This book reevaluates "international knowledge" in light of recent scholarship in the fields of hermeneutics, ethnography, and historiography regarding the non-West, the past, and the present of international society. Countering the disciplinary skepticism about political possibilities outside of the strictures of modern Western forms, it proposes formulations of power, interest, ethics, and subjectivity by a group of African intellectuals as plausible alternatives to official French and American postwar proposals for world order.