Human liberation has become an epochal challenge in today’s world, requiring not only emancipation from oppressive structures but also from the oppressive self. This book seeks to rethink knowledge vis-à-vis familiar themes such as human interest, critical theory and cosmopolitanism.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Foreword by John Clammer; Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge; PART I – NURTURING THE GARDEN OF TRANSFORMATIONAL KNOWLEDGE: ROOTS AND VARIANTS: 1. Knowledge and Human Liberation: Jürgen Habermas, Sri Aurobindo and Beyond; 2. Beyond West and East: Co-evolution and the Calling of a New Enlightenment and Non-duality; 3. The Modern Prince and the Modern Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom; 4. Kant and Anthropology; 5. Tocqueville as an Ethnographer of American Prison Systems and Democratic Practice; PART II – RETHINKING KNOWLEDGE: 6. Some Recent Reconsiderations of Rationality; 7. Contemporary Challenges to the Idea of History; 8. Rule of Law and the Calling of “Dharma”: Colonial Encounters, Post-colonial Experiments and Beyond; 9. Compassion and Confrontation: Dialogic Experiments with Traditions and Pathways to New Futures; 10. Rethinking Pluralism and Rights: Meditative Verbs of Co-realizations and the Challenges of Transformations; 11. The Calling of a New Critical Theory: Self-Development, Inclusion of the Other and Planetary Realizations; PART III – ASPIRATIONS AND STRUGGLES FOR LIBERATION:TOWARDS PLANETARY REALIZATIONS:12. Rethinking the Politics and Ethics of Consumption: Dialogues with “Swadeshi” Movements and Gandhi; 13. Swaraj as Blossoming: Compassion, Confrontation and a New Art of Integration; 14. Civil Society and the Calling of Self-Development; 15. The Calling of Practical Spirituality: Transformations in Science and Religion and New Dialogues on Self, Transcendence and Society; 16. Spiritual Cultivation for a Secular Society; 17. Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Towards Planetary Realizations; Afterword by Fred Dallmayr; Advance Praise

 “This book by Ananta Kumar Giri is very timely as the author discusses one of the key trends of contemporary global changes – knowledge, human liberation and planetary realizations. Indeed, sometimes too much attention is paid to the economic and also political dimensions of globalization while the role and transformations of the ‘human capital’ do not get much attention. Giri shows that what is really becoming the greatest value nowadays is the intellectual and moral background of civilization concentrated in the person, that in the globalizing world knowledge is acquiring the status of a high value and as the most important precondition for social development. In this book high academic standard is combined with the clearly displayed humanistic position of the author who advocates for bridging the East and the West, the First, Second, and Third Worlds on the background of shared knowledge and morality that underpins it. In his humanistic socio-historical stance Giri, at all significant distinctions in approaches, resembles another searcher of the world civilization’s foundations, Karl Jaspers. Indeed, Giri, an Indian who has worked intensively overseas, combines the East and the West in himself what makes his book even more interesting and instructive for the reader.” —Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow