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The Rights of the Governed
My subject is popular politics. When I say "popular", I do
not necessarily presume any particular institutional form or process of
politics. I do, however, suggest that much of the politics I describe
is conditioned by the functions and activities of modern governmental
systems that have now become part of the expected functions of governments
everywhere. These expectations and activities have produced, I will argue,
certain relations between governments and populations. The popular politics
I will describe grows upon and is shaped by those relations.
The familiar concepts of social theory that I will need to revisit in
this lecture are civil society and state, citizenship and rights, universal
affiliations and particular identities. Since I will look at popular politics,
I must also consider the question of democracy. Many of these concepts
will not look familiar any more after I position my lenses and persuade
you to look through them. Civil society, for instance, will appear as
the closed association of modern elite groups, sequestered from the wider
popular life of the communities, walled up within enclaves of civic freedom
and rational law. Citizenship will take on two different shapes - the
formal and the real. And unlike the old way, known to us from the Greeks
to Machiavelli to Marx, of talking about the rulers and the ruled, I will
invite you to think of those who govern and those who are governed. Governance,
that new buzzword in policy studies, is, I will suggest, the body of knowledge
and set of techniques used by, or on behalf of, those who govern. Democracy
today, I will insist, is not government of, by and for the people. Rather,
it should be seen as the politics of the governed.
I will clarify and elaborate on my conceptual arguments later in this
lecture. To introduce my discussion of popular politics, let me begin
by posing for you a conflict that lies at the heart of modern politics
in most of the world. It is the opposition between the universal ideal
of civic nationalism, based on individual freedoms and equal rights irrespective
of distinctions of religion, race, language or culture, and the particular
demands of cultural identity that call for the differential treatment
of particular groups on grounds of vulnerability or backwardness or historical
injustice, or indeed for numerous other reasons. The opposition, I will
argue, is symptomatic of the transition that occurred in modern politics
in the course of the twentieth century from a conception of democratic
politics grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty to one in which democratic
politics is shaped by governmentality.
The universal ideal of civic nationalism was well captured by Benedict
Anderson when he argued, in his now classic Imagined Communities,
that the nation lives in homogeneous empty time. In this, he was, in fact,
following a dominant strand in modern historical thinking that imagines
the social space of modernity as distributed in homogeneous empty time.
In his recent book The Spectre of Comparisons, Anderson has followed
up his analysis in Imagined Communities by distinguishing between
nationalism and the politics of ethnicity. He does this by identifying
two kinds of seriality that are produced by the modern imaginings of community.
One is the unbound seriality of the everyday universals of modern social
thought: nations, citizens, revolutionaries, bureaucrats, workers, intellectuals,
and so on. The other is the bound seriality of governmentality: the finite
totals of enumerable classes of population produced by the modern census
and the modern electoral systems. Unbound serialities are typically imagined
and narrated by means of the classic instruments of print-capitalism,
namely, the newspaper and the novel. They afford the opportunity for individuals
to imagine themselves as members of larger than face-to-face solidarities,
of choosing to act on behalf of those solidarities, of transcending by
an act of political imagination the limits imposed by traditional practices.
Unbound serialities are potentially liberating. Bound serialities, by
contrast, can operate only with integers. This implies that for each category
of classification, any individual can count only as one or zero, never
as a fraction, which in turn means that all partial or mixed affiliations
to a category are ruled out. One can only be black or not black, Muslim
or not Muslim, tribal or not tribal, never only partially or contextually
so. Bound serialities, Anderson suggests, are constricting and perhaps
inherently conflictual. They produce the tools of ethnic politics. Anderson
uses this distinction between bound and unbound serialities to make his
argument about the residual goodness of nationalism and the unrelieved
nastiness of ethnic politics.
I disagree. I believe this view of modernity, or indeed of capital, is
mistaken because it is one-sided. It looks at only one dimension of the
time-space of modern life. People can only imagine themselves in empty
homogeneous time; they do not live in it. Empty homogeneous time is the
utopian time of capital. It linearly connects past, present and future,
creating the possibility for all of those historicist imaginings of identity,
nationhood, progress, and so on that Anderson, along with many others,
have made familiar to us. But empty homogeneous time is not located anywhere
in real space - it is utopian. The real time-space of modern life is heterogeneous,
unevenly dense. Here, even industrial workers do not all internalize the
work-discipline of capitalism, and more curiously, even when they do,
they do not do so in the same way. Politics here does not mean the same
thing to all people. To ignore this is, I believe, to discard the real
for the utopian. Much recent ethnographic work has established that these
"other" times are not mere survivals of a pre-modern past: they
are new products of the encounter with modernity itself. One must therefore
call it the heterogeneous time of modernity.
