Gabriel Asuquo on African alternatives to Liberalism

 Gabriel Asuquo, a Nigerian philosopher' writes in Aeon of Liberalism as an 'empty ideology' which failed the African continent.

When African nations such as Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Cameroon claimed independence in the mid-20th century, they inherited more than borders and fragile institutions; they also inherited a political philosophy. Liberalism, born of Europe’s Enlightenment, was presented as the universal grammar of progress.

Newly independent African nations were faced with a choice. Either stay on the multi-party path with a mixed economy and vibrant private sector or adopt the single-party system of the Communist countries. Many countries gravitated to the latter model because it promised rapid growth and the retention of national wealth which might otherwise be exported to the financial centres of the West. 

It came clothed in the language of democracy, development and human rights, promising that multiparty elections, private property, free markets and individual rights would secure for Africa a swift entry into modernity.

Urban centres modernized by leaps and bounds. The youthful population was very quick to assimilate new ideas and ways of living. Education spread more rapidly than most people had thought possible. Africa soon had indigenous academics of high calibre. Sadly, the terms of trade tended to move against most primary producers. Where this was not the case, there was a 'resource curse' such that the exchange rate became overvalued and the economy failed to diversify. Great suffering was caused when the value of the principal export crashed. 

Yet, decades later, the record is sobering. Across much of Africa, democracy often feels like a ceremony without substance – citizens queue under the sun to vote, only for results to be decided in hotel rooms or courtrooms. Nigeria’s 2019 and 2023 elections, Kenya’s post-election violence of 2007, and Zimbabwe’s recurring electoral crises illustrate how manipulation and ethnic mobilisation routinely subvert the people’s will.

Save under military rule, Nigeria has been multi-party. Kenya and Zimbabwe have been de facto one party states.  

Economic liberalisation, hailed as a gateway to growth, frequently delivered hardship instead:

There would have been hardship in any case if the country ran out of money.  

Nigeria’s 1986 Structural Adjustment Programme brought mass retrenchments and inflation; Ghana’s ‘economic recovery’ deepened inequality; and Zambia’s privatisations eroded local industries.

 What was the alternative? 

Meanwhile, sovereignty itself bends under the weight of conditional loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank,

Unconditional loans are called gifts. During the Cold War there was some hope that the super-powers would finance the industrialization and infrastructure building of the Third World. The problem was that stuff people are anxious to give you for free, may turn out to be unfit for purpose. The thing ends up costing more than just buying the best product with cash. 

and the subtle dictates of global NGOs that shape domestic policy in the name of aid. On paper, citizens are free; in reality, their autonomy is trapped in the web of foreign dependence and internal elite capture.

Which is still better than Warlords rampaging all over the place.  

This failure cannot be explained solely by poor leadership or weak institutions. It reflects a deeper misalignment: liberalism, shaped by Western histories of individualism and capitalism, sits uneasily with Africa’s communal traditions, relational ethics and socioeconomic realities.

Which is why many countries rejected it and sought 'an African way to Socialism'.  

If Africa is to find a political path that truly resonates with its people, it must interrogate liberalism’s limits and begin the work of decolonising political thought, by drawing upon its own histories, values and philosophies to imagine alternatives.

This was done in the Sixties. It didn't work out too well.  

Liberalism is often portrayed as universal, but its origins are distinctly European.

Sadly, the origin of the boundaries of many African countries was European. Some aristocrats sitting in a palace in Berlin drew lines upon a map. Little wonder that some of the newly independent countries faced difficulties.  

It emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe was grappling with religious wars, absolutist monarchies, and the rise of capitalist economies.

There was State formation in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Few would have predicted that almost the entire continent would be parcelled out by European powers.  

Its ideals were shaped by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, who championed natural rights; Adam Smith, who gave free markets their moral basis; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who elaborated the social contract. The Enlightenment age celebrates reason, science and the autonomy of the individual as the hallmarks of progress and human flourishing.

Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703–c. 1759), an Nzema scholar from Axim became the first African to earn a doctorate in Germany. He lectured at universities in Halle and Jena. Then, he returned to his homeland. The suspicion is that he was imprisoned by the Dutch because he was sowing 'dissent'- i.e. trying to raise up his own people. 

In the 19th century, many of these ideas were crystallised in the work of John Stuart Mill, someone who wrote explicitly in On Liberty (1859) that liberalism was unsuitable for nations in their ‘nonage’,

like India. Mill & his dad had worked for the East India Company 

suggesting that they weren’t yet ready for liberalism – and needed a different approach, and at the same time implying a dubious hierarchy of cultural development.

Indeed. Even Herbert Spenser warned the Japanese not to imitate the West politically. They ignored the cunt and rose and rose.  

Liberal ideas flourished in societies with particular historical conditions: the growth of industrial capitalism, relatively homogenous nation-states, and centuries of contestation over monarchy and Church power.

British rule in India was often more liberal than it was in England. Holyoke, the man who invented the word 'secularism', was jailed for blasphemy. In Calcutta he would have been free to say what he liked- unless it might cause a riot.  

When colonial rule ended, liberalism was exported wholesale to Africa, with little regard for whether it fit societies shaped by communal land tenure, diverse ethnic structures, and long histories of exploitation.

The Brits did hold elections in most places to ensure that they were passing power to the right people. But, in some places, they passed power back to the existing monarch. 

Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah,

who created a one-party state  

in his seminal work Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), cautioned that the liberal order exported to Africa functioned less as an instrument of emancipation and more as a mechanism of continued Western subjugation.

Had he continued to hold elections, he wouldn't have died in exile.  

He contended that beneath the rhetoric of democracy and free markets lay a network of control, sustained through economic dependency, cultural infiltration and political manipulation.

He believed the CIA was plotting against him. He was probably right.  

Western powers, through the IMF, the World Bank and multinational corporations, dictated fiscal policies that tethered African economies to external capital and import dependence.

China, it must be said, was very generous in the aid it gave even when it was itself very poor.  

Political tutelage was maintained through conditional aid, diplomatic interference and the promotion of governance models that privileged elite compliance over popular sovereignty.

African leaders were tough and smart. Nobody could push them around. If Nkrumah had listened to Arthur Lewis (whose elder brother had settled in Ghana some decades previously) Ghana might have risen economically. Diversification was the key. South Korea started off a lot poorer than Ghana. It had no choice but to focus investment on industries which could quickly start earning foreign exchange. 

Even cultural and educational systems were subtly restructured to favour Western values while discrediting Indigenous epistemologies.

Africans did that for the same reason that Asians had done that. They wanted to catch up with the most productive countries as quickly as possible. However, there were some countries- e.g. Mobutu's Zaire- which emphasized 'authenticity'. Sadly, if the dictator is authentically a kleptomaniac, the country's wealth drains away.  

Thus, the liberal state in Africa, though draped in the discourse of freedom and modernisation, became the principal architecture through which imperial power was preserved under new guises.

There were seven Communist countries in sub-Saharan Africa. None survive today. Does 'imperial power' survive? Not in Anglophone countries. Britain simply isn't strong enough any more.  

At independence, liberalism’s appeal was understandable.

Socialism's appeal soon became greater. Perhaps, China's defeat of India in 1962 caused African leaders to prefer the Chinese model.  

Multiparty democracy promised choice. Markets promised growth. Rights promised dignity. But, over time,

the Army took over. Either that or some bunch of kleptocrats enriched themselves and transferred their wealth into Western tax-havens.  

the reality fell short. The consequences of liberalism’s empty promises are a stark reality across many African states. Some of these consequences are explained below:

Elections without democracy

African countries hold elections more frequently than ever before, but citizens often describe them as an elite game rather than a people’s mandate. The point is corroborated by Ifeoma Ezeabasili, a Nigerian-based researcher, who opines that: ‘Vote-buying is a persistent challenge that has undermined the integrity of elections in Nigeria. It is a practice where political actors offer material inducements, such as cash, food or other gifts, in exchange for votes.’

This was certainly true of my native Tamil Nadu back in the Nineties. Then people realized they could take the biryani & brandy bottle from one party and then go vote for another party on election day.  

This means that vote-buying, ballot rigging and ethnic patronage undermine the ideal of political equality. In Nigeria, for instance, the 2019 and 2023 federal elections descended into contests where ethnic loyalties – rather than a unifying national vision – dictated voting behaviour.

Nigeria is a very big and diverse country. The littoral is bound to continue to develop rapidly. This can generate tensions within a multi-religion country.  

In the 2019 presidential election, voting patterns in Kano and Lagos revealed deep regional and religious polarisation, while allegations of ballot manipulation and voter suppression in Rivers and Akwa Ibom states further eroded public trust. Similarly, in the 2023 election, the fierce contest between Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi exposed entrenched ethnic divisions, with Nigeria’s south-east largely backing the Labour Party, and the north rallying behind the centrist All Progressives Congress (APC) and the centre-right People’s Democratic Party (PDP). These dynamics left many Nigerians feeling excluded from the democratic process and disillusioned by the persistent triumph of identity politics over national cohesion.

Is the answer greater subsidiarity- i.e. devolution of powers? That is perfectly compatible with Liberal political philosophy.  

Rights without justice

Liberalism privileges individual rights,

e.g. the right of a guy from one part of the country to move to another part of the country and acquire property and gain a livelihood there 

but in societies where personhood is understood relationally – as among the Akan (an ethnic group who are predominantly located in the southern and central regions of Ghana),

internal slavery and 'pawnship' was only abolished around 1930. 

for whom one becomes a ‘person’

or a slave 

through community – rights talk, with its stress on individual rights, often feels incomplete. Land tenure illustrates this tension: while liberal law protects private property, many African communities such as the Igbo, the Zulu and the Akan regard land as a communal trust held for future generations. Imposing liberal legal frameworks has frequently led to dispossession, conflict and erosion of cultural ties.

British law in 'Protectorates' (e.g. Uganda as opposed to Kenya) could forbid alienation of tribal land to 'outsiders'. However, quite long leases were permissible.  

Markets without development

The World Bank and the IMF, echoing liberal economic orthodoxy, pushed African states to privatise industries, cut subsidies, and open markets.

African states would have had to do this anyway because they had run out of money. That's why they were trying to borrow.  

Structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and ’90s such as fiscal and monetary reforms, trade liberalisation, deregulation and public sector reforms were supposed to unleash efficiency and growth.

That was 'mere puffery'. What was important was that the State stopped trying to spend money it didn't have.  

Instead, they shrank public services, fuelled unemployment, and deepened poverty.

If you have been living on borrowed money, your poverty does indeed increase if people stop lending to you. 

The ‘free market’ became, in practice, a system tilted toward foreign investors and local elites, leaving ordinary citizens behind.

Did you know that nothing is free in a 'free market'. You have to pay for stuff. What a rip-off! 

Freedom without sovereignty

Perhaps most troubling, liberalism in Africa has often been tethered to external control.

So, something which doesn't exist is tethered to something else which doesn't exist. The Brits may have held elections in countries they were leaving but they didn't force those countries to continue to hold elections. They had no 'external control'.  

Donor agencies prescribe governance reforms;

Why don't the prescribe yet more theft and corruption?  

NGOs promote Western conceptions of democracy;

as opposed to African conceptions of slavery 

financial institutions set economic policy.

Sadly, this isn't the case.  

As Frantz Fanon

who was from Martinique which has chosen to remain part of France 

warned in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), independence risks becoming a sham if political forms are borrowed without genuine control over resources and destiny.

Ben Bella's crazy Socialistic policies in Algeria caused his overthrow at about the same time as the Ghanaian military got rid of Nkrumah. Rabid nutters ought not to control resources or destinies.  

Fanon went further to submit that the problem of postcolonial Africa is the absence of ideology. It is this void that liberalism and its apostles seek to fill in Africa.

By then most leaders were turning to Socialism or Communism. People said 'Nehru is a Liberal. Mao took down his pants and made fun of his puny genitals'.  

Thus, liberalism in Africa often produces institutions without substance – behind the façade of freedom something more colonial still lurks.

Did you know Bona Tilubu is actually a White lady? His real name is Queen Victoria.  

While constitutions, elections and rights charters exist on paper, their ability to transform lives remains limited.

Also, though Hogwarts School exists on paper, you can't actually study Magic there.  

The tension between liberalism and African thought is most evident in their divergent conceptions of the human person.

Liberalism says human persons can rise up by their own efforts. African thought suggests that everything is the fault of Whitey.  

Liberalism privileges the autonomous, rational and self-interested individual,

because such individuals can rise by their own efforts 

viewing society as an aggregate of free agents constrained only by rights-protecting laws. Mill, for example, in On Liberty, is almost entirely focused on giving individuals sufficient space to experiment with their lives and to make their own mistakes, as long as they aren’t directly harming others by their choices.

By contrast, African thought foregrounds relational personhood.

Europeans were once the rulers of much of Africa. Thus the 'relational personhood' of Africans is immutably fixed for all time.  

The Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti’s dictum ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am’

was proved false when he died in 2019. We still are. He isn't.  

captures a worldview echoed in Ubuntu philosophy, which stresses interdependence, solidarity and communal responsibility.

Mbiti was a Professor and parish priest in Switzerland for the last 14 years of his life. Ubuntu if you want to, I prefer to live somewhere nice.  

Personhood, in this framework, is not given but realised through participation in social life.

Preferably Swiss social life.  

It is earned through moral maturity and communal participation, not automatically given at birth. For instance, in the Igbo tradition of Nigeria, a newborn is not yet considered a mmadu (full person) until social rituals such as naming ceremonies, moral upbringing and community recognition affirm the child’s identity.

Some Christians believe baby will go to Hell if he dies before he is baptized. Nowt as queer as folk.  

Similarly, in the Akan tradition of Ghana, a person attains full personhood (onipa) by living virtuously, showing respect for elders, and contributing to communal welfare – failure to do so earns one the label onnye onipa (‘not a person’).

 Jews might say 'not a mensch'. So what? Liberalism has nothing to do with one's ontological beliefs. 

Among the Yoruba, moral character (ìwà pẹ̀lẹ́) is central: a person of wealth or intelligence but lacking good character is not regarded as truly human.

Just call him a pig and be done with it.  

The Nigerian poet Ifeanyi Menkiti

who settled in America 

in his essay ‘Person and Community in African Traditional Thought’ (1984) interprets such examples to mean that personhood in African thought is a socially acquired moral status, achieved through community validation and ethical living, rather than mere biological existence.

Nigerian origin kids do very well in America. They are one of the highest earning groups in that country. The fact is the biological existence of your progeny is likely to be qualitatively better in a country where people study biology, not philosophy.  

These ontological differences shape political practice.

No. They are wholly irrelevant.  

Liberalism valorises majority democratic rule

No. It preferred a restricted franchise based on property ownership and education.  

and adversarial economic/trading competition, whereas many African traditions favoured consensus.

This is why Africa took the lead in STEM subjects. Einstein travelled to Lagos to learn mathematical physics.  

As the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu

who settled permanently in the US in 1985 

observed, precolonial governance often relied on deliberation until agreement was reached, prioritising harmony over victory.

Why did precolonial governance end? It was because Whitey had better tech.  

Leadership was measured less by individual ambition than by the ability to sustain communal balance.

Would an African Copernicus have kept silent about his astronomical ideas so as not to rock the boat? No!  Africans are just as smart as anybody else. They may have been more diplomatic in their language but they could weigh up different proposals and chose the best solution. 

The contrast extends to property. Liberal regimes commodify land as a transferable asset.

Why not commodify people and sell them to slave traders?  

In much of Africa, however, land is sacred, binding the living to ancestors and future generations. To commodify it is to rupture identity and belonging.

Some very smart Africans decided to 'rupture identity and belonging' by emigrating to Europe or America.  

The result is a deep incongruity: liberalism anchors freedom in individual autonomy, while African traditions insist that freedom acquires meaning only within community, with its particular location and history.

In which case you should just do whatever the Big Chief tells you to do.  

To resolve this tension between African and imported traditions like liberalism, African scholars like Achille Mbembe from Cameroon,

now settled in South Africa 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o from Kenya,

 who died in the US

and Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni from Zimbabwe

but now resident in Canada 

have called for a decolonising of the epistemic and ideological structures that shape life and institutions in Africa.

This is best done if you live in Canada.  

This must begin with the decolonisation of political thought.

In other words, getting guys like this author to shut the fuck up about colonization. That shite ended sixty years ago. Get over it.  

To ‘decolonise’ political thought is not to reject every Western idea but to interrogate their relevance and reshape them in ways that serve Africa’s needs.

What Africa needs is yet more whining about Whitey.  

As Ngũgĩ argued in Decolonising the Mind (1986), colonialism operates not just through armies and economies but through cultural and intellectual dominance.

Which is why you should emigrate to Europe or America. Also, wear a tin-foil hat.  

Liberalism, when adopted uncritically, becomes a form of cultural colonialism shaping how Africans imagine politics in ways that may not serve them.

No African country adopted Liberalism. Some did have Emperors who went in for cannibalism but that's not the same thing.  

The decolonisation of political thought requires three moves: Critique: exposing how liberalism, despite appearances, sustains inequality and dependency.

Do this exposing from a nice campus in America or Europe. If you do it on an African or Indian campus, people think you are a loser.  

Recovery: reclaiming Indigenous traditions of governance, ethics and personhood.

Again, this is best done in America or Europe. Otherwise people think you are the village idiot.  

Reimagination: creating hybrid models that selectively borrow from global ideas while remaining grounded in African contexts.

e.g. Emperor Bokassa who repurposed cannibalism as ontologically grounded in the Eucharit.  

Mbembe, in On the Postcolony (2001), stresses that, for Africa to imagine its own political future beyond borrowed categories, it must forge concepts that reflect its lived realities.

In other words, it must stop writing shite about the 'Postcolony'.  

Decolonising thought is thus not nostalgia, a naive desire to return to some alleged Golden precolonial age, but is a form of innovation that respects the best aspects of Africa’s past.

No. The only type of thought which is 'a form of innovation' involves progress in STEM subjects. Anybody can talk nonsense in the way nonsense has always been talked.  

These innovative interpretations of the African experience are gradually forming philosophical and ideological alternatives to liberalism.

If you can't have liberalism because you are too poor, you may as well resign yourself to working super-hard so your kids or grandkids have a better life.  

These African alternatives to liberalism

e.g. Tribalism 

are not static or completed systems of ideas, they are rooted in the lived experiences of the African people.

In which case, they already exist. Liberalism does not.  

If liberalism has faltered,

It hasn't been tried- probably for very good reasons.  

what might replace it? African thinkers and leaders have long proposed some alternatives:

Ubuntu philosophy

Ubuntu (meaning ‘humanity’ in languages such as Zulu) emphasises compassion, solidarity and interdependence.

Teaching Ubuntu philosophy in America may pay the bills. But not all Africans can get such teaching gigs.  

Politically, it supports participatory decision-making, restorative justice, and prioritising community over competition.

In other words, doing nothing.  

South Africa’s much-admired Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996 drew on Ubuntu values to emphasise healing rather than vengeance.

While its leaders concentrated on stealing and getting rich.  

African socialism

Figures like Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania,

who created a one-party state 

and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana,

ditto 

sought to build socialism rooted in African communal values rather than Marxist orthodoxy.

They failed. Their countries got poorer. However, Nyerere kicked Idi Amin's ass when he tried to invade.  

Nyerere’s Ujamaa villages (from ‘fraternity’ in Swahili) aimed to promote collective ownership and self-reliance.

He forcibly moved 5 million people into these villages. The consequences were catastrophic. From producing 540,000 tons of surplus maize in 1970, the country found itself having to to import 300,000 tons of maize in 1974. US food aid helped keep famine at bay. 

While implementation was uneven, this vision of development anchored in solidarity remains a powerful critique of neoliberal capitalism.

It was stupid. Nyerere's should have let the scheme be voluntary. There was an advantage in concentrating households so as to improve access to services and this, by itself, would have led to the same outcome.  

Consensus democracy

Kwasi Wiredu proposed ‘consensus democracy’ as an alternative to adversarial party politics. Drawing from Akan traditions, he argued for deliberation until agreement, ensuring inclusivity and avoiding zero-sum contests. In traditional African consensus democracy, no individual holds veto power; rather, decisions emerge through prolonged dialogue until near-unanimity is achieved.

Unless everybody dies or runs away first.  

Consensus in this context implies collective harmony, not absolute agreement. Mechanisms like mediation by elders, appeal to communal values, and prioritising peace over victory prevent stalemate and preserve social cohesion in governance. This model challenges the liberal assumption that politics must be competitive and divisive.

Most of Africa was colonised. Clearly, there was something lacking in its traditional way of doing things.  

Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism

Together with Fanon, the first president of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara

who was killed by his Minister of Justice who reversed his leftist policies. 

and the Guinea-Bissau revolutionary Amílcar Cabral

killed by a rival 

emphasised that true liberation requires breaking economic dependency and asserting cultural pride. In office, Sankara pursued policies of self-sufficiency, land reform and gender equality, directly challenging the liberal development model. These alternatives are not perfect, but they illustrate that Africa need not be bound to one imported ideology.

Sankara & Cabral were killed by their own people. Cabral's death was amply avenged by his brother . 

For many Africans, the clash with liberalism is not theoretical but tangible in daily life. In Kenya, small farmers watch ancestral lands vanish under corporate claims because traditional communal tenure holds no place in imported liberal property law.

Kenya has been independent for 62 years. Surely, that's long enough to change colonial laws?  

In Nigeria, graduates queue for scarce jobs, wondering what ‘market freedom’ means in an economy dominated by patronage.

It means wages fall till the market clears.  

In South Africa, communities still trapped in poverty ask whether liberal democracy has truly dismantled the structural chains of apartheid, or just perpetuated them by other means.

Why aren't we rich? The answer is because we have low productivity.  

Such stories expose the urgency of the debate: political philosophy is not mere abstraction

it is worthless shit 

but the difference between democracy as empowerment or betrayal, and freedom as dignity or dependency.

Similarly medical philosophy is about finding the elixir of life. Why are those stupid Whiteys bothering with Medical School? Philosophy can make everybody immortal.  

What would a decolonised African political thought look like?

the word 'colonial' would not appear in it. Not everything would be blamed on Whitey and Neoliberalism.  

It would not mean a wholesale rejection of liberalism, nor a romanticised return to precolonial traditions. Rather, it would be a creative synthesis: a democracy that values consensus and inclusivity over narrow majority rule;

So, not a democracy at all. No decisions are made. There is no effective government. 

an economy that balances individual initiative with communal solidarity;

So, not an economy at all. Nobody does anything. Everybody shows solidarity by starving to death. 

a rights framework that binds freedoms to duties;

That's called slavery.  

and a politics of sovereignty that resists domination

by shitting itself. Nobody wants to dominate somebody who smells like shit.  

while engaging critically with global experience.

preferably on a nice American or European campus.  

Such a future demands intellectual courage,

i.e. intellectuals must be brave enough to tell stupid lies.  

policy innovation and grassroots participation.

i.e. shite tried by the likes of Nyerere. To be fair, he stepped down when he saw his policy had failed.  

Universities must teach African philosophies alongside Western canons,

No. They must teach STEM subjects not worthless shite. Also, teach Chinese. More and more trade will be with China.  

leaders must think beyond donor prescriptions, and citizens must reclaim agency in shaping their societies.

by emigrating like Wiredu?  

As Wiredu argued, the task is not to imitate the West but to

move there and settle permanently? 

think critically from Africa’s own resources – so that democracy becomes empowerment, freedom becomes dignity, and philosophy becomes a tool for liberation rather than dependency.

But liberation too must be transformed into slavery. Oh. Africa tried that already.  

The failure of liberalism in Africa is not simply the fault of corrupt leaders or fragile states:

or the fact that leaders didn't want the nuisance of fighting periodic elections 

it is a symptom of a deeper misfit between imported ideologies and lived realities.

In other words, Africans were trying to implement ideas for which their countries were not suited.  

Liberalism promised democracy, rights and prosperity, yet what it too often delivered were hollow institutions, widening inequality and crippling dependency.

Socialism promised slavery. That's why many African leaders had a soft spot for it.  

Decolonising political thought means asking with urgency: what kind of society do we want to build, and on whose terms? The answer will not be found in borrowed blueprints but in ideas rooted in Africa’s soil, spoken in its languages, and shaped by its values.

Yet most of the African intellectuals the author quotes uprooted themselves from Africa's soil so as to settle elsewhere.  

However, while cross-cultural exchange is inevitable in today’s rapidly globalising world, Africans can selectively integrate liberal values such as rights and accountability within their communal ethical frameworks,

My impression is that this had happened before I was born. Africans are smart. Sadly the terms of trade started to move against most African countries fifty or even sixty years ago.  

thereby preserving cultural continuity and ensuring contextual relevance. Nonetheless, the question Is there an African alternative to liberalism? is not a matter for philosophers alone;

It is not a matter for philosophers. Political Scientists- maybe.  

it is a practical call to reclaim agency, to imagine futures that serve Africa’s people first.

Sadly, imagining nice futures doesn't make your future nice.  

Africa must no longer remain a passive consumer of foreign ideologies

It wasn't passive. The very first generation of African leaders were innovative and sought indigenous solutions. Sadly, the cure was worse than the disease in most cases.  

but emerge as an innovator in global political thought,

Its innovations were disastrous. Anyway 'political thought' does not matter. Raising productivity by solving collective action problems is the task of the politician.  

offering models of solidarity, community and justice that the world itself desperately needs. The time to begin is now.

The world needs clean, green, energy and other technologies to reverse climate change. Young people need to study STEM subjects and find ways to come together to implement such solutions at the local level. 

True, Africans should learn about and take pride in their ancient culture and traditions but pride is not enough. Hard work, thrift, and enterprise too are required. Africa is blessed with abundant human resources to rise to the challenge. But saying 'boo to Neoliberalism' is no panacea.  

Nussbaum's nonsense about India.

The following was published in 2007. 

The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a critical examination of the influential thesis of the "clash of civilizations," made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.

In Gujarat as in Sindh there was a clash between Hindu and Islamic civilization. In Gujarat, Hindus prevailed. In Sindh, the reverse was the case. At one time some Socialists thought that religious differences would fade away because everybody would become an atheist. Nobody thinks that now.  

His picture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and an aggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today's India, where,

Muslims were butchered, expelled and stripped of any type of affirmative action by Pandit Nehru.  

I shall argue, the violent values of the Hindu right

whose inspiration was 'Jugantar' which reached its peak in Bengal circa 1905. 

are imports from European fascism of the 1930s,

Fascism only appeared on the scene where there was a real and present danger of a Communist takeover. 

and where the third-largest Muslim population in the world lives as peaceful democratic citizens, despite severe poverty and other inequalities.

Where Muslims are in the majority- e.g. Kashmir Valley- they expel kaffirs. There are Muslim political dynasties just as there are Hindu dynasties. That isn't very democratic at all.

The real "clash of civilizations" is not between "Islam" and "the West,"

There was a war against terror going on at that time. America was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Muslims.  

but instead within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others who are different, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity and the domination of a single "pure" religious and ethnic tradition.

This is irrelevant. Plenty of kaffirs live in Saudi Arabia. They are happy that criminals get short shrift there. On the other hand, it is no fun living in a very tolerant shithole where gangsters keep raping and beating you.  

At a deeper level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other

by shitting on their tits? This is not an urge most people have.  

and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.

All we ask is that you obey the law and refrain from shitting on our tits.  

This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country as good and pure, its enemies as an external "axis of evil." The other picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy and forces that promote democratic equality.

Neither picture matters. America is about productivity. If this fails to grow, it will fall behind its rivals. Smart people will emigrate. 

At what I've called the Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and aggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination.

America is highly productive. It is not interested in 'arguments about India'. True, you could make a little money, during the War on Terror, pretending that Modi, not Bush or Obama, was killing Muslims. But Muslims weren't taken in.  

Americans have a great deal to gain by learning more about India and pondering the ideas of some of her most significant political thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore

he renounced his knighthood 

and Mohandas Gandhi,

who returned this kaiser-e-hind medal around the same time. The Americans should renounce titles given to them by the British King. Oh. They got rid of such titles in 1776.  

whose ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely pertinent to today's conflicts. 

Both were afraid the Muslims (and the Punjabis) would take over the country if the Brits left without handing over the army to the Congress party. 

The creation of a liberal public culture: How did fascism take such hold in India?

It didn't. What India succumbed to was Dynasticism.  

Hindu traditions emphasize tolerance and pluralism,

which is why Hindus of different sects don't kill each other 

and daily life tends to emphasize the ferment and vigor of difference, as people from so many ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds encounter one another.

Only in the cities. 

But as I've noted, the traditions contain a wound, a locus of vulnerability, in the area of humiliated masculinity.

In which case Germans and Italians and members of the British Union of Fascists had suffered 'humiliated masculinity'.  

For centuries, some Hindu males think, they were subordinated by a sequence of conquerors,

Not Hindu males who are Nepali.  

and Hindus have come to identify the sexual playfulness and sensuousness of their traditions,

 which English dudes like Sir John Woodroffe were greatly enthused by. 

scorned by the masters of the Raj,

the Raj was cool with Indians having sex. It was Gandhi who wanted everybody to give up this filthy practice.  

with their own weakness and subjection.

Gandhi believed that loss of semen made you weak. That's why you should give up sex.  

So a repudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation of the masculine came to seem the best way out of subjection.

By contrast, the American Army insists that all soldiers get breast implants. General Eisenhower was promoted because he was the best Cancan dancer at West Point. Why do Indians not want their soldiers to train as female impersonators? It is because they are Fascist.  

One reason why the RSS attracts such a following is the widespread sense of masculine failure.

In 1933, German men stopped getting erections. That's why they made Hitler Chancellor. By contrast, America remained Democratic because FDR wore stiletto heels and black fishnet stockings. 

At the same time, the RSS filled a void, organizing at the grass-roots level with great discipline and selflessness.

Dr. Hardikar and Dr. Hegdewar were medical students in Calcutta before the Great War. They were inspired by the Jugantar revolutionaries. After the War Hardikar took the lead in organizing Congress Seva Dal to do crowd control at Congress events. But there was always the danger that the Dal- and Congress itself- would be banned. Thus Hegdewar set up the RSS as a 'non-political' copy of the Seva Dal. It turned out, doing social work raises your reputation and esprit de corps. Thus, while the Seva Dal degenerated into a bunch of corrupt gangsters, the RSS had a clean image. 

The RSS is not just about fascist ideology;

its ideology is 'Hindutva'- i.e. ecumenical Hinduism cutting across sectarian, caste or regional divisions.  

it also provides needed social services, and it provides fun, luring boys in with the promise of a group life that has both more solidarity and more imagination than the tedious world of government schools.

The RSS run plenty of schools.  

So what is needed is some counterforce,

This used to exist. There was a time when the Youth Congress involved doing social work. In the Fifties, there was some talk of creating a National Youth Leadership program. Even in the Seventies, some semblance of the thing existed.  

which would supply a public culture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization, and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against the appeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu right.

Congress was the muscular Hindu party par excellence. It did ethnic cleansing on an industrial scale.  

The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups in a nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash within each person,

So it isn't a clash at all.  

in which the ability to live with others on terms of mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense of being humiliated.

The author wants to live on equal terms with others. They keep shitting on her tits. This causes a clash within her.  

Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's real struggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need to dominate and one's fear of being vulnerable.

Stop having sex. It is disgusting.  

He deliberately focused attention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself out with pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an androgynous maternal persona.

by sleeping naked with young girls.  

More significantly still, he showed his followers that being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive and bashing others; it is a matter of

sleeping naked with young girls while getting Birla and Bajaj to give you lots of money.  

controlling one's own instincts to aggression

Gandhi was puny. The only person he could beat up was his wife. But he had sons. Sooner or later they would thrash the old man if he laid hands on their Mum.  

and standing up to provocation with only one's human dignity to defend oneself. I think that in some respects, he went off the tracks, in his suggestion that sexual relations are inherently scenes of domination and in his recommendation of asceticism as the only route to nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its root, and he proposed a public culture that, while he lived, was sufficient to address it.

Very true. While he lived only 100,000 or so people were killed during the Partition riots.  

The person who wrote the above was Martha Nussbaum who had dated Amartya Sen in the Eighties. I don't know what Sen did to her in bed, but what is clear is that Martha was highly traumatized. She wrote in the Boston Review

The identification of the female body with the nation

Sen used to confuse Martha's right nipple with Alaska.  

takes us some way into the grim darkness of Gujarat,

Gujarat had periodic riots since 1969. The attack on Hindu pilgrims was bound to be avenged. Would there be an exodus of Muslims? No. The Central Government thought that the Pakistani ISI had orchestrated the Godhra atrocity with a view to causing panic and exodus which would clog up the roads and thus hamper the Indian army in getting to the Rann of Kutch. This was because the Pakistani dictator had staged an attack on the Indian parliament in the hope of provoking military retaliation. This would get him off the hook with the Americans who wanted his Army to focus on fighting the Taleban (who were Pakistan's proteges) .  

but questions remain. If woman symbolizes nation, why are women brutally and sadistically tortured rather than abducted and impregnated?

Because the police would find such women and might punish you for rape.  

To be sure, many people were murdered at partition, and in the general violence many women were used simply as objects of the desire to maim and kill. On the other hand, the logic of colonial possession was also amply evident in that case, since men really did want to take these women to their country and force them to bear their children.

Hindus already lived in their own country. They were afraid of Hindu policemen and Hindu judges.  

And in large numbers, they did so. In Gujarat, we hear nothing of this sort.

For an obvious reason. You couldn't keep the woman you abducted. Someone in the neighbourhood would be bound to report the matter to the police.  

Women were simply tortured and killed.

Like men.  

So we wonder how the idea of woman as symbol of nation and national rule

like the raped Belgian nuns who featured in British propaganda during the Great War 

could possibly lend itself to this particular type of violence,

How did this stupid idea enter Martha's head?  

what the connection can possibly be between seeing a woman as a symbol of what one loves and honors and seeing her as an object that one can break up, with indifference to her pain.

Did Sen break up with Martha thus causing her a lot of pain?  

Shouldn’t we say that it’s only to the extent that men had lost the connection between woman and nation

Martha's left nipple is Alaska. Her right nipple is Arizona.  

that they were able to treat women in this hideous way, not even permitting the survival of the body itself, but first torturing it and then, usually, burning it to cinders?

I suppose this destroys DNA evidence.  

In short, how can one maim, burn, and torture the venerated body of the nation?

How can one shit on the tits of the US of A? Also, is there a video on this topic on Pornhub.  

The feminist concept of “objectification” provides essential insight here.

Feminists are objectively as stupid as shit.  

 Objectification is treating as a mere thing what is really not a thing.

Many Feminists have been used as dining chairs. That's so not cool.  

It has multiple aspects, including the denial of autonomy and subjectivity and the ideas of ownership, fungibility (one is just like the others), and violability (it’s all right to break the thing up or abuse it). Not all forms of objectification possess all these features: for example, one may treat a fine painting as an object,

because that is what it is. 

thus denying it autonomy and subjectivity,

paintings aren't allowed to pursue successful careers in Cost & Management accountancy.  

without holding it to be fungible with other paintings

This is only true of the original.  

and without holding that it is all right to break it up. In the domain of human relations, however, sinister connections begin to be woven among these different aspects. At the heart of all of them, I would argue, is the idea of instrumentality: a thing, unlike a person, is an instrument or means to the ends of persons; it is not an end in itself.

So are people when they do a job for which they get paid. Lots of things aren't instruments at all because they are inaccessible or no use has been found for them. This also true of some people.  

The objectification of women is primarily a denial that women are ends in themselves.

One can say 'women are not ends in themselves. They are instruments of God, the Creator.' This does not involve 'objectifying' women because they same thing can be said about all creatures.  

It is because one has already made that denial, at some level of one’s awareness,

there is no evidence that the rapist or mugger has made some denial preparatory to carrying out a crime.  

that it becomes so easy to deny women autonomy,

It is easy to deny anything whatsoever. Talk is cheap.  

to deny that their subjective experience matters, and, even, to begin to ignore qualitative differences between one and another, as pornography so easily does.

Sadly, porn makes a qualitative difference between ugly dudes like me and beautiful people with great hair. 

What is relevant here is that the logic of instrumentality also leads powerfully in the direction of seeing women as violable.

Homosexuals may see man as violable. Also goats.  

What you have already conceived of as a mere tool of your own ends, not an end in herself, can so easily be understood as something that you may beat, abuse, burn, even break up at will: it is yours to use, and to abuse.

Nonsense! You hire a Nanny to look after your kid. She does the work and gets paid for it. Yes, she is an instrument, while at work but this doesn't mean you can chop her up into little pieces.  

Even a precious painting has legal rights against such abuses only in virtue of its connection with a human maker: the “moral rights” of artworks under contemporary European law are not rights of the painting as such, but rights of the artist in the painting.

The Government can intervene to protect such a painting in the public interest.  

So too, once women are understood as mere instruments of men’s desires (for power, for pleasure), there would seem to be no principled limit on the ways one might use them.

It may seem so to Martha but that is because she is as stupid as shit.  

A means is a means to an end.

Or to another means. There may be no 'end'.  

To bring these points back to the case of India: treating women as the nation,

Indians don't do this. Even if Amartya told Martha her left nipple was Alaska, he wasn't treating her as the American nation. He was saying she was frigid.  

while apparently honorific, is already a form of objectification, and, particularly, of instrumentalization.

So is treating a goat as the Andromeda galaxy. But nobody does this.  

Under colonialism, a nation is a ground on which men may gratify their desires for control and honor.

No. Under colonialism, control of a territory is taken from pre-existing 'First' Nations and a bunch of immigrants rule over it.  

By being exalted into a symbol of nationhood, a woman is at the same time reduced—from being a person who is an end, an autonomous subject, someone whose feelings count, into being a mere ground for the expression of male desire.

Only in the sense that Uncle Sam and John Bull were reduced into being mere grounds for the expression of homosexual desire.  

Thus, although much of the time the male who sees a woman that way will still want her to live and eat and bear children, there is no principled barrier to his using her brutally if that is what suits his desires.

Only in the sense that there is no principled barrier to his sticking his own head up his arse.  

We see that connection already in the grim tales of domestic violence narrated by Tanika Sarkar.

She is Bengali and thus hates Gujaratis.  

And we see it clearly, I believe, in Gujarat.

What we see in Gujarat is that Modi put an end to communal violence. At a time when the C.M of Delhi, Sheila Dixit, said that her own daughter was not safe after dark in Delhi, NDTV showed footage of young girls meeting their friends and having snacks on the streets of Ahmedabad at 11 o'clock at night.  

Muslim female bodies symbolize a recalcitrant part of the nation, one as yet undominated by Hindu male power.

Also, many goats are not being sodomized by Hindu male power. Sheep are jelly. 

One reaction to that situation might have been to abduct the woman and to place her in one’s own household. But if women are things, instruments, objects, then their bodies may also be used in gruesome ways—if that is what will best satisfy one’s desires for power, honor, and security. Once the status of end-in-itself is denied, everything else follows on a whim.

Why did Gujjus not eat the women? Was it because they are Vegetarian? 

In short, it is not simply because the logic of the domestic sphere became the logic of kingly rule,

Domestic sphere has a big army and navy. That is why its logic became the logic of the kingly sphere.  

but because of the particular form this kingly rule took, involving the conception of women as means rather than ends,

we notice that male babies frequently kill their Mummies after they are weaned.  

that nation-worship can so easily segue into woman-killing.

In 1776, George Washington & his chums slaughtered their wives and daughters. They also ate their Mummies and Aunties.  

Other forms of kingly rule—for example, most parents’ relations toward their very young children—

Baby is the King. Daddy is very obsequious to Baby. Kingly rule is about chopping the heads of treasonous vermin.  

do not involve instrumentalization,

No. There has to be instrumentalization. The Doctor or Development Psychologist tells you how to upgrade your parenting skills so your kid will be smarter and healthier. You do spend some time cuddling baby, but you are also very careful to follow 'best practice' while performing particular functions- e.g. bathing or preparing food for the infant.  

and do not lead to violence of the sort we see in Gujarat.

Why haven't we seen any major violence in Gujarat since 2002? Modi & the BJP won't permit it.  

But the particular way in which kingly rule over women made them into a symbol of nationhood involved instrumentalization.

No. It involved rhetoric of a wholly metaphorical sort. Peeps love Mummy. Thus when you want to evoke love of country, you speak of it as the Motherland.  

So the woman was reduced from a person to a mere symbol, and that symbol, however apparently honorific, was a mere tool of male ends.

Indira Gandhi had a penis. Mrs. Thatcher had a bigger penis. That's why they won wars. 

The road from that point to violation is short and relatively direct

General Washington started raping, killing and eating women after helping establish the new American Nation.  

Perhaps, Martha believed she was doing something useful by attacking Narendra Modi. But people thought she was merely acting as Sen's mouthpiece. If Sen had made the same allegations against Modi as Martha, the Supreme Court might have asked him for evidence when they took suo moto cognizance of the case and appointed a SIT. Sadly, there was no evidence whatsoever. Modi was acquitted. Sen would have looked a fool for repeating hysterical nonsense. Martha, however, was a stupid foreigner. Nobody had any reason to take her seriously. 

The truth is, Modi improved governance and kept getting re-elected. Vajpayee however didn't get re-elected because he was senile. Advani, too, was simply too old to inspire confidence. Moreover, Manmohan's first administration was a success. Suddenly Modi himself was pretending to be a 'technocrat'. Still, what had permitted Congress to return to power was Rahul Gandhi. He had returned to India in 2002. His mother promptly issued a statement saying Congress would build the Ram Temple once the Court gave permission. The Sankaracharya who had performed her 'grha pravesh' ceremony would be put in charge. Suddenly people remembered that Sonia had made sure her daughter had a Hindu marriage thus ensuring that the grandkids would be Hindu by law. In other words, Congress was offering a young Hindu leader to a Hindu nation. True, the caretaker PM was a technocrat but, after the Crown Prince had got married and sired an heir, he would take over. Sadly, Rahul didn't want the top job and objected to any one else from his Party doing it properly. Thus, in 2014, Modi got a walk over.

This may not have been obvious in 2009 when an Italian journalist wrote the following- 

Martha Nussbaum and the Indian laboratory
Mariella Gramaglia 9 September 2009

This article was published in No. 114 of the Reset magazine (July-August 2009)

After May 17th 2009 it became possible to draw a sigh of relief and forget the first fourteen pages of Martha Nussbaum’s wonderful recent essay entitled The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.

Martha does not seem to have understood that religious violence in India peaked when Nehru was PM. Her former boyfriend's family had to run away from their ancestral home in East Bengal for no other reason. The plain fact is, if the minority starts a riot, it gets stomped by the majority. But the majority may ethnically cleanse the minority even if it is meek. That's what happened to the Kashmiri Pundits.  

In the introduction to the Italian edition, dated 2008, two years after her detailed book was published after lengthy studies and also a lot of research in the field both in India and the Indo-American Diaspora, the author warns readers. Pay attention – she more or less says – I am about to describe hell to you;

Hell was Partition presided over by Nehru 

the abyss over which Indian democracy has hovered

Indira Gandhi first turned her party into dynastic property and then suspended the constitution and jailed her opponents 

while led by the Hindu extremism of the BJP (Indian People’s Party)

It was Congress which was the muscular Hindu party. It killed not just Muslims, but also Sikhs. Rajiv Gandhi presided over a big blood letting in Delhi just as his grandfather had done.  

and its satellite organisations between 1998 and 2004, as well as the risk of fascism

Fascism was a reaction to Communism. Which party has been most successful in crushing Communism? It is Mamta's TMC which used to be part of Congress.  

and the danger of a war with Pakistan.

What danger? If Pakistan starts a war, they get stomped quite quickly.  

In 2004 Sonia Gandhi saved us,

No. It was Rahul's return which saved Congress. The question was whether, aged 34, he would be willing to become PM or at least join the Cabinet. The theory was that he would first get married and then take over his Daddy's old job.  

but I fear greatly that she will not manage to do so again and that hell will return.

Only Rahul mattered.  

Hell did not return.

The BJP led government wasn't hell. There was rapid economic growth.  

The Congress Party won 261 seats, only 11 fewer than those needed to govern and a number of seats easy to obtain through an alliance with just one regional political party.

Sadly, the coalition was corrupt. Manmohan pushed for more reform but Rahul cut him off at the legs.  

The Hindu Right lost 30 seats, and, in true Anglo-Saxon tradition, paid homage to the winners. Aggressive populists, curry-styled league members and authoritarian communists guilty of pogroms against peasant farmers in Western Bengal, beat their retreat.

The Commies were physically beaten by Mamta's goons. 

An honest Sikh wearing a blue turban returned to lead the government and a beautiful Italian lady (perhaps still a Roman Catholic as she was during the devout years of her youth) was now firmly in control of the relative majority party.

Hindus should be ruled by non-Hindus. Otherwise, India will become Hell. Sonia made sure her children and grandchildren would be Hindu. Her mistake was to listen to anti-Hindu Leftists. Rahul only came out of the closet as a sacred-thread wearing Brahmin around 2017. It was too little, too late.  

This was more than enough to confuse the demons of extremism and perhaps to disperse them, at least to a certain extent, as well as lowering the level of war tensions with Pakistan.

