Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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184 CHAPTER FIVE

makes no appearance in the Critique of Judgement (1790), not even in its

“Critique of Teleological Judgement”, and plays no role in his discus-

sions of human diversity and imperialism in the Conjectures (1786), To-

ward Perpetual Peace (1795), and The Metaphysics of Morals (1797). In

his last published discussion of race, within a short essay entitled “

Uber

den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie” [“Concern-

ing the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy”] (1788), Kant makes

no arguments about the preeminence of whites or Europeans over other

human races. In the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

(1798), published late in Kant’s life and based upon a revision of anthro-

pology lecture notes, he bypasses a detailed discussion of race by recom-

mending a work by Christoph Girtenner (7:320). Girtenner’s

Uber das

kantische Prinzip f¨ur die Naturgeschichte [On the Kantian principle for

Natural History] (1796) is an application of Kant’s hereditary theories to

nonhuman species.

Notably, in all of the late published writings in

which one would expect Kant to use the concept of human races—for

instance, in his treatments of the development of human nature, the de-

velopment of social and cultural history, the relationships between Euro-

pean and non-European peoples, and imperialism—he instead consis-

tently focuses upon subsistence methods and land-use practices to

account for human diversity, a method that emphasizes the collective

freedoms of diverse peoples.

Kant never repudiated the hierarchical

claims of his earlier writings on race, and indeed he continued to lecture

about the concept of race late into his life. Yet, strikingly, his develop-

ment of the idea of a distinctively human freedom (i.e., of cultural

agency) and concomitantly his sociological account of human diversity

displaced both the cognitive and the hierarchical assumptions and argu-

ments of race theory in his late moral and political works, in which he

explicitly defended non-European peoples and the equality of vary-

ing collective lifestyles (including pastoralism and nomadism) and vehe-

mently attacked European empires and conquest.

Thus, I turn now to

the other identiﬁable strand of Kant’s theoretical understanding of hu-

man diversity, one that dominates his later, considered writings on moral-

ity and politics, and that provides the conceptual language with which he

both analyzes social and political relationships among European and non-

European peoples and denounces European imperialism.

The Conjectures provides a speculative account of the early develop-

ment of agriculturally based, sedentary societies that is clearly inspired by

Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, but, unlike Rousseau, Kant also at-

tempts to identify the tensions among nonsedentary and sedentary com-

munities and the tendency of the latter to assimilate or to colonize the

former. This latter point is crucial: whereas Rousseau discusses the linear

transformation from “primitive” to “civilized” societies, Kant speculates

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 185

not only about the early development of settled societies but also about

the relationships between settled and nonsettled societies in the pre-

modern era. As we will see, in a crucial discussion of property in The

Metaphysics of Morals and in his writings on cosmopolitan right, Kant also

suggests how such relationships should (and should not) be developed in

his own day of increasingly global commercial relationships and Euro-

pean imperial expansion.

In his discussion of the political consequences of global cultural diver-

sity, Kant focuses on the tensions between pastoral peoples—those whose

sustenance and way of life is based primarily upon herding domesticated

animals, as well as “sporadic digging for roots or gathering of fruit”—

and agrarian peoples (8:118). Like Rousseau, Kant believes that the in-

troduction of agriculture and the early growth of settled communities

instigate profound changes in human life, including the rise of a variety

of artistic, scientiﬁc, and other cultural developments, and, concomi-

tantly, the rise of a disturbing amount of inequality and social and politi-

cal oppression. Kant also describes the basic differences between entire

nations that practise varying collective lifestyles and the resulting social

tensions among these coexisting peoples:

Pastoral life is not only leisurely, but also the most reliable means of support,

for there is no lack of fodder for animals in a largely uninhabited country.

Agriculture or the planting of crops, on the other hand, is extremely laborious,

subject to the vagaries of climate, and consequently insecure; it also requires

permanent settlements, ownership of land, and sufﬁcient strength to defend the

latter. The herdsman, however, abhors such property because it limits his free-

dom of pasture. (8:118)

The external conﬂicts between pastoralists (and hunters), on the one

hand, and settled societies, on the other, create a situation virtually iden-

tical to that of a Hobbesian state of nature. In this case, however, rather

than the pernicious atmosphere of conﬂict arising from individuals, or

loosely organized bands of individuals, with different personal under-

standings of the danger or insecurity of others’ behaviour, the Conjectures

delineates the conﬂicts between nations (or peoples, V¨olker) that arise

because of their differing collective ways of life.

Kant argues that civil constitutions and the public administration of

justice arose in part because of the speciﬁc internal social needs of settled

societies, such as the need for a stable system of property relations and

the desire to manage “major acts of violence” through public power

rather than through acts of private vengeance (8:119). In addition, how-

ever, external relations among settled and nonsettled peoples also pro-

vided an impetus to the political organization of agriculturally based

societies:

186 CHAPTER FIVE

Where people depend for their livelihood on the cultivation of the soil (and on

the planting of trees in particular), they require permanent accommodation;

and the defence of such property against all encroachment requires a large

number of people who are prepared to assist one another. Hence those who

adopted this way of life could no longer live in scattered family units, but had

to stick together and set up village communities (incorrectly described as

towns) in order to protect their property against savage hunters or tribes of

pastoral nomads. (8:119)

Once such agriculturally based societies gain strength, Kant suggests

three alternatives for the ensuing relationship between nonsettled and

settled peoples. First, their conﬂicts might drive some nomadic peoples

to the far reaches of the earth in search of safe territories in which they

can practise their way of life. In Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant speculates

that the peoples near the Arctic Ocean, such as “the Ostiaks or Sam-

oyeds” must have been driven to such extreme terrain and climates by

war (8:363–65).

Similarly, agriculturalists felt compelled to “distance”

themselves “as far as possible” from peoples who might undermine “the

fruit” of their “long and diligent efforts” (8:119).

The second option is

a somewhat voluntary assimilation: in short, hunting and pastoral peoples

will choose to enter settled societies. The social oppression and injustice

of settled societies might be overlooked by nonsettled peoples given “the

growing luxury of the town-dwellers” and thus they may “let themselves

be drawn into the glittering misery of the towns” (8:120). Third, Kant

also mentions brieﬂy the forced assimilation of nonsettled peoples

through the colonial activities of settled societies. Population growth,

among other factors, impels settled nations to expand by force “like a

beehive, [to] send out colonists in all directions from the centre—colo-

nists who were already civilized.” (8:119) Kant understood, in the early

essay Idea for a Universal History (1784), the implications of such activ-

ities in his own day, though only later (in his writings from the mid-

1790s onward) would he condemn them. The efforts of imperialists in

the past and in his own day, he implies, did not and would not spare

peoples who lead nonsettled ways of life. Kant anticipates—here without

judgement—that “the political constitutions of our continent . . . will

probably legislate eventually for all other continents” (8:29).

Anti-imperialism and Cosmopolitan Right

Kant recognized that the ongoing, often antagonistic relationships among

diverse peoples constituted the global political reality of his day, one that

demanded, in his view, not only a conjectural history of their early devel-

opment as he had earlier provided, but also an ethical and political anal-

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 187

ysis. His concept of cosmopolitan right, one of his three categories of

political justice, is meant precisely to offer a critique of empire.

Kant’s account of differing property regimes raises many of the central

imperial issues that he most fully addresses in his theory of cosmopolitan

right. In a striking section of The Metaphysics of Morals, he ponders some

of the moral issues that are raised by conﬂicts among peoples who prac-

tise different collective ways of life, in the context of a discussion about

the various uses of property. Kant dismisses John Locke’s argument that

one must mix one’s labour with the land (for instance, through the prac-

tice of agriculture) to be able to claim it legitimately as one’s own prop-

erty. As we have seen, this agriculturalist approach to justifying private

property was often used by British and French colonialists as a means to

deny indigenous peoples any ownership of the land they occupied, on the

view that they did not mix their labour with, and thus did not ‘improve’,

the land in any manner.

