The interrelation between the state, civil society and more recently, political society, notwithstanding the differences over what constitutes each of the domains, has singularly emerged as the most significant area of study in comprehending the process of democratization. Post the East European debacle, civil society has for long been projected and trusted as an all-encompassing panacea for most of the problems plaguing the developing societies. It is an imaginary political entity that is carved out to stand for various values that are actively pursued through varied institutions. Civil society has become a kind of ‘aspirational shorthand’ for the ideas/values of equity, deepening participation, public fairness, individual rights, tolerance, trust, legality, cooperation and informed citizenry (Elliot 2004). These ideals are fostered and protected by voluntary associational activity occurring independently or ‘outside’ of the state, including in wide-ranging associations or institutions such as clubs, religious bodies, sabhas and samajs, unions, professional associations, community action groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), media agencies, research institutes and youth organizations to name a few (ibid.). Civil society, therefore, seemed like a radical alternative in state-regulated societies. However, after the initial euphoria died out, scholars began to raise serious doubts about the scope and nature of the autonomy of civil society and its implications for the process of democratization. For instance, the emphasis on trust (one of the most significant markers of a civil society) in situations of marked inequality not only offers a false promise to the poor but also robs them of their right to struggle and protest (Edwards 2000).

The surface of the earth being partly formed by water and partly by land, and the organization of all living beings standing in close relation to the one or the other of these mediums, it is in the nature of things that no single species, either of animals or plants, should be uniformly distributed over the whole globe. Yet there are some types of the animal as well as of the vegetable kingdom which are equably distributed over the whole surface of the land, and others which are as widely scattered in the sea, while others are limited to some continent or some ocean, to some particular province, to some lake, nay, to some very limited spot of the earth' surface.

As far as the primary divisions of animals are concerned, and the nature of the medium to which they are adapted does not interfere, representatives of the four great branches of the animal kingdom are everywhere found together. Radiata, Mollusks, Articulata, and Vertebrata occur together in every part of the ocean, in the Arctics, as well as under the equator, and near the southern pole as far as man has penetrated; every bay, every inlet, every shoal is haunted by them. So universal is this association, not only at present but in all past geological ages, that I consider it as a sufficient reason to expect that fishes will be found in those few fossiliferous beds of the Silurian System in which thus far they have not yet been found.

Although the discoveries of Oersted, Arago, Faraday, and others, have placed the intimate connection of electricity and magnetism in a most striking point of view, and although the theory of Ampere has referred all the phenomena of both these departments of science to the same general laws, yet until lately one thing remained to be proved by experiment, in order more fully to establish their identity; namely, the possibility of producing electrical effects from magnetism. It is well known that surprising magnetic results can readily be obtained from electricity, and at first sight it might be supposed that electrical effects could with equal facility be produced from magnetism; but such has not been found to be the case, for although the experiment has often been attempted it has nearly as often failed.

It early occurred to me, that if galvanic magnets, on my plan, were substituted for ordinary magnets, in researches of this kind, more success might be expected. Besides their great power, these magnets possess other properties, which render them important instruments in the hands of the experimenter; their polarity can be instantaneously reversed, and their magnetism suddenly destroyed or called into full action, according as the occasion may require. With this view, I commenced, last August, the construction of a much larger galvanic magnet than, to my knowledge, had before been attempted, and also made preparations for a series of experiments with it on a large scale, in reference to the production of electricity from magnetism.

1. THE Erythronium albidum of Nuttall is a common plant near Lexington, where it is called Lambs-tongue. The root or bulb is used against the Scrophula [sic], being stewed with milk or cream, and applied to the scrophulous [sic] sores, which it will cure. The yellow flowered species or Erythronium luteum, has probably the same property. – Communicated by Mr. Crockett, a medical student.

2. The Bear-grass is not a grass; but a fine rare plant peculiar to the western states, the Helonias angustifolia of Michaux, which I have ascertained to be different from Helonias and called Cyanotris pratensis. Its bulb or root is employed in Kentucky and near Lexington for the cure of the Inflamed Breast: it is mashed and applied to the part as a poultice – Communicated by Mr. Crockett.

3. The Helenium autumnale is called Sneezeweed in Kentucky, owing to its strong sternutory [sic] properties. If the flowers are dried and snuffed, they will occasion a strong fit of sneezing.

4. The root and leaves of the Evonymus atropurpureus, which are called Arrow-wood or Wahoon in Kentucky, are used with efficiency in the Influenza, Cough, Colds &c. in the shape of tea or decoction.

