4 Lineages of political society
The mythical space of normative theory
It is sometimes said that modern political theory of the normative kind takes place in an ahistorical timeless space where perennial questions about the right and the good are debated. In fact, that is not quite the case. Rather, it would be more correct to say that these normative debates take place in a time-space of epic proportions which emerged fully formed only after the victorious conclusion of an epochal struggle against an old order of absolutist, despotic or tyrannical power. There is, thus, a definite historical past that is posited by modern political theory as an era that has been overcome and left behind, even if it appears only as an abstract and negative description of all that is normatively unacceptable today. Sometimes, this abandoned past is given a location in real historical time, as, for instance, the absolutist order of the ancien régime overthrown by the French Revolution, or the restricted rules of suffrage extended by the Reform Acts in Britain in the nineteenth century, or the regime of racial discrimination undone by the Civil Rights legislation in the United States. But it is also clear that in its abstract and negative character, this historical past is limitlessly elastic in its capacity to include virtually any geographical space and any historical period and designate them as the past that must be overcome for modern politics to become possible.
The curious fact is that this negatively designated historical past could even be found to coexist with the normatively constituted order of modern political life in a synchronous, if anomalous, time of the present. Thus, when the demand became vociferous in many Western countries in the early twentieth century for unrestricted voting rights for women, the existing restrictions were described as unacceptable remnants of a past order. If there is, in some not too distant future, a serious campaign for the abolition of the House of Lords, the existing upper house of the British parliament will, I am sure, be similarly consigned to a premodern past. Thus, even in its apparent indifference to the historical mode of argument, modern political theory of the normative kind uses a definite strategy of historicization in order to demarcate and serially redefine its own discursive space.
If I am permitted to adopt, somewhat insincerely (but only partially so), a position of externality in relation to the space-time of Western political theory and take a panoramic view of its progress since the beginning of the modern age, I would end up with the impression that there is an elemental sameness in all of modern political theory in the last three hundred years. It is as if all the major political developments of the modern world were anticipated, indeed foretold, at the birth of modern political theory in late seventeenth-century England. Thus, whether we speak of the abolition of feudal privileges, or independence from an imperial power that refused to grant representative government to its colonial subjects, or the abolition of slavery, or universal adult suffrage without discrimination on grounds of religion, race, class or gender – the basic structure of arguments appears to be contained within modern political theory from the moment of its formation. Consequently, it doesn’t really matter if John Locke could not even imagine women as fully rational members of the commonwealth, or if Immanuel Kant could do little more than hope that the Prussian monarch would be enlightened enough to rule according to the dictates of reason. Those views of individual political philosophers were remnants of a pre-modern political order that had managed, in a purely empirical sense, to coexist in the same contemporaneous time-space as modern political life. They could, by an appropriate historicizing strategy, be explained away from the normative space of modern political theory which would then be left free to traverse the entire discursive field opened up by its epic victory over absolutism. Needless to say, this discursive field can only be abstractly constituted.
As someone from the postcolonial world introduced from a very young age to the normative verities of Western political theory, I must confess that I have found all this quite baffling. How was it possible, I have asked myself, that all of the bitter and bloody struggles over colonial exploitation, racial discrimination, class conflict, the suppression of women, the marginalization of minority cultures, etc. that have dominated the real history of the modern world in the last hundred years or so, have managed not to displace in even the slightest way the stable location of modern political theory within the abstract discursive space of normative reasoning? How is it that normative political theory was never pushed into constructing a theory of the nation, or of gender, or of race, or indeed of class, except by marginal figures whose efforts were greeted at best with bare courtesy, and more often with open hostility? How could those contentious topics have been relegated to the empirical domains of sociology or history? How could it be that all of the conceptual history of modern politics was foretold at the birth of modern political theory? I have often heard it said, to the accompaniment of derisive sniggers, that Hegel’s confident pronouncement in the early nineteenth century that ‘what the spirit is now, it has always been implicitly … the spirit of the present world is the concept which the spirit forms of its own nature’1 was only a piece of idealist mystification, or worse, German delusion. I am not sure that Hegel’s detractors among contemporary political philosophers are necessarily free of that defect, even if they do not share the same national cultural traditions.
Having searched for several years both within and outside the domains of normative political theory, I think I now have the outlines of a possible answer to the question ‘how has normative political theory as practised in the West managed to fortify itself against the turmoil of the real world of politics and assert the continued validity of its norms as pronounced at its moment of creation?’ The answer will take us well outside the philosophically well-tempered zones of the Western world.
Two senses of the norm
Although the epic time of modern political theory appears to begin in seventeenth-century England, the conceptual innovations that enabled that abstract time-space to be constructed and secured against the incursions of the real world of politics appeared, I think, only around the turn of the nineteenth century. By then, European countries had, of course, had the experience of conquering and ruling over vast territories in the Americas. But the European empires in the Western hemisphere never seriously posed the problem of having to incorporate within a European political order the forms of law, property and government of the indigenous American peoples. The latter were not regarded as having a credible political society at all that needed to be integrated into the new imperial formation. Only the colonial settlements of Europeans and mestizos mattered – and these came to be organized on the most modern European normative principles of the time. In fact, the indigenous societies of the Amerindian peoples frequently served as examples of the pre-political natural condition of mankind that had to be superseded for the political and commercial societies of civilized people to emerge. But the European conquests in Asia that began in the second half of the eighteenth century posed entirely different problems. The existing political institutions of those defeated Oriental kingdoms could not be entirely set aside, for utterly ‘real’ political reasons. They had to be given a place within the new imperial order of European rule over its Eastern colonies. Thus began a new journey of normative Western political theory.
A key moment in the British history of the emergence of its modern empire was the debate in Parliament from 1781 to 1792 over the conduct of Warren Hastings as governor-general of India. Charged with corruption and high crimes, Hastings, in his defence, argued that India could not be ruled by British principles. If he had, in his own conduct, deviated from British norms, it was because Indian conditions demanded it. ‘The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power … Sovereignty in India implies nothing else [than despotism].’2 Edmund Burke, in his reply, was merciless:
… these Gentlemen have formed a plan of Geographic morality, by which the duties of men in public and in private situations are not to be governed by their relations to the Great Governor of the Universe, or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude.3
This was a licence for corruption and abuse of power. ‘My Lords,’ Burke thundered in Parliament,
we contend that Mr Hastings, as a British Governor, ought to govern upon British principles … We call for that spirit of equity, that spirit of justice … that spirit of safety, that spirit of protection, which ought to characterize every British subject in power; and upon these and these principles only, he will be tried.4
Burke’s claim was that Indians had their own ancient constitution, their own laws, their own legitimate dynasties. A British governor, ruling by true British principles, ought to have respected those institutions and customs and not, like Hastings, arrogantly cast them aside in order to introduce British forms with the substance of despotism.
The impasse created by debates such as this in the domain of normative theory was resolved, in the tumultuous age of revolutions, by a set of conceptual innovations that had little to do with the great political conflicts of the time. Writing his Principles of Morals and Legislation in 1789, Jeremy Bentham declared that the methods and standards of legislation he was proposing were ‘alike applicable to the laws of all nations’.5 More interestingly for us, in an early essay on ‘The Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation’, Bentham proposed the following method:
I take England, then, for a standard; and referring every thing to this standard, I inquire, What are the deviations which it would be requisite to make from this standard, in giving to another country such a tincture as any other country may receive without prejudice, from English laws? … The problem, as it stands at present, is: the best possible laws for England being established in England; required, the variations which it would be necessary to make in those of any other given country, in order to render them the best laws possible with reference to that country.6
In providing an instructive example of this method, Bentham chose a country that presented ‘as strong a contrast with England as possible’.
Such a contrast we seem to have in the province of Bengal: diversity of climate, mixture of inhabitants, natural productions, force of the country, present laws, manners, customs, religion of the inhabitants; every circumstance, on which a difference in the point in question can be grounded, as different as can be … To a lawgiver, who having been bred up with English notions, shall have learnt how to accommodate his laws to the circumstances of Bengal, no other part of the globe can present any difficulty.7
But Bentham also insisted that ‘human nature was everywhere the same’ and that different countries did not have ‘different catalogues of pleasures and pains’. Then why should not the same laws hold good for all countries? Because the things that caused pleasure or pain were not the same everywhere. ‘The same event … which would produce pain or pleasure in one country, would not produce an effect of the same sort, or if of the same sort, not in equal degree, in another.’8 But these grounds of variation were not all of the same kind either. Some were physical, such as the climate or the nature of the soil, and these were invariant and insurmountable. Others, no matter how difficult or inexpedient, were subject to intervention and change, such as ‘the circumstances of government, religion, and manners’.9 Different sets of laws would be appropriate for different circumstances. Further, by the application of appropriate laws, the mutable circumstances could be subjected to the forces of change.
Bentham thought of these variations as amenable to more or less precise and detailed qualitative and quantitative comparison – that is to say, they were all subject to some common measure. He suggested that the legislator should be provided with two sets of tables relating to the country for which he was legislating. One set would consist of the civil code, the constitutional code, a table of offences and punishments, etc. and the other set would comprise tables of the moral and religious biases of the people, a set of maps, a table of the productions of the country, tables of the population, and the like.10 Armed with these, he would be able to devise the best possible laws for any country.
Reading Bentham today, one can almost imagine an anticipation of the statistical handbooks of social indicators with which any undergraduate of the twenty-first century is now able to rank the countries of the world according to standards of living, mortality rates, quality of governance, human development and dozens of other evaluative criteria. Unlike in the writings of eighteenth-century historians and travellers brought up on Montesquieu, cultural difference here is no longer incommensurable. Rather, it can now be seen in terms of its consequences, plotted as deviations from a standard and hence normalized. Governments everywhere have been brought within the same conceptual field. All deviations between states were now comparable according to the same measure. States could be divided into ranks and grades.
