Between the Many and the One: Anticolonial Federalism and Popular Sovereignty

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172110185
Author(s):  
Nazmul S. Sultan
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Alternative Source ◽  
The People ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

Recovering a marginal body of pluralist political thought from early twentieth-century India, this article explores how the question of popular sovereignty shaped the federalist reconfiguration of the anticolonial democratic project. The turn to federalism was facilitated by the Indian reckoning with Hegel in the late nineteenth century, which led to the diagnosis that the universality ascribed to monist sovereignty relies on a “unilinear” theory of development. Through a sustained engagement with British pluralist and American progressive thought, Indian federalist thinkers eventually developed a many-willed conception of the people. In so doing, they hoped to overcome the denial of Indian peoplehood on the ground of its lack of national unity and historical backwardness. However, the alternative source of sovereignty the federalists pointed to—plural and many-willed—stood in tension with their simultaneous pursuit of a people speaking in one voice. In this way, the constitutive tension of the pluralist conception of sovereignty came strikingly alive in the colonial world.

The Many-Colored Cloak

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Malik Mufti
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Electoral Participation ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Ibn Rushd ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic Principles ◽  
The Many ◽  
Religion And Democracy

This articles argues (a) that democratic discourse has already become hegemonic among mainstream Islamist movements in Turkey and the Arab world; (b) that while this development originated in tactical calculations, it constitutes a consequential transformation in Islamist political thought; and (c) that this transformation, in turn, raises critical questions about the interaction of religion and democracy with which contemporary Islamists have not yet grappled adequately but which were anticipated by medieval philosophers such as al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd. The argument is laid out through an analysis (based on textual sources and interviews) of key decisions on electoral participation made by Turkey’s AK Party and the Muslim Brotherhoods in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Particular attention is focused on these movements’ gradual embrace of three key democratic principles: pluralism, the people as the source of political authority, and the legitimacy of such procedural mechanisms as multiple parties and regular elections.

scholarly journals Ethnic Hatred and Universal Benevolence: Ethnicity and Loyalty in Precolonial Myanmar, and Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-338
Author(s):  
Victor Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Pressures ◽  
Legal Equality ◽  
The One

AbstractInsisting on a radical divide between post-1750 ideologies in Europe and earlier political thought in both Europe and Asia, modernist scholars of nationalism have called attention, quite justifiably, to European nationalisms’ unique focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, territorial fixity, and the primacy of secular over universal religious loyalties. Yet this essay argues that nationalism also shared basic developmental and expressive features with political thought in pre-1750 Europe as well as in rimland—that is to say outlying—sectors of Asia. Polities in Western Europe and rimland Asia were all protected against Inner Asian occupation, all enjoyed relatively cohesive local geographies, and all experienced economic and social pressures to integration that were not only sustained but surprisingly synchronized throughout the second millennium. In Western Europe and rimland Asia each major state came to identify with a named ethnicity, specific artifacts became badges of inclusion, and central ethnicity expanded and grew more standardized. Using Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain as case studies, this essay reconstructs these centuries-long similarities in process and form between “political ethnicity,” on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. Finally, however, this essay explores cultural and material answers to the obvious question: if political ethnicities in Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain were indeed comparable, why did the latter realm alone generate recognizable expressions of nationalism? As such, this essay both strengthens and weakens claims for European exceptionalism.

scholarly journals The One and the Many: Revisioning Adorno’s Critique of Western Reason

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Cook
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 18, 2010.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lila Caimari
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Neighborhood Associations ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many

This introductory chapter begins with the author's account of the origins of the present volume, which can be traced back to her interest in a late nineteenth-century set of concepts, images, and metaphors that grew up around the figure of the modern criminal. It then discusses the population growth in Buenos Aires, which jumped from about 1.5 to 2.5 million in the two decades between the world wars and the corresponding urban expansion. This sets the stage for a description of the book's purpose, namely to explore the many dimensions of porteño life in the early decades of the twentieth century: its vital network of neighborhood associations, its literacy campaigns, its grassroots politics, its many reformist projects, and so forth.

