3 Review(s)

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 imperfection-ism, a set of anti-colonial and antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhis spiritual discipline. Re framing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Leela Gandhi presents moral imperfection-ism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought. She offers it to us as a key to democracys future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonia appeal for an ethics of becoming common. About the Author Leela Gandhi is Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University. She is the founding co-editor of the journal Post colonial Studies. Her publications include Post colonial Theory - a critical introduction and affective communities - anti colonial thought and the Politics of Friendship. hi is John Hawkes Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University. She is the founding co-editor of the journal Post colonial Studies. Her publications include Postc