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As feminist scholars, we hope that our own work is exempt from structural problems such as racism, sexism, and Eurocentricism, that is, the kind of problems that are exemplified and enacted by Kant’s works. In other words, we hope that we do not re-enact, implicitly or explicitly, Kant’s problematic claims, which range from the unnaturalness of a female philosopher, “who might as well have a beard,” the stupid things that a black carpenter said “because he was black from head to foot,” the poor women “living in the greatest slavery in the Orient,” to the “sheep-like existence of the inhabitants of Tahiti.” In this piece, I argue that we cannot simply hope to avoid these problems unless we are vigilant about incorporating the full picture of Kant’s and Kantian philosophy into our feminist appropriations. I will show that one way to minimize if not altogether avoid this risk is to follow the model of a new methodology that establishes the continued relevance of all of Kant’s claims for our present. Inspired by Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, I will call this alternative methodology the “constructive complicity” approach.

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While Kant's political writings employ a teleological language, the exact benefit of such language to his politics is far from clear. Against recent interpretations of Kant's political thought, which downplay or dismiss the role of teleology, I restore Zweckmässigkeit to its place in Kant's politics as a theoretically and practically useful material principle, and show that a teleological perspective complements the perspective stipulated by the formal principle of Recht. By means of a systematic reconstruction of what I call 'political Zweckmässigkeit', we gain a fuller portrayal of and a valuable insight into Kant's political thought.

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This article shows that the methodology of Mills’ ‘Black Radical Kantianism’ (BRK) represents a major plot twist for Kant studies as well as contemporary political philosophy utilizing Kantian ideas. BRK is no mere upgrade of Kant’s or Kantian ideal theory for racial justice. Mills’ methodology requires us to posit both that the real Kant and establishment Kantianism have been racist, sexist and Eurocentric; and that only by first admitting and reckoning with the compatibility of white supremacy and liberal egalitarianism can we hope to radicalize Kant or Kantianism.

Ine ´s Valdez's book is a gem, with game-changing contributions to cosmopolitanism in political theory and philosophy, international studies, and comparative political thought, not to mention in Kant and Du Bois Studies. A welcome tour de force, this book transfigures the premises and frameworks of Kant's and Kantian cosmopolitanism by bringing in DuBois's political craft as the much-needed reorienting normative framework of transnational justice. Not only is it rich and timely, but it also achieves a myriad of different and important tasks for contemporary political theory.As the title of the book suggests, Kant and Du Bois represent two ends of the spectrum of cosmopolitan theory with which Valdez engages: on the one side, we have the popular Kantian or Kant-inspired cosmopolitanisms of liberal, critical, or democratic theory varieties, and on the other side, we have ''colored cosmopolitanisms.'' The latter have been hitherto characterized as ''vernacular cosmopolitanisms'' and are considered to simply fill in the empirical details of white European normative frameworks, leaving the latter untouched. In a theoretical move building on the critique of what Charles W. Mills named the ''white racial framing of political philosophy'' (Mills, 2017, p. 194), Valdez flips the script of cosmopolitanism as we know it, and demonstrates that Du Bois's political craft offers a far richer and more truly inclusive or universal normative framework than what we currently have in all the Kantian varieties.Kant was silent on the Haitian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with his major political works that are considered to be cornerstones of cosmopolitanism. In a way, the meaning and legacy of this silence in both Kant's and neo-Kantian political theory are developed in the first two chapters of Valdez's book. Chapter 1 reconstructs the social and political context of the writing of ''Perpetual Peace,'' (1795) Kant's much celebrated essay that supposedly condemns colonialism once and for all (Kleingeld, 2014, pp. 43f.). Through careful textual and historical analyses, Valdez shows that Kant did not oppose actual colonialism, but Ó 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals