Kaviraj Sudipta’s Languages of Secularity outlines two main concerns: recent debates about secularity in Indian social science, and the colonial side of modernity. The former focuses on the reexamination of Indian thinking, and analyzing the historical changes in politics, religion, and Indian society. Sudipta argues that this change in thought was a significant moment in political theory, as it shows how India began to move away from Western social theory, and how the nature of social theory depends on the extension (...) and elaboration of ideas combined with academic thinking from the historical world. Sudipta’s second part of the paper concerns the differences between early modernization theory and more recent theories. Casanova, Jose. (shrink)

The question at the centre of this paper is part of a larger debate. Though the more limited question is hardly ever asked in academic discussions, the larger question – how can knowledge - or more broadly and less helpfully- thought in the world outside the West can be decolonized is at the center of lively debates surrounding the ‘end’ of postcolonial theory. Even this question can be asked in two significantly separate forms: about decolonizing knowledge in these societies; or, (...) alternative, knowledge about these societies, which would presumably include knowledge produced in the Western academia about these societies. The two propositions make a lot of difference. This essay, therefore, deals with that larger question of the humanistic and the historical sciences indirectly, because I believe that without becoming clear about this smaller question – what is Western about Western thought? - which might strike people as odd, we cannot make much progress. Indeed, my claim is that so much of uncertainty still attaches to the first discussion – whether we are making any progress at all or not – is precisely because the second question is not seen with clarity as being a precondition to making progress in the first. (shrink)

In their responses to James Tully’s article “Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond,” Garrick Cooper, Charles W. Mills, Sudipta Kaviraj and Sor-hoon Tan engage with different aspects of Tully’s “genuine dialogue.” While they seem to concur with Tully on the urgency of deparochializing political theory, their responses bring to light salient issues which would have to be thought through in taking this project forward.

This paper asks the following question: can an atheist reader fully taste the aesthetic meaning of poetry written by a theist author? This question is discussed with specific reference to the devotional poetry of Tagore. The paper discusses forms of pre-modern religious thinking which influenced Tagore’s conceptions of God, his relation to Nature, human society, and the human self. But it stresses that Tagore’s time was different from those of pre-modern believers. Tagore, as a modern thinker, had to fashion a (...) response to the ‘problem’ of disenchantment. He constructed a philosophic vision that embraced modern science, but argued that it did not dispel the sense of living in an enchanted universe. Consequently, it is argued that a nastika can enjoy his poetry. This requires the nastika to view the idea of God not as a failure of cognition, but as a triumph of the imagination. I can continue to enjoy Tagore’s poetry without unease. (shrink)

Civil society is one of the most used - and abused - concepts in current political thinking. In this important collection of essays, the concept is subjected to rigorous analysis by an international team of contributors, all of whom seek to encourage the historical and comparative understanding of political thought. The volume is divided into two parts: the first section analyses the meaning of civil society in different theoretical traditions of Western philosophy. In the second section, contributors consider the theoretical (...) and practical contexts in which the notion of civil society has been invoked in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These essays demonstrate how an influential Western idea like civil society is itself altered and innovatively modified by the specific contexts of intellectual and practical life in the societies of the South. (shrink)

This article notes the revival of interest in the idea of community in recent debates in political theory. It argues that one of the clearest presentations of the problem was in Hegel, taken up by the radical tradition from Marx. It analyses the further elaboration of the structure of the problem in Marx but argues that there is a baffling difficulty because the answer to the problem of community comes in the form of the state – an apparatus least likely (...) to create communal connection among alienated individuals. Next, Toennies’s classic analysis is taken up for scrutiny. Finally, it suggests that this large question can be broken up into more manageable smaller ones if we think about the artistic representations of the community idyll. (shrink)