Accordingly, such territory was considered to be

res nullius, or ‘belonging to no one’. It is signiﬁcant, then, that Kant

addresses this theory of property just before discussing conﬂicts between

agrarian and non-settled peoples in general and the moral claims of Eu-

ropean imperialists in particular. Kant presents the Lockean view in the

form of a question before rejecting it swiftly:

[I]n order to acquire land is it necessary to develop it (build on it, cultivate it,

drain it, and so on)? No. For since these forms (of speciﬁcation) are only acci-

dents, they make no object of direct possession and can belong to what the

subject possesses only insofar as the substance is already recognized as his.

When ﬁrst acquisition is in question, developing land is nothing more than an

external sign of taking possession, for which many other signs that cost less

effort can be substituted.

(6:265)

The clearest aforementioned sign, in Kant’s view, is the capability of de-

fending such land; in short, if peoples are capable of actively resisting

others’ attempts to use or to occupy their lands, this itself constitutes a

sign that they are the ﬁrst possessors, regardless of whether they have

cultivated or developed their lands.

Kant then moves to the issue of neighbouring families or peoples who

practise different collective ways of life. Can they, he asks,

resist each other in adopting a certain use of land, for example, can a hunting

people resist a pasturing people or a farming people, or the latter resist a people

that wants to plant orchards, and so forth? Certainly, since as long as they keep

within their own boundaries the way they want to live on their land is up to

their own discretion (res merae facultatis). (6:266)

We saw earlier in this chapter that Kant uses the Latin juristic term res

merae facultatis to refer to that part of the faculty of desire by which

188 CHAPTER FIVE

individuals exercise their cultural (or ‘negative’) freedom to make dis-

tinctively ‘human choices’, choices that result from our status as beings

with ‘humanity’ and that necessarily yield a plurality of perspectives and

practices. Recall that Kant defends giving individuals a wide latitude to

reﬂect and to act upon their choices about happiness, value, beauty,

work, which capacities they will cultivate, and other matters relating,

broadly stated, to their cultural activities and judgements. Here Kant ap-

plies this anti-paternalistic idea of a pluralistic and experientially situated

freedom to groups, that is, to the collective ways of life of entire peoples.

Kant continues his argument by moving immediately from the topic of

neighbouring peoples, who are adjacent to one another presumably be-

cause of much earlier migrations of the kind that he describes in the

Conjectures, to the more deliberate encounters of European voyages of

discovery and imperial activity. Kant notes that

it can still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own

will brings us into the neighborhood of a people that holds out no prospect of

a civil union with it, we should not be authorized to found colonies, by force if

need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these human

beings (savages) into a rightful condition (as with the American Indians, the

Hottentots [of southern Africa] and the inhabitants of New Holland [Aus-

tralia]); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent pur-

chase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our

superiority without regard for their ﬁrst possession. (6:266)

Kant contemptuously labels such rationalizations of European imperial-

ism as “Jesuitism” and writes that “it is easy to see through this veil of

injustice”. He concludes bluntly that “[s]uch a way of acquiring land is

therefore to be repudiated.” (6:266) Hence, Kant defends the freedom

of societies, including those of hunting and pastoral peoples, to organize

their most basic collective practices in the manner that they see ﬁt and to

defend their way of life against imperialists and others who attempt to

alter them.

To understand more fully the nature of Kant’s opposition to imperial-

ism, one must examine his writings on cosmopolitan right, the primary

critical purpose of which is to condemn European imperialism. Yet a

crucial question immediately presents itself before one can investigate the

concept itself: namely, to what domain of human activity does cosmopol-

itan right refer? Kant insists adamantly that the concept of a right should

be theorized at three conceptually distinct levels: the domestic, the inter-

national (rights pertaining to the law of nations), and the cosmopolitan.

His political writings make clear that at each level one can formulate an

ideal against which actual political practices can be judged and which we

should collectively attempt to realize, however imperfectly. Thus, the

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 189

idea of civil rights applies to the institutions and practices of individual

states. The ideal against which actual regimes are judged is that of a

“pure republic” in which public authority ﬂows from the sanctity of freely

made laws and not from the arbitrary power of any one group of particu-

lar humans, a regime in which “freedom [is] the principle and indeed the

condition for any exercise of [public] coercion” (6:340).

