Description

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.

Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought

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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... Read more

    Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
    Publication Date: 01/06/1999
    ISBN13: 9780226518824, 978-0226518824
    ISBN10: 0226518825

    Number of Pages: 245

    Non Fiction , Politics, Philosophy & Society

    Description

    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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