open discussions on important public decisions can vastly enhance information about society and about our respective prior ities, they can also provide the opportunity for revising the chosen priorities in response to public discussion. Indeed, as James Buchanan, the founder of the contemporary discipline of public choice theory, has argued: 'the definition of democracy as "government by discus sion" implies that individual values can and do change in the process of decision-making. (P 14)
2. While democracy must also demand much else, public reasoning, which is central to participatory governance, is an impor tant part of a bigger picture. I shall have occasion to return to this connection later. (P 16)
3. It is in this broad context that one can see the importance of the
contributions made by India's argumentative tradition to its intellectual
and social history, and why they remain relevant today. Despite
the complexity of the processes of social change, traditions have their
own interactive influence, and it is necessary to avoid being imprisoned
in formulaic interpretations that are constantly, but often uncritically,
repeated in intellectual as well as political discussions on
historical traditions. For example, seeing Indian traditions as overwhelmingly
religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical,
or fundamentally unsceptical (to consider a set of diagnoses
that have received some championing in cultural categorizations)
involves significant oversimplification of India's past and present. And
in so far as traditions are important, these mischaracterizations tend
to have a seriously diverting effect on the analysis of contemporary
India as well as of its complex history. It is in that broad context that
the corrective on which this essay concentrates comes particularly into
its own. The claim is that the chosen focus here is useful and instructive,
not that it is uniquely enlightening. (P31)
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