Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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194 CHAPTER FIVE

Diderot was simply giving an anti-imperialist spin on a theme with an

ancient provenance. As Anthony Pagden has noted, the

disapproval of travel belongs to an ancient European tradition, one which lo-

cates the source of all civility—which is, after all a life lived in cities (civi-

tates)—in settled communities, and which looks upon all modes of nomadism

as irredeemably savage.... Crossing the ocean was an act contrary to nature,

for the gods—or God—had ﬁlled half the world with water precisely in order

to keep humans apart.

Set against this intellectual context, and unlike Diderot who often de-

ploys (and thus seemingly endorses) a classic trope of this kind either to

subvert it ultimately or to cast doubt on some other tradition, Kant un-

ambiguously dispels this view of travel. With regard to oceans, for in-

stance, he argues the following:

Although the seas might seem to remove nations from any community with

one another, they are the arrangements of nature most favoring their com-

merce by means of navigation; and the more coastlines these nations have in the

vicinity of one another (as in the Mediterranean), the more lively their com-

merce can be. (6:353–54)

For Kant, nomadism per se, is not evil or depraved. Though one can only

speculate about such matters, his fairly generous views of hunting and

pastoral peoples in the light of most imperial discourse (for instance,

Kant’s view that their collective lifestyles are fundamentally human and

free and his defence of their legitimacy in resisting imperial subjugation

and all coercive efforts to change their societies) may have something to

do with his approval of the nonsettled, nomadic voyagers whose travels

created and strengthened a kind of global or transnational civil society,

related to, but distinct from, the relations of states. His theory of origi-

nally communal and traversable property establishes the authority of voy-

agers and, thus, the right to make contact and communicate with others.

Kant combines these two arguments of geography and property in a

passage worth quoting at length. He writes in The Metaphysics of Morals

that humans are enclosed

all together within determinate limits (by the spherical shape of the place they

live in, a globus terraqueus [a globe of earth and water]). And since possession

of the land, on which an inhabitant of the earth can live, can be thought only

as a possession of a part of a determinate whole, and so as possession of that to

which each of them originally has a right, it follows that all nations stand origi-

nally in a community of land, though not of rightful community of possession

(communio) and so use of it, or of property in it; instead they stand in a com-

munity of possible physical interaction (commercium), that is, in a thorough-

going relation of each to all the others of offering to engage in commerce with

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 195

any other, and each has a right to make this attempt without the other being

authorized to behave toward it as an enemy [simply] because it has made this

attempt. (6:352)

Kant’s use of the Latin commercium indicates that although cosmopoli-

tan right seeks in part to protect those engaged in market-oriented trade

(commerce in the narrow sense), the concept of a right to visit is also

intended more widely to refer to any possible interactions among individ-

uals of different peoples. Kant’s own language, in which he moves back

and forth from Wechselwirkung (interaction broadly construed) to Verkehr

(a term that he sometimes uses to denote contractual, trade or market-

based interactions, but that also means, more generically, dealings or

contact), both of which are usually translated into English as ‘com-

merce’, indicates the wide scope of Kant’s understanding of commercial

relationships. It would be a mistake, in other words, to treat cosmopoli-

tan right simply as a kind of bourgeois right, to view it as a concept that

Kant uses in order to legitimate an early form of global capitalism. In-

deed, given the nature of Kant’s attack on European imperialism, in

many respects he uses the ethical standards of a commercial community

(widely construed as cosmopolitan interaction) to attack the injustices

wrought by the narrower, market-oriented sense of commerce, such as

the exploitative, proﬁt-seeking practices of voyagers and the actions of

quasi-sovereign corporations like the imperial Indies companies. The two

senses of commerce, however, need not always be opposed. The “spirit of

[market] commerce” and the related “power of money”, both of which

Kant marshals famously in defence of the idea of a realistic (non-na¨ıve)

belief in political progress, are selﬁsh forces that (Kant wants his readers

to hope) might engender a prudentially oriented respect for cosmopoli-

tan right, since the concept itself might not motivate individuals to abide

by it (8:368). Here, then, we see Kant attempting to use market-oriented

commerce in service of the broader idea of a just and peaceful commer-

cium that the concept of cosmopolitan right demands.

