In this rich and elegantly written book, Sankar Muthu breaks the now-stereotypical association of Enlightenment political thought with an arrogant universalism that was implicitly or explicitly allied to imperialism. He suggests than an important strand of eighteenth-century political thought generated, and was intended to generate, a searching critique of the conquest of the world by European states. Indeed, far from being uniquely aligned with imperialism, eighteenth-century political thought was distinctive for generating such an opposition. Neither the two centuries that preceded it nor the century that followed saw such a systematic stand against imperialism from European philosophers.

Muthu's provocative thesis is that moral universalism did not suffice to ground opposition to empire. Natural rights theory, for instance, proved all too compatible with conquest. But neither did antiimperialism find its roots in a simple embrace of cultural relativism. Instead, the opposition to empire flowed from a subtle blend of universalism and pluralism—from the view that one of the universally shared and morally fundamental human capacities is the capacity for culture creation, and that the cultures thereby created are each, and incommensurably, valuable. This is opposed by not only explicitly racist views but also by accounts of natural human equality that characterize non-European peoples as “natural,” that is, in the state of nature, and therefore presocial and, crucially, precultural.

Muthu's method is to delve deeply into the arguments of a few thinkers. This is not a book about the political project of empire, nor about the political positions of eighteenth-century theorists. The most politically engaged eighteenth-century antiimperialist thinker, Edmund Burke, is hardly mentioned; and the greatest share of the book is devoted to one of the least, Immanuel Kant. This is a book about the philosophical underpinnings of imperialism and antiimperialism, the intellectual and moral rather than the political structure of the eighteenth-century intra-European debate about Europe's conquest of the world. If this move comes as something of a surprise, after so many works about John Locke's involvement with the Carolinas or Burke's work on India and Ireland, it turns out to be a most worthwhile surprise. Enlightenment Against Empire moves beyond accounts of political positions into thoughtful reconstructions and syntheses of arguments, and among its many virtues is to remind us that work in the history of political thought need not be done in an antiphilosophical fashion.

The major figures of the book are Jean Jacques Rousseau (as something of a foil) and Denis Diderot, Kant, and Johann Gottfried von Herder. Muthu brings Kant and Herder, in particular, much closer together than they are usually understood to be, by stressing both Herder's moral universalist concern with humanity and Kant's theories of cultural agency, antipaternalism, and noninterference. The treatment of Herder is an exceptionally careful and subtle one, and Muthu persuasively draws out of him a greater coherence of normative argument than is sometimes perceived in his work. Nonetheless, the association of Herder with antiimperialism comes as no great surprise, and it has long been recognized that his views were subtler than a simple cultural relativism. Kant is the hard, counterintuitive case, and also the most important case. Accordingly, Kant is the subject of the largest portion of the book; and the book must be counted an important addition to the literature on his political and social thought.

These chapters contain three major steps. Muthu portrays Kant's theory of virtue and freedom as being, to an important degree, a theory of cultural agency. He argues that this leads Kant to a theory of cultural incommensurability. And he treats both of those two steps as grounding Kant's antipaternalism and his critique of European imperialism. Even reminding readers that Kant made such a critique is a valuable service, given the use and abuse of Kant as a synecdoche for arrogant cultural imperialism or utopian cosmopolitanism. But Muthu accomplishes much more than that.

The first of the three steps is masterfully accomplished. The third, the account of Kant's antipaternalism and anti-imperialism, is compelling and persuasive, and serves to tie together themes from a wide variety of his writings. The account of incommensurability is not quite as successful. Muthu shows that Kant thought that no society had the right to rule another; that European states, in particular, were unworthy of being entrusted with the fates of other peoples; and that agricultural peoples were not superior in kind to nomadic or pastoral peoples. Those claims suffice to fill the gap between cultural agency and antiimperialism, without requiring the more radical and mostly inferred claim of wholesale cultural incommensurability. That a ranking of cultures does not authorize conquest, and that complete cultures are the wrong kinds of things to be ranked, is not the same as thinking that discrete cultural practices cannot be ranked along any dimension. The evidence Muthu has offered is compatible with, but does not compel, a reading of Kant as subscribing to incommensurability.

Two crucial substantive themes run through Muthu's discussions of Diderot, Kant, and Herder. The first is land use and property. The equation of settled agriculture with property rights, justice, and civil government was to be found not only in Locke but also in theorists of international relations such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, and in Rousseau's celebration of the naturalness of non-Europeans. For all of these thinkers, there was a difference in kind between the social organization of European agricultural and commercial states and the precivil existence of nomadic and pastoral peoples. Defeating imperialist arguments required denying this radical asymmetry. In particular, it required refuting both the idea that no settled agriculture meant no property, so that non-Europeans could be understood as having rights against dispossession, and the idea that no settled agriculture meant no government or sovereignty, so that non-Europeans could be understood as already living under systems of law and social organization that should not be replaced by European rule.

The second theme is the distrust of European states. Muthu suggests that this distrust diminished in postrevolutionary Europe, and that this helps to account for the decline in antiimperialist thought. In any event, he shows the degree to which Diderot, Kant, and Herder integrated their critiques of imperialism with critiques of the domestic character of eighteenth-century European states and societies.

One important historigraphic claim recurs several times and occupies the book's concluding chapter. The argument, not entirely novel but receiving a particularly forceful and effective defense here, is that more is lost than is gained by thinking of a category called “The Enlightenment.” “It is high time,” Muthu writes, “that we pluralize our understanding of ‘the Enlightenment’ both for reasons of historical accuracy and because, in doing so, otherwise hidden or understudied moments of Enlightenment-era thinking will come to light” (p. 264). He has offered a marvelous example of what research on such “hidden or understudied moments” can accomplish.