Transnational cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and justice as a political craft

Abstract

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