Uday Mehta

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Uday Singh Mehta is a political theorist and Professor of Political Science at Amherst College.

Mehta is best known for his two books, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke and Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. The latter book is a powerful reconstruction of the connections between the universalist aspirations of liberal thought and its inherent connection to imperialism. Mehta goes through great lengths, both empirically and theoretically, to demonstrate how liberal assumptions about reason and progress precluded their ability to engage with the "unfamiliarity" of foreign cultures, such as that of India, on their own terms. Counterintuitively, Edmund Burke's prudent disposition and lucid thought about the role of experience is presented as an alternative to the paternalistic colonial ambitions of figures like John Stuart Mill.

Mehta received his Ph.d from Princeton University and he taught at the University of Pennsylvaniabefore his current position at Amherst College .

[edit] External links

• Book description for Liberalism and Empire at University of Chicago Press