Moreover, once normalized, deviations could be tracked over time; the deviation of a state from the norm could close or widen. Thus, in time, a country could conceivably enter the grade of ‘advanced societies’ or drop out of it. The important innovation here was the handle that was afforded for the intervention of ‘policy’ to affect the distance of an empirical state from the desired norm. Indeed, as the philosopher Ian Hacking has shown, the statistical elaboration of the idea of normality in the nineteenth century would establish two senses of the norm: one, the normal as the right and the good – the normative, as political philosophy, for instance, would have it – and the other, the normal as the empirically existent average or mean, capable of improvement.11
Norms, deviations and exceptions
The significance of this conceptual innovation for the emergence of the new practices of government in the nineteenth century has not been adequately stressed. We see the concepts elaborated for the first time in Jeremy Bentham and his ‘utilitarian’ theories of legislation. But these formal properties of the comparative method would become part of the background assumptions of virtually all schools of thought on the subject of modern government, including many that had no truck with the baggage of utilitarianism as a political philosophy. Notwithstanding Bentham’s exaggerated confidence in the ability of his method to provide exact and unimpeachable solutions to every policy problem, what it did mark out was a conceptual field that could in principle integrate into a single theoretical domain all questions of governance in every society that exists in the world. Its comparative method of normalization would establish an enduring modality of relating the domain of the normative to that of the empirical, something that would long outlast the limited appeal of utilitarian political philosophy. The norm-deviation structure has provided, from the nineteenth century to the present day, an enduring framework for addressing policy questions of improvement, progress, modernization and development.
However, Bentham’s comparative method would also establish a second global paradigm. If constitutionally established representative government was to be recognized as the universally valid normative standard, then the universally valid and legitimate exception to that norm could only be some form of enlightened despotism. Despotism is unlimited and arbitrary power, unconstrained by constitutional rules. In this sense, it was often distinguished in the classical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from absolutism which was unlimited power but legitimately constituted within certain fundamental laws. The form of government recommended by the new normative theory for European colonies in the East was absolutist in the sense that while it did not recognize any limits to its sovereign powers within the occupied territory, it did claim to be constituted by, and to function within, certain fundamental laws. But it was despotic in its foundational assumptions since the authority that was to lay down those fundamental laws was arbitrarily constituted and was not in any way responsible to those whom it governed. But when despotism claims to be enlightened, it places a limit on itself and promises itself to be responsible: it becomes limited by and responsible to enlightened reason. When that happens, there is effectively no difference between despotism and absolutism. Despotism has to justify its actions to itself by their results.12 Since the empirically prevailing average social conditions in the ‘backward’ colonies were different from those in the advanced countries, the normative standard of the latter would have to be altered to suit the former. The universally valid norm would have to be withheld in favour of a colonial exception.
This structure of norm and exception can be seen in virtually every justification of colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The puzzle posed by postcolonial political theory – by Uday Singh Mehta, for example – of liberal democratic governments of Europe holding overseas territories under their despotic rule, thus apparently contradicting their cherished normative principles, dissolves when one realizes the power of the norm-exception construct.13 Thus, John Stuart Mill, one of the greatest liberal political theorists of all time, while making an extended case for the universal superiority of representative government, specifically argued that it could not apply, at least not yet, to dependencies such as India or Ireland.14 The latter were exceptions; hence there was really no contradiction in Mill’s normative liberal theory. He recommended a paternal British despotism for those countries, until such time as their peoples became mature enough to govern themselves. Of course, neither Mill nor any other liberal could suggest an impartial way of deciding when and if such a stage had been reached. Apparently, there was no alternative but to rely on the good sense of the paternal guardians to grant self-government to their wards. Or rather, the only alternative was to acknowledge the right of a subject people to announce its attainment of maturity by rebelling against its masters – a right somewhat incompatible with liberal doctrines of good colonial governance.
From the nineteenth century, therefore, the two senses of the norm encoded the basic political strategy of relating the normative to the empirical. The norm-deviation structure would establish the empirical location of any particular social formation at any given time in relation to the empirically prevailing average or normal. The corresponding normative framework could then provide, by means of a norm-exception structure of justification, the ground for the application of ‘policy’ to intervene and bring the empirical average closer to the desired norm. Normalization was the theoretical key to this political strategy.
The norm-deviation method as a crucial aspect of modern disciplinary practices is, as Michel Foucault has shown, ubiquitous in the operations of the modern regime of power.15 The norm-exception formula too is used widely to deal with the exigencies of heterogeneity and uncertainty in a policy field that has been presumably normalized. What I am also suggesting through my thumbnail sketch of the conceptual history of political institutions in the modern West is that, contrary to the long enshrined received narrative, those institutions and their normative principles were not the products of an exclusively endogenous development but the result of Europe’s encounters with its colonial territories, first in the Americas and then in Asia and Africa. Let me now move to our contemporary times and look at the formerly colonized parts of the world to see how the universal verities of Western political theory have fared in those places.
The civil and the political in alien spaces
I will have to be somewhat schematic in laying out the background conditions that made postcolonial political theory possible. The period of decolonization following the end of the Second World War made the nation-state the universally normal form of the modern state. Popular sovereignty became the universal norm of legitimacy: even military dictators and one-party regimes began to claim to rule on behalf of the people. But decolonization was achieved not necessarily because the paternal guardians decided that their immature wards had at last achieved adulthood. On the contrary, in most colonial countries, the people declared their determination to rule themselves by rebelling against their masters. This meant that the pedagogical role of those who were the guardians of the norm and the declarers of the exception came to be questioned. As we shall soon see, this would have important implications for the relation between the norm and the exception.
The normative principles of modern politics as established in the West held enormous sway over the new ruling elites in postcolonial countries, not least because of the influence of colonial education. But decades of colonial rule did not necessarily close the deviation of the empirical social indicators from the universally desirable norm. The sociologically grounded theories that now came into vogue rephrased the old arguments of colonial difference in a new language of modernization, calling the deviation a historical lag that had to be made up. Underlying these theories was, as Sudipta Kaviraj has recently pointed out, an assumption of symmetrical development, that is to say, an expectation that all of the functionally interrelated processes within modernity should emerge simultaneously.16 If they did not, then it was a case of imperfect or failed modernity. A little reflection will show that this expectation of symmetrical development is not unrelated to the abstract homogeneous discursive space cleared out and occupied by normative political theory.
But soon there began to emerge arguments about alternative or multiple modernities. These, Kaviraj has shown, are better understood as implying a sequential theory of development. This theory suggests that the particular sequence in which the different processes of modernity occurred in Western history need not be repeated elsewhere. In that case, the resultant forms of the modern in those places might look quite different. Thus, to take an example, if the particular sequence ‘commercial society – civic associations – rational bureaucracy – industrialization – universal suffrage – welfare state’, which may be taken as a schematic representation of the trajectory of the modern democratic state in the West, is replaced by a sequence in which rational bureaucracy and universal suffrage precede the others, then it is likely that the form of the state that would result would not be a replica of the state in the West. It is from a consideration of these alternative sequences of modernity rather than from that of multiple or post-modernity that postcolonial political theory was born.
But this raised entirely new theoretical problems regarding the relation between the two senses of the norm, viz. the empirical average and the normatively desirable. Let me illustrate this with reference to two sets of issues: the first, of legality, and the second, of violence.
Leaving out the white settler colonies, the domain of civil social institutions and modern representative politics was, in most parts of the colonial world, restricted to only a small section of the colonized population. Mahmood Mamdani has described how in Africa, there emerged a modern civic space that was racially divided but regulated by a modern code of civil law, while a huge domain of traditional society was organized under customary law. Following independence, the conservative regimes de-racialized civil society while leaving the traditional sphere of customary law largely intact, while the radical regimes tried to impose uniform citizenship on all by authoritarian methods, leading to resistance and conflict.17 In India, the new republic was founded on a liberal democratic constitution, universal suffrage and competitive electoral representation. But the space of politics became effectively split between a narrow domain of civil society where citizens related to the state through the mutual recognition of legally enforceable rights and a wider domain of political society where governmental agencies dealt not with citizens but with populations to deliver specific benefits or services through a process of political negotiation. In some of my recent work, I have described the anomalies that result in the application of the norm of equality of all citizens before the law and how those anomalies are sought to be resolved through the intervention of politics.18
Take the familiar example of squatter settlements of the poor in numerous cities of the postcolonial world. These urban populations occupy land that does not belong to them and often use water, electricity, public transport and other services without paying for them. But governmental authorities do not necessarily try to punish or put a stop to such illegalities, because of the political recognition that these populations serve certain necessary functions in the urban economy and that to forcibly remove them would involve huge political costs. On the other hand, they cannot also be treated as legitimate members of civil society who abide by the law. As a result, municipal authorities or the police deal with these people not as rights-bearing citizens but as urban populations who have specific characteristics and needs and who must be appropriately governed. On their side, these groups of urban poor negotiate with the authorities through political mobilization and alliances with other groups.
On the plane of governmentality, populations do not carry the ethical significance of citizenship. They are heterogeneous groups, each of which is defined and classified by its empirically observed characteristics and constituted as a rationally manipulable target population for governmental policies. Consequently, if, despite their illegal occupation of land, they are given electricity connections or allowed to use municipal services, it is not because they have a right to them but because the authorities make a political calculation of costs and benefits and agree, for the time being, to give them those benefits. However, this can only be done in a way that does not jeopardize the legal order of property and the rights of proper citizens. The usual method is to construct a case such that the particular illegality associated with a specific population group may be treated as an exception that does not disturb the fundamental rule of law. Governmental decisions aimed at regulating the vast populations of the urban poor usually add up to a huge pile of exceptions to the normal application of the law.
