The Republican Law of Peoples: A Restatement

Abstract

Liberalism is now the globally dominant ideology. It constitutes an ethico-juridical set of concepts, norms and principles, underlying assumptions and overarching narratives, which will necessarily be a central reference point for debate, whether as an accepted framework or one to be challenged, modified, and built upon. Race can only be transcended by facing and working through it, not by evading and pretending to have sublated it. A liberalism and a cosmopolitanism that fail to deal with race will continue to be a racial liberalism and cosmopolitanism, incapable of prescribing the measures of rectificatory racial justice necessary not just for dismantling the long-established structures of racial domination. As feminist liberals trying to reclaim rather than repudiate liberalism have sought to rethink patriarchal liberalism so as to purge it of a masculinist bias that runs far deeper than overtly stigmatizing representations of women.