Moral Images of Freedom resurrects the Kantian project of affirmative political philosophy and traces its oft-forgotten influences found in thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Benjamin. Drucilla Cornell responds to nihilistic claims about the empty purpose of critical theory in a world so utterly captured by violence in all of its worst forms: economic, social, political, and cultural. Cornell instead draws together a sweeping thread of hope in the varied symbolic forms of freedom persistent throughout the work of a broader range of critical theorists and addresses the burning challenge for such work to respond seriously to the need for a decolonization of critical theory itself and a sustained commitment to the possible future of socialism.

"In the face of terrible suffering, Cornell advances what she calls an affirmative political philosophy. Offering a theoretical vision attuned to this relationship of reason and sensory existence, Cornell exemplifies just how this can be done by mining what is vital in Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Fanon, Cassirer, and Benjamin. One of the book's great gifts is the way that it develops this insight, showing how engagement with Cassirer's understanding of the diversity and generative power of language can be put to the service of 'decolonizing' critical theory. Cornell calls for a new poetics of consciousness. Such a poetics takes us beyond the limitations of conceptual knowledge, opening us to unlikely, and uncanny, connections. The result is a stirring vision of what critical theory can be: hopeful, invigorating, humane." - The Review of Politics