{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023642172523961662, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005111821086261981, 'mean_word_length': 5.391836734693878, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today by Partha Chatterjee (review)

I early 2021, academia is choked with hasty analyses of Brexit and Donald Trump written by political scientists whose work suggests an ignorance of political life outside a small corner of the world. In these books, Euro-America is the cradle of liberal democracy, and the rise of populism in those places, therefore, heralds the death of liberal democratic ideals themselves. Partha Chatterjee’s book is different. A collection of three historical essays based on the 2018 Ruth Benedict Lectures at Columbia University, it situates popular sovereignty within its long-term, comparative context. Chatterjee proceeds from the assumption that the so-called populist “crisis of democracy” is a provincializing idea, one suggesting that there is a single model of democracy necessarily rooted in “Western civilization” (x). In Chatterjee’s reckoning, we will understand contemporary democracy much better by studying it in reference to political life in the postcolonial nations of Africa and Asia, which have a much longer history of populism. The book is insightful and persuasive because it explores these pressing political questions against a wider range of global experiences. Chatterjee calls for a decentering of the Euro-American context in understanding democratic life. However, the intellectual foundations of the book are the European theorists Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault and, as such, are consistent with the standard line in leftist political anthropology.