Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism (2019) offers an important caution against abandoning useful critical tools or modes of arguments due to their Eurocentric deployments. In this work Sekyi-Otu draws much-needed attention to how ostensible critiques of Eurocentrism can wind up forfeiting certain concepts to Europe, particularly and above all, a commitment to universalism. More than a defense of critical appropriation, we find in Left Universalism an insistence on universalism and universalistic thinking as ‘native necessity’ (p. 16), not beholden to European thought in the first instance.

In this paper I examine Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism alongside Amy Allen’s 2016 The End of Progress, which offers a useful illustration of how critiques of Eurocentrism can end up ceding modes of argument. Inspired by postcolonial and decolonial theory, Allen offers an extensive critique of contemporary Frankfurt School Theorists Axel Honneth, Jurgen Habermas, and Rainer Forst.^[1] The End of Progress is a useful text to work with here, as it represents an impressive and significant effort to address the Eurocentrism of a widely read tradition of social and political thought. I am not primarily concerned with addressing the theorists Allen is responding to, nor is my intent to single out her work as uniquely problematic. Rather, this paper is more concerned with the critical stakes of Allen’s intervention, and suggests that The End of Progress reveals the shortcomings of a ‘decolonizing’ approach that is more concerned with correcting European hubris than substantially engaging other traditions of thought. Working with the Frankfurt School’s dedication to immanent critique (i.e. evaluating the object of critique according to its internal standards, rather than by transcendent, independently justified standards), Allen offers powerful corrective to these thinkers, judged by their own standards and commitments. But while The End of Progress is in many respects an exemplary work, I argue here that its pursuit of a restrictively immanent mode of critique and neglect of universalizing impulses from other traditions of thought leads Allen to overstate the incompatibility of transcendental or foundationalist claims with anticolonial approaches.

It is worth noting at the outset that Allen and Sekyi-Otu share some important theoretical commitments. In particular they both share a broad commitment to universalism, and reject the idea that universalism can be grounded in a Eurocentric narrative of historical progress. Indeed, it is because of their common commitments, but distinct conceptual approaches, that The End of Progress offers a useful foil for Left Universalism. In her defence of universalism Allen resists any appeal to foundationalist, or context-transcending principles, which she argues would represent an authoritarian or imperialist imposition. While she defends a critical universalism that condemns violence and exploitation, she also thinks it important to reject any context-transcendent notion of ‘the good’. For Allen, the imposition of context-transcending claims implies an imperializing posture with respect to local contexts and traditions. This is in keeping with her overall objective of administering Frankfurt School critical theory a dose of ‘epistemic humility’ (2016, p. 209). In contrast, Sekyi-Otu points us to a rather different way of thinking about the necessity of universalism, anchored in the political challenges facing contemporary Africa. Grounded in this context, Sekyi-Otu is more concerned with the limits of a purely immanent approach to critique and argues for a necessarily context-transcending universalism that is nonetheless ‘always speaking in native tongues’ (2019, p. 20). Following from these strong commitments to a universalism that is neither context-blind nor context-bound, Left Universalism is refreshingly willing to substantively name and define this project as a defence of communism, standing in contrast to Allen’s more negatively defined and contextually justified universalist commitments.

While Left Universalism does not respond directly to The End of Progress, my hope is that bringing these two works together will help highlight some of the important contributions of Left Universalism. In particular, I want to draw attention to Sekyi-Otu’s emphasis on the ‘twofold obligation’ of critique: ‘to do justice to historicity, the determinate and determining circumstances of moral claims and demands and that upon which those demands and claims are ultimately predicated for their legitimation’ (2019, p. 35). This dual critical obligation in Left Universalism takes on board the necessity of immanent critique and attention to social and historical context, while also pointing beyond the limits of a more exclusively contextualist approach that animates efforts like Allen’s. Drawing on a wide range of texts from African literature and philosophy to illustrate the ethical concerns animating African debates about socialism and universalism, Sekyi-Otu orients us to concerns that appear absent in many conversations across critical theory and decolonial thought. My aim here is not to resolve these debates, or to attempt a wholesale vindication of Sekyi-Otu’s project, but rather to demonstrate how Left Universalism extends a line of inquiry that is cut short in The End of Progress. I approach this first by providing a brief overview of the latter work, and then turning in more depth to the former.

