The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today’s dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for “the people.” To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered in a (...) world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy. Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today’s tempests. (shrink)

The paper traces the continuities between empires and successor nation-states and examines how imperial prerogatives continue to operate in the global system. The author also looks at the failure of postcolonial states to deliver on their promises after achieving national sovereignty. In all this, the focus is on conceptualizing the category of ‘the people’, which is supposedly the source of legitimate power in the contemporary world. In particular the paper zooms in on the historical continuity that characterized traditional empires and (...) is just as present in the context of contemporary world powers – the right to invoke imperial prerogatives to declare colonial exceptions. (shrink)

Peter Thomas’s criticism of arguments advanced recently of an era of “post-hegemony” in Western democracies may be extended by considering the experience of post-colonial Asia and Africa. Reviewing the use of the Gramscian concepts of consent and passive revolution in the study of modern South Asian history, this paper argues that both of Gramsci’s objectives –a general theory of power and the analysis of historically contingent and strategic politics– can be retained to yield valuable analytical insights. The paper concludes that (...) rather than focusing on whether the analysis of hegemony can remain true to Gramsci’s text, one can put the concept to analytical use in explaining political change in different parts of the world today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 128-134 [Access article in PDF] Anderson's Utopia Partha Chatterjee Imagined Communities was, without doubt, one of the most influential books of the late twentieth century. In the years since it was published, as nationalism unexpectedly came to be regarded as an increasingly unresolvable and often dangerous "problem" in world affairs, Benedict Anderson has continued to analyze and reflect on the subject, adding two brilliant chapters to (...) his highly acclaimed book and writing several new essays and lectures. Some of these have been brought together, along with a series of essays on the history and politics of Southeast Asia, in The Spectre of Comparisons. The publication of this volume provides an opportunity for other scholars in the field to reassess the work of, and pay tribute to, a major intellectual of our time. 1 Theoretically, the most significant addition that Anderson has made to his analysis in Imagined Communities is his attempt to distinguish between nationalism and the politics of ethnicity. He does this by identifying two kinds of seriality that are produced by the modern imaginings of community. One is the unbound seriality of the everyday universals of modern social thought: nations, citizens, revolutionaries, bureaucrats, workers, intellectuals, and so on. The other is the bound seriality of governmentality: the finite totals of enumerable classes of population produced by the modern census and the modern electoral systems. Unbound serialities are typically imagined and narrated by means of the classic instruments of print-capitalism, namely, the newspaper and the novel. They afford the opportunity for individuals to imagine themselves as members of larger than face-to-face solidarities, of choosing to act on behalf of those solidarities, of transcending by an act of political imagination the limits imposed by traditional practices. Unbound serialities are potentially liberating. As Anderson quotes from Pramodeya Ananta Toer's novel Dia Jang Menjerah, which describes such a moment of emancipation experienced by one of its characters:By now, Is knew the society she was entering. She had found a circle of acquaintances far wider than the circle of her brothers, sisters and parents. She now occupied a defined position in that society: as a woman, as a typist in a government office, as a free individual. She had become a new human being, with new understanding, new tales to tell, new perspectives, new attitudes, new interests--newnesses that she managed to pluck and assemble from her acquaintances. [qtd. in Spectre 41] Bound serialities, by contrast, can operate only with integers. This implies that for each category of classification, an individual can count only as one or zero, never as a fraction, which in turn means that all partial or mixed affiliations to a category are ruled out. One can only be black or not black, Muslim or not Muslim, tribal or not tribal, never only partially or contextually so. Bound serialities, Anderson suggests, are constricting and perhaps inherently conflictual. They produce the tools of ethnic politics. [End Page 128]I am not sure that the distinction between bound and unbound seriality, despite its appearance of mathematical precision, is the appropriate way to describe the differences in political modalities that Anderson wants to demarcate. It is not clear why the "unbound" serialities of the nationalist imagination cannot, under specific conditions, produce finite and countable classes. Explaining unbound seriality, Anderson says it is that which "makes the United Nations a normal, wholly unparadoxical institution" [29]. But surely, at any given time, the United Nations can have only a finite number of members. And that is because, with its explicitly laid-down procedures and criteria of membership, the imagining of nationhood has been reduced to the institutional grid of governmentality. Again, if by revolutionaries we mean those who are members of revolutionary political parties, then the number of revolutionaries in a country, or even in the whole world, will also be finite and countable, in the same way that the census claims to provide a figure for, let us say, the number of Hindus in India. It is also not clear in what sense the serialities of governmentality are "bound." The series for Christians or English... (shrink)

Systematic variation of anisotropic X-ray line broadening in vapour-deposited Pb films of various thicknesses on glass substrates is studied using dislocation model of strain anisotropy incorporated into a modified Williamson-Hall and modified Warren-Averbach procedure. For smaller film thicknesses in the range of about 100-200 nm, the dislocation network is less correlated and contains substantial screw component and twin or growth faults. The films of larger thicknesses , on the other hand, consist mostly of edge dislocations with a more regular and (...) correlated dislocation structure. The present study reveals the inadequacy of applicability of conventional Warren-Averbach analysis in regular and correlated dislocation structures. (shrink)

There is a long-standing myth that the history of modern India was foretold at the beginning of the nineteenth century by British liberals who predicted that the enlightened despotic rule of India's new conquerors would, by its beneficial effects, improve the native character and institutions sufficiently to prepare the people of that country one day to govern themselves. Lord William Bentinck, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, while presenting as governor-general his case for the opening up of India to European settlers, (...) speculated on the possibility of “a vast change to have occurred in the frame of society . . . which would imply that the time had arrived when it would be wise for England to leave India to govern itself”, but added that such change “can scarcely be looked for in centuries to come”. The doctrinal basis within liberal theory for justifying a democratic country like Britain exercising despotic power in colonies such as Ireland and India was securely laid out by mid-century liberals such as John Stuart Mill. The project of “improvement” was revived at the end of the nineteenth century by Gladstonian liberals who inducted elite Indians into new representative institutions based on a very narrow franchise in preparation for some form of self-government. When power was ultimately transferred to the rulers of a partitioned subcontinent in 1947, the history of liberal progress in India was complete. The storyline was laid out, for instance, in Thompson and Garratt's Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India or in Percival Spear's revised edition of the hugely successful textbook by Vincent Smith. Even nationalist Indian scholars adopted at least a part of this story, nowhere more so than in the histories of constitutional law which traced the foundations of the postcolonial Indian republic to the progressive expansion of liberal state institutions under British rule. (shrink)