Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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204 CHAPTER FIVE

Kant’s understanding of the public law, and thus to change themselves

into agricultural, sedentary states. Kant’s social contract doctrine accords,

therefore, with his humanitarian and pluralistic defence of peoples’ free-

dom to lead their collective ways of life as they see ﬁt.

First, as I have argued, it is crucial that we comprehend Kant’s inten-

tion in using the peculiar narrative of a social contract. Kant seems to

construct the metaphor of a state of nature not as a basis from which

to urge New World peoples to enter into a settled, civil condition, but

rather to demand that already established states enter into a voluntary

congress to secure, however tenuously, international peace.

Second, Kant does not believe that the actual, historical origins of Euro-

pean civil societies were contractual. Indeed, Kant responded to a common

objection to social contract theory simply by accepting it. Hume and Kant

both agree that no voluntary contracts were ever drawn up historically, and

that this is especially clear in light of evidence provided by the power

politics of modern imperialism. The creation of civil societies in the New

World, they contend, is rooted in violence, not voluntary consensus. In his

1748 essay “Of the Original Contract”, Hume argues:

Almost all the governments, which exist at present, or of which there remains

any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or con-

quest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent, or voluntary subjection

of the people.... The face of the earth is continually changing, by the en-

crease of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires

into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes.

Is there any thing discoverable in all these events, but force and violence?

Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of?

In a different context, Kant argues against potential revolutionaries who

might try to research the actual origins of society in order to expose it, in

a Rousseauian fashion, as a sham or a conﬁdence trick by the rich and

powerful.

Engaging in such historical research with the practical intent

of delegitimizing a current regime is pointless, Kant argues, since either

the origins themselves are opaque or, to the extent that they can be

discovered, they no doubt will have unscrupulous beginnings. If that is

the standard of contemporary legitimacy, Kant implies, no current politi-

cal order would be even marginally legitimate.

It is futile to inquire into the historical documentation [Geschichtsurkunde] of

the mechanism of government, that is, one cannot reach back to the time at

which civil society began (for savages [Wilden] draw up no record of their

submission to law; besides, we can already gather from the nature of uncivilized

[roher] human beings that they were originally subjected to it by force). (6:339)

Kant appears to be making a point identical to Hume’s: the hunting and

pastoralists of the eighteenth century are not voluntarily forming civil

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 205

societies, but rather are having sedentary, civil life imposed coercively

upon them.

Kant’s language implies that hunters and pastoralists do not often form

agrarian civil societies of their own volition, unless they are unjustly

forced to by others. Indeed, in the Anthropology, Kant suggests that it is

unusual for peoples to move from a nonsettled to a settled condition. In

this sense, it is possible that he differs from Diderot who, in the Histoire

des deux Indes, makes the sociological claim that an internal logic of

“primitive” societies leads them, if left to themselves, to evolve into a

civilized condition (and that civilized states eventually collapse and lead

to a primitive condition). In contrast, Kant argues,

Since nomadic peoples (pastoral tribes, such as the Arabs) are not bound down

to any land, their attachment to their way of life—though this is not altogether

free of constraint—is so strong, and their haughtiness about it, which makes

them look down with contempt on settled peoples, so great that the hardship

inseparable from it has not been able to divert them from this way of life in

thousands of years. Peoples who are purely hunters (like the Olenni-Tungusi)

have really ennobled themselves by this feeling for freedom (which has sepa-

rated them from other tribes related to them). (7:269)