The End of Progress

The End of Progress opens with reference to Edward Said’s observation in Culture and Imperialism (1994) that the Frankfurt School has been ‘stunningly silent on racist theory, anti-imperialist resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire’ (p. 287). Taking stock of post-Habermasian critical theory’s inability to respond adequately to this challenge, Allen attributes this enduring failure to the school’s normative and methodological commitments. In particular, she suggests this is due to the role ‘progress’ has assumed in the work of Habermas (1991) and Honneth (1991). Allen details how these commitments arise from two important methodological precepts: first, a ‘desire to avoid the twin evils of foundationalism and relativism’ and second, an attendant commitment to immanent critique (Allen 2016, p. 14). This is an orientation Allen shares with her interlocutors, and she too is committed to grounding critique immanently, according to the values that hold within a given social and historical context, rather than positing external, context-transcending standards of evaluation. In fact, The End of Progress represents a masterful exercise in immanent critique, evaluating these thinkers on their own terms, and exposing the cracks in their normative infrastructures. Yet while the commitment to grounding critical theory immanently, within the ‘existing social world’, avoids the problems associated with foundationalist, context-transcending claims, Allen notes that it risks opening critical theory to the charge of relativism. If immanent critique operates according to the standards adhering within a given context, ‘then how can critical theory avoid the charge of reducing normativity to an endorsement of whatever normative standards happen to be accepted at a given time and place?’ (p. 13).

Allen argues that both Habermas and Honneth fall back on a neo-Hegelian understanding of ‘progress’ to get past this dilemma. Recourse to a notion of ‘progress’ allows their critical theory to anchor itself socially and historically, while providing a contextual benchmark for evaluating future ‘progressive’ politics. Whether these claims are oriented towards communicative rationality (Habermas 1991) or recognition (Honneth 1991), in both cases we see their normative principles ‘justified insofar as they can be understood as the outcome of a process of progressive social evolution or sociocultural learning’ (Allen 2016, p. 14). Allen argues that these claims depend on an account of social development that upholds the normative standards of European modernity as an advance over other forms of life. While this concept of progress allows these theorists to maneuver around the pitfalls of foundationalism (by grounding theory in the historical development of existing society), and relativism (by appeal to normative standards developed through a process of historical learning), these commitments put them at odds with postcolonial and decolonial critique. European modernity’s understanding of progress has of course been extensively critiqued by successive generations of anticolonial theorists on many grounds, including not least of all the role ‘progress’ played in justifying colonial domination. As such Allen quite rightly cautions that critical theory should be ‘extremely wary of such robust claims to progress as a historical ‘fact’ that is, to back-ward conceptions of progress that understand history as a learning process that has led up to ‘us’’ (p. 98).

While Allen argues that this understanding of ‘progress as fact’ poses ‘the most serious obstacle’ to ‘decolonizing’ the tradition, this is not her only concern (2016, p. 15). Forst’s project poses its own distinct challenge, and one which is perhaps more relevant to our discussion to follow. Forst is significant in part because he has distanced himself from the kind of historical arguments taken up by Habermas and Honneth. ^[2] Instead, he has taken up a ‘freestanding’ constructivist approach to grounding his normative project, built around a core, universal ‘right to justification’. Allen argues that Forst’s neo-Kantian approach, despite not relying explicitly on a narrative of historical progress, nonetheless remains embedded in a mode of critique that positions European modernity as a normative advance over other societies. Without getting into the weeds of Forst’s argument here, Allen’s main concern is that, by ‘grounding an account of social and political justice in a fundamental moral right, which is also a human right’, (p. 129), Forst winds up in a foundationalist position that is implicated in authoritarianism and imperialism.

Allen raises a couple distinct objections here. For one, she argues that Forst’s appeal to foundationalist claims abandons the methodological distinctiveness of the Frankfurt School’s commitment to immanent critique, and thus represents a retreat from the insights of critical theory. More significantly, drawing on James Tully (2008), Allen frames foundationalist arguments as tending towards authoritarianism or imperialism, because their ‘formal, abstract, universal, necessary, and obligatory character’ (2016, p. 138), represents an imposition over and above other knowledges and contexts. In Forst’s particular case, Allen also argues that he does not problematize the extent to which the Kantian account of practical reason grounding his ‘right to justification’ is entangled in colonial relations of power, and is thus not as universal as he thinks it is.^[3] Rather, it represents a ‘thick, particular, and Eurocentric notion in disguise’ (p. 16).

In a broader sense, her concern is that strong foundationalist claims are invariably incompatible with the kind of dialogue she wants to initiate with decolonial thought or non-Western traditions, because they enter the conversation already presuming their claims to be universal and applicable above and across contexts.

As noted, Allen shares with her interlocutors an understanding of their normative juncture. Like them, Allen wishes to maintain the school’s commitment to immanent critique, while avoiding foundationalism and relativism. She also wants to maintain the school’s commitment to progress and universalism, but seeks to ground these normative commitments rather differently. In keeping with her preference for immanent critique, Allen’s answer is to attempt an internal re-orientation within the tradition, built around Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault (depicted here as ‘Adorno’s other son’). For Allen these thinkers offer a more problematizing, genealogical approach to the question of progress, which maintains a forward-looking commitment to progress as a ‘moral-political imperative’ that does not depend on retrospective claims about progress as ‘fact’ (2016, p. 12). This re-thinking of the relationship between history and normativity challenges a vindicatory or self-congratulatory relationship towards the past, but does not abandon the possibility that we might make ‘progress’ in the future.