5. Dr. Samuel Brown having procured and shown me the plant which is said to occasion in Kentucky the Milk Fever, I have ascertained that it is the Euphorbia peploides (E. peplus of Pursh, not Lenneus) which is not uncommon on the cliffs and rocky situations in Kentucky. When eaten by cows through chance, it gives them a fever, and their milk becomes poisonous, producing the milk fever in those who drink it.

6. Many plants are called Gentian in Kentucky and used as succedanea of the foreign Gentian; they are Triosteum major and Tr. minor, Sabatia angularis, Gentiana amarelloides, and several other species of this last genus.

7. The root of the large Plantain, Plantago major, has lately been recommended in Europe as a good febrifuge.

8. The Water Horehound, or Lycopus virginicas, has lately been discovered to be an excellent remedy in Hemoptysis or spitting of blood. It is used in decoction or tea-like.

Introduction

The state of Kerala, located in the extreme southwest of the Indian subcontinent, has been an object of social and scientific interest for primarily two reasons. First, Kerala's politics, specifically, the dominance of the communists in the mid-twentieth century, attracted the attention of political scientists, who treated it as a laboratory of communist politics within the broader liberal-parliamentary framework of India (Jeffrey 2003). Secondly, Kerala's remarkable achievements in social development have led to a debate around the ‘Kerala Model’ since the mid-1970s. The state is marked by high literacy rates for both men and women, low birth, death, and infant mortality rates comparable to developed countries, a female-favourable sex ratio, and other positive social features, which are widely accepted to be an outcome of militant politics foregrounding ‘public action’ (Parayil 2000). Historically, the ‘political turbulence’ attributed to mid-twentieth century Kerala was offset by the continuous expansion of state welfare – a combination of policies for food security, land reform, improvements in educational and healthcare facilities, and social security. Under conditions of a strong Left hegemony, welfare was clearly pegged to a notion of people's collective rights as an instrument of upward mobility from poverty. The centrality of ‘public politics’ was unmistakable – the widespread participation of the masses in politics and their functioning as a keen and demanding electorate that drove ‘Kerala politicians to pursue programs in education, land reform and health that foster perceptible improvement in people's lives’ (Jeffrey 2003, 10).

I have been lately requested to determine the distribution of energy in the spectrum of an argand burner, and have been able to do this by means of the apparatus and methods previously employed at the Allegheny observatory for mapping the invisible spectrum of the sun. The results are curious; and, in the hope that they may also be found useful, I desire to communicate them to the academy. The difficulty is such a determination lies in the mapping of something which is wholly invisible; and it has not been made before, I presume, in spite of its economical importance, because there has been no means known of measuring this invisible energy, except in a rough way, by the thermometer or themopile, by a process which gives incomplete results.

It was my object not merely to indicate how much of the radiation from a gas-burner was visible, and how much was not, but to give a map of its distribution on the normal or wave-length scale, which would enable any one to see the quality and amount of the energy in each part of the light and head region.

The ordinary argand burner, burning common house-gas within a glass chimney, was first placed at the centre of the curvature of a large Rowland concave grating; and, but means of the bolometer, the head was measured at successive points in the spectrum down to a wave-length of about.001 mm., where the overlapping second spectrum began to be sensible.

The recent excellent works by Dujardin,1 Diesing,2 and Robin,3 upon animals and vegetable parasites of living animals, render another systematic record of the labors in this field almost superfluous; and the object of the present memoir is simply to give the result of a series of observations, commenced several years ago, upon associated entozoan and entophyta, constituting a flora and fauna within animals.

The existence of entozoan, or of animals living within other species has, from the most remote times, attracted attention, on account of the peculiarity of their position, the unpleasant ideas associated with them, the sufferings they frequently induce, and the difficulty of explaining their mode or origin.

The entozoan have always constituted the strongest support of the doctrine of equivocal or spontaneous generation, one which has found distinguished disciples even to the present time; but since the days when barnacles were supposed to originate from the foam of the ocean, and ducks and geese to be developed from barnacles, this belief has been so weakened by the accumulation of facts, undenied and undeniable by the supporters of the doctrine, that it bids fair soon to be little more than an echo of the past.

The entozoan have always constituted the strongest support of the doctrine of equivocal or spontaneous generation, one which has found distinguished disciples even to the present time; but since the days when barnacles were supposed to originate from the foam of the ocean, and ducks and geese to be developed from barnacles, this belief has been so weakened by the accumulation of facts, undenied and undeniable by the supporters of the doctrine, that it bids fair soon to be little more than an echo of the past.