The right of

nations (or right of states) applies to the relations among states. At this

international level, the regulative ideal against which present actions

should be judged and toward which states should strive is a free federa-

tion of states eventually encompassing “all the nations of the earth.”

(8:357) To whom or to what practices, then, does cosmopolitan right

apply, if not to relations among individuals or relations among states?

And what is the ideal of cosmopolitan right against which the relevant

extant practices should be judged?

In recognition of the heightened discovery, travel, and imperial activity

of his century, Kant believed that a discussion of justice at only the do-

mestic and interstate levels could not fully capture the newly emerging

ethical problems of the modern age. Although his discussions in Toward

Perpetual Peace of ancient trade routes—such as those that connected

Europe to Central Asia, India, and China—exemplify his understanding

of the extensive history of commercial relations and activity between Eu-

rope and the non-European world, Kant also believed that the world of

his day had become integrated to a degree that went far beyond transna-

tional relationships of the past.

One can plausibly describe this aspect of

Kant’s thought, then, as an early attempt to grapple with the globaliza-

tion of economic, political, and hence moral ties. Kant suggests that since

the

community of nations of the earth has now gone so far that a violation of right

on one place of the earth is felt in all, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is no

fantastic and exaggerated way of representing right.... (8:360)

In formulating this new ethico-political category, Kant stresses that it

rests not upon a preposterous and idealistic view of the international

community, but rather responds to the actual global relationships that

make the idea of cosmopolitan right a moral necessity. Cosmopolitan

right is therefore

a supplement to the unwritten code of the right of a state and the right of

nations necessary for the sake of any public rights of human beings and so for

perpetual peace; only under this condition can we ﬂatter ourselves that we are

constantly approaching perpetual peace. (8:360)

Kant afﬁrms the importance of cosmopolitan right even more starkly in

The Metaphysics of Morals, where he asserts that if we fail to secure a

190 CHAPTER FIVE

semblance of justice at any one of the three levels of human interaction

(the domestic, international, and cosmopolitan levels), then “the frame-

work of all the others is unavoidably undermined and must ﬁnally col-

lapse.” (6:311) For Kant, the particular activities that have engendered

not only the reality of a community of nations on the earth, but also the

issues of justice at this cosmopolitan level, are almost all related to Euro-

pean colonialism. Visiting foreign lands “and still more settling there to

connect them with the mother country, provides the occasion for trou-

bles and acts of violence in one place on our globe to be felt all over it.”

(6:353)

In a discussion of international right in the “Doctrine of Right”, Kant

argues that the analogy between warring states in the international arena

and warring individuals in a state of nature reaches its limit when one

fully considers issues of global justice because

we have to take into consideration not only the relation of one state toward

another as a whole, but also the relation of individual persons of one state toward

the individuals of another, as well as toward another state as a whole. (6:344,

emphasis added)

Kant informs his readers that in this section (on the right of nations, that

is, on international justice), he will concern himself only with those fea-

tures of international relations that are analogous to a hypothetical state

of nature, leaving unanswered the question of when he might consider

the nonanalogous relationships that he described brieﬂy above. We later

ﬁnd that he saves his discussion of non-interstate global relationships for

his section on cosmopolitan right. It then becomes clear that cosmopoli-

tan right concerns how individuals from one political realm ought to

relate to individuals of another (foreign) realm, as well as how states and

foreigners should treat one another—i.e., what visitors owe to foreign

states, and what states, in turn, owe to such foreign visitors.

