I claim that Gandhi’s principle (a principle which is, in one word, service), inspired as it is by a partly imaginary history, and seasoned as it is by experience, provides a theoretical alternative that is more comprehensive, and therefore more true, than standard economic theories. Since there are so many economists, and they have written so many theories, I find it difficult to specify which theories are the standard ones in contrast to which Gandhi’s principle is an alternative. I will deal with this difficulty partly by mentioning some things Gandhian commentators have had to say about the main schools of economics in subsequent chapters, and partly by commenting here on a passage which has been seminal for most subsequent writers on economics, the famous passage about Adam Smith and his dinner, found in his Wealth of Nations first published in 1776: “In almost every other race of animals each individual, when it is grown to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can enlist their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is to their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whosoever offers to another a bargain of any kind proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” (9)

Looking at this classic and fundamental passage from Smith helps to establish Gandhi’s outsider status. It is not a text Gandhi would have written. It lays down premises that are not his. If Gandhi were forced to speak Smith’s language, he would say that Smith underestimates the power of benevolence, and that Smith overestimates the extent to which human security can be achieved by relying on the self-interest of others for one’s bread. But Gandhi does not speak Smith’s language. He asks different questions, gets different answers, and uses a different vocabulary. Hence with respect to Smith and the intellectual traditions Smith started, Gandhi was an outsider, as, I suppose, Smith would have been in a traditional Indian village.

Gandhi did not expect the daily rice and lentils of the villagers to be supplied entirely by benevolence or entirely by self-interest, although he surely recognized the significance of each. He emphasized a third factor which he named as “dharma” a word usually translated as “duty,” “religion,” or “ethics” although Gandhi translates it in a passage quoted above as “law.”