But when the

two are in conﬂict, Kant’s anti-imperialist arguments evince the primacy

of the latter, ethical idea of commercium.

Kant asserts emphatically that a right to visit is not a right to conquer

or a right to settle. Cosmopolitan right “does not extend beyond the

conditions which make it possible to seek commerce with the old inhab-

itants.” (8:358) Authorized visitors, too, are under certain obligations to

foreign peoples (a visitor’s authorization is not absolute, just as a state’s

authority over its land is not absolute) and, thus, inhospitality can ﬂow in

either direction. At one point, Kant criticizes some non-European prac-

tices such as those of the inhabitants along the Barbary coast “in robbing

ships in adjacent seas or enslaving stranded seafarers, or that of the inhab-

196 CHAPTER FIVE

itants of deserts (the Arabian Bedouins) in regarding approach to no-

madic tribes as a right to plunder them” (8:359). Nonetheless, he singles

out European “commercial states” as particularly egregious offenders of

cosmopolitan right given their imperial exploits.

If one compares with this [the idea of cosmopolitan right] the inhospitable

behavior of civilized, especially commercial, states in our part of the world, the

injustice they show in visiting foreign lands and peoples (which with them is

tantamount to conquering them) goes to horrifying lengths. When America,

the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth were discovered,

they were, to them, countries belonging to no one [die keinem angeh¨orten],

since they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In the East Indies (Hindustan),

they brought in foreign soldiers under the pretext of merely proposing to set

up trading posts, but with them [came] oppression of the inhabitants, incite-

ment of the various Indians states to widespread wars, famine, rebellions,

treachery, and the whole litany of troubles that oppress the human race.

(8:358–59)

In addition to his effort to defend oppressed people’s resistance to impe-

rial rule, Kant investigates some other responses to the horrors of Euro-

pean activity in the world. Given their cruel behaviour, Kant praises the

restrictions imposed upon Europeans by China and Japan, much as Di-

derot had justiﬁed China’s prohibition of Europeans in the Histoire des

deux Indes. Kant writes that “China and Japan (Nipon), which had given

such guests a try, have therefore wisely [placed restrictions on them], the

former allowing them access but not entry [den Zugang, aber nicht den

Eingang], the latter even allowing access to only a single European peo-

ple, the Dutch, but excluding them, like prisoners, from community with

the natives.”

(8:359) In a moment suggestive of his contextualized view

of moral and political judgement, Kant praises the seemingly harsh re-

strictions because of China and Japan’s historical memory and political

circumstances.

Europeans had created such a pernicious historical rec-

ord of foreign exploitation, in Kant’s view, that non-European countries

that had the ability to do so, and that were not already dominated from

without, could legitimately curb European activities within their territo-

ries. Thus, actions that might prima facie violate the right to hospitality—

in particular, the treatment of foreigners as virtual prisoners—become

permissible in light of judgements of historical experience. Europeans,

Kant implies, had worn out their welcome in much of the world long ago

and, at least in some parts of the globe, were being treated accordingly.

While Kant does not rule out the legitimacy of making contact and

developing reciprocal ties with peoples through travel, he insists that the

right to try to establish community with others “is not, however, a right

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 197

to make a settlement on the land of another nation (ius incolatus [right to

inhabit]); for this, a speciﬁc contract is required.” (6:353) The people

itself must genuinely allow foreigners to inhabit their land as guests. As

he suggests in Toward Perpetual Peace, even a right to be a “guest” re-

quires “a special beneﬁcent pact” that invites foreigners to become “mem-

bers” of a household or, for that matter, of society in general (8:358).

