Permanent Black Politics Of The Governed, The: Reflections On Popular Politics In Most Of The World [Paperback] [Jan 01, 2007] PARTHA CHATTERJEE

Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures

by Partha Chatterjee

Using contemporary examples, the author examines the different forms taken by the politics of the governed, many of which operate outside the traditionally defined arena of civil society and the formal legal institutions of state. Looking at the global conditions within which such local forms have appeared, he shows us how both community and global society have been transformed.

Genres: Politics, Theory, Academic, History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies. He is also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.”

Reviews

[Riad Azam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The two most important concepts that I took away from this book is the idea of popular sovereignty and the distinction between civil and political society that Chatterjee makes here. He has written a separate book on popular sovereignty which I am going to read soon, hopefully. The distinction has been very useful and I have used it in quite a few of my papers and academic writings. However, my project supervisor says there has been a lot of critique of the distinction in anthropological literature and I need to have a look at that. Also, I was introduced to the concept of Foucault's governmentality for the first time over here. In summation, its a very good book.

[Eavan Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to Chatterjee, the Western model of popular sovereignty and civil society, often also upheld by third-world modernist elites, masks the heterogeneity experienced by disadvantaged groups. Most inhabitants in India, he argues, do not identify themselves as members of civil society, neither are they recognized as such by the institutions of the state (pp. 38). He argues that these groups of populations are not outside politics, rather, they are in a particular political relationship with the state, which is marked by claims to security and welfare provision by the administration. Here, we can identify a form of politics of the “political society”, with socio-economic rights concerns in essence and legally transgressive tendency, that is highly similar with the case of mainstream popular uprisings in China depicted by Perry. The concept of “political society” is indeed applicable to most countries in the world, as observable struggles over population management and governmentality are pervasive.
However, two aspects distinguish China’s political society to the Indian one. Firstly, Chatterjee highlights the tension between civil society and political society in India, as the momentum gained by the latter fuels discomfort among progressive modernist elites (pp. 47). In China, such a tension is not as salient, as those who advocate universal political modernization, elitist as they may be, do not constitute the ruling force and hardly form a full-fledged civil society in the strictly liberal sense, while rule-bending activities in the domain of political society is riskier and thus less active than in India. The marginalization of both political modernizers and antagonistic subalterns in China makes their presence and conflicts more invisible. On the contrary, the authoritarian environment may cultivate senses of solidarity between civil society and political society. To be sure, this is not to deny the existence of similar citizen-subaltern clashes between, for example, property rights claims by landholders and welfare and security claims by migrant tenants in urban spaces in China, but these clashes are not predominantly along the line of anti-elitism or anti-professionalism.
Secondly, in a typical political society, according to Chatterjee, in contrast to citizenship “which carries the moral connotation of sharing in the sovereignty of the state and hence of claiming rights in relation to the state” (pp. 136), subalterns do not have any inherent moral claim in relation to the state as they are contingently produced by the governmental administration and base their claims solely on calculation, not morality. Discursively, this is in stark contrast with the Chinese case, wherein subalterns use highly moralized Confucian and Marxist language, that is, a moral claim to subsistence and decent livelihood, to justify their entitlement to socio-economic goods provided by the state.

[风花 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chatterjee的读法：新中国乌有史？
虽然书评提了个很大的噱头，不过查特吉的这本书的读法很适合用来回答这样一个问题：如何面对中国实现了民主化之后的问题。看豆瓣书评，总用一种“第三世界打到美国霸权”的读法来读，我觉得倒是可惜了查特吉的独特的视角，以及这本书与中国问题之间微妙的关系。

这种第三世界打到美国霸权的读法就是把作者定位为“印度汪晖”，但是更有意思的读法则是把作者定位为“印度秦晖”来看。作者对印度问题的分析离不开“印度的民主”，作者并未把民主当作“美国/资本主义的虚伪/傀儡”，而是“被治理者用之以斗争的工具”。被治理者也就是那些印度的贫民窟居民，这些人的存在虽然也揭示了民主政治普遍公民权的“差异性”，不过国家依然不能强拆，搞“清理低端人口”，而是要把被治理者视作统计学-管理学意义的“人口”（而非普遍“公民”），来实行治理，并籍此纳入半法律意义（paralegal）的福利体系。而这种灵活-折衷的处理方式是建立在民主政治的意义上的。

而被治理者在这种“被治理者的政治-政治社会”可以利用的一个政治行动的资源就是“宗教”或“宗族”，而作者正是在这个意义上可以被视作“印度秦晖”，甚至作者也同样的重新发现了“community”（共同体）这概念（甚至在58页作者也提出了“地主和佃户在贫民窟中的冲突并不明显”的“关中模式”）。而作者被治理者的政治也可以从秦晖对权力的“保护-束缚”二分法来看，被国家纳入治理（束缚）也可以从某种程度上带来国家的保护（也是宋怡明“被统治的艺术”），但一些体制就可以只把治理视作“资源的汲取”，并不提供与束缚相对应的保护，而这可能就是民主制度的价值，或者“被治理者的政治”：“有选票就有威胁”。

[Ufuk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Türkçe baskının çevirisi kötü. Kitabın içeriği kitaba verilen adı karşılamaktan uzak. İçerik konferans metinleri vs. toplanarak oluşturulmuş, dağınık ve konu bütünlüğü yok. Örnekler ve tartışılan konular güncel değil. 2016’da niye yeniden baskı yapmış anlamak mümkün değil.

[Sidney Luckett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Essential reading for anybody trying to understand the socio-political dynamics of a postcolonial country

[Rust Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in matters of state but by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population.

[Preethi Krishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chatterjee’s Politics of the Governed is a collection of essays that that provide insights regarding political participation in a post colonial context. Through his theorization of the concept of political society Chatterjee differentiates between universal right bearing citizens of the imagined sovereign nationhood from populations or subjects who are categorized by the state to implement development policies. He argues that the idea of civil society often assumes the narrative of a homogeneous nation that provides equal rights to all its inhabitants. However, according to Chatterjee, most of the poor (both in rural and urban contexts) seldom take on the role of right bearing citizens in a context where the government only sees them as targets for welfare policies. What this leads to, is a different kind of mobilization from that seen in the scope of civil society. He says,

“The rural poor who mobilize to claim the benefits of various govern- mental programs do not do so as members of civil society. To effectively direct those benefits toward them, they must succeed in applying the right pressure at the right places in the governmental machinery. This would frequently mean the bending or stretching of rules, because existing procedures have historically worked to exclude or marginalize them. They must, therefore, succeed in mobilizing population groups to produce a local political consensus that can effectively work against the distribution of power in society as a whole. This possibility is opened up by the working of political society. When school teachers gain the trust of the rural community to plead the case of the poor and secure the confidence of the administrators to find a local consensus that will stick, they do not embody the trust generated among equal members of a civic community. On the con- trary, they mediate between domains that are differentiated by deep and historically entrenched inequalities of power. They mediate between those who govern and those who are governed” (p.66).
He acknowledges that such a political society could be seen as a space where people make claims from the government. However, the asymmetry in information and the lack of knowledge would make unequal distribution of benefits a legal outcome. However, “When the poor in countries like India, mobilized in political society, can affect the implementation of governmental activities in their favor, we must say that they have expanded their freedoms by using means that are not available to them in civil society”(p. 67). And such expansion of freedoms happens through paralegal processes and collective claims that appeal to moral solidarity.
Thus the conceptualization of political society offers several new ways of thinking of claims-making particularly in a context of new development policies and informality.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best discussion that I’ve read yet for comps of the relation between modern government and civil society. I really like the discussion of the 2 lines of political theorizing that Chatterjee identifies, one leading from the civil society to popular sovereignty, and the other from population to government, as well Chatterjee’s insight that modern imaginings of (even multicultural) nations presuppose and are formed by governmental power. National and ethnic movements for recognition or rights can’t be separated from (or, have no existence apart from) the categorizing powers of the state. I think I can usefully link this to Callon et al.’s discussion of hybrid forums. [Also, I kinda skipped the second half...]

[Sam Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and appreciated the distinction between the idealized citizen and the political relationships of populations to the governing bodies through various bureaucratic and administrative interactions. That said, I think I prefer the way that Barbara Cruikshank handles this dynamic by shifting the definition of citizenship to include subjecthood (thus making everyone KINDS of citizens) rather than his separation between citizen and population (thus excluding the majority of the population from citizenship).

[Benemint · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read compared to many books written by other thinkers with the similar scope of analysis.

[Mona Kareem]

A helpful read on subaltern political methods