Building from this notion of ‘progress as imperative’, Allen also seeks to avoid the difficulties associated with the foundationalist position, which would seem to rely on prior, context-transcending norms that do not appreciate their own particularity. Speaking to those working with her tradition, Allen writes:

We could understand ourselves, at a first-order, substantive normative level, to be committed to the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity with the suffering of others, but understand these commitments, at the metanormative level, to be justified immanently and contextually, via an appeal to the specific historical context rather than via an appeal to their putatively context-transcendent character. (2016, p. 211)

In other words, the first-order normative commitments can be maintained by critical theorists, so long as they are not justified by a sense of their trans-historical or trans-cultural validity. Allen argues that her ‘metanormative contextualism’, which grounds these commitments in their historical moment ‘need not entail relativism at the level of our first-order substantive normative commitments’ (p. 212). However, while Allen argues that her chosen approach avoids relativism, she also ultimately winds up joining Adorno in dismissing relativism as a ‘pseudoproblem’ (Adorno 2001, p. 175) that obscures the real issue: the alure of transcendent critique.

Allen argues that this ‘metanormative contextualism’ is ‘perfectly compatible with the kind of moral-political universalism that Habermas and others hold so dear’ (2016, p. 34). However, this moral-political universalism is primarily defended in a negative, rather than positive, register. As Allen (p. 217) quotes Adorno (2001): ‘We may not know what absolute good is or the absolute norm, we may not even know what man is or the human or humanity – but what the inhuman is we know very well indeed’ (p. 175). Following Adorno, Allen argues for a critical universalism of ‘negatively framed moral judgments’ responding to ‘concrete inhumanity’, rather than being based in any ‘objective moral facts’ (2016, p. 217). Allen’s project thus posits a universalism of negative moral judgment, grounded in a ‘contingent, context-immanent normativity’ (p. 228) that relies neither on retrospective claims about European modernity, nor on prior foundationalist commitments.

With its main animating impulse being to re-orient Frankfurt School critical theory towards a position of greater humility, The End of Progress is not so much a dialogue between this tradition and decolonial thought, but an interrogation of the necessary preconditions for that dialogue on the Frankfurt side. Allen’s engagement with non-European thinkers is largely limited to correcting European hubris. While many responses to Allen recognize she mounts an impressive critique of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst, they also note a tension between her preference for immanent critique and the aims of decolonial critique. As Linda Alcoff (2018) puts it, ‘The idea that immanent critique is the only kind that is possible is itself an enactment of Eurocentrism: closing critical theory off from engaging with other voices and other theoretical traditions’ (pp. 150-151). As Allen’s other decolonial critics like Jakeet Singh (2016) or Jake Bartholomew (2018) argue, the decolonial project is not primarily concerned with critiquing European thinkers on their own terms, but rather demands more substantive engagement with subaltern intellectual traditions and political struggles. In Bartholomew’s words, ‘It is not the job of decolonial thinkers to fix the errors of European philosophers insofar as they are Eurocentric. This merely reinforces a sort of theoretical dependency on Europe that must, after all, be overcome’ (2018, p. 635). More productive, Bartholomew suggests, would be investigate how this dialogue has already been bridged from the other side of the colonial divide, pointing to the reception and transformation of Frankfurt School critical theory in Latin America by thinkers like Enrique Dussel (2003). The objection here is in significant part concerned with location, and Allen’s failure to prioritize thinking from a position of (geographic and epistemic) exteriority. With these critiques in mind, it does seem ironic that Allen’s ‘decolonizing’ critique takes such an immanent form, when decolonial theorists are clearly invested in challenging this orientation.

Allen anticipates this line of critique, conceding that her project represents a ‘Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism’ (2016, p. 233). Still, she argues that such an internal critique remains a necessary, albeit ‘insufficient’, answer to the decolonial challenge. Given the enduring relevance of this trajectory of the Frankfurt School, and the broader problems implicated in their understanding of progress, The End of Progress is undoubtedly an important corrective. However, Allen also argues that her re-orientation of critical theory stands to make a positive contribution to conversations in postcolonial and decolonial thought. As she puts it, her book aspires not only to ‘decolonize critical theory’ but also to show how ‘postcolonial theory could be criticalized’ (p. 230). Yet this latter concern receives little attention beyond a brief coda in which she suggests her ‘metanormative contextualism’ could be of use to postcolonial and decolonial theorists. Thus, while The End of Progress makes a critical contribution to critical theory, it does seem to lack a more positive contribution to decolonial thought.

While these responses to Allen raise concerns with the scope, location, and direction of her project, a less acknowledged, but related, limit to her self-referential approach is that Allen does not consider foundationalist arguments arising from other traditions. Where Allen understands her project as a necessary move towards dialogue, I think it worth considering what kinds of conversations her own strong anti-foundationalist approach might foreclose. For all its efforts to shed assumptions, Allen’s project seems to have its own preconceptions about what this dialogue will imply – a vision of European hubris being corrected by subaltern epistemologies, but which do not themselves pose foundational, context-transcending claims. Foundationalist or context-transcending arguments are implied here not only to be at odds with the methodological precepts of critical theory, but also at odds with decolonial criticism. In this sense Allen’s dialogue seems to be more of an inter-cultural dialogue between discrete traditions and contexts, rather than a trans-cultural dialogue. These concerns also raise some questions about where Allen’s prescriptions might lead. Where it is obvious Allen wants her tradition to embrace a more modest and humble posture, it is not clear that this is a universal prescription for all traditions of thought (Singh 2016). This seems to leave open the question of whether context-transcending claims can be legitimately generated elsewhere. It also leaves us wondering if foundationalist arguments necessarily represent imperialist impositions, or if these modes of thought belong equally to other traditions?

