The objective of this paper is to delineate some of the emerging trends in politico-economic thinking from the point of view of what in the post-structuralist literature of social change has come to be known as post-modernity. Post-structuralism embraces the doctrine of a deconstructionist philosophy applied as much to economic theory and institutions as to science, society and politics. Deconstructionist philosophy is an approach toward acquiring an atomistic view of the inner structure of social reality. Hence, its constructive pattern is based on aggregation from the level of the micro-systems and the dissociation of the monolithic structure into its micro-elements. Consequently, we argue that such a picture on post-modernist approach to economic reasoning invokes nothing different from a utilitarian aggregation of independent decisions. Contrarily, when hegemony exists, then there is aggregation by convergence to the underlying hegemonic preferences.

After the classical approach to political economy and the rise of neoclassical institutionalism surrounding contested market behaviour, there exists rarely any alternative way of viewing the relationship between markets and institutions. In a recent article, Bowles writes, "The argument for social regulation of markets is transparent where either the agents or the enforcement process is endogenous. Where markets shape the capacities, values, and desires of the exchanging parties the standard normative case supporting market allocation (that it results in a Pareto-efficient outcome) collapses, for it rests on the assumption of exogenously given preferences." A reading of economic thought points out that essentially if a Kuhnian type paradigm shift caused by remarkably different ways of reasoning scientific phenomena, has taken place in economic history, then this has been with the Classical, Marxist and Keynesian schools. Thereafter, significant economic evolution can be associated with these prototypes. Of these latter days development are Hegelian and Schumpeterian development dynamics, both of which have entered Marxist doctrine and Myrdal's mixed economic order with institutionalism in it.


In Hegelian-Marxist dialectical process we find a regress of the mind into the limitless domain of Reason in search of Freedom. But while, Hegel aspired to derive historiography in the premise of a priori rationalism like Kant, Marx turned it around to relate ontological origins of historiography to economism. In Marxist dialectical materialism therefore, Hegelian epistemology becomes economistic empiricism. Berman points out that in the pedagogical explanation of economic history undertaken by Marx, there was the attempt on extrapolating world history from the history of Western culture. This approach not only marginalized the otherwise great contribution of other civilizations to world history, but also made Marx's reading of history a narrow one. Hegel too was locked in his belief of reproduction of the historical process of rationalistic evolution based on Germanic civilization. He writes in his Philosophy of History, "We have now arrived at the third period of the German World, and thus enters upon the period of Spirit conscious that it is free, inasmuch as it wills the True, the Eternal -- that which is in and for itself Universal."

Thus, in Hegelian-Marxism we find two independent approaches contesting with each other as explanation of history. These are independent in the sense, that it is impossible to transit from the deductive reasoning of history according to Hegel to the inductive reasoning of Marx and vice versa. In economic historicism, this divide between the purely epistemic (Kantian or Hegelian) and the purely ontic (Marxian or Humean) sides of interpreting reality, has become the sole cause of pluralism represented by methodological individualism and inconsistency between economic theory and reality. Such an inconsistency is shown in the pervasive nature of incomplete markets, which neoclassical economics and its prototypes are inadequate to treat due to the apolitical nature of these theories in the midst of their marginalist doctrines. Thus, once again to borrow from Bowles, "In many (such) contested exchanges either excess demand or excess supply will persist even in competitive equilibrium. To put it technically, these markets do not clear, and there is no pressure for supply to equal demand, no matter how competitive the market is." 

The divide between Marxism and Hegelian dialectics, between Kant and Hume, and generally between the purely a priori conditions of rationalism and the empirical conditions of the ontic order, pervades all of occidental concept of historicism. This is not to say that attempts to unify the two parts have not existed. Indeed in recent times such attempts have become the core of scientific endeavour in all branches. In Hegelian-Marxism too we find an aspiration for the dialectical process of circularity between the epistemic and the ontic, and historical change to modernity is defined by the emergence of the dialectical progress. But apart from a mere aspiration, there persists an irreconcilable methodological gap in the entire occidental order. This persistent divide is caused by the problems equally arising from the `finiteness' of world processes entrenched in Marxist economism as in Hume and Heidegger, and from the `infinite' nature of open-ended system that defies a positivistic determination of systemic unification in Hegel as in Kant.

