A01=Sankar Muthu
Age of Enlightenment
Anthony Pagden
Anti-imperialism
Author_Sankar Muthu
Cambridge University Press
Category=JPA
Category=NHTQ
Category=NHTR
Category=QDTQ
Category=QDTS
Civil society
Colonialism
Conceptualization (information science)
Conjectural history
Cosmopolitanism
Criticism
Critique
Critique of Pure Reason
Cross-cultural
Cultural diversity
Cultural pluralism
Dehumanization
Denis Diderot
Despotism
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethics
Explanation
Good and evil
Herder
Ideology
Immanuel Kant
Imperialism
Indigenous peoples
Institution
Intellectual
International relations
Kantianism
Lecture
Liberty
Modernity
Montesquieu
Moral universalism
Morality
Narrative
Noble savage
Oppression
Paternalism
Perpetual peace
Philosopher
Philosophical anthropology
Philosophy
Philosophy of history
Political philosophy
Politics
Practical reason
Prejudice
Princeton University Press
Principle
Rationality
Reason
Self-interest
Skepticism
Slavery
Social contract
Social criticism
Social Practice
Social theory
Sovereignty
State of nature
Superiority (short story)
The Metaphysics of Morals
The Spirit of the Laws
Theory
Thought
Value (ethics)
Wealth
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691115177
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 31 Aug 2003
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies.
In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.
Sankar Muthu is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
