The study of the history of anticolonial thought has long been a prisoner to a few intuitive—and often deceptively simple—assumptions. Some of these shorthand precepts were formed in the heyday of midcentury anticolonialism, while others emerged as convenient truisms as the memory of old empires and their anticolonial adversaries began to fade. One such idea is that since empires rejected the “human dignity” of subject peoples, their acts of resistance perforce sprang from a desire to reclaim the dignity that had been denied to them. As a piece of shorthand, it is not entirely devoid of truth. Yet its self-assured clarity can obscure, if not undermine, the fact that much of anticolonial politics was internally embattled, and that the disavowal of empire often intensified, rather than neutralized, anxieties about one’s own political collectivity. To write a history of an anticolonial archive that simultaneously contested empire and struggled with a sense of inadequacy is no easy task. The obvious risk is one of apology, of telling a self-referential story of anticolonialism in which the resistance against empire assumes a secondary place. In recent years, the tendency to project unrealized dreams of various sorts back into the anticolonial archive has further resulted in a displacement of the questions pertaining to anticolonialism’s struggle with itself.

The foremost virtue of Kevin Pham’s Architects of Dignity is its courage to take the salient theme of self-criticism in anticolonial thought seriously. The Vietnamese thinkers he studied over more than half a century were, by and large, scandalized by the heteronomy of their imperial existence. Opposition to the French, however, was only the beginning of a still more contested terrain of political theorization. Their turn to the Vietnamese cause filled them with what Pham describes as “shame,” which, in his telling, is an emotion as much as a call to action. This inward gaze, Pham’s narrative shows, became a prompt to think about the historical conditions of collective life, the role of the past, and the lineaments of possible futures for the Vietnamese people.

The book is divided into seven chapters, largely chronologically organized. There is a chain of intergenerational dialogue that unites the six thinkers Pham studies. Concurrently, the book also sheds light on the shifting global contexts of Vietnamese politics. With Phan Bội Châu and Phan Chu Trinh, for instance, we see a global moment when the example set by the rise of Japan opened a new set of intellectual possibilities across the colonial world. Nguyễn An Ninh and Phạm Quỳnh wrote amid the dying days of colonial liberalism and gradual reformism. Hồ Chí Minh and Nguyễn Mạnh Tường take the reader into the global story of revolutionary decolonization and its fraught aftermath. Though primarily a study of Vietnamese thinkers preoccupied with overcoming French rule, Pham’s narrative also creates space for those more open to empire (Phạm Quỳnh) and for those who critically examined the orthodoxies of the new postcolonial state (Nguyễn Mạnh Tường).

The argumentative structure of the book is organized around two distinct themes: dignity and shame. Though contiguous, the two themes tend to generate different conversations. The question of dignity has been a staple issue across the history of political thought, animating the stakes of different problems, such as equality, moral freedom, and human rights. Shame, while a common object of philosophical and psychoanalytic reflection, has arguably been a less central topic for political thought. One suspects that the disciplinary hesitation owes in no small part to the ways in which the concept of shame psychologizes the subject’s relation to the world, a move that also risks obscuring the normative or historical character of that relation. Pham’s generative move lies in rejecting that hesitation, intervening boldly in the problem-space between the righteousness of dignity and the self-indictment of shame. For many of these Vietnamese figures, the aspiration for dignity developed in tandem with a sense of shame, even as experiences of the latter reinvigorated the pursuit of dignity itself.

Throughout the seven chapters of the book, Pham reconstructs the different ways in which Vietnamese thinkers diagnosed and wrestled with the indignities imposed by French rule. The brutal record of colonial violence prompted a vivid indignation in Phan Bội Châu, while Hồ Chí Minh traced a loss of dignity back to both the racial hierarchy imposed by the empire and the “political inertia” of his fellow Vietnamese (p. 143). Their reflections on the sources of indignation led to diagnoses that were not directed solely at the imperial adversary. The pursuit of Vietnamese self-development and the sense of shame with the (collective) self became inseparable. The work of shame, however, was not univocal. For some, it led to a scathing assessment of the past. In other instances, it facilitated an indictment of the Vietnamese people for their indifferent slumber. The diagnoses that followed from the experience of shame did much constructive work along the way. They shaped the conceptions of the institutions that were to be built and the domains of collective life that were to be prioritized. Shame was an invitation to turn to self-cultivation, which also carried the risk of giving way to a pedagogical vision of social and political development through raising the people up—what Pham calls “paternalistic democracy” (p. 145).

An important contribution of the book to the global history of political thought is its rescuing of anticolonialism’s struggle with itself from the tenacious hold of a simple-minded psychology. Pham is unconvinced by the charges of “internalized inferiority” and “false consciousness” (p. 19). The pursuit of self-development that the sense of inadequacy spurred was, instead, an essential element of the anticolonial vision. Indeed, this contention resonates across many other histories of non-European political thought. That this insight has now become somewhat buried owes to the moralization of the study of anticolonial political thought, where the confrontation with empire is made to substitute for the novel intellectual challenges that anticolonial thinkers themselves sought to confront.

There is a certain gap, however, between Pham’s smooth narrativization of anticolonial indignation and his rather sparse conceptualization of dignity. Pham tells us early in the book that the feeling of indignation is the “surest proof that dignity is intrinsic and in need of social recognition” (p. 24). While the experience of indignation might be evidence of dignity, it does not answer the question regarding the precise conceptual shape of the problem. Although the book acknowledges that the question of dignity has long been central to European political thought, its engagement with such accounts is restricted chiefly to noting that they emphasize human and individual dignity over national or collective dignity.

Nonetheless, the book raises questions about dignity that transcend its own terms. In his influential 2012 book, Dignity, Rank, and Rights, Jeremy Waldron argued that “the modern notion of human dignity involves an upward equalization of rank, so that we now try to accord to every human being something of the dignity, rank, and expectation of respect that was formerly accorded to nobility” (p. 33). Historically traceable to the Levellers’ movement, Waldron’s account renders dignity less an intrinsic moral idea than a relational one. We often see a version of this story in the study of twentieth-century political thought, especially in the argument that the proliferation of nation-states was one such instance of an “upward equalization.” Yet this reading has also come under different sorts of challenge in studies of anticolonialism. To give one example, the contemporary preoccupation with federations in anticolonial thought stems largely from the contention that what anticolonial actors sought was not an equalization but a transformation of the “rank” (i.e., of the nation) itself. The old debate about whether the nation was a “modular” form or an anticolonial innovation, likewise, involved the problem of whether the pursuit of dignity should mean assuming the rank denied to subject peoples or striving for something altogether different. The study of dignity does not probe these vexing questions in the book in part because it remains nestled far too comfortably within the framework of “national dignity.”

The fundamentally historical character of the dignity question here is also important. It may very well be that collective dignity was a shared concern among the thinkers studied in the book. But given the relational nature of the problem—insofar as dignity involves the pursuit of “social recognition” (p. 3), which is necessarily context-dependent—its changing historical meanings can scarcely be taken for granted. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, the dignity of a people suddenly had much to do with the perceived depth of their history. In the age of self-determination, by contrast, one’s place in the community of nations became an important marker. In the era of decolonization, sovereign independence became the primary currency. The book’s narrative only implicitly registers some of these shifts. As a result, what these changes mean for the study of dignity as a concept—and for its place in the shifting terrain of twentieth-century anticolonial political thought—is not fully accounted for.

Doubt, uncertainty, and anxiety were often the very materials with which anticolonial thinkers fashioned their resources of critique. Their self-criticism frequently coexisted with—or even enabled—their commitment to the political end of sovereignty; it is thus unnecessary to choose between the two, as Pham illustrates. Ultimately, Architects of Dignity is an invitation to grapple with these difficult questions. In unsettling the predictable discussions of shame and dignity, Pham has revived necessary conversations about modes of self-diagnosis in anticolonial thought—a problem that arguably lay at the heart of the political thought that flourished in the global shadow of modern empires.