This essay examines Arendt’s descriptions of “Hottentots” in The Origins of Totalitarianism , especially the comparisons and contrasts she frequently draws between Hottentots and other peoples. In particular, Arendt highlights dehumanization of presumptively “civilized” people in comparing them to African “savages.” Close reading of such analogies demands that we look beyond the racial explanations that other scholars have offered and focus instead on how Arendt’s conception of humanity is bound up with a specific sense of culture that is antiprimitivist—exclusive of peoples without history, primitives. Analysis of her moral anthropology uncovers the Cape Colony discourses and postenlightenment German philosophical supports that inform her antiprimitivism. However, Arendt’s antiprimitivism may not remain confined to Origins. In later essays, Arendt analyzes the various aspects of culture in instructive ways.Yet she also synthesizes culture concepts into a schema that introduces problems for her.
T his article compares the political theories that Mohandas Gandhi and Aurobindo Ghose develop around the assumption that harm or violence is an unavoidable feature of all human action. Both Ghose and Gandhi venerated the Bhagavadgītā and shared a concern to foster life, and they shaped Hindu political theory by combining modern biological concepts with spiritual perspectives to determine the impact of harmful human actions within a totality of interdependent living beings. Although each thinker develops his anticolonial theory by balancing the value of life, the acceptance of an economy of violence, and the duty to act rather than renounce action, they diverge on the acceptability of violence whether in politics or in interactions with nature. Analyzing their framing of human actions as simultaneously biological and spiritual opens up a new perspective on Gandhi's refusal and Ghose's willingness to resort to violence in resistance to British colonial rule in India.
While Chapters 3 and 4 exposed failings in other Rousseauian projects of freedom, this final chapter draws together seemingly unapologetic moments of political resistance across Rousseau’s writings. What these scattered instances of resistance hold in common is a practice of freedom in flight from domination. This chapter reads together the flight of the “Hottentot” (the subject of both an important endnote and the frontispiece of the Discourse on Inequality), Rousseau’s complex metaphorics of the body politic in “Discourse on Political Economy” and Of the Social Contract, and finally his idealized portrait of the Jewish people: taken together, they sketch a theory of fugitive freedom. The chapter draws out this understanding of freedom as fugitive by way of several counterpoints: Walzer’s influential analysis of the political meanings of Exodus, the history of marronnage in the Americas, and readings of Behn’s Oroonokoand Voltaire’s Candide.
This chapter interrogates the political practices and forces that constitute anticolonial thought and comparative political theory. Both anticolonial and comparative political theorists are curators or collectors of culture and civilization. However, their political projects often point in distinct, if not opposed, directions. This chapter aims to map the different conditions under which each group collects, the different strategies by which they curate, the subject positions these conditions and strategies produce, and, most important, the effects of their appropriations. It does so by way of four contrapuntal pairings: Aurobindo Ghose with Fred Dallmayr, Mohandas Gandhi with Farah Godrej, Frantz Fanon with Leigh Jenco, and Amilcar Cabral with Roxanne Euben. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to take seriously a politics of incommensurability as a political practice, one attuned to the constraints that enable subjectivity oriented toward minimizing (usually historically sedimented) forms of domination.
Although some of his most important writings date to the period immediately after the Indian Revolt of 1857, J. S. Mill seemed unable to recognize that British violence might substantively contradict British people’s “civilized” character. Likewise, he could not view Indian actions, including recent insurgent violence, as political but rather only as expressions of “barbarian” character, nor could he consider the occasional reforming native leader effective in producing lasting political change. What enabled Mill to ignore evidence that contradicted his firm generalizations about essentially “barbarian” Indians and “civilized” Britons? Arguing that Mill wrote during an important shift in the order of European knowledge, this article explores two epistemological devices by which Mill consistently reconciled apparent outliers from a class to the rest of the class in question—his characterization of human differences as either “essential” or “accidental” and his reliance on a concept of the “norm” that is ambiguous between normative (ideal) and normal (typical) human character. Analyzing how Mill diminished both violence by the civilized and capacity for political change by barbarians as merely accidental, we can understand how epistemic and physical violence are linked and, more generally, how essentialism functions in the characterization of complex political phenomena.
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