Pakistan is smaller and poorer than India. It gets stomped if it wags its tail  

In a cartoon published in the International Herald Tribune, an powerfully armed Taleban bows in the presence of a man presumed to be Osama Bin Laden:

living happily in Pakistan under the protection of the Army.  

“Bad news, chief, Indian democracy is more stable now.”

Good news, chief. India is less democratic and more dynastic now.  

Hence, knowing only too well that danger remains history’s profession, we navigate with greater calm through Martha Nussbaum’s wonderful reflective seas.

Nussbaum doesn't know History. Also, sleeping with an Indian doesn't make you an expert on India.  

A Clash between or within Civilisations?

Between. That's why there is a Pakistan. Islamic civilization doesn't like kaffirs. The odd thing about Hinduism is that there is no sectarian violence within its fold.  

The title itself is a theoretical and contentious answer to Samuel P. Huntington’s famous book about the conflict of civilisations. India is an almost insuperable laboratory in the battles between “two different civilisations” within one same nation.

No. It coheres because it is Hindu. Where Hindus aren't the majority, there is secessionism.  

One appreciating multiple identities and people coming from various traditions, the other feeling safe only when those who are different are alienated.

India should not have demanded independence. Only White, non-Hindus, should rule.  

One perceiving national unity as an ethos and a collection of rules; the other as a sacred pact involving blood and land.

These are complementary, not competing, ideas.  

One holding out hands and minds to inclusion, the other considering inclusion as humiliating, not macho and a source of unbelievable insecurity.

Italy should invite in lots of nice African people. Why is an African not ruling Italy?  

In India as it really is today, the problems of the world are far better expressed than in Huntington-styled analyses showing the West besieged by young Muslims, fuelled by religion, the poor’s new vitamin.

Nonsense! In India, there was dynastic rule. You could compare it to North Korea or a Gulf Emirate. Incidentally, religion has a high income elasticity of demand. America is rich. It is also very religious.  

Are these not perhaps our problems too?

No. You don't have a brain dead dynast in charge of a National political party.  

Do they not require additional “ethical imagination”, as Nussbaum suggests?

i.e. telling stupid lies so as to show how virtuous you are.  

And what about a reappraisal of politics, a capability to practice “self-awareness”,

This is nonsense. Being 'self-aware' may have a psychological or spiritual benefit. But politics is about better solutions to collective action problems. This requires domain expertise.  

because, to quote Gandhi, it is only by controlling our own aggressiveness

Gandhi was a hooligan. He kept beating and sodomizing Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Finally, Maulana Azad persuaded him to show some decency and control his own aggressiveness. Sadly, it was too late. Jinnah was so traumatized that he demanded the creation of a Muslim State where randy Hindus didn't keep buggering everybody.  

that we will manage to become citizens who live respectfully with others

Fear of punishment does that. The reason Partition was so bloody was that the politicians didn't care about punishing the killers. Gandhi himself said he knew which members of his party had been killing Muslims. He took no action against them.  

and perceive the humbleness of compassion,

and the compassion of humility 

which is that vibration within us of a shared human fragility.

It isn't shared. Some people are very fragile and will die soon. Other's aren't. Thy can't share fragility any more than they can share their good health with others.  

Report of a massacre. This dark civilisation, that of the demons of Gujarat, has a name and a date. Name: Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of Gujarat. Date: February 27th 2002, the day on which the “Sabarmati” train stopped at the station in Godhra and 50 pilgrims returning from the Temple of Rama in Ayodhya, died in a fire, said (but never proved) to have been started by Muslims.

It was actually started by Mormons from Utah.  

During that same period there were massacres of 1.500 Muslims,

The Indian Government estimates that 3,300 Sikhs were killed when Rajiv took over.  

horrifyingly ferocious rapes, all modern, metallic and sadistic even when compared to the unforgettable horrors of Partition,

Howling Hindu mobs cut open the bellies of pregnant Muslim women and extracted the foetus which was just quietly reading a book by Noam Chomsky and underlining passages and writing 'how true!' int he margin. The mob then slit open the belly of the foetus and extracted a still smaller foetus which was reading Gramsci in the original Italian. 

and that Nussbaum portrays in great detail.

She repeats stupid lies.  

She does not forget the past with the movement for the reconstruction of temples to replace mosques, the initial poison of this great intoxication dating back a decade.

Babri Masjid was closed to Muslim worship under Nehru. A building not used for Islamic prayer is not a mosque according to Islamic law. Sonia said she would build the temple once the Court gave permission.  

She takes into account the global situation involving positive resistance and condemnation expressed by public opinion all over the world,

How many Muslims did America kill during the War on Terror? 1.3 million? More?  

but also the political and economic complicity of the Indian diaspora

Hindus are evil. I hate them. My boyfriend may have been Indian but he was an atheist.  

which seems to be an ethnic panorama in a foreign land rather than an ensemble of mature men and women capable of exercising control. She pays homage to the great women of Indian civil society who always stand out, and who in this case too stood by the victims, Teesta Setalvad

who feathered her own nest quite nicely 

and Indira Jaising,

who was useless. The problem with telling stupid lies is that it makes you lazy. You don't bother doing any alethic research. The Supreme Court took suo moto cognizance of the issue. It expected supposed witnesses to have actual evidence. There was a police officer who claimed he had such evidence. He was in the room when Modi gave the order to kill Muslims. Sadly, cell phone records showed he was miles away. One Minister- a lady Doctor- was sent to jail. There were eye-witnesses who said she had been distributing swords. Then, it turned out, there was incontrovertible evidence that she was working in a hospital tending to the wounded.  

among others (see also M. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach). Above all she takes into account the Gujarat pogrom as the main setting for barbarisms,

Why not the anti-Sikh riots? They were bigger.  

at a time when there was the risk of losing the India we know.

Modi put an end to the cycle of riots Gujarat had witnessed since 1969. He greatly improved governance. Incidentally his rival from the Congress party was an RSS man. Ahmed Patel, Sonia's adviser warned against the demonization of Modi. It resulted in his gaining popularity with Hindus across the country. Patel's son is now praising Modi and has given up working for Congress.  

Annihilating women. There is a national hymn that is apparently noble in its emphasis, but one that frightens Nussbaum.

So much so that she shits herself.  

It is entitled Vande Mataram and the lyrics also say “Mother, Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands, When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands And seventy million voices roar Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?”.

Bankim, who wrote this, warned the Bengali Hindus about the Muslims. So did Tagore. Sen's family ran away from East Bengal when Bankim' and Tagore's prophesy came true. Interestingly, Hindu swords, at the command of Mrs. Gandhi, liberated East Bengal from Pakistani rape and genocide.  

A mother-land, a feminine land, but also a violable land, a land to be re-conquered, torn from a contaminated enemy.

Our country should have a dick, not a vagina.  

The warrior’s land is a land of conquering and rape.

No. It is one which isn't conquered and where people are not raped.  

However, debates the author, sexuality is linked to patriotic chauvinism also in other ways.

What is Nussbaum's hatred of Hinduism linked to?  

The insecurity and reactive interiorised shame experienced by some Indians following the mortifications of Victorian conformism,

This is nonsense. The Victorians left Indian customs and traditions alone unless lobbied to intervene in some matter by influential Indians.  

has resulted in “projecting outside oneself, onto vulnerable people and bodies, the disgust experienced because of having an animal body.”

What is Nussbaum projecting? Whatever it is, it is stinky shit. 

(see also M. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law).

Why are people not shitting themselves in public? They are animals, aren't they? I wish Sen had shat on my tits. Sadly, Victorian morality had brainwashed him. He preferred to do his business in the toilet.  

Hence, extremisms are co-essential to hatred and contempt for women,

Nobody hates women more than Feminists.  

while apparently more innocuous politics have for some time prepared the ground for this perverse connection. As already practised by the British Raj, this consists in removing family law from the universal sphere.

You can't remove a thing from a place where it never was. Incidentally, it is the BJP which wants a uniform Civil Code. So do some Muslim women. However, in practice, if a community doesn't want it enforced, it won't be enforced. 

Divorce, inheritance, polygamy, the status of widows, alimony, are all the juridical prerogative of the various religious authorities,

Nonsense! Parliament has legislated for Hindus, Jains, Buddhists & Sikhs. Christians were already covered. Islam stands out.  

often coinciding with ethnicity

No. In India if you wanted a second wife, you pretended to convert to Islam.  

and are also effectively an extra-constitutional subject. The tribal shadow falls over women and increases the worst ghosts of dominations.

Not for non-Muslims.  

Inventing so as to dominate. Domination, however, is a mental exercise.

Nope. You need to kick ass to dominate.  

The devaluation of the humanistic culture is the result of modernity;

No. Useless shit gets devalued because it useless and is shit.  

the risk of making India a country of docile engineers with no compassion.

Engineers aren't docile. Chairman Xi is an engineer. If you have useful skills, you don't have to be docile. If you study and hope to teach nonsense, you may have to let your supervisor molest you. 

There is more, however, in the plans of the Hindu Right. There is the will to rewrite history,

which the Leftists had re-written 

to intimidate free research,

i.e. telling stupid lies 

to produce new disquieting text books.

Save in STEM subjects, text books don't matter.  

Indigenous issues and the legend of the country’s origins categorically exclude any ancient contamination with the West.

Nobody gives a shit about such things.  

The entire Mogul period, including the reign of the great Akbar, is catalogued as odious serfdom to Muslims.

Sen is totes gay for Akbar.  

Subtle disputes on the appearance or not of horses in the bas-reliefs and fossil remains of the Indo valley proving an invasion of “Arians” from Afghanistan and early contamination” of Indian purity, or testimonies of the butchering of cows in the thousand years Before Christ, all become sources of hatred, threats and fatwas.

Hindus don't go in for fatwas. BTW, Nehru was PM when Cow Protection was made a Directive Principle in the Constitution.  

The regime heralds and enthusiasts of roots triumph, and quite often serious scholars are threatened and ridiculed, in India as in the American and British diaspora.

This is true. I myself received rape threats when my twitter handle was 'Honeytits Cumbucket'.  

All this, with gauche speed after the electoral triumphs at the end of the Nineties, became daily food for children in many schools, together with negation of the Holocaust and appreciation for the role Hitler played in Germany’s rebirth.

Zail Singh praised Hitler in the Indian parliament. Indira made him President. Incidentally, Nehru's ambassador to West Germany had recruited Indians for the Waffen SS.  

It rains on wet muddy ground in forgotten and destitute schools, where the absenteeism of teachers is endemic, and pupils learn by heart dusty old ideas and 45% of families pay for illegal private lessons provided by the same teachers their children are entrusted to.

No. They go to private schools. Government school teachers are well paid but may be illiterate.  

A tender homage to fathers. In one chapter, with filial devotion,

Nussbaum can't have any such thing towards India. She has no ancestors from there.  

Nussbaum indulges in tender patriarchal viewpoints. In the political pantheon there is no Indira, the Durga warrior of the first nuclear experiments and emergency laws. There are instead Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru, each personifying one of the aspects of a great national archetype.

Gandhi demanded Congress control of the Army. Otherwise, he said, the Muslims & the Punjabis would overrun the country while the non-violent Hindu would have to trust to the Ahimsa fairy to protect their anal cherries. Tagore's book 'Home & Away' ends with Muslims slaughtering and robbing Hindus. That's why he didn't want the Brits to fuck off. His grandfather had felt the same way. Nehru pulled the trigger on Partition and presided over mass ethnic cleansing. Sadly, he had no understanding of economics and was suspicious of the Army. Thus the country became unable to feed or defend itself.  

