About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


1 Alternatives 1 (1975)

handle is hein.journals/alt1 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial Statement This journal should have started at least 20 years earlier. These have been the years that have been dominated, with few deviations, by the idea of uni- form solutions for all men and all societies. Among other reasons this is one that accounts for the malaise facing humanity today. Better late than never. Even today in different continents and among different classes in each society the notion of catching up with those who are seen to be more 'developed' and along the same course continues with uncommon persistence. To no small extent this persistence - which is based more on institutionalized interests of a few powerful people than on cons- cious deliberation by the large majority- accounts for the general scenario of inequity within societies and a state of myopic dependence between them. Most ideas take time in fructifying as general concepts capable of attract- ing the minds of men. There has to be a certain threshold of collective aware- ness, born normally of a deep sense of discontent with the prevailing state of affairs, before such fructification takes place. In the past few years this threshold has been reached for the concept of alternatives and the various associated thought processes and normative perspectives that go with it. And as with earlier conceptual breakthroughs, the idea of alternatives, imply- ing 'alternatives to what is' signifies a major dissatisfaction with both the existing state of affairs and the existing state of analytics - in short, with the existing paradigms of both science and politics. A feeling of fundamental dissonance between not only what is and what ought to be but also between what is and what can be (if only human agencies intervened decisively) under- lies the recent interest in seeking out alternative ways of attending to human Problems. It implies two considerations: that the world is becoming too uniform, too standardized, too dominated by a single conception of life and its meaning, with little scope for other available cultural and historical propensities and potentialities; and that such domination of a single con- ception has led to political and cultural domination by a single region of the World over all the others. inThe problem posed by the concept of alternatives is at once philosophical in respect of the validity of diverse worldviews and theoretical paradigms,