Enlightenment Against Empire. By Sankar Muthu. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 348p. $19.95.

In this rich and elegantly written book, Sankar Muthu breaks the now-stereotypical association of Enlightenment political thought with an arrogant universalism that was implicitly or explicitly allied to imperialism. He suggests than an important strand of eighteenth-century political thought generated, and was intended to generate, a searching critique of the conquest of the world by European states. Indeed, far from being uniquely aligned with imperialism, eighteenth-century political thought was distinctive for generating such an opposition. Neither the two centuries that preceded it nor the century that followed saw such a systematic stand against imperialism from European philosophers.