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Abstract:
Can we gain any fresh insight into the problem of mediating among competing truth claims in political life? This essay will demonstrate that the political theory of Mahatma Gandhi provides us with a novel way to understand and arbitrate the conflict among moral projects. Gandhi offers us a vision of political action that insists on the viability of the search for truth and the implicit possibility of adjudicating among competing claims to truth. His vision also presents a more complex and realistic understanding, than do some other contemporary pluralists, of political philosophy and of political life itself.
In an increasingly multicultural world, political theory is presented with perhaps its most vigorous challenge yet. As radically different moral projects confront one another, the problem of competing claims of truth arising from particular views of the human good remains crucial for political philosophy and political action. Recent events have demonstrated that the problem is far from being solved and that its implications are more far-reaching than the domestic politics of industrialized nations. As the problem of violence has also become coterminous with issues of pluralism, many have advocated the banishing of truth claims from politics altogether. Political theorists have struggled to confront this problem through a variety of conceptual lenses. Debates pertaining to the politics of multiculturalism, toleration, or recognition have all been concerned with the question of pluralism as one of the most urgent facts of political life, in need of both theoretical and practical illumination.1
This essay argues that a possible method for arbitrating among competing claims to truth, without altogether jettisoning the activity of truth-seeking from politics, is provided by Mahatma Gandhi. While various Western thinkers have offered solutions to this problem, fresh insight can be gained by turning to a thinker from the non-Western world.2 Gandhi's work presents fertile ground for this project, for he offers a vision of political action that includes the search for truth as integral to political life. Implicit in this vision is also the possibility that nonviolence, understood in a certain way, provides a means to adjudicate among competing truth claims. I begin by articulating the ontological and epistemological premises that underlie the Gandhian vision. While these premises raise the possibility of conflict among competing moral...