Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

DECOLONIZING WESTERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Charles W. Mills

Dept. of Philosophy

Northwestern University

Table of Contents

[Preface] 3

1.Redressing the exclusions of the canon 7

2. Identifying the imperial and racial dimensions of the canon (and its apostates) 10

3. Recognizing the coloniality of Rawls’s socio-political assumptions 15

4. Recognizing the coloniality of Rawls’s normative assumptions 19

5. Towards a dialogue of equals 23

ENDNOTES 24

[Preface]

The past few decades have seen a wave of decolonization in the Western academy. Across a wide array of disciplines - anthropology, cultural studies, education, geography, history, international relations, law (especially international law), above all, perhaps, literature - we have witnessed at least the beginnings (and sometimes much more) of a self-conscious rethinking and reorientation of the subject in the light of its past complicity, direct or indirect, with the colonial project. The critical scrutiny of the origins and evolution of the discipline in question; the examination of its overarching narratives, key assumptions, hegemonic frameworks, defining texts; the seeking out of the oppositional voices of traditionally excluded others; and the felt imperative of revisioning and restructuring it in the light of its problematic past, have been a common feature in a range of subjects. But the rate of progress has not been uniform. I want to suggest that in Western political philosophy in particular, the decolonizing enterprise has a long way to go, indeed in some respects has barely begun. In political theory - the theory wing of political science - more has been done, but political philosophy - the work done by philosophers - lags significantly and seriously behind.[1]

Consider the standard Anglo-American narrative, which can be found in any introductory textbook or encyclopedia entry. After a glorious two thousand-plus years’ history of grand theory, Western political philosophy fell into the doldrums by the late 19th century, and approached its final demise by the middle of the 20th century. More than one article of the time actually pronounced it dead, the victim jointly of noncognitivism in ethics and non-dissensus in the world. (This world, it will be appreciated, was a pretty small one.) Insofar as political philosophy was focused on normative matters, there were no normative claims to be made that achieved propositional status, just disguised commands and emotive utterances. But in any case, with the 1950s’ “end of ideology,” and the discrediting of “totalitarianisms” of the left and the right, all was so obviously well with the postwar liberal-democratic Western world that no grand reconstructive normative claims really needed to be made in the first place. The revived traditional Anglo conception of philosophy as humble “underlaborer,” the Wittgensteinian view of philosophy as a tool that “leaves everything as it is,” diminished the discipline’s role to a kind of housecleaning. Thus in his editor’s introduction to a 1967 Oxford anthology on political philosophy, Anthony Quinton suggests that the works of the “great tradition” are, by contemporary standards, “methodologically very impure.”[2] The proper subject of philosophy is “conceptual reasonings,” which are a second-order “classifying and analyzing [of] the terms, statements and arguments of the substantive, first-order disciplines.” Political philosophy would then just be the application of these principles to political affairs, which meant the transfer to political science of social-scientific factual/descriptive matters, and the deportation to the degraded realm of “ideology” of prescriptive recommendations about “ideal ends.” It followed that the classic texts that defined the tradition were, ironically, “too all-inclusive to count as works of political philosophy, strictly so-called.”[3] Bidding farewell to the sweeping holistic visions of the past, political philosophy proper had become a modest matter of linguistic analysis, such as how “sovereignty” or “authority” should be parsed.

A sign of this change in the way the subject is conceived has been the apparent

petering-out of the great tradition. Surveys of the history of political thought either

come to an end with Marx and Mill in the mid-nineteenth century or they wind up with apologetic chapters on the major ideological movements of the most recent period. . Analytic philosophers have paid little attention to those problems of political theory that do fall within their recognized field of interest. . It has been widely held, indeed, that there really is no such subject as political philosophy apart from the negative business of revealing the conceptual errors and methodological misunderstandings of those who have addressed themselves in a very general way to political issues. . A solid testimony to the width of this conviction has been the near-unanimity with which analytic philosophers have, until very recently, avoided the subject altogether. Of course the great tradition of political thought remains an important object of study in its own right. But to study its members is only marginally to continue the work they were doing.[4]

From this standpoint, then, political philosophy proper was restricted to second-order conceptual analysis (and there was little interest in doing even that), ruling out any substantive normative claims about the reordering of society. No wonder, given this unpromising diagnosis, that the opening sentence of the very first essay in Quintin’s collection, John Plamenatz’s “The Use of Political Theory” (1960), begins by reporting the widespread judgment that “the subject is dead or sadly diminished in importance.”[5]

What a change we have seen in the intervening half a century! Today analytic political philosophy is one of the healthiest sub-sections of the discipline, with numerous articles, books, journals, reference companions, conferences and guidebooks dedicated to its themes, and the ambit of its concern not merely not shrinking at “ideological” pronouncements about the polity as a whole, but indeed boldly extending them to the entire planet. It is, of course, John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice that is normally given the credit for this Lazarus-like resurrection, though Brian Barry’s earlier 1965 Political Argument sometimes gets a nod also.[6] Rawls revived social contract theory in an explicitly hypothetical form, eliminating any lingering aroma of ur-anthropology by making it a “device of representation” for getting at principles of justice for the “basic structure” of society. In the process, he showed Anglo-American skeptics that “grand theory” in political philosophy was indeed still possible, that substantive moral claims could be given a rationalist cognitivist foundation - politically constructivist if not metaphysically moral realist - and that the resources of economics and rational choice theory could be drawn upon in an exciting synthesis of ethics and social science. What would have been classified by Quinton as “methodological impurity” and “ideology” in 1967 were embraced only a few years later by a book that saw itself as a respectable part of the analytic Anglo-American tradition.

Four decades on, Rawls’s text has been translated into more than 30 languages, and Theory of Justice and his later work are the subject of a vast secondary literature whose indexing would constitute a book in itself.[7] Moreover, apart from reviving both Anglo-American political philosophy and social contract theory, Rawls reoriented the field, so that the adjudication of social justice rather than the justification of political obligation became the main point of the subject. The battlefront of debate was thus competing normative perspectives on justice, whether utilitarians counterattacking Rawls to defend their theory against his criticisms, libertarians arguing for Lockean entitlements and property rights that precluded Rawlsian social-democratic redistribution, egalitarians seeking to push Rawls further to the left, or communitarians trying to exorcise the ghostly and disembodied individuals they found in Rawls’s cast of characters. Correspondingly, with the discrediting of second-order hauteur about the appropriate purview of the subject, the tradition itself gained a renewed significance as a source of first-order theoretical (not just “ideological”) insight as against mere antiquarian study. Contemporary work is thus informed by and in a lively dialogue with the work of the past.

For political theorists in other traditions equally legitimately designated “Western,” of course, this narrative is a tendentious one. From their perspective, no dramatic 1970s deathbed resurrection of political philosophy was necessary because only a very narrow Anglo-analytic conception of the field had been on its deathbed in the first place (and whose consummation was, in any case, perhaps more devoutly to be wished than mourned!). Certainly for the Marxist tradition the dismissal as mere “ideology” in Quinton’s sense -

or perhaps as mere hackwork not creatively developing historical materialism - of texts by Marx’s successors from the late 19th century/early 20th century onward such as Labriola, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Althusser et al. would, for them, have just confirmed the parti pris essence of a bourgeois political categorization masquerading as a neutral and apolitical assessment. Grand theory was indeed still being produced - it was just that it was saying things mainstream right-wing liberal theory didn’t want to hear. Moreover, apart from the Western Marxist tradition, one would also have to take into account the work of Sartre, who, though not a political philosopher, developed a philosophical position with political implications, as well as frequently intervening directly in the debates of the day, for example in the 1950s controversies about Soviet repression and the exact nature of the Soviet state, or in his militant stance against the Algerian War. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, first published in 1949, has a claim to be considered the most important feminist text of the twentieth century, and thus a landmark in feminist political philosophy.[8] In the United States, John Dewey’s socially and politically engaged pragmatism, so influential in the 1920s-40s, was not to be ignored, nor, in quite a different key, the postwar writings of the German exile Hannah Arendt. So the Anglo-analytic picture is a misleading one, a testimony to a particular narrow vision of the field rather than a comprehensive assessment. And though Marxism in its classical form may now be dead or severely diminished both as an intellectual and a political force, along with existentialism, the critical theory that takes its inspiration in significant measure from Marxism is, in the work of Habermas, Honneth and many others, today thriving as, of course, is the challenge to orthodox conceptions of the polity and political power in the work of Foucault and Derrida.

Whether in the Anglo-American or the Continental branches, then, the grand Western tradition is alive and well. But my claim would be, as emphasized at the start, that this resurrection (if the need for and fact of a resurrection is conceded) has not been accompanied by the systematic post-colonial, anti-colonial rethinking of the subject to be found in other branches of the academy. Yet in bodies of thought like Marxism and specific theorists like (in very different ways) Arendt, Sartre, and Foucault, or, going back to earlier elements in the liberal tradition, what Jonathan Israel calls the “radical Enlightenment” of Diderot, Raynal, and the Encyclopédistes,[9] it is not merely that resources for anti-colonial critiques can be found but that they have in fact already been made. The longstanding existence of an oppositional strain of anti-imperial political theory authored by thinkers of the West themselves, that has been both drawn upon and contested by those forcibly incorporated into the West, must also be recognized and brought back to the discipline’s self-conscious awareness. Many of these subversive contestations have themselves likewise been forgotten, so that the tradition seems more monolithically imperial than it actually is,[10] and these hegemonic assumptions, unchallenged, continue to shape the debates of the present, especially given the collapse of “Third Worldism” and the attempts to find alternatives to incorporation into the capitalist world-system. In this paper, I want to identify and argue for the reconsideration of some of the key framings of the field as legacies of the colonial heritage that need to be rejected, so it can be constituted on a new basis.

1.Redressing the exclusions of the canon

To begin with the most obvious point: the tradition continues to be conceived of

exclusively or largely as a monologue coming from the European West, the white West, with little or no thought being given to the possible need to consider the replies to these diktats from the West’s nonwhite “Others” - or, indeed, whether the very geography of the “West” may need to be remapped. Again, it is the standard reference work that is most useful for illustrating this point, since it is here that we are being given the official cartography of the field.

Consider, for example, Blackwell’s Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, which originally appeared as a single volume in 1993, and was later expanded and re-issued in two volumes in 2007.[11] At nearly 900 pages in a small font, it contains 55 chapters: nine “Disciplinary Contributions,” eight “Major Ideologies,” and thirty-eight “Special Topics.” Philip Pettit’s essay, “Analytical Philosophy,” opens the “Disciplinary Contributions” section and sets the theoretical stage for the Anglo-American account. Writing a quarter-century after Quinton, Pettit basically repeats Quinton’s white and Eurocentric picture of the field, asserting that from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, “political philosophy ceased to be an area of active exploration. . there was little or nothing of significance published in political philosophy.”[12] Now this is, of course, precisely the period in which the anti-colonial movement across the world is gathering momentum, and in the post-bellum United States black activists are beginning the long battle (still not complete) to make their country live up to the promise of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. But for Pettit, none of the texts produced by these global political struggles - work by people like Gandhi, Sun Yat-Sen, Garvey, Douglass, Du Bois, Fanon, Cabral - merit inclusion, whether because they are insufficiently analytic, non-Western, or simply unworthy of the designation of political philosophy.

Nor is it just a matter of narrow analytic philosophers with a restrictive conception of the discipline, however. The succeeding essay by David West, “Continental Philosophy,” is only marginally better.[13] For the same time period that is Pettit’s reference point (late nineteenth century onwards), West ranges over the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), Habermasian discourse ethics, existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus), Heidegger and Saussure, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, Lyotard and postmodernism. Here at least there is a brief mention of the nonwhite world, with some references to Sartre’s and Camus’s conflicting positions on the Algerian War. But the challenge to the Marxism and critical theory of the North posed by the theorists of the South, the anti-imperialist problematic and its possible reshaping of the global cartography of the political, the issue of race and ethnicity and how it might affect a conceptualization based on classes and class struggle, the alternate periodization offered to the European postmodern by the temporality of the postcolonial, the notion of a distinctively black existentialism that would make the “absurdity” of white domination and the “dread” and “anguish” it produced theoretically central, are not discussed. Postcolonial theory itself (Said, Spivak, Bhabha) gets only a single sentence.

