Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development

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 philosophy, political theory, the history of ideas, racial and ethnic studies, social theory, and cultural studies.

• Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time)
• A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France
• Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity
• Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
• Enlightenment against Empire
• The Racial Contract
• The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New Directions in Critical Theory)
• Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference - New Edition (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History)
• Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking