The first two chapters deal with an array of political theory. Besides being where the concepts of political society and civil society are introduced, it key argumentative method expounded here is showing the dislocation of theory and history. This dislocation can also be read like a western trait, as political thinking made in the global south, especially in the case of newly formed independent nation-state India, the incorporation of population groups was written into the state constitution. What must be marked here, is that Chatterjee shows that this incorporation with the date mainframe at the outset does not resolve the differences between the citizen's category and the population's category. This means that make real two types of communities within the logics working state. These working are governmental processes. The combination of the three ideas here, the realness of history over theoretical trend, the realness of systemically created communicates (civil and political), and the realness of governmentality as an aspect of, but different from the democratic procedure are ruminated upon in the third and final chapter. It is taken forward by how state policies and procedures, such electoral practices invoke and mobilize populations. Chatterjee here drawing attention to how such moves are contradictory to the claims and principles of the nation-state, yet its own propagation requires it to uses such moves. In legitimatizing the presence of such a move within statecraft, Chatterjee goes on to legitimize it at the level of national subjects. He takes the examples of the of "People’s Welfare Association" whose formational aim is to legitimize a particular squatter settlement, which inherently an illegal communal category. Chatterjee shows that the claims made by the association are in keeping with the governmental notions of populations, using large swaths of marginal categories to identify themselves (refugees, landless people, day laborers, homestead). However, they use unify these populational categories in claiming to be of a singular community, one family. Populations lack moral status, they are made of subjects whose only deification is the subjecting to a particular category, none of the conditions of populations create a claim to citizenship. However, communities do, as they are moral categories and inherently treat their subjects as value-laden entities claiming district positions. Thus communities have the conditions for citizenship, and here a population is claiming the legal status of a community, through the legitimate avenues of governmental avenues. Chatterjee in the third chapter shows how political society is a means of acknowledging and working with both top-down and bottom-up processes of population mobilization.
The second part of the book takes this argued category and applies it to the situation of globalized mobilization. From terrorist acts, global economic trends, issues of democratic universal values such as secularism, and material development plans, each chapter how's how neoliberal politics though expounding the notions of citizenship consistently mobilizes the category of populations. The key argumentative category in these chapters is the nation. At the level of global trends, nations become both the site of creating populations as well as the device. National history, economic position all becoming tactics in creating and sustaining populations. At the same time creations of such times automatically create communities of the same, sharing the very same tactics that were used in their creation. Chatterjee uses Political Societies to trace the national creation of population and the forming of communities by the same.
What must be emphasized is the book argues for the legitimacy and potential of Political Societies, because of the opposing legitimate status and limitations of civil society. The avenue inhabiting the optimal position within the nation-state, that of citizenship, is unequal in its real condition. Such inequality extends further by maintaining the civil tactics of statecraft and ignoring governmental processes of the same.
