Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
1-3-2009
Abstract
To Uphold the World carries a Foreword by Amartya Sen, and also engages seriously with his writing, together with Martha Nussbaum, on human capabilities. Rich is similarly engaged with the progressive ideas of Karl Polanyi, Manuel Castells, Vaclav Havel, Joseph Stiglitz and a number of other contemporary thinkers and theorists, including Hardt and Negri. Gandhi too is an obvious choice, for a book about the revival of ethical and ecological thinking within a framework of civilisation, globalisation and cosmopolitanism. The Dalai Lama provides an encouraging and appreciative Afterword. The ethico-political categories available in India, from niti and dharma to dhamma and ahimsa, from artha and kama to satya and karuna, have a fascinating history that is always rewarding to revisit. Rich writes with ease, so that the complex statecraft laid out in Kautilya’s text and the conflicted personality of Ashoka shine through his accounts, as though 2,300 years had not passed since these men founded a tradition of political thought for the subcontinent.
Recommended Citation
Vajpeyi, Ananya, "Edicts for the Ages" (2009). History Faculty Publication Series. 4.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/history_faculty_pubs/4
Comments
First published in Economic & Political Weekly on January 3, 2009: http://epw.in.