This book is an ethical history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth-century. In this era, Leela Gandhi argues, the concept of ethics had obtained a ubiquitous application. No longer the denominator for right and wrong or good and bad behavior, merely, it came to designate all projects of disciplined self-fashioning. These could tend either toward exclusivity and hierarchy or toward a more inclusive universalism, depending on the players. Gandhi discloses a shared ethos of perfectionist values across imperialism, fascism, and new liberalism, and highlights its exclusion of the ordin ... More

This book is an ethical history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth-century. In this era, Leela Gandhi argues, the concept of ethics had obtained a ubiquitous application. No longer the denominator for right and wrong or good and bad behavior, merely, it came to designate all projects of disciplined self-fashioning. These could tend either toward exclusivity and hierarchy or toward a more inclusive universalism, depending on the players. Gandhi discloses a shared ethos of perfectionist values across imperialism, fascism, and new liberalism, and highlights its exclusion of the ordinary, the unexceptional, and the unremarkable. By contrast, she illuminates a range of anti-colonial and anti-fascist practices of moral imperfectionism and points to their emergence in hidden transnational pockets, encounters, and events. She shows how these oppositional practices were devoted to self-ruination and an anti-care of the self and aimed at making common cause both with the victims and abettors of unjust sociality, by defending the former and reforming the latter. Gandhi draws her examples from belle époque anti-materialism, antinomian Indian spirituality, the military cosmopolitanism of WWI, and the world-situation of mutiny in the moment of post-war demobilization and decolonization. She also engages key thinkers of the time, including M. K. Gandhi, Edmund Husserl, Aimé Césaire, Henri Bergson, Sri Ramana Maharishi, Sigmund Freud, and Theodor Adorno. Bringing raw material practices into conversation with the mainstream of twentieth-century thought in an imaginative historiography, this book defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection.