Elvira Basevich

In this essay, I argue that Hegel's model of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is normatively gripping for Du Bois's critique of Radical Reconstruction. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I use Du Bois's insights to explain the nature of progressive political change in historical time, an account Hegel lacks. I reconstruct the normative basis of Du Bois's political critique by articulating the three essential features of public reasoning qua citizenship. Second, I defend the promise of black civic enfranchisement with respect to the institutional conditions of love and labour in the wake of the Civil War. Third, I establish the central role black freedmen played in realizing the ideals of democratic self-governance affirmed in principle but seldom realized in practice in the United States.

In this essay, I advance Charles Mills’s project of a “black radical Kantianism” that addresses the nonideal empirical reality of “racial liberalism.” My aim is to expand Kant’s theory of justice in light of the specific obstacles that racial caste poses for the reform of imperfect constitutional states. First, contra Mills, I defend the indispensability of ideal theory for theorizing a Kantian model of justice and show, instead, that the nonideal circumstances of racial caste pose a distinct obstacle for the implementation of the requirements of justice. Second, I assess the a priori ideals of citizenship and publicity in Kant’s political philosophy as the normative basis for the reform of imperfect constitutional states with a longstanding habit of tolerating racial domination. Third, I introduce what Onora O’Neill identifies as the “virtues of justice” to guide the public use of reason by an autonomous but historically situated citizenry. I thus expand the ideals of citizenship and publicity in Kant’s political thought to develop citizens’ moral perception by facilitating their public confrontation of the shared experiences of racial domination, past and present, including the history of racial injustice and trauma.

In this essay, I assess the experiences of divine revelation in St. Teresa of Ávila and Simone Weil by contrasting their underlining models for the realization of the highest good. For St. Teresa, god’s manifestation is physically gratifying, which implicitly represents the world as part of a metaphysical order in which god intervenes to reward the good with happiness. For Weil, on the contrary, divine revelation issues from suffering, which she calls “affliction.” Against the conventional view that Weil defends a theodicy, I argue that her account of affliction highlights the problem of radical evil and senseless suffering in 20th-century Europe. In line with Kant—an unlikely ally, perhaps—she articulates the moral grounds of religion to sustain moral faith, namely: the challenge of maintaining a good will in the aftermath of senseless suffering and for resisting the natural propensity to radical evil in response.