Along these lines, Kant explains in a footnote in Toward Perpetual

Peace that cosmopolitan right refers to

the right of citizens of the world, insofar as individuals and states, standing in the

relation of externally affecting one another, are to be regarded as citizens of a

universal state of mankind (ius cosmopoliticum). (8:349)

Although the emphasis here on being citizens of the world might appear

to be a slightly different way of representing the domain of cosmopolitan

right, in Kant’s German this amounts simply to a description of the word

used for “cosmopolitan right” itself, as Weltb¨urgerrecht is literally a com-

pound of “world”, “citizen”, and “right”. While Kant argues against an

actual world government and instead for simply a voluntary federation of

states, he believes that the complex interrelationships between states and

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 191

foreigners raise issues of justice that can only be met by a separate cate-

gory of justice, one that recognizes that the interrelationships among hu-

mans bind them together as fellow citizens of the earth, despite the fact

that they inhabit different sovereign realms. Thus, as Kant makes a point

of emphasizing, humans from different societies owe something to each

other as a matter of justice, not simply as a matter of philanthropy or

generosity, despite the absence of a shared sovereign power that unites

them all. The one innate right of humanity—the protection of the dis-

tinctively human freedom that underlies humanity as cultural agency—

that humans possess simply by being human and not because of any civil

agreements or the possession of citizenship hence receives its most robust

political expression in Kant’s account of cosmopolitan right. In The

Metaphysics of Morals, the three concepts that are said to follow from the

innate right of humanity are equality, freedom, and communication, each

of which is central to Kant’s understanding of cosmopolitan right.

It should be clear, then, why a discussion only of interstate relations is

insufﬁcient for the purposes of discussing political justice at a global level.

The language of justice—or, in Kant’s terms, the domain of right—ex-

tends beyond the borders of any one state and, at a global level, involves

more than just interstate relations. Kant’s statements about cosmopolitan

right suggest that it is not its global scope that distinguishes it from

international right. Instead, cosmopolitan right is unique in that it at-

tempts to articulate a normative ideal that attends to the ethical problems

raised by increasingly common relationships between “[foreign] individ-

uals and states”, in contrast to the traditional purview of the ‘law of

nations’ that pertains mainly to “states in relation to one another (ius

gentium)” (8:349). Presumably, even if the ideal condition of a voluntary

federation of states were met, ethical problems would still be raised by

the manner in which (for example) states and foreigners (or individuals

from different countries) dealt with one another. Such foreign individuals

might act as the agents of a state or they might simply be travellers of the

kind who voyaged frequently in Kant’s day, with no apparent intention of

conquering lands, however much their information might have helped

later colonialists. Bougainville, the eighteenth-century French explorer

who circumnavigated the globe and whose travel writings inspired Di-

derot’s dialogue about Tahiti and imperialism, seems to ﬁt this latter cat-

egory. As we saw earlier, in a book review of Bougainville’s Voyage autour

du monde, Diderot criticized Bougainville’s travels for, perhaps unwit-

tingly, laying the groundwork for what Diderot assumed would be French

colonial activity in the South Paciﬁc. Diderot was, of course, prescient in

this regard; indeed, Tahiti remains one of France’s last colonial outposts.

Yet, unlike Diderot, who proclaimed in his book review that Bougainville

and every other European should simply leave Tahiti alone, Kant never,

192 CHAPTER FIVE

even for rhetorical effect, called for a prohibition of developing transna-

tional ties. Rather, his category of cosmopolitan right attempts to articu-

late an ideal with which one can both condemn European imperialism

and encourage nonexploitative and peaceful transnational relations.

Kant understood, of course, that injustices often followed voyages of

discovery and the commercial activities of trading companies, such as (to

use one of Kant’s examples) the British East India Company. Nonethe-

less, he argues that the “horrifying” abuses that transnational voyages

have unleashed “cannot annul the right of citizens of the world to try to

establish community with all and, to this end, to visit all regions of the

earth.” (6:353) As he explains, cosmopolitan right should be limited to

“conditions of universal hospitality” (8:357), which include, for instance,

the right of a foreigner not to be treated with hostility because he has arrived

on the land of another. The other can turn him away, if this can be done

without destroying him, but as long as he behaves peaceably where he is [auf

seinem Platz], he cannot be treated with hostility. (8:358)

But why should we try to establish community with others at all? As we

have seen, Kant’s understanding of the transnational ties that were devel-

oping in his day (often unjustly because of ‘hostile’ Europeans) brought

issues of cosmopolitan justice to the fore. In addition to the timeliness of

theorizing cosmopolitan right in his day, Kant provides more fundamen-

tal reasons that suggest its enduring moral importance.

