Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development - Softcover

McCarthy, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521740436 ISBN 13: 9780521740432

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

An exciting study of ideologies of racism and imperialism that accompanied the rise of the West. Thomas McCarthy analyzes hierarchical conceptions of human development that have underwritten European-American hegemony, and proposes a critical theory of development to counter contemporary neoracism and neoimperialism.

About the Author:

Thomas McCarthy is William H. Orrick Visiting Professor at Yale University and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0521740436
• ISBN 13: 9780521740432
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264