Sekyi-Otu, drawing on a deep well of African proverbs, literature and philosophy, offers a compelling response to these questions. Sekyi-Otu shares with Allen’s critics a certain reservation about the predominance of immanent critique, but raises his own distinct concerns. Rather than focusing on motifs of exteriority per se, which animate some of the responses to Allen’s work, Sekyi-Otu embraces the foundationalist and transcendental arguments of African ethical thought. Left Universalism thus challenges the implicit assumption of The End of Progress that foundationalist or context-transcending arguments are at odds with non-European normative traditions. Moreover, these foundationalist commitments enable Sekyi-Otu to elaborate the positive content of his normative project as a transcultural commitment to communism, thus offering a more robust defence of universalism than we find in Allen’s more negative account.

Left Universalism

Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism offers a robust defense of universalism, grounded in the challenges facing contemporary African societies, but with clear implications beyond these contexts. Like Allen, Sekyi-Otu is quick to reject any apologia for Eurocentric narratives of historical progress. Sekyi-Otu objects not only to the role of these philosophies of history in justifying colonialism, but also perhaps more crucially, he is concerned with how an ‘obstetric’ understanding of historical change in Marxist thought has undermined the possibility of realizing socialism in Africa. Also, like Allen, the notion of progress that informs Sekyi-Otu’s ‘visionary foundationalism’ (2019, p. 28) is indelibly future-oriented, expressed as a ‘hope for things to come’, rather than a search for assurance in the past.

Yet while the ‘visionary foundationalism’ championed here is not a God’s eye view, a ‘stainless product of a-view-from-nowhere’ (2019, p. 12), it nonetheless remains adamantly a foundationalism, in that its normativity is grounded in an essentially universalizable and transcultural concern with ‘what is good and possible for human being’ (p. 28). Sekyi-Otu’s humanistic universalism is built around the context-transcending ethical imperatives that he argues are present in any local instance of criticism or justification. For Sekyi-Otu, any domestic critique is implicitly and inherently making meta-ethical claims about the human desirability of a given practice or relation. This is not a prior, formal commitment that operates above local context, but a commitment to locating the transcendental concerns that animate any localized critique. Critique is never, per Sekyi-Otu, exclusively internal. In short, Left Universalism exhorts the reader to pay close attention to diverse traditions of critique, but without losing sight of those universal aspects of local reasoning that are always context-transcending in their implications. As Sekyi-Otu puts it, referencing Forst’s Contexts of Justice (2002), ‘Is it not the case that the claims of justice are indeed occasioned by context but not captive to it?’ (2019, p. 35). Where Allen worries that foundationalist, context-transcending arguments assume an imposing or imperial posture, Sekyi-Otu understands these modes of argument as simply ‘the regular prose of the world’ (p. 158), common features of African moral discourse as much as European. That this is the ‘regular prose of the world’ is of course no guarantee of salutary argument. Still, for Sekyi-Otu, it remains imperative to understand foundationalist claims as inherent and essential to African thought, rather than as imports or impositions.

Sekyi-Otu’s unapologetic claim that ‘vindication of … internal egalitarian principles, beyond tautological affirmations of ‘our’ values, must ultimately speak in the name of human dignity as an ethical universal’ (2019, p. 70) may well seem too abstract, demanding, or imposing a claim for Allen. The claim here is undoubtedly injunctive, but in Sekyi-Otu’s terms it represents no imposition on any local context. As we have seen, Allen’s metanormative contextualism forswears any appeal to context-transcending standards, and commits itself to finding its normative justification only internally, on the terms of the traditions or contexts it engages. In response to arguments of this sort, Sekyi-Otu points out that local debates are always already implicitly making context-transcendent claims, and thus firmly pushes back against the notion that such claims necessarily represent an imposition. Moreover, a commitment to pursuing critique only on the terms that hold within a context would seem to disallow a critique of those terms themselves. As Sekyi-Otu argues, without such context-transcending imperatives, ‘no radical internal questioning of a society’s existing practices, conventions and norms would be possible, save at the behest of cultural invaders and missionaries’ (p. 20).

