Ever since the Enlightenment, there have been two ways of looking at the Enlightenment. In one reading, it is a univocal celebration of universal progress and science, such as, for example, Voltaire’s belief that European thought patterns are at the pinnacle of human history. The other Enlightenment confronts rationality and idealism with the fact that the mind’s scope is always anchored in the body. Universality is bought at the price of forgetting the particularity of life. This was pioneered by Diderot in France and Herder in Germany, both of whom understood that European domination of the globe has less to do with European rationality and more to do with European power. Unfortunately, it was for the most part the former view of Enlightenment that played a founding role in the development of postcolonial theory. But over the past decade or so, this has been subject to revision in a number of important publications, such as Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire (2003) or Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa’s Postcolonial Enlightenment (2009).

Sunil Agnani continues this revisionist project with his fascinating and well-researched book on the attempts by Burke and Diderot to formulate a “proper” critique of empire, that is a critique from within, as in Adorno’s observation: “one must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly” (Minima Moralia, cit. Agnani 183). By building his investigation on Adorno’s insight, Agnani gives it a theoretical depth that extends well beyond the matter at hand. “Properly hating empire, in this autocritical spirit,” Agnani observes, means not only the analytical work involved in “a critique of the ideology of the ‘classical’ empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth century”; it takes on the challenge of investigating how postcolonial regimes perpetuate these “parallel abuses of terms and concepts” (183). This theoretical foundation deserves more prominence. It ties in with Adorno’s method of determinate negation in ways that still need to be further explored by critiques of imperialism. As it stands, the reader has to wait until the epilogue before discovering what drives the project theoretically, working backward to try to find out what Burke and Diderot might and might not share with Adorno.

Much has been written about Edmund Burke’s views on the French Revolution (which he soundly dismissed as a political failure), his position on England’s involvement in India and the trial of Warren Hastings (whom he accused of perverting commerce to the benefit of imperialism), and on his theory of the sublime (which inspired Kant to tackle the same topic in the Critique of Judgement). Although there have been some attempts to link Burke’s views on France and India, none have managed to produce as compelling a connection as Agnani. His thesis, stated many times in the book, is that Burke’s views on the malpractices of the East India Company decisively shaped his opinion of Jacobinism. In his mind, both were the consequence of an inability to respect established political orders, resulting in colonial domination (yes, he had an argument to explain why Jacobinists were “colonizing” France). In Burke’s mind, the “India-returned boys… were Jacobins of a more profound sort, themselves the destroyers of a class of gentry and the agents of ‘total revolution’ and subversion. In fact, they may have been the initial model whose activities allowed him to see almost a decade before the French Revolution what the sudden decimation of an old established order would mean” (120). In Burke’s linking of these two upheavals, we can see “that the emergence of a colonial modernity is not simply a peripheral element helpful in understanding the beginnings of modernity in Europe, but that it is constitutive of the very language used to describe and name that modernity” (132).

What then of Diderot? Diderot’s position on European imperialism, at least as interesting as Burke’s, is given only half the space of the latter and is intended to serve as a “foil… to explore elements of Burke’s political thought on Europe’s relation to its incipient colonies” (3–4). Agnani writes interesting and insightful pages on Diderot’s struggles to reconcile encyclopedism with the acknowledgment of cultural particularity; on his attempts to consider the possibility of gentle commerce (as proposed by Montesquieu) together with a noncoercive colonialism; and on the way literary fantasy undermined political philosophy in his musings on Tahiti. But in the pages on Burke, he seems to have all but forgotten that Diderot was intended as a foil. What exactly are we to take from the contradictions in Diderot that give us more insight into Burke? Or vice versa? Again, we have to wait for the epilogue to find Diderot back in the discussion. And here, there is no sense of dialogue between Diderot and Burke. Where the two are juxtaposed, Agnani begins to become incoherent. He tells us that “this book has attempted an estrangement that is premised on the productive possibilities of discursive schisms and evanescent moments of insurgency, an estrangement from the familiar images of Diderot and Burke that follows as far as it is possible to do so their critique of empire” (181). Formulations like this serve only to detract from what Agnani really has to offer. Instead of pushing the complexity of his topic to the point where it starts slipping beyond his reach, I found myself wishing he would concentrate on the insights he commands.

Strangely, as Diderot fades from sight, the figures of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Baptiste Belley emerge toward the end of the book as the more interesting foils for Burke. If Adorno’s claim that hatred of a tradition requires the kind of autocritical position Agnani praises, what can we learn about those positions outside the tradition that attempt something similar? This surely is worthy of just as much energy as placing Diderot alongside Burke, and surely it would have provided a more reliable test for the hypothesis on hating empire properly. Agnani points at both kinds of foil, but he pursues neither.

It takes a determined reader to work through structural flaws such as this and to forgive its author (and the copy editor at Fordham Press) the more grating cases of repetitive argumentation, self-congratulatory stylistic flamboyance, and semantic fuzziness. But if the reader is determined, the reward is great.