Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Interrogate Political Society?
- Part I Political Society and Protest Politics
- Part II Political Society, Middlemen and Mobility
- Part III Civil Society and/or Political Society
- Chapter 10 Clubbing Together: Village Clubs, Local NGOs and the Mediations of Political Society
- Chapter 11 Civic Anxieties and Dalit Democratic Culture: Balmikis in Delhi
- Chapter 12 The Habits of the Political Heart: Recovering Politics from Governmentality
- Chapter 13 Civil Society in the East and Some Dark Thoughts about the Prospects of Political Society
- Part IV Rejoinder
- List of Contributors
Chapter 12 - The Habits of the Political Heart: Recovering Politics from Governmentality
from Part III - Civil Society and/or Political Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Interrogate Political Society?
- Part I Political Society and Protest Politics
- Part II Political Society, Middlemen and Mobility
- Part III Civil Society and/or Political Society
- Chapter 10 Clubbing Together: Village Clubs, Local NGOs and the Mediations of Political Society
- Chapter 11 Civic Anxieties and Dalit Democratic Culture: Balmikis in Delhi
- Chapter 12 The Habits of the Political Heart: Recovering Politics from Governmentality
- Chapter 13 Civil Society in the East and Some Dark Thoughts about the Prospects of Political Society
- Part IV Rejoinder
- List of Contributors
Summary
‘If half my heart is here, doctor, the other half is in China, with the army flowing towards the Yellow River’ writes Nazim Hikmet, in his famous poem, Angina Pectoris: ‘I look at the night through the bars, and despite the weight on my chest, my heart still beats with the most distant stars.’
Partha Chatterjee's ‘Politics of the Governed’ and in particular, his concept of political society, is deservedly famous because it identifies the central conundrum in a post-Foucauldian theoretical world, where hope is not lost but politics loses its way in a mass of identities and governmental ascriptions, where universalist citizenship is an ideal, but the citizen herself or himself is a cipher in some computerized code; when welfare becomes the ideal of an equal citizenship in a Marshallian framework, but this notion of welfare itself creates a ‘proliferation of governmentality’ (Chatterjee 2004, 36). What do we do when our deepest aspirations (for example, for universal equality) turn into categorical chains that imprison us (as has happened to affirmative action in India); or, conversely, as the communitarians bemoaned of old, what do we do when the idea of universal citizenship that we struggle for obliterates our most personal identities? Unlike Foucault, for whom resistance or politics was only possible at the interstices, for Chatterjee, ‘popular politics in most of the world’ remains an abiding area of interest, an arena that he fleshes out with compassion and insight.
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- Re-framing Democracy and Agency in IndiaInterrogating Political Society, pp. 269 - 288Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012
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