Michael Brooks was that rarest thing: a warm and brilliant communicator who combined sweeping intellectual curiosity with deep moral conviction. I was only able to speak with Michael a few times, but I was immediately struck by how real his interest in other people was. Michael never did that thing where one gets a few stock questions about your life out of the way before moving on to talking about oneself. To talk with him was an experience of two people really getting to know one another, and he made you feel valued by the sincerity of his interest in your opinions and concerns.

This is why, in the three years since Michael passed away, his loss has never been more keenly felt. Cut down as he was rising to the height of his powers, Michael had just released his book Against the Web, responding to the “Intellectual Dark Web,” which ended with a few of his thoughts about “cosmopolitan socialism” and what it might mean to his intellectual and spiritual heroes. For Michael, authors like Cornel West and Amartya Sen and politicians like his beloved Lula da Silva embodied a kind of cosmopolitan spirit, wherein nothing human was foreign to them — and no person who needed help was too far away for them to listen.

All this made it intimidating when I was pitched on writing a book on cosmopolitan socialism to build on what Michael had set out to do. On the one hand, it seemed like a reasonable fit; I’d already written a book on international law and cosmopolitanism and had always wanted to come back to the topic. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine a more humbling request. I wasn’t Michael, and I felt it deeply wrong that he’d been denied the time needed to write his own book on the subject.