A few years ago I found myself at the Ogden, Utah rodeo with thirty schoolteachers from all over the world. They were participants in a Fulbright-supported American studies institute, and the trip to Utah was part of a weeklong foray into a part of America quite different from Amherst, MA, where the bulk of lectures and discussions had taken place in the previous three weeks. Our visit happened to coincide with “Armed Services Day,” and the spectacle my students encountered proved even more impressive than the riding and roping they had expected. The principle feature of that spectacle had to do with the organizers’ almost total confounding of religion and patriotism. At the high point of the event, over the roar of military band music and military helicopters passing overhead, the booming voice of the announcer declared that “God's helicopters” were protecting America and the rest of the world from tyranny. The books under review here endeavor to explain the spectacle in Ogden on that summer day—along with the train of events that, over sixty years ago, launched a crusade against “godless communism” and, a few decades later, made “the Christian right” a major force in American politics.

In the early 1960s, Donald Smith's India as a Secular State questioned the credentials of the Indian state's secularism. Since then the issue of what constitutes secularism in India has loomed large in Indian political thought. Like a number of other key categories in political history, such as nationalism, the debate has centred on the question whether the Indian state's version of secularism is viable in its own right or not, and if it is viable, whether it extends the concept of secularism in new and innovative directions. The other possibility is to see this secularism as a “derivative discourse” (to adopt a phrase from Partha Chatterjee), confusedly echoing Western notions of secularism, with the caste and communal complexities of Indian society and the structuring role of religion in everyday life at odds with any coherent or recognisable notion of secularism.

This paper is about Gandhi's critique of politics, of which his ambivalence towards democracy was a part. I argue that for Gandhi the ground of moral action is fearlessness, while that of political reason is security and self-defense. Gandhi sees the context of moral action in the mundane fabric of everyday life, in places such as the family and the village. For that reason he does not believe that moral action requires being supplemented by the particular kind of unity which politics and the state call for and necessitate.

It is tempting to think that we have heard just about all we want or need to know about race. As the above quotes indicate, modern notions of race have always revolved around the faculty of vision, with supplementary contributions from other senses such as hearing, as Arendt notes in a tacit allusion to one mark of Jewish difference—the way they sounded when concentrated in urban settings. Yet two very recent works—Mark M. Smith's How Race Is Made and Anne C. Rose's Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South—have much to teach us about how race has “worked”, particularly in the twentieth-century South but also, by implication, in the United States in general. Both works assume that, historically, race is no mere add-on to the self, a kind of externality that, once detected, can be relatively easily excised. Rather, it stands right at the heart of personal and group identity in a nation where race and ethnicity continue to assume surprising new shapes and forms.

Having put an end to his first great movement of non-cooperation following the First World War, Gandhi sat down to learn the lessons of this early experiment in mass politics. In 1926 he went on to impart these lessons to his fellow workers in the Sabarmati Ashram by way of a series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi was interested in exploring the relations between violence and non-violence, which he thought were so intimate that one could very easily turn into the other. Seeking out the Archimedean point that made such a turning possible, the Mahatma had occasion to criticize any ethics that would divide good from evil on the basis of a moral calculus. How, he asked, was an ethics possible that recognized the intractability of ignorance and compulsion? Any ethical system that relied upon knowledge and choice, he thought, was either deluded or true only for a very small elite. A common ethics, then, had to be one which recognized ignorance and compulsion not negatively, as posing limits to moral life, but rather in the form of positive virtues like duty and obedience. Gandhi's commentary on the Gita was therefore an attempt to think about moral action in the context of ignorance and compulsion, which he did by focusing on the integrity of the act itself divested of the idealism lent it by any moral calculus.

In 1935, as the Nazis’ state-of-the art eugenics exhibition from the Deutsches Hygiene Museum was concluding its American tour, a decision had to be made about whether to return the displays to Germany or to house them in an American museum. After the American Academy of Medicine decided against the display because of its political implications, the director of the Buffalo Museum of Science, Carlos Cummings, himself a physician, offered his institution as the exhibition's permanent home. “What is the astounding eugenics program upon which Chancellor Hitler has launched the German people?” Cummings wondered aloud. “As a matter of public interest, without endorsement,” he added, “the Museum will display in the Central Hall throughout this final quarter of 1935, a set of fifty-one posters and charts . . . which gives Americans a graphic explanation of Germany's campaign to rear in posterity ‘a new race nobility.’” Seven years later, with war raging, the museum received permission from the company that had insured the exhibition, to dismantle it from its permanent home in the museum's Hall of Heredity. An exhibition about eugenics, Nazi eugenics no less, that had been enthusiastically received as it had traveled the United States in the mid-1930s, had seemingly fallen victim to the war against eugenics launched by cultural anthropologists and geneticists. In light of the broad scholarship on eugenics, this certainly would be a plausible reading of the deinstallation of the Nazi eugenics exhibition. But the three books under review here suggest a more complex reading, one that suggests that eugenics and racism, considered as ideological systems, were less easily dislodged from American culture than from Buffalo's Museum of Science.