At this point of our discourse the explanation of the capitalist process according to Schumpeter needs to be examined. The moral dimension was considered by Schumpeter as part of market order, not in alienation with it. Thus the market system has a profound role to play in establishing ethics and through this in determining global change in Schumpeterean developmental dialectics. Capital came to be explained in terms of technological change by innovations and entrepreneurship. Both of these were seen as systems of relationships rather than as physical endowments acquired and preserved by the privileged few. Such systemic relationships were seen to form in the midst of organizations. This capital relationship took the meaning of capitalism as the organization that develops ever changing sequences of relations between the modes of production and the sharing of capital endowments.

One notes that the particularly different treatment of the dialectical process proffered by Schumpeter rested upon his focus on the moral relevance of markets and its possibilities in the midst of knowledge diffusion. This knowledge diffusion acquired the nature of technological change under economic innovation. The moral relevance of markets was realized by the organization of collective decision making, which came to be known as capitalism. Schumpeter's concept of holding capital as a system of organizational relationships was a moral configuration of what was otherwise inherently an amoral perspective in Marxism, for capital was associated with surplus value. But there is a greater difference in the moral perspective of a market-organization related explanation of development in Schumpeter. This is the view that ethics and morality becoming dialectical forces in the determination of capital as system of relations enforceable by organization, become endogenous processes of Schumpeterean developmental dynamics, enterpreneurship and technological change. Such a perspective is quite different from the neoclassical apolitical treatment of markets.

Economic historicism in Schumpeter is essentially the cause and effect of the extensive relationship between enterpreneurship and technological change. Both are realized by the ethical perspective of capital being relational in the political economy. But problems arise in Schumpeterean dynamics by the open-ended episteme of organizational behaviour. While defining the importance of ethics in markets, Schumpeter did not attempt to explain the epistemology of what must comprise a set of rules of conduct. Must this be textual in nature derived from a tradition of universally accepted primal laws or must it be left to pluralistic determination by the human praxis? The first of these is an impossibility, for occidental scholars have forever divorced God from markets at the turn of the Eighteenth century Enlightenment, never to return to it.

In the second case, the ascent of the praxis is once again into the Kantian and Hegelian rationalistic realms. The problems of methodological pluralism that so arise, thereafter confuse the meaning of organization formed by interactions and consensus, except as attained by dominant power in the system.

Schumpeter's views of organization and technological change have been taken up by Drucker in recent times to expound his ideas on the post-capitalist knowledge order. But knowledge to Drucker is the end result of a relational process that underlies human capital development. He writes, "What makes the market superior is precisely that it organizes economic activity around information." Yet Drucker's concept of information capitalism has nothing to do with economic epistemology. Consequently, even his claim of a new economics post-Keynes and post-neoclassicism does not yield the foundations of any alternative knowledge-centered theorizing. Contrarily however, economic history points to the fact that the turn of every major juncture of thought was preceded by a new epistemological outlook. In the absence of such shifts, one must condescend to the inevitable conclusion that the continuation of the same a priori and a posteriori ontologies, differentiated between themselves as deductive and inductive methods of inquiry, respectively, comprise the core problem in the unification of economic knowledge.

Modernity in the Hegelian, Marxian and Schumpeterian worlds reflects the nature of continuous evolution from an infinite sequence of primal forms towards a creative order. The prospects sought are liberation and freedom -- not from the grips of subjectivity that random evolution brings along with it. Instead, the concept of freedom here means openness in the flight of rationalism. This makes the mind alone as the supreme formulator of destinies and the mover of change. Thus, only cogent thoughts that can be protected by powerful survival conditions, which Nietsche and Darwin considered to be the dominant reality of existence, emerge as acceptable ones.

