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. She is John Hawkes Professor of English and
Humanities at Brown University. She is the founding co-editor of the
journal Postcolonial Studies.
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