Inder Marwah, Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill, and the Government of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. x + 298.

Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill, and the Government of Difference presents a brilliant reconstruction of two canonical thinkers ’ views on racial and cultural diversity, providing a definitive account of the role of anthropology in Kant ’ s system of morality and mining understudied dimensions of Mill ’ s corpus for an account of politics that is culturally pluralist and open to revisiting its own presuppositions. This reconstruction shows that Kant, the thinker who has been repeatedly enlisted to theorize justice by political philosophers, offers a system that is ill fitted to incorporate difference in egalitarian terms and that Mill, while rightly chastised for his hierarchical views of non-Europeans and his own material involvement in colonialism through the British East India Company, is a thinker whose notion of progress is “ contingent, context-dependent, and unpredictable ” (p. 208), lending itself to politics that welcome cultural difference and are less likely to be seduced by certainties of superiority. Despite the highly complex arguments sustained in this book, Marwah ’ s prose is thoroughly readable and rewarding, be it through the masterful piecing together of the anthropological dimensions of Kant ’ s morality – scattered in his essays, lectures, and critical writings – or the careful genealogy of the substantive transformations in Mill ’ s thought, away from the narrow utilitarianism of his father and toward an account of habituation more alert to failure, difference, and education. The introduction sets comparative Kant and Mill the Vis-à-vis contemporary analytical work on global justice, show Kant ’ this his developmental character formation, Kant certain natural predispositions of women and non-whites. literature ’ dismissal of Mill ’ s thought as narrowly utilitarian and/or entanglements