Independent Indian: Work & Life of Dr Subroto Roy

For almost two decades, I have found myself in a saga exploring the Rule of Law, the nature of justice and freedom, and the nature of racial animosity and xenophobia in the United States. Judge it here for yourself. There are 10 pdf files in a password protected post of the same name. Please send me an email identifying yourself and offering any reason, including curiosity, that you may have to want to examine the matter. Files 1 and 2 marked SCOTUS are the front-matter and Petition for Writ of Mandamus as received by Circuit Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States in February 1996. Files 3 to 10 constitute the Appendix of Record giving the rulings of the US District Court for the District of Hawaii and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, including especially in File 8 the “after-discovered” evidence of how my attorney had been covertly purchased by my opponent. An example of perjured trial testimony is contained in File 2. In September 2007, I asked my opponent — the Government of one of the 50 States — to voluntarily admit its wrongdoings to the present Chief Judge of the US District Court as is required by law. Government lawyers should, after all, try to act lawfully.

Our cook said she would be gone for three days next week. No leave was due so she faced the risk of having her wages docked. It did not matter to her, she would be going anyway. It transpired she was going home to vote for the local “panchayat” elections, so she would in fact be going at full pay. Her home is in the Sunderban jungles, where there are tigers; she said she had heard of four villagers being lost to man-eaters over the years. Bee-keeping and honey-making are among the many crafts and trades besides farming and fishing there. It takes her five hours to get home from Calcutta, two hours by train, two more hours by bus, then an hour walking along unpaved roads. One day to travel each way, and one day to cast her vote for the local government that will hold office for the next  five years.  The politics are split two ways: there are the official communists versus a coalition of the unofficial communists allied with non-communists. The local offices of both sides had recently telephoned her residence in Calcutta urging her to come back home and had canvassed for her vote. One vote among many hundreds of thousands. She is confident her vote will be secret (by electronic machine) and the political parties do not know who voted for whom. But they do try to pressure people in informal exit polls afterwards to figure out who voted which way if they can. What does her vote matter, she was asked. Suppose she went on holiday for three days instead, what would happen? Well, she said, I would be in trouble with the panchayat if I needed their signature on something and they knew I had not come back home to vote; they would say, well, you live in the big city, why do you need our decision in your favour? Indian democracy at work. A committed free thinking electorate. She makes about Rs 4000 per month and lives comfortably; she is a widow with a son in his twenties; she put him through a post-graduate college studying Bengali literature in which he has a Master of Arts. But he is also training to be an auto-mechanic which will have better job-prospects. India’s political economy at work.

Subroto Roy

Some 20 years ago I recall watching James Webb, then Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration, on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and thinking “this man would be a great US President”. He then seemed for many years to disappear from the public eye, perhaps due to personal problems, until he returned recently as a Democrat and the junior Senator from Virginia. I am delighted to see his name being floated as a possible Vice-Presidential running-mate for Barack Obama, e.g. by Professor Gerald Pomper at

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/obama_should_pick_webb_for_run.html

I agree with Professor Pomper’s analysis. An Obama-Webb ticket would be unstoppable for the reasons he has given and more. It will also be good for America and the world in the 21st Century.

I say this as a Ron Paul fan who — had I been an American voter, which I am not — would have voted for Carter 1980, Reagan 1984, Bush Sr 1988, Bush Sr 1992, Dole 1996, Bush Jr 2000 (ok ok, I did not think he’d be that bad), Kerry 2004.

Hillary Clinton’s name has been floated as a possible Veep candidate — for John McCain! Wouldn’t that be fun? Obama-Webb vs McCain-Clinton!

Subroto Roy

John Wisdom (1904-1993), Main Philosophical Works:

Interpretation and Analysis, 1931
Problems of Mind and Matter 1934
Other Minds, 1952
Philosophy & Psychoanalysis, 1953
Paradox & Discovery, 1965
Logical Constructions (1931-1933),1969
Proof and Explanation (The Virginia Lectures 1957), 1991

Secondary literature:
Wisdom: Twelve Essays, R. Bambrough (ed) 1974
Philosophy and Life: Essays on John Wisdom, I. Dilman (ed) 1984.

Renford Bambrough (1926-1999), Main Philosophical Works:

“Socratic Paradox”, Philosophical Quarterly, 1960

“Universals and Family Resemblances”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1960-61

“Plato’s Modern Friends and Enemies”, Philosophy 1962

The Philosophy of Aristotle, 1963

“Principia Metaphysica”, Philosophy 1964

New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (edited by R. Bambrough), 1965

“Unanswerable Questions”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 1966

Plato, Popper and Politics (edited by R. Bambrough), 1967

Reason, Truth and God 1969

“Foundations”, Analysis, 1970

“Objectivity and Objects”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1971-72

“How to Read Wittgenstein”, in Understanding Wittgenstein, Royal Institute of Philosophy 1972-3

“The Shape of Ignorance”, in Lewis (ed) Contemporary British Philosophy, 1976

Introduction & Notes to Plato’s Republic (Lindsay trans.), 1976

Conflict and the Scope of Reason, 1974; also in Ratio 1978

“Intuition and the Inexpressible” in Katz (ed) Mysticism & Philosophical Analysis, 1978

Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge, 1979

“Thought, Word and Deed”, Proceedings of Aristotelian Society Supplement 1980

“Peirce, Wittgenstein and Systematic Philosophy”, MidWest Studies in Philosophy, 1981

“The Scope of Reason: An Epistle to the Persians”, in Objectivity and Cultural Divergence, Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1984

“Principia Metaphysica: The Scope of Reason” also known as “The Roots of Reason”; a work and manuscript mentioned several times but now unknown.

A personal note by Subroto Roy for a public lecture delivered at the University of Buckingham, August 24 2004:

“Renford Bambrough and I met once on January 31 1982, when I had returned to Cambridge from the USA for my PhD viva voce examination. He signed and gave me his last personal copy of Reason, Truth and God. Three years earlier, in 1979, I, as a 24 year old PhD student under F.H. Hahn in economics, had written to him expressing my delight at finding his works and saying these were immensely important to economics; he invited me to his weekly discussion groups at St John’s College but I could not attend. Between 1979 and 1989 we corresponded while I worked in America on my application of his and Wisdom’s work to problems in economics, which emerged in Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry (Routledge, International Library of Philosophy 1989, 1991), a work which got me into a lot of trouble with American economists (though Milton Friedman and Theodore W. Schultz defended it). Bambrough said of it “The work is altogether well-written and admirably clear”. On another occasion he said he was “extremely pleased” at the interest I had taken in his work. The preface of my book said he was not responsible for the use I had made of his writings, which I reiterate now. Returning to Britain in 2004, I find the work of Wisdom and Bambrough unknown or forgotten, even at the great University North East of Buckingham where they had lived and worked. In my view, they played a kind of modern-day Plato and Aristotle to Wittgenstein’s Socrates; in terms of Eastern philosophy, the wisdom they achieved in their lives and have left behind for us in their work to use and apply to our own problems, make them like modern-day “Boddhisatvas” of Mahayana Buddhism. My lecture “Science, Religion, Art, and the Necessity of Freedom” purports to apply their work to current international problems of grave significance, namely the cultural conflicts made apparent since the September 11 2001 attacks on America. As I am as likely to fail as to succeed in making this application, the brief bibliography given above is intended to direct interested persons to their work first hand for themselves.”

April 2007: See also Preface 2007 to the republication here at www.independentindian.com of Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry, and also the 2004 public lecture “Science, Religion, Art & the Necessity of Freedom”.

I was graced with the selfless friendship of this great American from 1983 onwards. We met last at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1992 when I flew from Washington DC to see him. He was without a doubt among the most decent, honourable and scholarly of all economists in the 20th Century.

Not only did he write this, he later deposed on my behalf as an expert witness in a US federal court.

A Man of Reason
Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Obituary Notice in The Statesman,

Perspective Page Nov 22 2006 www.thestatesman.net

Milton Friedman, who died on 16 November 2006 in San Francisco, was without a doubt the greatest economist after John Maynard Keynes. Before Keynes, great 20th century economists included Alfred Marshall and Knut Wicksell, while Keynes’s contemporaries included Irving Fisher, AC Pigou and many others. Keynes was followed by his you