The modern form of the nation is both universal and particular. The universal
dimension is represented, first, by the idea of the people as the original
locus of sovereignty in the modern state, and second, by the idea of all
humans as bearers of rights. If this was universally true, how was it
to be realized? By enshrining the specific rights of citizens in a state
constituted by a particular people, namely, a nation. Thus, the nation-state
became the particular, and normal, form of the modern state. The basic
framework of rights in the modern state was defined by the twin ideas
of freedom and equality. But freedom and equality frequently pulled in
opposite directions. The two, therefore, had to be mediated, as Étienne
Balibar has usefully pointed out, by two further concepts: those of property
and community. Property sought to resolve the contradictions between freedom
and equality at the level of the individual in relation to other individuals.
Community was where the contradictions were sought to be resolved at the
level of the whole fraternity. Along the dimension of property, the particular
resolutions might be more or less liberal; along the dimension of community,
they might be more or less communitarian. But it was within the specific
form of the sovereign and homogeneous nation-state that the universal
ideals of modern citizenship were expected to be realized.
The ideas of freedom and equality that gave shape to the universal rights
of the citizen were crucial not only for the fight against absolutist
political regimes but also for undermining pre-capitalist practices that
restricted individual mobility and choice to traditional confines defined
by birth and status. But they were also crucial in separating the abstract
domain of Right from the actual domain of life in civil society. In legal-political
theory, the rights of the citizen were unrestricted by race, religion,
ethnicity or class (by the early twentieth century, the same rights would
also be made available to women), but this did not mean the abolition
of actual distinctions between men (and women) in civil society. Rather,
the universalism of the theory of rights both presupposed and enabled
a new ordering of power relations in society based precisely on those
distinctions of class, race, religion, gender, etc. At the same time,
the emancipatory promise held out by the idea of universal equal rights
also acted as a constant source of theoretical critique of actual civil
society. That promise has, in the last two centuries, propelled numerous
struggles all over the world to change unequal and unjust social differences
of race, religion, caste, class or gender.
The debate in Anglo-American political philosophy between liberals and
communitarians seems to me to have confirmed the crucial role in this
political history of the two mediating concepts of property and community
in determining the range of institutional possibilities within the field
constituted by freedom and equality. The communitarians could not reject
the value of personal freedom, for if they overemphasized the claims of
communal identity, they were open to the charge of denying the basic individual
right to choose, possess, use and exchange commodities at will. On the
other hand, liberals too did not deny that identifying with the community
might be an important source of moral meaning for individual lives. Their
concern was that by undermining the liberal system of rights and the liberal
policy of neutrality on questions of the common good, communitarians were
opening the door to majoritarian intolerance, the perpetuation of conservative
practices and a potentially tyrannical insistence on conformism. Few denied
the empirical fact that most individuals, even in industrially advanced
liberal democracies, led their lives within an inherited network of social
attachments that could be described as community. But there was a strong
feeling that not all communities were worthy of approval in modern political
life. In particular, attachments that seemed to emphasize the inherited,
the primordial, the parochial or the traditional were regarded by most
theorists as smacking of conservative and intolerant practices and hence
as inimical to the values of modern citizenship. The political community
that seemed to find the largest measure of approval was the modern nation
that grants equality and freedom to all citizens irrespective of biological
or cultural difference.
Such political community, it has been felt, must be nested in a network
of norms in civil society that prevail independently of the state and
that are consistent with the laws of the state. Only such a civil society
would provide, to use an old phraseology, the social basis for capitalist
democracy. This was the grand theme of virtually all sociological theories
in Europe in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, when the
problem was posed of the possibility of capitalist transition in the non-Western
world, the same presupposition provided the foundation for modernization
theory, whether in its Marxian or Weberian version. The argument, to put
it simply, was that without a transformation of the institutions and practices
of civil society, whether carried out from the top or from below, it was
impossible to create or sustain freedom and equality in the political
domain. To have modern and free political communities, one must first
have people who were citizens, not subjects. For many, this understanding
provided the ethical core of a project of modernization of the non-Western
world: to transform erstwhile subjects, unfamiliar with the possibilities
of equality and freedom, into modern citizens.
However, while philosophical discussions on the rights of citizens in
the modern state hovered around the concepts of liberty and community,
the emergence of mass democracies in the advanced industrial countries
of the West in the twentieth century produced an entirely new distinction.
