Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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274 CHAPTER SEVEN

theoretically identiﬁed once the many layers of sociability, culture, and

historical artiﬁce have been stripped away—was too insubstantial to bear

any actual moral weight. The debates surrounding New World peoples

are especially instructive on this point, given the paradoxical fact that

Amerindians, South Paciﬁc Islanders, and other newly discovered peoples

were often presented in modern philosophical writings as empirical exam-

ples of purely natural humans, that is, as those who inhabit a state of

nature. It might seem that, from the standpoint of a social contractarian

and modern natural right perspective, one could not be more human

than a natural or pure human, but it was precisely those who were so

identiﬁed theoretically who were ultimately most easily dehumanized in

practice.

The defence of non-Europeans against European imperial powers and

the development of anti-imperialist arguments depended not only upon

potentially egalitarian and humanitarian concepts (which, despite their

exclusionary tendencies, at least countered the idea that non-Europeans

were inherently inferior in some fundamental sense), but also, secondly,

upon reconceptualizing the relationship between cultural diversity and

humanity. In the view of a number of Enlightenment anti-imperialists,

what most noticeably differentiates humans—their various and often in-

compatible or competing cultural systems of meanings and values—is

integral to the human condition. Humans, in other words, were theo-

rized as fundamentally cultural beings or cultural agents, as I have put it

so as to emphasize the symbiotic relationship that these anti-imperialists

discern between human reason, freedom, and imagination, and humans’

social and cultural contexts. To view human beings in this way acknowl-

edges their status as artful, reasoned, and free individuals who are partly

shaped by their social and cultural contexts, yet who also through their

actions and through changing perceptions alter such contexts themselves.

Standard readings of Diderot and Kant, in particular, have generally ig-

nored the ample textual evidence to support such a view and argue in-

stead that they held humans to be respectively either materially deter-

mined automatons or, at bottom, ‘noumenal’ metaphysical subjects. As I

have argued at length in the preceding chapters, such interpretive mis-

conceptions fail to illuminate the speciﬁc manner in which Diderot and

Kant theorize humanity and (what we would today describe as) cultural

diversity and, accordingly, how they engage in anti-imperialist arguments.

The changing understanding of New World peoples is represented well

by the contrast that can be drawn between, on the one hand, noble

savage theory and most social contract accounts of Amerindians (which

portray them as living solely by the light of Nature, by either natural

instincts or natural laws) and, on the other, the political theories of Di-

CONCLUSION 275

derot, Kant, and Herder, which view New World inhabitants as fellow

cultural beings (rather than as pure or natural humans).

Third, closely related to the idea that humans are fundamentally cul-

tural agents is the view that differences in social practices and cultural

norms—even among the peoples who seemed strangest and most ‘exotic’

to European observers, such as Amerindians, Hottentots, and South Pa-

ciﬁc Islanders—are often incommensurable and do not imply that the

peoples themselves or the individual bearers of such distinct ways of life

are inferior. By incommensurability, I mean the idea that, with regard to

certain practices, institutions, or concepts, there are no universal stan-

dards that one could use to rank them as better or worse, superior or

inferior. Under conditions of incommensurability, one can at best draw

upon partial, incomplete, and plural standards, since there is no single

norm, principle, or value with which they can be compared and judged.

Some sense of moral incommensurability, while closely related to the sec-

ond idea of humans as cultural agents, by no means follows necessarily

from it. Some early modern thinkers, for instance, held that Amerindians

were civil beings who led ordered and rationally comprehensible ways of

life. Perhaps the most notable of these thinkers was Las Casas, whose

personal moral indignation against Spanish imperial aggression gave rise

to his spirited defence of Amerindians against imperial assaults, which

hastened the demise of the belief that aboriginals were natural slaves. But

Las Casas was not an opponent of imperialism as such, nor was he a

thoroughgoing critic of the anthropological assumptions that grounded

the predominant justiﬁcations of European empires. While he took

Amerindians to be social and cultural beings, he nevertheless categorized

them explicitly as inferior peoples because their speciﬁc cultural values

and practices were thought to be inferior in comparison to those of

Christian societies. Thus, Las Casas ranked the known peoples of the

globe in his Apologetica Historia and explained that Europe’s civilizing

mission could raise inferior peoples, who were said to be on the lower

end of this universal scale of progress, to the heights of Christian under-

standing.

