The first part of this post proposed that historically, a certain logic bound together economic liberalism and colonialism - exemplified by Dutch and English policy in the early modern period - just as a different economic rationale linked their opposites, anti-colonialism and the "closed commercial state", exemplified by Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate. I also suggested that, aside from the dimensions of exploitation and coercion involved in the colonial system, its expansion of global trade also failed to guarantee peace between rival commercial powers, as illustrated by the growth in legitimized piracy and commercial wars. In fact it could be argued (as I have sketched out in an earlier post) that most major conflicts between European powers from the late 17th century up to the Napeolonic Wars were motivated or strongly informed by the clash of commercial interests. Part II of this post will explore that connection further, giving it a name - the "jealousy of trade" - and identifying the theoretical resistance to it during the eighteenth century, finishing with the Idealist political theories of Immanuel Kant and J. G. Fichte in the 1790s.
The common liberal assumption that trade promotes peace - since commerce is founded on the reciprocity of interests, whereas war occurs where interests clash and no reciprocal contract can be agreed - does not seem to hold good for this period. If each country were only trading what they themselves produced, then peace might have been a realistic prospect; but under conditions of colonial expansion, the potential losses from a state of war were outweighed by the greater gains to be had from seizing or monopolizing the territory, resources and trade of regions outside Europe.
Under these conditions, it also makes no sense to imagine a contrast between the bellicose tendencies of rulers such as Louis XIV and the inherently peaceful activities of international merchants. This was not only because trading companies such as the English East India Company increasingly owned their own armies, but also because states themselves increasingly had to consider their (military-backed) commercial strength relative to rivals as a key factor in contemporary Realpolitik - as part of what was called "reason of state". The name given to this new factor in political calculation was "jealousy of trade" - the title of an essay by David Hume ("Of the Jealousy of Trade", 1758), and of a magisterial volume of revisionist essays in the history of liberal economic thought by the Hungarian Cambridge-based scholar Istvan Hont: Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
As Hont defines it, "jealousy of trade...emerged when success in international trade became a matter of the military and political survival of nations... It inaugurated global market competition as a primary state activity" (Jealousy of Trade, pp. 5-6). Exceeding the frameworks of international law imagined by Grotius or Pufendorf, the logic of jealousy of trade was one of untrammelled state self-interest - and following on from the most notorious theorist of such self-interest, Nicolo Machiavelli, it could therefore be described as "an extrapolation of Machiavellianism to the modern trading economy" (ibid., p. 9). Hobbes' Leviathan also described the relations between the rulers of sovereign states as a perpetual state of "jealousy" mixed with combative readiness: "in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another;...which is a posture of war" (Leviathan, I.13, cit. Hont, pp. 1-2). The emblem of "Reason of State" (ragione di stato) in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1603) pictures the psychological and moral forces at play. "Reason of State" is armoured, and her dress (like that of the emblem of "Jealousy") is embroidered with eyes and ears signifying continual watchfulness; she treads on the book of "Justice" (ius), indicating her willingness to ignore legality; like "Reason", she has a lion representing the passions by her side, but here the lion is off the leash. As Hont comments, such a political agent "uses the passions instrumentally and corrupts politics into a calculated application of naked power" (p. 12, note 16).
The strategy of Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, provides an illustration of the attitude: "in addition to financing Louis' wars, Colbert's policy was to wage commercial war against Europe with all the means at his disposal" (Hont, p. 24). Military and economic competition supported one another: it was difficult to break the hold of the Dutch on overseas trade without military force; but war (the Franco-Dutch war of the 1670s) required financing, based increasingly on loans secured against the state's taxes; tax revenue depended on commercial turnover; and that depended on healthy manufacturing and trade. Trade in luxuries, often from outside Europe - coffee, sugar, fur, cotton - was particularly lucrative. Agriculture, by comparison, was not - thus marking the growing neglect of agricultural investment characteristic of the ancien régime, and factoring into its demise in 1789.
