Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy. Edited by Andrew Valls. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 294p. $45.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

This is an important work, which I highly recommend. Andrew Valls has gathered an impressive collection of essays, primarily from philosophers, each of which examines the place of race in the work of a writer of the modern Western canon. The writers under examination here are Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche. They are all strong, thoughtful essays, and the text as a whole will prove valuable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate philosophy and political theory classes.