Conclusion—Western vs. Eastern Replies to the Inverse Economic Pyramid: Innovation, Development, and the Material Future of Cosmoipolitan Justice
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Jonathan BowmanCosmoipolitan JusticeStudies in Global Justice1510.1007/978-3-319-12709-5_66. Conclusion—Western vs. Eastern Replies to the Inverse Economic Pyramid: Innovation, Development, and the Material Future of Cosmoipolitan Justice
(1)
St. Charles College, St. Peters, MO, USA
6.1 Introduction
6.1.3 Sen on Capabilities: A Revisionist Understanding of Non-Western Contributions to Global Innovation
Abstract
Managerial, marketing, production, research, and human capital innovations in the emerging world—particularly in China and India—have led to a barrage of cleverly coined phrases such as ‘reverse innovation,’ ‘inverse innovation pyramids,’ ‘frugal innovation,’ and even ‘disruptive innovation.’ These trends in neo-innovation call for incremental improvement, collaborative exchange between suppliers and consumers, and markets targeting the middle and lower tiers of the global economic pyramid. Insofar as many of these models emphasize investment in human and cultural capital over sheer growth of economic capital, they also lead to an array of exotic corporate species that befuddle Western observers. Sen explains these best in terms of his conciliatory and dialectical assimilation of market efficiencies matched with the egalitarian assurance of democratic legitimation. In contrast, Lander privileges neo-liberal market approaches to the global economy as the unique achievement of the West, Europe, UK, and the USA as global template for future innovation. At the other extreme, Onuma offers a neo-Marxist critique of a long history of Eurocentric economic and moral exploitation of non-Western powers via the domineering imposition of an inherently biased and overly individualistic framework for international law. Once I lay out Sen’s capability account as a viable middle way, I conclude with four non-Western economic and social innovations that lend credence to inter-Axial—East to West—moral, social, and technological learning. I commend their mutually reinforcing material and egalitarian efficacy at expanding the capability sets of those at the middle and bottom of the global inverse pyramid.
Keywords
CapabilitiesDevelopmentGlobalizationGuanxiHuman capitalInnovationInverse pyramidJugaadMarc LanderYusuaki OnumaAmartya SenShanzhaiSacralized redistribution6.1 Introduction
The conventional Western model of economic innovation elicits images of transformative technological breakthroughs and revolutionary new inventions produced by strategic, entrepreneurial, self-assertive elites. These novelties are then graciously disseminated to the masses via centralized processes of manufacturing that thereby seek to maximize growth and economic capital. However, managerial, marketing, production, research, and human capital innovations in the emerging world—particularly in China and India —are turning these paradigmatic conceptions upside down, leading to a barrage of cleverly coined phrases such as reverse innovation , inverse innovation pyramids, frugal innovation, and even disruptive innovation. Diverse in the array of products and processes, these trends in neo-innovation call for incremental improvement, collaboratively dynamic exchange between suppliers and consumers, and markets targeting the billions of persons comprising the demographic of the middle and lower tiers of the global economic pyramid (Woolridge 2010). Insofar as many of these models emphasize investment in human and cultural capital over sheer growth of income, they also lead to an array of exotic corporate species that befuddle Western observers.
It is my contention that the attendant shift in understanding of successful economic innovation will call for a radical reinterpretation of the nature, practices, and goals of economics as a social science in the West. Fortunately, I will not have to take up such a gestalt enterprise alone since much of the required work has already been done by Nobel Prize winning economist, professor, philosopher, and ethicist Amartya Sen . In his first major work, Inequality Reexamined (1992), he anticipates such a shift in social-welfare analysis from income comparison to measurements of aggregate social well-being and freedom:
If the fundamental fact of human diversity and its far-reaching implications come to be recognized more widely in welfare-economic analysis and in public-policy assessment, then the approach would certainly need some radical transformation. The operations would have to move from the income space to the space of the constitutive elements of well-being and also of freedom, if the intrinsic importance of freedom, discussed earlier, is accepted. Social-welfare analysis would then take a different form, and the evaluation of inequality and of distributional badness would then have to reflect that foundational transformation. (Sen 1992, p. 101)
Sen calls for a return to the lost heritage of economics as an inherently moral and social discipline (that he notes, was indeed still present in Adam Smith) . In treating economics in terms much grander than the strict domain of profit margins, supply and demand curves, and cold impersonal mathematics, he seeks to retrieve the necessary human element to this social science. As a representative from the largest democracy in the world, he also emphasizes dimensions from the Indian experience that reinforce essential ties between market efficiency and democratic accountability. While he concedes electoral politics alone do not constitute the benchmark for the substantive merits of democratic orders, he does gain credence both in counter critiques that democracy is a predominately Western phenomena and also critiques of questions of scale for the prospects of global democratization insofar as India boasts a functional democracy comprised of more than a billion persons organized into upwards of 200 distinct political parties (2013, p. 249).