So neither from the Anglo-American nor the Continental viewpoint do global Euro-domination and the resistance to it figure as important themes. Unsurprisingly, then, nowhere in the 55 essays and nearly 900 pages of the text is there any sustained discussion of race, racism, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, or the political struggles against them, let alone any chapter (whether under “Disciplinary Contributions,” “Major Ideologies,” or “Special Topics”) dedicated to the subject. We are being given a construction of the canon that limits the issues and figures of political philosophy to the writings of Western political theorists (the West as the world), and not even any of those writings that are auto-critical in solidarity with the non-Western world.

Similarly, Steven Cahn’s huge collection for Oxford (a massive 1200 pages), Classics of Political and Moral Philosophy, informs us in Cahn’s preface: “Here in one volume are the major writings from nearly 2,500 years of political philosophy.”[14] But the only person of color included in the writings of the modern period is Martin Luther King, Jr., who is confined to the appendix.[15] Likewise, the blue-covered Cambridge series, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, whose aim it is to provide the definitive editions, with the appropriate scholarly apparatus, of “all the core texts in the Western political tradition,” is now (2012) up to 111 volumes, but does not yet contain a single non-white author. So the line-up of Western political thinkers is coextensive with the line-up of global political thinkers, the line-up of Western political thinkers is a white one, and the systemic critique of the West is denied “political” status.

Such a boundary policing is doubly problematic. In the first place, even if there were no political relationship between the West and the rest of the world, it defies credibility to think that over this period of thousands of years, no non-Western thinker could have produced anything worthy of political study. But in the second place, of course, it raises the question of how we are defining our terms. From modernity up to the mid-twentieth century what we know as the “West” was a series of empires that, by the beginnings of the twentieth century, jointly occupied most of the planet. So from the modern period onwards to the second half of the twentieth century, Western political rule gradually extends over, and is contested by, people who, at least in this juridical sense, are part of the West, if rarely given substantively (and often not even nominally) equal rights within it. The oppositional political texts they produce are to that extent “Western” also, and can be excluded only at the cost of admitting that the canon is constructed primarily of the rationalizers of the existing order, not its opponents. (If, pre-Rawls, the central question for political philosophy has historically been the justification for political obligation, think how radically this question must be rethought for those who never gave actual consent to being incorporated into the polis in the first place. If, post-Rawls, the central question for political philosophy has become the justice or injustice of the “basic structure” of the polis, think how radically this question must be rethought for those whose non-consent completely undercuts the contractarian underpinnings of contemporary distributive justice theory, demanding instead that rectificatory justice should be our focus.) Marcus Garvey and Mahatma Gandhi, by virtue of being Jamaican and Indian, were citizens of the British Empire; Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, by virtue of being Martinican, were citizens of overseas France. In that sense, these are “Western” political theorists, engaged in debate with the Western polity imposed on them, even if one-sidedly so, and getting no or little response.

Moreover, apart from work from the overseas territories of the colonial empires, we also need to consider the domestic empire of the United States. Critics have long pointed out that the official framing of the United States as a nation born out of an anti-colonial struggle, and committed to opposition to European imperialism in the Western hemisphere, obfuscates the nation’s own intra-continental imperial expansion, its manifest colonial destiny to swallow the land of the indigenous nations on the North American continent itself. Black nationalism, the political ideology distinctive to the diasporic black tradition, conceptualizes black Americans as a black nation subordinated by the white one, a formulation often echoed even by those who do not accept the ideology itself. But even when variants of “white” ideologies are being advocated - black liberalism, black conservatism, black Marxism - the radical difference introduced by racial subordination would still justify their representative inclusion (as with white feminism, which also comes in a range of variants, some drawing on male-created originals, and which is included in the Blackwell text). In the work of David Walker, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and many others we find an alternative political vision, the ghettoized black city in the shadows challenging the shining white city on the hill.[16] The growing body of work on these writers is not merely seeking to establish their importance as thinkers but to reclaim them as political theorists, representatives of an emergent black tradition of what has been called “Afro-modern political thought” that includes anti-slavery, anti-Jim Crow, and anti-imperialism.[17] The segregation of the official canon is itself the manifestation in political philosophy of the “global color-line” Du Bois pointed out in the world.[18] That a century after he wrote this color-line still exists is perhaps the clearest testimony to the unreconstructed nature of the discipline, its failure to acknowledge its historical formation as a body of theory increasingly influenced (in the modern period) by the colonial experience. The rethinking of modernity requires us to explore its dark side, and how very differently it is experienced by those denied its promise, by those subjected, in different ways, to the moral-political hierarchies, anti-egalitarian ideologies, and “absolutist” regimes putatively demolished by the American and French Revolutions but actually maintained or re-established on a racial basis.[19]