Ever since the idea was formulated some fifteen years ago, political society as redefined in the context of post-colonial democracy has acquired a life of its own. Scholars who have found the idea useful have retooled it to serve their own purposes. Others have protested that it confuses matters and misleads inquiry, or worse, that it is seriously mistaken in its theoretical grounding. I have regarded all these discussions as extremely gratifying and have, over the years, found myself responding to the debates, learning from my interlocutors and clarifying the idea for better analytical use. The essays collected in this volume are serious engagements with the concept of political society in the theoretical as well as the empirical domains. I greatly appreciate this opportunity to re-examine the concept from so many different angles and to respond, not polemically, but in a spirit of shared intellectual concern, even if it means having to mark out differences in theoretical perspective and political choice.

It may be useful to recall the circumstances in the 1990s when the idea was formulated. It was the time, of course, of the so-called liberalization of the Indian economy, but the intellectual world in India was then far more passionately involved in the debates over secularism. I became associated at the time in some field research in Kolkata on workers in the informal sector and inhabitants of squatter colonies.

Introduction

In a series of essays and a book, Partha Chatterjee has offered a new term for describing, as he puts it, ‘popular politics in most of the world’ (Chatterjee 2004). In order to account for what he deems to be the differences between the First World and Third World democracies, he argues that a fourth category must be added to the conventional tripartite division between the state, civil society and family: the category of ‘political society’. The latter term is designed to adjust the concept of ‘civil society’ to conditions of post-colonial governmentality (Chatterjee 2001, 37). Chatterjee's intervention has spurred much productive debate and discussion among students of development and democracy, and should be applauded for helping us rethink political theory and political anthropology in the twenty-first century. I, however, will argue that the basic proposition underlying his argument is false.

The essential problem with Chatterjee's argument is that he takes what ought to be treated as normative categories – the family, civil society, and the state – and treats them as descriptive categories. In so doing, he reifies the very categories he is critiquing, and fails to recognize them as institutions that people sometimes do and sometimes do not fetishize in their own day-to-day practices. By drawing on ethnographic examples of Balmiki politics in Delhi and street hawker protests in Mumbai, the paper points to the theoretical problems posed by Chatterjee's attempt to conceptualize political society as a demographically and institutionally separate sphere that is outside of civil society.

The origin of the existing distribution of species in this department of zoology deserves attentive consideration. Two great causes are admitted by all, and the important question is, how far the influence of each has extended. The first is, original local creations; the second, migration.

Under the first head, we may refer much that we have already said on the influence of temperature, and the restriction of species to particular temperature regions. It is not doubted that the species have been created in regions for which they are especially fitted; that their fitness for these regions involves an adaptation of structure thereto, and upon this adaptation, their characteristics as species depend. These characteristics are of no climatal origin. They are the impress of the Creator's hand, when the species had their first existence in those regions calculated to respond to their necessities.

The following questions come under this general head:—

1. Have there been local centres of creation, from which groups of species have gone forth by migration?

2. Have genera only and not species, or have species, been repeated by creation in distinct and distant regions?

3. How closely may we recognize in climatal and other physical conditions, the predisposing cause of the existence of specific genera or species?

With regard to the second head, migration, we should remember, that Crustacea are almost wholly maritime or marine; that marine waters are continuous the globe around; and that no sea-shore species in zoology are better fitted than crabs for migration.

The screw is the simplest instrument for converting a uniform motion of rotation into a uniform motion of translation (see “Mechanics,” vol. xv, p. 754). Metal screws requiring no special accuracy are generally cut by taps and dies. A tap is a cylindrical piece of steel having a screw on its exterior with sharp cutting edges; by forcing this with a revolving motion into a hole of the proper size, a screw is cut on its interior forming what is known as a nut or female screw. The die is a nut with sharp cutting edges used to screw upon the outside of round pieces of metal and thus produce male screws. More accurate screws are cut in a lathe by causing the carriage carrying the tool to move uniformly forward, thus a continuous spiral line is cut on the uniformly revolving cylinder fixed between the lathe centres. The cutting tool may be an ordinary form of lathe tool or a revolving saw-like disk (see “Machine Tools,” vol. xv, p. 153).

Errors of Screws. – For scientific purposes the screw must be so regular that it moves forward in its nut exactly the same distance for each given angular rotation around its axis. As the mountings of a screw introduce many errors, the final and exact test of its accuracy can only be made when it is finished and set up for use.

