Rationality and Alienation: Themes from Gandhi

This chapter begins with four broad claims from Gandhi’s moral and political outlook and proceeds to integrate them in an argument that (1) diagnoses the failure of the political Enlightenment to make its own ideals of liberty and equality compatible and then (2) looks to the conceptual resources of more traditional and religious outlooks of both the West and the East for a reconfiguration of our political ideals. In this reconfiguration, the ideal of an ‘unalienated life’ is seen as the most fundamental political ideal and liberty and equality are brought in no longer as central but as merely necessary conditions for this more basic and more human ideal in a way that removes the tension between liberty and equality.