Dr Amir Ali, Assistant Professor, Centre for Political Studies

Dear Sudhir. I read your blog post on political theory. First of all, it is great that you made the effort to write in a field that is so jealously guarded by political theorists who have basically made political theory into a priestcraft. In this priestcraft of political theory there is a panoply and pantheon of conceptual gods – liberty, equality, democracy, civil society, and so on.

I completely agree with you on the need for political theory to be emancipatory. I do not know what you mean specifically by emancipation and I hope that in your next post you explain and expand upon this a little more. But let me set out what I mean by emancipation in political theory. To my mind, it is intimately and inextricably linked to the human condition a large part of which is the self-imposed bondage of human beings. Political theory must reflect upon this self-imposed bondage and seek to remove it. I think every society creates its own form of self-imposed bondage and political theory needs to pick the locks of these chains. This idea of course comes very much from Rousseau. 

Let me also add that I think that political theory over the centuries has kept coming back to the same set of questions. There is thus something enduring about political theory. This endurance is not of the form of the questions remaining exactly the same, but their constancy emerges from the flux and change of society itself. To reiterate what this means is that political theory’s constantly unchanging questions are a function of the ever-changing nature of societies.

Where I disagree with you is the idea of distancing from European and first-world contexts. For better or worse Europe and the first world colonised our part of the world and other parts such as Latin America and Africa. I completely reject post-colonial ideas and am largely uncomfortable with decoloniality for its exaggerated and affected distantiation from Europe and the first-world. I have as much interest in Europe as I have in India, Africa, and Latin America. I reject the insularity of indigineity in favour of a rooted cosmopolitanism. And here I stress rooted cosmopolitanism because it is premised upon my identity as third-world scholar, yet one who engages actively and enthusiastically with other parts of the world. 

My political theory is thus one of a rooted cosmopolitanism and not one of an insular indigineity.