[C]ompared with the United States (an aspiring torch-bearer of democracy in the contemporary world), India fares better in many respects. For instance, India has much higher voter turnout rates (the United States has near the bottom of the international scale in that respect); it has more extensive provisions for the political representation of socially disadvantaged groups; and it is less vulnerable to the influence of ‘big money’ in electoral politics. There are fewer disputes on the outcome of elections in India than in the United States (the drama of ‘hanging chads’, as in the disputed election of 2000, and other counting battles seem to separate the American elections from their Indian counterparts). There is also far greater pluralism in Indian than in US politics. Dozens of political parties, from extreme left to extreme right, are represented in the Indian Parliament, in contrast with just two parties (with very similar positions on many issues) in the United States Congress. (Sen and Dreze 2013, p. 249)
By mixing the greatest insights of American, Chinese, and Indian political successes and failures, he also incorporates non-Western philosophies as they reaffirm or contrast with the Western classics written by Karl Marx and Adam Smith . In extending his conceptual genealogies of the Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, and Ancient Greek traditions back to the historical context of Jaspers’ initial Axial Age breakthrough, he also brings a neo-Aristotelian element to economics as a science devoted to enhancing well-being and the capability to function in social, morally, and rationally fulfilling manners. In his most recent work, The Ideal of Justice, he describes the enterprise as follows:
The approach developed in this book is much influenced by the tradition of social choice theory…and concentrates, as the discipline of social choice does, one making evaluative comparisons over distinct social realizations. In this respect, the approach here also has important similarities with the works of Adam Smith , Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx , among others. While the roots of the approach go back to the Enlightenment, there is a significant contrast with another tradition particularly cultivated over that period—the discipline of reasoning about justice in terms of the idea of the social contract. (Sen 2010, pp. 410–411)
As an practical elucidation of the shift proposed above, in the relevant footnote to these claims, he demonstrates the layered heritage behind both his ability to engage in the history of economics as a moral practice in its Western heritage of intellectuals while also bringing to bare the cultural influence of his upbringing in India :
I have also discussed earlier the similarity between the approach here and the long Indian tradition of seeking justice as nyaya (concentrating on comprehensive outcomes), rather than niti (focusing on arrangements and institutions). (Sen 2010, p. 411)
While the invocation of social choice theory might lead the uninitiated audience to presume the vestiges of a neo-liberal individualism permeating his ethical-moral approach, perhaps the crowning achievement of his Development as Freedom are his concluding insights that individual responsibility always already presupposes robust institutional conditions for its exercise as a functional capability (1999, p. 284). Akin to a slave that cannot responsibly opt for freedom, he finds that it would be naïve to suppose that the solution to dilemmas faced by developing nations rest upon sheer aggregate increases in income alone. He transforms both domestic and international rubrics of assessment of economic health away from sheer income growth of individuals and GDP/GNP of nation-states, into the more complexly rich domain of enhancing comparative indices that he respectively terms capability sets. As brief examples, the holistic range of these reflexive and mutually reinforcing capabilities to function with individual responsibility include: literacy and numeracy, low infant and adult mortality rates, gendered egalitarianism, social welfare safety nets, health care institutions, means to political participation in decision-making, market-steering legal mechanisms, cultural and religious liberties, famine prevention through democratic accountability of leaders, employment opportunities, and access to educational and job training institutions (Sen 1992, pp. 39–42, 1999, 2010, pp. 388–389).
In order to demonstrate the balanced tenor of Sen’s neo-Aristotelian and/or neo-Buddhist middle way—or perhaps even neo-Confucian doctrine of the mean—I will first engage in a brief overview of two contemporary representatives of philosophical extremes that Sen both wants to concede some degree of truth without fully endorsing their radical excesses. On the one hand, I will use the work of contemporary Harvard social scientist M. Lander as something of a representative of Adam Smith’s model of privileging neo-liberal market approaches to the global economy at the extreme of championing the unique achievement of the West, Europe, and the USA as the global template for future material innovation . On the other hand, I will employ the social scientific legal scholarship of Onuma Yasuaki as a neo-Marxist critique of a long history of Eurocentric economic and moral exploitation of non-Western powers. Onuma sees no impending end to neo-colonial forms of exploitation insofar as the domineering imposition of an inherently biased and overly individualistic framework for international law continues to predominate (Onuma 2010; Zakaria 2008).
Once I lay out these two alternative extremes of the spectrum, I will return to a further explanation of Sen’s capability account of Development as Freedom (1999), specifically focusing on his views of globalization and culture. My contribution will be to connect his capability approach to economic science with the recent attention given globally to the role of the ‘emerging economies’—particularly in India , China , and East Asia—in reshaping both Eastern and Western understandings of the role of innovation in navigating the complex benefits and harms of increased globalization, including the pronounced end of and hope for national insularity against global dynamics that thereby constitute a shared materialist species-ethic of interdependence.
China has joined—and become a leader of—the world economy with stunning success, and from this India, like many other countries, has been learning a great deal, particularly in the recent years. The insularity of the earlier Indian approach to economic development needed to be replaced and here the experience of China has been profoundly important. There are great lessons also from China’s early move to universalized health care and education. But the role of democratic participation in India suggests that some learning and understanding may go in the other direction as well. As it happens, India is the only country in the outside world to which scholars from ancient China went for education and training. The overcoming of cultural insularity that we can observe both in China and in India in the first millennium has continuing interest and practical usefulness in the world today…India and China learned a lot from each other in the first millennium, but the significance of that epistemic process has not dried up even at the beginning of the third millennium. (Sen 2005, pp. 189–190)
After doing the conceptual work needed to explain Sen’s views in light of its multi-faceted Indian Chinese, European, and American influences, I will further illustrate the changing dynamics between Eastern and Western approaches to a shared global economy by focusing on three Eastern forms of innovative novelty: firstly, Indian jugaad, secondly, Chinese guanxi and, thirdly, shanzhai . Lastly, I conclude with a specifically African case to seek to address the development economics of the growing North-South divide that is seeming to replace the old East vs. West dichotomy. The cases from Africa examine the conferral of authority upon various aid networks that produce a hybridization of pre-Axial local, Axial universalism, and post-Axial contemporary domains to constitute what I call—for sheer lack of a better concise terminology in the attendant literature—sacralized redistribution . Here I will attempt to apply some of the dynamics Casanova saw in the Nordic-Lutheran approach to basic rights to socio-economic rights as formulated in the unique hybridization of pre-Axial tribal forms and the post-Axial and post-colonial African re-appropriation of Abrahamic traditions.
While assuming moral learning through innovation cuts across a variety of business disciplines and takes on an array of institutional, technological, and scientific manifestations, we will not presume any one common cultural framework or the inherent superiority of a Western approach. Not only do I intend to hint at the historical and cultural successes of the Indian jugaad model of frugal engineering, the Chinese neo-Confucian model of guanxi as social networking, the Chinese practice of shanzhai as bandit/guerrilla innovation, and the African creative melding of pre-Axial and Axial models of authoritative trust through sacralized redistribution, but I will also conclude with some brief remarks on the implications of these novelties for challenging Western understandings of human nature and economics as a social science. I will follow Sen in presuming an inherent tie between market efficiencies and democratic participation in bringing these revisionist perspectives to bear on the cultural dynamics that drive participation in the global economy (Sen 1999; Bohman 1996).
6.1.1 Landes on the Historical Conditions for the European/British ‘Invention of Invention’
In David Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), the author’s title intentionally plays off of Adam Smith’s title The Wealth of Nations (1776). He intentionally insinuates exceptionalist roots to technological and material innovation that have a distinctly European, British, and free market origin. Landes wants to uphold the historical distinctiveness and incommensurable impact of European technological innovation. He describes European societies amidst the Middle Age period of ‘the invention of invention’ as follows:
[T]hey entered during these centuries into an exciting world of innovation and emulation that challenged vested interests and rattled the forces of conservativism. Changes were cumulative; novelty spread fast. A new sense of progress replaced an older, effete reverence for authority. This intoxicating sense of freedom touched (infected) all domains. (Landes 1998, p. 57)
Since Landes wants to defend a European exceptionalist thesis, while technological and scientific conditions were indeed ripe for key world-transformative change in non-Western contexts (particularly China) , he finds that historically the radical transformation affecting the West was long forestalled in the East.
