Humanism and Its Manifestations

Humanism is the crux of modernism, or of the modern age. It is the centrality of the human person in human imagination. The grand ideas which the postmodernists contested may or may not be the essential aspect of modernism; they could have been facilitated by modern epistemology. It is another matter that postmodernists contested the very idea of essence itself.

The point I made earlier is what I am repeating here. Humanism manifests itself as liberalism in the domain of knowledge, as democracy in political affairs, and as capitalism in the economic sphere.

I anchor liberalism here in the idea of liberty, which I see as a mutual agreement on conditions that enable human beings to realise their humanity. In other words, it is a social contract wherein every order recognises the autonomy of individual human beings and constrains and disallows any person or group from violating it. In logical progression, democracy is the demand for the consent of such autonomous human beings in conducting collective affairs, which again are meant to ensure the autonomy of each of them. Capitalism, in that sequence, is not about capital being the centre of an order. Capital is only the lifeblood of such an order. The crux lies in the ownership of human beings over their persons and possessions, and their ability to conduct their businesses with utmost ease.

Humanism is the way humanity should follow.

Niraj Kumar Jha