Populations respond to the regime of governmentality by seeking to constitute themselves as groups that deserve the attention of government. If as squatters they have violated the law, they do not necessarily deny that fact, nor do they claim that their illegal occupation of land is right. But they insist that they have a right to housing and livelihood in the city, and, if they are required to move elsewhere, they must be provided with rehabilitation. They form associations to negotiate with governmental authorities and seek public support for their cause. This becomes a major form of political participation for these groups, invoking their status as formal citizens but acting in ways that often contravene the approved practices of civic life. Their political mobilization involves an effort to turn an empirically formed population group into a moral community. The force of this moral appeal usually hinges on the generally recognized obligation of government to provide for the poor and the underprivileged. This obligation may be seen as part of the general democratic temper of our age. But I believe it is also specifically a consequence of the anti-colonial movement that overturned the paternal despotism of imperial rule and established the formal sovereignty of the people.
If we consider the example of elections in India, for instance, we will find that the overwhelming bulk of the political rhetoric expended in election campaigns concerns what governments have or have not done for which population groups. The function of rhetoric here is to turn the heterogeneous demands of populations into the morally coherent and emotionally persuasive form of popular demands. In this sense, as Ernesto Laclau has argued, populism is the only morally legitimate form of democratic politics under these conditions.19 It is important to emphasize that unlike the symmetrical theory of modernity which would regard such populism as a perversion of modern democratic politics, the sequential theory would consider it with utter seriousness as a new and potentially richer development of democracy. It is also worth pointing out that one of the persistent findings of election studies in India is the relatively high electoral participation of voters belonging to the poor and underprivileged sections of the electorate.20
However, the negotiations that take place in political society frequently involve an invitation to the authorities to declare an exception. Thus, when squatters claim that they be allowed to occupy their settlements, or hawkers that they be allowed to set up stalls on the streets, they do not demand that the laws of property be abolished or that all trade licences and regulations be set aside. Rather, they demand that the authorities make a political judgement to use the sovereign power of the state to declare their case as an exception to the norm laid down by the law.
It is true, of course, that the law is also frequently broken by the propertied and the wealthy, that is, by those who claim to be proper citizens inhabiting civil society. Thus, municipal building regulations, trade regulations and tax laws are widely believed to be broken by the urban rich, many of whom, being influential and well connected, even flaunt their impunity. But these violations are unable to mobilize the moral justification that the illegalities of the poor manage to do in the arena of democratic politics. Hence, they are dealt with through corruption, evasion or the blatant use of force. They fail to become issues of negotiation in political society.
We should also remember that vast sections of the poor in postcolonial economies find a living in the so-called informal sector of employment which is largely unregulated and in which production or service units frequently violate labour, tax and environmental laws. Quite often, these enterprises have owners who are themselves workers and it is not unusual for them to value the survival of their units and the livelihood of their employees above the objective of making profits for further accumulation. They frequently use collective political mobilization and seek the help of political parties and leaders to ensure the conditions of their survival, often by demanding that the usual tax, labour or environmental regulations not be applied in their case. Here again, politics intervenes to suspend the norm and create an exception, supposedly in a justified cause.
This raises another interesting problem for contemporary political theory. Is justice better served by the non-arbitrary procedures of the equal application of the law, or by the contextual and possibly arbitrary judgement that addresses the peculiarities of a particular case? It is useful to recall here an observation of Alexis de Tocqueville from the time when the modern democratic state was in its youth. Distinguishing between tyranny and arbitrary power, he says, ‘Tyranny may be exercised by means of the law itself, and in that case it is not arbitrary; arbitrary power may be exercised for the public good, in which case it is not tyrannical.’21 We could say that political society, operating under conditions of electoral democracy in India, affords the possibility of inviting the arbitrary power of government to mitigate the potentially tyrannical power of the law. As a matter of fact, it could even be said that the activities of political society in postcolonial countries represent a continuing critique of the paradoxical reality in all capitalist democracies of equal citizenship and majority rule, on the one hand, and the dominance of property and privilege, on the other.
It is relevant to point out, for instance, that this critique has a genealogy going all the way back to the origins in the eighteenth century of British colonial attempts to impose a regime of the non-arbitrary rule of law in the newly conquered territories of India. Ghulam Husain Tabatabai, the most perceptive Indian historian of the eighteenth century, and Mirza Abu Taleb, who travelled to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, both wrote extensively and critically on what they thought was an expensive, slow, distant and unconscionably inflexible judicial system introduced by the British in Bengal. Both thought that direct access to an impartial judge who was knowledgeable about and sensitive to the specific circumstances of a case was far more likely to serve the cause of justice.22 The critique has continued to inform popular beliefs and practices about the judicial system of modern India. Thus, for example, one of the most sought after services of elected local bodies in rural West Bengal is arbitration in property, family and community disputes. Even though this is not one of their statutory functions, elected local representatives are preferred by rural people for resolving conflicts than the slow, non-transparent and frequently corrupt institutions of the police and the courts.23 The latter are seen as instruments that only the wealthy can manipulate to their advantage; the poor avoid them to the best of their ability.
It is also worth mentioning here, in a comparative spirit, the analysis offered by Achille Mbembe of the postcolonial state in Africa. He argues that the specific form of sovereignty claimed over the territory and resources of Africa by the colonial powers frequently led to the authoritarian postcolonial state form characterized by the étatisation of society, the socialization of state power and the privatization of public prerogatives. These three features of the postcolonial state were all marked, Mbembe says, by the socialization of arbitrariness.24 Although the Indian state is nowhere near as authoritarian as many of the African states, the continuing social legitimacy of arbitrary power is an important and under-researched aspect of the practices of Indian democracy.
If one then thinks of this widely shared popular critique of the modern normative idea of the non-arbitrary and equal application of the law within a sequential rather than a symmetrical framework, one could be led in some unexpected directions. Thinking symmetrically, one might conclude, like many conservative colonial officials of British India, that the impersonal procedures of rational law and bureaucracy were unsuited to backward societies used to customary rather than contractual obligations and that the exercise of personal but impartial authority was more appropriate. This would be the familiar declaration of a colonial exception. But if we take the sequential logic more seriously, we might be moved to suggest not the irrelevance of the norm of the impersonal and non-arbitrary application of the law but its critical re-evaluation in the light of emergent practices in many postcolonial countries that seek to punctuate or supplement it by appealing to the personal and contextual circumstances.
It is important to stress that the normative principles of Western political theory continue to enjoy enormous influence all round the world as models that are worthy of emulation. But the actual practices of modern political life have resulted not in the abandonment of those norms but in the piling up of exceptions in the course of the administration of the law as mediated by the processes of political society. The relation between norms and practices has resulted in a series of improvisations. It is the theorization of these improvisations that has become the task of postcolonial political theory.
One other area where such improvisations have led to a distinct reformulation of the received norm is that of the secular state. The French republican ideal of laïcité, having travelled to Turkey as laïque, has in recent years provoked much controversy and conflict over state recognition of religious practices without as yet producing any redefined norm.25 In India, while the secular state is a central feature of the constitutional structure, its practice has come to mean neither the mutual separation of state and religion nor the strict neutrality of the state. Rather, an altogether new norm of the modern secular state seems to have emerged, which Rajeev Bhargava has theorized as that of principled distance, which implies disestablishment but not the strict non-intervention of the state in religion.26 In this context, one must also mention the massive but as yet untheorized process of the establishment of modern secular states all over East Asia, apparently without any serious debate over the question of secularism. What is it about the sequence of modernity in that part of the world that made this possible?
The political management of violence
A study of squatter settlements in the city of Calcutta carried out by Ananya Roy brings out an interesting gender dimension of political society.27 The livelihood of families living in these illegal settlements greatly depends on the employment of women as domestic help in neighbouring middle-class houses. This is, of course, an informal sector of employment lacking any form of self-organization of labour. The men of the settlements often do not have regular jobs. But they form associations to seek the support of political parties in order to protect their settlements. The associations are entirely male. The reason is not merely that political work is traditionally seen as a male pursuit, but also because politics in the slum neighbourhoods is thought to be dangerous, involving frequent incidents of violence. Political society, consequently, tends to be a masculine space.
The point is illustrated graphically in Thomas Blom Hansen’s study of the Shiv Sena in the towns and cities of Maharashtra, especially Mumbai.28 The political effectiveness of the Shiv Sena as a right-wing populist party claiming to defend Marathi interests and Hindu dominance has crucially depended on its control over the urban slum population and the informal sector of labour. Hansen shows that a key figure here is the local dada, the strongman who builds a personal network of loyalty and protection and projects the image of masculine, assertive and often violent power. The modality of this power is performative; it is effective precisely to the extent that it works as a demonstrated threat that brings about the desired result. The issues on which the Shiv Sena intervenes are everyday matters of political society among the urban poor – jobs, housing, living conditions in the slums, prices of essential items of consumption, dealing with the police and the authorities. The methods are direct and often theatrical: the image of local strongmen projecting raw power to secure instant justice is what is expected to attract their followers. For the most part, the actual violence is kept within carefully controlled limits. Only rarely is there widespread organized violence and that too only after a decision of the central leadership of the party, as in the 1992 killings of Muslims in Mumbai.
The subject of violence brings into view the dark underside of political society. It is clear that the real world of politics is quite far removed from the Weberian ideal of the state having a monopoly of the means of legitimate violence. Since many of the practices of political society involve the transgression of the law, it follows that agents other than the state authorities must also acquire the means of using force to defend those practices when necessary. Once again, political parties and leaders try to mobilize such means, with or without the acquiescence of the authorities. This is undoubtedly the principal reason why there has emerged the phenomenon of what is often called the ‘criminalization’ of politics, that is, the increasing presence of persons with criminal records among elected representatives at local, state and even national levels. That violators of the law can become legitimate representatives of the people is not necessarily a symptom of popular foolhardiness or of the perversion of electoral democracy. Rather it is a sign of the inability of the normative regime of law to fully bring under its order the real heterogeneity of power relations in society. It is also significant that in most local formations of political society, a certain ‘normal’ level of violence tends to be established which represents some sort of empirical equilibrium among prevailing power relations and that there are recognized thresholds beyond which violence would be regarded as having crossed the limits of normality. On the other hand, when a situation has to be demonstrated as intolerable or outrageous, there is frequently a spectacular show of violence, usually involving the destruction of public property or attacks on government institutions and personnel. Violence here is not mindless or blind, but rather, even in its most passionate expressions, calculated to elicit the desired response from the government and the public.
A consideration of postcolonial politics against the background of Western normative theory might suggest that moral norms should be abandoned in favour of realist politics. However, this would mean a trivialization of the challenge posed for postcolonial political theory. Even though the demand for realism has much merit, it cannot mean, as Raymond Geuss has pointed out, the claim that morality has no place in politics.29 Rather, as we cannot fail to see in numerous accounts, postcolonial politics frequently presents a moral critique of the normative standards upheld by Western political theory and improvises practices that run parallel or counter to the approved forms. The theoretical challenge that is thereby posed is twofold. The first is the challenge to break the abstract homogeneity of the mythical time-space of Western normative theory by emphasizing the real history of its formation through violent conflict and the imposition of hegemonic power. The second is the even greater challenge to redefine the normative standards of modern politics in light of the considerable accumulation of new practices that may at present be described only in the language of exceptions but in fact contain the core of a richer, more diverse and inclusive, set of norms.
As far as the first challenge is concerned, the work of many historians and literary scholars has brought together in recent decades a mass of evidence that shows that several key political and economic institutions of the modern West were produced not endogenously but through interaction with the colonial worlds across the Atlantic and in the East. Thus, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that the idea of universal citizenship was indeed first posed in the age of revolutions by the Haitian uprising of black slaves.30 Susan Buck-Morss has pushed the argument further by showing that the consciousness of emancipation that inspired the idea of equal citizenship in the modern state, as elaborated by philosophers such as Hegel, was directly the product of an engagement with the challenge posed by the Haitian revolution.31 Buck-Morss has also drawn our attention to the fact, long known to scholars of colonial trade but never remarked upon, that the factory, that central institution of the industrial revolution, was invented as the European merchant company’s foreign trading station.32 We also know that the joint stock company, another pillar of modern capitalism, was first developed as an institution of colonial trade, the English East India Company being the most successful pioneer.33 Such instances can be multiplied and extended to institutions of bureaucracy, diplomacy, international law, penal administration, surveillance, crowd control, emergency relief and a host of other aspects of modern government.
The point is not merely to insist upon an acknowledgement that the institutions of economic and political life in the modern West have a historical genealogy that extends into the formerly colonial world. It is to explore the further implication of that history for the authoritative status of the normative claims of Western political theory for our contemporary world. If we know that the principal hegemonic strategy for establishing the universal claims of the normative standards of Western political institutions is to combine a norm-deviation paradigm in the empirical domain with a norm-exception paradigm in the policy domain, what has been the consequence of decolonization and the emergence of postcolonial thinking for the continued relevance of this strategy?
One has heard several voices in recent times that reject, on ideological grounds, the claims of normative Western political theory. Thus, representative electoral democracy has been rejected as Western or bourgeois and therefore unsuited to conditions in non-Western countries. The idea of human rights has been similarly rejected as Western or Christian and therefore inapplicable to other societies. There have been claims on behalf of ‘Asian values’ or ‘Islamic principles’ as having greater universal validity than the Western norms of modern democratic government. While the conflicts rage over these questions in the field of ideology, what should be of greater interest to political theory are the ways in which actual practices in the field of government and politics cope with the realities of power in a world in which no society has the option of entirely escaping the tentacles of modern economic, political and cultural institutions. Once we recognize this, we have no alternative but to return to the problem of symmetrical versus sequential accounts of modernity. If by tracing the historical genealogy of Western political institutions we have established the sheer historical contingency of Western modernity, there can be no reason left to demand the symmetrical repetition of that configuration of institutions in other parts of the world. Hence, political theory is left with the task of describing the varied products of different sequences of development in different countries as novel but ineluctably modern practices of government and politics. Such descriptions cannot avoid the question of normative evaluation. However, since many of these practices imply a critique of the normative standards of Western political practice, political theory cannot any more proceed with its normal business of endlessly elaborating and refining its normative principles supposedly established from the moment of its birth. That is the challenge posed by postcolonial politics.
The second task of redefining the universal normative standards set by Western political theory in the light of the experience of postcolonial politics involves serious moral evaluation. We have noticed that the divergent practices that have emerged in postcolonial countries are frequently justified as exceptions to the normative rule. Could the accumulation of exceptions justify a redefinition of the norm? Take the example of citizenship. The normative rule under the Indian Constitution is equal citizenship for all. But from the very beginning, exceptions were made to provide for special representation and reserved places in government service and education for scheduled castes and tribes and for the personal laws and special educational institutions of minority religious communities. Initially, these exceptions were justified as transitional measures to be removed when a reasonable equality of opportunity was established between all groups and communities. As these practices have unfolded in the last half century, even though the constitutional language of exceptions continues, the democratic politics of caste and religious minorities proceed by taking these exceptional provisions of differentiated citizenship as enduring background conditions that lay the ground for new strategies of negotiation with government. The question is: can the contemporary practices be framed as a redefined norm that endorses differentiated citizenship as the normative standard for the modern state?
The question becomes more worthy of our attention when we realize that differentiated citizenship has, in some form or other, become normal practice in the empirical sense in most Western countries, even though it is still described as exceptional in relation to the legal norm. Thus, the practices that have evolved to deal with new immigrants, including undocumented ones, in the countries of Western Europe and North America are no different from what we have described as characteristic of political society in postcolonial India. Has there been a redefinition of citizenship in actual practice that is awaiting a political theorist to put into normative language?
Interestingly, the growing phenomenon in contemporary Western democracies of deep and pervasive mistrust of elected representatives and apparent voter apathy has led theorists to look closely at practices such as popular vigilance, denunciation, negative coalitions, mock trials, etc. Pierre Rosanvallon has called such non-electoral forms ‘counter-democracy’.34 If one turns to post-colonial democracies, one will find many of these counter-democratic forms in the domain of civil society of the urban middle classes, as seen most recently in the campaigns that led to the ousting of the popularly elected government in Thailand. In India, while mistrust of representatives and the forms of counter-democracy can be widely observed, the urban middle classes show a marked lack of faith in the efficacy of elections, while those who most use the instruments of political society to deal with government – the poorer sections of people in both cities and villages – are the ones who persistently vote in large numbers. Once again, the postcolonial is marked by difference.
The emergence of postcolonial states in the latter half of the twentieth century appeared to affirm the determination of formerly colonial peoples not to allow the imperial powers to point to an empirical deviation from the norm and declare an exception in relation to the universal normative standard. But, as we have seen, the postcolonial regimes have adopted the same norm-deviation and norm-exception paradigms in governing their own populations. Not only that, the politics of the governed operates within the same paradigms and invites governmental authorities to declare an exception and suspend the norm in their case. The question that pervades postcolonial politics today is: who is it that should get to declare the exception? That is the question that is debated every day in this part of the world, not always, I might add, by entirely peaceful means. The question that appears to have receded from view is one that used to be asked in the twentieth century: is it possible to think of modern politics outside the norm-deviation and norm-exception paradigms? That question does not seem to be thinkable today except in a non-realist theoretical mode. Since I am able to deal with politics only when it is real, whether in the past, present or future, I will not attempt to answer that utopian question.
1 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, tr. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 150.
2 Speech by Warren Hastings in his defence in the House of Commons on May 1, 1786, cited in Marshall, ed., Speeches and Writings of Burke, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 348–349. It is speculated that these passages in Hastings’s defence were actually composed by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. See Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry and the Millennium (1983).
3 ‘Opening of Impeachment’, February 16, 1788, in Marshall., ed., Writings and Speeches of Burke, vol. 6, p. 346.
4 Ibid., pp. 345–346.
5 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ch. xvii,
6 Bentham, ‘Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation’ in John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), p. 171. I have been unable to determine the exact date when this essay was written. It appears to be sometime in the early 1780s.
7 Ibid., p. 172.
8 Ibid., p. 172.
9 Ibid., p. 177.
10 Ibid., p. 173.
11 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 160–169.
12 Leonard Krieger, An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 39.
13 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
14 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), ch. xviii.
15 Especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
16 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, Archives européennes de sociologie, 46, 3 (2005), pp. 497–526.
17 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
18 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
19 Ernesto Laclau, On Popular Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
20 Yogendra Yadav, ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in the Electoral Politics of the 1990s’, in Francine Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and Balveer Arora, eds, Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
21 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, tr. Henry Reeve, revised by Francis Bowen, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 262.
22 Abu Taleb Khan, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Years 1799 to 1803, tr. Charles Stewart (1814; New Delhi: Sona Publications, 1972), ch. xxii, p. 196. There is a four-volume edition of the 1788 translation of Ghulam Husain’s work Sair ul-mutakkherin published in 1902: A Translation of the Sëir Mutaqherin; or View of Modern Times, being an History of India, from the Year 1118 to the Year 1194, (this Year answers to the Christian Year 1781–82) of the Hedjrah; etc. by Seid-Gholam-Hossein-Khan, vols. 1–4 (Calcutta: R. Cambray, 1902). A facsimile edition of the 1926 edition is now available from New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1986.
23 Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, Partha Chatterjee, Pranab Kumar Das, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Manabi Majumdar and Surajit Mukhopadhyay, Strengthening Rural Decentralization (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 2006).
24 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 24–65.
25 Nilufer Gole and Ludwig Ammann, eds, Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University, 2006).
26 Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
27 Ananya Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
28 Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
29 Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
30 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
31 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
32 Ibid., pp. 101–103.
33 K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Frank Cass, 1965).
34 Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).