Radical universalism, p.1
Radical Universalism, page 1
Radical Universalism
Beyond Identity
OMRI BOEHM
New York Review Books New York
This is a New York Review Book
published by The New York Review of Books
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www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2025 by Omri Boehm
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Barnett Newman, Jericho, 1968–69; © 2025 The Barnett Newman Foundation/ArtistsRights Society (ARS), New York.
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boehm, Omri author
Title: Radical universalism: beyond identity / by Omri Boehm.
Description: New York: New York Review Books, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025023625 (print) | LCCN 2025023626 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681379852 paperback | ISBN 9781681379869 ebook
Subjects: LCSH: Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804 | Humanism | Identity politics
Classification: LCC B821 .B524 2025 (print) | LCC B821 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025023625
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20250
ISBN 978-1-68137-986-9
v 1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com
For Amitai
This is the Triumph of the religion of the prophets over the moral philosophy: that it alone discovered the idea of humanity.
—HERMANN COHEN
The “we” must not be previous to the question.
—MICHEL FOUCAULT
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Acknowledgments
The Mark of Cain
Truth, Enemy of the People
The Abrahamic Distinction, or What Enlightenment Is
Afterword: Out of the Pit
Appendix: The Opposite of Forgetting
Notes
Biographical Note
Introduction
The Origin
IN 1959, W. E. B. Du Bois was invited to the Kremlin, where he was informed that a committee had chosen him as that year’s recipient of the International Lenin Peace Prize. The timing was not accidental. A Soviet committee bestowed on the towering African American scholar and author of Black Reconstruction in America1 a prize “for the strengthening of peace among the nations”—a sort of communist Nobel—to make a point. As the Cold War was in full swing and the Civil Rights Movement was picking up momentum, Soviet Russia presented itself as successful where US liberal democracy had failed in achieving racial justice. No doubt, there was a political agenda behind the committee’s decision, but it would be mistaken to dismiss it as mere propaganda. In Jim Crow America, Du Bois could hardly have been bestowed a similar honor by the White House. The previous year, he had already received an honorary doctorate in economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin, where at the turn of the nineteenth century he had spent a brief but formative period, taking classes with figures such as August Meitzen (Max Weber’s mentor) and Wilhelm Dilthey. In 1960, as the Lenin Prize was awarded at the Soviet embassy back in Washington, DC—Du Bois insisted that the ceremony would be held in America—the man who once described his life as the “autobiography of the race concept,”2 concluded his acceptance speech with a statement that in his mouth is hardly laconic. “I still cling to the dream of the America into which I was born.”3
Four years later, in September 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. would travel to Berlin for a historic visit, at the invitation of the city’s mayor, Willy Brandt. The official reason for the invitation was commemorating John F. Kennedy, who spoke in Berlin the previous year in front of the wall and was assassinated just a few months later. Brandt’s decision to honor the assassinated president of the Western superpower conqueror-turned-protector by inviting the Black and still highly controversial icon of the Civil Rights Movements was remarkable. Just the year before, King was sitting in a Birmingham cell for marching in Alabama against court orders. The publication of his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” overlaps virtually to the day with Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Clearly, West Germany also had ways to make a point about Western values and racial justice. During his visit, King insisted on crossing the wall and visiting East Berlin, despite the reluctance of his hosts. In fact, the American embassy attempted to sabotage the crossing by confiscating King’s passport. In the end, he did cross and gave a short sermon in the Marienkirche, using his American Express card for identification at the border. A president of the American Academy in Berlin would comment many years later that this was one indication that “capitalism can work” after all.4
It may be tempting to think that the heated identity debates of the last years were eclipsed overnight by Russia’s gruesome attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Hamas’s brutal massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip since. All mark the sudden return of an old-new type of conflict to the center of attention. New wars, anything but cold, are in the making, and could seem to take the attention from the debates about race, gender, and identity. But think again: Questions of racial and social justice have always haunted Western liberal democracy—with the United States of America as its blemished symbol—against challenges facing it from without. True, in contrast to Soviet Russia, Vladimir Putin does not confront the West with a thorough ideology. But for years now, he has been positioning himself as the alternative to Western liberalism with regards to gay rights, the attack on Christian family values, and ethnic “threats” posed by welcoming immigrants. That’s one of the reasons why not just the president of the United States but large portions of the Republican Party count as Putin enthusiasts. Besides, it seems clear that if Putin has any ideology, it is a nihilist one, celebrating power, and the question is to what extent what people call the West stands in good faith for an alternative ideal.
This question has been reopened especially after October 7th and its aftermath that many, including the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice in the Hague, investigate as acts of genocide and crimes against humanity. Nothing makes the challenge to liberal democracy, broadly conceived, clearer: The strength of the principles for which we fight externally is measured by the integrity with which we hold these principles within.
For several years now, liberal democracy has been facing a crisis. The familiar intellectual attacks on its core value—Enlightenment universalism—have increasingly gained footing in political circles beyond sophisticated intellectual debates and lofty philosophy departments. What began in the 1960s as a postmodern provocation from Paris, carrying clear echoes from the Black Forest of the 1920s and ’30s, now influences politics well outside America’s Culture Studies departments of the 1980s. The version of postmodernism that is being exported back to Europe in the form of critical race and post- or de-colonial theory is one that does not take the dreams of a Martin Luther King any more seriously than “the dream of America” into which Du Bois was born. Those dreams are being dismissed as illusions by both the left and the right that tend to agree on at least one point: The problem with Enlightenment universalism is not so much that it has failed but that it was attempted. Indeed, both sides of the aisle strive to replace the measure of abstract universalism by concrete identity: the right fights in terms of traditional values, the left fights in the name of gender and race. Universal humanism is no longer accepted as the basis from which unjust laws and discriminatory power structures should be criticized and transformed. Rather, it is perceived as the mask that allows those in power to keep those power structures.
Authors writing in solidarity with African Americans, LGBTQ+ communities, ethnic minorities, and other discriminated groups—not to say endangered groups, like the Palestinians—often oppose the critique of “identity politics” or “postcolonialism” by presenting it as a form of “white fragility,” or the hypocritical oversensitivity of the privileged. And, often, not without reason. One author went so far as to dismiss the growing talk of an “illiberal left” as a “fairy tale.”5 While it is easy to focus on “juicy anecdotes about the excesses of anti-racist leftists,” the argument goes, these only constitute a “marginal phenomenon.” The growing progressive anti-universalist trends are not about “locking people into a would-be prison of identity” but about “demanding fundamental rights.”6
Especially if fundamental rights are at stake, however, the growing opposition to Enlightenment universalism, and the accompanying conviction that Immanuel Kant was the father of modern racism and even Nazism,7 should be taken more seriously. At stake are not minor juicy anecdotes, like the firing of a New York Times columnist or a New York Review of Books editor in chief for holding views that disagree with current convictions. As we enter an epoch of fighting for Western liberal democracy in Europe, as we struggle against the rise of far right politics and ethnic nationalism, Donald Trump’s attack on the rule of law and on global conventions; as we face global disasters and migration waves, it makes a difference whether we hold fast to the idea of universal humanism as a compass, even a weapon, or create a society in which this idea is mocked and despised. On October 9, 2023, I held a Kant seminar in New York, asking my students to speak, in the context of Kant and the ideal of human dignity, about Hamas’s attack: Does a stateless,
I can imagine that some liberal universalists in the center—or those who are on the so-called pro-Israeli side—are at this point nodding their heads in agreement. That may be too fast. For many years now, what liberal democrats understand as “universalism” has been shrinking and shrinking; by now, all that remains are the concept’s empty shells. The clearest indication of the void may be the disappearance of the concept of duty, and the prevalence of the concept of right. All of us are familiar with the canonization of human rights that emerged at the end of the Cold War “as the international morality of the end of history” and called for an “entire library” of literature that explains their grounds.8 While there exists a vast literature on the history, philosophy, and sociology of rights, hardly, if ever, is the question posed whether human duties are still alive. As one classic article on the topic suggests, whereas the concept of duty is premodern and religious, the concept of right is modern and secular: Duties are what philosophers call heteronomous. Moses brought written divine duties down from Mount Sinai and gave them to the Hebrews. Rights, by contrast, are the mark of human self-determination or autonomy.9 In this convenient atmosphere, liberals rarely argue for some hard universal duty for all humans that may well demand that they act against their interests—it usually does. Instead, they invoke their right as citizens to refrain from doing just that. When such “universalists” in turn defend Enlightenment rationalism against “identity politics,” it tends to be the positivist strand of that movement that identifies “reason” with “interests,” and for which “Enlightenment universalism” is, properly understood, a contradiction in terms. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that a professed anti-universalist such as Richard Rorty provides the backbone for much of the liberals’ allegedly universalist worries about identity. When in the 1990s Rorty led the attack on “culture studies,” he opposed the postmodern concept of identity with that of “national pride.”10 His most acute current follower, Mark Lilla, similarly confronts identity with “we-liberalism” and “patriotism,” but unlike Rorty, he does hold that the alternative he thereby offers is universalist.11 For the historian Jill Lepore, who is much more progressive than Rorty or Lilla, there is “only one way” to defend liberal universalism and that is “making the case for the nation.” Whereas Rorty explicitly appealed to Avishai Margalit’s liberal Zionism when speaking of American liberal patriotism, Lepore explicitly referred to Yael Tamir’s liberal Zionist argument in Liberal Nationalism. Since she makes the case specifically for the American nation, Lepore adds, this requires “grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights.”12