The first personifies devotion to categorical, moral and spiritual duty,

the duty to tell stupid lies  

to national liberation to the extent of strictness addressed at oneself and the abolition of joy and the human body.

Nonsense! He was against sex but liked giving and receiving enemas.  

The second incarnates grace, creativity, poetry drawing and dancing (Amita Sen, to whom the book is dedicated, Amartya’s mother, a magnificent dancer from the Tagore and Santiniketan school),

Tagore invented some new style of dancing. It was crap. Amita, as the daughter of a Professor at Shantiniketan, had to participate in that boring shite.  

a taste for freedom and a critical spirit within the educational process.

She was a housewife. Her daddy married her off instead of sending her to College.  

The third represents rationality, the scientific spirit, unease when faced with superstitious devotion and trust in progress.

He was a Socialist/Agnostic but did have a superstitious streak.  

Nothing will nourish the new India better than an intelligent and well-educated mixture of these various ideal schools of thought.

No. They were useless. What can flourish is what raises productivity. Tagore & Gandhi presided over money-pit Ashrams. Nehru set up loss making Industries. A poor country can't afford to follow useless shitheads.  

But will globalisation, with its paradoxical fusion of the most cynical secularisation and the most regressive identity rootedness, allow this? Let it be clear, this book does not speak only of India.

Few in America would have predicted that Trump would come to power. In India, most people thought Rahul would get married and then take charge of the Commonwealth Games (as his father took charge of the Asian Games) before shouldering Manmohan Singh to lead his party to victory in the 2014 election. Sadly, Rahul proved gun shy. Also, he was a dog in the manger. He wouldn't let someone else from his party to take the top job. Thus, in 2014 it was a case of Modi vs. Nobody. Now, it appears that seat redistribution will be implemented for the next General Election. This means the Hindi belt gains more representation. Who will they vote for? The BJP can't afford to be complacent in this matter. 

How shtupid was Judith Shklar?

The supervisor for Judith Shklar's PhD thesis was Carl Joachim Friedrich, a German-American scholar and former student of Max Weber's economist brother. Thus he absorbed the view that Max Weber & Hugo Preuss, writing the Weimar Constitution, had made a fatal error by creating the possibility of a 'plebiscitary' (or Caesarean) President. He played a role in the framing of the West German constitution. His oeuvre seems worth re-examining today in the light of recent developments in both the US & Germany. 

What isn't worth re-examining is Judith Shklar whose two big ideas were

1) the primacy of cruelty as the worst evil. 

The problem with this notion is that what is or isn't cruel depends on one's imagination. Only if evil is itself imaginary would cruelty be the summum malum more particularly if it has imaginary wings and flies around taking copious, albeit imaginary, dumps on your head. 

In any case, any political regime whatsoever can reduce cruel or inhumane practices. 

What of 'moral cruelty'?  Shklar describes it as 'not just a matter of hurting someone’s feelings. It is deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else”. This is 'mental cruelty' which the law recognizes. Within a marriage, it is grounds for divorce. Within an enterprise, it may come under the heading of bullying and attract a payment of damages. Other instances may involve the criminal  offense of harassment or malicious communication as well as actions in tort. Shklar seems oblivious to the fact that the law has evolved a lot since the time of Montaigne. Moreover, existing remedies are constantly being repurposed by courts so as to tackle the underlying problem. Simply saying 'boo to moral cruelty' is otiose. 

2) "liberalism of fear," which emphasizes the avoidance of fear and oppression as the foundation of political life. 

Death is not imaginary nor is the fact that getting hit by a bus is very fucking painful. Political life should be founded on abolishing death and anything which causes pain. 

Shklar says 'while the sources of social oppression are indeed numerous, none has the deadly effect of those who, as the agents of the modern state, have unique resources of physical might and persuasion at their disposal”. She is wrong. The cartels will do things to you which no policeman or jailor would dream of. The reason States exist is because the alternative would be infinitely worse. 

Shklar made no contribution to the study of Politics. She merely expressed abhorrence of cruelty and things which cause pain or which people might find oppressive (e.g. having to listen politely to a crashing bore at a party). She appeared wholly unaware of the steps taken by Judges and Legislator and Social Planners to ameliorate the problems she pointed at. 

The fact is Liberalism, like Socialism or Communism, is a solution to a set of collective action problems. It is only concerned with cruelty or fear or oppression to the same extent as any other approach to such problems. Thus, the Commissar, just as much as the Capitalist, might object to a procedure which is unnecessarily cruel or oppressive or repugnant in some manner. If you have to execute a traitor, just do it already. Don't drag things out by chopping bits off him as he howls in agony. The thing isn't efficient. Fear is bad because it has a disincentive effect. People are less productive when they fear being robbed or raped on their way to or from work. Cruelty causes revulsion. People exposed to it may react by beating the shit out of you or else they may vote with their feet and run away to somewhere nice. 

Shklar was a well paid Professor on a posh campus. She knew nothing about 'lived realities of fear, cruelty, and injustice'. Her job was to teach ' grand theoretical systems' and then look at empirical evidence regarding their allocative and dynamic efficiency. 

Aeon magazine has an essay by Samantha Ashenden & Andreas Hess on Shklar from which I extract the following-

Shklar is most often cited as a critic of mainstream liberal thought.

e.g. that of Hayek & Friedman? She would have needed to be an economist to succeed in that project. Perhaps, Rawls or Dworkin are meant. But, again, they fall down because of mistakes in their economic thinking.  

During the Cold War in particular, liberalism served as an ideological weapon against the totalitarian threat of the former Soviet Union and its satellite states.

If so, it was wholly ineffective. The truth is, the US was perfectly happy to let Western Europe follow a 'mixed economy' model which, as Sir John Hicks pointed out, was more Socialist than Capitalist in that profit rates were implicitly set by the State. Moreover, Exchange Controls were ubiquitous even after the collapse of Bretton Woods, and financial markets played only a limited role in allocating investible funds. 

In the 'developing' world, the US dropped any pretense of promoting Liberal Democracy. They preferred Dictators supported by the Army.   

But Shklar was concerned about the stifling dimensions of this kind of Western intellectual defence mechanism:

One might say that Goldwater and Reagan (and Thatcher, a little later on) defended classical liberalism at a time when elites preferred 'Corporatism'. Indeed, the Tinbergen 'convergence hypothesis' (also endorsed by Galbraith) saw bureaucratic Communism becoming indistinguishable for bureaucratic Managerial 'Capitalism'.  

it served merely to protect the status quo,

Nothing is protected by hot air.  

and was very often a mere fig leaf for the accumulation of material wealth and for other, more problematic aspects of Western culture.

People are proud to get a shiny new car or TV set. Why buy a fig-leaf if you have a ginormous dong?   

It didn’t ignite any critical reflection or assist any self-awareness of how the liberties of Western democracy had arrived at such a perceived high standing.

That 'critical reflection' was plentifully supplied by the Mont Pelerin Society. Goldwater & Reagan gassed on about it endlessly.  

It was also silent about the fact that fascism had developed in countries that had been identified as pillars of Western civilisation.

No. It had developed amongst 'Huns' (Germans) and spics, dagos, wops, etc.   WASP societies were immune to such beastliness. 

In a talk to the American Political Science Association titled 'Redeeming American Science', Shklar said

What I plan to do in this talk is therefore quite ambitious, namely, redeem American political theory,

i.e. stuff stupid Professors gassed on about. Could the subject be 'redeemed'? Only if smart people entered the field and professional politicians were willing to pay them a lot of money for their advise.  

in order to bring out both its intrinsic intellectual importance

Alchemy appears intrinsically important because we have lots of lead and would like to turn it into shiny shiny gold. Sadly, only charlatans or lunatics go in for Alchemy. Thus it has no intellectual importance.  

and its significance for American political science.

There are plenty of smart people making lots of money as political consultants or analysts. What they do is increasingly scientific. Sadly, you need to be smart to go in for it.  

Far from being demeaning and scientifically superfluous, I would like to show that we have much to gain from seeing our present work as a continuation of the history of political thought in America.

Let's pretend we are as smart and as important as Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.  

Such an outlook would serve to integrate political theory into political science, where it belongs;

Shklar was saying 'we have been teaching nonsense all these years. Our theory is completely disconnected with anything scientific. But political analysts were using path breaking statistical and game theoretic methods during the same period. The whole theory of 'rent seeking' evolved in the Sixties. Interestingly, these ideas were equally relevant for Socialist countries- if not more so. By the Eighties, the 'reverse game theory' of mechanism design had become an indispensable policy tool. Meanwhile, Shklar & Co had been getting more and more hysterical.  

and it would also offer mainstream political science the self-understanding that only a historically grounded analysis can give it'

This assumes that collective action problems are bedeviled by hysteresis. Yet the experience of the post-War years (during which there were very dramatic changes in the type of regime) showed that ergodicity prevails. The German 'Historical School' was shown to be useless. Harvard dropped the German language requirement for Econ PhDs and substituted a Math requirement by about 1960. 

(American Political Theory) has been charged with an obsessive and unconscious commitment to a liberal faith that prevents it from asking profound and critical questions.

America developed its own indigenous critiques of (Whig) Liberalism. Indeed, America inspired Europe's 'Listian' policies. With the election of Andrew Jackson, populist policies enter the policy space. Later, America produced Henry George and 'Trust busting'. It was in America, not Europe that an issue like bimetallism could dominate politics.  The provincial German pedant was wrong to be condescending towards the Americans. 

Incapable of envisaging alternatives, American political thought is said to be mired in the legacy of John Locke and a mindless optimism.

This may be said by ignorant immigrants teaching nonsense. It isn't true.  

The fact that there have always been many lively controversies, moreover, does nothing to dispel this bland uniformity,

if that is what you are determined to see, that is what you will see.  

because all parties are at some level said to be liberal.

What Americans object to is politicians being very liberal with their money.  

In any event our petty intellectual squabbles

e.g. the squabble which led to the Civil War?  

are mere shadowboxing compared to the real thing, the kind of ideological combat that feudalism and class war generated in Europe.

The last peasant uprising in Germany was crushed in 1525. By contrast, the Americans had a Revolution in 1776. They kicked out Mad King George's booted Hessians. Still, the fact is, they had originally petitioned the King to protect their rights as loyal subjects and English freemen. The King considered the petition to be disingenuous- which it probably was. Still, had he a better appreciation of the military situation, he might have taken a more conciliatory course. 

Be that as it may, the truth is, Europe was more conservative and traditional than America. Ideology mattered little. Being occupied by a vast Army altered the type of regime- but for most people it was just a case of repeating this slogan rather than that slogan or tugging your forelock to this Lord rather than that Lord. 

Shklar admits that American political thought isn't boring and repetitive. What she doesn't get is that America did the innovating. Europe played catch up. 

On close examination American political theory is not, in fact, just our own; for it has not been hermetically sealed off from European thought.

It was populated by migrants from Europe. But its political system is sui generis.  

Isolating it in order to illuminate its peculiarities is bound to reduce it to charmless uniformity. We do have special political traits; but from Locke to Social Darwinism, from the negative to the positive state, from Montesquieu to the Chicago School of political sociology, the controversies and the agreements have been shared, even if not shared identically by both sides of the big puddle.

It is fair to say that after the Second World War, Western Europe imitated America. Thus, when my father was born, he was a British subject. I am a British citizen. We now have a Supreme Court, just like the US, and have got rid of hereditary membership of the House of Lords. I suppose, if Trump wants to take over from King Charles, Sir Keir Starmer will have to accommodate him. 