The thrust of Sekyi-Otu’s ‘visionary foundationalism’ is perhaps best explained with reference to his reservations about an exclusively immanent, or contextualist, mode of critique. While Allen acknowledges that immanent critique risks assuming a conciliatory posture with respect to a given context, she ultimately presents this as a fairly negligible concern. A rather different set of normative priorities inform Left Universalism. Sekyi-Otu worries that an insistence on contextual fidelity risks constraining a more radical questioning of a society’s existing practices and norms. Sekyi-Otu describes this as ‘criticism-as-patriot-act’ (2019, p. 26), which dictates that critique can only be offered in loyalist spirit, rather than as wholesale repudiation. If immanent critique demands adherence to the terms that hold within a context, where does that leave you if the context itself is what you wish to contest? As Sekyi-Otu puts it, ‘If the way we do things and have done things here … is the problem … then the classical Jeremiad – ‘Ye defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination’ (Jeremiah 2:1), you have traduced our values – will not suffice, immobilized as it is by its self-referentiality’ (p. 27). Sekyi-Otu is particularly concerned with how discourses of racial and national solidarity (in Africa and elsewhere) constrain the space of ‘loyalist denunciation’ when it comes to class and gender oppression. Sekyi-Otu argues that in such contexts, a foundational appeal to human dignity may appear more ‘transgressive’ (p. 27) than appeals to violated tradition. For Sekyi-Otu, criticism of class exploitation or gendered violence should not be limited to claiming such practices are opposed to Akan, African, or Canadian values, but also that they represent fundamental violations of the human.

This ‘counter-factual’ dimension to Sekyi-Otu’s universalism (2019, p. 29), affirming human dignity in the face of suffering and exploitation, has some resonance with Allen’s negatively-defined universalism anchored in ‘the concrete denunciation of the inhuman’ (Adorno, 2001, p. 175). Yet where Allen, with Adorno, demurs on the possibility of generating a positive content from this condemnation, Sekyi-Otu’s goes further, detecting ‘an idea of humanity presupposed [emphasis added] by revulsion with unjust inhuman conditions of existence’ (p. 30). Here Sekyi-Otu resists offering a singular, fixed understanding of the human. Rather than universalizing a particular understanding of the human, Sekyi-Otu’s universalism is grounded on how any community is ‘always already posing the generic question of the human’ (p. 16), one expression of which we find in the Akan rhetorical question: ‘Na ɔnoso onyε onipa?’ [Is she not also a human being?] (p. 17). While Left Universalism finds its normative footing in the enabling question of the human rather than attempting to universalize a singular answer, this does not mean that Sekyi-Otu is uninterested in attempting answers. Indeed, Left Universalism is a pressing call for the necessity of engaging the question in the first instance. Moreover, Sekyi-Otu’s willingness to broach the ‘generic question’ in these terms allows him to go further in proffering more demanding universalist commitments than we find in Allen’s somewhat amorphous appeal a ‘moral-political universalism’, the substance of which remains unclear.

As Sekyi-Otu clarifies, the aim of Left Universalism is not to radically de-historicize our understanding of the ‘human’, nor is it to abandon inquiry into the social and historical contexts that have shaped different answers to the question. Walking this line between the contingent and the essential, one of the work’s most compelling prescriptions lies in what Sekyi-Otu describes as ‘critique’s twofold obligation to do justice to historicity, the determinate and determining circumstances of moral claims, and that upon which those demands and claims are ultimately predicated for their legitimation’ (2019, p. 35). We find guidance on how to heed this dual critical obligation in Sekyi-Otu’s reading of Fanon, and particularly Fanon’s ‘non-immanent critique of race’ (Gilroy 2014, p. 140). As Sekyi-Otu clarifies, Fanon’s critique of race and racism does not appeal to values that hold within the concept of race. We can see the operation of this dual obligation in Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon, doing justice to historicity, contextualizes the idea of race as a imprisoning ‘historical-racial schema’ (2008, p. 91), produced by a long history of colonial racism. But Fanon does not contain his resistance to racism in these terms and makes a context-transcending appeal to the break from the schema of race, writing, ‘The density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom’ (2008, p. 205). Fanon’s critique of racism thus does not adhere to the terms obtaining within race-thinking itself but finds its normative resistance in a foundationalist appeal to a ‘new humanism’. As Sekyi-Otu puts it, rather than supporting the ‘conservation and resignification of the racial’, Fanon posits demands that ‘transcend racial orders and racism’ (2019, p. 42).

This mode of argument also informs Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, with its context-specific rejection of individuality and universalism in the colonial context. As Fanon forcefully puts it in the opening pages of the book, ‘[decolonization] is not a discourse on the universal’ (2004, p. 6). Sekyi-Otu warns that we ought not to give these pronouncements the final word, thus ‘mistaking parody for principle’ (2019, p. 168). While Fanon rightly insists that decolonization must be understood as a ‘historical process’ (2004, p. 2), Sekyi-Otu suggests we must equally appreciate how Fanon ultimately invokes values that transcend this context. The universalistic values championed by Fanon throughout his oeuvre find no vindication in the colonized world, and cannot be realized by a purely immanent critique. Hence the uncompromising rejection of the opening chapter ‘On Violence’ with its depiction of decolonization as a ‘tabula rasa’ (Fanon 2004, p. 1). Thus as Fanon offers a context-specific disavowal of a false colonial universalism, he makes a transcendent appeal to values that do not obtain in this world. As Sekyi-Otu explains:

