Author Meets Critics: Sandipto Dasgupta’s "Legalizing the Revolution"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Political theorists have become ever-more attuned to the theoretical importance of anticolonial movements and the ambitious visions of postcolonial futures they proposed. Through an original account of India’s anticolonial movement and constitution-making experience, Sandipto Dasgupta’s "Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony" (Cambridge University Press, 2024) significantly deepens that discussion by directing our attention to the unique promises, challenges, and contradictions of giving institutional form to those visions.

Decolonization was the most prolific era of constitution making. Yet constitutional theory and histories of decolonization have rarely crossed paths. "Legalizing the Revolution" bridges the divide between constitutional theory and anti- and postcolonial thought, and does so in new and exciting ways. Firstly, the book offers a distinctive theory of postcolonial constitution. In contrast to the familiar liberal template of constitutional theory, Dasgupta argues that the postcolonial constitution-making project was oriented towards change rather than limits. The analysis of a constitution in transition and aimed at transformation can reveal much about what constitutions as such can and should do. Secondly, Dasgupta uses the Indian constitution-making experience to theorize the institutional dimension of decolonization that is often ignored in postcolonial thought. The constitution-making experience becomes an archive for theorizing the project of instituting a postcolonial future against an imperial past. Both aspects come together to foreground and conceptualize a fundamental tension at the heart of postcolonial foundation: how to translate the revolutionary energy of popular anticolonial politics that made decolonization possible into an administered and controlled project of social transformation through the law. That is, how to legalize the revolution.

"Legalizing the Revolution" exposes the contradictions and limits of this project. The unresolved tension between the popular and the administrative, law and revolution, shaped the trajectory of postcolonial political development, as well as informed the distinctive architecture of postcolonial institutions. Dasgupta shows how the inability to realize the promise of a robust popular political life generated by the anticolonial movement accounts for the persistence of hierarchies and domination and the eventual crisis of democracy in the global periphery. In this way, the book recovers the unrealized promise of imagined postcolonial futures and offers keys to understanding the predicaments of postcolonial presents.

"Legalizing the Revolution" is an exciting intervention in debates on decolonization, popular politics, constitutional thought, and institutions. This author-meets-critics panel brings together junior and senior scholars with wide-ranging expertise in law, democracy, constitutionalism, popular movements, and the politics of decolonization to critically examine the book’s claims and contributions. The panel will be chaired by Karuna Mantena (Columbia), with commentaries from Jason Frank (Cornell), Lisa Disch (Michigan), Giulia Oskian (Yale) and Joy Wang (Chicago), and a reply by Sandipto Dasgupta (New School).

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Karuna Mantena Columbia University

Presenters

• Jason Frank Cornell University

• Lisa J. Disch University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Giulia Oskian Yale University

• Joy Wang University of Chicago

• Sandipto Dasgupta New School for Social Research