Kant understands, however, that the more pressing question in the con-

text of imperial activity concerns whether diverse peoples, such as hunters

or pastoralists, rightly possess the lands that they inhabit and, even if they

do, whether their use of such vast swaths of land is defensible. He con-

siders such views by examining a common imperialist argument whereby

a number of colonial settlements would be deemed justiﬁable because

colonists simply become the neighbours of indigenous peoples; surely for

this, the argument runs, no special agreement or pact of beneﬁcence is

necessary. Kant puts the question as follows: “in newly discovered lands,

may a nation undertake to settle (accolatus [dwell near, as a neighbour])

and take possession in the neighbourhood of a people that has already

settled in the region, even without its consent?” Kant responds,

If the settlement is made so far from where that people resides that there is no

encroachment on anyone’s use of his land, the right to settle is not open to

doubt. But if these people are shepherds or hunters (like the Hottentots, the

Tungusi, or most of the American Indian nations) who depend for their suste-

nance on vast open stretches of land [großen ¨oden Landstrecken], this settle-

ment may not take place by force but only by contract, and indeed by a con-

tract that does not take advantage of the ignorance of those inhabitants with

respect to ceding their lands.

(6:353)

As inviting as “discovered” territory may seem to potential colonists,

“vast open stretches of land” are not necessarily inhabitable by foreigners

without indigenous peoples’ real and uncoerced consent, since its very

vastness may be necessary for the basic sustenance of hunting or pastoral

peoples. One implication of this passage is that individuals from settled

societies are deceiving themselves by judging other peoples according to

their own ultimately conventional (in this case, agrarian) standards.

Lands that appear to serve no purpose, in the European view, may very

well be necessary for the collective lifestyles of whole nations. Such

judgements, in other words, must be made in a manner that presupposes

the rationality and freedom of indigenous peoples’ land use, especially

when that use relates to their basic survival. With the decline of anti-

imperialist political thought in the post-Enlightenment age, Kant’s call to

respect the freedom of non-European peoples and his arguments against

imperialism would later invite scorn from commentators who concluded

198 CHAPTER FIVE

that such beliefs offered “proof of Kant’s incapacity to judge of cultural-

historical things”, since “primitive peoples”, according to this view, “lack

concepts of right, [and thus] treaties [with them] cannot be made, as

Kant demands.”

Given Kant’s anthropological assumption that land use is one of the

most fundamental social characteristics of a people, his defense of hunting

and pastoral uses of land is an endorsement of the humanity (the cultural

agency) of such peoples’ collective ways of life. We have already seen that

Kant does not hold the view that pastoralist and hunting peoples lead lives

that are irrational or inhuman and thus that they have no right to their

lands. Rather, when peoples engage in such collective practices, he argues,

their distinctively human freedom (res merae facultatis) must be re-

spected. As we have just seen, the political criticism that such a view makes

possible is taken up by Kant in his discussions of cosmopolitan right.

We have already surveyed the principal reasons why Kant ﬁnds Euro-

peans’ imperializing mission unjust: it violates peoples’ freedom to order

their collective ways of life and it oversteps the ethical limits imposed

upon travellers according to cosmopolitan right, an ethical and political

concept that he articulates precisely to scrutinize interactions between

foreign peoples and voyaging individuals, including colonialists and

members of potentially exploitative trading companies. Underlying all of

this philosophically, I have suggested, are Kant’s understanding of nega-

tive freedom and distinctively human choice (which for him are among

the sources of “humanity” and “culture in general”), and his anti-pater-

nalistic commitment to a wide latitude of judgement and self-determina-

tion. In addition to his positive defence of non-Europeans against impe-

rial incursions, Kant dismisses two “specious [scheinbar] reasons” given

to support the colonization of the New World: that “it is to the world’s

advantage, partly because these crude peoples will become civilized . . .

and partly because one’s own country will be cleaned of corrupt men, and

they or their descendants will, it is hoped, become better in another part

of the world (such as New Holland [Australia]).” (6:353) Kant’s reply is

swift and concise: “But all these supposedly good intentions cannot wash

away the stain of injustice in the means used for them.” (6:353)

But why does Kant believe that the standard justiﬁcations of imperial-

ism are “specious” and only “supposedly” good? In particular, why does

Kant contend that the mission to civilize others is specious? To be sure,

as we have seen, he abhors the coercion involved in such imperializing

activities—the means of imperialism—as ethically unacceptable because

of their intrinsic brutality and because they are a manifest affront to the

idea that peoples ought to be allowed to make their own determinations

as to how to organize their societies. But what of the ends of imperialism,

especially the standard imperialist justiﬁcation that ‘civilized’ societies

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 199

ought to civilize ‘primitive’ peoples? Is the very goal of ‘civilizing’ other

peoples just or unjust? If the questions are put in this manner, then the

answer can be drawn straightforwardly from Kant’s anti-paternalism: just

as individuals (or states) should not directly order others’ life choices,

groups of colonialists should not restructure the collective life choices of

entire peoples. Thus, if the human freedom that underlies humanity as

cultural agency itself is given its due, then there cannot be a duty to

civilize others, just as there cannot be a duty to develop other individuals.