First, the ﬁnitude of humans’ geography, that is, the very idea of a

“globe”, entails that individuals and societies cannot avoid interacting

with one another. Humans do not live on an inﬁnite plane along which

they can spread without having to engage each other. Along these lines,

it may be helpful to recall Kant’s account of the social effects of war and

the forced migrations that, in his view, originally populated much of the

earth. At some point, Kant implies, whole peoples cannot continue to

ﬂee the injustices of persecution and settle in neutral, unoccupied territo-

ries. The globe itself poses intrinsic geographical limits to the strategies

of mass exodus and national isolation. Since humans live on a “sphere,

they cannot disperse inﬁnitely but must ﬁnally put up with being near

one another” (8:358). This geographical argument, in combination with

the political reality of increasing interconnectedness among peoples, pre-

sents the need for an ethical standard by which individuals and states can

attempt to relate to one another in a nonexploitative manner. The rela-

tionships among far-ﬂung peoples will not only take place at the realm of

interstate relations, but will also be fostered as a result of trade, voyages

of anthropological and scientiﬁc study, and other forms of travel and con-

tact. Kant’s concept of cosmopolitan right seeks to attend to this com-

plex global reality.

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 193

Second, Kant’s account of property serves as the basis for an argument

about the legitimacy of humans to voyage in pursuit of community with

others. A key tenet of Kant’s theory of property is that “[a]ll human

beings are originally in common possession [Gesammt-Besitz] of the land of

the entire earth” (6:267). In other words, the territories that peoples

possess today have not always been owned, but were originally held in

common. Thus, there is a certain arbitrariness as to why certain people

live on, and rightfully possess, particular areas of the earth. As Kant sug-

gests in Toward Perpetual Peace, “originally no one had more right than

another to be on a place on the earth.” Hence, Kant’s argument is that

we should not presume from the simple fact that we legitimately possess

a territory that this gives us the authority or the right to exclude others

from it entirely. Given the ultimately arbitrary origins and, consequently,

the equivocal status of our property, the rightful possessors of territories

lack absolute authority over it. The individuals and governing authorities

of nations, therefore, are under an ethical obligation to visiting for-

eigners, who themselves possess a certain authority that demands ethical

respect.

At one point, therefore, Kant refers to one aspect of “the right

of hospitality” as “the authorization of a foreign newcomer” (8:358).

In part, the authorization of those who roam from territory to territory

derives from humanity’s collective ownership of the earth’s surface, if not

its underlying land. There are also vast swaths of the earth’s surface that

are uninhabitable and that create ideal opportunities for travellers to seek

community with other societies. As Kant argues, the “right to visit”, or

to present oneself for society, belongs to all humans beings by virtue of the

right of possession in common of the earth’s surface.... Uninhabitable parts

of the earth’s surface, seas and deserts, divide this [global human] community,

but in such a way that ships and camels (ships of the desert) make it possible to

approach one another over these regions belonging to no one [die keinem

angeh¨orten] and to make use of the right to the earth’s surface, which belongs

to the human race in common, for possible commerce. (8:358)

Kant’s understanding of the legitimacy of travel stands in striking con-

trast to one of the prevalent views of voyaging and seeking out new lands

and peoples in the tradition of European thought. Even Diderot, though

ultimately a kind of cosmopolitan at heart, as his reveries about cross-

cultural learning, interethnic marriage, and transnational community

building evince, feared nonetheless that the very act of travel created cor-

rupt and rapacious behaviour, for travellers who were too far removed

from the moeurs of their homelands at times became ferocious beasts

abroad. Of course, Diderot’s concerns about travel stemmed almost ex-

clusively from his hatred of imperialism and the cruel domination of for-

eign peoples that ultimately resulted from travel in the modern age. But