BACK TO KANT: FOUNDATIONS OF INTELLECTUAL MODERNITY

Lahouari Addi

Armand Colin, 304 pages, 2026

Why you should look at it:

√ A renown Algerian sociologist’s reflections on Kant

√ A strategic repositioning of Kantian thought for interpreting our own era

√ An illuminating interdisciplinary dialogue between Kant and leading figures of the social sciences

Why would a sociologist find it useful to read Kant three hundred years after his death? Coming from a background steeped in both North African and Western sociopolitical thought, Lahouari Addi’s perspective implicitly challenges the "provincializing" of Kant.

Building on his previous work, Addi’s new book places Kant at the center of contemporary debate on rationality, freedom, and human dignity. By deconstructing morality, mysticism, and religion, its pages reveal a liberating philosophy that transcends dogma. Drawing on Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Rawls, and Bourdieu, Addi highlights Kant’s contemporary relevance to justice, economics, emancipation and mutual recognition. He acknowledges that while Kant was a "herald of bourgeois universalism" whose political views were tied to his era's property-owning class, his underlying principles of autonomy and dignity can be repurposed for broader emancipatory goals.

One of the major contributions of Addi lies in his ability to bring Kant into dialogue with leading figures of the social sciences. Far from simply juxtaposing these references, he creates a genuine intellectual tension among them, in which each author serves to illuminate, extend, or sometimes challenge the Kantian legacy. The author develops an approach that treats Kant’s thought not as a static philosophical system, but as a living reflection capable of illuminating our current ethical, political and geopolitical debates.

Lahouari Addi is a sociologist who taught at the University of Oran (Algeria) and later at Sciences Po in Lyon (France.)  He is currently a research associate at the Triangle Laboratory at ENS Lyon and a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). His published works in English include The Crisis of Muslim Religious Discourse: The Necessary Shift from Plato to Kant (Routledge, 2023) and Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam (Georgetown, 2017.)