The process of change is then described in the historicity of this dominance. Marx saw this in capitalism, but could not explain it in a functionalist way by means of the socialist transformation, for the epistemological roots of Marxist thinking is dimmed by its empiricist content. Hegel lost it in his miscontrued idea of Freedom when this was equated with Germanic civilization. Everything that happened to history after that was a convergence to the Germanic world in Hegel's view, just as capitalism, power, productivity and progress were equated with Protestant Ethics by Weber. In Schumpeter we find the continuous destruction of the present, as markets and technologies combine to evolve newer states of nature. This too is a Darwinian concept of economic evolution used here to explain the open-ended feature of embedded individualism, randomness, dominance and movement in capitalist transformation.

Modernity is then a philosophy that takes a Rostowian stages perspective to change and growth, but underlines these with the evolutionary philosophy of the entire order. The consequence is then a convergence of individuals, groups, markets, institutions and the global order to the conditions of power and perceptions, pluralism and differentiations that capitalism enforces.

Post-modernity is a deconstructionist philosophy to liberate the tragedy of man from the aggrandising spirit of dominance by what Fukuyama called the `megalothymia', or the very large. The result of dismantling the megalothymia is the rise of the individual as the powerful. Atomism becomes the return of the individual spirit. It is a convergence toward yet a continuing random, subjective, pluralistic and individuated order. It is now caused and enforced by what Fukuyama calls as `isothymia'. With the rise of the individual in the isothymotic convergence comes the micro-relevance of preferences -- of all kinds -- gender, family, population, belligerence, environment, agent-agent relations. In each of these cases the rise of the individual deconstructs both the nature of the megalothymia as well as the desynthesizing language games of revealed texts. The consequence is that gender is now not premised on the realization of an interactive convergence within this group. Rather it finds expression in the definition of individuation within powerful groups as is the case of labour union. The family is seen not as a cohesive group based on gender-agent interactions but rather as a relationship whose welfare is tied to determinations arising in the market order. Becker describes the state of marital contract as follows: The utility-maximizing rational choice perspective implies that a person would divorce if the utility expected from remaining married is below the utility expected from divorce, where the latter is affected by the prospects of remarriage.

The absence of an epistemological shift and the consequential inability to unify economic knowledge between the a priori or theoretical domains of primal relations, and the a posteriori or the positivistic domains including institutions and empirical facts, remain the central problem of economic history. In post- modernist context, this historiographical problems compounds by the deconstructionist and post-structuralist methods used. The compound problem manifests itself as a final fragmentation of collective decision making into methodological individualism. On the other hand, there exists no viable method to aggregate micro-decisions to the institutional level, or to define a logical micro-macro interface. Likewise, on the side of institutions there is no connection between microeconomic and macroeconomic policies. For example, price level of macroeconomics is of a different nature from microeconomic price. Macroeconomics is not a study of aggregate behaviour and there is no decision making inherent in it.

Thus a profound confusion over deconstructionist method is engendered by the distinct two-sided approaches. These are namely, the problem of aggregation to the collective from individuated forms and the problem of deconstructing a collective into individuated components. This dual problem is what Rousseau recognized as he wrote, "It is said that Japanese mountebanks can cut up a child under the eyes of spectators, throw the different parts into the air, and then make the child come down, alive and all of a piece. This is more or less the trick that our political theorists perform -- after dismembering the social body with a sleight of hand worthy of the fairground, they put the pieces together again anyhow." Such an aggregation problem is also to be found in utilitarianism. This in recent times has become the theoretical grounding of new institutionalism using additive social welfare functions with exogenous ethical perceptors.

Myrdal wanted to break away from this crass concept of institutionalism as being devoid of organizational substance. In his perspective of institutionalism, Myrdal presented a social causation model. This concept comes close to Schumpeterean methodology toward integrating relations across society and economy and thus in defining the developmental process. Yet Myrdal's concept of mixed economy suffers from the aggregation problem that we have just seen. When polity is active, market interference and X-inefficiency increase. When markets become active, this causes tradeoffs with social prerogatives. At best a mixed economy can be seen as a process of correcting incomplete contracts. Such contracts cannot be enforceable in either the institutional or market orders. Thus such incompleteness causes transaction costs, which cause pervasive economic disequilibrium. The end result is either a non-consensual organization or one where consensus is enforced by hegemonic convergence.