One should not overlook the local circumstances that give a special color to American political ideas, but there is no reason at all to treat them either in quarantine or contemptuously.

You can take the girl out of Europe but you can't take European arrogance out of the girl. Who in their right mind would treat the most powerful country in the world with 'contempt'? 

At least four obvious political phenomena have contributed to distinguishing American political thought from its cultural neighbors:

Its closest cultural neighbors are Canada and the British West Indies.  

the early and painless acceptance of white adult male suffrage,

Some States- Vermont, Kentucky etc. did get it in the late eighteenth century but this became the rule only around 1856 which was the same time as South Australia got it. Canada was somewhat laggard in this respect. 

federalism,

Canada has it 

judicial review,

India has it.  

and most deeply, the prevalence of chattel slavery

in some states not others. Thus it can't be a distinguishing feature of American politics.  

long after it had disappeared in the rest of the European world.

Serfdom was abolished at about the same time as slavery was abolished in the US.  

Not racism-which is universal-but slavery in a modern constitutional state is truly unique.

The US has dual sovereignty. Is there a right to secession? The South thought so. It turned out they were wrong.  

Monarchical States may have a Constitution. Spain didn't have slavery in its own country but permitted it in Puerto Rico till about 1880. 

Until the Civil War amendments America was neither a liberal nor a democratic country, whatever its citizens might have believed.

No. It was both. It's just that African Americans and the First Nations were not accorded equal treatment under the law. But the fact that a thing is rationed, does not mean it doesn't exist. 

Yet it did have in place a set of institutions that were capable of becoming so and to an unequaled degree.

This could be said of any country. Any set of institutions can be improved.  

This country had embarked upon two experiments simultaneously:

just like the UK or France or Canada or India 

one in democracy, the other in tyranny.

Democracy was an experiment. Tyranny pre-existed the Revolution. Having studied and taught worthless shite, Shklar was unable to write a single sentence which wasn't false or foolish or both false and foolish.  

This list of the characteristics of our political development is hardly complete (I would add our unique university establishments),

Canada simply isn't that different from the US. What makes America special is its large population, strong economy and kick-ass Military.  

but it does point to features that have set American political institutions apart

There are no such features. Some countries have an 'Executive Presidency'. Others don't.  

and have had a decisive impact upon its most reflective citizens.

Its more reflective citizens consider 'Political Theory' to be a waste of time. Hire a smart analyst to help your candidate get elected. Don't listen to stupid Professors who had to run away from Hitler or Stalin or whoever.  

Of all aspects of this political culture none might seem more peculiarly local than political science,

in which case, the US would have hardly permitted German refugees to teach that shite.  

in all its many manifestations and eclecticism. To be sure, political science is only one of the modern social sciences; but it is the one that has flourished most in America,

Tullock & the theory of rent seeking is very American. Why? It is empirical. It is practical. It can go hand in hand with 'mechanism design' to radically improve outcomes and raise total factor productivity. 

where it has also lately become notably democratic.

No. It has become Statistical and Game theoretic. Those who understand how to use Big Data are changing the political climate as we speak.  

At the deepest level all the social sciences are part of a process of intellectual democratization.

No. They appeared at the same time as State bureaucracies expanded. Consider the LSE. Haldane helps set it up along with Imperial College because the Government needed better accountants and actuaries as well as chemical engineers.  

For only recently (in the last two centuries) has either the inclination or the political need to think seriously about the lives of ordinary people as intrinsically significant emerged at all.

Nonsense! The King had to think about 'ordinary people'. If they didn't have enough food to eat, they might slaughter his garrison and run riot. States came into existence to solve collective action problems. In poorer states, the ruling class has to closely monitor the conditions of the masses. Thus, as Marx noticed, the German Prince brought in a Yankee- like Count Rumsford- to find ways to feed his people more cheaply and make them more productive. The American Federal Government could rely on a 'spoils system' because 

1) there was 'subsidiarity'- i.e. local communities solved their own collective action problems

2) there was a large entrepreneurial class which any White Male could become part of. Specific projects requiring Federal funding could be pushed through by a more or less corrupt political machinery. 

The history, remote or contemporary, of great men and dramatic events has only very lately made a place for people who are absent from the annals of monumental history.

Nonsense! History is all about this King or that Emperor having his head chopped off because the poor weren't getting enough bread to eat.  

These lives can never be more than statistics; but they have come to matter, partly because social scientists became convinced that they were important in and of themselves

No. Social Scientists realized that their discipline was applied Statistics with a bit of Game theory thrown in. If you weren't mathsy, you were merely masturbating. Admittedly, there was also some mathsy masturbation- e.g. Social Choice theory.  

and partly because the many began to assert themselves as urban citizens, as voters, as strikers, and as members of increasingly diverse and lay-oriented religious denominations.

This happened everywhere. But any set of institutions- not necessarily democratic- can accommodate these changes or else do stupid shit with the result that the country becomes a 'failed state'. 

All the social sciences are submerged biographies of the silent majority of humanity:

Nixon spoke of the 'silent majority'.  

the peasant, the artisan, the immigrant, the slave, women,

most of whom had the capability innovate or become entrepreneurs. Good mechanism design promotes this possibility. It is the path to affluence. 

and (in our case) that basic irreducible unit of representative politics, the voter. All of them, even as mere numbers, have surfaced in the human sciences as part of a long and slow democratization of values

Nonsense! Great Empires in the Egypt and Iraq and China and India had a class of bureaucrats. The first census in the world was conducted in 3800 BC. It also counted livestock and other resources.  

in a period whose ideologies were often in every degree hostile to these aspirations.

Ideologies don't matter. What concentrates minds is the risk that starving mobs will kill and eat the rich.  

This is the historical context that makes the fact-mindedness of the social sciences different from that of those ancient bureaucratic regimes that also liked to keep minute records about their subjects.

No. This is what makes them similar. It is a different matter that some people got paid a little money to teach worthless shite at Uni. The moment you graduate and start working, your boss tells you to forget everything the Professor said. 

Some of the finest social scientists from Alexander Hamilton to Vilfredo Pareto have been utterly opposed to democracy.

They pointed out certain obvious dangers. The Classical Liberal solution was to have 'checks and balances'.  

Others have been ardently democratic.

Interestingly, almost all social scientists are opposed to death- at least when it comes to themselves. The failure of social scientists to abolish death is due to Neo-Liberal Patriarchy and the fact that dicks haven't been banned despite the fact that dicks are RAPING the Environment.  

The democratization of values that is implicit in the social sciences in general is

like the Collectivization of farts. Society as a whole must take responsibility for the 'silent but deadly' one I just released.  

entirely compatible with a great variety of political beliefs and theories, including some of the most destructive and cruel.

In other words, the thing is meaningless.  

Nevertheless, I do want to argue that within a welter of diverse ideas the social sciences are fundamentally inclusive in their orientation

i.e. a drooling imbecile can get a PhD in Social Science. That's Inclusivity right there.  

and that given the institutions of American government, a
democratic political science was eventually to be expected.

What was not expected, back in the Fifties, is that Sociology & Poli Sci would turn to shit. 

To be fair, Shklar gives an okay account of late eighteenth and nineteenth century American political thought and ends with Dewey & Merriam. But, that's just when the story gets interesting. The Great Depression caused the Cowles Commission to use advanced mathematical techniques to understand and solve the new collective action problems (and opportunities) facing the nation. That's when Social Science become Sciencey rather than idealistic or historicist.  

I hope that I have shown that its history has been a profound meditation upon our political experiences and our peculiar and often tragically flawed institutions.

That may have been true prior to the Great Depression. After the Wall Street crash, there was no time for 'profound meditation' or, if there was a bit of money for it, the task could be palmed off on refugee scholars.  

I expect-indeed hope-that others will give different accounts. However, if one were to cast aspersions on American political theory,

You'd have to understand that guys like Tullock & Buchanan were doing it. Shklar wasn't. She was merely virtue signaling in a hysterical manner. 

it should not be that it is Oedipally attached to liberalism

Oedipus killed his daddy and fucked his mummy. If that's attachment, we don't want it.  

but that like the rest of the political classes of Europe and America, it failed to understand itself and lacked the imagination to project a plausibly better future.

No. It did the reverse. Rights become meaningful when analyzed as Hohfeldian Incidents. Link them to incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. Or, don't bother. There may be a cheaper Coasian solution. American and European 'political science' pictured a better world and helped create it by getting Public Finance and mechanism design right.  

If we can learn to do better,

we aren't teaching worthless shite

it will be because democracy is itself dynamic.

Chinese Communism is more so.  

The history of American political science is a part of its development,

No. It is a function of who would be willing to pay for it and whether they would notice if only cretins produced it.  

which was neither painless nor uniform; but it has been an intellectual adventure of the first order.

It really hasn't. Quantum Mechanics is an intellectual adventure of the first order. A guy with room-temperature IQ can do Poli Sci. Did you know Modi has a Masters degree in 'entire Political Science'? Mamta has a Doctorate from 'East Georgia University'. Nobody cares. What can't be denied is that they are superb politicians- i.e. masters of 'the art of the possible', not some arcane theory. 

As for 'American Political Theory'- what can we say about it in the age of Trump? Cruelty to migrants is celebrated. A climate of fear is celebrated. If oppression is what will make America great again, we can't have too much of it. 

Shklar appeared a true prophet in the era of Clinton, Obama & even Joe Biden. It wasn't that long ago when political correctness or 'wokeism' ruled the roost. 

The Aeon article I previously mentioned was written just 5 years ago. I suppose it was written before COVID took hold and suddenly the 'boomer' generation knew the meaning of real fear. Our liberties were taken away on a scale unprecedented in peace-time. Yet, most of us were touchingly grateful to the State for enforcing these restrictions. 

 In America... the fight between master and slave had not been just a Hegelian fantasy, it had been real.

No. It had been real in Haiti. In the US, the masters were simply too strong. Also, the White Southerner didn't really believe that the slave was hard working. He thought only fear of the whip kept him at his task.  

The fight against slavery was a fight for ‘freedom itself’, it was ‘a way of political life’ and was very differently conceived than the mainly European distinction between positive and negative liberty of which Berlin had been so fond.

There was a fight over the right of secession which had an economic aspect. The South might have preferred to have free trade with the UK. The North wanted protection for its industries. The West wasn't happy with the North's financial domination but it needed capital to expand and populate the frontier. 

Hannah Arendt was another of her targets.

To be fair, Shklar's parents had taken her to Canada which never had slavery. Arendt was very happy to get to Jim Crow America.  

Shklar admired Arendt, but felt that something was amiss in her work.

It was ignorant shite. It was Ayn Rand who made more money and who had a political impact.  

Shklar agreed with what Arendt had to say about the unprecedented social and political conditions under which the American republic was first conceived:

There were no unprecedented conditions. Different territories have different economic interests. Would the King do a deal acceptable to the colonists? No. He was as mad as a hatter.  

the notable success the Founding Fathers had in absorbing the revolutionary spirit and energy of the people,

meaningless shite. The people didn't want to pay taxes to King George. Also they wanted to expand to their West regardless of any treaties with the 'Injuns'. Because they were very good at fighting, they prevailed. 

establishing the country’s political institutions, and finally the relative success and achievements of the American revolution when compared with the problems associated with the French revolution.

The Americans expelled the Loyalists once and for all. After that, they had dual sovereignty and each State could pretty much do as it liked. The French were synoecist- i.e. centralizing. The result was that they exchanged a King for an Emperor.  

