Elements of politics

Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South, by Prathama Banerjee (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

Reviewed by Whitney Russell, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee offers a new and compelling way to ask how any definition of the political comes to be formulated in the first place. While the title might set the expectation that Banerjee herself will propose a new definition of politics, this is not her intention. Instead, Banerjee shows how non-European perspectives render visible the non-universality of the political, and especially the ways in which a notion of politics emerges through differentiation from whatever is non-political in a given historical moment. Rather than looking to reclaim a non-European notion of politics (which she notes has already been done by postcolonial political theorists), Banerjee is looking at the history of political theory in the context of colonialism to understand how the political, versus the social, becomes thinkable as a category of life. The text, therefore, is not focused on redefining politics, but on how a notion of the political comes into being.

Banerjee draws from postcolonial theory to explain how “the political” gets drawn out of “the social” only under certain historical conditions. For instance, colonial thinkers saw politics as something that only existed in advanced societies; so-called “primitive” societies were assumed to have no politics at all until the society had reached an advanced level of civilization. Banerjee suggests in response not that politics are universal, but that any time politics are carved out of the social this is an outcome of particular ways of thinking about (and making assumptions about) four “elementary aspects of the political.” These “elementary aspects” are cast in the mold of Emile Durkheim’s and Ranajit Guha’s engagements with the “elementary,” indicating foundational materials that are not composed of anything else. Elementary particles are substance without substructure, and this is the ground from which Banerjee is thinking about the political.