2. Identifying the imperial and racial dimensions of the canon (and its apostates)

What we have to do, then, is to expand the current vocabulary of Western political philosophy to admit colonial and imperial domination as themselves political systems, not merely national but global, and centrally constituted by race. For political philosophy, the central political unit of the modern period is the nation-state, which, in the Anglo-American field over the past forty years, has primarily been conceptualized, following Rawls, as the contractarian nation-state. So whether one is located in the former colonizing polities, the former colonized polities, or the Euro-settler states created by European expansionism, this concept is supposed to constitute the common political framework within which debates about political philosophy are supposed to take place. But such a concept cannot capture the crucial difference between those polities which were the rulers and those which were the ruled, nor the distinct histories of colonizers and colonized, settlers and indigenous, free and enslaved, in the colonial world. To ignore this history and this set of central political divisions in the name of an abstraction ostensibly innocent only serves to guarantee that the experience of the white political subject, whether Europeans at home or abroad, will be made the standard-bearer of political modernity itself. It is to erase a history of domination which needs to be formally recognized as itself political and leaving a political legacy that can only be properly addressed through being acknowledged at the abstract conceptual level at which philosophy operates.

I suggest that political philosophy needs to draw here on the growing body of oppositional work in International Relations (IR) that is challenging the Westphalian narrative. In the introduction to her edited collection, Decolonizing International Relations, Branwen Gruffydd Jones summarizes this challenge:

The modern discipline of IR and its twentieth-century trajectory is presented to the newcomer in a huge number of textbooks and compilations. What is remarkably absent from IR’s self-presentation . is awareness of its colonial and imperial roots and context. . Imperialism is characterized by relations, doctrines, and practices of exclusion; imperialism is the very antithesis of universal international recognition. . The architects of IR’s self-construction not only have ignored the imperial context of the discipline’s modern origins but also have self-consciously located IR’s heritage or canon in classical European thought from ancient Greece through to the Enlightenment - Thucydides, Machiavelli, Bodin, Grotius, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and so on. These thinkers lived during the context of, and in part helped to legitimize, European violence against non-European peoples through conquest, enslavement, slave trade, colonization, dispossession, and extermination over more than five centuries. . The history of modern international relations is widely accepted to be rooted in the European state system, which was born at the Peace of Westphalia. . For most of the world, it is arguably the history of the colonial state and political economy rather than European sovereignty and liberal democracy that is central to understanding modern international relations. . To the extent that political institutions and norms of liberal democracy and sovereignty did emerge, slowly and partially, in Western Europe in the centuries after Westphalia, these developments unfolded during the same centuries as European expansion, slave trade, and formal colonial occupation and rule of most of the world. That such very different forms of political and international interaction took place during the same period in time is not a coincidence, and they cannot be understood in isolation.[20]

The Westphalian narrative is, of course, central to the post-Rawlsian literature, with its vocabulary of well-ordered societies, burdened societies, and outlaw states. But the political and economic interrelations that shaped the two poles of the international order in this period, exploitative relations enabling Western democracies today to position themselves as presumptively far closer to the “well-ordered” ideal than the so-called “burdened” and “outlaw” states, are not only not examined, but conceptually blocked by a framing that denies their historic and current interconnectedness. This “isolation,” this conceptual and causal quarantining, pre-empts the question of whether the most flagrant outlaw states may not once have been (or may even still be?) the Western democracies themselves, and whether this outlawry might conceivably have had some contributory role in creating the “burdens” faced by the nations of the South today. Thus the bracketing-out of empire even in the putatively empirical discipline of IR results - in the political philosophy that, though not empirical, presupposes its picture of the world - in a foreclosing of the investigation of crucial questions relevant to global justice and governance.

In her recent Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker argues that the absence of hermeneutical tools in a particular discourse is itself a distinctive kind of injustice, leaving the subordinated without the materials to conceptualize and theorize about their situation.[21] Of course, the difference here is that an anti-colonial and anti-racist tradition does already exist, so it is not at all that one is starting from zero. But the refusal of entry into the legitimized realm of political philosophy of this body of thought is a cognitive handicap nonetheless, at least for the purposes of contesting dominant framings. The non-naming of this political system in current Western political philosophical discourse in a sense names it out of existence, deprives us of the cognitive resources to analyze it, or even (legitimately) to talk about it, given the way the field is currently structured and framed. One feels oneself out of court, out of bounds, transgressing the rules of the discipline. So there is a double mystification, which in complementary conceptual operations jointly obliterates the colonial past. It is not merely a matter of the non-inclusion of the anti-colonial and anti-racist voices of people of color (or the anti-colonial and anti-racist texts of white progressives), but also the sanitization, the deracialization, of the (generally) imperial political views of the officially included and canonized European theorists. Anti-colonial opponents are not recognized, and the grounds that would justify the need for their recognition are removed through omitting or marginalizing but in either case failing to make theoretically central to the debate the (generally) pro-colonial dimension of the theories of the recognized thinkers. The formal inclusion in the lexicon of political philosophy of colonial rule as a system of domination would retrieve a history less than a century behind us (if it is behind us) which is already in danger of being forgotten. It would provide a conceptual space, a theoretical location, in which these complementary exclusions could be addressed.

Moreover, such a recognition would also require taking race seriously, conceptualizing it as a line of moral demarcation that - in contradiction to the official narrative of modernity - differentiates the status of “persons” and ultimately justifies their political demarcation and differentiation also, within structures both of formal and informal political rule. Western political philosophy’s current disingenuous disavowal of its racist past seeks to erase the fact that in the classic colonial period race was the marker of biological and/or cultural superiority/inferiority. Colonial rule is also racial rule, a system that is not merely intra-national but international, and rationalized by political philosophy itself. Instead, according to the standard narrative, the acknowledgment of the moral equality of persons is supposed to be the baseline for modern political theories. Thus in his introduction to political philosophy, Will Kymlicka tells us that: “[T]he idea that each person matters equally is at the heart of all plausible [modern] political theories.”[22] Philip Pettit echoes the judgment in the Blackwell essay cited at the start: “[A]ll plausible modern political theories have in mind the same ultimate value, equality. . [E]very theory claims to treat all individuals as equals.”[23] Paul Kelly says the same thing: “Equality . is a peculiarly modern value” linked with “the idea of the modern individual emerg[ing] as a distinct bearer of ethical significance.”[24] So we are being offered a periodization, to be found in other areas of philosophy also, in which there are three main epochs - ancient, medieval, modern - and this periodization is supposed to chronologically map a normative progression by which the moral inequality and ascriptive hierarchy of the ancient and medieval worlds, of pre-modernity, are triumphantly replaced by the equality and individualism of the modern. The idea is that while modernity gives rise to a variety of political ideologies, they all have in common as a normative starting-point the moral equality of persons. Fascism will then be represented as a political outlier, a deviation from the Western tradition. Racism, if mentioned at all, will not be represented as a political ideology at all, but psychologized, turned into a personal moral failing.

But the problem is that this orthodox narrative, this story of normative equalization, is false. It is not the case that nonwhites were generally seen as equal, morally, legally, and politically. For a more accurate account, we need to turn instead to Jean-Paul Sartre, who writes in his famous preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: “[T]here is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism. . On the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-than-humans.”[25] Personhood needs to be recognized as a technical term, a term of art, whose defining characteristics are generally so devised as to make whiteness a prerequisite for personhood. Nonwhites fall under an array of alternative categories - “savages,” “barbarians,” “natives” - whose common feature is generally their normative inequality. These are not people in the full sense of the word, and as such they are not entitled to the full schedule of rights and protections of Europeans. So it means that in the political ideologies of modernity we have an internal racial structuring, a color-coding, by virtue of which different moral, legal, and political rules are prescribed for these different populations. An ontological bifurcation runs through most modern Western moral-political thought, giving rise to what Edmund Burke once famously called “a geographical morality,”[26] a racially partitioned set of norms.