This ﬁts well with passages that we have already seen from the Conjec-

tures about nonsettled and settled peoples who look down upon one

another and who each believe their lives to be superior. We saw then that

at least some nonsettled individuals would be attracted to what Kant

called the “glittering misery” of the towns, and would thus voluntarily

assimilate into civil societies; but others, he implied, would be colonized

by agriculturalists who would spread out like “bees” radiating outward

from their civilized hive (8:119). In short, Kant believes that many of the

social transformations from a nonsettled to a settled condition both his-

torically and in his time were engendered by an externally imposed brute

force, rather than an evolutionary, internal social transformation. At the

same time, in the Critique of Judgement, Kant argues that certain aspects

of the natural world can be viewed by humans as having purposive powers,

even though we cannot state that such purposes are at all intentional

ends of nature; along these lines, he argues that

the vermin that plague humans in their clothes, hair, or bedding are, in accor-

dance with a wise dispensation of nature, an incentive for cleanliness, which is

in itself already an important means for the preservation of health. Or the mos-

quitoes and other stinging insects that make the wilds of America so trying for

the savages are so many goads to spur these primitive people to drain the

swamps and let light into the thick, airless forests and thereby as well as by the

cultivation of the soil to make their abode more salubrious. (5:379)

206 CHAPTER FIVE

Such statements in Kant’s thought indicate that there may in fact be

universal features of human life that could impel nomadic societies to

become agrarian and sedentary over time by the volition of such peoples

themselves. For Kant, this would be a mixed blessing, for as his writings

make clear, civilized societies offer both greater opportunities (at least for

the privileged in such societies, as he notes) for the development of a

wide range of human capacities and the development of aesthetic human-

ity, which he very much values, while they also create and perpetuate

massive injustices not only to themselves but very often to other peoples.

It remains an open question, then, whether Kant believed, like Diderot,

that sedentary, civilized societies, without conquests and imperial rule,

would have developed in all areas of the world. Still, the upshot of all

these considerations is that Kant’s social contract doctrine in particular is

not meant to suggest that the peoples of the New World should (it is an

open question whether they freely will at some point) eventually form

sedentary societies. The social contract doctrine for Kant is a hypothetical

theory—an “Idea” in his terminology, just like his philosophy of histori-

cal progress—that he admits has little or no historical or empirical basis,

but that serves as an ideal with which especially European states and the

international relations of his day could be assessed.

A third aspect of Kant’s understanding of a social contract is that such a

contract is meant to provide a normative orientation for the political prac-

tices of “states”, that is, of settled, agricultural societies that are charac-

terized by the public administration of justice (a Rechtstaat). Kant’s social

contractarianism obligates individuals in such societies to strive perpetually

toward freer, more just, and less violent political conditions. A limitation of

Kant’s political theory, insofar as it constrains his ability to come to terms

with human diversity, is a common assumption of much eighteenth-cen-

tury political thought: civil life, in its fullest sense, requires a sedentary,

agriculturally based society. Thus, Kant describes nonsedentary groups,

including New World peoples, as tribes, societies, or peoples, but never as

constituting states. In this respect, the most humanitarian sixteenth-cen-

tury Spanish theologians, especially Las Casas, had a much broader and

more ﬂexible understanding of the kinds of societies that one might con-

sider to be political. Since he was writing within a Christian Aristotelian

tradition, for Las Casas to prove that Amerindians were fully human be-

ings, he needed to show that they were political beings, given Aristotle’s

fundamental claim that “man is by nature a political animal”. But if politics

and political life are viewed more narrowly and artiﬁcially, if they refer to a

centralized, public power that is constructed either by consent or by force,

then a defence of others as human beings need not show that other peoples

are law-governed and civil. Thus, for Kant, the assumption that Africans,

Amerindians, South Paciﬁc Islanders, and Australian aboriginal groups are

human and that they live their collective lives in a human manner consists

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 207

simply of theorizing their group behaviour as humanly and freely chosen.

From this perspective, freedom, and not politics per se, becomes central to

a justiﬁcation of others as truly human; and, for Kant, as we have seen, it is

speciﬁcally a concept of cultural freedom, a plural and experientially situ-

ated and informed freedom, that characterizes all human groups and all

individual humans. It is a freedom that makes humans distinctively similar

and yet incommensurably different.

What follows from this is that New World peoples do not seem to be

under a political obligation, in Kant’s view, to enter civil relations. Al-

though Kant does not make such a claim explicitly, we know that he ﬁnds

hunting and pastoralist lives defensible on the grounds of cultural free-

dom and that he does not proclaim in his political writings that such

peoples ought to transform their ways of life to form agriculturalist, set-

tled states. The general issue then becomes how Kant’s social contract

narrative is broadly consistent with his defence of non-European peoples

given his contractarian argument that all savages (all noncivil beings) are

under a moral duty to enter civil relations with one another. One can

reconstruct a number of passages from Kant’s writings to suggest that the

hypothetical inhabitants of a state of nature are agrarian, settled individ-

uals. Thus, it is a moot question to ask whether hunters and pastoralists

should become civil beings: the problems that the state is created for,

according to Kant’s social contract story, are those of settled peoples.

Thus, while Kant considers many New World peoples to be noncivil and

nonagrarian, they are not examples of the hypothetical natural humans in

a social contract narrative who are under a categorical duty to leave their

condition and to create a coercive public power.

Although the duty to join a civil society is mandatory, from a moral

viewpoint, Kant always makes a curious exception to it in his descriptions

of it. Consider the following two examples, from Theory and Practice

(1793) and The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) respectively:

The union of many for some (common) end (that all of them have) is to be

found in any social contract; but that union which is in itself an end (that each

ought to have) and which is therefore the unconditional and ﬁrst duty in any

external relation of people in general, who cannot help mutually affecting one

another, is to be found in a society only insofar as it is in the civil condition

[Zustand], that is, constitutes a commonwealth. (8:289, emphasis added)

From private right in the state of nature there proceeds the postulate of public

right: when you cannot avoid living side by side with all others, you ought to

leave the state of nature and proceed with them into a rightful condition, that

is, a condition of distributive justice. (6:307, emphasis added)

Why would Kant make such qualiﬁcations? The Conjectures (1786) offers

some valuable clues. Kant argues there that nonsettled peoples are not

208 CHAPTER FIVE

subject to civil authorities, in his full sense of the term “civil”, because

their lack of ﬁxed property allows them a much greater opportunity of

exit that agrarian-based citizens possess. Using pastoralists as his exam-

ple, he claims,

The Bedouins of Arabia still describe themselves as children of a former sheik,

the founder of their tribe (such as Beni Haled and others). But the sheik is by

no means their master, and he cannot force his will upon them as he chooses.

For in a nation of herdsmen, no one has ﬁxed property which he cannot take

with him, so that any family which is discontented with its tribe can easily leave

it and join forces with another. (8:120)

Apparently, Kant believes that individuals in nonsettled societies are in a

position in which they can, without enormous effort, “avoid living side

by side with all others”. (6:307) Whatever one might think about the

anthropological accuracy of such a view, Kant’s account of the character

of social relationships in societies that lack any ﬁxed property differs from

his hypothetical description of a state of nature. This is made clear by

Kant in a transitional sentence of the Conjectures in which he begins his

discussion of the original formation of civil societies:

The following period began with man’s transition from the age of leisure and

peace to the age of labour and discord as the prelude to a social union. Here,

we must make another major leap and suddenly put him in possession of do-

mestic animals and of crops which he can propagate himself for his own con-

sumption by sowing and planting.

(8:118)

The necessary precursor to the creation of a civil authority is sedentary,

agricultural life. This is the condition that creates most of the problems

to which the formation of the state is meant to mitigate: securing ﬁxed

property, defending permanent settlements, and punishing by public law

(rather than by private vengeance) major acts of violence that occur

among people who have settled close to one another; in short, a state is

created to make (at least somewhat) secure the inherently insecure seden-

tary lifestyle.

Due to these three features of Kant’s social contract doctrine—its in-

ternational intent, hypothetical nature, and agriculturalist character—the

contractarian model of a Rechtstaat does not lead to the view that non-

sedentary peoples are under a duty of justice to form a public administra-

tion of justice in the manner of civilized states. In this sense, Kant’s dis-

tinctive uses of the social contract and the metaphor of the state of

nature do not carry with them the usual developmental implications of

social contractarianism for nonsedentary peoples. Kant hypothesizes a so-

cial contract in rather narrow terms such that it models not humanity per

se, but a peculiar form of noncivil social relations that he believes never

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 209

existed historically and that, in any case, does not resemble conditions in

the New World.

