This impressive book draws on meticulous research and brings care and imagination to its interpretation. The principal chapters will be a valuable resource for political theorists concerned with Kant, Mill and the themes of empire and diversity.
The discussion of Kant clarifies the problematic relationship between what we may term the anthropological and the ethical dimensions of his thought, drawing on and extending Christine Korsgaard's distinction between incentive and principle (34) and showing how the two can be brought together in a developmental frame. Discussion of Kant continues with an account of the ways in which his antique and disturbing racial theory plays into his account of development. Marwah weighs forcefully into the ongoing debate between those scholars who see Kant's racial theory and those who see his anti-colonialism as more central to his political philosophy, and he gives reasons for favouring the former view.
Interestingly, both Kant and Mill could be seen as developmentalists with a cosmopolitan terminus, but Marwah distinguishes quite sharply between their respective projects. Mill's cosmopolitan terminus, he argues, is less exclusionary, more open to cultural diversity and more attractively fallibilist than is Kant's. The discussion of Mill draws upon admirably comprehensive and detailed research and certainly provides a more than adequate response to the obtuse remark about Mill that Marwah says on page 1 provoked his book.
After the discussions of Kant and Mill, there is something of a change in discursive register, as the book opens up into more recent political theory. Here, of course, it becomes more necessary than before to rely on secondary sources regarding liberalism's complicity in empire and, it is added, regarding the complicity of the Enlightenment and the West more generally. The author maintains a sane balance, despite the fact that many of the views discussed have been arrived at in a somewhat more frictionless way than his own. The book argues that despite these wide-ranging sources of critique, a “Millian” view remains viable and even attractive.
That conclusion may be weakened rather than strengthened by the critique of “Kantian” liberalism that follows. John Rawls, of course, is the target, but he is represented here not in his own voice but by way of hostile critics’ views, and more uncommitted readers may be left wondering why Rawls, who after all celebrates the diversity of goods and warns us about the “burdens of judgment,” could not equally well be classed—if we were somehow obliged to choose—as a Millian fallibilist rather than a Kantian. The critique of Rawls then rather quickly broadens into very brief critiques of contractualism and ideal theory in general, but at this point we have gone beyond what can compellingly be claimed on the basis of this book's own fine research.
A strength of this book is its demonstration that, contrary to much recent theorizing, it is mistaken to think of liberalism (or any -ism) as a thing (234) that particular theorists instantiate. It is a category into which we place people; or if, sometimes, they place themselves within it, they occupy it only selectively and nonexclusively—if, that is, they have anything to say that merits our attention. Despite Marwah's efforts, the familiar chosiste view recurs on the back cover of the book: it is hard to believe that any reader could still believe that what Kant or Mill said would tell us anything, either way, about liberalism's potential. But authors cannot be held responsible for their publisher's choice of blurb material, and they should be given credit for their originality rather than their conformity to expectations.