More than three decades ago, in his Toward the Final Solution, George Mosse indicted the failure of his scholarly contemporaries “to integrate the study of racism within [their] study of the modern history of Europe,” and urged that they should “examin[e] racism with the same attention that [they] have given to socialism, liberalism, or conservatism,” since it was “the most widespread ideology of the time.”[27] As noted at the beginning, much has been done in other fields since then to remedy this failure, but political philosophy remains delinquent. Thomas McCarthy begins his recent Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development with the observation that “In mainstream political philosophy, the history of European racism, with its vast implications for the theory and practice of modern liberalism, has long remained on the margins.” Despite the fact that “[race relations] are contemporaneous with, and deeply implicated with, Western modernity from the first voyages of ‘discovery’ to present-day neocolonialism” and that in this global context “racial classification would have a strong claim to being the most significant” of what Rawls categorizes as the “morally arbitrary facts about individuals and groups” determining actual “legal and political standing,” the rethinking of Western political philosophy to take the shaping reality of race into account “has only recently begun.”[28]

McCarthy’s own book is a valuable contribution to this enterprise, as is the recently-translated blistering exposé by the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History.[29] But such work remains very much the exception; it is political scientists rather than political philosophers who have been most prominent in this revisionist project: Barbara Arneil’s John Locke and America, Uday Singh Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire, Jennifer Pitts’s A Turn to Empire, James Tully’s Public Philosophy in a New Key, and others.[30] The danger is that such revisionist work will be seen as conceptually irrelevant to the discipline, not judged to require any remapping of the philosophical terrain itself. The peculiar pretensions of philosophy must be remembered. The abstraction from the empirical which is its defining feature is generally taken to justify the ignoring of such real-world “deviations,” since the important thing is the concepts employed. The aspiration to the timeless and universal then rationalizes an idealized form of abstraction which, through its obfuscation of the distinctive political experience of people of color in modernity, makes the representative political individual European. Whiteness as racelessness becomes abstractness becomes philosophical representativeness.

What is required is a philosophical rethinking of the conceptual topography of the maps of political modernity that would both bring out the racialized dimension of concepts putatively colorless and all-inclusive and redraw that topography itself to make explicit its relation to the non-European world. Personhood itself, far from being an uncontroversial normative baseline for humanity in general, as the Kymlicka, Pettit, and Kelly quotes suggest, is contested from the start. The 1550-51 Valladolid Debate between Sepulveda and Las Casas on the humanity of the Amerindian population needs to be seen as a pivotal episode in establishing the social ontology of modernity, as do the later disputes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the standing within the human order of Africans and Native Australians, and the 1919 refusal by the Anglo-Saxon nations at the post-World War I Versailles Conference to accept the Japanese delegation’s proposal to incorporate a racial equality clause into the League of Nations’ Covenant.[31] No less than the contestation of feudal ascriptive hierarchy by the bourgeois revolutions and their famous texts, these battles for racial equality, and the conflicting claims of racist versus anti-racist ideologies, are ideologically and politically central to the making and remaking of the modern world, and need to be categorically located as such. Vitoria’s and Grotius’s views of Native Americans and their implications for the normative foundations of international law and judgments of sovereignty; Hobbes’s ferocious state-of-nature-as-a-state-of-war and its link with Native Americans; Locke’s non-industrious Amerindians, who are not living up to the divine imperative to go out and appropriate the world, thereby adding value to it; Kant’s racial hierarchies and their implications for his view of personhood and the philosophy of history; Hegel’s Eurocentric cartography of Geist, which makes it clear that the World-Spirit is a white spirit; Mill’s exclusion of “barbarians” from the scope of his anti-paternalist “harm principle,” and recommendation of “despotism” for them - the philosophical implications of these assumptions and conceptual framings about humanity are not highlighted and elaborated as they should be. But neither is the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist oppositional tradition (hedged and Eurocentric as it too often was) of the West: the Encyclopédistes’ denunciation of empire, Burke’s indictment of British rule in India, Marxism’s location of primitive capitalist accumulation in Amerindian expropriation and African slavery, Hannah Arendt’s “boomerang thesis” linking the Nazi Holocaust to the colonial genocides, Sartre’s anti-colonial writings. Decolonizing Western political philosophy will require an acknowledgment of the transcontinental dimension of the thought of Western political theorists, the general complicity of the tradition with the colonial project, and the existence of opposing voices within that tradition. Such central categories as personhood, society, sovereignty, obligation, property, civilization, the rule of law, were all historically operationalized by different rules for Europeans and populations of color, and the white political subject cannot stand in racelessly for the global political subject of modernity.