Omri Boehm’s new book argues that both the left and the right must abandon divisive identity politics and embrace the transformative power of Enlightenment ideals.
...Boehm’s lodestar is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who defined the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Kant warned about the temptations of mechanical thinking — the lazy habit of falling back on an external authority (the will of the king, the consensus of public opinion) in order to avoid the difficult work of thinking for ourselves. When the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem, he declared — absurdly and abominably — that he had lived his life according to Kant’s precepts, yet was helpless before his superiors’ command to follow orders. Boehm quotes Hannah Arendt’s response: “In Kant, nobody has the right to obey.”
Before I started reading this book, the title “Radical Universalism” struck me as an oxymoron. I associated the word “universalism” with an inclination toward complacency — an approach that deployed the tepid vocabulary of reform and individual rights to preserve the status quo. There seemed to be little that was radical about it.
But Boehm’s book has persuaded me that universalism could be more profoundly transformative than anything offered by the self-styled “radicals” on either end of the political spectrum. Recognizing our duty to one another will be a hard sell in a world where we have been encouraged to think only about our own convenience and interests. Boehm makes an inspiring case for why this impossible project is necessary work...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/books/review/radical-universalism-omri-boehm.html?smid=em-share
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