Biographies Short Biography Semblanzas
RAJANI KANTH was trained originally in Social Anthropology at the Delhi School of Economics in New Delhi. He subsequently taught Political Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi , before moving to New York to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research, taking up the formal study of Political Economy. After a brief stint as Advisor to the United Nations, in New York, he returned to the Academy, holding affiliations ,in various capacities, with the State University of New York, the University of Utah, University of Aarhus (Denmark), the University of New South Wales (Australia), the National University of Singapore, Oxford University , and Harvard University, amongst others. He is currently a Professor of Economics (Visiting) at Duke University.
His various published works include Political Economy and Laissez-Faire (1986), Capitalism and Social Theory (1992), Paradigms in Economic Development (1994) , Breaking With the Enlightenment (1997), and Against Economics (1997). His newest work, titled Against Eurocentrism, is currently under Publication Review.
Résumé/ Summary/ Resumen
ECONOMICS AND CIVILISATION:
THE TRANS-ANTHROPIC EPIPHANY OF ETHICS
AND THE IMMANENT CLIMACTERIC OF MODERNISM
Abstract
RAJANI KANTH,
This paper examines the question of the inherent compatibility
of the
'values' secreted by mainstream economics, i.e. the economics of modern
capitalism, or modernism for short, and the parameters of
what may generally be understood as the prerequisites of civilization.
It poses the issue, in terms transcendent, whether ethics in the broadest ,
trans-anthropic sense might not be incompatible with the ontological
premises of so-termed 'rational economic man'.
It also suggests that 'reform' of mainstream economics is not
possible within the paradigm of modernism, given that economics itself
is the hegemonic crown jewel of that ideology, but that ‘economics’
could be made subject again to the hegemony of ethics and moral
philosophy (as in classical times) so that appropriate restraints in the
direction of re-enabling the possibility of civilisation are, after a very
long time, on the agenda once more of post-modernist , non-Eurocentred,
trans-materialist, social discourse.
The corollary of such an effort is the likely, serendipitous, rediscovery of utopia - and the necessary abandonment of the tawdry wares of modernism in both its epistemic and ontic predicates.