Orphan Paradox

Dinesh Sharma provides a psycho-historical analysis of Indian democratic leaders and US democratic leaders to untangle how Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic data assumptions apply not only to psychological sciences but to most of the Western social sciences as well. As democratic institutions around the world come under threat, it is useful to compare the founders of the oldest constitutional democracy, the United States, with the largest populace democracy, India, to examine what the future of democratic societies may hold. Sharma compares the founding fathers of America, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison with their Indian counterparts, namely Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar. While the struggle to build democratic institutions is a constant theme in the lives and works of these men over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cultural and historical contexts of their life narratives offer a critique not only of democracy, but how to better understand leadership across cultures and histories in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world.