The book is a collection of seven lectures divided into two parts. Chapters 1 to 3 make up the first part and are lectures given in November of 2001, at Columbia University. They establish the books key concern, which is unearthing the extent to which governmentality is both a key operational feature of modern optical state and simultaneously neglected aspect within political thought and study. The extent of this assertion comes across in the differentiation of civil and political society.
The objective of the book is both show and tell. Political society, as being different from civil society, is a real existent community, that is a result of a liberal state, just as much as the category of citizen. The struggle for showing it is linked to the struggle of mobilizing it (political society) as a feasible concept that can use political scrutiny. The absence of the concept and the effects of such an absence is a major topic of the book.
To be sure, the reason for such an overlooking is not merely placed as theoretical or critical oversite. Rather the problem is located within a reading of history rather than political theory. As Chatterjee notes in the first and second chapters where the question of political mobilization is addressed, the Wests implementation of governance tactics such as in the case of welfare, came into the modern nation-states framework, only after the formulation of civil rights and citizenship. In the case of the global south and it's colonized history, governmentality were the first aspects of the nation-state that were introduced. Thus Democracy's history is of more use to Chatterjee's analysis than its political philosophy. History is key to the whole text, as each lecture, and hence each chapter addresses a particular case. The first section often deals with particular thinkers and the historical significance of their ideas. The second section deals with cases where the political societies within particular state localities interact with global trends of market and politics. History as a key analytical feature that Chatterjee uses, keeps the case's social significance intact. What this also does is change the nature of the argument. The histories make the mainstream political discussion, with its insistence on civil society alone, flawed. But not through contradictory argument, in implication, the 'show'. The 'tell' is thus becomes a suggestion, the analytical emphases on political society become a negative argument for civil societies and it's demographic capabilities.
