the attention they deserve. Moreover, elements of the earlier work remained somewhat obscure—and thus their import was not thoroughly appreciated—until their fuller explication in later years. A salient example of this is Guha’s argument about capital’s abandonment of its universalizing mission, which was briefly outlined in the first volume and presented in bits and pieces over the next few years, but could not be properly grasped till the publication, in 1997, of Dominance without Hegemony. So, too, with Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism, which was introduced in the early 1990s but did not then attract the attention it is now garnering.45 Hence, there would seem to be a need for a fresh examination of the project, now that members of the collective have articulated its implications more extensively.
A second difference regards content. Several well-known engagements with Subaltern Studies have, between them, taken on different aspects of the project. One prominent theme has been the worry that the collective has not so much provided an alternative to the Orientalism of Western theories as revived it, repackaged as radical chic.46 Another has been the claim that the agrarian analysis offered by the theorists is not an alternative to Western theories but rather an offshoot of the impeccably Western economics of A. V. Chayanov.47 Others have noted that the early commitment to popular history was quickly replaced by an obsession with elite discourse, specifically the discourse of the Bengali elite.48 Yet another theme has been the epistemological claims of the project and, in particular, its flirtation with relativism.49 Finally, there is now a considerable literature on the Subalternist critique of secularism.50
In large measure, I agree with many of these critiques and will amplify some of them in the following chapters. And yet, even though certain aspects of Subaltern Studies have been effectively criticized, the actual theory produced by the group has largely escaped scrutiny. Instead, the object of attention has more often been the politics of the project—its motivations, its implications, its place in the broader intellectual landscape. What has been given especially short shrift is the Subalternists’ social and historical theory, on which they base the arguments that have drawn the greater part of the critical attention. One intended contribution of the present book is an analysis of these more foundational elements of the Subaltern Studies project and, by extension, the wider gamut of postcolonial studies. Here the primary focus will be the Subalternists’ historical sociology, particularly their understanding of the East-West divergence—a subject crucial to their project, albeit one that has garnered very little attention. But I will also address more theoretical matters that have rarely been scrutinized in depth, and more rarely still in tandem with their broader historical claims.
1.5 THE FAILURE OF SUBALTERN STUDIES
Having signaled this book’s goals, let me now describe its basic architecture. Readers will have noticed that the main thrust of Subaltern Studies is to stress difference. The project’s basic message, which is consistent with the broad orientation of postcolonial studies, is that because Western theories are incapable of understanding the dynamics of non-Western societies, their inadequacy calls for a drastic overhaul of fundamental concepts or even the construction of an altogether new framework. The inadequacy of received theories stems from their inability to appreciate the fact that capitalism in the East turned out to have fundamentally different properties than did capitalism in the West.
In the six theses previously enumerated, it is possible to discern three domains in particular where Subalternist theorists stress a fundamental divide between East and West. The first is in the nature of the bourgeoisie: the Western bourgeoisie carried forth capital’s universalizing drive while its descendant in the East did not. Second, the power relations produced by Western capitalism were unlike the power relations capitalism generated elsewhere. Third comes the question of political psychology: political actors are motivated by a different set of concerns in the East than they are in the West.
I will argue that the claims for a fundamental difference with regard to capital, power, and agency are all irredeemably flawed. I take up the question of the bourgeoisie in chapters 2 through 4; chapters 5 and 6 examine the issue of power; chapters 7 and 8 examine the problem of political psychology. Chapter 9 then addresses one of the main pillars of recent Subalternist theorizing, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s arguments about historicism. I conclude with an assessment of Partha Chatterjee’s theory of colonial nationalism.
The main thrust of the book, then, is to elucidate the failure of the arguments from difference, so central to postcolonial theory. Subaltern Studies has been the most ambitious attempt to demonstrate the various dimensions in which East and West diverge, but the attempt has not succeeded. The point is not to insist that there are no differences at all between the two; rather, that the differences, such as they are, are not of the kind described by the Subalternists. Now, this refutation of their historical and political sociology is important in its own right, but it matters also for its theoretical implications. Postcolonial studies has famously advocated an overhaul of the received frameworks of European thought. Again, the call to rethink the basic structure of Western theory is based on the prior claim that the structure of modernity in the East is so different from its structure in the West that the categories developed out of the European experience cannot possibly be adequate for analyzing the East. But if the sociology on which this argument rests is shown to be deeply shaky, then the grandiose claim that we must rethink our understanding of capitalism, politics, history, agency, and everything else is also called into question. If there does not exist a fundamental divergence between East and West—regarding the nature of their bourgeoisie, the power relations in place, and the subaltern groups’ motivational structure—then we are permitted to consider the possibility that the theories emerging from the European experience might well be up to the task of capturing the basic structure of Eastern development in the modern epoch. Instead of being entirely different forms of society, the West and the non-West would, according to this perspective, turn out to be variants of the same species. Further, if they are indeed variations of the same basic form, the theories generated by the European experience would not have to be overhauled or jettisoned, but simply modified.
In order to drive this point home, I complement the critique of Subalternist theories by developing an alternative analysis of the same phenomena they take up. Hence, in the chapters on the bourgeoisie, I show that Ranajit Guha’s argument is mistaken and also explicate the essential convergence of capitalist strategies West and East; in the critique of Chakrabarty’s analysis of power, I explain how capitalism produces precisely the forms of authority that he deems departures from “bourgeois forms of power”; and in rejecting Chatterjee’s and Chakrabarty’s account of political psychology in the East, I provide positive evidence that it is the same as the political psychology of actors in the West, bolstering my argument with elements of a theory of rationality in political agency. So, too, with my critique of historicism and of Chatterjee’s theory of nationalism. My hope is that readers will not only be persuaded of the weaknesses of the Subaltern Studies project but that they will also see the strength of the very theories that the Subalternists impugn.
In the course of showing the flimsiness of their case, and offering an alternative to their account, I hope to show that Subaltern Studies fails to deliver on its two basic promises—that it has developed an explanatory framework adequate for understanding the nature of modernity in the East, and that it is a platform for radical critique.
THE EXPLANATORY FAILURE
Subaltern Studies fails as an explanatory framework because it systematically misrepresents the relationship between capitalism and modernity, both in the East and in the West. It does so in two ways. First, it promotes a distorted understanding of what is distinctive about capitalism as a social system. Subalternist theorists take certain aspects of twentieth-century liberal culture as being defining characteristics of capitalism itself. Not surprisingly, once capitalism is defined so narrowly, it is easy to conclude that what we have in the East is not capitalism at all or that it is a bastardized version of the system. Recall