This is a distinction between citizens and populations. Citizens inhabit
the domain of theory, populations the domain of policy. Unlike the concept
of citizen, the concept of population is wholly descriptive and empirical;
it does not carry a normative burden. Populations are identifiable, classifiable
and describable by empirical or behavioural criteria and are amenable
to statistical techniques such as censuses and sample surveys. Unlike
the concept of citizen which carries the ethical connotation of participation
in the sovereignty of the state, the concept of population makes available
to government functionaries a set of rationally manipulable instruments
for reaching large sections of the inhabitants of a country as the targets
of their "policies" - economic policy, administrative policy,
law and even political mobilization. Indeed, as Michel Foucault has pointed
out, a major characteristic of the contemporary regime of power is a certain
"governmentalization of the state". 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. Its mode of reasoning
is not deliberative openness but rather an instrumental notion of costs
and benefits. Its apparatus is not the republican assembly but an elaborate
network of surveillance through which information is collected on every
aspect of the life of the population that is to be looked after. It is
not surprising that in the course of the twentieth century, ideas of participatory
citizenship that were so much a part of the Enlightenment notion of politics
have fast retreated before the triumphant advance of governmental technologies
that have promised to deliver more well-being to more people at less cost.
Indeed, one might say that the actual political history of capital has
long spilled over the normative confines of liberal political theory to
go out and conquer the world through its governmental technologies. Much
of the emotional charge of the communitarian or republican critique of
contemporary Western political life seems to flow from an awareness that
the business of government has been emptied of all serious engagement
with politics. This is shown most obviously in the steady fall in electoral
participation in all Western democracies and the recent panic in left-liberal
circles in Europe at the unexpected success of right-wing populists.
How did the enumeration and classification of population groups for the
purposes of welfare administration have this effect on the process of
democratic politics in advanced capitalist countries? Many writers working
in vastly diverse fields have thrown light on this question in recent
years, from the philosopher Ian Hacking to the literary historian Mary
Poovey. Most relevant for us is the account given by British sociologists
such as Nikolas Rose, Peter Miller or Thomas Osborne of the actual working
of governmentality in Britain and the United States. They have surveyed
the emergence of what has been called "government from the social
point of view", typically in the areas of work, education and health,
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There was, for instance, the
rise of social insurance systems to minimize the uncertain impact of the
economy on various groups and individuals. There was the constitution
of the family itself, the subject of numerous pedagogical, medical, economic
and ethical discourses, as a site of governmentality. There was a proliferation
of censuses and demographic surveys, making the work of governmentality
accountable in terms of numbers, and leading in turn to the idea of representation
by numerical proportions. The management of migration, crime, war and
disease made personal identity itself an issue of security and therefore
subject to record and constant verification. There was always a multiplicity
of population groups that were the objects of governmentality - multiple
targets with multiple characteristics, requiring multiple techniques of
administration.
We could then say, in short, that whereas the classical idea of popular
sovereignty, expressed in the legal-political facts of equal citizenship,
produced the homogeneous construct of the nation, the activities of governmentality
required multiple, cross-cutting and shifting classifications of the population
as the targets of multiple policies, producing a necessarily heterogeneous
construct of the social. Here, then, we have the antinomy between the
lofty political imaginary of popular sovereignty and the mundane administrative
reality of governmentality: it is the antinomy between the homogeneous
national and the heterogeneous social.
Ideas of republican citizenship often accompanied the politics of national
liberation., and fired the imaginations of nationalist revolutionaries.
But without exception - and this is crucial for our story about politics
in most of the world - they were overtaken by the developmental state
which promised to end poverty and backwardness by adopting appropriate
policies of economic growth and social reform. With varying degrees of
success, and in some cases with disastrous failure, the post-colonial
states deployed the latest governmental technologies to promote the well-being
of their populations, often prompted and aided by international and non-governmental
organizations. In adopting these technical strategies of modernization
and development, older ethnographic concepts often entered the field of
knowledge about populations - as convenient descriptive categories for
classifying groups of people into suitable targets for administrative,
legal, economic or electoral policy. In many cases, classificatory criteria
used by colonial governmental regimes continued into the post-colonial
era, shaping the forms of both political demands and developmental policy.
Thus, caste and religion in India, ethnic groups in Southeast Asia and
tribes in Africa remained the dominant criteria for identifying communities
among the populations as objects of policy.
There are then two sets of conceptual connections I have described. One
is the line connecting civil society to the nation-state founded on popular
sovereignty and granting equal rights to citizens. The other is the line
connecting populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple policies
of security and welfare. The first line points to a domain of politics
described in great detail in democratic political theory in the last two
centuries. Does the second line point to a different domain of politics?
I believe it does. To distinguish it from the classic associational forms
of civil society, I am calling it political society.
