The common cause : postcolonial ethics and the practice of democracy, 1900 - 1955 / Leela Gandhi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gandhi, Leela, 1966- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Democracy--Moral and ethical aspects.

Democracy.

Postcolonialism--Moral and ethical aspects.

Postcolonialism.

Postcolonialism--India.

Anti-imperialist movements--India.

Anti-imperialist movements.

India.

Physical Description:

xi, 240 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Summary:

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi 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, 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, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: moral imperfection: an ethics for democracy

After virtue: the strange case of belle époque socialist antimaterialism

On descent: stories from the gurus of modern India

Elementary virtues: Great War and the crisis of European man

Inconsequence: some little-known mutinies around 1946

Epilogue: paths of ahimsaic historiography.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226019871

022601987X

9780226019901

022601990X

OCLC:

858672841