I Do Not Buy My Freedom Because I Am Not a Fool

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Oscar de la Torre
Keyword(s):  
Negative Impact ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Work ◽  
Equatorial Africa ◽  
Commercial Networks ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Rubber Boom ◽  
Slave Quarters ◽  
The One

The first part of the chapter analyzes the different paths by which slaves acquired environmental knowledge: importing skills and strategies from equatorial Africa, acquiring knowledge when doing agricultural work in plantations and farms, and maintaining interethnic contacts with Indians. As they learned the ways of local peasants, the enslaved gradually built entire parallel economies with vigorous ties to the expanding network of commercial houses that existed in late nineteenth-century Amazonia. Instead of using the term “internal economy of slavery,” I conceptualize them as an economy that ran parallel to that of their masters, given the size and complexity of the commercial networks in which the slaves participated. The chapter also describes the process of community formation inside the slave quarters at the time of Amazonia’s rubber boom, which had both a positive and negative impact on the prospects of Amazonia’s black slaves. On the one hand, it made it possible for them to expand their parallel economy. On the other hand, that slaves could carry out such a broad scope of activities meant that the slaveowners could adapt to the changes of the era. In Amazonia slavery was just like rubber: flexible and adaptable to multiple conditions – hence its durability.

State, Market, and Popular Sovereignty in Agrarian North America

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
American Political Economy

This essay focuses on agriculture and particularly the “freehold ideal” of independent farmers in the nineteenth-century United States. An odd contradiction of American territorial settlement was the farmers’ simultaneous drive to exploit resources for the market and the aim of many of those actively engaged in settlement to shield themselves from the market’s dangers by acquiring land on the frontier. Clark shows how the ideal of freehold farming, which was so central to the American political economy, was actually threatened not so much from the dangers of the market overwhelming the small farm as from the family farm running out of labor to uphold its own productive capacity. Labor, not land, was the problem confronting the freehold vision, as he argues in a provocative re-reading of late nineteenth-century small farmers’ calls for state intervention.

The Abominables

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Marco Pinfari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Rule Breaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Many ◽  
Reign Of Terror

This chapter explores the use of monster metaphors in framing “terrorist” actors since the French Revolution. While acknowledging that these metaphors effectively present the “terrorist” as an abject “other,” it argues that the main purpose of the use of monster imagery in framing “terrorists” is to highlight their unmanageability, which may be instrumental in securing popular backing for specific types of rule-breaking behavior in counterterrorism. It presents these arguments while reviewing examples drawn from the origins of modern terrorism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include the gorgon Medusa, which appears for instance in relation to Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” and the many-headed hydra—one of the oldest metaphors for representing unruly behavior that proves unmanageable. It then introduces another type of unmanageable monster that would become particularly popular to frame terrorists—Frankenstein’s monster—and its use in the late nineteenth century to frame Irish nationalism.

Gay Affections

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gay Identities

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.

scholarly journals Editorial

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Diederik F. Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Great War

I am pleased to introduce Boyhood Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1. This issue’s authors unanimously invite an appreciation of the many regional, temporal and contextual inflections of manliness-in-the-making. After all: “Among boys, as among men, there are ‘all sorts and conditions;’ environment moulds them” (Anon. 1890: 147). This merits a bit of intercontinental timetravel. Ecce puer: from Lord Baden-Powell’s and American contemporaries’ middle ages to late nineteenth-century Mexico’s French Third Republic, back to Baden-Powell and into the Great War, and back again to presentday Mexico. In Mexico, on both visits, we are travelling back and forth as well, between the rural and urban experience.

RACE, EMPIRE, AND THE LIMITS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH NATIONHOOD

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 873-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
COLIN KIDD
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Scotland's Unionist culture has already become a world we have lost, investigation of which is hampered by the misleading notion of a ‘Celtic fringe’. Nineteenth-century Lowland Scots were not classified as Celts; indeed they vociferously projected a Teutonic racial identity. Several Scots went so far as to claim not only that the Saxon Scots of the Lowlands were superior to the Celts of the Highlands, but that the people of the Lowlands came from a more purely Anglian stock than the population of southern England. For some Scots the glory of Scottish identity resided in the boast that Lowlanders were more authentically ‘English’ than the English themselves. Moreover, Scottish historians reinterpreted the nation's medieval War of Independence – otherwise a cynosure of patriotism – as an unfortunate civil war within the Saxon race. Curiously, racialism – which was far from monolithic – worked at times both to support and to subvert Scottish involvement in empire. The late nineteenth century also saw the formulation of Scottish proposals for an Anglo-Saxon racial empire including the United States; while Teutonic racialism inflected the nascent Scottish home rule movement as well as the Udal League in Orkney and Shetland.

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