In terms of the formal structure of the state as given by the constitution
and the laws, all of society is civil society; everyone is a citizen with
equal rights and therefore to be regarded as a member of civil society.
The political process is one where the organs of the state interact with
members of civil society in their individual capacities or as members
of associations. In actual fact, this is not how things work. Most of
the inhabitants of India are only tenuously, and even then ambiguously
and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the
constitution. They are not, therefore, proper members of civil society
and are not regarded as such by the institutions of the state. But it
is not as though they are outside the reach of the state or even excluded
from the domain of politics. As populations within the territorial jurisdiction
of the state, they have to be both looked after and controlled by various
governmental agencies. These activities bring these populations into a
certain political relationship with the state. But this relationship does
not always conform to what is envisaged in the constitutional depiction
of the relation between the state and members of civil society. Yet these
are without doubt political relations that may have acquired, in specific
historically defined contexts, a widely recognized systematic character,
and perhaps even certain conventionally recognized ethical norms, even
if subject to varying degrees of contestation. How are we to begin to
understand these processes?
In order to do so, we shall have to inquire deeply into the politics
emerging out of the developmental policies of government aimed at specific
population groups. Many of these groups, organized into associations,
transgress the strict lines of legality in struggling to live and work.
They may live in illegal squatter settlements, make illegal use of water
or electricity facilities, travel without tickets in public transport.
In dealing with them, the authorities cannot treat them on the same footing
as other civic associations following more legitimate social pursuits.
Yet state agencies and non-governmental organizations cannot ignore them
either, since they are among thousands of similar associations representing
groups of population whose very livelihood or habitation involves violation
of the law. These agencies therefore deal with these associations not
as bodies of citizens but as convenient instruments for the administration
of welfare to marginal and underprivileged population groups.
These groups on their part accept that their activities are often illegal
and contrary to good civic behaviour, but they make a claim to a habitation
and a livelihood as a matter of right. They profess a readiness to move
out if they are given suitable alternative sites for resettlement, for
instance. The state agencies recognize that these population groups do
have some claim on the welfare programmes of the government, but those
claims could not be regarded as justiciable rights since the state did
not have the means to deliver those benefits to the entire population
of the country. To treat those claims as rights would only invite further
violation of public property and civic laws.
What happens then is a negotiation of these claims on a political terrain
where, on the one hand, governmental agencies have a public obligation
to look after the poor and the underprivileged and, on the other, particular
population groups receive attention from those agencies according to calculations
of political expediency. Groups in political society have to pick their
way through this uncertain terrain by making a large array of connections
outside the group - with other groups in similar situations, with more
privileged and influential groups, with government functionaries, perhaps
with political parties and leaders. They often make instrumental use of
the fact that they can vote in elections, so that it is true to say that
the field of citizenship, at certain points, overlaps with that of governmentality.
But the instrumental use of the vote is possible only within a field of
strategic politics. This is the stuff of democratic politics as it takes
place on the ground in India. It involves what appears to be a constantly
shifting compromise between the normative values of modernity and the
moral assertion of popular demands.
Civil society then, restricted to a small section of culturally equipped
citizens, represents in countries like India the high ground of modernity.
So does the constitutional model of the state. But in actual practice,
governmental agencies must descend from that high ground to the terrain
of political society in order to renew their legitimacy as providers of
well-being and there to confront whatever is the current configuration
of politically mobilized demands. In the process, one is liable to hear
complaints from the protagonists of civil society and the constitutional
state that modernity is facing an unexpected rival in the form of democracy.
I must now conclude. Let me do this by reminding ourselves of the founding
moment of the political theory of democracy in ancient Greece. Centuries
before either civil society or liberalism was invented, Aristotle had
concluded that not all persons were fit to become part of the governing
class because not everyone had the necessary practical wisdom or ethical
virtue. But his shrewd empirical mind did not rule out the possibility
that in some societies, for some kinds of people, under some conditions,
democracy might be a good form of government. Our political theory today
does not accept Aristotle's criteria of the ideal constitution. But our
actual governmental practices are still based on the premise that not
everyone can govern. What I have tried to show is that alongside the abstract
promise of popular sovereignty, people in most of the world are devising
new ways in which they can choose how they should be governed. Many of
the forms of political society I have described would not, I suspect,
meet with Aristotle's approval, because they would appear to him to allow
popular leaders to take precedence over the law. But we might, I think,
be able to persuade him that in this way the people are learning, and
forcing their governors to learn, how they would prefer to be governed.
That, the wise Greek might agree, is a good ethical justification for
democracy.
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