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This page gathers in one place snippets, quotations, and paragraphs plucked out while reading through the book The Web of Freedom: J.C.Kumarappa and Gandhi's Struggle for Economic Justice. It is a book which speaks to the economic malaise of our time through exposing the contours of a more rational vision of human society. It was a vision which flowed, as the book puts it, from the close nexus of theory-praxis in the mind of J.C.Kumarappa (1892-1960).
Most will not have the time at hand to devote themselves to familiarise with the book's core. This page intends to at least show how far we, collectively, seem to have deviated from what reason would demand, and importantly, how it is still within us to see the contrast and make some homely amends.
pg. 4
A fundamental characteristic of the modern age is the economic ideology of large-scale industrialization and its socio-political sibilings of growth and development. A corollary to the rise of this view is the precipitous decline of the village in the modern imagination. For technocratic modernists, the Indian village remains a stigmatized site that represents an irredeemable, collective burden. In challenging this view, Kumarappa emerged as a feisty, relentless, and original champion of rural India and its people. He painstakingly applied himself to revivifying the village through a robust, local economy. In the process, Kumarappa presented a searching examination of modern political economy and its implicit assumptions. His work also clarified, through a theory of decentralization, that the Gandhian advocacy of an agrarian economy was not a harkening to a hoary past. Rather, it arose from the need to preserve the essential freeomds of an individual in the face of massive political and economic inequalities in modern societies.
By forging a new idiom for contemporary times, Kumarappa shed light on some of the most fundamental questions that continue to haunt our contemporary social, political, and economic landscape. He made contributions to our understanding on a wide range of economic and political questions, such as the human ecology of industrialization and mass production, the role of machinery and industrial efficiency, the nature of an economic agent, the role of money in the modern economy, economic value, the meaning of work and principles of democracy, as well as concepts such as well-being and standard of living. Similarly, he developed a comprehensive philosphical framework that addressed itself to questions pertaining to social evolution, human nature, value theory, and the place of humands in their larger ecological setting.
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