The Common Cause

In The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi reconsiders the history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi recovers the stories of Indians and others who refused the spoils of anticolonial nationalism and spiritually embraced an alternative democracy, including the best that Europe itself had to offer. She identifies, on the one hand, a heroic ethic of moral perfectionism shared across imperialism, fascism, and new liberalism-an ethic notably contemptuous of the ordinary and the unexceptional. On the other hand, and the main focus of her book, is an ethic of moral imperfectionism -a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness, indeed abnegation, and ranging from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi s spiritual discipline. These oppositional practices, Leela Gandhi argues, made common cause both with the victims and abettors of social injustice by defending the former and reforming the latter. Her book elegantly recovers the elusive history of moral imperfectionism, offering it to us as a lost tradition of democratic thought and as a key to its future elaboration. Euro-American opinion holds that democracy is a uniquely Western property and inheritance. In contrast, Gandhi s book claims a global provenance for democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection. It mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common. "