The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy
Leela Gandhi
Price
595
ISBN
9788178244570
Language
English
Pages
252
Format
Paperback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2015
Territorial Rights
Restricted
Imprint
Permanent Black

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance. In The Common Cause Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternative version. Using ethics as a lens, she describes a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century.

She identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism — an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial and antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline.

Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Leela Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought. She offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.

LEELA GANDHI is Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University. She is the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Her publications include Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction and Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship.hi is John Hawkes Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University. She is the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Her publications include Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction and Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship.