Marwah Inder S, Associate Professor
Inder S Marwah
Associate Professor
Faculty
Department of Political Science
Members
Institute on Globalization & the Human Condition
Area(s) of Interest:
Biography
Inder S. Marwah is a political theorist whose research, broadly speaking, considers how different traditions of political thought respond to the fact of human diversity in more or less capacious ways. Much of his work focuses on the intersections of race, empire and political thought in the 18th-20th centuries. He also has research and teaching interests in democratic theory, modern political thought, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and comparative and non-western political thought.
His first book, Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill and the Government of Difference (Cambridge, 2019), addresses the complex and often fractious relationship between liberalism and difference by examining how distinctive strands of liberalism encounter and incorporate human diversity. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished writings, private correspondence and lecture notes, it offers systematic reconstructions of Immanuel Kant’s and John Stuart Mill’s treatments of human diversity – racial, cultural, gender-based and class-based – to understand how two leading figures reacted to pluralism, and what we might draw out of them. His more recent work in this vein adopts a more critical stance, focusing on how liberalisms past and present are shaped by race-thinking and empire.
A second project, supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and tentatively entitled Evolution against Empire, remains centered on imperialism, race and political theory but approaches them from the other side of the colonial divide, focusing on the political thought of subjects of empire. It explores how anti-imperialist activists, thinkers, jurists, journalists and political figures across the non-western world appealed to Darwinism and evolutionary theory to challenge the theoretical grounds and political practices of empire. While the impacts of social Darwinism are well established, the project aims to uncover a lesser-known strand of anti-colonialism drawing on evolutionism to contest the political teleologies underpinning empire. The project is split between India and the Middle East (at this point, at least).
Education
PhD - University of Toronto (2011)
MA - University of Toronto (2001)
BA (Hons) - Trent University (2000)
Teaching
POLSCI 2O06 - Political Theory
POLSCI 3PB3 - Politics from Below
POLSCI 4Y03 - Domination and Decolonization
POLSCI 715 - Liberalism and Imperialism
Research
Book
Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill and the Government of Difference (Cambridge, 2019)
Journal Articles
• “Provincializing Progress: Developmentalism and Anti-Imperialism in Colonial India.” Polity, Vol. 51 (3) 2019, 498-531.
• “A Dangerous Turn: Manipulation and the Politics of Ethos.”Constellations, Vol. 24 (2) 2017, 167-179.
• “Two Concepts of Liberal Developmentalism.” European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 15 (1) 2016, 97-123.
• “Elateres Motiva: From the Good Will to the Good Human Being.” Kantian Review, Vol. 18 (3) 2013, 413-437.
• “What Nature Makes of Her: Kant’s Gendered Metaphysics.” Hypatia, Vol. 28 (3) 2013, 551-567.
• “Bridging Nature and Freedom? Kant, Culture and Cultivation.” Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 38 (3) July 2012, 385-406.
• “Complicating Barbarism and Civilization: Mill’s Complex Sociology of Human Development.” History of Political Thought, Vol. 32 (2) 2011, 345-366.
Chapters
• “Race, Culture and Ethnicity: On 'Monstrous Species' in the Age of Enlightenment.” In A Cultural History of Democracy, eds. Anna Plassart and Michael Mosher (Bloomsbury, 2021).
• “John Stuart Mill.” In Manjeet Ramgotra and Simon Choat (eds), Reconsidering Political Thinkers (Oxford, 2021).
• “Rethinking Resistance: Spencer, Krishnavarma and The Indian Sociologist.” In Burke Hendrix and Deborah Baumgold (eds.), Colonial Exchanges: Political Theory and the Agency of the Colonized (Manchester, 2017).
• “Liberal Theory.” In Michael T. Gibbons, Diana Coole, Elisabeth Ellis and Kennan Ferguson (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
• “Immigration, Citizenship and Canada’s New Conservative Party.” First author; co-authored chapter with Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos and Steven White. In James Farney and David Rayside (eds.) Conservatism in Canada (Toronto, 2013).
Critical Exchanges and Symposia
• “Empire and its Afterlives.” Contemporary Political Theory, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00391-8 (with Jennifer Pitts, Onur Ulas Ince, Timothy Bowers Vasko and Robert Nichols).
• “Liberalism and Empire, at the Intersection of History and Theory.” The Disorder of Things, July 2017, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2017/07/24/liberalism-and-empire-at-the-intersection-of-theory-and-history/ (with response from Duncan Bell).
Reviews
• Matthew Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and its Critics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 18 (4) 2019, 243-246.
• Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 15 (3) 2016, 45-49.
• Georgios Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Utilitas, Vol. 26 (3), 2014.
• M. Chazan et al. (eds), Home and Native Land: Unsettling Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2011). Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33 (6) 2012, 1-3.