Pub Date : 2022-05-10DOI: 10.1177/00905917221092821
Tejas Parasher
Through a study of Gandhian political writings in mid-twentieth-century India, this article explores the neglected question of how the issue of representative democracy shaped anticolonial thought. The rise of a Gandhian perspective on electoral representation was made possible by the account of modern democracy given in Gandhi’s "Hind Swaraj" (1909). From the 1930s, four key Indian thinkers influenced by Gandhi expanded on "Hind Swaraj" to argue that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced the kinds of unaccountability and elite capture of legislatures that they identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions, combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents articulated ideas of antiparliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty.
{"title":"Beyond Parliament: Gandhian Democracy and Postcolonial Founding","authors":"Tejas Parasher","doi":"10.1177/00905917221092821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092821","url":null,"abstract":"Through a study of Gandhian political writings in mid-twentieth-century India, this article explores the neglected question of how the issue of representative democracy shaped anticolonial thought. The rise of a Gandhian perspective on electoral representation was made possible by the account of modern democracy given in Gandhi’s \"Hind Swaraj\" (1909). From the 1930s, four key Indian thinkers influenced by Gandhi expanded on \"Hind Swaraj\" to argue that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced the kinds of unaccountability and elite capture of legislatures that they identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions, combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents articulated ideas of antiparliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"837 - 860"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42668624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-05DOI: 10.1177/00905917221085605
S. Seth
{"title":"Book Review: The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought, by Sinja Graf","authors":"S. Seth","doi":"10.1177/00905917221085605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221085605","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"51 1","pages":"442 - 447"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44120374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-05DOI: 10.1177/00905917221082639
Deva Woodly
of Arendt’s archival “heroes” (107), uniquely exemplified in Honig’s analysis by Arendt’s exclusion of Ali from her discussions of civil disobedience in the 1970s. The example suggests the ways in which exclusion can clarify the value of refusal. Honig’s notes are extensive and need to be read. I would have liked a bibliography. The book’s intended audiences include political theorists, feminist scholars, and classicists, although the latter may put up some resistance. But this potential resistance simultaneously illustrates the ways in which, as Honig says, “refusal is generative” (107).
{"title":"Book Review: Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement, by Erin Pineda","authors":"Deva Woodly","doi":"10.1177/00905917221082639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221082639","url":null,"abstract":"of Arendt’s archival “heroes” (107), uniquely exemplified in Honig’s analysis by Arendt’s exclusion of Ali from her discussions of civil disobedience in the 1970s. The example suggests the ways in which exclusion can clarify the value of refusal. Honig’s notes are extensive and need to be read. I would have liked a bibliography. The book’s intended audiences include political theorists, feminist scholars, and classicists, although the latter may put up some resistance. But this potential resistance simultaneously illustrates the ways in which, as Honig says, “refusal is generative” (107).","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"985 - 990"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41681833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-05DOI: 10.1177/00905917221092424
A. McQueen
Thomas Hobbes tells us that he wrote Leviathan to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. This article interprets the argumentative strategy of the second half of Leviathan in light of this intention. Over the course of his three major political works, Hobbes develops a convergent argument to absolve God’s laws. This strategy of judicial rhetoric relies on using multiple independent claims in the hope that one’s audience finds at least one of them persuasive. This was a risky strategy for Hobbes that angered his critics. The strategy also reveals something about what sort of philosopher Hobbes was and how we ought to approach his work.
{"title":"Absolving God’s Laws: Thomas Hobbes’s Scriptural Strategies","authors":"A. McQueen","doi":"10.1177/00905917221092424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092424","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Hobbes tells us that he wrote Leviathan to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. This article interprets the argumentative strategy of the second half of Leviathan in light of this intention. Over the course of his three major political works, Hobbes develops a convergent argument to absolve God’s laws. This strategy of judicial rhetoric relies on using multiple independent claims in the hope that one’s audience finds at least one of them persuasive. This was a risky strategy for Hobbes that angered his critics. The strategy also reveals something about what sort of philosopher Hobbes was and how we ought to approach his work.","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"754 - 779"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45224072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.1177/00905917221077140
K. Bassi
the fact that this series involved the revisitation of its documentary subjects at seven-year intervals—that “Unlike a map, which renders a physical landscape as a physical replica, there is really no danger that film will ever perfectly represent its object—at least not when its object is a subject—for the subjectivity of persons, although a phenomenon of duration like film, is not a phenomenon of the same nature” (121). The imperfection of cinematic representation is not, as Dienstag makes clear, an occasion for special concern, merely pessimism—but only insofar as pessimism implies that in film, just as in representative democracies, we do not always get what we want. Or when we get what we want, we have to give up a little of something else that might matter to us so that others can have something, but not all, of what they want or need, too. And if what we give up, ultimately, is the narcissistic satisfaction that follows from, or compels, a belief that what appears, appears just for us, what, exactly, will we be missing out on?
{"title":"Book Review: A Feminist Theory of Refusal, by Bonnie Honig","authors":"K. Bassi","doi":"10.1177/00905917221077140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221077140","url":null,"abstract":"the fact that this series involved the revisitation of its documentary subjects at seven-year intervals—that “Unlike a map, which renders a physical landscape as a physical replica, there is really no danger that film will ever perfectly represent its object—at least not when its object is a subject—for the subjectivity of persons, although a phenomenon of duration like film, is not a phenomenon of the same nature” (121). The imperfection of cinematic representation is not, as Dienstag makes clear, an occasion for special concern, merely pessimism—but only insofar as pessimism implies that in film, just as in representative democracies, we do not always get what we want. Or when we get what we want, we have to give up a little of something else that might matter to us so that others can have something, but not all, of what they want or need, too. And if what we give up, ultimately, is the narcissistic satisfaction that follows from, or compels, a belief that what appears, appears just for us, what, exactly, will we be missing out on?","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"980 - 985"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41392228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-23DOI: 10.1177/00905917221076085
B. Price
{"title":"Book Review: Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity, by Joshua Foa Dienstag","authors":"B. Price","doi":"10.1177/00905917221076085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221076085","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"975 - 980"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44154099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-28DOI: 10.1177/00905917211065064
Jasper Friedrich
What are we to make of the fact that world leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have, within the last few decades, offered official apologies for a whole host of past injustices? Scholars have largely dealt with this phenomenon as a moral question, seeing in these expressions of contrition a radical disruption of contemporary neoliberal individualism, a promise of a more humane world. Focusing on Canadian apology politics, this essay instead proposes a nonideal approach to state apologies, sidestepping questions of what they ought to do and focusing instead on their actual functioning as political acts. Through a sociologically informed speech act theory and Foucault’s work on power, apology is conceptualized as a speech act with an essentially relational nature. The state, through apologizing, reaffirms the norms governing its relationship to its subjects at a moment when a past transgression threatens to destabilize this relation. From a Foucauldian point of view, the state’s power inheres in the very stability of the state–citizen relation, and we should therefore see apologies as defensive moves to protect state hegemony. In the context of Western liberal democracies, such as Canada, apologies embody, rather than challenge, the logic of neoliberal governmentality by suggesting that everything, including resentment against the state, can be managed within the current status quo. Nevertheless, total cynicism about apology politics is not warranted. In many indigenous apology campaigners’ demands for contrition we see another side of apologies: their potential to bring about change by enacting counterhegemonic relations to the state.
{"title":"Settling Accounts at the End of History: A Nonideal Approach to State Apologies","authors":"Jasper Friedrich","doi":"10.1177/00905917211065064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211065064","url":null,"abstract":"What are we to make of the fact that world leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have, within the last few decades, offered official apologies for a whole host of past injustices? Scholars have largely dealt with this phenomenon as a moral question, seeing in these expressions of contrition a radical disruption of contemporary neoliberal individualism, a promise of a more humane world. Focusing on Canadian apology politics, this essay instead proposes a nonideal approach to state apologies, sidestepping questions of what they ought to do and focusing instead on their actual functioning as political acts. Through a sociologically informed speech act theory and Foucault’s work on power, apology is conceptualized as a speech act with an essentially relational nature. The state, through apologizing, reaffirms the norms governing its relationship to its subjects at a moment when a past transgression threatens to destabilize this relation. From a Foucauldian point of view, the state’s power inheres in the very stability of the state–citizen relation, and we should therefore see apologies as defensive moves to protect state hegemony. In the context of Western liberal democracies, such as Canada, apologies embody, rather than challenge, the logic of neoliberal governmentality by suggesting that everything, including resentment against the state, can be managed within the current status quo. Nevertheless, total cynicism about apology politics is not warranted. In many indigenous apology campaigners’ demands for contrition we see another side of apologies: their potential to bring about change by enacting counterhegemonic relations to the state.","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"700 - 722"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42706830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-12DOI: 10.1177/00905917211069607
H. Ramesh
Recent years have seen a notable surge in scholarship on the life and thought of B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). This essay contributes to this literature by uncovering heretofore underemphasized aspects of how Ambedkar theorized the relationships between caste oppression, democracy, and state action. The essay demonstrates that, particularly in the period from 1936 to 1947, Ambedkar closely attended to the pathological imbrications between caste society and representative institutions in India; that he theorized an alternative, ambitious conception of democracy that encompassed the social and political spheres; and that he framed the state, and Dalit presence within the state, as a uniquely appealing instrument to transition from the former arrangement to the latter. In addition to filling gaps in the scholarship on Ambedkar, this interpretation offers important resources for contemporary democratic theory—in particular by countering perspectives that remain overly skeptical of the state’s capacity to move against social oppression in ways that enable, rather than inhibit, collective self-government.
{"title":"B. R. Ambedkar on Caste, Democracy, and State Action","authors":"H. Ramesh","doi":"10.1177/00905917211069607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211069607","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen a notable surge in scholarship on the life and thought of B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). This essay contributes to this literature by uncovering heretofore underemphasized aspects of how Ambedkar theorized the relationships between caste oppression, democracy, and state action. The essay demonstrates that, particularly in the period from 1936 to 1947, Ambedkar closely attended to the pathological imbrications between caste society and representative institutions in India; that he theorized an alternative, ambitious conception of democracy that encompassed the social and political spheres; and that he framed the state, and Dalit presence within the state, as a uniquely appealing instrument to transition from the former arrangement to the latter. In addition to filling gaps in the scholarship on Ambedkar, this interpretation offers important resources for contemporary democratic theory—in particular by countering perspectives that remain overly skeptical of the state’s capacity to move against social oppression in ways that enable, rather than inhibit, collective self-government.","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"723 - 753"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42718127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-05DOI: 10.1177/00905917211062571
Lauren Guilmette
does the idea of state personality extend in the case of a sovereign member state within the European Union, of which it is a member: could the EU itself be held accountable for actions of its authorized representatives, who themselves are states, rather than citizens? The common practice of holding states responsible—a key feature of international liberal order—has long been misunderstood through a misleading analogy drawn from individual responsibility. Impressive in its breadth, Leviathan on a Leash averts the human-state analogy trap and presents masterfully a novel theory of state responsibility, where, in short, states are responsible for the actions of their authorized representatives. As long as our idea of state responsibility rests on a misguided form of collective responsibility, we will not be able to understand properly some of the basic features that make the international order liberal. After all, what is liberal about a practice where all citizens collectively are made to suffer through sanctions because of their leaders’ corruption (think, for example, of the “odious debt” of $28 billion the Philippines owed foreign creditors after the fall of its dictator Ferdinand Marcos)? What we need, as Fleming superbly shows, is a conceptual framework that can determine when to apply collective rather than individual responsibility, and how states can be held collectively responsible. The irony is that in order for us to leash our leviathan we need to update our outdated understanding in the twenty-first century by a return to the seventeenth century.
{"title":"Book Review: Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge, by Cressida J. Heyes","authors":"Lauren Guilmette","doi":"10.1177/00905917211062571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211062571","url":null,"abstract":"does the idea of state personality extend in the case of a sovereign member state within the European Union, of which it is a member: could the EU itself be held accountable for actions of its authorized representatives, who themselves are states, rather than citizens? The common practice of holding states responsible—a key feature of international liberal order—has long been misunderstood through a misleading analogy drawn from individual responsibility. Impressive in its breadth, Leviathan on a Leash averts the human-state analogy trap and presents masterfully a novel theory of state responsibility, where, in short, states are responsible for the actions of their authorized representatives. As long as our idea of state responsibility rests on a misguided form of collective responsibility, we will not be able to understand properly some of the basic features that make the international order liberal. After all, what is liberal about a practice where all citizens collectively are made to suffer through sanctions because of their leaders’ corruption (think, for example, of the “odious debt” of $28 billion the Philippines owed foreign creditors after the fall of its dictator Ferdinand Marcos)? What we need, as Fleming superbly shows, is a conceptual framework that can determine when to apply collective rather than individual responsibility, and how states can be held collectively responsible. The irony is that in order for us to leash our leviathan we need to update our outdated understanding in the twenty-first century by a return to the seventeenth century.","PeriodicalId":47788,"journal":{"name":"Political Theory","volume":"50 1","pages":"820 - 825"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42795984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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