Fanon’s ‘l’universel abstrait’ is heretically Hegelian because in the ‘colonial context’, as he sees it, all putative universals – of the true, the right, the good and the beautiful – are not just defective, imperfect albeit worthy intimations of higher universals. They are here radically vitiated by the transparent and coercive particularity of interests to which they minister, interests that are fundamentally non-universalizable: such is the essential sophistry of what Charles Mills calls the ‘racial polity’. The result is that while Hegel’s critique of individuality and universality in ‘civil society’ is an ‘immanent critique’, Fanon’s critique, given that the ‘context’ it addresses is in his estimation less than promising, can only be a ‘transcendent critique’. Put in the jargon of Critical Theory, the work of ‘negation’ with respect to such inauspicious circumstances of individuality and universality will have to be, ‘in this context’, more subversive than a ‘determinate negation’, a more transgressive version of even Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’. (2019, p. 167)

Immanent critique is thus impossible in such an irredeemable context, with no values worth appealing to against itself. Fanon normative critique is not derived from the values of this degraded world, but through the ‘foundational and exhortative’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p. 166) appeal of a ‘new humanism’, realized through collective action and a total rejection of the colonial context.

To follow Sekyi-Otu’s closing reference to Adorno in the above cited passage, I think we can gauge the distance between Sekyi-Otu and Allen to some extent through that separating their respective touchstone thinkers: Fanon and Adorno. As Sekyi-Otu’s exegesis details, Fanon does not seek to overcome colonialism on the basis of principles adhering within colonialism itself, but makes a more radical, foundationalist appeal to the human subject. This is clearly a critique from without rather than from within. This stands notably at odds with Adorno’s critical disposition (at least on Allen’s reading). In a passage Allen cites approvingly (pp. 215-216), Adorno (2001) warns that ‘Transcendent critique sympathizes with authority in its very form …. Anyone who judges something that has been articulated and elaborated … by presuppositions that do not hold within it is behaving in a reactionary manner, even when he swears by progressive slogans’ (p. 146). On this view, to imagine your own externally-derived principles can transcend their context is a necessarily authoritarian gesture. While there is much to be learned from Adorno’s reservations here, the distance between this prescription and Fanon’s critical orientation, to say nothing of their respective political concerns, is stark.

It is worth pressing further to clarify the political prescriptions enabled by Sekyi-Otu’s epistemological commitments. Fanon may be the theoretical lodestar of this collection of essays, but the stakes of Sekyi-Otu’s left universalism also find poignant clarification in the book’s Third Chapter, ‘Ethical Communism in African Thought’, which offers a deep engagement with Ayi Kwei Armah’s essays and novels. For Sekyi-Otu, Armah’s ethical, and ‘radically deontological’ (2019, p. 113) defence of communism poses a provocative challenge to many accepted precepts of historical materialism. As Sekyi-Otu elucidates, communism figures in Armah’s writing as a ‘radical decision’ (p. 103) and ‘perennial ethical enterprise’ (p. 90) rather than as a consequence the historical development of a society’s productive forces. Armah not only repudiates the crudest economic determinism but goes so far as to reject the notion that communism is dependent on the development of capitalist production at all. For Armah, this position gives the dangerous impression that communism is possible only for wealthy countries with advanced productive forces. For Armah and Sekyi-Otu, narratives of historical progress and development undermine and elide the substantive ethical, elective, and voluntarist commitments necessary to realize communism, and have served as particular impediments to building socialism in Africa. As Armah (1984) puts it: ‘[Communism] is a philosophy built on the principle of justice, an unambiguous principle which entails a commitment to share scarcity and sacrifices democratically … communism is not so much about ease or hardship as it is about justice’ (p. 106).

Presenting communism as a perennial ethical imperative to share in both prosperity and hardship, rather than ‘history’s unwilled consequence’ (Sekyi-Otu, 2019, p. 2), Sekyi-Otu and Armah echo the young Marx’s claim that, humanity ‘is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect it’s old work’ (2010, p. 144). This untangling of the communist necessity from the development of capitalism is not to jettison an indispensable critique of contemporary dynamics of accumulation, dispossession and exploitation. Sekyi-Otu may be adamant that a ‘universalism necessitated by historical circumstance … is much too fallibilistic a reed upon which to repose the recurring and irrevocable ethical tasks always required of us’, (p. 36) but this is not deny that the global power of capital does still necessitate a universalist response. Still less is it to deny that our animating visions of a communist future are shaped by confronting socially and historically defined challenges. In short, Sekyi-Otu is clear that his rejection of a ‘radical historicism’ (p. 36) does not advocate a kneejerk, radically de-historicized mode of critique in response. However, he reminds us that the rightness of communism is not contingent on a historical level of development but depends above all on our ability to enact egalitarian justice, in which ‘there is no getting away from the necessity of choice’ (p. 103). Rather than waiting on the development of objective conditions, Sekyi-Otu reminds us of the courage and moral clarity communism requires. As Sekyi-Otu describes the task of the ‘ethical communist’:

The ethical communist, while she must indeed address the question of historical and social causality (on pain of desiring to give the poor food but failing to answer the question why the poor have no food), cannot disavow the deontic account of communism as what I have called possibility as demand, Fanon’s ‘ideal conditions for the existence of a human world’ requiring realization by our shared agency. (2019, p. 150)

In short, we have here again an instance of the ‘twofold obligation’ to do justice to historicity and historical causality, and also the ever-present commitments to egalitarian justice undergirding such a critique.

