Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy

Abstract

The past few decades have seen a wave of decolonization in the Western academy. Across a wide array of disciplines—anthropology, cultural studies, education, geography, history, international relations, law, above all, perhaps, literature—we have witnessed the beginnings (and sometimes much more) of a self-conscious rethinking and reorientation of the subject in the light of its past complicity, direct or indirect, with the colonial project. But the rate of progress has not been uniform. I suggest that in Western political philosophy in particular, the decolonizing enterprise has a long way to go, indeed in some respects has barely begun. In this essay, I do a general critique of the tradition for its Eurocentrism, and then turn to a critique of the work of John Rawls specifically, given his centrality to current Anglo-American political philosophy.