B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the radical Indian anti-caste thinker, left unfinished a critical corpus of works on “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India”, a fragment of which was provisionally titled “Essays on the Bhagavad Gita”. This essay engages with that corpus, situating Ambedkar's encounter with the Gita within a much broader twentieth-century political and philosophical concern with the question of tradition and violence. It interrogates the excessive and heterogeneous conceptual impulses that mediate Ambedkar's attempt to retrieve a counterhistory of Indian antiquity. Located as it is in the same Indic neighborhood from which a radical counterhistory of touchability might emerge, the Gita is a particularly fraternal and troubling text for Ambedkar. Yet his responsibility towards the Gita comes to be hinged not upon evasion but rather upon an exaggeration of its hermeneutic power; that is, upon his painstaking inflation of the Gita's willfully modern interest in instituting the universal. Ambedkar's relentless struggle to annihilate this universality of the Gita would have to be founded upon another universality, at once destructive, excessive and counterlegislative. In this unfinished attempt to recuperate the ideality of the universal, this essay asks, does Ambedkar himself become the most thorough modern practitioner of the Gita?

This essay examines the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for V. D. Savarkar's interpretations of religion, nationalism, and the idea of Hindu India. As one of the intellectual founders of Hindu nationalism, Savarkar has emerged as the most controversial Indian political thinker of the last century, gaining notoriety for his program to ‘Hinduize Politics and Militarize Hindudom’, for his anti-Muslim and anti-Christian politics, and for his advocacy of violence in everyday life. By bringing together key selections from Savarkar's seminal historical writings, the essay also traces how Savarkar developed the concept of ethical warfare from the Gita for his political purposes of contesting colonial power and creating a Hindu nation. It also shows that Savarkar adopted history writing as his main literary form for his engagement with the Gita and its principles, thereby departing from the existing hermeneutical traditions of studying the Gita. For Savarkar, the creation of historical knowledge that embodied key ideas from the Gita was necessary for transforming the individual and the nation. He claimed that it ultimately motivated individuals to adopt violence for the creation of Hindu India.

This essay revises the common assumption that non-violence has been central to political modernity in India. The “extremist” nationalist B. G. Tilak, through a foundational philosophical reinterpretation of the Bhagavad Gita, created a modern theology of the Indian “political”. Tilak did so by directly confronting the question of the possibility of the “event” of war and the ethics of the conversion of kinsmen into enemies. Writing in the aftermath of the Swadeshi movement and from a prison cell in Rangoon, Tilak interpreted action as sacrificial duty that created a vocabulary of violence in which killing was naturalized. Violence, whether conceptual or otherwise, was not directed towards the “outsider” but was of meaning only when directed against the intimate. Unlike the distinction between friend and foe that has been taken as central to the understanding of the political in the twentieth century, it was instead the fraternal–enmity issue that framed the modern political in India. Tilak foregrounded the idea of a de-historicized political subject, whose existence was entirely dependent upon the event of violence itself. This helps to explain both the unprecedented violence that accompanied freedom and partition in 1947 and also the fact that it has remained unmemorialized to the present day.

In her book Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008) the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum joins a chorus of American intellectuals who have criticized France and other European nations for their failure to embrace the concept of cultural pluralism. In Nussbaum's opinion, the meaning that the French attach to egalité has remained stuck in circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The concept is outdated and has not in the contemporary world been able to protect cultural diversity in general and religious diversity in particular. Her book takes to task what she terms “the French tradition of “coercive assimilation” that is insensitive to what George Washington stressed as the “‘delicacy and tenderness’ that is owed to other people's ‘conscientious scruples.’” The French refusal to allow Muslim schoolgirls to cover their heads with a foulard, however stylish it might be, is linked back to the French emancipation of Jews that required, in Nussbaum's analysis, a heavy requirement of cultural erasure. The French, like most Europeans, grew used to the idea “that citizens are all alike,” an idea that now haunts France as it tries to figure out what to do with its Muslim population.

There is no conservative thought in America, only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, thus providing a generation of historians with a convenient set piece to demonstrate the inadequacies of mid-century liberalism and its blindness to the nascent conservative intellectual movement gathering strength and purpose just as Trilling wrote. Two excellent new books about American intellectual history cast this quote in yet another light. Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History carefully documents a centuries-long tradition of conservative thought in America, from the founding era through the end of the twentieth century. In The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, Michael Kimmage asserts that Trilling himself be considered a source of conservative ideas in postwar America. Taken together, the books by Allitt and Kimmage indicate that a new cycle of writing about conservative thought has reached full flower. For far too long, the field of conservative intellectual history has been dominated by the figure of George Nash, author of the classic 1976 The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. These books provide an updated and more critically sophisticated way to examine the terrain Nash strode alone for so long. More significantly, they indicate that intellectual historians are ready to consider conservatism in dialogue with liberalism, bringing new balance to the study of American ideas. Furthermore, both books, Kimmage's in particular, suggest that some of what we are calling conservative and liberal might be flying under the wrong flag. The key to sorting out the confusion will be drawing a more careful distinction between conservatism as a “movement” and as a body of ideas, and looking at both conservatisms as part of a typically American response to historical change, rather than as an exotic and abberant specimen.