I thank Nazmul Sultan for his excellent, eloquent review of my book. I want to offer my response in two parts.

First, Sultan offers astutely observed reasons why studies of anticolonial thought have overlooked self-criticism as expressed by the colonized. I agree with them all and would add that another reason may have to do with the identity of the scholar. A white political theorist may feel more reluctant to publish on how Nguyễn An Ninh saw Vietnamese intellectual culture as deficient and, therefore, shamed his people for it. This is also to say that it is good that new generations of scholars from “non-Western” backgrounds are studying anticolonial thought: they may feel freer to take seriously the self-criticisms of “their people.” Furthermore, related to Sultan’s point about the moralization of the study of anticolonial political thought, political theorists who are politically engaged anticolonialists may feel the need to hide from public view the disagreements and self-admitted weaknesses of oppressed people. Referring to Asians and Africans who attended the 1955 Bandung Conference, Malcolm X explained in a 1963 speech to an audience of Black Americans that any “little spat they had, they’d settle it among themselves, go into a huddle. Don’t let the enemy know that you’ve got a disagreement.” This may be good advice as a political strategy, but it is bad advice as a scholarly commitment if one wants to understand how the colonized made sense of themselves and their world. My book attempts to take self-criticisms among Vietnamese anticolonialists out of their huddle and bring them into the open—partly to correct for a problematic tendency I see in the popular anticolonial imagination to essentialize “Vietnamese anticolonialism” as something teleological, romantic, always united, and always proud.

Second, although I agree with Sultan that my conceptualization of dignity can be deepened, I want to defend my framework of national dignity as something capacious enough to allow us to probe some of the vexing questions that Sultan poses. As Sultan notes, Jeremy Waldron views the notion of human dignity as an “upwards equalization of rank.” But for Waldron, equal ranking is something to be bestowed upon the powerless by the powerful. We can see this in the quote by Waldron that Sultan cites: “We now try to accord to every human being something of the dignity, rank…” The “we” is presumably the powerful people. Waldron would oppose the notion that equal rank and status are things to be fought for and earned by the powerless. Yet the Vietnamese thinkers conclude that it is naïve to believe that dignity (and therefore rights) will be accorded by the powerful. Those who are powerless have no rights, and if they want rights, they must generate their own power. Though troubling, this view is not new and has truth to it. In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza frequently made the same point: one has exactly as much right as one has power. These Vietnamese thinkers sought to generate national power to not only achieve the same sovereignty and status as other nations but also to transform Vietnamese society and, for some, the world.