Book review of Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Political Theory, edited by Mangesh Kulkarni (Atlantic, 2025)

In times where interdisciplinary studies have become the new norm, Dr. Mangesh Kulkarni's book is a gateway into theories of contemporary relevance. The book at first glance appears to be juggling with a lot of ideas, theories and contemporary issues. However, the beauty of the book is the way it maintains coherence while dealing with diversity. Spanning over twelve essays by scholars from varied locations, this book engages with some of the most pressing normative and empirical challenges of late modernity. Throughout the chapters, there is a constant engagement with dominant trajectories of contemporary political thought like questions of justice, citizenship, power, legitimacy, and moral responsibility. It reflects that political theory today must operate in a space of fractured universals and contested norms.

Political Theory after Liberal Consensus

The fragility of the Liberal Political Theory is recurrent in the course of this book. As Andrew Shorten notes in his book, the liberal approaches to political theory are limiting (Shorten 2012). Being the dominant narrative of the modern times, this theory is shown as inadequate to address the issues of our times. Jayant Lele, among several other contributors in the book, interrogates the liberal consensus that emerged after the Cold War. There is an uneasy coexistence that appears simultaneously with global inequality, imperial violence, and cultural fundamentalism. Lele's criticism of Rawls, Habermas, and Derrida demonstrate the volume's general skepticism towards the liberal theory. As much as these theories tried to assert moral universality, they paid inadequate attention to global power dynamics and political economics. Lele points out that all three of them have ultimately failed to address the problem of structural violence of global capitalism and imperial power. Rawls' political liberalism, Habermas' proceduralism, and Derrida's late political interventions, he suggests, converge in their inability or unwillingness to sustain a robust critique of political economy and religion. For Lele, combining Marxian critique with indigenous and marginalized traditions is a way of challenging the dominant structures. As such, this paves the way for the volume's commitment to theory that is historically grounded, normatively charged, and politically consequential. However, this volume does not simply abandon liberal theory; it subjects liberalism to sustained interrogation which gives the work more depth and keeps it from falling into rigid anti-liberalism.

Globalisation: Between Pessimism and Possibility

Rohini Hensman argues against understanding globalisation as a single economic ideology. She explains it as a complex and contested process. The chapter highlights the limits of associating globalisation with adjectives like capitalism, imperialism and neo liberalism. Instead, she expresses that globalisation creates new political spaces and institutions that can potentially advance democracy and human rights. For her, the institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and International Criminal Courts (ICC) are treated as contested sites where democratic struggles can unfold. Hensman acknowledges the structural inequalities embedded in global governance and the uneven distribution of its benefits. Yet her insistence on prioritising democracy over sovereignty marks an important departure from statist and nationalist critiques. The essay implicitly challenges political theory to rethink citizenship beyond the nation-state, a theme that recurs in later discussions of feminism and minority rights.

Prakash Sarangi deals with the methodological debate within political theory. He examines the public choice theory and evaluates democracy through its lens. This approach applies methods from economics and mathematics to understand political decision making. It focuses on how individual preferences are translated into collective outcomes through voting and institutional rules. The assumption that individuals are rational, self-interested actors is critiqued at the end. It is a narrow view that fails to capture the moral, emotional, and social dimensions of political life. As a result, the chapter presents public choice theory as a useful but at the same time an incomplete tool for understanding democracy.

Feminism and the Reconfiguration of Justice and Citizenship

I believe this is one of the strongest sections of the book. Lajwanti Chatani engages with Feminist political theory in relation to citizenship and justice. It is a critical engagement with both the liberal and republican traditions of citizenship and reveals the gendered biases and exclusions implicit in these traditions. The feminist approach seeks to not only to include women in the existing traditions but at the same time transform the very conceptual underpinnings of citizenship. Engaging with thinkers like Carole Pateman, Carol Gilligan and Chantal Mouffe, the author highlights the internal debates in the feminist theory. The discussion about the public–private divide, care ethics, and the Wollstonecraft dilemma highlight the struggles of articulating gender justice without either assimilating women into masculinist norms or essentialising difference. Mouffe's reconfiguration of citizenship as an articulatory principle enables the recognition of difference without reducing it to a fixed identity. Furthermore, the redistribution-recognition debate is examined through the lens of Nancy Fraser's scholarship. It further problematises the traditional narrative of justice by characterizing gender and race as two-dimensional expressions of injustice. Fraser's approach resists the binary choice between economic and cultural claims. The collection therefore presents feminism as a critical practice that subverts single-axis narratives of justice and reveals the limitations of moral abstraction.

Group Rights and Identity

The chapter by Arpita Anant focuses on not limiting the debate of rights to the domestic sphere only. Enriching political studies on groups by incorporating external dimensions, this essay traces how global ideological currents have shaped Muslim political thought in India and thus demonstrates how domestic identity politics are inseparable from global ideological and institutional currents. From pan-Islamism to human rights discourse, transnational influences are shown to interact with local histories in complex ways. The discussion of Indian Muslim responses, from Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's rejection of pan-Islamism to post-independence engagements with human rights discourse, illustrates how external contexts can function as resources rather than threats. This chapter concludes with a refusal of homogeneous Muslim identity arguing its core is local. The significant highlight of the chapter is demonstrating that an enriched co-existence can take place within a liberal nationalistic society.

Civil society and the ambiguities of Democratic Action

Sanjay Palshikar in his chapter on Civil society does not treat it as a fixed concept, the chapter problematizes the concept asking whether civil society exists independently of the language used to describe it. The problem of civil society is examined through a critical dialogue with Indian political thought. By engaging with the works of Rajini Kothari, Gurpreet Mahajan, Partha Chatterjee, Palshikar demonstrates that civil society is far from a settled or unproblematic category. A notable contribution of this chapter is the critique of rigid binaries between civil society and the state, and between legality and illegality. These binaries, according to the author, fail to capture the complex ways in which collective action actually operates in Postcolonial contexts. This chapter argues that democratic deepening often occurs through collective practices that do not fit neatly into these categories.

Rebellion, power and communicative action

In the chapter, "Albert Camus' and the politics of friendship", Mangesh Kulkarni takes a distinct philosophical turn. The author, through Camus's notion of rebellion, carves out a philosophically oriented politics of friendship. Camus' rebellion rejects both metaphysical coalition and nihilistic negation and affirms human dignity through resistance to injustice. Although Camus' rebellion was essentially individualistic, it was reworked as affirmation of human dignity and the recognition of limits. He argued for a politics of restraint, dialogue and solidarity. A significant contribution of the chapter is Camus's concept of political friendship which is understood through the lens of weak ontology i.e. the refusal to anchor politics in absolute truths while still preserving moral commitment. In conclusion this concept offers a valuable moral resource for contemporary politics which is capable of accommodating difference without erasing universality.

A radical concept of power through the lens of the political is presented in the chapter by Syed A. Sayeed. According to him, to understand the nature of the political dimension of social reality one must engage in 'hermeneutics of suspicion' wherein one can identify the underlying nature of power. For this task he dives into the examination of language that is a primary medium through which dominant groups impose and normalize their perspectives within society. Rather than proposing an alternative political framework, the chapter calls for continuous ethical vigilance against the institutionalisation of power. The importance of this chapter is the way it exposes the hidden mechanisms of domination demanding that political theory critically reflect on its own complicity in sustaining power structures.

Deepti Gangavane engages with the discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas which situates his theory within broader debates on modernity, rationality, and normativity. For Habermas, the questions of justice can be solved through open and rational discussion which is called 'communicative rationality'. He grounds moral validity in the presupposition that everyone affected can agree to them through fair discussion. A criticism of discourse ethics is also presented by the author, particularly its formalism and its reliance on ideal communicative conditions that rarely exist in practice. Real discussions are often shaped by power, inequality, and social position. While conceding that this was not the objective of Habermas, the author argues that a consequence of this position is that free and equal dialogue is difficult to achieve, making the theory incomplete.

Bio politics, Knowledge Regimes and State Violence

The final section of this book invokes the use of domination that threatens the very core of liberal legality. By challenging the assumption that traditional knowledge is obsolete or unscientific, Kannama Raman in her chapter highlights the contemporary relevance of Traditional Knowledge systems. She situates this debate surrounding intellectual property rights, biopiracy, and state sovereignty. By doing so, she showcases how global capitalism has turned Knowledge into a commodity which subsequently led to the emergence of academic capitalism. The highlight of this chapter is the warning against the nationalist appropriation of traditional knowledge for reactionary purposes.

Shardool Thakur applies Agamben's theory of biopolitics to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) making one of the most politically charged interventions in this volume. He conceptualises the North-East as a space of exception highlighting the disjunction between democratic self-image and coercive practice. This essay powerfully demonstrates how states deploy emergency powers to normalise violence. The book concludes with an essay on torture by Clemens and Grigg. Although torture is officially condemned as a human rights violation, still the practices at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib suggest its growing normalisation. It is often dismissed, as the authors say, as the actions of "a few bad apples." The chapter argues that torture undermines freedom of speech, erodes the rule of law, and stands in direct opposition to democratic values. It also deals with psychoanalysis and suggests that the drive to dominate and inflict pain is often denied but persists within political power. Finally, the chapter insists that any acceptance of torture requires a fundamental rethinking of democracy itself.

Critical Assessment and Conclusion

This edited volume succeeds in accommodating different disciplines and presents a remarkable intervention in thinking on contemporary political questions that demands interdisciplinary inquiry. The book is at its best when it comes to exposing the limitations of the dominant paradigms and forces the reader to ask uncomfortable questions about Justice, Democracy, Power, etc. Its ambition lies less in proposing any new theory but an effort is made to exemplify political theory as a critical practice. However, like any volume it has some limitations. The most important one is that despite positioning itself in the Global South it mostly engages with the scholarship emerging in the western political thought. Indian and non-Western thinkers are engaged only as objects of analysis not as theoretical resources in their own right. Regardless of Lele's call for invoking counter hegemonic traditions, neither his essay nor the ones that follow perform this task. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume is also concerning because the thematic clusters that are identified do not genuinely share an intellectual conversation. Some arguments that should ideally be seen in contestation merely sit easily alongside each other without responding to each other. For example, Hensman's cautious optimism about globalisation should have come in conversation with Raman's critique of global knowledge systems and so on. It reflects that the volume only deals with strong individual themes rather than conceiving the book as a collaborative project that is an outcome of a deliberative practice of engagement. In this regard it charts familiar terrain that is the bane of most edited scholarship that fail to provide unified exploration into themes that though topical and important often do not cohere together.

The book has its own sets of exclusions. The feminist theory discussed by Chatani could also have been expanded. This single essay grapples with the entire feminist project. Instances of gendered experiences of state violence, feminist critique of civil society could have been engaged with as the volume deals with such issues. Largely, this volume only focuses on critique of current frameworks rather than offering alternative perspectives.

Overall, this volume remains a valuable contribution to political theory scholarship in India. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students seeking critical, interdisciplinary approaches to the enduring problems of justice, citizenship, and emancipation. Graduate students looking for a serious and critically minded introduction to the major debates in contemporary political theory can also benefit from this book. Readers can expect a thoughtful experience as this book will leave them with more productive doubts than they arrived with. Its limitations are real, but they are also productive; they mark the boundaries of where the project of a genuinely postcolonial and interdisciplinary political theory must still go.

Bibliography

Shorten, Andrew, ed. Contemporary Political Theory : A Reader. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012