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Rethinking Scarcity: Political Imagination and the Myth of Economic Man
Abstract
This chapter interrogates the modern myth of scarcity — not as a universal economic truth, but as a theological residue of Western thought, repackaged as scientific reason. The figure of the “economic man,” descended from Protestant notions of sin, salvation, and moral failing, now masquerades as a neutral model of rationality. This fiction, universalized through colonial expansion, has shaped development discourse in societies like India, often by displacing indigenous modes of knowing. Rather than reform this model, we argue for its provincialization. Drawing on Indian traditions of dharma, relationality, and experiential action-knowledge, the chapter invites a rethinking — not of how we fit into global economic theory, but of whether that theory ever understood us. It is not “scarcity” that defines the human condition, but the colonial will to describe others as lacking.
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