Guarding The Guardians: Payoffs and Perils

The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire Susan Pedersen Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xviii + 571 pp. The Guardians is an ambitious work of institutional history with a global reach by a world-class historian at the height of her powers. It is a tour de force. The first comprehensive history of the League of Nations’ mandate system in a half-century, it does not relate events in each mandatory territory but at the international level, when arguments and Continue reading → Continue reading →

Moralism and Its Discontents

The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice Rainer Forst, translated by Jeffrey Flynn New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. x + 351 pp. Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development Thomas McCarthy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. viii + 254 pp. Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism James D. Ingram New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ix + 338 pp. The moralizing tone of contemporary politics is hard to ignore. From the smoldering ruins of a War Continue reading → Continue reading →