All social contract doctrines are also narratives that present an evolution-

ary or developmental story about how societies and polities form and

reform themselves over time. Kant accordingly presents such a develop-

mental account in his political philosophy, but it is important to note that

the end toward which it works, as Kant’s writings on cosmopolitan right

make clear, is a world in which agriculturalist, pastoral, and nomadic peo-

ples respect one another’s independence and collective freedoms. As we

saw in the last chapter, Kant’s philosophy of history is meant to instill hope

in his readers that such a future is possible and, thus, to make it more likely

that they will work toward bringing about such civil, international, and

cosmopolitan justice. What Europeans and other agrarian, sedentary soci-

eties have achieved thus far, Kant notes in the seventh proposition to the

Idea for a Universal History, “amounts merely to civilization” and so “we

are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves

morally mature.” In large part, what held Europeans back from moral

maturity, in Kant’s view, was that their “states apply all their resources to

vain and violent schemes of expansion”. Whether or not Kant, like Di-

derot, held the opinion that all nonagrarian peoples would eventually by

their own volition develop sedentary societies (in which case they would

then be morally obliged to work toward fostering systems of rights and

republican governments), this was not in any way, for Kant, a prerequisite

for such peoples’ individual and collective rights and independence to be

respected. Nor, as Kant argues repeatedly, was this an end toward which

European states could legitimately coerce them, either directly by imperial

and military force or indirectly by commercial means.

Kant’s nuanced account of humanity and his accompanying under-

standing of moral and political judgement—one that comprises a com-

mitment both to moral universalism and to a doctrine of moral incom-

mensurability—animates his account of cosmopolitan justice among

European and non-European peoples in a variety of intriguing ways.

Kant defends the lives, the freedom, and the independence of peoples

remarkably different from his own both as incommensurably diverse and

as similarly human. Kant, like Diderot and Herder, views the universal

and particular features of humanity as deeply interwoven. What makes us

different, in many respects incommensurably different, relates fundamen-

tally to what deﬁnes us as human—this, Kant implies, is what defenders

of empire, in their quest to justify the proﬁtable destruction and conquest

of foreign societies, actively deny. For Kant, to respect the incommensur-

able pluralism of both individual and collective lives, either at home or

abroad, is to respect our shared humanity.

Six

Pluralism, Humanity, and Empire in

Herder’s Political Thought

In the most stereotypical, but still widely articulated, contentions about

eighteenth-century political thought, Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings

are said to be a counterpoint to Enlightenment thinking. In these ac-

counts, Herder is a nationalist in contrast to the Enlightenment’s cosmo-

politanism, a romantic to the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, and a cul-

tural pluralist to the Enlightenment’s monistic penchant for universal,

cross-cultural truths.

The problems with such characterizations lie partly

in their assumptions about Enlightenment thinking, as I will discuss fur-

ther in the following chapter: ﬁrst, that there is such a thing as ‘the’

Enlightenment; second, that its core features are easily categorized; and,

third, that terms like ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’, and so

forth are straightforwardly precise and helpful concepts that can accu-

rately describe the attitudes and arguments of eighteenth-century thinkers.

If, as I will suggest in the next chapter, Enlightenment or eighteenth-

century political thought should be pluralized so as to come to terms

with its actual complexity—that is, to appreciate its otherwise under-

emphasized or even occluded nuances—then we should also consider

rethinking its supposed antithesis: the category of ‘the Counter-Enlight-

enment’ and, hence, reconsider whether Herder is an (or even the para-

mount) example of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ thought.

To be sure, Herder himself believed that his writings were at odds with

what he thought was the ‘spirit’ of his age. Such self-understandings are

crucial for an appreciation of how Herder understood his own intellectual

projects, but we should not be misled by such assertions to think that he

was largely outside of, and not much inﬂuenced by (or only negatively

inﬂuenced by), a variety of eighteenth-century discourses that are com-

monly associated with ‘enlightened’ thinking. One of the many philo-

sophical beneﬁts of revising widely held characterizations of Herder’s

thought is that we begin to appreciate the complex manner in which he

sought to balance humanistic and particularistic ideas. Viewed from this

perspective, Herder appears in a new light, as one of many eighteenth-

century thinkers who aimed to relate the cross-cultural and culturally par-

ticular values, ways of life, practices, and institutions into a coherent

whole. The particular balance that Herder creates is distinctive, but it is

HERDER’S POLITICAL THOUGHT 211

not fundamentally distinct—that is, radically different in kind—from

what we can ﬁnd among thinkers who are usually taken to be among the

paragons of Enlightened thinking (and, importantly, whose writings in-

ﬂuenced Herder), such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant.

In this

chapter, I argue that a study of his most important political writings—

especially his magnum opus, the Ideas Toward a Philosophy of History of

Humankind—reveals a nuanced relationship between his cosmopolitan,

cross-cultural understanding of ‘humanity’ and his arguments for distinct

national communities. In presenting this interpretation of ‘nation’ and

‘humanity’ in Herder’s thought, I suggest that his seemingly peculiar

synthesis of universalism and particularism is, in fact, part of a constella-

tion of discourses in eighteenth-century political thought that integrates

such perspectives. The key political topic that can help illuminate the

manner in which he relates these universal and particular languages con-

cerns European imperialism; for, in attacking the enterprise of building

and maintaining European empires abroad, Herder balances a commit-

ment to national self-determination with the idea of a single, shared ‘hu-

manity’, understood both anthropologically as that in which all individ-

uals and peoples partake equally and, as a moral ideal, that toward which

we all ought to strive, notwithstanding the various (and, for Herder, the

ethically valuable) diversities that seem to divide us.

Herder articulates his social and political thinking largely through his

attempts at reconceptualizing human history.

His critical stance toward

historical thinking is most thoroughly and eloquently presented in a re-

markable, anonymously published work, Auch eine Philosophie der Ges-

chichte der Menschheit [Yet Another Philosophy of History of Humankind]

(1774; hereafter YPH). In hindsight, a number of the central historical

and political themes that characterize Herder’s later writings can be

found, in a distilled form, in this early work, although YPH is largely

critical in tone, whereas his later writings are more constructive.

While

science and technology per se do not come under attack in YPH, as they

do in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, Herder seeks to iden-

tify and to probe the symptoms of a variety of social ills through a self-

consciously iconoclastic assault upon prevailing intellectual dispositions.

Dissatisﬁed with the state of academic knowledge and the conventions of

political life, Herder calls for a new universal history to begin to grasp the

outlines of the human condition in all its variety, a task that he himself

would eventually undertake in the Ideas (1784–91), to which I will turn

later.

I detail in the opening sections of this chapter Herder’s philosophical

approaches toward the study of history and society in YPH, especially as

they relate to ﬁrst, the limits of generalizations and the contingency

of human lives; second, the perpetual ﬂux that characterizes human

212 CHAPTER SIX

history and all societies; third, the limited horizons of any one individ-

ual’s knowledge, and the lack of a universal standard by which we can

rank peoples or conceptions of happiness; and fourth, the concept of the

‘nation’. Herder’s arguments in YPH already give some indication of the

manner in which he would later develop his own anthropological and

political study of the world’s peoples and histories in the Ideas. My anal-

ysis of the Ideas focuses in the ﬁfth section upon Herder’s anthropologi-

cal understanding of humanity; in the sixth, upon his conceptualization

of human diversity; and ﬁnally upon his doctrine of moral incommen-

surability and his ethical understanding of Humanit¨at, by which Herder

theorizes international justice and a world beyond empire. The languages

of moral universalism and humanity are far stronger in Herder’s political

thought than is usually assumed. Moreover, his commitment to cultural

pluralism and his doctrine of incommensurability (and concomitantly his

attacks on ethnocentrism) are closely related to his complex understand-

ing of ‘humanity’. Stated most abstractly, then, Herder’s political thought

does not choose between the universal and particular aspects of human

life and moral judgement, but presents them as closely interrelated. Hence,

his anti-imperialism reﬂects not simply a defence of cultural particularity

and national independence, but also a humanistic afﬁrmation of the uni-

versal dignity that he identiﬁes in the diverse ﬂourishing of human reason

and freedom from individual to individual, and from people to people.

Generalizations, Contingency, and Historical Judgement

Throughout Yet Another Philosophy of History, Herder mocks those who

too easily generalize about the social and political features of human soci-

eties. “No one in the world”, Herder exclaims, “feels the weakness of

general characterization more than I do.”

(SC 181) Indicating the fra-

gility and arbitrariness of language itself, topics that he investigated at

length in his earlier study on the origin of languages, he concludes that

the ultimate result of such facile conclusions is a series of chimerical

words that fail to signify any of the particularities that actually constitute

social life. Such generalized language must often be articulated and ap-

plied in the most arbitrary fashion and, thus, imposes on history and

societies a set of characteristics that obfuscates the rich diversity of hu-

man life. As Herder notes, it is a difﬁcult enough task to appreciate the

nuances of a single individual, let alone the distinctive qualities of a par-

ticular people. Yet, he asks,

If this is so, how then can one survey an ocean of entire peoples, times and

countries, comprehend them in one glance, one sentiment or one word, a weak

incomplete silhouette of a word? A whole tableau vivant of manners, customs,

necessities, particularities of earth and heaven must be added to it, or precede

HERDER’S POLITICAL THOUGHT 213

it; you must enter the spirit of a nation before you can share even one of its

thoughts and deeds. You would indeed have to discover that single word which

would contain everything that it is to express; else one simply reads—a word.

(SC 181)

It is important to note that Herder does not rule out the very possibility

of making general claims about humans as such or about speciﬁc peoples.

His primary concern stems from the oversights and distortions that occur

when one acts on the presumption that the primary, or even exclusive,

goal of social and historical analysis is to identify and catalogue general-

izations.

For Herder, one of the misfortunes that result in adopting such ap-

proaches is that foreign peoples remain poorly understood and under-

valued. When one applies only “general textbook concepts about the

advantages, virtues, and happiness of nations so distant and varied”, the

consequences are usually “miserable” and reveal, more than anything

else, only the “fashionable prejudices of our century” (SC 184). Herder’s

arguments often target the arrogance and parochialism of those who

judge other times and places in light of a present age that all too often is

assumed to be a pinnacle of wisdom or virtue. Herder implies that cor-

recting this intellectual myopia requires acknowledging not only our own

ﬁnitude but also the contingency of every situation, of every time and

place. Ideally, the recognition of our difference from others should en-

gender an appreciation of the local and circumscribed nature of every

situation. In light of this, he contends that the common delusions of

superiority and certainty that instead guide the most prevalent under-

standings of the world and its past leave us with pejorative, insincere, and

asinine characterizations of others, from which nothing proﬁtable could

possibly be derived. Herder resorts to a series of biting questions to un-

derscore his point:

Why do we not realize that if we do not have all the vices and virtues of by-

gone ages it is surely because we are not in their position . . . [and] have [nei-

ther] their strength and savour, nor breathe the same air. To be sure, this is not

a fault, but why fabricate false praise and absurd pretensions? Why delude our-

selves about our means of education as if they had achieved something? Why

deceive ourselves about our own triﬂing importance? Why, ﬁnally, drag into

every century the story of a partial, derisory lie which ridicules and belittles the

customs of all peoples and epochs, so that a healthy, modest, unprejudiced man

ﬁnally comes to read nothing more into all the so-called pragmatic histories of

the world than the nauseating rubbish of ‘the loftiest ideals of his time’. (SC

212)

The tone with which historical and social study is often conducted, a

disposition that fails to appreciate the full consequences of the fact that