Book Review: In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship, by Çiğdem Çidam

warranted detailed treatment, rather than the occasional cursory references offered here. Slavery and the slave trade are more-or-less coterminous with the beginnings of the notion of what Graf calls universal crime, and it would have been interesting to know how—apart from the use of this notion by abolitionists—invocations of humanity and universal crime intersected with the enslavement of humans. And greater acknowledgment and some engagement with those non-Western critics of the uses and misuses of “humanity” and “humanism”—Fanon and Césaire among them—would have added some range and depth to a book that is otherwise almost wholly concerned with Western thinkers and with the natural and positive international law traditions of Europe. There is by now a substantial body of literature that shows that the social arrangements and normative standards often proclaimed to be universal are particular to Europe. The previously mentioned criticisms notwithstanding, this mostly well-argued and thought-provoking work is a welcome addition to this literature. It convincingly shows that current efforts to invoke “humanity” as a moral reference point do not always herald an expansion of our moral horizons and demonstrates that such efforts have a prehistory in which “human” all too often meant European, or white.