Given the trenchant criticisms that Diderot, Kant, and Herder

level against European institutions, beliefs, and practices, the triumphal-

ism that lay behind such imperialist cross-cultural judgements became

increasingly suspect. Under the inﬂuence primarily of Rousseau, and thus

given their view of European social and political life as inegalitarian, cor-

rupt, and often oppressive, Diderot, Kant, and Herder found it delusional

to think that European institutions, mores, practices, or religious beliefs

should serve as the benchmark against which other peoples ought to be

judged. On the whole, the transformation in their thinking about human

nature in relation to cultural pluralism led also to an appreciation of the

276 CHAPTER SEVEN

plurality of cultural perspectives and forms of life that ultimately had sig-

niﬁcant consequences for their political theories. As Herder argues in his

Letters on the Advancement of Humanity,

There is no such thing as a specially favoured nation (Favoritvolk) on earth . . .

there cannot, therefore, be any order of rank.... Least of all must we think of

European culture as a universal standard of human values. To apply such a

standard is not just misleading; it is meaningless.... The culture of man is not

the culture of the European; it manifests itself according to place and time in

every people. (18:247–49)

Ultimately, Diderot, Kant, and Herder undermine the imperial language

of inferiority and superiority, and concomitantly the assumption that peo-

ples are commensurable, which informed many defences of European

empires.

There are two senses in which incommensurability plays a central role

in the anti-imperialist political thought that I have identiﬁed, and it is

important to see in what ways they are linked to the idea of humans as

cultural agents. First, the idea of what Steven Lukes has called ‘overall

incommensurability’ plays a signiﬁcant role in the anti-imperialist political

thought that I have explored. By ‘overall incommensurability’, I refer to

the view that two groups cannot be compared according to a particular

criterion because they are each so internally complex that it is impossible

to make judgements of their relative worth as a whole. Thus, peoples (for

example) are “rankable in too many different ways that cannot in turn be

combined into a single way”; that is, “the various ways of ordering them

. . . are non-congruent”.

Simply stated, it is becomes easier to judge

Amerindians, South Paciﬁc Islanders, sub-Saharan Africans, and others as

simply inferior when their societies are perceived as undifferentiated

units. Once such peoples became theorized as artful and social individuals

who live in societies with distinct practices, institutions, and value sys-

tems, even if such societies as a whole are viewed as less complex than

European societies, it nevertheless becomes more difﬁcult (though not of

course impossible) to make sweeping judgements about their inferiority.

The theory that humans are constitutively cultural agents and the doc-

trine of overall incommensurability are, then, conceptually related to one

another, although it is obviously possible (consider Las Casas) to hold

the former view without also endorsing the latter.

In addition to presenting a more nuanced, multifaceted understanding

of humanity itself, and also speciﬁcally of New World peoples, Diderot,

Kant, and Herder attack the view that there exists a universal standard

that could be used to rank a wide variety of practices and beliefs (let

alone entire peoples). They are all, to be sure, moral universalists in some

sense, but for now it is important to stress in what sense they are also

CONCLUSION 277

pluralists and how this pluralism is related to their commitment to a

universal morality. This suggests a second and more complex form of

incommensurability in their moral and political thought. Not only is it

impossible to compare and rank peoples as whole entities, but a variety of

speciﬁc institutions, practices, and beliefs are also not amenable to such

judgements for there are no cross-cultural norms (or universal scales of

value) with which (or along which) they could be compared and judged.

As I have noted, understandings of the dominant patterns of land use,

property relations, and the primary means of subsistence in a society

played a crucial role in many modern debates about imperialism; seden-

tary agricultural societies in particular were viewed as radically distinct

from societies that were nomadic and whose subsistence was based upon

hunting, ﬁshing, and herding. For many imperialist thinkers (for instance,

international jurists such as Grotius and Vattel), an agriculturally based

society constituted the prerequisite for a basic moral order; hence, pre-

agricultural societies were thought to lack a moral and political status

equal to that of European states on the stage of international politics.

Moreover, from this perspective, given imperialists’ frequent appropria-

tions of Locke’s account of property, not only do New World peoples

thereby lack a sovereign status, but they also lack title to the lands that

they were said to inhabit wastefully. According to Diderot, Kant, and

Herder, however, these are precisely the kinds of cross-cultural judge-

ments that one cannot make, for there are no cross-cultural standards

with which one could make universal judgements about the superiority

or inferiority of the diverse land-use practices that, in part, were seen to

differentiate European from most non-European peoples.

Judgements, then, that nomadic lifestyles are not manifestly inferior to

sedentary forms of life, and that many ways of life and understandings of

value cannot be rank ordered, inform Enlightenment anti-imperialism.