The historical element of social causation emerges from the deconstructionist mechanism built in the individuating relations of markets and polity. The consequences of such individualism are extensive. Individuation transmits similar behaviour to institutions as to markets. This point is well proven by the theory of public choice applied to a neoclassical utilitarian treatment of political cycles.

Schumpeterean kind of moral relevance of markets then becomes non-functional. Much of post-modernist aspirations to ethics and morality, aesthetics and social reconstruction, become vacuous in the future prospect of economic theory and institutionalism.

The deconstructionist meaning of polity-market interrelationships with the rage of individualism following this order, defeats the purpose of objectivity that deconstructionism would otherwise like to attain. Consequently, many of the social goods become distorted in meaning and substance.

A good example here is the theory of entitlement provided by Nozick, which clamours for a return to the pure holding of bundles in the state of nature without his `morally abhorring' intervention of governments and institutions. On the other hand, we note the market distortionary approach to distributive equity by Rawls. Here the domain of social contract is seen to start from a state of complete equality in a monadic state Original Position. The non- relational character of Original Position is similar to the static full-information assumption of neoclassical economics. The subsequent states of Rawls' Difference Principle are like the intergenerational second-best distortionary conditions of neoclassical school. 

In this way, deconstructionism in every form is found to be a continuation of the old character of neoclassicism bringing it closer to a classical laissez faire norm. Indeed, new classicism announced by Hayek in his theory of market catallaxy and his conclusion on the functional non-sequiter nature of social justice in free market transformation points to such an ethically benign order.

The post-modernist historical context of Hayek's ideas on markets and social institutions is thus seen to be embedded in the concept of autonomy of ethical values from the market order. Indeed, Hayek like Hegel, views the historical process as the continuous progress of rationality expressed through market preferences. The extent of Hayek's liberalism associated the market process makes him a protagonist of `hyperliberalism' and hyperrationality.

Such ideas go against the economic historicism of Schumpeter and Polanyi. The rise of money is seen by Hayek as a contravention of market transactions mobilized by economic institutions. In the earlier economic historians most importantly Polanyi and recently in the concept of moral economy given by Popkin, one finds that informal exchange in goods and services in the absence of money, performed an important task of market transactions. Thus, cultural and social values had a primal role to play in the transactions of these earlier markets. From these transactions arose the contravention of money as a medium of exchange and store of value. Money is then seen in economic history to be an instrument rather than a fundamental of market order.

Hayek's onslaught against social justice in the market order is a confirmation of the capitalist order over the plight of a more organized self-consciousness. It affirms the ethically benign nature of markets and transactions that remains inherent in capitalist world system. In this milieu, institutions too became ethically benign. Thus, the neo-liberal content severed capitalism from its Schumpeterean roots and placed instead individualism into it of the nature of an utilitarian collective. Social justice ceased in Hayek to form the otherwise indispensable sui generis of all socio-economic thinking, behaviour and activities, which in turn can be mobilized by a special consideration on polity-market interactions. We will take up this alternative outlook later in this paper.

Hayek's concept of social justice and markets was also anti- Rawls and pro-Nozick. He shared some of the essence of new institutionalism in its neoclassical mould. Central social issues such as of entitlement, property rights and re- redistribution were foreign to Hayek's new classicism. Thus, the exogenous nature of ethical values to be found in new institutionalism, social choice theory and public choice theory taken up in the neoclassical methodology, constitutes the nature of Hayek's institutions in the midst of market catallaxy.

Hayek is also responsible in turning a historistic concept of economic evolutionism into economism. He writes, "It is of course true that within the overall framework of the Great Society there exist numerous networks of other relations that are in no sense economic. But this does not alter the fact that it is the market order which makes peaceful reconciliation of the divergent purposes possible -- and possible by a process which redounds to the benefit of all."