In Partha Chatterjee's idea of political society, we get one of the most original and insightful descriptions of contemporary Indian society and politics. Reading it now makes great sense in terms of how the state deals with the ordinary people of countries like India or even how people deal with the government everyday under a democracy. In spite of its originality and its great merits, I have been uncomfortable with the sense he makes of this idea of political society. At the risk of pre-empting the argument of this essay, I feel, the idea of political society has no future, not in the sense of what we would often be accused of in school or at home, but in the sense of the possibilities of imagining our futures, of utopias – scientific or superstitious; but, more of all that later.

In this essay, I shall do three things. First, I shall critically engage with the Western idea of civil society and enquire into the possibilities of civil society in the non-West; then, I shall critically engage with the concept of political society which Chatterjee advocates, instead of civil society. Finally, I shall try to argue out a case for a civil society suited to our societies and our futures.

The Idea of Civil Society

In a state-of-the-art essay on civil society, Sudipta Kaviraj identifies three contrasts, which help exemplify the meaning of civil society.

There would be, perhaps, very little disagreement if one were to argue that over the last decade or so, civil society has emerged as a ‘hold-all’ concept that has been both an explanatory category as to how some societies are managing their democratic processes as well as a normative category that sets goals in terms of what societies should aspire to be in future in order to claim to be potentially or essentially democratic. However, there would be very substantive disagreement over how civil society as a conceptual tool has fared in terms of explaining ‘realconcrete’ political processes across societies, beginning from the continental to the Oriental parts of the world. Regardless of whether or not civil society had taken shape in Europe and was then ‘exported’ to other parts of the world, in the process, it signifies both the ‘imperialism of categories’ and also thereby seriously mars its potential in explaining the ‘specificities’ of the societies that are non-European. If civil society has shaped, and in turn taken shape through, the institutional and political processes integral to the way democracy works in a country like India, how should one approach this concept?

It is now nearly twelve years since the discussion of that “mystery of mysteries,” the origin of species, was reopened by the publication of the first edition of Mr. Darwin's most remarkable work. Again and again in the history of scientific debate this question had been discussed, and, after exciting a short-lived interest, had been condemned by cautious and conservative thinkers to the limbo of insoluble problems or to the realm of religious mystery. They had, therefore, sufficient grounds, a priori, for anticipating that a similar fate would attend this new revival of the question, and that, in a few years, no more would be heard of the matter; that the same condemnation awaited this movement which had overwhelmed the venturesome speculations of Lamarck and of the author of the “Vestiges of Creation.”

The present number is intended as the integral portion of a publication of no inconsiderable magnitude on the insects of North America.

But little, I might almost say nothing, has yet been done in the United States, in relation to the very interesting and important science upon which this work is intended to treat; while, in other departments of natural history, we have publications honourable to the republic, there is not, as far as I know, in the archives of American science, the record of an indigenous work on this subject.

In Europe, a celebrated writer informs us, the insects, so numerous, so diversified in their characters, in their colouring so elegant and varied, and so singular in their manner, have so much interest under these different relations, that of all the animals, they have been the most observed, the most studied, and are those upon which the labours of naturalists have been the most exercised. But in the United States, entomology, of all the sciences, has been regarded with the least attention by the learned. The attractive charms of natural history have, indeed, with us, allured many votaries; but these, in general, choose those departments for their study of which the knowledge is more readily acquired, and where the labour of initiation is not arduous or protracted. Hence the higher departments of zoology, botany, &c. are more frequently selected, offering as they do more prominent and obvious characters, easily detected by the investigator.

In a letter of July 3d, I informed our late most worthy president that some bones of a very large animal of the clawed kind had been recently discovered within this state, and promised a communication on the subject as soon as we could recover what were still recoverable of them. It is well known that the substratum of the country beyond the Blue Ridge is a limestone, abounding with large caverns, the earthy floors of which are highly impregnated with nitre; and that the inhabitants are in the habit of extracting the nitre from them. In digging the floor of one of these eaves, belonging to Frederic Cromer in the country of Greenbriar, the labourers at the depth of two or three feet, came to some bones, the size and form of which bespoke an animal unknown to them. The nitrous impregnation of the earth together with a small degree of petrification had probably been the means of their preservation. The importance of the discovery was not known to those who made it, yet it excited conversation in the neighbourhood, and led persons of vague curiosity to seek and take away the bones. It was fortunate for science that one of its zealous and well-informed friends, Colonel John Stewart of that neighbourhood, heard of the discovery, and, sensible from their description, that they were of an animal not known, took measure without delay for saving those which still remained.