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Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance. In The Common Cause Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternative version. Using ethics as a lens, she describes a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century.
She identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism - an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But she also ...
‘It I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ So E.M. Forester famously observed in Two Cheers for Democracy. This epigrammatic manifesto, where ‘friend’ stands as a metaphor for cross-cultural collaboration, holds the key, Leela Gandhi argues, to the hitherto neglected history of Western anti0imperialism. Focusing on individuals and groups who renounced the privileges of ...