As discussed earlier, however, Kant justiﬁes a moral duty to develop

one’s own human capacities. Is there, then, a corresponding duty for peo-

ples to ‘improve’ or ‘perfect’ themselves? In the language of the eighteenth

century, are hunting and pastoral peoples duty-bound to become “civi-

lized” through their own internal efforts? How far does Kant accept the

global diversity of peoples that he identiﬁes? To ﬂesh this out further, we

can ask the following: While there is no just way for Europeans or any

other nations to bring such changes about by force, should hunting and

pastoral peoples themselves (through their own actions, and of their own

volition) transform their lifestyles and practices into those of agrarian so-

cieties and institute the public administration of justice and rule of law, as

described, for instance, in the “Doctrine of Right”? The general ques-

tion, then, is whether these ways of life (hunting, pastoral, and agri-

cultural) are commensurable—whether, that is, they can be ranked or

ordered along some universal scale of value, such that an ‘inferior’ people

ought to raise themselves to a ‘superior’ level of social and political devel-

opment. Kant did not address this question directly in his political philos-

ophy (incidentally, this itself is astonishing in the light of eighteenth-

century developmental accounts of non-European peoples), but it is

worthwhile to reﬂect along these lines upon the broader implications of

his theory of cosmopolitan right, as I do brieﬂy below. In the next sec-

tion, I will examine Kant’s political thought in order to determine what

light his social contract account might shed on this issue.

We have seen already that in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant treats the

decision to lead a hunting or pastoral existence as an instance of human

choice, i.e., of cultural agency. Kant’s use of the language of distinctively

human freedom, e.g., res merae facultatis, to defend the viability of such

differences among peoples indicates that absolute moral judgements

about them cannot be made. Consequently, hunting, pastoral, and agrar-

ian societies are neither morally obligatory nor morally wrong. For Kant,

as I argued earlier, choices at the cultural level involve relative or compar-

ative judgements that are based upon varying and partial understandings

of experience. If one chooses to continue a nonsettled existence, this falls

within the range of judgements that a categorical ethics cannot prescribe

or deny. Judgements of this kind are morally neutral and thus are judged

200 CHAPTER FIVE

according to standards of satisfaction and happiness that, for Kant, are

inherently plural. There are no universal standards of happiness, he ar-

gues, with which one could deﬁnitively rank various morally neutral ways

of life, whether they are individual lives or the most fundamental collec-

tive practices (the most basic issues of land usage) of entire nations. The

three forms of group life with which Kant differentiates global peoples

are, thus, incommensurable; there is no universal value with which one

could rationally judge one against the other. This is the ultimate conse-

quence of Kant’s claim about societies and how they should structure

their most fundamental collective practices (from hunting or herding ani-

mals to farming and the sedentary, urban lives it makes possible): again,

“how they want to live on their land is up to their own discretion (res

merae facultatis).” (6:266) Strikingly, by invoking the language of hu-

manity, in the broad sense of cultural agency, Kant afﬁrms the ultimate

incommensurability of these collective ways of life.

An Unusual Social Contract Doctrine

In Kant’s thought, the only potential source for making a claim that a

nonsettled people is under a categorical duty to become a settled people,

and thus that along some objective scale of value, the life of agrarian

nations is superior to that of hunting and pastoral nations, rests upon his

social contract theory: it is a categorical imperative, Kant argues, that

individuals in a state of nature should leave this noncivil condition and

institute a collective public power that is based upon the rule of law. For

most social contract theorists before Kant, the concept of the state of

nature is much more than a metaphor used to legitimate civil power.

