Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development

by Thomas McCarthy

• ISBN13: 9780521740432
• ISBN10: 0521740436
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-10
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In an exciting new study of ideas accompanying the rise of the West, Thomas McCarthy analyzes the ideologies of race and empire that were integral to European-American expansion. He highlights the central role that conceptions of human development (civilization, progress, modernization and the like) played in answering challenges to legitimacy through a hierarchical ordering of difference. Focusing on Kant and natural history in the eighteenth century, Mill and social Darwinism in the nineteenth, and theories of development and modernization in the twentieth, he proposes a critical theory of development which can counter contemporary neoracism and neoimperialism, and can accommodate the multiple modernities now taking shape. Offering an unusual perspective on the past and present of our globalizing world, this book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of political theory, the history of ideas, racial and ethnic studies, social theory, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Political philosophy and racial injustice: a preliminary note on methodology

Kant on race and development

Social Darwinism and white supremacy

Coming to terms with the past: on the politics of the memory of slavery

What may we hope? Reflections on the idea of universal history in the wake of Kant

Liberal imperialism and the dilemma of development

From modernism to messianism: reflections on the state of 'development'

Conclusion: the presence of the past

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