Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill, and the Government of Difference presents a brilliant reconstruction of two canonical thinkers’ views on racial and cultural diversity, providing a definitive account of the role of anthropology in Kant's system of morality and mining understudied dimensions of Mill's corpus for an account of politics that is culturally pluralist and open to revisiting its own presuppositions. This reconstruction shows that Kant, the thinker who has been repeatedly enlisted to theorize justice by political philosophers, offers a system that is ill fitted to incorporate difference in egalitarian terms and that Mill, while rightly chastised for his hierarchical views of non-Europeans and his own material involvement in colonialism through the British East India Company, is a thinker whose notion of progress is “contingent, context-dependent, and unpredictable” (p. 208), lending itself to politics that welcome cultural difference and are less likely to be seduced by certainties of superiority.
Despite the highly complex arguments sustained in this book, Marwah's prose is thoroughly readable and rewarding, be it through the masterful piecing together of the anthropological dimensions of Kant's morality – scattered in his essays, lectures, and critical writings – or the careful genealogy of the substantive transformations in Mill's thought, away from the narrow utilitarianism of his father and toward an account of habituation more alert to failure, difference, and education.
The introduction sets up the rationale for the comparative account of Kant and Mill and the two literatures that the book addresses. Vis-à-vis contemporary analytical work on global justice, Marwah aims to show that Kant's well-entrenched influence in this literature, particularly due to his moral universalism and explicit opposition to colonialism, should be systematically rethought based on his problematic developmental account of character formation, which Kant finds to be curtailed by certain natural predispositions of women and non-whites. Despite this literature's dismissal of Mill's thought as narrowly utilitarian and/or entanglements with empire, Marwah argues for his reconsideration as a productive resource to navigate present-day cultural pluralism (p. 3). The second interlocutor of the book is the postcolonial literature on empire. About this literature, Marwah contends that more complicated accounts of liberalism – which his exegetical analysis proves – could complement and correct the overly homogeneous accounts of liberalism and its connections to domination currently provided.
Chapters 2 and 3 cover Kant's account of character, developing a more comprehensive view of Kant's liberalism that considers the subjective dimensions of moral and political life introduced in his teleological writings on anthropology, education, politics, and history. These reveal that affect, habituation, and culture are central to Kantian ethics, and that their omission misrepresents it (p. 58). For Kant, bridging the gap between what we are and what we aim to be requires demanding conditions of realization involving pedagogy, civilizing influences, and republican institutions (p. 59). These conditions notwithstanding, racial difference and gender pose hard limits to moral development, even though they are functionally conducive to the realization of these ends (pp. 109–10).
Chapters 4 and 5 turn to Mill and to criticizing portrayals of his liberalism as closed to human difference, an account that misses Mill's “expansive writings on national character, human development, and political life” (p. 126). Unlike Kant's exclusionary anthropology, Mill's account of citizens’ acculturation does not demarcate “democratically capable societies from uncivilized ones” based on citizens’ cognitive abilities (p. 129). Instead, Marwah argues, Mill develops an account of democratic character and the institutions that fuel “acculturation to the habitus of democratic life.” Importantly, Mill's associationist moral psychology amends his utilitarianism's argumentative deficits, showing that social virtues like politeness, sociability, cooperation, and care for others, initially pursued for our own selfish ends, eventually become fixed in our habits as virtues that are deemed pleasurable, and thus become part of individuals’ happiness, rather than mere means to it (pp. 157–58). Chapter 5 ties this framework to Mill's accounts of historical evolution, social progress and civilization, which Marwah finds “keenly attuned to the vast differences between peoples, to the contingencies and unevenness of historical progress and to the pathological features of civilized societies” (p. 175). This chapter also contains an account of Mill's romanticism and his trenchant critique of his father's and Jeremy Bentham's moral and political theories. Turning away from James Mill's faith in the historical rationalization of humanity, Mill describes cultures as sedimented custom and tradition that shape the character and institutions of human societies, a vision that grounds a variable and culturally differentiated account of social development (p. 189). This account requires a critique of James Mill's exclusively self-interested account of action (in contrast with J. S. Mill's associationist framework) and a critique of Enlightenment philosophers’ parochialism and the attendant ahistorical accounts of European idiosyncrasies as universal (p. 189).
Chapter 6 returns to Marwah's twin interlocutors to right the wrongful dismissal of Mill's cultural pluralism and democratic habituation and warn of the problematic exclusions in Kant's trajectory to moral personhood, while resisting oversimplifying accounts of the boundedness between liberalism and empire and/or domination. This latter task Marwah accomplishes in a sympathetic yet critical dialogue with the postcolonial literature on liberalism and empire. He suggests refining the critical lens to consider how political theory can productively and inclusively theorize human difference, including by mining the liberal tradition. This entails recognizing the manifold roles of liberalism, including its role in advancing political emancipation in colonial settings (pp. 230–33) or animating contemporary theorization in creative ways that do not reduce liberalism to any of its historical forms, but take it as an unfixed resource, ready to take new shapes and occupy new realms (pp. 234–35).
The trajectory in the thought of Kant and Mill that Marwah traces in the book is nothing short of impressive: he brings disparate texts to bear on well-treaded interpretations of two widely read thinkers, upends conventional accounts of them, and debunks the presumed affinity of Kant with contemporary progressive projects while elevating Mill as a promising antifoundational thinker to consider the politics of cultural difference untethered by parochialism and teleologies of universal history (pp. 208–9, 237). Yet when addressing liberal political theory – one of the book's interlocutors – the examination of Rawlsian liberalism falls short of the promise to examine the “legacies, traces and ongoing implications” of these thinkers “in contemporary politics and political thought” (p. 7). In this examination, the legacies of Kant in Rawls and, to a lesser extent, Rawlsians are scrutinized, but this analysis is not paired with an equivalent Millian counterpoint or an effort to elucidate how his pluralist framework could amend or surpass Rawls's in its ability to face the vast divides over race, gender, and other difference markers that pervade contemporary politics. The almost exclusive focus on Rawls/ian ideal theorizing is understandable given the scholarly moment in which the book was conceived and written, in which A Theory of Justice was hegemonic and targeted by critiques of its unwelcoming stance toward marginalized citizens’ claims for justice (pp. 241–42).
But even within the Rawlsian conversation, the Kant whom Marwah deconstructs in the first half of the book is not the Kant who reappears in conversation with the Rawlsian liberals he identifies as “unreceptive to marginalized citizens’ often ‘heteronomous’ claims for justice.” In fact, despite or in addition to being racist, Kant criticized Europeans’ standards partly due to the barbarism of colonial wars, which habituated them away from moral subjectivity. This raises a productive contrast with Rawls’ idealism about western societies, which is coupled and causally connected with the more confident western paternalism of the analytic tradition of global justice. Kant's racist anthropology made sense of the distance between the barbarian ways of Europeans he observed and the world of morality they had to reach, but analytic neo-Kantians are less wary of positioning the west atop the scale of democratic governance.
Marwah's invocation of Charles Mills's ideological critique of ideal theory can further this point (pp. 244–45). If Mills's claims are about the location from which white male philosophers theorize the question of injustice (a privileged upbringing and professional life spent reading Kant and Mill rather than W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon), would similarly situated philosophers armed with a Millian framework do any better? In other words, is the mere treatment of cultural diversity in Mill without complementary accounts of colonial injustice by anti-colonial thinkers sufficient? Or is it that they simply cannot do better without incorporating the insights of consciousness raising feminism and Black feminists’ accounts of the entwined character of property, gender, and kinship during slavery? If so, then, why read Mill to counter Kant, if we can read Claudia Jones, or Hortense Spillers? Differently put, Marwah's history of political thought is closer to Dipesh Chakravarty's H1 than H2 (pp. 179–80). By this I mean that while Marwah uncovers a Millian liberalism that helps us consider the claims of culture, this liberalism is not “interrupted” by non-westerners whose critique of progress may be better attuned to the harms of imperialism.
This relates to one further point regarding the limits of the Millian liberalism proposed in the book. First, Mill's critique of liberal democracy is strong and potentially an important piece of how we should think about positive democratic freedom in times of crisis. However, he appears less interested in thinking about the imperial and the global as it relates to liberal democracy, which makes his juxtaposition with the postcolonial scholars primarily concerned with empire whom Marwah critiques somewhat unsatisfactory. While successfully making the less expansive point that the liberal tradition is diverse and able to conceptualize difference (against apolitical accounts of empire, modernity, and the west in certain strands of the postcolonial literature), Marwah's reconstruction of Mill still does not provide enough tools with which to think the world of empire and its overcoming. Mill's discussion of “collective despotism” (p. 195), for example, appears concerned with democratic ills that are properly domestic, rather than with how liberal democracies in the West operate despotically toward the non-West, as Du Bois would do in his work (Du Bois “The African Roots of War,” 1915 and Valdez, “Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination,” forthcoming). Moreover, the examples of comparison of “unchecked” European forms of government with the despotism of China are less concerned with global relations of domination than with issuing warning signs to European countries by comparing them with countries that he would have expected everyone agreed in finding uncivilized. I have a similar reaction to his mention of Spain and Portugal as examples of decline due to the Holy Inquisition and “mental slavery” (p. 198). Both of these examples have affinities with Kant's comparison of European powers with uncivilized peoples, and with Kant's own negative assessment of Southern Europe in his anthropology. While I am persuaded that there is a rejection of Europe as the template that Kant posits it to be, I am less confident that Mill is the proper counter to the lack of historical and political nuance in the treatment of empire. In other words, while Mill seems concerned with European states self-sabotaging their material progress and the public-mindedness of their democracies through an “unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit,” and the exercise of “power without knowledge” (pp. 194–95), he is less keen to explore how the excessive wealth and associated moral deficits that follow are also connected to the violent imperialism through which the wealth was obtained. In this sense, the Kantian critique of the degeneration that colonial conflict brought to both European mores and political institutions diagnosed European colonial violence better than Mill, even if the critique was embedded in a misguided belief in the ultimate redeemability of the European project.
These remarks do not diminish the erudition and care with which Liberalism, Diversity, and Domination succeeds in its core goal: to highlight the diversity of western liberal thought by approaching Kant and Mill's complex accounts of character, habituation, and cultural and racial difference. The array of questions that Marwah's book motivates speaks instead to the ambition of this work, which should become required reading for Kant and Mills scholars, liberal theorists of justice, and postcolonial approaches interested in the variety of the liberal tradition and its potential openings toward difference.