Yet, while a deep sense of moral incommensurability pervades Diderot,

Kant, and Herder’s political thinking, so too does a strong commitment

to moral universalism. For all of them, the two are closely related, for the

qualities that fundamentally characterize humanity and that deserve uni-

versal respect, in their view, are among the key sources of cultural differ-

entiation, much of which lies beyond the purview of universal judge-

ments. Diderot, Kant, and Herder distinguished between norms, practices,

and institutions that, they argue, clearly violate human dignity and free-

dom, such as slavery, serfdom, imperialism, and the Indian caste system,

and those that cannot and should not be judged according to such cross-

cultural concepts, in part, because such judgements themselves violate

humanity. To use the terminology that I have adopted in this book, the

distinction here concerns when cultural agency ought to be respected

morally and politically and when speciﬁc uses of cultural agency, as with

278 CHAPTER SEVEN

the manifold actions and judgements of European imperialists, subvert

the very grounds of cultural agency itself—the practical reason, freedom,

imagination, skills, and self-cultivation (both individual and collective)

that deﬁne humanity itself for Diderot, Kant, and Herder. Strikingly, as

we have seen, these anti-imperialists do not simply limit the reach of

universal principles in particular cases; rather, they theorize the relation-

ship between the universal categories they posit (humanity, freedom, dig-

nity, and the moral principles meant to safeguard them), on the one

hand, and culturally varying norms, practices, and institutions, on the

other, as complexly intertwined. Hence, for them, humanity is virtually

synonymous with cultural difference, and thus the respect for the univer-

sal dignity of all humans necessarily implies a wide degree of respect for

differing individual and collective ways of life.

The cogent manner with

which they relate moral universalism and moral incommensurability in

the course of their anti-imperialist political philosophies are hidden from

view, however, by pervasive accounts of ‘the Enlightenment’ and what

are often taken to be ‘its’ dogmatic veneration of moral universalism and

concomitant denigration of cultural pluralism.

As I noted in the introduction, unlike the anti-slavery writings of the

eighteenth century, Enlightenment-era anti-imperialist thought failed to

generate a legacy that would be nurtured by prominent nineteenth-cen-

tury thinkers. Thus, Enlightenment anti-imperialism remains a historical

curiosity, for it emerges in European thought in the late eighteenth cen-

tury among a variety of celebrated thinkers only to ﬁnd itself as a mar-

ginalized philosophical viewpoint by the 1830s. In coming to terms with

this intellectual shift, it is likely that, ﬁrst, the range of languages of hu-

man diversity and, second, a change in the kind of intellectual sensibility

that informed political thinking about ‘European civilization’ contributed

to the decline of anti-imperialist thought.

Although arguments about changes in the broader intellectual context

from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries are necessarily

highly speculative, it is worth noting that the plurality of competing lan-

guages of diversity in the eighteenth century, in contrast to the narrower

conceptualizations of (what is now often termed) cultural difference in

the nineteenth century, may have had a role to play in this shift on ques-

tions of empire. The categories under which human diversity were theo-

rized by the philosophes and Aufkl¨arer of the eighteenth century in-

cluded—among others—climate, national character, race, moeurs, Kultur,

stadial accounts of social development, and sociological distinctions

among agricultural, hunting, and pastoral lifestyles. This very diversity of

languages about difference, and the variety of meanings ascribed to each

one, may have enabled the development of unusual, and at times nu-

anced, accounts of cultural pluralism, since such concepts or explanations

CONCLUSION 279

were often played off one another and combined in the most innovative

accounts. In contrast, by the nineteenth century, the language of race,

which was ﬁrst developed in the inﬂuential natural histories of the eigh-

teenth century by Buffon, Linnaeus, and Blumenbach, had overtaken

other conceptual contenders and was much more frequently deployed in

political writings to categorize non-European peoples. Similarly, the con-

cept of the nation increasingly informed philosophical and anthropologi-

cal understandings of (primarily European) peoples.

To be sure, uncertainties and disagreements about the relative merits

of different understandings of race and nation (and less often of other

explanations of human diversity) and the standards with which one might

be able, or not be able, to judge varying social practices, institutions, and

whole peoples characterized nineteenth-century debates about cultural

diversity. Nevertheless, the ideas of race and nation in earlier Enlighten-

ment writings were still in a nascent state and had to contend with a

number of alternative explanations and categories.

