ABSTRACT This interpretive and genealogical essay argues that B. R. Ambedkar deploys Dewey’s concept of “associated life” in two distinct senses: the sociological and the political. In the former, Ambedkar uses “associated life” to diagnose how caste’s graded hierarchy destroys fraternity, community, and the very conditions for meaningful participation in the public sphere, and suggests ways to transform it. In the latter, Ambedkar transforms associated life into a contractual and power-sharing framework for negotiating coexistence among unequal groups structured by caste and religious cleavages. He employs consociational means, that is, power-sharing self-determination mechanisms for communities as rights-protecting strategies to secure disadvantaged communities the capacity to co-determine the “terms of association.” I show how Ambedkar builds on these two senses to advance a realist, group-protective, and anti-majoritarian democratic theory, what may be called a normative consociationalism, in the service of Deweyan associated life. Through a close analysis of Ambedkar’s writings on franchise, the Communal Award, and the Poona Pact, the paper reconstructs his democratic thought as a historically grounded model for achieving associated life through consociational means. Ambedkar’s vision emerges as a “realism of hope”: an attempt to build the preconditions of democratic fraternity by institutionalizing power-sharing in deeply divided and unequal societies.
Danish Hamid (Fri,) studied this question.