Amerindians and other New World inhabitants almost always played a

prominent role as empirical illustrations of the natural (noncivil) condi-

tion of humanity in social contract doctrines. This underscored the argu-

ment, as it typically ran, that the social contract was not a hypothetical

construct, but rather a sober and incisive description of Europe’s own

history.

New World peoples, in this view, represent empirical examples

of the natural and savage Europeans of the distant past, before they be-

came civilized; that is, before they entered civil relations under a contrac-

tually created sovereign power. In addition to providing an arguably his-

torical and anthropological foundation for the legitimacy of the modern

state, deploying the ﬁgure of New World lawless savages sometimes served

to legitimate the imperial enterprise—if European savages acted rightly

in forming civil societies in ancient times, then contemporary savages

should civilize themselves as well, though now with the imperial help of

their civilized brethren. The issue of agrarianism is central given that the

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 201

standard understanding of civil society and civilization—and thus of poli-

tics itself—is based upon city life, the sedentary life of the polis that agri-

culture makes possible.

In at least one important way, Kant deviated from the social contract

tradition that he inherited and appropriated by jettisoning any reliance

upon Amerindians, South Paciﬁc Islanders, or indeed any non-Europeans

in theorizing a state of nature. Kant insisted that his social contract doc-

trine was hypothetical and, in this respect, he is rather unusual, though

not unique, for Rousseau also makes a similar claim, though it is largely

undermined, as I argued in chapter 2, by his relentlessly naturalistic por-

trayal of Amerindians and Hottentots in his discussion of the earliest state

of nature. Kant describes in the clearest possible terms both the hypo-

thetical nature and the chief purpose of the social contract device in The-

ory and Practice:

[I]t is by no means necessary that this contract (called contractus originarius or

pactum sociale) . . . be presupposed as a fact (as a fact it is indeed not possi-

ble)—as if it would ﬁrst have to be proved from history that a people, into

whose rights and obligations we have entered as descendants, once actually

carried out such an act, and that it must have left some sure record or instru-

ment of it, orally or in writing, if one is to hold oneself bound to an already

existing civil constitution. It is instead only an idea of reason, which, however,

has its undoubted practical reality, namely to bind every legislator to give his

laws in such a way that they could have arisen from the united will of a whole

people and to regard each subject, insofar as he wants to be a citizen, as if he

has joined in voting for such a will. For this is the touchstone of any public

law’s conformity with right. (8:297)

Kant did, however, rely upon another frequently cited example used by

social contractarians to elaborate and defend his views about the law of

nations. While Kant seemed to believe that an actual empirical example

may be impossible to provide, he also held that one remarkable analogy

to it could be found in the political world of his day: states in the interna-

tional order, he argues, lead an existence that is almost identical to the

grim and unstable predicament of individuals in a hypothetical, noncivil

condition.

The imperializing rhetoric that sometimes follows from a naturalistic

representation of New World peoples in social contract theories does not

hold in Kant’s political thought because of his exclusive use of the inter-

national order as an empirical example of a natural state. The one occa-

sion in which Kant uses the classic image of the Amerindian in his politi-

cal writings consists of a satirical moment in Toward Perpetual Peace.

Kant plays ironically with the idea of New World individuals as natural

savages and cannibals to criticize the violent behaviour of European states,

202 CHAPTER FIVE

much as Montaigne drew upon conventional sixteenth-century stereo-

types of Amerindians to decry the cruelty of intra-European religious fa-

naticism in “Of Cannibals”:

Just as we now regard with profound contempt, as barbarous, crude, and brut-

ishly degrading to humanity, the attachment of savages to their lawless free-

dom, by which they would rather struggle unceasingly than subject themselves

to a lawful coercion to be instituted by themselves, thus preferring a mad free-

dom to a rational freedom, so, one must think, civilized peoples (each united

into a state) must hasten to leave such a depraved condition, the sooner the

better; but instead each state . . . command[s] many thousands to sacriﬁce

themselves for a matter that is of no concern to them; and the difference be-

tween European and the American savages consists mainly in this: that whereas

many tribes of the latter have been eaten up by their enemies, the former know

how to make better use of those they have defeated than to make a meal of

them, and would rather increase the number of their subjects, and so too the

multitude of their instruments for even more extensive wars, by means of them.

(8:355)

Kant’s ironic use of a predominant image of the Amerindian in order to

attack what he characterizes as European savagery is fraught, like all such

rhetorical strategies, with the danger of reifying the very image that is

meant to be deployed facetiously. Still, we know from his lectures on

physical geography that Kant doubted the existence of cannibalism, and,

accordingly, censured Europeans for using the term “cannibal” as a place-

holder for any people about whom they knew virtually nothing, such as

most of the peoples of Africa.

And, as we have seen in The Metaphysics of

Morals, non-European peoples, including hunters and pastoralists, in

Kant’s view, lead their lives not as a result of “mad freedom”, but rather

because of their distinctively human freedom. By conceptualizing the dif-

ference between hunting, pastoral, and agrarian peoples as one rooted in

human freedom—the freedom that characterizes “culture in general”—

such collective lives immediately win respect as equally legitimate forms

of life that are neutral from the standpoint of a categorical morality.

In addition to all this, it is well worth noting Kant’s attitude toward

linguistic and religious diversity on a global scale. Kant supports a plu-

rality of societies that are characterized by various religions and lan-

guages. He argues in Toward Perpetual Peace that this diversity is a check

against the political despotism of large states or, worse on his view, a

single world state. In an argument that is obviously relevant to empire-

building—though here he does not explicitly make such a link (as

Herder did), focusing instead on the spectre of a world government—

Kant argues that political communities of this vast size are bound to be

despotic and ultimately anarchic: “as the range of government expands

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 203

laws progressively lose their vigor, and a soulless despotism, after it has

destroyed the seed of good, ﬁnally deteriorates into anarchy.” (8:367)

Sociologically, then, the existence of human differences (especially, for

Kant, religious and linguistic differences) is politically advantageous; thus,

the fact of difference should be celebrated by any friend of political free-

dom. But such differences can also “bring with them”, Kant concedes,

“the propensity to mutual hatred and pretexts for war”. Moreover, as he

knew, imperialism can undo by force, by stamping out or by subverting

religious and linguistic difference, what (we can speculatively presume)

“nature” uses to keep human groups from forming a despotic universal

state. Kant hoped that a combination of selﬁsh motives (the spirit of

commerce and the power of money) and a “gradual approach of human

beings to greater agreement in principles”, most crucially that of the law

of nations and cosmopolitan right, would make imperialism and aggres-

sive state actions ethically unacceptable to a more enlightened global

community (8:368). The diversity of languages and religions would then

remain and would serve a key purpose in securing political freedom and

cosmopolitan justice, while its potentially damaging effects might be mit-

igated for both selﬁsh and moral reasons.

Kant realized that this consti-

tuted a hope, and (as we saw in the last chapter) he staked this hope not

upon a guarantee of political progress but upon a realizable goal toward

which individuals could and should work.

It is clear that while Kant views hunting and pastoralist peoples as

social groups who live freely chosen, human ways of life, he does not also

consider them to be political societies. In this respect, he exempliﬁes

much of the history of theorizing civil life, which is, by both linguistic

and philosophical tradition, the sedentary life of a polis. As I have argued,

there is a strong assumption that runs throughout much of the tradition

of European political thought that fundamentally links agrarianism and

the political (or civil) life. The social contract tradition often reinforced

this link by treating nonsettled peoples as perfect examples of individuals

in a state of nature who ought to leave their condition to create a civil

(and presumably a settled, agrarian) life. In Kant’s understanding, many

New World peoples are social but noncivil humans. This would seem to

indicate that they are identical to the individuals of Kant’s state of nature,

for, in his social contract account, the state of nature can be, and often is,

social; what ultimately deﬁnes this condition is that it is not civil. Kant

did not believe, however, that the hunters and pastoralists of his day were

identical to the noncivil, natural humans of his social contract narrative,

as I later argue for three reasons. In this respect, in the tradition of mod-

ern political thought, Kant was a most unusual social contract theorist.

What follows from this is that hunting and pastoralist peoples are not

under a categorical duty to transform their societies on the model of