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Human Needs and Freedom: Three Contrasting Perceptions and Perspectives

Discussions on human needs assume, even when not explicitly stated, certain ontological, historical and anthropological perspectives, and they often represent a mix of normative and empirical elements. Moreover, such discussions often ignore or sidetrack the linkages of need-satisfaction with larger issues such as freedom, social justice and ecological balance. These linkages point to the necessity of establishing harmony between man, society and nature. This paper deals with how these linkages have been perceived in three streams of thinking, Liberalism, Marxism and Gandhism. Believing in the idea of linear progress, the Liberals (excepting J. S. Mill) and Marx did not recognize that unrestrained proliferation of needs was subject to limits to growth, depletion of natural resources and degradation of natural environment. Marx believed that the process of need-satisfaction mediating between Man as subject and Nature as object releases the dormant, creative capacities of human beings. Marx therefore stood for large-scale industrial production as necessary for human need-satisfaction. He saw dehumanization and alienation as the consequence, not of industrialization, but of a disjunction between the forces of production and the relations of production, which is the characteristic of capitalism and which will disappear in socialism. Neither the liberals nor Marx saw that industrialization itself entails centralization, degradation of human values and spoliation of nature. Gandhi, on the other hand, saw in need proliferation the root cause of human predicament and in industrialization its exacerbation. He did not accept the proposition that by changing social forms, man will shed his covetousness, self-aggrandizing tendency, etc. He therefore called for self-restraint and limitation of wants, which would obviate the necessity of large-scale industrialization. He clearly saw that man himself has created the civilizational predicament through his own activities, and therefore emphasized that the reform of the system must begin with the reform of man through non-attachment, non-violence and quest for truth.