However, Shklar thought that Arendt’s account of America ‘exploded into wrongness’. Too much of the US and its history was missing from Arendt’s picture. For instance, the US had to fight a Civil War in order to secure the liberal promises of its revolution for African-American men, let alone women.

Hilarious! White dudes in 1776 were promising the world to darkies. Also, they demanded the banning of dicks- save such as are used for exclusively homosexual purposes.  

Arendt had no real appreciation of post-Civil War history,

she didn't know modern German history. She had studied utter shite at Uni.  

the complexities of Southern politics,

she knew well enough that darkies did the shitty jobs and couldn't vote in many of the States. She didn't care. She wanted to earn dollars and that is what she did.  

or of the many dimensions of American race relations, which could not be addressed through a simple distinction between public and private life.

Nor could they be addressed by some more complex distinction. What mattered was things like Voter Registration and entering segregated diners. That took courage.  

Shklar also differed from Arendt in her understanding of the environment in which Americans found themselves. Using an expression first coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson, she distinguished between the ‘party of hope’ and the ‘party of memory’. The former position was represented by Thomas Paine

Paine was a crank. He lost popularity by attacking organized religion and the contribution of George Washington.  

and Thomas Jefferson, and referred to the rejection of and radical rupture with almost everything that related to European history; Paine and Jefferson not only insisted firmly on living in the present,

then they died. They should have insisted on living in a more vehement manner 

but their attitudes also allowed them to nurture bright hopes for the future.

then they died. Sad.  

John Adams, and to some extent James Madison, represented what Shklar called the party of memory: both suggested looking to the past in order to find out what had gone wrong with classical European republicanism.

Why not simply admit that Adams and Madison had different economic interests from Jefferson?  

Adams and Madison shared a more pessimistic outlook than Jefferson and Paine, and Shklar thought this more robust. It allowed her to criticise both Arendt’s classicist republicanism and her uncritical defence of American exceptionalism, and also to give due credit to a skeptical tradition of American political thought.

A Canadian probably does know more about America than a German.  

Again, these were echoes of her take on the peculiarly American interpretation of the liberalism of fear. Shklar’s position amounts to one that sees American liberalism as a rather delicate achievement.

It was swamped by Jacksonian populism long ago. The question was who would control the gigantic state apparatus created over the course of the Thirties and Forties. The answer was technocrats like McNamara till they shat the bed and first tax-payers and then, later on, share holders, rebelled. 

Unlike Arendt’s treatment of the American political tradition, for which Mount Rushmore’s monumentalism is the obvious symbol,

Peter Norbeck was the Senator from South Dakota. He got federal funding to create a tourist attraction. It is said that President Coolidge enjoyed fishing there so much he signed off on the project. 

Shklar arrived at a more sophisticated and vital understanding of America and its history – and how its arguments are still played out and matter in our time.

No. American politics is but the shadow thrown by economic forces. Shklar didn't understand Econ.  

One might ask, where is the positive in all this? Shklar was no system builder, unlike her friend and colleague John Rawls.

He misunderstood Harsanyi's 'veil of ignorance' gedanken. Also, he had never heard of Insurance. If you could end up disabled and unable to work, you take out insurance or vote for a compulsory insurance scheme.  

She was highly critical of Rawls’s attempt to build a theory of justice with his 1971 book of that name.

But not for the right reason.  

In her own, much shorter book The Faces of Injustice (1990), she suggested a change of perspective: injustice is not just the negative counterpart to justice. Instead, injustice must be studied as a phenomenon in its own right.

But if stupid people do the studying, the result will be stupidity. In any case, the theory of justice is the theory of justiciability which distinguishes cases where injustice has a remedy. 

She maintained that to give injustice its due demands not only a different perspective but also a different type of narrative, one that helps to identify and recognise the many victims of injustice.

Shklar was teaching imbeciles. Her colleagues were cretins. She needed to identify and recognize the various types of horrendous epistemic self-abuse they had been subjected to. While at the LSE, I made it a point to approach Dr. Amartya Sen and condole with him for the repeated anal rape he must have suffered at the hands of various slum-dogs in Calcutta. Sadly, he did not appear grateful for my solicitude.  

Such a new critical approach, she argued, could tell us more about the many faces of injustice

e.g. the face Amartya Sen makes when he is being buggered by a Dalmatian.  

than following the false hope of striving for an ever-more perfect state of justice,

Shklar taught shit. She wasn't striving for anything.  

including the idea of a perpetual amelioration of the laws.

Which is what actually happens. That's why judges and lawyers get paid lots of money.  

Shklar’s political thought presents particular challenges to triumphalist and exceptionalist narratives.

Very true. Trump would shut the fuck up any time she was prowling around.  

She detected that the legacy of slavery made America’s commitment to democracy often sound hollow.

American democracy meant it could keep slavery for longer than the British West Indies.  

To her, discrimination remained a major scar that had not healed, despite all the rhetoric of equality and hard-fought-for improvements such as citizenship.

White lady liked virtue signaling. Black ladies weren't taken in. Every time she mentioned slavery or Jim Crow, they would ask how many of her Aunties were killed by Hitler.  

Her position with regard to relations between Israel and Palestine was even more revealing. She never defended the hawks and hardliners in the conflict

which made them cry and cry 

‒ and dared to say so in a letter that she circulated to colleagues and friends

i.e. useless cretins 

after a visit to the region in 1987.

Did she support recognition of the Palestinian state in 1988? The fact is, the US had been quietly pushing Israel to return to the pre-67 borders even in the time of Nixon and the Rodgers Plan. That's why Kissinger was hated by the Israelis.  

She reminded her American friends to remain realists, focusing on what could be achieved ‒ and defended. She did so by pointing out that ‘the Jews of Israel have achieved one of the aims of Zionism: they are no different, neither worse nor better, than the rest of mankind.

Sadly, they were better than their neighbors. Even economically, they began to rise in the Eighties thanks to Reagan's 'tough love'.  

They are neither smarter, nor more virtuous than all the other nations.’

No. On average, they are smarter, have lower alcoholism, spousal abuse, etc.  

Shklar’s intellectual formation is quintessentially that of

a person too stupid to do STEM subjects 

an exile. Born Judith Nisse in 1928 into a mainly German-speaking Jewish family,

Jews had only been allowed to settle in Riga in 1841. Thus, this was an immigrant family living amongst an alien people. 

her upbringing in Riga was not that of the typical Jewish shtetl of the region. Her father was a wealthy businessman, her mother a medic. Her education took place in a French lycée, an urban and secularised environment dominated by humanist subjects and language education.

In other words, her upbringing alienated her from the Latvian majority. But it also made it easier for her to assimilate to countries with a West European language and culture.  

In 1939, her parents decided to heed the advice of family friends to escape to Sweden. 

In one lucky move, the family managed to escape the totalitarian threat of both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. From Sweden, the Nisse family moved on, equipped with false papers, first through the Soviet Union to Vladivostok, then from Vladivostok to Japan, and finally from Japan via ship to Seattle. On arrival in the US, they were interned but, thanks to a rabbi who had spotted them among mainly Chinese and other internees of Asian origin, soon released.

In other words, her family was saved because of the color of their skin. 

This odyssey demonstrated to the adolescent Judith that conditions existed in which, independent of how wealthy one’s parents were or how educated one was, no guardian angel would come to the rescue to guarantee safe passage and asylum.

It showed the reverse. Money was the guardian angel.  

It pushed her into a kind of refuge in books and made her sharpen her intellectual interests, in the first instance in classic and modern literature and later in political ideas.

Because she was too stupid to do STEM subjects.  

It would be facile to draw a straight line between Shklar’s work at Harvard and her experience fleeing Riga followed by a harrowing journey into exile.

Latvia was a democracy in the inter-war period. The State monitored anti-Semitic activities and could provide a little protection to the Jewish community.  

But it would also be a mistake to maintain that there is no relationship between her early experience and a life spent thinking deeply about the political problems of loyalty, obligation and belonging.

There were no such problems. North America had been good to her family. They were loyal and soon felt they belonged.  

Toward the end of her life, Shklar undertook work on citizenship, exile and emigration to

play the Holocaust card and attract attention to herself 

throw new light on the history of political obligation and loyalty.

No such light was needed. The thing was as plain as day.  

She had always felt that the story of exile sat uncomfortably with the ideal of belonging.

She wasn't an exile. She was an immigrant. There may have been some Latvian Jews in America who booked their passage home after the place had been annexed by Stalin. They were exiles. Shklar wasn't. She didn't go to Latvia on a tourist visa.   

As she pointed out in her last two essays and in some of the lectures given just a few months before her death in September 1992 (recently published as On Political Obligation), exile was a fundamental human experience

as opposed to a canine experience? But it isn't fundamental at all. Few are exiles. Migration, for economic reasons, is much more common.  

that had captured the attention of historians, poets and novelists. Despite the depth and breadth of interest in exile, political theorists had had little to say on it – something that she attempted to remedy.

Exiles are often deeply involved in a type of politics which may bring about regime change in the home country. Some exiles gain command over immigrant communities with mischievous consequences. Mary Kaldor has studied this phenomenon.  

The exile’s perspective allowed her to address aspects of some core problems of political thought, including conditions for submission to rules and political obligation, but from an original angle.

She wasn't an exile. It is not the case that she had to flee Canada. She moved to the US to advance her career.  

Shklar was aware that today’s emigrants and exiles face conditions different from the ones that she and her family had faced fleeing from mid-20th century Europe.

No. Nothing much had changed.  

In many instances, there is no host country to offer asylum.

The US was turning away boatloads of Jews. The places which would let you in tended to be shitholes. That is still true today.  

There is often no country to escape to. Most of today’s refugees find themselves ‘in pure limbo’, a situation that evokes moral concern, even moral outrage.

It also evoked a shift to the Right in Europe & America. But Pakistan and Iran are now deporting Afghans in industrial quantities.  

In turn, those who are outraged and show solidarity find themselves in a solitary situation akin to that faced by Henry David Thoreau:

No they don't. Thoreau wrote well. They don't.  

they can neither join a liberating force nor is it always possible to identify fully with the many refugees due to the lack of detailed knowledge, physical distance, culture and lack of shared language.

Very true. If you claim to be a Somali woman, people expect you to speak Somali.  

As Shklar rightly observes, there is no ‘we’ here. What exactly do obligation and loyalty refer to?

Virtue signaling and hypocrisy.  

What are the responsibilities of humans to one another in such situations?

They must offer elderly Professors gratuitous rape counselling. Say 'I know you have been viciously raped by various dogs. Also, you were forced to eat cat poo by Chairman Miaow. I want you to know that we all empathize with you.' 

Since her death, Shklar’s questions on exile have grown weightier, and her insights sharper.

Because, as a ghost, she is slightly less stupid. 

For her, exclusionary practices

e.g. burying or cremating dead people instead of inviting them to dinner 

often give birth to loyalties of dubious quality.

Not if you exclude those whose loyalty is dubious. Killing them, too, sends a strong signal.  

One conclusion that offers itself from the modern experience is that cultural and national cohesion remain overrated ideas, prolonging and even causing the conditions in which injustices thrive.

Worse yet is the fact that dicks haven't been banned. Dicks cause RAPE! 

Shklar was aware that citizenship might not be the solution to all problems

even if Trump gives US citizenship to everybody in the world, dicks will continue to exist.  

but she was convinced that it remained an essential precondition not only for achieving a democratic and principally open country

Very true. Once 1.3 billion Muslims move into the US, they can vote for Sharia law. 

but first and foremost for making possible the experience of individual liberty.

e.g. by killing kaffirs.