In Liberalism, Diversity and Domination, Inder Marwah addresses, and addresses well, the important issue of liberalism's openness to difference. The book offers a qualified defense of liberalism by arguing that there are distinct varieties of liberalism and some are more open to difference than is often thought. In particular, Marwah argues for a form of liberalism inspired by (but not identical to) the thought of John Stuart Mill (“Millian liberalism”), which he contrasts with the Kantian liberalism he sees as currently dominant. The book's approach is notable. It engages with current debates on liberalism and difference in the literature on liberalism and postcolonialism, but turns to the history of political thought, specifically Kant and Mill, to shed new light on this issue. The concern with any book that draws on such a diversity of areas is that it will rely on potted interpretations and caricatures to cover its broad subject matter. This is emphatically not the case here. The book goes far beyond the familiar confines of Kant's Groundwork and Critiques and Mill's On Liberty and Utilitarianism to engage deeply and comprehensively with each thinker.

In the book's first chapter, Marwah introduces the central conceptual move in his argument. Given the imperialist actions and comments of liberal countries and thinkers (including Kant and Mill), he notes that one can see the relationship between liberalism and exclusion as (1) inherent and unremediable (the postcolonialist view); or (2) historically contingent and incidental (Rawls and Habermas); or, and this is Marwah's own view, (3) there are distinct visions of liberalism with different conceptual frameworks and these frameworks will make each liberalism more or less open to difference. Even if a particular liberal thinker makes exclusionary comments, the question is whether exclusion plays a central role in that thinker's conceptual framework. Marwah goes on to argue that exclusion is fundamentally embedded in Kant's theoretical framework but not in Mill's. Each thinker’s account of societal development proves pivotal in determining this.

The next four chapters make up the bulk of the book and offer detailed discussion of Kant and Mill, with two chapters dedicated to each thinker. The exposition of Kant focuses on his approach to moral formation, which, unlike the transcendental arguments of the Groundwork and similar works, is highly empirical (Kant's “impure ethics”). Marwah focuses not on the well-known works of the critical period but on postcritical works on anthropology, religion, and ethics. Marwah argues that Kant provides an account of human development that is teleological, with the aim being rational perfection (101). Kant famously makes comments on women and some non-European groups that permanently exclude them from full attainment of this aim. Marwah contends that these comments are not incidental but dovetail with Kant's account of development and concludes that exclusion is fundamental to Kant's liberalism.

Marwah's discussion of Mill focuses on his account of character. Drawing on a wide variety of Mill's works, Marwah argues that his account of character formation and development goes beyond the cognitive aspects of politics and pays much attention to the affective. Furthermore, this character is highly influenced by cultural and institutional conditions and biology plays little role in its formation. Although acknowledging the arguments and evidence for Mill's imperialism, Marwah contends that Mill offers a pluralistic conception of development (202). Mill often speaks of “civilization” but, for him, civilization is not a simple civilized/not-civilized dichotomy (he sees many European countries as deficient in civilization) but a multifaceted and disaggregated phenomenon with multiple pathways for development. This account of development is not teleological but sociological, fallible, and open-ended.

In the book's final substantive chapter, Marwah turns to current political theory. He provides a critique of the postcolonial charge that liberalism is inherently hostile to difference, drawing on the variety within the liberal tradition, and also describes his own Mill-inspired interpretation of liberalism (Millian liberalism). Shorn of Mill's parochial comments on non-Europeans, Millian liberalism offers a vision of human politics and development that is open-ended and fallible and sees value in difference. In contrast, Kantian liberalism, exemplified above all by Rawls, tolerates difference but sees justice as abstract from social realities and attaches little inherent value to difference (244).

This is an ambitious book that draws from a variety of disciplines. Since the book covers so much ground, subject experts will no doubt find areas to disagree with or where they would have liked to see more detail (the literature on the relationship between Kant's transcendental ethics and his empirical ethics is an interpretive minefield, and Marwah recognizes that his approach is, at least currently, a minority one [29n15]). I will focus on what I see to be the book's central aim: defending liberalism against the charge of inherent hostility to difference and offering Millian liberalism as a viable vision of liberalism. It is notable that only one chapter, the shortest substantive chapter in the book, directly engages with the current debates on these issues. In contrast with the rest of the book, the argument here is less detailed and, at times, is not firmly connected to earlier arguments (the critique of Kantian liberalism draws very little on the detailed interpretation of Kant offered earlier in the book). More detail here would have been beneficial.

On Mill himself, I am not certain that his developmentalism is as non-convergent and open-ended as the book claims. At times, Mill makes comments to the exact opposite effect. In On Liberty, he states that debate on fundamental issues will not be unending but rather unity is desirable and “as mankind improve, the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase” (Collected Works, 18:250). If unity is Mill's aim, if only in some distant future, then difference may not have the inherent value to him that the book contends it has. The larger context for the above comment is, I believe, that Mill's break with Comte and his approach to history may be less complete than Marwah suggests. Mill's inverse deductive method receives ample praise in the book (14), but Mill's Autobiography makes clear this is something he learned from Comte (Collected Works, 1:219). More engagement with the literature on the Mill-Comte relation, one example being Frederick Rosen's Mill (Oxford University Press, 2013), would have been fruitful.

Marwah's detailed historical treatment of Kant and Mill clearly demonstrates there is substantial variation within liberalism on the question of difference, and this is perhaps the greatest evidence the book presents against any attempt to argue that liberalism, as a whole, is hostile to difference. Such a claim would be reductive. Throughout the book, Marwah takes a sympathetic tone towards the postcolonial literature, and the contributions of this literature must be noted, but this tone should not distract from the fact that the book's argument, if correct, is a fundamental challenge to central claims of this literature. This is a highly important debate and this carefully researched and well-crafted work is a worthy contribution to it. It is worth the investment of time for anyone interested in liberalism, its history, and its relation to difference.