Society and Political Theory

What hinders agencies from serving society better is the lack of suitable theories, in general and, in particular, political theories. They need political theories not only to plan a project, but to realise the very need for any project and to visualise it. A political theory is the problematisation of collective existence, which is otherwise lived as a fait accompli, and an attempt to find a way to overcome it. Theories provide a map of social realities and an organisation of action plans.

One may feel that one is working through common sense or raw intelligence, but in reality, one is only working with theories already diffused as common sense. If a nation ignores serious research that yields grounded, practical theories, or does not nurture spaces for people to philosophise in a similar vein, it will not solve its problems; rather, it will further complicate them by adopting foreign-baked theories. This is not an argument against the universality of theory as such, but against its uncritical transplantation without mediation through local histories, institutions, and social experience.

A large chunk of so-recognised political theorists is still busy figuring out what political theory is. At a second level, they learn some high-sounding names and jargon and keep regurgitating them in front of people. Initiates are awestruck by the sheer incomprehensibility of what they hear. Thirdly, what is discussed and understood often resembles filmy drama: a social or status-group conspiracy followed by its surgical solution. Fourthly, some highly regarded theories are merely descriptive, and they describe reality in a manner that kills the possibility of solutions. They turn the persistence of problems into a mission, much like typical missionaries. Fifthly, and finally, within the limits of my own understanding, they often exhaust their careers in comprehending theories of Western origin, endlessly elaborating upon them, and pursuing adaptations that are never fully realisable.

To conclude, societies need genuine theories.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Paradox of Perfect Answers

In an age where intelligence is becoming mechanised and gaining sophistication with every passing moment, questions acquire greater significance than answers. If one knows how to question, a machine can often respond better than an ordinary human being, as it scans vast ranges of sources and possesses the capacity to process them according to need. Answers are readily available; it depends on one’s will and knack for discerning and netting them. This is one side of the story.

The other side reveals a deepening crisis. Answers, despite being the best possible, often carry little traction. What largely remains unseen is that answers derive significance only when they emerge from personal, lived experience and effort, and when the act of answering involves standing by them. This emerging condition makes it all the more critical that people remain answerable. The ready availability of the best possible answers may, if not accompanied by renewed moral sensibilities and appropriate structural arrangements, curtail answerability and imperil humanity in ways never witnessed before.

The problem itself is not new; it is its severity that is unprecedented. One can always access the best possible answers, yet no one remains answerable for them. Understanding that is devoid of shared concern and conviction carries little value.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Education of the World and the World of Education

The distinguishing mark between a good state and a bad one is the quality of its education. But what is education? Its foundation is neither the catchphrase of the three Rs nor literacy alone, but the telling of good stories. Education is, in fact, the inculcation of commitment to goodness; this is followed by the cultivation of both the capacity and the inclination to act well—that is, the acquisition of the skills needed to live well oneself and to help others live better. Pedagogy is therefore among the most serious enterprises of humanity—one that can be compromised only at grave peril.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Finding Hope Amid Despair

The world may well become a better place once the dust raised by contemporary geopolitical storms settles. The United States may, perhaps unintentionally, help many countries retain their talented people and develop more diversified international relations on fairer terms. What the GATT could not achieve after decades of negotiations, the present unsettled conditions seem to be bringing about. Free trade agreements are being forged among nations whose economies run on mutually accepted policies.

History suggests that human conditions have, on the whole, continued to improve. Yet the critical role of human agency in this process cannot be denied. Progress is not automatic. Societies must work consciously toward betterment, minimising suffering and shortening periods of turbulence. However, human imaginings of the good and the real conditions required to realise it often diverge. The global leadership that emerged from the victorious side after the Second World War shaped the post-war international order. Had that leadership been better at imagining a more inclusive and sustainable conception of the good from the ruins of the war, it is unlikely that the world would have reached the present impasse.

A similar limitation marked the institutional imagination of the post war period. The GATT rested on the assumption that principles resembling national governance, such as uniform rules, reciprocity, and procedural equality, could be effectively applied at the international level. With the benefit of hindsight, one can infer that this did not allow it to live up to its promise. The international system operates among sovereign yet deeply asymmetrical nations, where formal equality does not produce substantive parity. The United Nations reflected the same contradiction by advancing a universal normative framework while confronting persistent power asymmetries. These tensions were visible early on, but were largely ignored in the GATT negotiations toward the WTO.

This is the time to realign reality with imagination.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Whither the Idea of the University?

While the USA leads the world in redefining the word “bizarre,” two Chinese universities now occupy the top two positions, pushing Harvard to third place in a ranking by a European institution. The fact is that, despite the USA remaining at the top of the world, it is sliding downwards. Time will tell whether this decline is irreversible. It is also not clear whether the present administration is causing this decline or merely demonstrating it.

Questions arise as to why America appears to be faltering despite housing some of the best educational institutions in the world. At the same time, China continues to grow with the rapid upgrading of its universities. Do universities merely perform in accordance with the prevailing political ecosystem? It would be far-fetched to suggest that universities lack their own autonomous mind and institutional agency. If this is indeed the case, as present indications suggest, it is a travesty of the very idea of the university.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Humanism and Its Perils

Modernism, as an advance towards humanism, has also revealed its weaknesses. As it evolved in the Western world, crass individualism emerged as its dominant tendency. At a basic level, the binary of the “I” and the “other” became central to human self-understanding. This binary, when reflected at the community and national levels, takes the form of aggressive nationalism and a drive to dominate others. It facilitates the otherisation of people and weakens sympathy for those of different races and nationalities. The culmination of this modernist trajectory was the two great wars that devastated the world.

Apart from this inherent weakness, which appears to be resurfacing with renewed force, other threats to humanism have emerged. One such threat is the rise of political and economic systems that are neither liberal nor democratic, but instead host forms of captive capitalism.

A separate challenge arises from the growing ethnic consciousness in different parts of the world, which undermines the universal moral claims of humanism.

The newest threat to humanism comes from technology. Human relevance has historically depended on mutual service and interdependence, but this role is increasingly being taken over by machines. Autonomous systems and their interconnectedness across geographies may severely undermine human agency and control. Clouds are gathering over both human consciousness and the experience of life itself.

Humanism needs to address both its internal contradictions and emerging external challenges.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Humanism and Its Manifestations

Humanism is the crux of modernism, or of the modern age. It is the centrality of the human person in human imagination. The grand ideas which the postmodernists contested may or may not be the essential aspect of modernism; they could have been facilitated by modern epistemology. It is another matter that postmodernists contested the very idea of essence itself.

The point I made earlier is what I am repeating here. Humanism manifests itself as liberalism in the domain of knowledge, as democracy in political affairs, and as capitalism in the economic sphere.

I anchor liberalism here in the idea of liberty, which I see as a mutual agreement on conditions that enable human beings to realise their humanity. In other words, it is a social contract wherein every order recognises the autonomy of individual human beings and constrains and disallows any person or group from violating it. In logical progression, democracy is the demand for the consent of such autonomous human beings in conducting collective affairs, which again are meant to ensure the autonomy of each of them. Capitalism, in that sequence, is not about capital being the centre of an order. Capital is only the lifeblood of such an order. The crux lies in the ownership of human beings over their persons and possessions, and their ability to conduct their businesses with utmost ease.

Humanism is the way humanity should follow.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Age of Empires

It is bewildering that a pre–World War world of power blocs and imperial instincts is returning in the twenty-first century, the very age in which human beings have taught machines to think and even write poetry. Many assume this is capitalism in full bloom. The truth is the opposite. What we are seeing is capitalism under subversion, hollowed out by forces that reject the modern idea that human beings, not empires or myths, are the centre of the world. 

Modernism was never just technology. It was the belief that human dignity, choice, and reason should govern society. That is why it expressed itself as liberalism in thought, democracy in politics, and capitalism in the economy. When that humanist core is weakened, these institutions remain, but they begin to serve domination rather than freedom.

Human existence does not offer infinite paths. Either we defend the worth of the human being and, with it, internationalism and democracy, or we will drift back into a world of empires at the top and feudalism below, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Thinking versus Fantasising

The cognitive ability among members of a political community to see the distinction between thinking and fantasising is a critical factor in ensuring social advancement. Both involve intense engagement of the mind, but they differ in their relation to reality. Thinking aims to understand what is true, what follows from what, and what can be justified by evidence and logic. It is constrained by facts and often leads to uncomfortable or humbling conclusions. Fantasising, by contrast, serves the ego and emotions. It creates inner narratives shaped by desire, fear, or vanity, with no obligation to be accurate. Thinking submits to what is; fantasising reshapes what is to fit what one wants to believe. The first is labour; the second is pleasure.

The point I want to make is that even recognised intellectuals confuse fantasy with thinking and then do tremendous labour to prop up their wishful thinking with logic, data, and agency. This has happened repeatedly and has been a recurring tragedy for humankind. For instance, one can review a whole stream of Western political philosophy that gained great traction in the developing world.

Niraj Kumar Jha

India and a World Losing Its Moral Compass

Times are worrying, and they demand worry. Internationalism, or at least its façade, is fast receding from the world; the UN looks increasingly defunct, and the WTO is toothless. Concerns for the global commons, existential threats to humanity, terrorism, and now cybercrime have all been pushed to the back burner. Citizens everywhere are more vulnerable today than in the recent past.

Instead, what is pushing forward are the crass imperial campaigns of the powers that be. These are now conducted openly, stripped of their old moral and diplomatic covers. The irony is that the former global imperial powers are themselves now at the receiving end of these new pressures, squeezed from both sides of their geography.

We Indians, each of us, must recognise the scale of these emerging threats. The moment demands far stronger unity and purpose, infused with rationalism in both thought and action. We must compete for organisational efficiency in every domain of the public and private sectors so as to gain an edge over other powers, and we must invest in research and development not only in technology but across all walks of life, for instance, in the reconstruction of our own society.

India, as the lone continuing civilisation that has consistently upheld the finer human values, bears a greater responsibility to humanity: to defend and promote democratic ideals in the world. For that too, national strength is the basic need.

Niraj Kumar Jha

A Quarter into the Twenty-First Century: From Promise to Peril

As the world enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century, it appears more perilous than its first quarter. In the late twentieth century, many imagined the new century with hope: a new century for a new world. At that time, few could have foreseen the phenomenal advance in digital technology, which has proved to be a great advantage for humanity, almost beyond the horizon of contemporary imagination.

That period was also marked by an unmistakable movement towards greater freedom. Iron curtains and other barriers were being dismantled; walls were coming down, and borders were becoming less forbidding. The world was moving towards greater integration and shared prosperity. A landmark moment in this historical trajectory can be identified: Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech in Vladivostok in 1986. From that point onward, however, the world today appears to have returned to square one, perhaps even worse, notwithstanding the great technological gains of the era and humanity’s unprecedented capacity to overcome, or at least substantially reduce, distances among itself.

In that earlier phase, realism in international relations was still wrapped in certain values, and power politics was at least accompanied by proclamations of idealism. What we witness now is a crass display of naked power, unembellished and unapologetic, shaping global affairs. The cumulative human effort to make the world more responsible to itself seems to have come to nought. A genuine promise of cooperative internationalism was rebuffed and ultimately thwarted.

This is, therefore, a moment for serious introspection about the ideas, institutions, and people who have failed the world. In my view, no one can claim innocence: the so-regarded lowliest individuals influence the so-regarded events at the summits, and the most seemingly innocuous conversations and actions of ordinary people carry consequences far beyond their immediate contexts. If the twenty-first century is not to be surrendered to cynicism, coercion, and conflict, it must be reclaimed consciously. The task before humanity is not merely to diagnose failure, but to rethink and renew the moral and institutional foundations of global order itself.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Republicanism

Republicanism is almost an unknown idea and ideal even among the literati. Certainly, the general understanding that the head of state is an elected office is widely prevalent; however, its deeper significance is rarely discussed in private conversations or public discourse. In contrast, democracy is invoked ad nauseam in both spheres.

Republicanism is the opposite of monarchism, but this is only the starting point. At a deeper level, it must be seen as an attempt to reverse a long civilizational process in which human history has largely been a march toward the refinement and strengthening of tools of domination, of some over others, both among political units and within them. To begin with, by republicanism, the American founding fathers meant elite mediation within their democratic setup, so that popular will itself did not subvert the idea of freedom. Today, however, the idea requires an infusion of fresh moral and institutional inputs if it is to contribute meaningfully to human progress toward a more fulfilling life.

For instance, republicanism may be invested with Gandhism, which alone articulates a reversal of this civilizational trajectory by anchoring human affairs in truth and non-violence, i.e. in morality and compassion, and through decentralisation and horizontalisation.

Niraj Kumar Jha