Tag Archives: Immanuel Kant

De Ambulandum

01 Fri Apr 2016

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Salve, amici! Every visit to the doctor these days seems to come with an exhortation to walk more. In the midst of a global obesity epidemic, the virtues of simple, low-intensity workouts like walking have seen a remarkable comeback, especially for the older among us and those with joint trouble. Walking comes to us almost as naturally as breathing, so naturally, in fact, that we think of it only in its absence – illness – or as a quiet act of solitary rebellion against the mechanisation of society. Whether by sheer numbers or necessity, the present association of walking with health has become so strong that we forget what an important part such a simple activity held in our cultural and intellectual development.

flaneurBefore health concerns came to dominate our physical activity scenario in the post-fast food age, walking was seen as a joyous pastime that promised liberation from the humdrum. The mid- 19th century saw the birth of the flâneur in Paris, the urban stroller who explored boulevards and arcades, parks and cafés. Bourgeois intellectuals sauntered through the city, in imitation of the greats like Honoré de Balzac, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Hessel, observing yet not participating in the ebb and flow of urban life. Walter Benjamin writes that it was fashionable to take turtles for walks in the 1840s; the chelonians would set the pace for the flâneurs.

The act of walking was at once of observing and being observed. It was an economic statement – that one could afford the idle luxury of a jaunt – as well as a cultural one, taking a bird’s eye view of city life, micro-history, and fashion; the city was a book to be read by walking. In the transience of walking was found a solitude of the crowded street, a detachment amidst the throngs, as Søren Kierkegaard sought in Copenhagen, and Immanuel Kant in Königsberg before him.

The urban walker, however, has been a bit of an endangered species in modern times. Whether due to the Stürm und Drang intellectuals, the Romantics, or some other intellectual movement, the spirit of the age as been to wander in the wilderness. Civilisation was to be found in pristine nature rather than the trinkets of man. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was among the first who turned an intellectual gaze upon the humdrum activity of walking, according it the status of a conscious activity and ascribing significance to walking for its own sake. Until then, walking had certainly been held in high regard but rarely in isolation. Rousseau came at the beginning of an intellectually turbulent, uncertain time, and after him, the next century and a half turned his less-travelled path into a well-worn road – GWF Hegel, Edmund Husserl, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Frank O’Hara, and others added theories or anecdotes to the reflection upon walking.

Nature was the venue for these philosophes, away from the din and smog of the rapidly modernising cities of Europe and America. Clean air, unpredictable breaks in the horizon, solitude, and the slow rhythmic pace were thought to rejuvenate mind and soul as the increasing popularity of Alpine resorts declared. There is surely something to the persistent claim that the bodily rhythms of walking somehow correspond to mental processes; think, for example, of how Jews shukel while learning the Torah or during tefillah. Perambulatory mechanics serve a similar purpose, though on a significantly more expansive scale and in pursuit of secular perspicacity.

Walking was seen as a deeply meditative practice perhaps marginally inferior to reading; to walk was to wander in the mind as much as on land, as to read was to journey in the mind and on the page. For some, like Woolf, walking activated melancholy and gloom while others, like Thoreau, found their muse in their rhythmic steps. To walk was to unchain the mind from the strictures of convention to let it revel in the barely plausible. As the activity of philosophers and poets, walking was seen as an eminently intellectual pursuit rather than physical exercise. Walking was clearly associated with health as it is today, but it was more of a psychological, perhaps even spiritual, tonic rather than a physical one.

Before the philosophers came the pilgrims. In the Middle Ages, walking was the subject of poets, and pilgrimage was one of the fundamental forms walking could take. The view was neither physical exercise nor intellectual stimulation, but a quest for self-transformation as much of the literature of the era, from Geoffrey Chaucer to John Bunyan, from Dante Alighieri to Thomas Malory, and from Miguel de Cervantes to John Milton, reveals. Whether it is Virgil and Beatrice guiding Dante, Christian, or Persiles, the journey – walk – itself is central to the narrative and the protagonists are passively passing through.

The sanctity of a pilgrimage had diminished considerably by the 15th century as pilgrims had become notorious for their chicanery and hence objects of mockery and suspicion. This is at the root of the subtle ridicule  Chaucer, Cervantes and others expose their bawdy and playful protagonists to. However, in the early Middle Ages, pilgrimages were difficult and fraught with danger, truly an act of penance.

Yet it was only in the Greco-Roman world that walking was not just a show, an intellective lubricant, or exercise but a marker of civilisation and even divinity. Of course, walking was all those other things too but it was much more. In his Geographica, the Greek geographer narrates an anecdote about an early interaction between the Romans and the Vettonians, a local Iberian tribe. Upon seeing a couple of Roman generals out for a stroll between the tents, the Vettonians were puzzled and tried to lead them into comfortable seating quarters since they thought that one should remain seated if not engaged in some utilitarian task. This is amusing to Strabo because the “barbarians'” response betrays their lack of culture. So strong is this view that it lasted even until the Age of Empire when the imperial portrayal of Orientals as indolent implied their inferiority on the civilisational scale.

To Romans, walking was a profoundly social activity; to be seen strolling with someone marked him as a good friend. The assumption of a constant audience made even the smallest of acts markers of identity and character. Though Cicero accepts the contemplative aspects of walking in De Officiis, he makes it clear in his letters to Atticus (Epistulae ad Atticum) what the true importance of walking was – company and conversation as a symbol of friendship. In fact, it is rare to find flâneurs in Latin literature.

woman who walksHow one walks was also very important to Romans – one’s gait was a mirror to one’s mind and character. A remarkable sample of the value of one’s gait is seen in Book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid, when a young Aeneas asks his father about the character of several heroes as they walk through the city. Earlier in the Aeneid, when Aeneas and Achates have been shipwrecked and separated from their men, they chance upon a strange woman – the goddess Venus, incognito – who tells them the story of the land they have found and its queen. Virgil writes, “…et vera incessu patuit dea” (and the goddess was revealed by the way she walked). Iris is similarly revealed in Book Five of the Aeneid when she appears in disguise to urge the Trojan women to burn their ships.

The intense focus on gaits meant that considerable effort was spent in teaching the children of the elites how to walk properly. The delicious paradox is that the gait was considered a natural indicator of character and here were the elites, training to be natural! Men walked differently from women, slaves from free men. Within the polis,  elite Romans inevitably walked in groups; just two noblemen with their bodyguards was enough to comprise a small group, and the companion and the guards indicated wealth, status, and ties.

Unlike the Romantics, the Greco-Roman world was also quite hostile to walking in nature. A telling exchange can be found in Plato’s Phaedrus, when the eponymous protagonist tries to urge Socrates out of the city walls. The Greek philosopher replies, “You’ll have to forgive me, my friend. I’m an intellectual, you see, and country places with their trees tend to have nothing to teach me, whereas people in town do.” Of course, the Peripatetic philosophers are the more commonly known example of this attitude; Aristotle believed that to leave the polis would be the act of either a god, unmoved by wild nature, or a beast. Seneca, however, reveals an ambiguity in the Roman mind towards nature in his De Tranquillitate Animi: they are at once interested in it and yet have a negative opinion of it.

So next time you go for a walk, remember – you are not only going to get some exercise but also to contemplate, meditate, display yourself, and participate in an act of civilisation. Go ahead, reveal the divinity in you!

Until next time, stammi bene.

This article first appeared in the April 2016 print edition of Swarajya as part of the column, Sprezzatura.

The Footballer

16 Sat Jan 2016

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Kissinger - The IdealistFerguson, Niall. Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. 1008 pp.

Le uova non hanno ballare affari con pietre (Eggs have no business dancing with stones) – Sicilian proverb

There are three things going for Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (henceforth The Idealist). The first is that the author, Niall Ferguson, has a felicity with words that is rare among academics. As anyone who has read the two-volume The House of Rothschild or The Cash Nexus can attest, Ferguson survived the systematic excoriation in graduate school that transforms the Queen’s English into dense, jargon-laden, and self-absorbed prose. The Idealist, for all its impressive archival and primary source research, remains a book for the general public and is not an impenetrable tract that only a few specialists will relish.

