Inder Marwah’s new book challenges political theorists who have been involved in uncovering colonial processes and logics, as well as delving into the difficulties of achieving decolonization. In today’s scholarly climate, liberal political theorists and critics of liberalism frequently talk past one another, so in some respects it is quite a pleasant shock that Inder Marwah’s Liberalism, Diversity and Domination works so hard to speak across this particular divide. Marwah wants both groups to reconsider the relation of liberal thought and diversity. He does not ignore or excuse the many problems that scholars such as Uday Mehta, Jennifer Pitts, Jeanne Morefield, Sankar Muthu, and many others have uncovered in the liberal political tradition. Indeed, if there is a way of capturing the spirit of Marwah’s argument, it might be the word “nonetheless.”

There are two audiences that Marwah is writing for in this careful, articulate volume. The first is liberals who have moved away from John Stuart Mill and have realigned themselves under Immanuel Kant’s star; the second is critics of liberalism for its shortcomings surrounding gender and race. Marwah wants to convince both camps to reconsider the value of Mill. He admits, “Mill is no longer the wellspring of moral, political, normative or institutional insight to which liberals turn in navigating ethical and political dilemmas” (p. 3). Conversely, “since 1971, Kant’s stature in liberal political theory has become virtually hegemonic” (p. 3). In response to this shift, Marwah’s second and third chapters engage in an extensive consideration of Kant’s theory in relation to human diversity: they uncover a stadial theory of development within it, thereby challenging neo-Kantians. In effect, Marwah shows that women must subordinate their own interests to provide the spur to male self-improvement. The more asymmetrical gender relations are, Kant argues, the more the male capacity for morality is developed. “‘The female sex,’ as Kant most succinctly captures it, ‘is for the cultivation of the male sex’” (quoted on p. 89). How about that as a statement of means/ends rationality? In making this move, Marwah shows that, contrary to many contemporary interpretations, domination is an essential element in Kant’s scheme for the perfection of moral capacity; therefore, Marwah wants liberal political theorists to question their newfound allegiance to him.

Next, he wants them to rediscover the neglected tools that rest within Mill’s thought. The fourth and fifth chapters are dedicated to his resuscitation. Marwah admits that Mill did initially share in his father’s more schematic and overtly racist understanding of the relationship between British and Indian citizens. However, Mill’s mental breakdown led him to reject his father’s frameworks. The younger Mill discovered that, contra his educational upbringing at the hands of his father and Jeremy Bentham, human beings were more than mere bundles of rational thought and that relationships, culture, and feelings also needed to be taken into account. J. S. Mill nursed himself back to mental health through a steady diet of British romantic poetry, and Marwah explains that the rest of his life’s work can be understood as pursuing a grand synthesis between romanticism and empiricism.

It is in chapter 3, “Democratic Character and the Affective Grounds of Politics,” that Marwah makes his strongest arguments for Mill. Marwah argues that race plays no significant role in Mill’s later work, particularly in his understanding of the moral capacity for self-rule. Mill was also a well-known champion of the rights of workers and women to participate in politics. Marwah argues that Mill acknowledges the possibility that people with more and less rational capacity can exist in any society, regardless of racial composition. Take Mill’s description of the proclivity of the unformed masses in Considerations on Representative Government, regardless of the society in which they are found: “they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty…a people may be unwilling or unable to fulfill the duties which a particular government requires of them” (quoted at p. 139). In situations such as this, representative government exacerbates the pathologies of self-interested and short-sighted citizens by enabling them to destroy their own democratic institutions.

I must confess I had just put down an account of the most recent British general election when I read this chapter. Boris Johnson is such a buffoon that he hid in a freezer to avoid an interview in the closing days of the campaign. I am not sure he need have bothered, as what political figures do and say seems to hold no sway on the way citizens behave. Take your pick whether we are witnessing groups of voters engaging in magical thinking or just purely self-destructive impulses. But I had to give Marwah and Mill some credit for prescience in light of recent voting behavior. As Marwah puts it, “A citizenry that cares little about institutions of law, that fails to stop crimes when they see them performed, that is unmotivated to learn about political representatives, and that is generally indifferent to public life cannot, he [Mill] argues, maintain a democratic state” (p. 139). Amen.

This does not mean, however, that I am going to adopt Mill as one of my guiding lights, and let me explain why. In his chapter, “Complicating Civilization and Barbarism,” Marwah tries to disentangle Mill’s ideas about what it takes to maintain a democratic structure from his ideas about civilization and barbarism. Marwah points out that ultimately Mill did not see the two terms as a stark binary: “barbarians” lurked within civilization, and “civilized” elements lurked within even barbarous individuals. To say that this is a tool of measurement that can be applied within and between populations and even individuals does not fundamentally change the overarching dynamic, however. For example, it is hard not to think that part of the complacence of large segments of the contemporary British and US voting populations might originate from their sense of superiority. They assume that their systems stand as beacons to the rest of the world and that the rule of law is so well established within their borders that lawbreaking by their elected officials is a mere detail. The language of civilization is an inherently comparative one, and it has been used to claim morality and capacity where they do not exist, and to obscure them where they have existed for centuries through a vast array of lenses, including gender, class, religion, race, language, and nation. The term itself contributes to the miseducation of citizens. Ultimately, Mill’s thought does not escape the traps of “civilization,” and Marwah’s resuscitation of Mill’s thinking meets its upper limit here.

Nonetheless, this book, largely about Kant and Mill, should manage to interest and inform the most reticent of readers. It deserves a wide readership because it wrestles with the realities of domination and power. Mill’s descriptions of representative government gone bad resonate and seem particularly valuable at this historic juncture. Mill may offer the correct diagnosis of the ill; however, it could be that Millian liberalism—just as Marxism has so long been accused of—provides better tools for critique than remediation.