Review Essay: “Keeping It Real”

Intrigue and suspense are nonissues since Valls's introduction thoroughly preempts his contributors with what amounts to a scorecard: “Reiss concludes that there are no grounds for thinking Descartes supported slavery but that his silence on the issue remains troubling” (p. 9); Barbara Hall finds that Hobbes's writings “warrant considering him a racist” (p. 9); Spinoza and Leibniz are found to be “incompatible with racism” (p. 9); there is “strong evidence of Locke's racism” (p. 10); “Berkeley was a nonracist who endorsed slavery, and Hume was a racialist who did not,” while Rousseau “embraced neither slavery nor racism” (p. 11); “Hegel expressed some clearly racist views” (p. 12); John Stuart Mill was “not as enlightened on race as some have thought” (p. 12); Marx “should not be seen as a racist thinker” (p. 12); and Nietzsche's “relation to race is far too complex” to be considered racist (p. 13).