Sunil Khilnani

"Our appreciation of the importance of India can only increase in light of current events in Asia and after the revelations about India's nuclear capabilities. This study addresses the paradoxes and ironies of this the world's largest democracy. Do the old ideas, or idea, of India still hold true - especially now that the country is in the hands of a very different kind of leadership? Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?". "In his new introduction, Khilnani addresses these issues in the new perspectives afforded by events of the recent year in India and in the world."--BOOK JACKET.

For thirty years after the Second World War, the French intellectual Left dominated cultural and political life in France as well as achieving immense influence and prestige internationally. Yet during the 1970s, a remarkable change occurred: Marxist and Leftist arguments dramatically collapsed; France's intellectuals, after veering sharply to the Right, arrived at a new understanding of liberalism and, abandoning Marxism and the idea of revolution, sought ways to govern the Republic. In this original and challenging book, Sunil Khilnani examines how and why this massive shift in intellectual preferences took place. Unlike other accounts - which have interpreted Leftist political arguments as timeless philosophical debates or as indices of socio-economic developments - Khilnani skillfully explores the political contexts in which these arguments were advanced and defended. He argues that war and occupation had severely disrupted the nation's political identity, and that in these circumstances the language of revolution provided intellectuals with a ready terminology with which both to redefine the political community and to establish a special role for themselves. He discusses the forms of political criticism available to intellectuals after 1945, focusing on the arguments of the two most prominent revolutionary thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. He then addresses the period between 1968 and 1981, when the idea of revolution came under attack, and the impact of Francois Furet's revisionist historiography of the French Revolution, which decisively undermined the very idea of revolution in France. Khilnani concludes with remarks on the revival of intellectual interest in the idea of the Republic. This vigorous and highly accessible book will appeal to everyone curious about what has happened in French intellectual life since 1945, and to all concerned with the fate of the Left.

Un portrait politique de l'Inde depuis 1947. L'Union indienne, fruit du postcolonialisme, est une democratie issue des Lumieres anglaises, mais complexe et paradoxale dans une region regie par le systeme rigide et contraignant des castes.

Created as epic spectacles for the stage, these immensely readable dramas burst with extraordinary characters, apocalyptic images and violent, often erotic, encounters. In Colossus, the subject is the great Spanish painter Goya. Deluging us with an overpowering stream of stage pictures, Barker evokes a world where love, art, cannibalism, and sudden redemption are interwoven. In Frankenstein in Love, Barker's homage to Mary Shelley's masterpiece and the shockingly graphic tradition of Grand Guignol theatre, we are invited to a wedding the likes of which the world has never seen. In the History of The Devil, Lucifer himself is brought to trial and, clue by clue, we piece together the mystery of Evil Incarnate. Dim the lights. Raise the curtain. The stage is set for three journeys into the dark heart of the imagination.

Democracy is everywhere praised and aspired to as a political system. Yet in established democracies people feel dissatisfied with existing institutions and the levels of accountability they offer. This book explores the ways in which democracy in national states, local government and social institutions can be renewed and extended.