In eighteenth-cen-

tury debates about human diversity, no single category, classiﬁcatory

scheme, or set of explanations of cultural difference was hegemonic in the

manner that racial typologies of non-European peoples dominated post-

Enlightenment anthropological and political thought. Although at the

cost of greater incoherence and instability, the diversity of approaches

toward understanding cultural pluralism in the eighteenth century may

have afforded a wider conceptual space for categorizing and explaining

the diverse qualities and behavioural characteristics of peoples.

At the same time, it should be noted that the most inﬂuential nine-

teenth-century thinkers who defended European imperialism usually did

not rely upon, and indeed often argued against, racist contentions about

the intrinsic inferiority of foreign peoples. The idea of nationhood as a

status that only some peoples, through a gradual process of progressive

development, had achieved historically, one which indicated that such

peoples could govern themselves and should help less fortunate peoples

to do so, lay at the heart of John Stuart Mill’s justiﬁcation of British

imperial rule over India.

As, Mill contends, “Despotism is a legitimate

mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be

their improvement.”

Other prominent philosophers, such as Hegel and

Marx, relied solely upon linear conceptions of social progress to tout

either the civilizing possibilities of imperial rule or the ultimately produc-

tive development of feudal societies into capitalist economies, if only be-

cause communism itself could not be achieved without progressive changes

both in the mode of production and in the ownership of the means of

production. Like Mill, Hegel and Marx did not view non-European peo-

ples as inherently backward; rather, with the help of imperial rule, such

peoples would be lifted to a condition in which they could eventually

280 CHAPTER SEVEN

govern themselves or, in the case of Marx, European imperialists would

unwittingly prepare the ground for future revolutionary transitions to

communism in the non-European world.

Other thinkers rested their

imperialist arguments upon the national glory and political energy that

would likely result from conquest abroad; thus, for Tocqueville, the social

stresses and strains of democratizing and modernizing France could be

partly alleviated by the grand venture of colonizing Algeria.

This points to an important feature of Enlightenment anti-imperialism

that cannot be fully captured by the three philosophical developments

that I sketched earlier, since a key difference between the critics of empire

in the eighteenth century and the imperialist political thinkers in the

nineteenth century is one of intellectual sensibility or disposition, rather

than entirely a difference in philosophical argumentation about human

nature, cultural difference, and moral judgement. As we have seen, Di-

derot, Kant, and Herder were deeply critical of European states, for they

viewed them as violent, absolutist, war-seeking, aggressive, and corrupt.

While they valued the semblance of the rule of law that governments

could at their best achieve, they also believed that actual European gov-

ernments and societies were very far indeed from the ideal forms of gov-

ernance that their political writings theorized; accordingly, they treated

the very concept of ‘civilization’ with derision. The myriad social and

political changes that the French Revolution ushered in eventually

seemed to yield a political sensibility among many nineteenth-century

European political thinkers that made them far more sanguine about the

achievements of ‘European civilization’ than their eighteenth-century

forebears. They were thus more amenable to the view that Europe had

genuinely advanced beyond the non-European world and, hence, they

were more open to the idea that it should forcibly lead non-European

peoples toward a higher form of political rule, economic rationality, and

social development. This was to be true even for those nineteenth-cen-

tury thinkers who were, however differently, social critics who sought to

engage in the reform of European societies and governments, such as

John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, Hegel, and Marx, each of whom in his

own way considered the social, economic, and political changes from

1789 onward as truly signiﬁcant advances toward more just societies. In

contrast, Diderot (who died ﬁve years before the storming of the Bas-

tille), and even Kant and Herder (who both held some hope that the

French Revolution might inspire positive reforms in European societies

and political systems) ultimately remained deeply disenchanted with the

European states of their day.

This sense of distance from their own societies and governments fos-

tered a sense of irony and scepticism about the grandiose claims that state

(and imperial) authorities made about the political achievements of Euro-

CONCLUSION 281

pean civilization. In this respect, as I have noted, Diderot, Kant, and

Herder were all profoundly inﬂuenced by their philosophical engage-

ments with Rousseau. Intellectual temperaments characterized by a deep

disenchantment with, irony toward, and scepticism about European po-

litical systems might not themselves foster a hatred of European empires,

but they clearly undercut many of the pretensions that usually accompany

civilizing imperialism. Their antipathy toward orthodox forms of religious

authority further underscored their hatred of imperial paternalism and

thus their discomfort with any form of missionary zealotry; it is telling,

along these lines, that Kant derided justiﬁcations of European imperial

incursions as “Jesuitism”.

