Kant's Theory of Cosmopolitanism and Hegel's Critique

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 29, Issue 6, 2003, Pages 609-630

  Fine, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

cosmopolitanism; Habermas; Hegel; Kant; nationalism; peace; right; war

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997909310     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453703296001     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Kant's key essays are: ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (1785), ‘Reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind’ (1784–5); ‘On the Common Saying “This may be true in theory but it does not apply in practice”’ (1793), ‘Toward Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch’ (1795–6), ‘International Right’ in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797); ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798). They are collected in Immanuel Kant, Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
2. See, for example, Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1990), ‘Excursus on Hegel’.
3. See especially Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially ‘external sovereignty’, ‘international law’ and ‘world history’.
4. Karl-Otto Apel, ‘Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace as Historical Prognosis from the Point of View of Moral Duty’, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 87.
5. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight’, in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 113–53;
6. J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 165–202. Related formulations may be found in the other discussions of Kant's theory of cosmopolitanism in Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann (1997) Perpetual Peace.
7. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961).
8. Carl Schmitt, Glossarium 1947–1951 (Berlin: Dunker and Humblot, 1991)
9. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976);
10. both cited in Habermas, ‘Kant's Idea …’, pp. 194–201. Habermas points out that Carl Schmitt rejected the distinction between offensive and defensive wars on grounds that jus ad bellum (the right to war) is constitutive of state sovereignty, but that he did not take into account the fact that classic international law failed in face of the emergence of total wars. His attempt to decriminalize the Nazi extermination of Jews intimated that his conservative juridical arguments were little more than a façade.
11. See also Robert Fine, ‘Crimes against Humanity: Hannah Arendt and the Nuremberg Debates’, European Journal of Social Theory 3(3) (2000): 293–311;
12. Michael Salter, ‘Neo-fascist Legal Theory on Trial: an Interpretation of Carl Schmitt's Defence at Nuremberg from the Perspective of Franz Neumann's Critical Theory of Law’, Res Publica 5(1999): 161–94.
13. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest, 1979), pp. 326–40. On the hypocritical critique of hypocrisy Arendt writes: ‘Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest. What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards … the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension … the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun’ (pp. 334–5).
14. Habermas writes that ‘Schmitt comes closer to Hegel's criticism of Kant when he speaks of hypocrisy’ and ‘furnishes the contemptuous formula “bestiality, humanity”’; ‘Kant's Idea’, p. 145.
15. Kant, Political Writings, p. 108, 103. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 brought to an end the German phase of the Thirty Years War and entrenched — arguably for the first time — the principle of sovereignty in inter-state affairs.
16. David Held argues that this model remained intact until 1945 and that many of its assumptions are still operative in international relations today. See David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 77–83.
17. Kant, Political Writings, pp. 105–6, 47 and 172, 106–25, 105, 114. In the section on ‘International Right’ in the Metaphysics of Justice Kant summarized the Hobbesian analogy thus: that in existing external relationships with one another, states act like lawless savages in a condition ‘devoid of right’ — a condition of war. States are bound, however, to abandon such a condition and establish a federation of peoples in accordance with the idea of an original social contract, so that they will protect one another against external aggression while refraining from interference in one another's internal disagreements. This federation must not embody a sovereign power as in a civil constitution but only a partnership or federation of independent states which can be terminated at any time.
18. Kant, Political Writings, p. 166, p. 173.
19. The immediate occasion for Kant's writing of ‘Perpetual Peace’ was an event that was hardly predisposed to the cosmopolitan idea: it was the signing of the Treaty of Basel in which Prussia agreed to hand over to France all territories west of the Rhine in exchange for being allowed to join Russia and Austria in the east in partitioning Poland. This was the sort of realpolitik treaty that Kant condemned as a mere ‘suspension of hostilities’ and as the opposite of true peace. Concerning the collapse of cosmopolitan ideals in the French Revolution, Julia Kristeva recounts in her book, Strangers to Ourselves, that in the early days of the revolution something like the germ of a cosmopolitan policy was developed by its leaders. Decrees were passed offering French citizenship to foreigners who resided in France for five years and who had means of subsistence; societies and newspapers for foreigners were encouraged; the use of force against other nations was disavowed; support was given to revolutionaries from other countries to rid themselves of despotic rulers; and certain ‘benefactors of humankind’ (including Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham and William Wilberforce) were awarded honorary French citizenship. This new dawn was not, however, to last. With the launching of the revolutionary wars, xenophobia became an active political force; foreigners were held responsible for all that went wrong — military defeats, economic difficulties, political crises; foreign clubs and newspapers were disbanded; and terror was concentrated against foreigners. Even Tom Paine, ‘citizen of the world’, the man who signed himself Humanus, was impoverished, imprisoned and then expelled. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), Ch. 7, ‘On Foreigners and the Enlightenment’.
20. Kant, Political Writings, p. 125, pp. 164 and 174, pp. 107–8, p. 114.
21. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy 1 (1997): 1–25. Here Nussbaum traces the debt Kant owed to ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism. The central difference she sees between Kant and the Stoics is that for Kant the search for peace requires a persistent vigilance toward an ineliminable human aggression, while for the Stoics aggression is a consequence of unwise attachments to external things and persons.
22. Kant, Political Writings, p. 189, p. 191.
23. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §343R, §209R, §258fn, §209A, §268.
24. An enlightened defence of Hegel's patriotism is put forward by Shlomo Avineri in his Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 181 and 240.
25. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §268A.
26. In the Metaphysics of Justice Kant argues that the unilateral will of the property owners must give way to a ‘collective, universal and powerful Will that can provide the guarantees required’ (§8), and that ‘the first decision the individual is obliged to make, if he does not wish to renounce all concepts of right, will be to adopt the principle that one must abandon the state of nature in which everyone follows his own desires, and unite with everyone else … in order to submit to external, public and lawful coercion’, (§44). On the principle that ‘a person is subject to no laws other than those that he (either alone or … jointly with others) gives to himself’, Kant argues that the legislature expresses the ‘general united will’ and can do ‘absolutely no injustice to anyone’. He writes that it is the duty of citizens to ‘endure even the most intolerable abuse of supreme authority’ (p. 86) since the ‘well-being of the state’ refers only to that condition in which ‘the constitution conforms most closely to the principles of justice’ and must not be confused with ‘the welfare or happiness of the citizens of the state’. For Kant it is imperative that everyone obey the law ‘without regard to his inclinations’ (p. 15) on the understanding that the duty to obey the law can take no account of the pleasure or displeasure with which it is combined. Our freedom, as he puts it, does not lie in our capacity to choose for or against the law, but only in our ‘internal legislation of reason’ (p. 28). The nub of Hegel's critique of Kant's theory of right is that it is not critical enough. Trust in the state haunts Kant's discussion of public law as much as trust in property haunts his discussion of private law. Kant, ‘The Metaphysical Elements of Justice’, part 1 of The Metaphysics of Morals (Indianopolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
27. Kant, ‘Metaphysical Elements of Justice’, §8.
28. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §327A, §327A, §328, §268R, §328R, §329A, §324R and A.
29. For such a reading see W. H. Walsh, Hegelian Ethics (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998), pp. 50–1.
30. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel writes: ‘it was a great advance when political life became the property of everyone through the advent of representative government … [but] to associate the so-called representative constitution with the idea of a free constitution is the hardened prejudice of our age.’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures in the Philosophy of World History, ‘Introduction: Reason in History’, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 121.
31. It appears in the Westphalian model that every state is a sovereign and independent entity in relation to other states, that the legitimacy of the state is a purely internal matter, that the principle on which states relate is that no state should interfere in the internal affairs of another. But if it is true that the state cannot be a subject of right without relations to other states, any more than an individual can be a person without a relation to other persons, then its legitimacy must at least be supplemented by recognition on the part of other states. This recognition in turn requires a guarantee that the state will likewise recognise those other states that recognize it; i.e. that it will respect their independence and sovereignty. Accordingly, no state can in fact be indifferent to the internal affairs of another (Philosophy of Right, §331R).
32. Self-determination becomes ‘sheer restless activity which cannot yet arrive at something that is’ (Philosophy of Right, §108A)
33. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §5R and A., §108A.
34. Hannah Arendt captures this very well in her analysis of concentration camps and death camps. She writes: ‘It is not only the non-utilitarian character of the camps themselves — the senselessness of “punishing” completely innocent people, the failure to keep them in a condition so that profitable work might be extorted from them, the superfluousness of frightening a completely subdued population — which gives them their distinctive and disturbing qualities, but their anti-utilitarian function, the fact that not even the supreme emergencies of military activities were allowed to interfere with these “demographic policies”. It was as though the Nazis were convinced that it was of greater importance to run extermination factories than to win the war.’ Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, p. 233.
35. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §324A, §324A, §259A). A more recent example might be the alliance of Allies after the war — France, USSR, UK and USA; they set up a court at Nuremberg with jurisdiction over the crimes committed by Nazis but the alliance then quickly fell apart.
36. Benjamin writes that ‘if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathise … the answer is inevitable: with the victor … Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), Thesis VII.
37. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 12, §340, §342, p. 22, §340, §1, §31, p. 21, p. 23, p. 15, p. 11, p. 20.