Sekyi-Otu’s willingness to follow the transcendental and foundational claims animating Fanon, Armah and a host of other African ethical thinkers, takes us beyond Allen’s negatively defined universalism, and also beyond some of the postcolonial and decolonial thinkers she engages. For an example we might turn to Walter Mignolo (2007), who argues for ‘pluriversality as a universal project’ (pp. 452-453) but rejects communism as a context-transcending ‘abstract universal’. For Sekyi-Otu, these approaches would seem to represent a ‘soft relativism’ (2019, p. 71). Following the texts and proverbs elucidated in Left Universalism, we are left with a universal vision that remains fundamentally pluralistic, but which still offers an affirmative project, defined around an ethical commitment to communism. As Sekyi-Otu puts it, glossing Armah, ‘communism is a choice, a way of life chosen and choiceworthy because it is right, the right form of human association [emphasis added]’ (p. 116). At its most essential, this task is to ‘enjoin the practice of sharing as the first and fundamental virtue of the communist way of life’ (p. 116). This is not the imposition of a monopolistic vision of communism, but rather an attempt to expand our understanding of the communist ‘tradition’ to encompass its global diversity. We find an evocative metaphor for this pluriversal vision of the communist project in Armah’s 1984 essay ‘Masks and Marx’. Following Sekyi-Otu (p. 113), it is worth quoting this passage at length:

Let a water image illustrate the point: give communism the image of a central sea of ideas. Into this common sea run tributary rivers from all the world’s continents, all the peoples of the world. Call the African rivers Africa’s contribution to communism; call the Asian rivers Asia’s contribution to communism and call the European rivers Europe’s contribution to communism. But do not impose the identity and the name of one continent on the common sea. Worse still do not impose the identity and the name of one individual from one continent first on all that continent’s streams, then on the common sea of human values. To do that would simply to place obstacles in the way of a rational, universal theory of revolution and communism. (Armah, 1984, p. 40)

We find here a pluriversal vision of communist theory and practice that remains undergirded by a strong universalist concern to defending communism as ‘the right form of human association’. For Sekyi-Otu and Armah, communism does not exist as a singular project as defined by European theorists, but is the name for the ‘family of visions of egalitarian justice that people all spaces of human experience in time’ (2019, p. 113). This is not the retreat from communism as Eurocentrism that we find in thinkers like Mignolo, for instance, but rather a commitment to ‘redrawing the geography of the idea of communism’ and thus restoring to it an ‘authentic universality’ (p. 113). Sekyi-Otu’s willingness to uphold a foundationalist perspective seems to give his project a more clearly defined scope and animating impulse than we find in Allen’s commitments to a ‘moral-political universalism’ of negative judgment and contextual justification.

 Conclusion

It is important to not frame these commitments to immanent critique, and Sekyi-Otu’s ‘visionary foundationalism’, against each other. Indeed, both are essential. Sekyi-Otu employs immanent critique to great effect, particularly in his second chapter, ‘Difference and Left Universalism’. Far from rejecting immanent critique, Sekyi-Otu simply warns against the notion that it should be the exclusive or overriding mode of our critical inquiry. Integrating immanent, contextual concerns into his ‘twofold obligation of critique’, Sekyi-Otu also directs our attention towards transcendental claims that operate in moral discursive worlds outside of Europe, and which in his view provide internal critique with its ultimate normative potency. As we have through an exposition of The End of Progress, even works that both challenge Eurocentrism and seek to defend universalism can go too far in depicting modes of argument as imperialist impositions. In contrast, Sekyi-Otu argues that transcendent critique is already immanent to any context, and rebukes the burden that constant invocations of contextual fidelity can impose on those mounting radical critiques of their contexts and circumstances. Left Universalism makes a compelling case that we should appreciate transcendental and foundationalist claims as Indigenous to Africa’s (and the world’s) moral universe.

