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The aim of this webinar is to discuss the global rise in populism in order to understand how the populist form of politics has distinctive histories in the global north and global south. The discussion will center around Partha Chatterjee’s recent publication I Am The People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today.
Drawing on the works of Gramsci, Foucault and Laclau, the text contains a set of theoretically rich reflections on the historical conditions for the rise of populism around the globe. Chatterjee stresses that while populism in the West has emerged recently in response to a crisis of neoliberalism, populism in the postcolonial states, particularly in India, has a longer history.
By the 1970s, India’s social heterogeneity and the absence of a hegemony of capital outside the life spheres of the elite and urban middle classes, forced political parties to rely on populist strategies in order to form electorally successful majorities. While populism in the west is the epoch defining political reality, in a postcolonial state like India, the rise of right wing Hindu nationalism, Chatterjee suggests, is actually an attempt to go beyond populism to establish a more potent hegemony.
Partha Chatterjee will be joined by Sandipto Dasgupta and Sanjay Ruparelia to explore the ideas contained in the book, and discuss the challenges that western and postcolonial democracies face in the current conjuncture.
This event is FREE and open to the PUBLIC. You will receive a link to the online event after you register.
Presented by Democracy Seminar and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research.
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Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
The Democracy Seminar is a project convened by publisher and founding editor Jeffrey Goldfarb and senior editors Elzbieta Matynia and Jeffrey C. Isaac. This world-wide discussion among pro-democracy intellectuals and activists addresses the political, social and cultural obstacles to democratic governance; investigates the rise and appeal of illiberal philosophies and practices; and explores ways for rolling back autocratic politics. Read here about the first international meeting of the DS project.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies hosts transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
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Andrew Arato is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory in the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research. He has taught at L'École des hautes études and Sciences Po in Paris, as well as at the Central European University in Budapest. He had a Fulbright teaching grant to Montevideo in 1991, and was Distinguished Fulbright Professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/M,Germany. Professor Arato has served as a consultant for the Hungarian Parliament on constitutional issues (1996-1997), and as U.S. State Department Democracy Lecturer and Consultant (on Constitutional issues) on Nepal (2007). He was re-appointed by the State Department in the same capacity for Zimbabwe (November of 2010), where he had discussions with civil society activists and political leaders in charge of the constitution-making process. He was invited Professor at the College de France (Spring 2012).
Professor Arato's scholarly research is widely recognized, and conferences and sessions have been organized around his work at University of Glasgow Law School (Spring 2009) and Koc University, Istanbul (December 2009), as well as at the Faculty of Law, Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa (August 2010). Arato was appointed Honorary Professor and Bram Fischer Visiting Scholar at the School of Law, University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg (June 2010-June 2011).
Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, and received his PhD 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.
His books include: The Politics of the Governed: Considerations on Political Society in Most of the World (2004), A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002), A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (1997), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993). His recent work on global practices of empire since the eighteenth century has resulted in the book The Black Hole of Empire (2012).
Chatterjee delivered the Ruth Benedict lectures in the Department of Anthropology in April 2018. The expanded version of these lectures is to be published by Columbia University Press in 2019 as a book entitled "I am the People": Reflections on Popular Sovereignty. A larger book entitled Government by the People: Critique of the Nation Form is nearing completion. His next project will be a people's history of Bengal (including Bangladesh and West Bengal) in the twentieth century.
He is also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.”
My research is in the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial presents. My book manuscript, Legalizing the Revolution (under contract with Cambridge University Press), reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience.
Before coming to The New School, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the British Academy, and taught at Ashoka and Columbia Universities.
Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
Daniel Tourinho Peres teaches undergraduate and graduates courses on Political Philosophy at the Philosophy Department, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He is also a member of the Centre of Studies in Humanities (CRH-UFBA) and a research fellow at the Brazilian National Council of Scientific Research (CNPq). He works mostly on modern political thought.
Paulo Fábio Dantas Neto is Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science of the Philosophy and Human Science School at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), teacher of the Post-Graduation Program of Social Sciences (PPGCS/UFBA) and a researcher at the Center of Studies and Research on Humanities (CRH/FFCH/UFBA). Leads the research group “Ecos do Subsolo” (Echoes from Underground) on the thematic area of Brazilian Political Thought. He has prior trajectory of research on elite and political parties with emphasis on Brazilian and Bahian politics. He was a councilman in Salvador (1983-1988), state deputy in Bahia (1989) and Secretary of Education in Salvador (1994).
Sanjay Ruparelia holds the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Ryerson University in Toronto. His research examines the politics of democracy, inequality and development in India, Asia and the postcolonial world. His books include Divided We Govern: coalition politics in modern India (Hurst and, 2015); The Indian Ideology: three responses to Perry Anderson (editor; Permanent Black, 2015); and Understanding India’s New Political Economy: a great transformation? (co-editor; Routledge, 2011). He is currently preparing two book manuscripts, provisionally titled Contesting a Right to Welfare: law, citizenship and accountability in India and A New Path to Welfare: rights and constitutionalism in the global South. Prior to Ryerson, Sanjay was Associate Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research, and Assistant Director of the South Asia Institute at Columbia University. He earned his BA in Political Science from McGill University, and M.Phil in Sociology and Politics of Development and Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Cambridge.
Alessandro Pinzani is professor for ethics and political philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis (Brazil) and since 2006 he is a fellow researcher of CNPq (Brazilian Research Council). He writes on Critical Theory, social philosophy, poverty, and democracy. He got his PhD and Habilitation in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Dresden (2013), Bochum (2016 and 2020) and Graz (2019) as well as at the Czech Academy of Sciences (2019), and a visiting scholar at Columbia University, NY (2001/02), at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2010) and at the University of Florence (2015/16). Among his books: Jürgen Habermas (München: Beck, 2007), An den Wurzeln moderner Demokratie (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), Money, Autonomy, and Citizenship with W. Leão Rego, Dordrecht: Springer, 2018).