Colbert's approach is sometimes described as "mercantilist", a systematic and illiberal subordination of commerce to state interests (above all a well-stocked treasury) such as no modern state in the age of (neo)liberalism would officially countenance. However, Hont points out that Colbert's policies liberalized France's economy in a number of ways, and were predicated on growth (p. 24). The contemporary critics of "Colbertism" were thus not attacking a misguided form of protectionism that would hold France back; they were rather disputing, simultaneously, the luxury and military-colonial ambition of the Sun King and the growth-oriented economic policy that drove that ambition. As public critics of absolutist rule, in the first instance, they belong to the history of the Enlightenment - but from that critique flowed a hostile attitude to European expansion and colonialism that we are less likely to associate with Enlightenment politics. Yet as recent scholarship such as the work of Sankar Muthu is uncovering (Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, 2003)), the anti-colonialism of the Enlightenment was a significant intellectual and political force.
First among Colbert's critics was the Archbishop Fénelon, author of the Adventures of Telemachus (1699), "probably the most widely read secular book in the eighteenth century" (Hont, p. 25). Part of its popularity derived from its allegorical critique of Louis XIV's policies - one pointed enough that Louis banished the author from Versailles. Fénelon's ideal republic of Salentum represented everything that the roi soleil's France was not: at peace, morally virtuous, socially balanced, severely restrained in its consumption of "luxuries", concerned for the health of the countryside and its agriculture more than the towns and their trade, and economically almost self-sufficient (rather like Japan's Dejima Island, it had only a single, carefully controlled port). As Mervart has noted (p. 328), Kaempfer's vision of Japan has Fenelonian overtones; so too did the economic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his late work The Government of Poland (1772), Rousseau recommended that the Poles steer well clear of the corrupt, hypocritical and self-interested policies that characterized other European major states. At the beginning of Chapter XI, devoted to economics, he describes these states' aims and methods:
Instead the Poles should try and accomplish as little as possible through money, and avoid luxury and dependence on foreign trade: "The prevailing spirit of your economic system, if I had my way, would be as follows: pay little attention to foreign countries, give little heed to commerce; but multiply as far as possible your domestic production and consumption of foodstuffs."
Writing from the perspective of a modern historian broadly sympathetic to liberalism, Hont finds such visions reactionary and unrealistic, referring to Fénelon's "dream of dismantling the modern economy" (p. 28). Yet as he acknowledges, at the time it was not Fénelon's idea of peace through autarchic withdrawal from the field of commercial rivalry that looked implausible so much as the alternative, and now realised, concept of a "European Union", put forward by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre. In his Project for Realising Everlasting Peace in Europe (1713), which in fact influenced various projects of international federation (not just the EU) in the 20th century, Saint-Pierre intended "to put an end to jealousy of state. He believed that by forming a European Union jealousy of trade would also disappear and commerce would become 'universal, free, equal, certain, perpetual, amongst all Nations'" (Everlasting Peace, p. 8, cit. Hont, pp. 27-8). With the benefit of hindsight (more even than Hont possessed), we can see that Saint-Pierre was both right and wrong. He was right that peace would prevail throughout the territories of his European Union; but wrong - as has been painfully evident since the financial crisis of ten years ago - that this would abolish the economic and political damage wrought by "jealousy of trade". That was one idealistic expectation too far.
Kant was more realistic. It is often believed that in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant foreshadowed the modern thesis of the "end of History", the belief in a peaceful global association of liberal capitalist democracies as the telos of Enlightened development. But he knew very well that with states as they were, operating in the unscrupulous spirit of "jealousy of trade", the real conditions for such an association could not exist. Kant's "Third Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace" investigated the widest framework of relationship between human societies, what Grotius had imagined as a "state of nature" governed by natural law. Kant preferred to conceive of it as a "law of world citizenship", and seconding Pufendorf's arguments against Grotius, he proposed that this should be "limited to conditions of universal hospitality". A traveller might expect to be allowed to stay temporarily in a foreign land, but he could expect no permanent right of residence there. Travel across genuinely uninhabited areas of ocean or desert should be permitted without interference from bandits or pirates. Yet their "inhospitality" was nothing compared with that of European colonial powers:
Nevertheless, moral condemnation was not enough for Kant. A system of states was an established feature of the modern world, and if they behaved badly, one could not expect to bring them into line merely through moral judgement - though one could do better than to justify immoral exploitation through legal means, as Grotius and Locke had done. The Romantic-sentimental strain of Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism had relied strongly, ever since Fénelon, on the encouragement of moral "virtue" - something increasingly associated by both Rousseau and the Jacobins of the French Revolution with national loyalty, as well as with the rejection of luxury, exploitation and aristocratic privilege. Yet as an inner attribute, "virtue" - like loyalty - could never be fully depended upon. When the Jacobins began to give more importance to it than to the rule of law, and place more faith in the spontaneous decisions of the "people" than in the processes of the state, the result was the bloody anarchy of the 1793 Terror. Rousseau's romantic faith in France's moral reform from within seemed to have led to a dead end.
It was Germany that developed the most adequate philosophical path out of this crisis: the combination of Romanticism with what would come to be known as German Idealism. What Kant, the founder of the German Idealist tradition, brought to the table was a concern with law and system that had largely been absent from the discourse of "sentiment" and "virtue" circulated by Rousseau and the French revolutionaries. Moral action was not simply a matter of feeling rightly and then acting in accordance with that feeling, no matter what anyone else did: it had to have a systematic base. In a general ethical context, this found expression in the famous "categorical imperative" ("Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law" - which takes as its starting point that one acts ethically according to "maxims", and not according to feelings or intuitions of justice). In the context of politics, it meant that the state could be useful precisely as a systematizing force, a way of making ethical conscience and self-interest coincide, for each individual, through a system of laws. Men under a republican constitution did not need to be "angels" to make society work. Rather, as Kant put it in the First Supplement to Perpetual Peace:
The "realistic" acknowledgement of self-interest as a key motive force in human interaction thus re-emerges - apparently returning us to the world of more hard-headed early modern political theorists such as Machiavelli and Hobbes. Yet unlike The Prince or Leviathan, Kant's treatise deals with a republican state, and it is not a prince or monarch who keeps the peace through a "mechanism of nature", but the more "ideal" power - embodied in a constitution "in which laws have force" - of Reason (Vernunft). For Kant, Reason is the faculty that informs our ethical consciousness; but here it also does the job of creating a domain of "right" (Recht, which in German also means "law") in the "mechanical" context of the established State. Establishing such a domain comes before any expectation of individuals' "progress in morality": first a lawful constitution, then "virtue".
The decisive change in Fichte's approach to the interconnection of ethics and politics comes, as Isaac Nakhimovsky has traced, in 1795 through his reading (and published review) of Kant's Perpetual Peace. (Q.v. Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, chapter 1; on a personal note, I met Isaac in Cambridge about four or five years ago, without realizing then the enormous importance of what he was working on! My discussion of Fichte here also draws on Anthony Curtis Adler's translation of (and introduction to) Fichte's work, The Closed Commercial State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), henceforth CCS; and on Richard T. Gray's "Economic Romanticism: Monetary Nationalism in Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Adam Muller", in Eighteenth-Century Studies 36:4 (2003), pp. 535-57.) Fichte had been a Kantian since reading all three of the master's Critiques in 1790, and shot to fame with the publication of a work mistaken for one of Kant's own two years later. Yet the French Revolution, and the atmosphere of enthusiasm surrounding its reception in Germany, were just as decisive influences on the philosophy he began to expound to students at the University of Jena in 1793. Reading Perpetual Peace apparently modified that enthusiasm.
Whereas in 1793 Fichte defended a "humanitarian vision of a cosmopolitan moral community" (Nakhimovsky, p. 18), a mutual cultivation of mankind's innate "social drive" that would eventually make possible the abolition of states and the "establishing [of] a perfect society", by 1795 he saw a more fundamental role for "right" or law as instituted by states. Indeed, so fundamental was the concept of Recht as established by states that for Fichte there was no such thing as "natural law" (Naturrecht), as theorized by Grotius, Locke et al. Precisely the difference between man's internal moral conscience and the idea of "right" was that rights existed from the outset in a systematized and defensible form: one needed no presumption of virtue or civic "good will" on the part of citizens in order to enforce them - "right must be enforceable, even if there is not a single human being with a good will" (Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, p. 50, cit. Nakhimovsky, p. 42). Without a state, or something equivalent to it in terms of both law and the force to back it up, there were no "rights": the domain of "right" was a social, artificial construct, rather than something naturally and universally existing ("There is no natural right at all in the sense often given to that term, i.e. there can be no rightful [or lawful] relation between human beings except within a commonwealth and under positive laws", Foundations, p. 132).
