The point is not merely to insist upon an acknowledgement that the

institutions of economic and political life in the modern West have a

historical genealogy that extends into the formerly colonial world. It

is to explore the further implication of that history for the authoritat-

ive status of the normative claims of Western political theory for

our contemporary world. If we know that the principal hegemonic

strategy for establishing the universal claims of the normative stand-

ards of Western political institutions is to combine a norm-deviation

paradigm in the empirical domain with a norm-exception paradigm

in the policy domain, what has been the consequence of decolonization

and the emergence of postcolonial thinking for the continued rele-

vance of this strategy?

One has heard several voices in recent times that reject, on ideologi-

cal grounds, the claims of normative Western political theory. Thus,

representative electoral democracy has been rejected as Western or

bourgeois and therefore unsuited to conditions in non-Western coun-

tries. The idea of human rights has been similarly rejected as Western

or Christian and therefore inapplicable to other societies. There have

been claims on behalf of “Asian values” or “Islamic principles” as

having greater universal validity than the Western norms of modern

democratic government. While the conflicts rage over these questions

in the field of ideology, what should be of greater interest to political

theory are the ways in which actual practices in the field of government

and politics cope with the realities of power in a world in which no

society has the option of entirely escaping the tentacles of modern

economic, political, and cultural institutions. Once we recognize this,

we have no alternative but to return to the problem of symmetrical

versus sequential accounts of modernity. If by tracing the historical

genealogy of Western political institutions we have established the

sheer historical contingency of Western modernity, there can be no

reason left to demand the symmetrical repetition of that configuration

of institutions in other parts of the world. Hence, political theory is left

with the task of describing the varied products of different sequences

of development in different countries as novel but ineluctably modern

24 Lineages of Political Society

practices of government and politics. Such descriptions cannot

avoid the question of normative evaluation. However, since many of

these practices imply a critique of the normative standards of Western

political practice, political theory cannot any more proceed with its

normal business of endlessly elaborating and refining its normative

principles supposedly established from the moment of its birth. That

is the challenge posed by postcolonial politics.

The second task of redefining the universal normative standards set

by Western political theory in the light of the experience of postcolonial

politics involves serious moral evaluation. We have noticed that the

divergent practices that have emerged in postcolonial countries are

frequently justified as exceptions to the normative rule. Could the ac-

cumulation of exceptions justify a redefinition of the norm? Take the

example of citizenship. The normative rule under the Indian consti-

tution is equal citizenship for all. But from the very beginning,
exceptions were made to provide for special representation and re-

served places in government service and education for Scheduled

Castes and Tribes and for the personal laws and special educational

institutions of minority religious communities. Initially, these excep-

tions were justified as transitional m