‘Europe’, as Diderot, Kant, and Herder un-

derstood it in their anti-imperialist political philosophies, was very far in-

deed from the models of political justice that they theorized; indeed, for

them, Europe was the primary source of social and political injustice

around the world, rather than the standard-bearer of liberty or rights for

the rest of humanity that should either inspire other peoples or be vio-

lently forced upon them.

In the end, this political sensibility animated

many of their vehement arguments against the ideological bases of Euro-

pean imperial rule over non-European peoples.

In contrast to widespread accounts of ‘the Enlightenment’, the late

eighteenth-century anti-imperialists studied in this book fold into their

view of humanity the particularities of human life—the varied under-

standings and responses that draw upon memory, imagination, inherited

practices, and customs. In their view, humans possess certain universal

capacities that allow us to develop, sustain, and revise a wide variety of

cultural practices. For Diderot, Kant, and Herder, these universal capaci-

ties consist most fundamentally of freedom and hence the ability to en-

gage in imaganitive, aesthetic, instrumental, and moral reasoning. But

their understandings of reason and freedom are not homogenous, for

they view them as necessarily contextualized and open ended. Moreover,

for them, cultural diversity cannot be reduced to reason and freedom

even though these are the necessary prerequisites for the generation,

maintenance, and transformation of plural practices and beliefs. The plu-

ralism of human life exists precisely because humans’ conscious and free

(and at times unwitting and contingent) interactions with climate, tech-

nology, social and political conditions, and other factors engender a mul-

tiplicity of norms and institutions. There is a close relationship, then,

between the philosophical anthropologies of Diderot, Kant, and Herder

and their understandings of cultural pluralism and social life. Respecting

human freedom came to mean, among other things, respecting the cul-

tural pluralism that in part signiﬁes our very humanity; it also meant that

political criticism should be directed toward establishing the most fruitful

282 CHAPTER SEVEN

conditions possible for the sustenance of this differentiated sense of hu-

manity. Such conditions are often undermined and corrupted, in their

view, by a variety of social, political, and religious practices, beliefs, and

institutions. For these thinkers, European states were by far the worst

offenders in this respect, for throughout the globe they routinely and

oppressively denied individuals and whole peoples the freedoms necessary

for the cultivation of their humanity, that is, for the workings of their

cultural agency, and thus for a ﬂourishing pluralism. Such views fuel these

thinkers’ antipathy toward the pathologies of state power generally as

well as their attack more speciﬁcally upon the violent and homogenizing

paternalism of imperial power.

I have considered the following questions: Which understandings of

non-European peoples, cultural pluralism, liberty, and human nature en-

gendered or impeded anti-imperialist sentiments? What are the key argu-

ments that were made against European imperialism by thinkers such as

Diderot, Kant, and Herder, and what does this tell us about (a) histo-

riographical debates about ‘the Enlightenment’ and (b) the contested

meanings of, and relationships among, humanity, cultural pluralism, and

moral judgement? The responses I have offered throughout this book

provide the beginnings of a more nuanced conception of Enlightenment-

era political thought and a striking set of arguments about the moral and

political consequences of different understandings of the relationship be-

tween humanity and cultural difference. By studying this strand of En-

lightenment political thought through the lenses of imperialism, under-

standings of the non-European world, and theories of human nature and

cultural diversity, one can discern philosophical commitments to a shared

humanity that partly transcend, yet are partly deﬁned by, cultural differ-

ence; a philosophical disposition that engages in cross-cultural judge-

ments and yet folds into its ethical worldview an assumption of a deep

moral incommensurability that constrains or disallows many cross-cul-

tural judgements; and a critique of state-sponsored or state-sanctioned

injustices that demands a respect for cultural difference, while also draw-

ing upon an understanding of human freedom as a universal good. Among

the more remarkable features of such writings—an aspect that should

give pause to those who theorize an intractable conceptual divide be-

tween universalism and relativism in moral and political thought—is that

an increasingly acute awareness of the irreducible plurality and partial

incommensurability of social forms, moral values, and political institu-

tions engendered a historically uncommon, inclusive moral universalism.

The conventional distinctions that many contemporary political theorists

explicitly deploy or tacitly assume fail to capture the often counter-intu-

itive philosophical strategies and outlooks of the anti-imperialist current

of Enlightenment political thought. Indeed, if a central reason to study

CONCLUSION 283

the history of political thought is to gain the perspective of another set of

assumptions and arguments that are shaped by different historical sensi-

bilities and directed toward distinct political phenomena, and thus to

defamiliarize our otherwise complacent political and ethical beliefs and

priorities, then the study of Enlightenment anti-imperialism offers pro-

ductive opportunities for such a task.