This leads to the second thing, that it is a biography – that too an authorised one – of “the most revered and reviled man” in international politics since Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Kissinger. It is bound to attract more than the average Kissingerologist, be he an academic, journalist, activist, or quack. The third reason is, of course, the highly provocative assertion in the subtitle that Kissinger, universally seen as a ruthless and amoral arch-realist, the 20th century incarnation of Niccolò Machiavelli, is an idealist. This clever bait-and-switch, either by the publisher or the author, is, however, explicitly confessed in the introduction itself – what Ferguson actually means to argue is that his subject is an idealist of the Kantian variety, not the more commonly understood Wilsonian mould.

What is a Kantian idealist? Fundamentally, this is an epistemological inquiry that lays out a framework of what one can and cannot know, and the relationship between the subject and the object of inquiry. In Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Immanuel Kant argued that the world appears to us as we see it without implying any sort of truth claim about objects in it as they truly are, or ding-an-sich as the German philosopher put it. Kant was certainly not the first to postulate this – strands of this kind of thinking goes back to the pre-Socratics and can also be found in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. How this affected Kissinger, which is what is important to our story, is in his rejection of materialist theories of capitalist – or socialist – superiority. For the young Kissinger, the Cold War was not a competition over who had more nuclear warheads, missiles, or submarines; those were, without doubt, the tools but the struggle was over something far greater – the idea of freedom. It was this positive message that would win the world over to the West better than any short-term inducement of economic or military aid, Kissinger believed.

There are two points of clarification here. The first is that Kantian or transcendental idealism can lead to empirical realism: though we may not know the true nature of objects, we may still know them as they appear to us. This is not the beginning of some radical subjectivity as Kant argues that all rational beings share an objective knowledge of the rational world that is derived from logical inferences about basic categories. There is, to use Kant’s words, a transzendentale Einheit der Apperzeption, or a transcendental unity of apperception without which it would be difficult to postulate a categorical imperative. Simply put, the young Kissinger could well have been a functional realist even as he was moved by Kantian idealism. This is the line between Kissinger the thinker and Kissinger the actor, a discontinuity that will only grow in the second volume of the biography as the German-Jewish émigré moves office into the most political square footage in the world.

The second point is that the overwhelming use of realism in opposition to (Wilsonian) idealism creates a situation ripe for misunderstanding, something the author himself teeters on at certain points in his tome. Ferguson contrasts the high-minded Kissinger with the technocratic and pragmatic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson who sought to win the Cold War not by championing the West’s ethical values but by pushing the utilitarian benefits of modern American industrial modernity. This mistakes the tools with which the Cold War was fought for the reasons it was fought; Kennedy and Johnson may not have had a greater moral mission – the Anglo Saxon fetish for empiricism ran particularly strong in that era – but this hypothesis is merely stated and not proven.

Ferguson has a nuanced treatment of idealism but he is less clear on what he means by realism. He mentions it only in passing, and that too in opposition to Wilsonian idealism. This is a facile treatment of realism, a school of thought that has become ever more refined since the end of the Second World War. Despite its several offshoots – classical realism, liberal realism, neorealism, offensive realism, defensive realism, and more – its core assumptions remain the same: that states are the most important actors on the world stage, they are rational, unitary, competitive, and driven by self-interest. Raisons d’état may be pursued by a variety of means, not excluding propaganda and other means of what is today called soft power. These non-military and non-economic methods of winning allies and influencing neutrals, in essence, propagate a moral framework which undergirds the greater struggle of the Cold War. Given the enormous efforts of the United States Information Agency in France, Italy, Scandinavia, India, and other countries, Ferguson’s binary of Kissinger as the moral Cold Warrior and the US leadership as amoral politicians is uncharitable. Realism need not be amoral – the lack of faith in other people, to view one’s fellow man as moved – if not driven – by self-interest is not amoral. In other words, Ferguson might consider if it is perfectly possible for Kissinger to have moral considerations and yet be a realist.