One might think that this move could only be regressive: some concept of "natural law" or "natural right" ought to be retained, even if the particular definitions offered by Grotius and Locke appeared to be framed in the interests of European colonialism. Yet more than the content of those definitions, one might reply, was it not their form and manner of framing that was problematic? In each case (and also in the case of their opponents such as Pufendorf), European thinkers and administrators were deciding, from within the legal security of their own states, how to extend rights to a domain "outside" those states. Inhabitants of that domain did not need to be consulted, and could indeed be treated more or less like wild animals (to be exploited or protected, depending on one's standpoint). Fichte's theory of the construction of rights, on the contrary, was based on the idea that the stage prior to their emergence - the moment of "encounter" - could not be legally defined other than by the expectation of imminent mutual definition, based on each party recognizing the other as human, and thus as a rational and moral being capable of entering freely into an agreement or contract. "This alone is the one true human right that belongs to the human being as such: the right to be able to acquire rights" (Foundations, p. 333).
This was the only a priori "natural law": everything else would need to be worked out through actual negotiation. Yet the results of such negotiation could only be guaranteed, or reliably enforced, within the framework of a state: outside this, it would always be possible for one party to ignore the other's "right to acquire rights" (or to renege on any contract that had initially been formed) and treat them as a mere object, or an obstacle. As Nakhimovsky aptly sums up: "Human beings were obviously capable of seeing one another as things as well as persons. They could form and maintain a community only if they all decided never to treat one another like things, and to guarantee this, they would have to form a state" (p. 51). Intersubjectivity - social awareness and communication - is the basis of "right" or lawful action. (It cannot be coincidental that it was also basic to Fichte's theory of the self and self-consciousness, the very foundation of his Idealism, according to which "one needed to be recognized as a person by another person in order to recognize oneself as a person in the first place" (Nakhimovsky, p. 49). Cartesian self-introspection was not enough.) As will be seen in the third part of this post, this had specific implications for concepts of property and its intersection with labour - both defined as kinds of right.
The common liberal assumption that trade promotes peace - since commerce is founded on the reciprocity of interests, whereas war occurs where interests clash and no reciprocal contract can be agreed - does not seem to hold good for this period. If each country were only trading what they themselves produced, then peace might have been a realistic prospect; but under conditions of colonial expansion, the potential losses from a state of war were outweighed by the greater gains to be had from seizing or monopolizing the territory, resources and trade of regions outside Europe.
Under these conditions, it also makes no sense to imagine a contrast between the bellicose tendencies of rulers such as Louis XIV and the inherently peaceful activities of international merchants. This was not only because trading companies such as the English East India Company increasingly owned their own armies, but also because states themselves increasingly had to consider their (military-backed) commercial strength relative to rivals as a key factor in contemporary Realpolitik - as part of what was called "reason of state". The name given to this new factor in political calculation was "jealousy of trade" - the title of an essay by David Hume ("Of the Jealousy of Trade", 1758), and of a magisterial volume of revisionist essays in the history of liberal economic thought by the Hungarian Cambridge-based scholar Istvan Hont: Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
As Hont defines it, "jealousy of trade...emerged when success in international trade became a matter of the military and political survival of nations... It inaugurated global market competition as a primary state activity" (Jealousy of Trade, pp. 5-6). Exceeding the frameworks of international law imagined by Grotius or Pufendorf, the logic of jealousy of trade was one of untrammelled state self-interest - and following on from the most notorious theorist of such self-interest, Nicolo Machiavelli, it could therefore be described as "an extrapolation of Machiavellianism to the modern trading economy" (ibid., p. 9). Hobbes' Leviathan also described the relations between the rulers of sovereign states as a perpetual state of "jealousy" mixed with combative readiness: "in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another;...which is a posture of war" (Leviathan, I.13, cit. Hont, pp. 1-2). The emblem of "Reason of State" (ragione di stato) in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1603) pictures the psychological and moral forces at play. "Reason of State" is armoured, and her dress (like that of the emblem of "Jealousy") is embroidered with eyes and ears signifying continual watchfulness; she treads on the book of "Justice" (ius), indicating her willingness to ignore legality; like "Reason", she has a lion representing the passions by her side, but here the lion is off the leash. As Hont comments, such a political agent "uses the passions instrumentally and corrupts politics into a calculated application of naked power" (p. 12, note 16).