Contributing factors to the comparatively slowed Eastern progress, according to Landes, include the sharp inequalities in gender relations that did not allow for industrial employment and a more widely differentiated division of labor. While paper was prevalent in China and Arabic societies for about 1000 years, Landes notes that it had been produced laboriously by hand and foot (46, 51–52) and the ideographic style of Chinese writing made the mass printing difficult for all texts other than canonical treatises (51). In contrast, he notes that the water wheel in the West was applied to the mechanized production of paper, thus paving the way for the later onset of mass printing via moveable type. In the context of smaller-scale technological innovation , eyeglasses perhaps doubled the productive career and magnified the expert skills of medieval craftsmen, including having led to the production of finely tuned small mechanical tools and instruments (46–47). Lastly, he claims that European free market exchange and private property also served as the necessary cultural backdrop for innovation to flourish (50).
As distinctly cultural contributions to European successes, he argues that religious resistance to centralized political control vastly aided technological and scientific maturation. He observes during this stretch of the late Middle Ages an ongoing spirit of inquiry and critique that eventually came to its climax in the Protestant Reformation (58).
Important in all of this was the Church as custodian of knowledge and school for technicians. One might have expected otherwise: that organized spirituality, with its emphasis on prayer and contemplation, would have had little interest in technology….And yet everything worked in the opposite direction: the desire to free clerics from the time-consuming earthly tasks led to the introduction and diffusion of power machinery and, beginning with the Cisterians, to the hiring of lay brothers (conversi) to do the dirty work. Employment fostered in turn attention to time and productivity. All of this gave rise on monastic estates to remarkable assemblages of powered machinery. (Landes 1998, p. 58)
As other related cultural influences, he includes the Judeo-Christian tendency to look favorably on manual labor, the call to subdue nature, and a progressive narrative of overall historical progress in terms of the respective linear stages of creation, fall, redemption, and glory also stirred on technical innovation (58–59). He notes the epistemic advantages to the two kingdoms split between the mundane and transcendent that led clerical societies to employ technological innovations like the mechanical clock during the Middle Ages in order better to assess quantitative increases in output and thereby drive production efficiencies to free up time for regularized periods of contemplative prayer (Landes 1998, pp. 45, 58).
Also on the cultural-spiritual front, albeit in a dialectical contrast, Landes notes that the clock also served as a secularization force. Originally, the Middle Age Church kept track of time by the flow of nature (God’s creation), dividing night and day hours into an equal number of parts thereby to produce irregular hours. However, the advent of clocks in the public space of the town square brought about a shift in authority and perspective on the regularized ordering of time toward mundane affairs (49) and led to the capacity not just to quantify and track labor output and productive increases but also to facilitate the temporal coordination of the increasingly complex differentiated modes of industrial production (50). Despites these gradual trends toward secularity, the Judeo-Christian linear sense of time also played a unique role in shaping an individual and collective consciousness oriented toward a quasi-Weberian conflation of moral-spiritual progress and discipline as facilitating ongoing materialistic innovative progress:
Other societies thought of time as cyclical, returning to earlier stages and starting over again. Linear time is progressive and regressive, moving on to better things or declining from some earlier, happier state. For Europeans in our period, the progressive view prevailed. (Landes 1998, p. 59)
A sentiment of social progress in tandem with his predominate stress on the role of the free market led Landes to a view of Westernization as the major driver of global innovation even into the present. This main impetus to ongoing social transformation and progress leads to market-oriented social and economic reform that spread from England to Europe and then to the US. In endorsing this narrative of moral and social progress, he would like future trends to follow in the neo-liberal fashioning of a globalized free market that simultaneously spreads civilizing ideals of discipline, order, and collectively historical species-ethical progress.