Despite an interesting yet eventually unconvincing central theme, the beauty of The Idealist is in the vast amount of information it provides on its subject. Ferguson keeps his word – he promises a bildungsroman wie es eigentlich gewesen (as it actually was – Leopold von Ranke’s conception of how history should be written) at the outset and does not disappoint. In keeping with Ranke’s advice, Ferguson allows the data to speak for itself as much as possible without lending his own voice at every turn. When writing a biography, it is important that the author not get too close to his subject; rather than judge, he must present the world the subject inhabited with all its choices and limitations. Ferguson does this admirably well – the wealth of archives, obscure collections of private papers, and interviews that went into producing this book – 111 archives worldwide and 37,645 pages of documents, we are told – itself makes it a worthwhile addition to one’s bookshelf.

Born Heinz Kissinger on May 27, 1923, to an Orthodox Jewish schoolteacher in Fürth, a small town barely seven kilometres northwest of Nürnberg in the German province of Bavaria, the future American secretary of state was an average student who loved football. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, the Kissingers were fortunate to have family already in the United States that was willing to sponsor them. Kissinger was barely 15, old enough to feel the persecution and hatred but not yet mature enough to understand why. In several interviews, the nonagenarian has rejected being a child of Weimar, downplaying the psychological impact of persecution and flight.

Kissinger returned to his hometown barely six years later in an American military uniform, and though the Kissinger clan had been culled by at least 30 members, he showed surprising equanimity, especially considering his age, and bore no ill will against the Germans. This is after his unit in the 84th Infantry Division had been part of the liberation of two satellite concentration camps of Neuengamme at Ahlem and Salzwedel and he understood full well just how his family might have perished. As he wrote to his father, “You, dear father, say: be tough to the Germans… I say be tough, yes. But show them also why you are tough. Prove to them that you are here in Germany because you are better, not that you are better because you are here. Be fair in your decision, be ruthless in your execution. Lose no opportunity to prove by word and deed the virility of our ideals.”

Kissinger has never made much of his military service though records show that he earned a Bronze Star; after the war, he was put in charge of de-Nazification efforts in Krefeld owing to his fluent German and passable French. Contrary to common belief, he did not reinstate former Nazis to their positions in the interest of efficient administration; in fact, it was US policy to gradually slow down and abandon de-Nazification. He was excellent at his job, earning promotions all the way to sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps before he returned to the United States.

One of the greatest influences on Kissinger in his formative years had been Fritz Krämer, the Mephistopheles to Kissinger’s Faust, as Ferguson describes. Krämer was also a German-Jewish refugee like Kissinger but 15 years his senior, and the two met at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, where Kissinger had been stationed for training. He met the second great influence in his graduate advisor, William Yandel Elliott III, at Harvard University, which Kissinger attended on the GI Bill and wrote that famed 388-page senior thesis that his undergraduate advisor, Carl Friedrich, refused to read past page 150. Kissinger’s dissertation, published as A World Restored, has been misunderstood, Ferguson argues, as in praise of Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich when in fact the real hero of the work was British foreign secretary Robert Stewart, more popularly known as Lord Castlereagh. On this, Ferguson’s case is compelling and it is worth revisiting A World Restored.

The Idealist takes us through Kissinger’s career until 1968. His frustration at the difficulty in being heard in the corridors of power, his failure to secure a tenure-track position – the Holy Grail of academia – at Harvard, and the stupendous success of his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957 that at once made him a known figure. In it, Kissinger proposed the radical idea that nuclear wars could be fought, that they could remain small and localised for surely the Soviets would have the sense to distinguish between a strike on an armoured division in an open field from the annihilation of Moscow. In a world ensconced in MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction – Kissinger’s proposal was indeed radical. Nonetheless, MAD seemed a bluff to the young assistant professor from Harvard, and a particularly bad one at that. The biographer disagrees with the biographee on limited nuclear war and it is also clear that Kissinger was out of his depth then on nuclear strategy, considering a 500-kT nuclear device a small, tactical weapon!

Kissinger would advise the Kennedy and Johnson administrations but never get close to power himself. Partly, this was because he was seen as the Republican Nelson Rockefeller’s man, having supported his presidential bid in 1960, 1964, and 1968. It was also because the National Security Adviser and his one-time mentor from Harvard, McGeorge Bundy, repeatedly blocked him from access to the president. Kissinger’s perseverance is obvious, and he would remain close to government circles despite his unworthiness among “the best and the brightest.” Ferguson describes Kissinger’s positions on some of the key issues that occupied the United States in the 1960s – Berlin, the Multi Lateral Force, the Vietnam War, German reunification, Ostpolitik, China – all the while arguing for Kissinger’s idealism. It is only with his experience in the negotiations on bringing peace to Indochina that realism first posed a serious challenge to Kissinger’s idealism, setting the stage for the sequel to The Idealist to be called, The Realist.