 |
| "Reason of State", from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (1603) |
The strategy of Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, provides an illustration of the attitude: "in addition to financing Louis' wars, Colbert's policy was to wage commercial war against Europe with all the means at his disposal" (Hont, p. 24). Military and economic competition supported one another: it was difficult to break the hold of the Dutch on overseas trade without military force; but war (the Franco-Dutch war of the 1670s) required financing, based increasingly on loans secured against the state's taxes; tax revenue depended on commercial turnover; and that depended on healthy manufacturing and trade. Trade in luxuries, often from outside Europe - coffee, sugar, fur, cotton - was particularly lucrative. Agriculture, by comparison, was not - thus marking the growing neglect of agricultural investment characteristic of the ancien régime, and factoring into its demise in 1789.
Colbert's approach is sometimes described as "mercantilist", a systematic and illiberal subordination of commerce to state interests (above all a well-stocked treasury) such as no modern state in the age of (neo)liberalism would officially countenance. However, Hont points out that Colbert's policies liberalized France's economy in a number of ways, and were predicated on growth (p. 24). The contemporary critics of "Colbertism" were thus not attacking a misguided form of protectionism that would hold France back; they were rather disputing, simultaneously, the luxury and military-colonial ambition of the Sun King and the growth-oriented economic policy that drove that ambition. As public critics of absolutist rule, in the first instance, they belong to the history of the Enlightenment - but from that critique flowed a hostile attitude to European expansion and colonialism that we are less likely to associate with Enlightenment politics. Yet as recent scholarship such as the work of Sankar Muthu is uncovering (Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, 2003)), the anti-colonialism of the Enlightenment was a significant intellectual and political force.
First among Colbert's critics was the Archbishop Fénelon, author of the Adventures of Telemachus (1699), "probably the most widely read secular book in the eighteenth century" (Hont, p. 25). Part of its popularity derived from its allegorical critique of Louis XIV's policies - one pointed enough that Louis banished the author from Versailles. Fénelon's ideal republic of Salentum represented everything that the roi soleil's France was not: at peace, morally virtuous, socially balanced, severely restrained in its consumption of "luxuries", concerned for the health of the countryside and its agriculture more than the towns and their trade, and economically almost self-sufficient (rather like Japan's Dejima Island, it had only a single, carefully controlled port). As Mervart has noted (p. 328), Kaempfer's vision of Japan has Fenelonian overtones; so too did the economic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his late work The Government of Poland (1772), Rousseau recommended that the Poles steer well clear of the corrupt, hypocritical and self-interested policies that characterized other European major states. At the beginning of Chapter XI, devoted to economics, he describes these states' aims and methods:
"Have professional soldiers, fortresses, and academies; above all have a good system of public finance which will make money circulate rapidly, and thereby multiply its effectiveness to your great profit; try to make money very necessary, in order to keep the people in a condition of great dependence; and with that end in view, encourage material luxury, and the luxury of spirit which is inseparable from it. In this way you will create a scheming, ardent, avid, ambitious, servile and knavish people, like all the rest; one given to the two extremes of opulence and misery, of licence and slavery, with nothing in between. But you will be counted as one of the great powers of Europe; you will be included in all diplomatic combinations; in all negotiations your alliance will be courted; you will be bound by treaties; and there will be no war in Europe into which you will not have the honour of being plunged. If you are lucky, you will be able to recover your ancient possessions, perhaps to conquer new ones, and you will be able to say, like Pyrrhus or the Russians — in other words, like children — 'When the whole world is mine, I shall eat a lot of candy.'" (Rousseau, The Government of Poland, chapter XI)
Instead the Poles should try and accomplish as little as possible through money, and avoid luxury and dependence on foreign trade: "The prevailing spirit of your economic system, if I had my way, would be as follows: pay little attention to foreign countries, give little heed to commerce; but multiply as far as possible your domestic production and consumption of foodstuffs."
Writing from the perspective of a modern historian broadly sympathetic to liberalism, Hont finds such visions reactionary and unrealistic, referring to Fénelon's "dream of dismantling the modern economy" (p. 28). Yet as he acknowledges, at the time it was not Fénelon's idea of peace through autarchic withdrawal from the field of commercial rivalry that looked implausible so much as the alternative, and now realised, concept of a "European Union", put forward by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre. In his Project for Realising Everlasting Peace in Europe (1713), which in fact influenced various projects of international federation (not just the EU) in the 20th century, Saint-Pierre intended "to put an end to jealousy of state. He believed that by forming a European Union jealousy of trade would also disappear and commerce would become 'universal, free, equal, certain, perpetual, amongst all Nations'" (Everlasting Peace, p. 8, cit. Hont, pp. 27-8). With the benefit of hindsight (more even than Hont possessed), we can see that Saint-Pierre was both right and wrong. He was right that peace would prevail throughout the territories of his European Union; but wrong - as has been painfully evident since the financial crisis of ten years ago - that this would abolish the economic and political damage wrought by "jealousy of trade". That was one idealistic expectation too far.
Kant was more realistic. It is often believed that in his 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Kant foreshadowed the modern thesis of the "end of History", the belief in a peaceful global association of liberal capitalist democracies as the telos of Enlightened development. But he knew very well that with states as they were, operating in the unscrupulous spirit of "jealousy of trade", the real conditions for such an association could not exist. Kant's "Third Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace" investigated the widest framework of relationship between human societies, what Grotius had imagined as a "state of nature" governed by natural law. Kant preferred to conceive of it as a "law of world citizenship", and seconding Pufendorf's arguments against Grotius, he proposed that this should be "limited to conditions of universal hospitality". A traveller might expect to be allowed to stay temporarily in a foreign land, but he could expect no permanent right of residence there. Travel across genuinely uninhabited areas of ocean or desert should be permitted without interference from bandits or pirates. Yet their "inhospitality" was nothing compared with that of European colonial powers:
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 (Nippon), 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 [the European states] 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 (Kant, Perpetual Peace, Third Article).
Nevertheless, moral condemnation was not enough for Kant. A system of states was an established feature of the modern world, and if they behaved badly, one could not expect to bring them into line merely through moral judgement - though one could do better than to justify immoral exploitation through legal means, as Grotius and Locke had done. The Romantic-sentimental strain of Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism had relied strongly, ever since Fénelon, on the encouragement of moral "virtue" - something increasingly associated by both Rousseau and the Jacobins of the French Revolution with national loyalty, as well as with the rejection of luxury, exploitation and aristocratic privilege. Yet as an inner attribute, "virtue" - like loyalty - could never be fully depended upon. When the Jacobins began to give more importance to it than to the rule of law, and place more faith in the spontaneous decisions of the "people" than in the processes of the state, the result was the bloody anarchy of the 1793 Terror. Rousseau's romantic faith in France's moral reform from within seemed to have led to a dead end.
It was Germany that developed the most adequate philosophical path out of this crisis: the combination of Romanticism with what would come to be known as German Idealism. What Kant, the founder of the German Idealist tradition, brought to the table was a concern with law and system that had largely been absent from the discourse of "sentiment" and "virtue" circulated by Rousseau and the French revolutionaries. Moral action was not simply a matter of feeling rightly and then acting in accordance with that feeling, no matter what anyone else did: it had to have a systematic base. In a general ethical context, this found expression in the famous "categorical imperative" ("Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law" - which takes as its starting point that one acts ethically according to "maxims", and not according to feelings or intuitions of justice). In the context of politics, it meant that the state could be useful precisely as a systematizing force, a way of making ethical conscience and self-interest coincide, for each individual, through a system of laws. Men under a republican constitution did not need to be "angels" to make society work. Rather, as Kant put it in the First Supplement to Perpetual Peace:
"The problem of the formation of the state, hard as it may sound, is not insoluble, even for a race of devils, granted that they have intelligence. It may be put thus:—'Given a multitude of rational beings who, in a body, require general laws for their own preservation, but each of whom, as an individual, is secretly inclined to exempt himself from this restraint: how are we to order their affairs and how establish for them a constitution such that, although their private dispositions may be really antagonistic, they may yet so act as a check upon one another, that, in their public relations, the effect is the same as if they had no such evil sentiments.' Such a problem must be capable of solution. For it deals, not with the moral reformation of mankind, but only with the mechanism of nature; and the problem is to learn how this mechanism of nature can be applied to men, in order so to regulate the antagonism of conflicting interests in a people that they may even compel one another to submit to compulsory laws and thus necessarily bring about the state of peace in which laws have force. We can see, in states actually existing, although very imperfectly organized, that, in externals, they already approximate very nearly to what the Idea of right [Rechtsidee] prescribes, although the principle of morality is certainly not the cause. A good political constitution, however, is not to be expected as a result of progress in morality; but rather, conversely, the good moral condition of a nation is to be looked for, as one of the first fruits of such a constitution. Hence the mechanism of nature, working through the self-seeking propensities of man (which of course counteract one another in their external effects), may be used by reason as a means of making way for the realization of her own purpose, the empire of right."
The "realistic" acknowledgement of self-interest as a key motive force in human interaction thus re-emerges - apparently returning us to the world of more hard-headed early modern political theorists such as Machiavelli and Hobbes. Yet unlike The Prince or Leviathan, Kant's treatise deals with a republican state, and it is not a prince or monarch who keeps the peace through a "mechanism of nature", but the more "ideal" power - embodied in a constitution "in which laws have force" - of Reason (Vernunft). For Kant, Reason is the faculty that informs our ethical consciousness; but here it also does the job of creating a domain of "right" (Recht, which in German also means "law") in the "mechanical" context of the established State. Establishing such a domain comes before any expectation of individuals' "progress in morality": first a lawful constitution, then "virtue".
The decisive change in Fichte's approach to the interconnection of ethics and politics comes, as Isaac Nakhimovsky has traced, in 1795 through his reading (and published review) of Kant's Perpetual Peace. (Q.v. Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, chapter 1; on a personal note, I met Isaac in Cambridge about four or five years ago, without realizing then the enormous importance of what he was working on! My discussion of Fichte here also draws on Anthony Curtis Adler's translation of (and introduction to) Fichte's work, The Closed Commercial State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), henceforth CCS; and on Richard T. Gray's "Economic Romanticism: Monetary Nationalism in Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Adam Muller", in Eighteenth-Century Studies 36:4 (2003), pp. 535-57.) Fichte had been a Kantian since reading all three of the master's Critiques in 1790, and shot to fame with the publication of a work mistaken for one of Kant's own two years later. Yet the French Revolution, and the atmosphere of enthusiasm surrounding its reception in Germany, were just as decisive influences on the philosophy he began to expound to students at the University of Jena in 1793. Reading Perpetual Peace apparently modified that enthusiasm.
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| Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) |
One might think that this move could only be regressive: some concept of "natural law" or "natural right" ought to be retained, even if the particular definitions offered by Grotius and Locke appeared to be framed in the interests of European colonialism. Yet more than the content of those definitions, one might reply, was it not their form and manner of framing that was problematic? In each case (and also in the case of their opponents such as Pufendorf), European thinkers and administrators were deciding, from within the legal security of their own states, how to extend rights to a domain "outside" those states. Inhabitants of that domain did not need to be consulted, and could indeed be treated more or less like wild animals (to be exploited or protected, depending on one's standpoint). Fichte's theory of the construction of rights, on the contrary, was based on the idea that the stage prior to their emergence - the moment of "encounter" - could not be legally defined other than by the expectation of imminent mutual definition, based on each party recognizing the other as human, and thus as a rational and moral being capable of entering freely into an agreement or contract. "This alone is the one true human right that belongs to the human being as such: the right to be able to acquire rights" (Foundations, p. 333).
This was the only a priori "natural law": everything else would need to be worked out through actual negotiation. Yet the results of such negotiation could only be guaranteed, or reliably enforced, within the framework of a state: outside this, it would always be possible for one party to ignore the other's "right to acquire rights" (or to renege on any contract that had initially been formed) and treat them as a mere object, or an obstacle. As Nakhimovsky aptly sums up: "Human beings were obviously capable of seeing one another as things as well as persons. They could form and maintain a community only if they all decided never to treat one another like things, and to guarantee this, they would have to form a state" (p. 51). Intersubjectivity - social awareness and communication - is the basis of "right" or lawful action. (It cannot be coincidental that it was also basic to Fichte's theory of the self and self-consciousness, the very foundation of his Idealism, according to which "one needed to be recognized as a person by another person in order to recognize oneself as a person in the first place" (Nakhimovsky, p. 49). Cartesian self-introspection was not enough.) As will be seen in the third part of this post, this had specific implications for concepts of property and its intersection with labour - both defined as kinds of right.
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