Wallerstein too has shown that England during the Eighteenth century industrial revolution gained immensely from its expanding population size. This brought into existence the proletariat, which financed cheap labour and large markets with elastic demand. The capital saving innovations helped capitalists to gain from the informal sector of households and the cheap labour provided by a new culture of economic activity in the milieu of economic growth and social revolution. The proletariat thus contributed greatly to the English and French industrial revolutions. This owed much to the cultural and non-competitive nature of work at the level of the proletariat. On the other hand, the capitalist world system managed to suppress popular organization. Wallerstein writes in this regard, "They (changes in the world capitalist system) represented its (world capitalist system) further consolidation and entrenchment. The popular forces were suppressed, and their potential in fact constrained by the political transformations." (edited)

Wallerstein's concept of world-system comprises a closed order endowed by its own inner culture and power relations. The difference among many such world systems is their relative sizes. Those that are large and domineering become like empire type world- system. In this sense of world-system their is an obvious individuation by partitioning between systems, that do not integrate by exchange of relations, with the result of power dissipation through a more cohering knowledge-based interactive process. Thus a partitioning of economic history by means of various world-systems is a pluralistic approach either to endorse or to explain the positivistic case of methodological individualism gaining its high ground under neo-liberalism and capitalism. Such a critique of capitalism and democracy as supportive instruments of liberalism is also to be found in Ferry and Renault's explanation of the ideas of market oriented permissions in the concept of entitlements.

The above discussions lead us to believe that post-modernist deconstructionism is simply a pluralistic device for asserting the structuralist and functionalist approaches to be found in Hegelian, Marxian and Schumpeterian dynamics of social change. It comes at a time when the world system is required to legitimate the power- driven capitalist transformation that is taking place in the aftermath of a an unnatural figment of modernism that found expression in Hegelian-Marxist and Schumpeterian dialectics. 

The roots of post-modernist awakening in its deconstructionist characteristics are also found in the pluralistic domains that survive in the type of subjectivity derived from dualism and perception. Deconstructionist process leads to atomism of the mind and self. Foucault laments on this condition of the individual as the tragedy of man. Inter-systemic unification and knowledge formation in differentiated domains are thus rendered impossible. Alongwith such deconstructionism comes the impossibility for ethics, be this in globalization, sustainable development, human development or new institutionalism. 

Finally, if the old epistemological order has become the continuing new through invoking of Greek thought in modernity and post-modernity, the central questions remain as follows: Is atomism, individualism and pluralism the essence of sciences, life and thought? Does the natural order belong otherwise to an essentially interactive-integrative order of historicity, which even though pervasive in nature, is suppressed by the order of atomism? The answers either in the affirmative or negative to these questions will invoke the essence of reality. 

The resource of environment suffers in its objective concept from the misleading identity of how it is treated. In other words, is environment a good or a service? If the nature of environment is any of these, it gets rendered to consumptive hedonism. It experiences efficiency-equity distortions as the conflict between polity and market proceeds over the control of environment as such a good/service or a resource. At the end, deconstructionist methodology converges to the individualistic perspective of neoclassicism. If environment is to be treated as an ecological common, then deconstructionist methodology must yield to the primal concept of environment and ecology as a system of monotonically positive interactions between the social and economic goals. The ecological order with human dimensions is a field of cognitive realizations caused and affected by interactive preferences. 

The ecological order with interactions between physical and human forms represents an understanding and application of laws emanating from an epistemology that unifies relationship between and among the human world and the universe. Within this unifying epistemology, bits of ethically endogenized general equilibrium subsystems perpetually develop into more extended systems. In other words, temporary general equilibrium subsystems in the small assume grander forms in the large, as knowledge proceeds to evolve. Therefrom, the ethical nature of socio-economic comprehension and its application proceed as cause and effect interrelationships. Such evolving knowledge-induced or interactive relations progressively well-define the global concept of ecology and environment.

How does the post-modernist methodology of deconstructionism appear in the light of such a conception of environment and ecology? To investigate this we show how modernity and post- modernity both become dysfunctional in addressing the ethics- centered focus of development.

The issue at point transcends from the particular treatment of environment and ecology as relational commons to a generalized treatment of all experiences of thought in a morally prevalent universe. Here the methodology of deconstructionism is seriously questioned by its inherent plurality of beings, multitudes of subjective forms, all necessitating convergence by dominance for attaining functionalism and structure. Institutions and science suffer from the same type of methodological individualism in their axiomatic core. Ethics is then misconstrued as an individualistically perceptual, and hence, subjective notion of reality. The mosaic of social cohesion is ruptured as atomism deepens more of individualism, subjectivity and plurality. Inter- and intra-systemic differentiations intensify. More of dominance now makes the `I' conflict aganist the `Thou'. The neoclassical order of the past and the atomism, individualism, ethical subjectivity of Ghaia, are re-established in post-modernity. Only the focus of the agent has changed from `megalothymia' to `isothymia'.