Ironic in hindsight, when news got out that Nixon had appointed Kissinger as his National Security Advisor despite the latter’s campaign on behalf of the former’s rival, there was general satisfaction that the right man had been chosen for the job. The American public would soon change its mind though his popularity – his high-flying social life and his dark humour – would keep them enchanted for at least another five years.

It is intriguing why Kissinger, were he so Machiavellian a realist, would back a losing horse thrice for the Republican nomination for president. Was he that clueless about American politics, or was it that he simply supported whom he believed to be the best man for the job? Although Ferguson holds this up as another indication of Kissinger’s idealism, the biography has no satisfying answer to offer either way.

Kissinger’s unyielding position on compromise over Berlin, in contrast with his willingness to abandon Vietnam, may also give an insight into the professor’s world view. Kissinger has always been the oddball in US politics, fitting in none of their four broad schools of thought – Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, or Wilsonian. At his core, despite the external trappings of an American education, Kissinger was still European in outlook. His countenance of an independent European nuclear deterrent – anathema to the White House – and hostility to Ostpolitik also lends weight to this suspicion. In fact, it might even be worth exploring if Kissinger was not a European realist rather than a Kantian idealist. His ease in relating to Europe’s pre-eminent realpolitikers like Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer over the state of Berlin, the future of China, and nuclear strategy is worth noting. In a 1963 article in Foreign Affairs, the future secretary of state described their thinking as: “their reality is their concept of the future or of the structure of the world they wish to bring about.”

Some might fault Ferguson for not covering in greater detail some of the events of the Cold War that transpired between 1951 when Kissinger set up the Harvard International Seminar and 1968 when he accepted Richard Nixon’s offer to become the NSA. However, The Idealist is ultimately a biography of Henry Kissinger and not a textbook of Cold War history – at 1,008 pages, perhaps Ferguson can be let off the hook for not being sufficiently thorough.

There are a couple of other burrs – putting the blame on India’s Forward Policy for the Chinese invasion of 1962, for example, or holding North Vietnam solely responsible for the failure of talks in 1967/68 – that will irritate the specialist but as Ferguson confesses, he is no Cold War historian and it would be a particularly persnickety reviewer who holds that alone against a generally excellent work.

Ferguson’s cursory dismissal of most of Kissinger’s critics might also be found unconvincing. However, the author makes a powerful case that by the ethical standards even middle-of-the-road critics of Kissinger want to impose, several senior US officials who have served before and after Kissinger ought to be in the docks right alongside him. Yet it is only Kissinger who is at the brunt of all the ire.

Kissinger’s own point about blame is also interesting – historians study what happened but it is equally important to understand what did not happen or what could have happened to obtain a full picture of the choices and limitations of office bearers. Yet that which did not happen does not leave a trail as rich as that which did; in mining only the latter, scholars sometimes completely miss the zeitgeist.

This biography has evinced interest for one other reason: Kissinger sought out this author. Admittedly, the offer had first gone to another British historian, Andrew Roberts, but he turned it down for personal reasons and Ferguson was seduced by the promise of new documents – at least 145 boxes of them. As is the question with any authorised biography, how independent was the author? And as is the answer each time, completely! In this case, it might even be true. Ferguson’s portrait of Kissinger in the first half of his life is neither flattering nor admiring; the subject was a man of substantial achievement and that would be hard to hide. Furthermore, it is equally dishonest to be harsher to your subject in the hope of appearing impartial before your peers and readers.

Kissinger has been called many things, even if we stick to the polite epithets. Jussi Hanhimäki called him a flawed architect in his 2004 publication, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. It was soon after this that a friend of mine went to visit Kissinger and in the course of the conversation, the topic came to Hanhimäki’s work. “You know,” my friend said, “perhaps a more useful way to look at you is as a footballer.”

“How so?” Henry wanted to know.

“Well,” continued my friend, “in football, you have a clear goal…but the situation is very dynamic. And in heading towards that goal, you may pass, dribble, foul, get fouled, fall back, surge… But none of it changes the goal.”

In his deep German-accented voice, Henry said, “I like that.”

Riflessioni: Is Welfare a Right?

06 Sat Oct 2012

Posted by in India, South Asia, Theory & Philosophy

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There has been, in some sections of society, a backlash against the “Liberal” idea of rights. Pointing to the moral decay of the times, some conservatives argue that the notion of rights without duties is fundamentally responsible for the proliferation of insouciance, selfishness, and entitlement that we see. Furthermore, they bemoan the encroachment of the law into arenas they feel should be left within the purview of traditional institutions such as the family, religious organisation, or the social web. The root of this malady of the times, conservatives argue, is the cult of individualism. Placing the individual above all else – family, clan, tribe, community – tears the moral fabric of (traditional) society.

The confusion over what rights entail is the result of much Leftist loose talk. The rush by every imaginable group to claim rights (and sometimes victimhood) for themselves has only caused much confusion about this issue. Rights are claimed on behalf of everything from the state to one’s one pet idiosyncrasies – state’s rights, individual rights, human rights, animal rights, gay rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, the right to life, the right to education, the right to self-defence, the right to health, the right to free expression, the right to privacy, the right to legal redress… the list is endless. To make any sense of all this, it is necessary to elucidate the different kinds of rights, whence they are derived, and how they stand with respect to each other.

Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most important modern philosopher, sets the groundwork for a theory of rights in his famous Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. According to Kant, there is only one innate right, and that is the right to freedom. This right is not an a priori position, but is in fact based on the observation that every person is born with free will. This Will may, in due course, be bound by obligations and influenced by peripheral factors, but a person may choose to, has the freedom to, disregard his or her obligations and other desires. This freedom of Will is important because, without it, there can be no morality – how is one responsible for, in Kant’s example, theft, if one has no choice to commit or desist from it?

As Kant further explained, a right does not indicate any relation between one’s action and another’s desire; thus, acts of kindness or benevolence (or their inverse) may be morally desirable (or not) but cannot be coercively extracted from or prohibited to an individual. “Equity (aequitas),” Kant says, “does not properly constitute a claim upon the moral duty of benevolence or beneficence on the part of others.” However, it must be remembered that the focus of this understanding of equality and rights is the individual, not the state.

In Kant’s worldview, the state is a web of juridical rights; in that sense, legislated rights are purely relational and thus below innate rights. A person’s claim to some property would, theoretically, deny the freedom of others to claim the same property. Therefore, rights over the property in question are agreed upon through a civil legislative system. Property rights are thus considered acquired rights and not innate rights as freedom is. While both are relational – it makes no sense to claim freedom if you are the only person around – the innate right of freedom derives from an intrinsic quality of the person whereas acquired property rights are derived from the state’s power to ratify economic transactions.

A third category of “right” is constituted by what might be better understood as privilege. This is a right that is extended to a person but need not be. For example, one would be allowed into Via di Santa Susanna while one is an employee of the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna (AISE) but not after terminating employment. Or on a more informal level, I might allow you to borrow one of my books, but that does not imply your right to my books.

Now, let us turn to India, for it makes an interesting case study for welfare rights. The ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has instituted schemes and is investigating others that would extend a broad umbrella of welfare rights over India’s teeming millions. This welfare umbrella constitutes the alleged rights to food, education, health, and employment, coming at a cost that is bound to cripple the economy. How are we to understand this new system of handouts?

To begin with, we observe that Kant would have advocated these schemes, if not between individuals (duty cannot be legislated), then certainly between the state and the individual. Yet the matter is not so simple; Kant lived in an era of monarchies when the King was supposed to be a paternal figure, taking care of the needy in his kingdom. His Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten was published in 1785, four years before the French Revolution. Europe’s monarchies, though they had evolved with the continent’s turbulence, remained a mai-baap raj when Kant wrote that the state had a right to tax its more affluent subjects (can we really speak of citizens then?) to provide for the less fortunate ones. The new economy of world capitalism had yet to transfigure the world, transferring power out of the hands of kings and emperors and into the hands of traders, merchants, and bankers. Yet Kant also warns that “the principle of happiness…has ill effects in political right just as in morality, however good the intentions of those who teach it,” and reminds us that “if the supreme power makes laws which are primarily directed towards happiness, this cannot be regarded as the end for which a civil constitution was established.”

