It happens only in India. The original home of the Third Way -- remember the Buddha? -- is now being lectured to by Tony Blair's friend, ...
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It happens only in India. The original home of the Third Way — remember the Buddha? — is now being lectured to by Tony Blair’s friend, philosopher and guide on what the middle path is all about.
A little bit of market and a little bit of social justice (and a lot of showbiz). If it sounds similar to Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialist model, forget it. This is Anthony Giddens’ prescription for the world, especially India. Who is to argue with the director of the London School of Economics, the bastion of our radical Leftists, where over half the students are from outside England? Certainly not a class of politicians desperately short of ideas. Otherwise, like the canny Blair, would they not have adopted the teachings of Guru Giddens?
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Here’s a man who urges a cosmopolitanism which does not reject tradition as the answer to fundamentalism. Here’s a man who urges more government, not less; more regulation, not less; less bureaucracy, not more. Here’s also a man who believes that India has no way out but to livewith globalisation, which he maintains is not the same as liberalisation. Music to the ears of a government urgently in need of some international approbation, you would think. But you have to have time off from hosting tea parties for stormy petrels to think in such terms especially as they have just recovered from an orgy of celebration over the success of another intellectual with a heart, Amartya Sen. For that you need precisely the skill that Giddens has a doctorate in the marketing of the Big Idea. In a world that is mourning the passing of the imagination, he is an eminent citizen. Courted by politicians, who submit questions at his lectures, and loved by the media, who never stop oohing at his showman-like lectures, Giddens is the best spokesman for Cool Britannia. Who else could mask a tiny nation’s hopeless dependence on Big Brother America with such elegant formulations: that we all live in a dialogic democracy, and that we can just not afford to opt out of globalisation any more.
It is perhapsfitting that the man who is redefining politics in the Western world — Bill Clinton is also a pupil — is a sociologist. We live in uncertain times, Prof Giddens is fond of saying, and there’s no social science more inexact that sociology. A little bit of that and little bit of this, and a new political philosophy is born on the ashes of capitalism and communism which people died for. In fact, Prof Giddens too says “we should be prepared to mount an active defence of these values wherever they are poorly developed, or threatened. None of us would have anything to live for, if we didn’t have something worth dying for”. But somehow Clinton’s touchy-feely excuse to rule the world (and bomb Kosovo) and Blair’s Sun-savvy tycoon-funded socialism do not fit the bill. But with the world tuned in to the entertainment channel, anyone who is able to popularise a life of the mind is welcome. And who better than one who has authored 20 books in a 30-year-long academic career?
