This is an important work, which I highly recommend. Andrew Valls has gathered an impressive collection of essays, primarily from philosophers, each of which examines the place of race in the work of a writer of the modern Western canon. The writers under examination here are Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche. They are all strong, thoughtful essays, and the text as a whole will prove valuable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate philosophy and political theory classes.

Still, with regard to a political science audience, not all of these essays speak easily to the concerns and approaches of political theorists. For example, the idea that a philosopher such as Berkeley is “not a philosophical racist” but is an “ethnocentric” who would welcome “the destruction of Native American cultures insofar as this might aid in the conversion of these people to Christianity,” as William Uzgalis concludes in his essay, might be read by political theorists to be a philosophical distinction without a political difference (p. 123). The same might be said about the distinction between “racialism and racism,” which Valls, drawing from Kwame Anthony Appiah's work, recommends in the Introduction and effectively employs in his piece on Hume: “Racialism” refers to the empirical claim that “there are races that differ in certain characteristics,” and “racism” denotes the moral position that “members of different races are justly treated differently” (p. 7). In reading this collection, one gains a strong sense of the differences between a philosophical notion of race based in ontological and epistemological claims and a political theoretical notion of race concerned with the public construction and articulation of racial identity and inequalities in the formation and maintenance of political communities. These essays lean toward the philosophical take on race, but not entirely, demonstrating the complexities of the issue.

Timothy Reiss's chapter on Descartes does a nice job of dealing with a tough assignment: how to discern the racial views of a philosopher who “named race never and slavery twice” (p. 17). Reiss provides a rich sense of Descartes's intellectual forebears—notably Aristotle, Aquinas, Vitoria, Las Casas, and Bodin—on the question of slavery and the prescient issue of the status of indigenous people in the midst of European colonization. Reiss does more than ask the Nixonian question “what did Descartes know and when did he know it?” He connects context to Cartesianism to show, for example, how Descartes ultimately echoes Aristotle by seeing slavery as still “a civil condition, however appalling” (p. 37). This chapter nicely leads off the collection by offering a preracialization-of-slavery view of modern philosophy and a model for how to bring together historical context and textual analysis. A number of chapters utilize this model to good effect, in particular those by Anthony Bogues on Mill, Robert Bernasconi and Anika Maaza Mann on Locke, and Richard Peterson on Marx.

Bogues's piece does the best job of balancing text with context, set in particular around the fascinating story of Mill's involvement in the fallout and assessment of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. In so doing, Bogues offers an example of the racial coding in modern liberal thought located most notably in the savagery/civilization binary that served as a popular trope for theorists seeking to reconcile their liberal views with their nation's colonial practices. In a similar way, Bernasconi and Mann deftly bring Locke's work on The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina into conversation with the Two Treatises to consider as “evidence of his racism” the “contradiction between the Locke who profited from slavery and the Locke who, as a theorist of natural rights, would be appealed to by opponents of slavery” (p. 90). In the end, among other things, they substantiate Locke's role in and advocacy of racializing slavery. My only significant quibble is that it would have been nice to see the authors consider if Locke's involvement with slavery and his liberalism may not have been contradictory at all, but rather indicative of the mutually constitutive forces shaping an embryonic herrenvolk liberal democracy. Peterson's take on Marx is also subtle in situating him historically, leading to an acute assessment of how Marx's racial “blind spot” limited the possibilities of his work. To Peterson, “Marx's shortsightedness about race is connected to a general failure regarding modern identity and the politics concerned with it” (p. 248), and this failure undermines his theory of class consciousness because racial identities are viewed as epiphenomenal rather than as constructed identities with their own independent power.

Other essays eschew context in favor of close textual readings. A nice example of this is the chapter by Debra Nails on Spinoza, where like Reiss, she is dealing with a thinker who said very little about race. Nails provides an edifying reading of Spinoza's philosophical system, especially his ontology, in which she connects an illustrative take on the right to exist and power of the coffee cup in her hand to an explanation of the right and power of the concept of race(s) to exist. This essay should provoke a fruitful debate between philosophical and political theory understandings of right, power, and race. James Winchester's chapter on Nietzsche is also compelling reading, with a specific focus on the latter's attentiveness to the intricate relationship between physiology and philosophy, and thereby his fascination with the concept of race breeding. On balance, Winchester sees Nietzsche as more of a racialist than a racist. But here we also see an example of how this distinction can ring a little hollow. When interpreting the meaning of Nietzsche's claim that “Negroes are representatives of a prehistoric men who are capable of enduring pain” and his claim that Jews “are the strongest, toughest, purest race living in Europe ‘today’” (pp. 259, 265), Winchester sees this as not fundamentally racist—as not justifying unequal treatment—because to Nietzsche, these were compliments paid to two noble, even racially superior groups. But it is too easy to deny the existence of a racist claim by saying that a writer has referred to a particular group as in some way superior. One only needs to look at the way this construction has worked against indigenous people—that is, “noble savages”—to see that the claim to superiority in one sense, here a philosophical one, can easily undergird and mask a justification for inferior status in another sense, usually a political one.

Due to chronological organization, the essay on Nietzsche closes the collection, but Charles Mills's chapter on Kant would have been a better choice, because Mills utilizes his specific analysis of Kant's racist formulations in order to address his wider concern with the construction of personhood in seemingly universalist modern philosophy more generally. Mills wants us to resist the urge to explain away a claim or exclusion a writer makes about race and instead take them up “as a philosophical challenge” in which we ask, in this case, “how Kant's theory needs to be rethought in the light not merely of his own racism but of a modern world with a normative architecture based on racist Kant-like principles” (p. 190). Cultivating this connection between philosophical approaches and political theory concerns is a goal worth striving for, one which this collection works to foster by advancing our investigation of race in modern thought and provoking interdisciplinary debates on this complicated issue.