Any redistributive scheme appropriates funds from the more affluent to provide services for the less affluent with the state as the intermediary. This redistribution, labelled by populist politicians as a right, is not based on any commensurate exchange but is marketed as a public measure of goodness of those advocating such policies. The notion that the state is a contract between similar-minded people to govern cannot be given infinite latitude as, by that logic, that tyranny of the majority can easily be channelled towards expropriation of wealth from the affluent, subjugation of undesirables, and worse, elimination of the unprotected. As we see from this example, that a state has the power to act in a certain way or even that the right to act in a given manner has been granted it by the people does not make in itself make an action moral. State action in such a case is proof of might, not right.

For John Stuart Mill, labour was the basis of property. Since, money has become the universal instrument of commerce. Welfare schemes deal in the transfer of goods and services but involve no bilateral transaction of value. At best, this can be termed charity, and at worst, theft. Yet there is no choice in participating in this charity; the state taxes its citizens and redistributes the monies as it sees fit, based upon criteria it has drawn up. Such an exchange – let us generously call it charity – falls within the moral realm and not a juridical one. Kant argues that though charity is a noble act and perhaps even moral (according to his three formulations of the categorical imperative), it should not be upheld as a universal principle. As Kant explains,

For a will that resolved in this way would contradict itself, inasmuch as cases might often arise in which one would have need of the love and sympathy of others and in which he would deprive himself, by such a law of nature springing from his own will, of all hope of the aid he wants for himself.

WN Hohfeld, the famous American jurist, posited that every kind of right creates a corresponding obligation on someone else. For example, my claim to a piece of land creates an obligation on everyone else’s part of non-interference in that property. My liberty to build a house on the land or cultivate a large vegetable garden creates a corresponding absence of inconsistent claims from others. If I hire someone to work my garden, I have an authority right over my employee, and in some countries, agricultural income is tax-free and my income from the garden has immunity from the income tax collector. In the case of welfare, a moral claim, there ought to be a corresponding moral duty. What is this duty upon the recipient of the society’s largesse? This is an oft-unanswered question in government welfare schemes. On a side note, while all have heard of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian constitution, how many have heard of the fundamental duties?

Let a critique of the loose language of rights not be mistaken for a lack of empathy. It is natural for humans to feel for others in dire straits – the old schoolteacher on the verge of being evicted from his rented apartment, the maidservant who can’t afford the medical bills of her crippled young daughter, a war veteran reduced to begging in his later years. Few would argue over subsistence allowances from the state to such chronic cases. However, locating such cases, monitoring them, and disbursing assistance to them enlarges the role of the state (and consequently the bureaucracy) in private affairs. What would perhaps serve society better is encouragement of private philanthropy and employer pension plans indexed to inflation. Furthermore, the (Indian) state can instead focus on job growth by unshackling the manufacturing industry and encouraging trades and crafts in local communities. Education loans and scholarships could be made available for only the economically disadvantaged who are capable. Microlending should be introduced to provide initial support to local entrepreneurs. All these tiny measures and more will build on local skills and answer local needs better than any centralised bureaucracy rife with corrupt officials ever can.

The development of trades will enhance cottage industries and hopefully raise families to subsistence levels, while industrial jobs in manufacturing will provide additional jobs. Such “welfare” schemes will help individuals and communities stand on their own feet far more easily than making them dependent on regular handouts. Furthermore, it will boost local economies and contribute to general national growth rather than sap the nation’s economic health as the UPA’s schemes have done so far. The argument against the Left’s irresponsible, parasitic, and destabilising welfare plans is not an abolishment of welfare but a large shift to “productive welfare.” This shift cannot be complete as there will inevitably be those who are genuinely disabled by age and/or illness, but it will get a vast majority of people off the dole. Most importantly, it is essential to challenge the loose talk that welfare is a right (particularly one without a corresponding duty) – it is a privilege, and hopefully a temporary one.