Politics, Possibility, and Risk

Abstract

Abstract The concluding chapter synthesizes the full scope and nuance of Mill’s arguments regarding women’s emancipation, class reform, and British imperial practice as a resource for contemporary political thought. Mill’s politics of uncertainty is applied to three areas: (1) contemporary studies of gender and cross-cultural politics, (2) discussions of empire and imperialism, and (3) the practice of political theorizing today. Scholarly preoccupation with liberalism in these areas bears the same methodological and political risks that we find in receptions of Mill: namely, a narrowing of our interpretive horizons and by extension, of the political possibilities we envision. Moving beyond that trap, however, outlines new spaces for cross-cultural collaboration on issues of gender equity, as well as for a more expansive and comparative analysis of empire and the legacies of imperialism in the modern age. In its concluding remarks, the book reimagines contemporary interpretive practices through Millian uncertainty and beyond the trap of liberalism.