The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (180 page)

 
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A need refers to what is required in order to do something or achieve some state of being. ‘Human needs’, for example, have been taken to describe requirements which must be satisfied if harm to an agent is to be avoided. Thus theorists have spoken of needs for food, drink, shelter, and even love, on the grounds that deprivation of any of these ‘goods’ will constitute harm to an individual. A strong defence of the notion of needs contrasts it with the notion of
wants
. Needs are universal, wants reflect the variety of circumstance and taste. Need-satisfaction is fundamental to welfare, want-satisfaction desirable but less urgent—and therefore needs have normative priority over wants. It is possible to be ignorant of one's needs, but not of one's wants.
There is, however, widespread scepticism about the distinction between needs and wants. Sceptics suggest that the notion of needs is socially relative and that of harm morality-dependent; that alleged needs may be met at so many different levels that they cannot define a baseline for considerations of welfare; that there is no less subjectivity in acknowledging needs than in asserting wants; and that purported needs merely represent someone's (contestable) view of the requirements of human flourishing. Although, in general, socialist political thought has been more sympathetic than other traditions to the notion of needs, and more willing to build theoretical prescriptions upon it, some contemporary radicals, particularly those concerned with societal shaping of our perceptions of ‘need’, are to be numbered amongst the sceptics.
AR 

 
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(1889–1964)
The first Prime Minister of independent India. He was also the architect of India's developmental policy in the immediate post-independent era. Influenced by
Marxism
, liberalism, and Fabian socialism, Nehru was a modernizer who wanted India to become an industrialized and economically self-reliant nation. Impressed with the rates of economic growth in the Soviet Union, Nehru tried to combine markets and a planned economy in a model of mixed-economy for India, with a significant regulatory and productive role for the state. In foreign policy, Nehru was one of the initiators of the Non-Aligned Movement, and for India's friendly relations with the Soviet Union.
SR 

 
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The revival of classical economics which began when its statements were recast in a more mathematically exact form in the late nineteenth century. In political discussion, however, the term refers more particularly to the rejection of government intervention in markets. The fundamental neoclassical complaint against
Keynes
is that he makes inconsistent assumptions about the rationality of economic actors. However, these refinements are lost in the usual political use of the term, where it becomes a synonym for ‘market economics’.

 
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See
imperialism
.

 
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This prefix variant of
corporatism
was frequently used by the new generation of corporatist theorists that emerged in the 1970s, largely as part of an effort to distinguish the corporatist model from earlier variants that had fascist or right-wing associations.
WG 

 
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