Sekyi-Otu also invites us to re-consider certain methodological trends in critical theory and communist thought, particularly the turn away from ‘Kantian’, transcendental modes of argument, which represent ‘a tabooed and heretical strain of the [communist] tradition in the West’ (2019, p. 144). In the domain of critical theory, it is this orientation that Allen (2016) rejects as a turn to ‘political philosophy as applied ethics’ (p. 62). Against the implicit assumptions informing Allen’s vision of the ‘dialogue’ between critical theory and non-European traditions of thought, Sekyi-Otu makes the provocative claim that deontological modes of argument might actually find more resonance in ‘subaltern epistemologies’ than those sharing Allen’s concerns might expect. Left Universalism suggests that a turn to the philosophy and politics of the global south might well yield more unexpected dialogues like those Sekyi-Otu stages, bringing together thinkers like G.A. Cohen, Ayi Kwei Armah, Enrique Dussel, and Ama Ata Aidoo.

This is not to suggest that Allen does not make a significant or worthwhile contribution in The End of Progress, nor is it to imply that she would necessarily be unsympathetic to Sekyi-Otu’s politics. While perhaps more limited in its positive contributions, Allen’s critique of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst is incisive. The enduring influence of this trajectory of the Frankfurt School alone makes this a useful endeavor, and a case for greater epistemic humility and modesty is certainly worthwhile for a tradition that has largely left its universalist claims uninterrogated. But left universalists following Sekyi-Otu can also stand to bring some of her theoretical insights on board. While this paper has focused largely on the limits of Allen’s immanent critique, her efforts raise some important cautions for the left universalist project, one of which I would like to flag briefly in this conclusion.

As the left universalist engages and confronts state power, some of Allen’s reservations about power and context seem particularly opportune. In a passage that highlights this concern, Sekyi-Otu lauds the ‘first principle of human dignity and self-determination’ that informs ‘the readiness of some Native Women’s Organizations in Canada, fearful of the odious consequences of difference absolutism, to risk suspicions of disloyalty by preferring national normative universals, say, the civil commons of Canadian Charter of Rights protections, to unquestioning identitarian allegiance to the idea of aboriginal self-government’ (2019, p. 71). As Indigenous theorists such as Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard attest to, we should be very wary of the Canadian state’s claim to represent such ‘national normative universals’. Indeed, it seems curious to present the colonial state in this way, when it is in fact Canada’s long history of sexist, colonial legislation, what Simpson (2016) describes as a ‘legal femicide’, that structures the terms of these apparent conflicts between Indigenous women and self-determination. As Coulthard (2014) acknowledges: ‘There is no doubt that certain segments of the male Native elite have problematically seized the language of cultural incommensurability … to justify the asymmetrical privileges they have inherited from … successive pieces of Indian legislation since 1869’ (p. 94). However, he continues: ‘the reification and misuse of culture in this case cannot be understood without reference to the colonial context within which it continues to flourish’ (p. 94). This is certainly not to deny the particular difficulties Indigenous women face in navigating these contested demands, or to condemn their political decisions, but it is to challenge Canada’s self-appointed position as a neutral arbiter of these claims.

Sekyi-Otu’s view that claims to self-determination must also ‘ultimately speak in the name of human dignity as an ethical universal’ (2019, p. 71) is not irrelevant here. But the left universalist must exercise great suspicion about the colonial state’s claim to represent to this universal. An interrogation of context and power does not diminish left universalist commitments, but it does represent a challenge that must be met and navigated carefully. While Allen does not herself address the struggles of Indigenous communities against settler colonialism, some of her theoretical concerns may help re-orient the ‘left universalist’ to engage these contexts with more attention to abuses of ‘universalism’, and the power dynamics involved in the state’s universalist claims in different contexts. I think Sekyi-Otu would likely agree that White Paper liberalism, which offered an assimilative ‘universal enfranchisement’ at the cost of the extinguishing Indigenous rights to self-determination, represents a specious or false universal in a similar vein as his critique of French laïcité (p. 66).^[4] Such concerns certainly do not invalidate the animating vision of the left universalist project, but they do speak to some of the strategic and contextual concerns Allen raises. To encapsulate this point, the left universalist must be mindful that the second obligation of critique (to do justice to the transcendental) does not subsume the first (to do justice to historical context), at the expense of our ability to navigate the false and coercive universalism of the colonial state. The left universalist promise is too great to risk such co-optation.

The challenges that face the left universalist are great indeed, but Sekyi-Otu issues a courageous call to meet them. Left Universalism stands to make a significant contribution to many conversations unfolding in different strains of critical theory and decolonial thought, and deserves the widest possible readership. Foremost among Sekyi-Otu’s contributions is his attention to a tradition of communist thought that both challenges ‘the Western left’s willful ignorance of ethicist discourses of socialism and communism outside the West’ (2019, p. 144) and orients readers towards the African left. Sekyi-Otu provides a vital resource for challenging European hubris not by ceding the terrain of the universal, but by exploring how universalist concerns have been engaged in other traditions, and particularly in African political discourse. In this sense Sekyi-Otu’s project represents move beyond merely provincializing European thought (necessary as such a task has been), towards de-provincializing African thought, by emphasizing the context-transcending, universal significance of the questions African thinkers have long been asking. Left Universalism is in this sense not so much a final word, but a call to think again in these terms. This exhortation to confront the ever-present necessity and possibility of realizing a better world is as timely and timeless as it has ever been.

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