enlightenment. Indeed, detailed investigations of related figures and controversies surround the exegesis of Spinoza’s oeuvre, particularly the 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the posthumously-published 1677 Ethics, and the 1660-1 Korte Verhandeling. Israel’s reading of the Korte Verhandeling in particular supports his crucial claim that Spinoza’s system was essentially determined by 1660 which, in turn, buttresses the underlying claim for Spinoza’s primacy. He introduces such key philosophers as Franciscus Van den Enden, Johan de la Court, Peter Cornelius Plockhoy, Johannes and Adriaen Koerbagh, and Lodewijk Meyer, as well as debates and events concerning early modern science, political theory, and the (unsuccessful) efforts on behalf of Anti- and Moderate Enlightenment forces alike to curb the publication and distribution of radical texts and ideas. Israel’s treatment of Johannes Bredenburg and the so-called “Bredenburg Debates,” of Balthasar Bekker, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontanelle, and the heated disputations over superstition, oracles, and the existence of the devil reveal the degree to which Spinozism and the very name “Spinoza” became watchwords for disruptive or impious challenges to existing beliefs and institutions. This is even the case in controversies where the so-called “Spinozists” act in the name of religion and deny the influence of such a notorious atheist and innovator. This is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the case of Pierre Bayle, a figure who in his conflicting allegiances to the Reformed Church, to Catholicism, and to Spinozism throughout his life comes to exemplify the complex protean tenor of Radical Enlightenment debate and exegesis. Despite his avowed hatred for Spinoza and his declared piety, Bayle’s careful (and lengthy) treatment of Spinozism across his works led contemporary and future readers to suspect the motivation of his philosophical and theological projects. Controversial issues such as tolerance and the stated virtue of atheists led Bayle’s readers to Spinoza in spite of (or, as Israel suggests, in accord with) his declared intentions. Much of the work of Radical Enlightenment – indeed, what makes it an invaluable intervention in the history of Enlightenment thought as well as in the history of religion – lies in Israel’s attention to lesser-known figures and, ultimately, to the lesser-known Dutch context of early modernity. This is