Dismantling Feudal Landed Power
The revolutions were launched by the bourgeoisie in order to dismantle feudal agrarian relations. This follows naturally from the premise that capital is propelled to expand its zone of operation. In predominantly agricultural economies, as long as the peasantry remained in possession of its land and was subject to feudal rent, capital would come up against hard limits to its expansion. The central task in 1640 and in 1789, therefore, was to eradicate feudal lordly power. It was only with the abolition of feudal property that the bourgeoisie could fulfill its historic mission—to overturn the rule of the landowner, create a national market, overcome localism, forge a national community, and so on. The critical place of this element of the classic revolutions emerges even more clearly when Guha explains the reasons for Indian capital’s failures. Above all for him, the roots of failure lie in the compromises made with landed classes, so that instead of overthrowing them, capital acceded to their continued rule in the countryside.
Securing Hegemony over the Antifeudal Coalition
Even though the bourgeoisie was committed to overthrowing feudal power, it could not do so alone. It was still a minor actor in the broader political landscape, lacking the means to assault the dominant order on its own. Hence, it had to bring other classes—primarily the peasantry, but also subordinate urban classes—to its side. It could do so either by various authoritarian and coercive means, or by soliciting their consensual participation. Guha maintains that one of the crowning achievements of the bourgeoisie in the great revolutions of 1640 and 1789 was that it secured broad-ranging consent to its leadership. This is an important part of his argument: he regards a central contrast between the bourgeois revolutions and the Indian nationalist movement to have been that elite leaders in the former movements secured compliance from subaltern classes through consent, while those in the latter could do so only through coercion.
Guha contends that the leaders of the bourgeois revolutions achieved consent by genuinely accommodating subaltern interests within their political programs—an instance of capital’s universalizing tendency—though he does not detail what those concessions might have been. What he seems to have in mind is peasants and workers being won over on the promise to dismantle seignorial power, and, equally important, the promise of political liberties. The effectiveness of bourgeois leadership issued from the fact that the concessions they made were real, not empty slogans. Their assumption of leadership thus had a genuine basis: “it was initially as an acknowledgement of the connection between its own interests and those of all the other nonruling classes that the bourgeoisie had led the struggle against feudalism and established its hegemony over the peasantry.”25
The bourgeoisie, then, acquired social consent to its leadership through recognition of subaltern interests. The reliance on consent, as against coercion or discipline, is what Guha takes to be the defining characteristic of political hegemony. He often discusses hegemony not only in terms of consent, but as the ability truly to represent the interests of others, to “speak for” other classes; in the bourgeois revolutions, he writes, “the bourgeoisie in the West could speak for all of society in a recognizably hegemonic voice, even as it was striving for power, or had just won it.”26 A hegemonic class can “speak for all of society” because it recognizes, and represents, the interests of subordinate groups. In so doing, it can relegate coercion to a secondary or even peripheral role in the maintenance of its power. Its strategy is to integrate the other classes into one encompassing community of interests, albeit one in which power imbalances are preserved.
From Coalitional Hegemony to Social Hegemony
The third critical feature of the bourgeois revolutions was their outcome: the construction of a social order in which the bourgeoisie was hegemonic, not merely dominant. What this means is that, just as it did during the antifeudal mobilization, capital maintains its power by relying more on consent than on coercion. We move now from hegemony as a characteristic of a political movement to hegemony as a means of social integration.
In his discussion of how the bourgeoisie secures popular consent to its rule, Guha returns to the language of representation: the dominant class secures its power by “representing all of the will of the people.”27 So, the achievement of the British and French bourgeoisie was that it anchored its rule not on coercion or force, but on its willingness to represent wider social interests. In this way, it embarked on the creation of an entirely new political community, unlike anything witnessed before the advent of bourgeois rule. The bourgeoisie created a new political nation, based on universal principles and issuing from its universalizing drive.
While this characterization of the new political order does describe its functional form, it does not tell us much about the institutional mechanisms through which hegemony is reproduced. If the new ruling class committed itself to the represention of wider social interests, there must have been an institutional matrix through which it achieved this end. Unfortunately, Guha does not identify the institutional supports of hegemony in the new order. We must resort, therefore, to a more interpretive strategy, pulling together his scattered remarks on the matter.
As discussed above, Guha often describes hegemony as the ability to “speak for all of society” or to “represent the will of the people.” What he seems to have in mind as the specific embodiment of this principle is that of liberalism, political and economic, both as a set of institutions and as the language of political contestation. Capital gains its legitimacy, its ability to speak for the nation, by opening a space for subaltern groups to articulate and pursue their interests—albeit within the limits of bourgeois property relations. The basic rights and freedoms associated with liberalism and political democracy are the means by which they achieve these ends. The formal freedoms associated with liberal democracy greatly expand the scope of political practice for the laboring classes. Moreover, in allowing for new political practices, they also create an entirely new political idiom. This means that the institutions of liberalism are not the only factor in the building of hegemony. The bourgeoisie also enables the creation of a new discursive form, what Guha calls a “political idiom,” through which interests are expressed by social actors. This idiom is that of rights, liberties, equality, universal principles. The political actualization of rights, freedoms,and the rule of law thus brings social classes into one encompassing political order and becomes the basis of a new political discourse.28
The significance of the bourgeois revolutions, then, was that they embodied the universalizing tendency of capital. This tendency initially took shape as a broad, antifeudal social coalition led by the bourgeoisie and became a new liberal political order based on universal rights and formal equality. In so doing, it created, for the first time, an encompassing political community that brought together dominant and subaltern classes into the same political domain. This was, for Guha, the historic achievement of the British and French bourgeoisie. As was said above, it set the standard against which the performance of colonial and national capital in India is measured.
Having examined the significance of capital’s universalizing drive in Europe, we now turn to its frustration in modern India.
2.5 UNIVERSALIZATION ABANDONED: CAPITAL’S COLONIAL VENTURE
Two forms of capital are relevant for understanding Indian political evolution: the capital that rested in European hands during the years of British rule, and the capital that belonged to Indian entrepreneurs. The very presence of these two forms—the fact that they successfully reproduced themselves over the course of two centuries and even swelled enormously in scale—might suggest that the universalizing tendency did materialize in the Subcontinent. But Guha resists any such conclusion. While capital did migrate to the Indian Subcontinent, it did not instantiate its universalism in the relevant way. What Guha has in mind is the political and cultural transformation that was unleashed in Europe. Judged by this standard, he announces, both groups failed. Neither segment of the class had any inclination to play the transformative role of their counterparts in early modern Europe. Hence, “the universalist project we have been discussing hurtled itself against an insuperable