The concept of sustainability is then a readjustment process of understanding a conscious use of the environment as an intergenerational common good. It does not yield to the understanding of environment and ecology as a domain of ethics- centered relations between economic and social forces while retaining the great relevance of markets. This is to say that we are looking into the new set of environmental-ecological relational world view for a moral transformation of the economic and scientific methodology, experience and continuity. We are thus prescribing an ethics-centered regenerative socio-scientific process to replace the ethically neutral neoclassical continuity in post-modernity.

What can Islam therefore offer to the construction of an ethics-centered world view? How does this negate the post-modernist trends in thought? What is the direction for Muslims and the Muslim world in the future age?

Answers to these questions necessitate first the understanding of Qur'anic historicism in general and then the economic historicism that emanate therefrom. As a text, the Qur'an presents the march of the universe and alongwith it of its soul, beings and systems in the uniquely contrasting mould of truth and falsehood. These are the only two realities of the Qur'anic precepts of life, thought and experience.

Truth is premised in the Oneness of God. It is pervaded by the Great Messengers who are entrusted to continue the message of Divine Unity. The axiomatic foundation of this Divine order is that it is completed in the message of Islam that has been perfected with the Prophet Muhammad. It is reflected in every sign of existence (the meaning of Signs of God). It is discovered by discursive and analytical methods extending from searching to questioning to affirmation to self-referencing of Divine Oneness.

Falsehood on the other hand, is the logical complementation of Truth. It is logically necessary to affirm the power and meaning of existence premised in Truth. This subservience of Falsehood to Truth presents a single generic order of creation in Truth itself. Thus a process of negation is permitted by the Qur'an for the universe to pronounce the inexorability of Truth. The Qur'anic verse in this regard is: "Apart from Truth what remains but error?" (Haqq-ul-Yaqin)

The contrasting deconstruction of this measure is made to rest on the power of logical discourse that emanates from the equally confirming validity of the text. In this regard, a Qur'anic verse says that if there was even a single contradiction in the Qur'an, one would have found many. All methods of discourse and analysis are thus presented by the Qur'an for the discovery of Truth. They remain inexorably immanent. These methods include pervasive discursions, synthesis and anti-synthesis, analysis and evolutionary historicism in the discursive planes. The method is confirmed finally by a self-referencing text of the Qur'an on itself.

The universe in this order is not taken to be additive, as was the case of deconstructionist methodology of post-modernity. Rather, the concept of the universe is that of a relational domain of inter-systemic forms in the small and in the large. They are all continuously and dynamically interacting, evolving and integrating on the premise of the Unifying Epistemology. The concept of the universe in which Truth pervades and beings take forms, interrelate, change and indefinitely conserve themselves, is one of causation, continuity and unification.

The Qur'anic precept of the universe and its pervasively interacting-integrating subsystems within a primordially unified universe, is also not the concept of mental forms governing reality that has been given by Iqbal, Hubner, Reichenbach and Foucault. For in all of these we find that either a Greek perception of ethical serenity defeats the human reach for any functional use of the concept of Freedom (Iqbal); or the open-ended a priori realm of reason rejects self-referencing by means of the Divine Agent. A tacit recognition is thus made regarding the impossibility of attaining knowledge in the order of rationalism (Foucault's lament on the tragedy of man and Hubner's search for `systems ensemble'). Considering Islamic World View in the Domain of Environment- Ecology.

We have called the universally Unifying Epistemology of the Qur'an as Unification Epistemology. Let us then investigate how this epistemology can be applied to a new construction of ecological awareness different from the post-modernist approach. 

Ethical neutrality in neoclassical economics is caused either by the effect of market consequentialism on exogenous ethical policies or by the inability for ethical preferences to integrate with market process. Contrarily, the approach to the study of environment-ecology as a relational domain, makes this knowledge-induced. This knowledge induction comes in two ways. First, there is the inherent knowledge of the physical order. But this needs anthropic presence to tap and use the embodied knowledge. Thus the correspondence between physically endowed knowledge and the anthropic comprehension of the same, generates two way discursions. Discursions emanate from the anthropic understanding of physical reality in the light of the endowed Precept of Unicity. Secondly, this process intensifies in discursions among the anthropic agents themselves. Discursions as the central means of discovering knowledge, makes the Unification Epistemology or the unifying essence of this episteme, cause and effect in a circular causation and continuity model of unified reality premised in that epistemology. This presents an altogether new approach from the deconstructionist nature of reborn neoclassicism in post-modernity. It presents an ethico-economic study of environment-ecology as a relational system. 

The nature and substance of ethics in the cause-effect circular causation and continuity model of unified reality must be one that endogenizes ethics in all decision-making systems. Here not merely agent-agent specific inter- relationships but also conceptions of the physical environment are induced by the unique view of a universally relational order. The environment by our definition of such an agent-cosmic anthropic interrelationship and its development into the epistemology underlying such interrelationships, fits directly the perspective of such a universally interactive domain.

It is not within the scope of this paper to venture into this area of ethical endogeneity in ecological perspectives. We will simple make a brief presentation of the non-neoclassical nature of this methodology. The unifying essence of this methodology is brought out by the inherently discursive interactive-integrative essence of the world view.

First, by ethical endogeneity we mean the formation and continuity by cause and effect of interactive preferences between and among anthropic agents and the physical world. The first set of preferences generates a movement toward knowledge formation leading thus to consensus. The second set of preferences generates a natural way of deriving, comprehending and applying a unification epistemology to the physical world in relation to its human effects and vice versa.

Thus, instead of purely market equilibrium prices of neoclassical economics, we have now prices emanating from interactions endemic to agent-agent specific decision making. This would involve conscious processes involving a large number of considerations. Important ones are to realize the nature and quantity of goods to be produced and sold, the nature of technology to be adopted, economic cooperation in production and consumption. Such an interactive decision making assumes the existence of underlying processes that simulate the issue at hand between polity and the market order. Consequently, interactive preferences between the two kinds of agents arise. These are brought about by dynamic changes in consumer preferences, production menus, and hence, in modes of income distribution. Interactive preferences represent knowledge formation in the polity-market (ecology) interrelationships. They establish continuity and circularity in the polity-market (ecology) interrelationships.

There is a good deal of positive evidence for the human ecological transformation that can be created by Islamic basis of financing and development, particularly at the grassroots. For example in Malaysia, eversince the inception of Islamic financial institutions and their instruments to finance shareholding and ownership among the poor target groups, a massive amount of financial resources has been mobilized. Here are some statistics in that regard. It is important to note here the depth of attractiveness that the Islamic financial instruments have generated to bring about a value-centered transformation alongwith economic interests in Malaysian `ethicized' market transformation. There exists cause to be hopeful about the realization of growth with distribution and a caring Malaysian society by the year 2020. Such a transformation on the basis of both economic prosperity and development of values, grounds the Malaysian Vision 2020.

The central message of the Islamic financial instruments is to operate on profitsharing, equity-participation, shareholding cooperative investments, while eliminating the eliminating the interest rate gradually. The attractiveness of such instruments is caused both by the economic interests of ownership among the poor target groups and by Islamic value orientation. However, certain kinds and denominations of such grassroots shares can also be held by the well-to-do to cooperatively finance joint ventures for the common benefit of both the poor and the well-to-do.

Amanah Saham Nasional as these shares are called, comprised a total share value of M$5,200 million with an accumulated investment of M$11,000 million by the end of 1990. The number of Bumiputera (Malay poor target groups) shareholders stood at 2.5 million, which comprised 46 per cent of the total number, 5.4 million of eligible (underprivileged) Bumiputeras.

Interest rates on savings hovered between 3.50 per cent and 6.00 per cent annually, between 1985 and 1990, respectively. As opposed to these rates, Islamic Bank Malaysia paid monthly rates of profits to depositers amounting to 9.43 per cent on 60 months deposits and 7.25 per cent on 12 months deposits during this time period.

