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Kant’s Subaltern Period: The Birth of Cosmopolitanism from the Spirit of Occupation

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Cosmopolitanism in Conflict

Abstract

With a focus on Kant’s early writings, Etkind situates Kant’s political thought on cosmopolitanism within his career as a lecturer and author in other subjects, including his Universal History and Ethnography of the North. Exploring Kant’s life, ideas and publications during the Seven Years’ War and the Russian occupation of Königsberg, Etkind revises Kant’s position vis-à-vis the European imperial hegemony. In the period when Königsberg changed hands between Prussia and Russia, he argues, Kant was a colonial subject. This unique subaltern experience helped him to formulate his ethical and political philosophy, including his ideas of cosmopolitanism. A fresh reading of a contemporaneous source, the memoirs of the Russian officer Andrei Bolotov who was stationed in Königsberg, helps to flesh out multiple facets in the mutual perception between Russian invaders and Prussian natives in the early 1760s.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am using here Karl Mannheim’s classical definitions of ideology and utopia , combining them with Walter Benjamin ’s tragic contrast between the winners and losers of the historical process; see Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London : Harvest, 1955); Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History ’, in Illuminations (New York : Harcourt, 1968), 253–265.

  2. 2.

    See Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideas, eds. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, eds. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gerald Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); David Held , Cosmopolitanism. Ideals and Realities (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); Pauline Kleingeld , Kant and Cosmopolitanism. The Philosophical Ideas of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Georg Cavallar, Kant’s Embedded Cosmopolitanism (Berlin : de Gruyter, 2015); and Global Political Theory, eds. David Held and Pietro Maffettone (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).

  3. 3.

    On Kant’s cosmopolitanism and the Stoics, see Martha Nussbaum , ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’, in: Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideas, 25–58; Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  4. 4.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (Harlow: Pearson, 1994), 66–112; Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); see also Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi, Introduction to: Kant and Colonialism, eds. