Anthropology as humanist education
Historical origins of the current global impasse; Kant's Perpetual Peace.
Historical origins of the current global impasse
The current break in history goes far deeper than the post-war replacement of social democracy by neoliberalism. We are witnessing the end of ‘national capitalism’ whose origin was in the 1860s. Since then, there have been two phases of financial imperialism, each lasting four decades. The first ended in the First World War. The social organization of money that we lived by in the last century is unraveling (Hart 2024). It was the synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism—the institutional attempt to manage money, markets, and accumulation through central bureaucracies for a cultural community of national citizens. Governments soon provided new legal conditions for the operations of large business corporations. A bureaucratic revolution ushered in the era of mass production and consumption. The financial crisis since 2008 is only superficially a question of credit boom and bust. Folk models usually lag behind world history in the making.
Capitalism has always rested on an unequal contract between owners of money and those who make and buy their products. This depends on an effective threat of punishment if workers withhold their labour or buyers fail to pay up. The owners cannot make that threat alone: they need the support of governments, laws, prisons, police, even armies. By the mid-nineteenth century, the machine revolution was pulling unprecedented numbers of workers into the cities, adding a new dimension to crowd control. The political revolutions of the 1860s to early 70s were founded on an alliance between capitalists and the traditional enforcers (military aristocrats owning landed estates) to form governments capable of managing industrial workforces and taming criminal gangs in the main cities.
Fustel de Coulanges (1864) showed that for a thousand years in the ancient Mediterranean landed power (aristocracy) slugged it out with maritime trading cities (democracy). La cité antique (The Ancient City) has been sold as a conservative reaction to contemporary capitalism—it was. It is also the best account of the wars and revolutions waged between power and money in the first millennium BCE. Like Giambattista Vico (1744, Burke 1985, Hart 2022:30-32), Fustel understood that religion and poetry are needed to build a new civilization.
Finally, the Roman Empire made the western world safe for landed military aristocracy until 1500 years later. David Graeber’s book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2010), did a good job of identifying the political economy of ancient empires and their antithesis in decentralized finance and commerce (Weisweiler 2022). His story ends in 1971 when European empires collapsed, and the dollar went off gold. It was the start of our era, but some readers might want to know what happened since and why.
Despite a barrage of propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization. These are territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism, bureaucracy, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion and the nuclear family (Hart 2002). Marx was right to think that another age of money, driven by liberal revolutions embracing movement and universal society, could dissolve traditional landed power and act as a bridge to societies better able to serve the common interests of humanity. But this dynamic stalled when the capitalists jumped back into bed with their former opponents, the military landowners. The nation-state then restored the idea that subordinate classes should again be boxed up in polities with narrower and static horizons: agrarian civilization redux, this time with machines.
Now the slogans of liberal revolution became ideological cover for national capitalism, autocracy masquerading as democracy. After 1945 politicians and laws checked capitalism. Reagan and Thatcher’s counter-revolution against all that around 1980 revived market fundamentalism and masked state power with the tools of mass propaganda. It is all coming unstuck now. National capitalism and the western imperialism that it enabled from the mid-nineteenth century set back humanity’s emancipation from an inequality that Hegel, Marx and Lenin each envisaged in their own way (James 1948).
Industrial capitalism’s potential to release the human drive for more freedom, equality and happiness was only temporary. The idea of a nation represents an escape from modern history, from the realities of urban industrial life, into the timeless rural past of the Volk, the people conceived of as a homogeneous peasantry, living near to nature, unspoiled by social division, the very archetype of a community united by kinship. Before nationalism, western intellectuals compared their societies with the city states of the ancient world. Now they fabricated myths of their own illiterate ethnic origins in primeval forests (Thom 1995).
The institutional legacy of Bronze Age agrarian civilization 5,000 years ago was restored when the capitalists realised that the traditional enforcers whom they once sought to displace from government were needed not only to enforce their contracts with workers and consumers, but for crowd control in burgeoning cities threatened by factory workers en masse and criminal gangs, not to mention for subjugating the rest of humanity to their colonial empires. Political revolutions of the 1860s and early 70s in the leading countries of the era—Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, and Japan—installed a ruling compromise between two classes made by money and landed power respectively.
Two world wars established national capitalism as the last century’s dominant social form. Gordon Childe’s (1954) Bronze Age “urban revolution” still weighs heavily with us as a result. The traditional recipe for managing inequality, to inject as much distance as possible between rich and poor, is contradicted by a world being drawn closer together by fast transport and the digital revolution in communications. Yet, rather than embrace as inevitable its demographic replacement by the young, darker, poor masses, the dominant white elite frantically erects further barriers against entry whose principle is apartheid generalized to a world scale.
The opponents of globalization, who resist the new mobility enjoyed by capital by making a myopic appeal to national interest, participate unwittingly in this rearguard action to preserve the privileges of the western nations. If Marx (1867) showed us how the social relations of production act as so many fetters on the development of the productive forces, these today take the form of territorial states seeking to maintain established privilege by constraining the movement of people, goods, money and information in a world society that is both more integrated and more divided. Market fundamentalism has now split into two potentially warring camps: the predominantly neoliberal universalism of mainly western transnational corporations versus nationalist ‘strong men’ combining free trade and protection in authoritarian regimes. The roots of the global crisis today can only be understood in long-term historical perspective.
Anthropology in the last century was mainly restricted to universities who saw their task as supplying fodder to the bureaucracies of national capitalism. It was a highly self-referential discipline based on narrow localism and denial of history—fieldwork-based ethnography. That model and the nation-states that supported it are failing now. This historical framework on offer in this essay is well-suited to understanding today’s world crisis. Contemporary academics have had no use for Immanuel Kant’s book which turned lectures of over two decades into a means for his students and the public to use as a source for lifelong learning. It is time that they got to know it and him better.
Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch
Immanuel Kant has been usually regarded as a dry old stick who was so rigid that he timed his morning walks like clockwork. His main biographer points out that he made the mistake of abandoning institutional commitments to do nothing but write in the last decade of his life (1795-1804), culminating in his thoughts on education (pedagogy) edited for publication after his death. As a result, the three speakers at his funeral resented him, especially Fichte who spent that decade trying to replace him as Germany’s leading philosopher. Their versions of him have become sedimented as a misleading fabrication. A comparable instance is when Voltaire fell out with Rousseau and published an anonymous pamphlet which the English subsequently used to demonize Jean-Jacques as the progenitor of the French revolution.
Kant’s aesthetic was based on the double meaning of ‘common sense’ as shared thought and the physical senses, epitomized by him as ‘good company, good food and good conversation’. He never left his East Prussian home city of Königsberg, now Russian Kaliningrad. David Hume asked him why he never went abroad; he replied, “People come to Königsberg; you came to Königsberg.” The city was a major port and the people he had most in mind were not intellectual admirers, but Portuguese and Dutch sailors whom he interviewed down at the docks. He was particularly interested in how they maintained social order at sea beyond the reach of territorial states. The title of this essay is itself a joke taken from these conversations. It comes from a Dutch pub sign with its satirical claim that heavenly bliss can now be had from getting drunk on their gin without having to die first.
What follows has two parts: the first contains only its section headings; the second contains lightly edited versions of the text to give the flavour of Kant’s prose and because they are more important for our purposes. The third and final section, ‘The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality’, is the most famous part of the essay, defining ‘cosmopolitan right’ as being at least to allow travellers to pass though a country without being treated as an enemy to be harassed or even killed. Kant knew that leagues of states were waging war in his day. The Napoleonic wars made his ideas seem even more utopian than they were. His reasoning, however, is very sharp and, although his world was not ours, we can take several lessons from his arguments that I return to in the final short section of this essay.
SECTION I. THE PRELIMINARY ARTICLES FOR PERPETUAL PEACE AMONG STATES
No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War
No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation
The state of peace among men living side by side is Standing Armies Shall in Time Be Totally Abolished
National Debts Shall Not Be Contracted with a View to the External Friction of States
No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State
No State Shall during War Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible, Such As the Employment of Assassins, Poisoners, Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason in the Opposing State
SECTION II. THE DEFINITIVE ARTICLES FOR PERPETUAL PEACE AMONG STATES
The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican
The only constitution which derives from the idea of the original compact, and on which all juridical legislation of a people must be based, is the republican. This constitution is established, firstly, by principles of the freedom of the members of a society (as men); secondly, by principles of dependence of all upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and, thirdly, by the law of their equality (as citizens). The republican constitution, therefore, is, with respect to law, the one which is the original basis of every form of civil constitution. The only question now is: Is it also the one which can lead to perpetual peace?
The republican constitution, besides the purity of its origin (having sprung from the pure source of the concept of law), also gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence, i.e., perpetual peace. The reason is this: if the consent of the citizens is required to decide that war should be declared, nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. Among the latter would be: having to fight, having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on account of constant wars in the future.
But, on the other hand, in a constitution which is not republican, and under which the subjects are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.
In order not to confuse the republican constitution with the democratic (as is commonly done), the following should be noted. The forms of a state can be divided either according to the persons who possess the sovereign power or according to the mode of administration exercised over the people by the chief, whoever he may be. The first is properly called the form of sovereignty, and there are only three possible forms of it: autocracy, in which one, aristocracy, in which some associated together, or democracy, in which all those who constitute society, possess sovereign power. They may be characterized, respectively, as the power of a monarch, of the nobility, or of the people. The second division is that by the form of government and is based on the way in which the state makes use of its power; this way is based on the constitution, which is the act of the general will through which the many persons become one nation. In this respect government is either republican or despotic.
Republicanism is the political principle of the separation of the executive power (the administration) from the legislative; despotism is that of the autonomous execution by the state of laws which it has itself decreed. Thus in a despotism the public will is administered by the ruler as his own will. Of the three forms of the state, that of democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which "all" decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, "all," who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.
Every form of government which is not representative is, properly speaking, without form. The legislator can unite in one and the same person his function as legislative and as executor of his will just as little as the universal of the major premise in a syllogism can also be the subsumption of the particular under the universal in the minor. And even though the other two constitutions are always defective to the extent that they do leave room for this mode of administration, it is at least possible for them to assume a mode of government conforming to the spirit of a representative system (as when Frederick II at least said he was merely the first servant of the state).
On the other hand, the democratic mode of government makes this impossible since everyone wishes to be master. Therefore, we can say: the smaller the personnel of the government (the smaller the number of rulers), the greater is their representation and the more nearly the constitution approaches to the possibility of republicanism; thus the constitution may be expected by gradual reform finally to raise itself to republicanism. For these reasons it is more difficult for an aristocracy than for a monarchy to achieve the one completely juridical constitution, and it is impossible for a democracy to do so except by violent revolution.
The mode of governments, however, is incomparably more important to the people than the form of sovereignty, although much depends on the greater or lesser suitability of the latter to the end of [good] government. To conform to the concept of law, however, government must have a representative form, and in this system only a republican mode of government is possible; without it, government is despotic and arbitrary, whatever the constitution may be. None of the ancient so-called "republics" knew this system, and they all finally and inevitably degenerated into despotism under the sovereignty of one, which is the most bearable of all forms of despotism.
The Law of Nations Shall be Founded on a Federation of Free States
When we see the attachment of savages to their lawless freedom, preferring Peoples, as states, like individuals, may be judged to injure one another merely by their coexistence in the state of nature (i.e., while independent of external laws). Each of them may and should for the sake of its own security demand that the others enter with it into a constitution similar to the civil constitution, for under such a constitution each can be secure in his right. This would be a league of nations, but it would not have to be a state consisting of nations. That would be contradictory, since a state implies the relation of a superior (legislating) to an inferior (obeying), i.e., the people, and many nations in one state would then constitute only one nation. This contradicts the presupposition, for here we have to weigh the rights of nations against each other so far as they are distinct states and not amalgamated into one.
When we consider the perverseness of human nature which is nakedly revealed in the uncontrolled relations between nations (this perverseness being veiled in the state of civil law by the constraint exercised by government), we may well be astonished that the word "law" has not yet been banished from war politics as pedantic, and that no state has yet been bold enough to advocate this point of view. Up to the present, Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and many other irritating comforters have been cited in justification of war, though their code, philosophically or diplomatically formulated, has not and cannot have the least legal force, because states as such do not stand under a common external power.
There is no instance on record that a state has ever been moved to desist from its purpose because of arguments backed up by the testimony of such great men. But the homage which each state pays (at least in words) to the concept of law proves that there is slumbering in man an even greater moral disposition to become master of the evil principle in himself (which he cannot disclaim) and to hope for the same from others. Otherwise, the word "law" would never be pronounced by states which wish to war upon one another; it would be used only ironically, as a Gallic prince interpreted it when he said, "It is the prerogative which nature has given the stronger that the weaker should obey him."
States do not plead their case before a tribunal; war alone is their way of bringing making it. But by war and its favorable issue in victory, right is not decided and, though by a treaty of peace this war is brought to an end, the state of war, of always finding a new pretext to hostilities, is not terminated. Nor can this be declared wrong, considering that in this state each is the judge of his own case. Notwithstanding, the obligation which men in a lawless condition have under the natural law, and which requires them to abandon the state of nature, does not quite apply to states under the law of nations, for as states they already have an internal juridical constitution and have thus outgrown compulsion from others to submit to a more extended lawful constitution according to their ideas of right.
This is true despite reason, from its throne of supreme moral legislating authority, absolutely condemns war as a legal recourse and makes a state of peace a direct duty, even though peace cannot be established or secured except by a compact among nations.
For these reasons, there must be a league of a particular kind, which can be called a league of peace, and which would be distinguished from a treaty of peace by the fact that the latter terminates only one war, while the former seeks to make an end of all wars forever. This league does not tend to any dominion over the power of the state but only to the maintenance and security of the freedom of the state itself and of other states in league with it, without there being any need for them to submit to civil laws and their compulsion, as men in a state of nature must submit.
The practicability (objective reality) of this idea of federation, which should gradually spread to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace, can be proved. For if fortune directs that a powerful and enlightened people can make itself a republic, which by its nature must be inclined to perpetual peace, this gives a fulcrum to the federation with other states so that they may adhere to it and thus secure freedom under the idea of the law of nations. By more and more such associations, the federation may be gradually extended.
We may readily conceive that a people should say, "There ought to be no war among us, for we want to make ourselves into a state; that is, we want to establish a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary power which will reconcile our differences peaceably." But when this state says, "There ought to be no war between myself and other states, even though I acknowledge no supreme legislative power by which our rights are mutually guaranteed," it is not at all clear on what I can base my confidence in my own rights unless it is the free federation, the surrogate of the civil social order, which reason necessarily associates with the concept of the law of nations--assuming that something is really meant by the latter.
The concept of a law of nations as a right to make war does not really mean anything, because it is then a law of deciding what is right by unilateral maxims through force and not by universally valid public laws which restrict the freedom of each one. The only conceivable meaning of such a law of nations might be that it serves men right who are so inclined that they should destroy each other and thus find perpetual peace in the vast grave that swallows both the atrocities and their perpetrators.
For states in their relation to each other, there cannot be any reasonable way out of the lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual men, should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to the constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing state consisting of various nations, which will ultimately include all the nations of the world. But under the idea of the law of nations they do not wish this and reject in practice what is correct in theory. If all is not to be lost, there can be, then, in place of the positive idea of a world republic, only the negative surrogate of an alliance which averts war, endures, spreads, and holds back the stream of those hostile passions which fear the law, though such an alliance is in constant peril of their breaking loose again.
The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality
Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. A special beneficent agreement would be needed to give an outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.
Uninhabitable parts of the earth, the sea and the deserts, divide this community of all men, but the ship and the camel enable them to approach each other across these unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face of the earth, which belongs to human beings generally. The inhospitality of the inhabitants of coasts in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded travelers, or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of the deserts who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus opposed to natural law, even though it extends the right of hospitality, i.e., the privilege of foreign arrivals, no further than to conditions of the possibility of seeking to communicate with the prior inhabitants. In this way distant parts of the world can come into peaceable relations with each other, and these are finally publicly established by law. The human race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a constitution establishing world citizenship.
But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice which they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc., were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilized intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In East India (Hindustan), under the pretense of establishing economic undertakings, they brought in foreign soldiers and used them to oppress the natives, excited widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind.
China and Japan, who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused them entry, the former permitting their approach to their shores but not their entry, while the latter permit this approach to only one European people, the Dutch, but treat them like prisoners, not allowing them any communication with the inhabitants. The worst of this (or, to speak with the moralist, the best) is that all these outrages profit them nothing, since all these commercial ventures stand on the verge of collapse, and the Sugar Islands, that place of the most refined and cruel slavery, produces no real revenue except indirectly, only serving a not very praiseworthy purpose of furnishing sailors for war fleets and thus for the conduct of war in Europe. This service is rendered to powers which make a great show of their piety, and, while they drink injustice like water, they regard themselves as the elect in point of orthodoxy.
Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a supplement to the unwritten code of civil and international law, indispensable for the maintenance of the public human rights and hence also of perpetual peace. One cannot flatter oneself into believing one can approach this peace except under the condition outlined here.
Supplements and Appendices:
Supplement 1. Of the guarantee of perpetual peace
Supplement 2. Secret article for perpetual peace
Appendix 1. On the opposition between morality and politics with respect to perpetual peace
Appendix 2. Of the harmony that the transcendental concept of public right has established between morality and politics.
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