recognizably hegemonic voice, even as it was striving for power, or had just won it.”26 A hegemonic class can “speak for all of society” because it recognizes, and represents, the interests of subordinate groups. In so doing, it can relegate coercion to a secondary or even peripheral role in the maintenance of its power. Its strategy is to integrate the other classes into one encompassing community of interests, albeit one in which power imbalances are preserved.
From Coalitional Hegemony to Social Hegemony
The third critical feature of the bourgeois revolutions was their outcome: the construction of a social order in which the bourgeoisie was hegemonic, not merely dominant. What this means is that, just as it did during the antifeudal mobilization, capital maintains its power by relying more on consent than on coercion. We move now from hegemony as a characteristic of a political movement to hegemony as a means of social integration.
In his discussion of how the bourgeoisie secures popular consent to its rule, Guha returns to the language of representation: the dominant class secures its power by “representing all of the will of the people.”27 So, the achievement of the British and French bourgeoisie was that it anchored its rule not on coercion or force, but on its willingness to represent wider social interests. In this way, it embarked on the creation of an entirely new political community, unlike anything witnessed before the advent of bourgeois rule. The bourgeoisie created a new political nation, based on universal principles and issuing from its universalizing drive.
While this characterization of the new political order does describe its functional form, it does not tell us much about the institutional mechanisms through which hegemony is reproduced. If the new ruling class committed itself to the represention of wider social interests, there must have been an institutional matrix through which it achieved this end. Unfortunately, Guha does not identify the institutional supports of hegemony in the new order. We must resort, therefore, to a more interpretive strategy, pulling together his scattered remarks on the matter.
As discussed above, Guha often describes hegemony as the ability to “speak for all of society” or to “represent the will of the people.” What he seems to have in mind as the specific embodiment of this principle is that of liberalism, political and economic, both as a set of institutions and as the language of political contestation. Capital gains its legitimacy, its ability to speak for the nation, by opening a space for subaltern groups to articulate and pursue their interests—albeit within the limits of bourgeois property relations. The basic rights and freedoms associated with liberalism and political democracy are the means by which they achieve these ends. The formal freedoms associated with liberal democracy greatly expand the scope of political practice for the laboring classes. Moreover, in allowing for new political practices, they also create an entirely new political idiom. This means that the institutions of liberalism are not the only factor in the building of hegemony. The bourgeoisie also enables the creation of a new discursive form, what Guha calls a “political idiom,” through which interests are expressed by social actors. This idiom is that of rights, liberties, equality, universal principles. The political actualization of rights, freedoms,and the rule of law thus brings social classes into one encompassing political order and becomes the basis of a new political discourse.28
The significance of the bourgeois revolutions, then, was that they embodied the universalizing tendency of capital. This tendency initially took shape as a broad, antifeudal social coalition led by the bourgeoisie and became a new liberal political order based on universal rights and formal equality. In so doing, it created, for the first time, an encompassing political community that brought together dominant and subaltern classes into the same political domain. This was, for Guha, the historic achievement of the British and French bourgeoisie. As was said above, it set the standard against which the performance of colonial and national capital in India is measured.
Having examined the significance of capital’s universalizing drive in Europe, we now turn to its frustration in modern India.
2.5 UNIVERSALIZATION ABANDONED: CAPITAL’S COLONIAL VENTURE
Two forms of capital are relevant for understanding Indian political evolution: the capital that rested in European hands during the years of British rule, and the capital that belonged to Indian entrepreneurs. The very presence of these two forms—the fact that they successfully reproduced themselves over the course of two centuries and even swelled enormously in scale—might suggest that the universalizing tendency did materialize in the Subcontinent. But Guha resists any such conclusion. While capital did migrate to the Indian Subcontinent, it did not instantiate its universalism in the relevant way. What Guha has in mind is the political and cultural transformation that was unleashed in Europe. Judged by this standard, he announces, both groups failed. Neither segment of the class had any inclination to play the transformative role of their counterparts in early modern Europe. Hence, “the universalist project we have been discussing hurtled itself against an insuperable barrier in colonialism.”29 Let us, then, examine Guha’s arguments for the dimensions of bourgeois failure—both British and Indian—within colonial India.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF LIBERAL COLONIALISM
Guha begins with the observation that elite historiography assumes a basic continuity between the liberalism of British domestic culture, and the structure of colonial rule. It “regard[s] the colonial state as an organic extension of the metropolitan bourgeois state and colonialism as an adaptation, if not quite a replication, of the classic bourgeois culture of the West in English rendering.”30 Taking as its model the European experience, liberal historiography assumes that
capital, in its Indian career, succeeded in overcoming the obstacles to its self-expansion and subjugating all precapitalist relations in material and spiritual life well enough to enable the bourgeoisie to speak for all of society, as it had done on the occasion of its historic triumphs in 1648 and 1789.31
This view, generated by the bourgeoisie itself and propagated by its intellectual representatives, has sustained liberal apologetics for both the colonial and the post-colonial political order. Given this core assumption, notes Guha, it is hardly surprising that colonialism “was regarded by [bourgeois apologists] as a positive instance of the universalizing instance of capital”32 or that a basic continuity was assumed between the colonial era and the regime that followed it. Guha affirms that there was, in fact, a deep continuity between the two, but not in the fashion suggested by liberal ideology. On the contrary, in neither era was either segment of capital inclined to carry out the mission to which both claimed fidelity.
COLONIAL CAPITAL
There were two indices of the colonial bourgeoisie’s abrogation of its historic mission in India: the first was its willingness to impose an autocratic order rather than a liberal one, and the second was its resort to an alliance with, rather than the destruction of, the ancien régime.
Guha takes the political order established in India by the colonizers as direct evidence that the British bourgeoisie was not committed to the same project it had launched at home. He points to the anomaly of “the metropolitan bourgeoisie, who had professed and practiced democracy at home, but were quite happy to conduct the government of their Indian empire as an autocracy.”33 But while he frequently refers to this disjuncture as a paradox or anomaly, he understands that it is not entirely surprising.34 The fact that the colonial state “[was] created by the sword made this historically necessary.”35 It was, after all, a forcible imposition of alien rule on a subject population. The very idea of its transmutation into a liberal order was therefore problematic. Since the state had to be autocratic, there was no possibility of incorporating the laboring classes into the broad political culture in the way that had been accomplished in Europe. They remained an external force, with their own culture and interests,
