You will have noticed that these two readings of Gandhi, which I call absurd, are made for the other. Both deny exactly what I call his “integrity,” with the latter opinion claiming that he is all and only a philosopher with no serious interest in politics, and the former claim that our interest in him lies solely in his political successes, not in his distant philosophy. The idea of “integrity” is therefore precisely intended to make it clear that these two points of view, in all their frank contrast, have a common underlying error, because they do not perceive what I call Gandhi`s “integrity”. Let me conclude my already too long answer to your question with a point that is close to my heart, even if it may seem terminological. It is tempting to say that Marx is a figure of the Enlightenment, and how to present him as a source of criticism of modernity? I think that`s a terribly unwise way of thinking intellectually. It is simply a matter of denying the weight and obesity of liberalism in the organization of modernity, which still has a dominant influence on society today and is even totally complicit, I would say, with the so-called right-wing populist efforts to oppose it. The political enlightenment and its legacy are massively marked by liberal thought and ideals. It is completely distorted to see the Enlightenment as a mere collection of teachings and ideas into which Locke, Mill and Hegel and Marx can be thrown. It is intellectually much more honest to say that there were radically different voices like Marx, and Marx was part of the tradition of romantic thought in many ways. If you take a book like Christopher Hills` The World Turned Upside Down, in which he looks at the early radical and communist views during the English Revolution, you will find precursors of Marx who presented the ideas that, if they had fought rather than oppressed, would have followed the path that England and Europe would have taken from primitive to late modernity, they would have anticipated. These ideas were marx`s forerunners, and they are the beginning of a trajectory that leads to Marx through romantic thought, both in England and Germany. In fact, Christopher Hill, in this book, when he wants to present some of these radical ideas, quotes Blake, as well as other left-wing historians and intellectual historians like E.P. Thompson.
But romantics are often seen as Enlightenment against. So what about when a trajectory that some will call counter-information falls under the label “Enlightenment”? I think it`s just a dogmatic appendage to the word “Enlightenment” to insist that figures like Marx and Gandhi and the Romantics must all be counted as part of the Enlightenment. There is much more clarity (not to mention intellectual honesty), to simply admit what is actually the case, that terms such as “modernity” and “Enlightenment” are complacent terms that emerged when it became clear that liberal doctrines and institutions (including the institutions and policies that surround capital, as well as the restrictions on capital created with “social democracy”) appeared in Europe from the seventeenth century. They had penetrated. I therefore insist and repeat that modernity is defined in an omnipresent way by liberalism and social democratic ideas that limit classical liberalism. And the fact is that modernity, although it has been dominant, as I said, was not and still is not quite complete within its reach. From the early radicals of the seventeenth century to Gandhi, the Romantics and Marx, there have been divergent radical voices (which go far beyond social democratic constraints as liberalism goes far beyond social democratic constraints). . . .