In 1985 alone Islamic Bank Malaysia as a Group had current savings, investment and other deposits of customers of M$410,224,204. This comprised 4.18 per cent of total national savings. Shareholders' funds stood at M$422,650,150. (Ismail 1990). In 1994, total liabilities, shareholders' funds and Takaful funds (= total assets) amounted to approximately M$3.046 billion for the Islamic Bank Malaysia Group. This marked a 51.63 per cent increase over the 1993 value; and an average annual increase of 62.18 per cent between 1985 and 1995. Net profits in 1994 was M$29.906 million. This marked a 36.34 per cent increase over the 1993 value. Dividend rate was 8 per cent in 1994.

The Malaysian New Economic Policy which is now replaced by the New Development Policy aimed at the alleviation of poverty. These schemes were designed to correct the social imbalance that existed widely for some time between the rich and poor in Malaysia. The result has been impressive, as Malaysia today becomes an exemplary country in the world to have virtually eliminated rampant absolute poverty, although relative poverty between the various states remains. The historical Malaysian economic record based on Islamic financial markets has shown a positive impact on the human ecological transformation in terms of development and ownership at the grassroots.

The advance of occidental societies is deeply premised in its dualistic independence between the purely a priori and purely a posteriori parts of an otherwise unified reality. From such epistemological origins are derived the occidental prescriptions of behaviour, institution, state and science. Nothing is left untouched in this epistemological entirety. Thus, there is no immanent neutrality in science as in political economy, from this distinctly occidental essence. It primordially derives from Hellenic thought compounded with extreme rationalism and individuation of self. Society and state, economy and markets, globalization and international relations, all form themselves within this perception of functional reality. Such a foundationalism gains profound pervasiveness in the occidental order, giving it legitimacy by dominance. This is how methodological individualism is explained scientifically by neoclassicism. The models simply change structure from the individual to institutions, to state and the global order. Across the advance from modernity to post-modernity, the underlying neoclassical methodology and its emerging forms are found to continue, simply with a change of agent-specific focus. The focus now deepens toward individualism.

At the epistemological level this carries with it a perceptual, non-integrating, non-interactive, subjective and random flight of the intellection process to the extent that individuation creates plurality of forms. Dualism is extended to pluralism in this order. In the midst of these differentiations convergence is possible by means of two factors. These are, Eurocentric dominance representing power and a common epistemology determining form and behaviour of occidental pursuasion.

We have discussed this transference of the unique neoclassical methodology of individualism in both modernity and post-modernity by taking the example of sustainability as a form of world view. We have shown that sustainability and ecology cannot be liberated from the hedonic passions of the consumer and producer in a consequentialist market economy. Here ethics remain neutral to all forms of neoclassicism in modernity and post-modernity. The issue of sustainability cannot be addressed in the absence of an ethics-centered meta-theory of life, thought and experience.

This search brings us to the only other alternative to occidental order. This is the Islamic world view as premised in its Unification Epistemology -- not so much in Muslim history. Thus, this Unification Epistemology emanating directly from the Qur'an is shown to be of the essence of a unique process of historicism that is dynamic in principles. Events are descriptive of this principle of conflict between Truth and Falsehood. In this order, Qur'anic historicism remains unbounded by space and time, finding pervasive applications as descriptive confirmations of the principle. Knowledge now becomes the thoroughly endowing element of this order. It moves the world into the evolutionary process of knowing by cause and effect. We thus introduced the circular causation and continuity model of unified reality to explain the universal order of the Qur'an in the midst of its Unification Epistemology.

The theme of ecology and environment as relational domains in the context of a unifying knowledge forming process, is once again taken up and studied. What is true of the address made to environment, ecology and sustainability, is equally true of the universal entirety and its subsystems. Thus, while post-modernity remains a continuity of modernity, both being premised in their Hellenic culture of individuation and rationalism. The Qur'anic world view presents the universe as a relational and integral form. These relations are learned by textual reference to Unification Epistemology using discursive methodology. In this, ethics become endogenous explanations of regenerative forms.