The Common Cause : Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955 / Leela Gandhi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gandhi, Leela, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Anti-imperialist movements--India.

Democracy--Moral and ethical aspects.

Postcolonialism--India.

Postcolonialism--Moral and ethical aspects.

Democracy--Moral and ethical aspects--India.

Democracy.

Postcolonialism--Moral and ethical aspects--India.

Postcolonialism.

Anti-imperialist movements.

Local Subjects:

Anti-imperialist movements--India.

Democracy--Moral and ethical aspects.

Postcolonialism--India.

Postcolonialism--Moral and ethical aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (253 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Moral Imperfection: An Ethics for Democracy

1. After Virtue: The Strange Case of Belle Époque Socialist Antimaterialism

2. On Descent: Stories from the Gurus of Modern India

3. Elementary Virtues: The Great War and the Crisis of European Man

4. Inconsequence: Some Little- Known Mutinies Around 1946

Epilogue: Paths of Ahimsaic Historiography

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226020075

022602007X

OCLC:

870994425