It should have been obvious that to make a case for universalism, the nation is the wrong starting point. A gulf separates the only possible origin of universalist politics—a truth about the equality of all humans—and the reduction of this truth to a “very good idea.” That we have become numb to the allegedly insignificant difference between the two may be the best evidence that the meaning of universalism has been successfully shredded to pieces. It is now shredded to pieces with the anti-humanist failures, not just of the postcolonial left but of liberal progressives in the international community who have failed to uphold international law: Protect the Palestinians from Israel’s systematic destruction of conditions of life in Gaza. All too often, universalists’ concern about the anti-universalism of “postcolonialists” and “critical race” thinkers has been the most comfortable way to bury uncomfortable universalist commitments—the duty to prevent crimes against humanity, and even genocide. The anti-humanism of some left circles is answered with hegemonic “post-humanism,” where the idea of humanity has been degraded as “metaphysical” or moral fanaticism. The call to protect international law and hold Israel, and Israeli war criminals, strictly accountable is denounced by many as “problematic” if not anti-Semitic. The thread unifying both sides of this debate has been, from the start, the willingness to tolerate, and even justify, crimes against humanity.
For those who still hope to reclaim a universalist humanism that resists both, Kant remains the indispensable thinker. He grasped that the Enlightenment movement that preceded him was not a universalist movement but, in fact, universalism’s worst enemy. Its positivist reduction of humans to blind nature replaced humanity with what Nietzsche would call “wise beasts”—objects of mastery and possession, exploitation and enslavement, not dignity. It is against this reduction that Kant insisted that the concept of humanity must remain abstract: free of biological, zoological, historical, and sociological facts. Such a metaphysical idea of humanity was familiar at least since the biblical prophets; what made Kant’s achievement epoch-changing was his ability to translate the biblical idea without falling back on religious faith or scientific reduction. In Kant, the idea of humanity was for the first time formulated as a moral concept: What makes humans human is not a natural characteristic but their freedom to follow their duty to moral laws. It is because human beings are open to the question of what they ought to do that they themselves are subjects of absolute dignity.
The term “absolute” is not gratuitous. By formulating the idea of humanity as a moral concept, Kant did not just translate the biblical notion of duty; he modernized the idea of following a law that is not man-made. The fate of universalism hangs together with the fate of this concept: Only a law or a truth that’s independent of human convention is universal in scope rather than relative to the interests, identities, desires, and “good ideas” of those who have the power to legislate in human society. As we shall see, the commitment to universalist principles is often grounded in deep-rooted historical commitments—and then, as in the case of the German context, historical commitments mark the limit of universalist ones and undermine them from within. More important, only such a law is universal also in authority rather than just scope—it transcends the legitimacy that is conferred upon human agreements that may well be unjust. Kant would agree on this point with “identity leftists”: Short of an abstract idea of humanity and a metaphysical concept of law, universalist lingo is identity politics for white men. It allows those in power to exploit the shells of an empty moral language to preserve unjust power structures that ought to be transformed.
And yet, just as fake universalists pursue their own identity politics, the identarian left shares with fake universalism more than they would like to concede. Anti-universalist theories tend to provide intellectual frameworks that deconstruct race or gender as biological concepts. Debates focus on unearthing the Enlightenment, or Kant, as the inventors of the scientific idea of race; on whether, say, Du Bois did or did not completely overcome a biological understanding of that concept; whether we should occupy ourselves only with the biological “meaning of race” or also with “the truth of it” (and, as the case may be, its falsity).13 The tacit assumption is that by contrast to race (or gender), humanity is a biological concept. But it makes very little sense to deconstruct a dehumanizing concept of race while at the same time celebrating the destruction of the concept of humanity. The fight against systematic injustice and fake universalism can only be carried out in the name of true universalism. Not in the name of identity.
In the following, I offer a rereading of three texts: the Declaration of Independence, Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?,” and the Binding of Isaac. This is not going to proceed as a one-text, one-chapter scholarly sort of interpretation. Rather, I make a case for universalism by studying the way in which these texts intertwine: They are monuments of a tradition that stands near to us but remains too often misunderstood; one in which the moral idea of humanity as open to absolute duty was still living.
