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Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Volume 2Society, Institutions, and Development$
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Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Volume 2: Society, Institutions, and Development

Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur

Print publication date: 2008

Print ISBN-13: 9780199239979

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2009

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239979.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 19 April 2021

Democracy and Its Indian Pasts

Democracy and Its Indian Pasts

Chapter:
(p.488) Chapter 26 Democracy and Its Indian Pasts
Source:
Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Volume 2
Author(s):

Sunil Khilnani

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239979.003.0027

Amartya Sen has argued powerfully against narrow conceptions of democracy, that restrict its meanings to elections and state forms, and see it as a unique acquisition of the West. He has urged a more historical conception, which sees democracy as rooted in everyday capacities associated with voice and familiar to most societies: discussion, debate, public deliberation. In this perspective, India's remarkable contemporary democracy can be seen as rooted in long historical traditions of argument and pluralism. While noting this important expansion in our points of view, this chapter seeks to raise some specific questions about: i) Sen's account of Indian traditions of public deliberation and reasoning and their relation to current Indian democracy; ii) the notions of tradition and argument which Sen deploys; and iii) the relationship between democracy and public reasoning. This relationship is more tenuous that Sen perhaps allows: because democracy installs politics as sovereign, Sen's attempt to establish ‘the sovereignty of reasoning’ may have real limits.

Keywords:   democracy, India, politics, history, argument, reasoning, heterodoxy, traditions

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