I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today by Partha Chatterjee (review)

I Am the People is Partha Chatterjee’s treatise on the rise of populism in Western Europe and the United States of America.

In early 2021, academia is choked with hasty analyses of Brexit and Donald Trump written by political scientists whose work suggests an ignorance of political life outside a small corner of the world. In these books, Euro-America is the cradle of liberal democracy, and the rise of populism in those places, therefore, heralds the death of liberal democratic ideals themselves.

Partha Chatterjee’s book is different. A collection of three historical essays based on the 2018 Ruth Benedict Lectures at Columbia University, it situates popular sovereignty within its long-term, comparative context. Chatterjee proceeds from the assumption that the so-called populist “crisis of democracy” is a provincializing idea, one suggesting that there is a single model of democracy necessarily rooted in “Western civilization” (x). In Chatterjee’s reckoning, we will understand contemporary democracy much better by studying it in reference to political life in the postcolonial nations of Africa and Asia, which have a much longer history of populism. The book is insightful and persuasive because it explores these pressing political questions against a wider range of global experiences.

Chatterjee calls for a decentering of the Euro-American context in understanding democratic life. However, the intellectual foundations of the book are the European theorists Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault and, as such, are consistent with the standard line in leftist political anthropology. Chatterjee describes Western liberal democracy in the second half of the 20th century as a Gramscian project of hegemonic rule through which the bourgeoisie created consent by influencing civil society institutions. This project relied on Foucauldian technologies of governance and biopower that collapsed in the wake of neoliberalism. Some readers may find it anachronistic to build a contemporary analysis on these terms. However, the book is a testament to how much good work can be done when someone uses familiar ideas in an intelligent, careful way.

The brief preface alone arguably provides a clearer explanation for the rise of Euro-American populism than is to be found in entire shelves of contemporary studies:

The pedagogical function of eliciting consent from the governed, which had been carried out earlier through trade unions and political parties with mass following, was now consigned to the risky fortunes of the market. . . [Successful movements and leaders would] tie together the various unfulfilled demands of these heterogeneous populations into chains of equivalence, claiming that, despite all their differences, they constituted the authentic people who were facing a common enemy—namely, the oligarchy in power.

(xiv–xv)

In making these claims, the book presents an accessible account of how Euro-American populism must be understood in terms of shifting relations between capital and political society. The book is strongest when Chatterjee analyzes Asian colonial history to illuminate the provincialism of European political life and when he explains the relationship between political and civil society. The most persuasive ideas here will be familiar to readers of his earlier work on the nation and colonialism (Chatterjee 1993) as well as popular politics (Chatterjee 2004, 2008). However, while it may seem that the author is retreading old ground, the book makes a convincing case that his ideas are relevant to the current moment.

As might be expected from a collection of lectures, some of the essays fit better with the overall argument than others. For instance, Chapter 1 discusses two different historical cases about colonialism and nationalism. The first is the 1946 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which was convened to try Japanese military and political leaders for war crimes. During the tribunal, Indian justice Radhabinod Pal (unsuccessfully) voted to absolve the accused of all charges. Justice Pal’s judgment is used as a heuristic to understand the “transformation of the global order in the era of decolonization” (34), where former colonies began to forge connections with non-Euro...