Comment on Radical Humanism. (2009)
Radical Humanism, also called New Humanism, is the philosophy Manabendra Nath Roy (M. N. Roy) built after leaving communism. It was stated in the Twenty-two Theses adopted by his Radical Democratic Party at Bombay in December 1946 and elaborated in New Humanism: A Manifesto (1947) and Reason, Romanticism and Revolution (1952–55). It is “radical” because it goes to the root: the individual, whom nation, class and party had each made a means.
Philosophical Foundations
- Physical realism. The universe is a self-contained, law-governed physical system. With no supernatural will behind it, humans can remake what humans made. Roy revived Protagoras‘s maxim that man is the measure of all things, and added that man is the maker of his own destiny.
- Reason as biology. Rationality is no divine spark but an evolved way of adapting to an ordered nature.
- Autonomy of ideas. Ideas arise from the brain but, once formed, act as independent causes. Against economic determinism, cultural and intellectual change can drive history.
- Secular ethics. People are moral because they are rational: reason shows that cooperation serves each better than conflict. It needs neither God nor class interest.
Freedom as the Supreme Value
The first theses make the quest for freedom and the search for truth the basic urges of progress. Freedom means the steady removal of every obstacle, material, social or psychological, to the flowering of individual potential. The degree of freedom a society secures for its members is the measure of its progress. The individual is prior to society; collective arrangements are instruments.
Political and Economic Programme
- Organised democracy. Parliamentary democracy hands sovereignty to parties at each election. Roy wanted power exercised not periodically, but from day to day through local people’s committees, with recall and non-party candidature.
- Cooperative economy. Production for use, organised cooperatively, avoiding both capitalist profit and state ownership.
- Cosmopolitanism. Nationalism was a stage; the goal was a world federation built upward from local units.
- Philosophical revolution first. Education in rational attitudes had to precede political change, so Roy dissolved his party in 1948 and turned to study circles.
Significance
- Article 51A(h) makes it every citizen’s duty to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform: Roy’s vocabulary in one clause. After Narendra Dabholkar‘s murder (August 2013), Maharashtra enacted its anti-superstition and black magic law (December 2013); a Pune court convicted two gunmen in May 2024.
- Vithal Mahadeo Tarkunde (V. M. Tarkunde), Roy’s party secretary, became founding president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties during the Emergency, carrying humanism into rights politics.
Limits
- Utopianism. A precondition taking generations is not a programme; people learn self-government by practising it.
- Party-less democracy has no answer to aggregation at national scale, and free association itself produces parties.
- Elitism. Rule by the enlightened resembles the vanguard Roy rejected.
- Structure. Treating caste and patriarchy as superstition understates them; B. R. Ambedkar saw graded inequality needing legal remedy.
- His optimism about reason sits uneasily with the Frankfurt School‘s darker verdict on instrumental reason.
Conclusion
Radical Humanism is weak as institutional design but strong as a standard. Its test, whether a practice enlarges the real freedom of living individuals now, remains a sharp check on both majoritarian and doctrinaire politics.