A Woman in the True Tradition of Political Economy
Sudha Shenoy 1947-2008, was more than an economist, she was a keeper of academic traditions, a living lore-mistress, a transition belt between cultures and generations of scholars. She was one who both introduced me, and then reintroduced me, to the world of Austrian economics, which was quite a feat in itself, since in those days I was a kind of refugee from a different cognitive world. Sudha was the kind of economist who could speak to a disaffected social scientist or even literary critic in such terms as to make the “dismal science” of economics come alive as a branch of the humanities.
I really only knew her briefly, but now that she is gone a host of memories crowd in on me…things that she said in an off handed way which struck everyone present as profound, yet largely went unrecorded for posterity. For example, she once conjectured the “throw away hypothesis” that most Austrian economists came from marginalized religious backgrounds, that is to say, they were more likely to be the children of atheists, Quakers, or Jews than, for example, Methodists. Her implication was that the principles espoused by Mises and others could be seen as an amplification of the rhetoric of dissent (which in the Anglo-Saxon world included Catholics like Neuman). She herself was a dissenter from her own tradition, for she had become a Buddhist by choice. Most Westerners would be hard pressed to distinguish a Hindu from a Buddhist, and I imply no invidious comparison, but for Sudha it was a characteristically intellectual choice…a rejection of cast and mythogogy for reason or “dharma” a Sanskrit term which approximates the Greco-Christian term “logos.”
Another shocking manifestation of Suda’s dissenting mentality was her rejection of the cult of Mohandas Ghandi. At the time I met her there was a vigorous trend among libertarians to incorporate Ghandi among the icons of the movement on the pretext that there was an unbreached continuity between the nonaggression principle and a strategy of nonviolence. Although there was never a gentler person than Sudha Shenoy, she was quick at spotting and denouncing cant in whatever cultural guise it appeared. Once she explained to me that even the wife of the Great Souled One considered him a madman. Well, considering that her husband adopted celibacy without calling a family conference to discuss the matter in advance…Mrs. Ghandi may have had some insight that the rest of us lack.
Yet for all of her critical acumen, Sudha was a conservative thinker in the very best sense. She was impatient of those neologizing disciplinary distinctions which seem based more on the unionization of intellectual nitch-holders than on real differences in subject matter. I remember a debate at George Mason over who had been the first to recognize the division of labor. Cantillon was said to have gotten it earlier than Smith, while others claimed that it was all to be found in the writings of the Spanish Scholastics. Sudha settled it with one word: “Plato” which compelled our assent, for everyone (well almost) remembered the passage of the Republic where Socrates had described specialized exchange within his soon-to-be-reformed “city of pigs.” Although Plato seldom appears on reading lists compiled for the inspiration of libertarians, the passage is there and its priority is unquestioned.
That was Sudha. She was never one to reject a valid insight, no matter of what obscure and dubious provenance. This made her a balancing influence within the world of Austrian scholarship. Among the Misesians she was a Hayekian, and among the Hayekians she was always trying to push towards a more fundamental and radical reinstatement of liberty. In a wider sense, her mind encompassed strands which had been sundered since the time of what Karl Jasper called the “Axial Age” i.e. of c. 600B.C, up to the present: Greek philosophy, Indian metaphysics, British political economy, the Mengerian revolution, contemporary social science, and American libertarianism. Yet the result of these influences was not a miasma of eclecticism, but a mind all the more focused on a single goal…a world governed not by coercion but by spontaneous and tacit agreements. No doubt Suda would wish, in lieu of mourning the loss of that mind, that we should redouble our efforts in pursuit of its goal.