6.1.2 Onuma on the Transcivilizational Alternative to Eurocentric Imperialism
In sharp contrast to Landes’ endorsement of global free market competition as the template for organizing international society, Onuma Yasuaki’s A Transcivilizational Perspective on International Law (2010) details a long narrative of Western imperial domination that he argues has strategically used international law to stifle economic, social, and cultural progress in both non-Western and developing nations. He explicitly points to the use of law intentionally to steer and gerrymander what will count as legitimate forms of innovation . Onuma argues that three Westernizing trends have historically destabilized the international order. The first two—(1) the enduring sense of victimization felt by many non-Western nations and (2) the imposition of a normative framework of a sovereign states order hereby conflict sharply with transnational economic interdependence. He argues that victimization and imposition are
closely related to the third problem, i.e. the emerging discrepancies between the increasing substantive (economic and military) power of Asian nations, particularly China and India , and the persistent intellectual and informational hegemony of Western nations, especially the United States. (Onuma 2010, p. 57)
Therefore, Onuma advances a threefold legal realist and historical revisionist attack against the Western understanding of the triumphant successes of international law.
Primarily, in light of the first problem of perceived endemic victimization, Onuma argues that Western powers must not fuel the sense of victimization that has carried over from colonialism and must refrain from engaging in more covert forms of neo-colonialism . Onuma points to eradicating the double-standard of demanding external recognition from others and only, in rare cases, reciprocally conferring mutual recognition when in Western interests. He also laments Western trends of only having come to the conferral of communicative status to an interlocutor following the realization of a shift in power in the strategic engagement with a more formidable economic or military counterpart. In these cases, the legal conferral of statehood and international recognition must not merely contribute to Eurocentric national self-preservation, safety, and security with only second-hand coerced consent rendered legitimate by international laws and norms (268).
Secondly, in light of the problem of the sovereign states system in conflict with enhanced global economic integration, he treats the achievement of the current sovereign states system as actually a twofold failure (322–323). On the one hand, the US and Europe only conferred legitimacy on non-Western nations in many cases for economic reasons after having portioned large geographic regions into territorial borders that were drawn up more in light of other competing colonial claims to sovereign jurisdiction rather than via consultation with those indigenous peoples most affected (279–280; 286). Given a neo-Marxist spin, Onuma observes that post-colonial conferrals of state recognition typically took place after having already monopolized innumerable resources, including but not limited to: engaging in the global trade of slaves, decimating entire populations of undesirable indigenous persons, and in many cases, trading the conferral of citizenship status for compulsory military service.
Thirdly, as his proposed solution, for a twenty-first century world in which transnational economic interdependence has led to a multi-polar shift in power, he argues that we must follow his recommendation to develop and occupy the transcivilizational perspective. Only from this perspective can we begin to reconcile the growing economic and military presence of a multi-polar world with the requisite dispersal of intellectual and informational power in shaping the global order away from Eurocentric/Western prejudices:
The perspective I call ‘transcivilizational’ can help to respond to these epistemological, normative and practical problems by expanding our concerns, questioning our self-evident or axiomatic assumptions, and enlarging our perspectives in a multi-layered manner. It is a perspective from which we see, recognize, interpret, assess, and seek to propose solutions to, ideas, activities, affairs and problems that transcend national boundaries, by developing a cognitive and evaluative framework based on the deliberate recognition of a plurality of civilizations that have long existed in human history. (Onuma 2010, p. 61)
Such a perspective will not only open up the prospect for revising both European and non-Western views for what will be taken as legitimate international law, but it also assumes an epistemic dimension conceding that no one civilization operating alone can adequately encounter the growing array of species crises that are truly global in magnitude and scope.1
Lastly, given Onuma’s own Japanese/Asian heritage, he finds good reason to hold that the Chinese ‘Middle Kingdom ’ has contributed as much, or more, to cultural, technological, and social innovation than its European counterpart. For instance, in direct contrast to Landes’ view of Western world-historical progress, one need only compare the more than two millennia Confucian heritage of the Middle Kingdom in contrast to the concomitant brief world-historical imprint left by the mere centuries comprising the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. On this same note, Onuma finds the Chinese form of universality through the extension of ren/jen as a species-capacity has contributed and can continue to offer much more to the universalization impulses of humanistic morality than the Westernized dubious history of human rights protection (314–320; 361–362).
In the imperial court of successive Chinese dynasties, various local princes, diplomats, agents of European chartered companies and other important persons were treated as tributary missions wishing to partake in Chinese civilization. Many of them acknowledged the universal authority of the Chinese emperor. Yet, we hardly think of treating such acknowledgement as evidence of the universality of Sinocentricism in those days. Sinocentricism might have been a universalistic notion, but not actually a universal notion that is valid to the whole cosmos or globe. Comparatively speaking, however, for the most of pre-nineteenth century human history, the universalistic claim of Sinocentricism had far more substantial basis than the universalistic claim of European natural law. It is only through the uncritical projecting today’s Eurocentric notion onto the past that we are tempted to search for universality—not the universalistic claim—of natural law or European international law during the premodern period. (Onuma 2010, p. 363)
In addition, even if one were to follow the Western track along the purported progress of the greater unfolding of human rights, Onuma argues that much more emphasis needs to be placed on the socio-economic and cultural rights that comprise UN and Geneva conventions than merely the individual and political rights that carry a disproportionate amount of attention.
In summation, akin to advocates of the necessity for opening up cultural space for reverse/inverse innovation —particularly with China and India as emergent global powers—Onuma argues that the West must awake from its dogmatic legal-juridical slumber and concede the presence of a multi-polar world (59; 368; Zakaria 2008, pp. 1–3).2 Given the end of the Cold War division of alliances down the USSR and US axes, and given his skeptical attitude toward the US/West leading a unipolar order merely reflecting their own interests, he seeks to initiate the onset of an age of academic discourse also in line with his hope for the adaption of the transcivilizational perspective.
[E]xperts have had insufficient knowledge on legal and other aspects of non-Western societies, cultures and civilizations, which should have a bearing on the concepts or frameworks of international law. In terms of representative legitimacy, most traditional concepts of international law—those of so-called “customary” international law—lack global legitimacy because they were not created and formulated in a manner representing humanity as a whole. More than 80 per cent of the world’s population was not represented in the process where predominant notions and framework of “customary” international law were created and formulated.…The concepts or frameworks do not correspond to or represent realities of power constellation in the twenty-first-century world. (Onuma 2010, p. 178)
As yet an additional means for holding nation-states and the various multi-polar alliances to enhanced accountability, he also calls for a greater role to be played by NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in holding even their own home nation-states up to openly public criticism. As empirical support for this last charge, he highlights the success of Japenese NGOs in getting their own national leaders to sign on to and implement political and socio-economic human rights, specifically to minority groups holding little to no real political power in the Japanese national public sphere. Finally, in addition to treating socio-economic rights on the same par as political rights in this transcivilizational dialogue, his neo-Marxist affinities find a direct correlation between the material and spiritual capacities of civilizations that need not follow the neo-liberal preference of market growth at the necessary expense of the loss of a cultural and/or spiritual heritage that cannot be given an instrumental exchange value (Nussbaum 2011, note 35).
6.1.3 Sen on Capabilities: A Revisionist Understanding of Non-Western Contributions to Global Innovation
Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) offers an intermediate position based upon universal human capabilities to function that can be used to preserve culture while fostering innovation . Akin to Sen’s mediation between the best insights of Smith and Marx—while avoiding the excesses of class disparity and totalitarian rule—Sen can also strike a mean between Landes’ over-confidence in Western markets and Onuma’s skeptical critique of Eurocentric neo-colonialism . In particular, Sen defends capability sets necessary for education as (a) the means to develop the new skills required in an interdependent world, (b) the way for cultures to have a voice in how they best seek to shape their preservation, and (c) the vehicle for inter-cultural exchange that can be mutually enriching in a globalized world.
Somewhat similar to Onuma, Sen’s Asian/Indian heritage lends him the unique perspective to propose a revisionist historical approach to technological and scientific innovation that will unmask faulty biases contributing to the dogmatic belief in Western superiority.
Western promoters of personal and political liberty in the non-Western world often see this as bringing Occidental values to Asia and Africa. The world is invited to join the club of “Western democracy” and to admire and endorse traditional “Western values.” In all this, there is a substantial tendency to extrapolate backward from the present. Values that European Enlightenment and other relatively recent developments have made common and widespread cannot really be seen as part of the long-run Western heritage—experienced in the West over millennia. What we do find in the writings by particular Western classical authors (for example, Aristotle) is support for selected components of the comprehensive notion that makes up the contemporary idea of political liberty. But support for such components can be found in many writings in Asian traditions as well. (Sen 1999, p. 233)