Liberalism and Empire

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A01=Uday Singh Mehta
Author_Uday Singh Mehta
Category=JPA
Category=JPFK
Category=NHD
Category=NHTQ
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Product details

  • ISBN 9780226518817
  • Weight: 539g
  • Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
  • Publication Date: 01 Jun 1999
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
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One takes liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Singh Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward or infantile. In this, liberals manifested a narrow conception of human experience and ways of being in the world. Ironically, it is in the conservative Edmund Burke - a severe critic of Britain's arrogant, paternalistic colonial expansion - that Mehta finds an alternative and more capacious liberal vision. Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, this book reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

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