Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Chatterjee fixes his glance at what the world governance pundits ignore: popular politics in the world today. The case-study methodology is vintage Subaltern Studies; but the voice is that of a public intellectual who speaks to New York from Kolkata. There are the singular readings of Gramsci and Foucault that we have come to expect; but there are also new angles on globalization, national sovereignty, secularism and the war on terror. The book ends on a superb note of productive contradiction - when the author leaves popular politics and speaks in praise of "gatherings of self-conscious people" to counter urbanization in the service of neo-liberalism.
— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Director, Center for Comparative Literature and Society
Talal Asad
In this brilliant set of essays, Partha Chatterjee develops an original thesis about what used to be called the Third World. Contrary to accepted wisdom, he argues that the growth of democracy there does not depend primarily on the strengthening of "civil society" (where modern citizens exercise their rights in relation to one another and to the state) but on something else: the increasing entry of the rural and urban poor into "political society." This is the space of governmentality, in which marginal population groups are able to compel the post-colonial state to negotiate their entitlements -- often in illegal ways. The Politics of the Governed is a deeply thought-provoking book, skillfully combining rich ethnographic detail with important theoretical insights. It moves effortlessly from describing the political struggles of shanty-town dwellers in India to analyzing the contradictory effects of global capitalism and discussing the moves of American imperial power around the world. No one who is seriously concerned with understanding the political predicament of the contemporary world can afford to miss this humane and illuminating work.
— Talal Asad, distinguished professor of anthropology, City University of New York, and author of Formations of the Secular
Ira Katznelson
The great majority of humanity, Partha Chatterjee brilliantly explains, is not linked to political expression in ways the richest parts of humanity find comfortable. Bringing together lectures delivered in New York and Oberlin, Delhi and Calcutta, The Politics of the Governed insists we come to understand sympathetically, yet without credulousness, how relationships between the lived day to day and large-scale, often global, institutions of power have transformed the tone, dimensions, and possibilities of popular politics. The book further insists that we come to terms with the insufficiency of dominant categories of analysis that all too often are aseptic and anodyne. Old models -- whether of empire, citizenship, or civil society -- have become anachronisms. New models -- especially of political society and democracy -- are required urgently. By setting out on this course, this learned and powerful discourse fires our analytical and political imagination.
— Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University, and author of Desolation and Enlightenment
Arjun Appadurai
This remarkable collection of essays extends Partha Chatterjee's earlier work on the career of the nation-form, and, with characteristic brilliance, shows that in an era of new forms of violence, empire, and governmentality, democratic politics can be found in unexpected places and movements. Civil society will not look the same after this book has been read and debated.
— Arjun Appadurai, New School University
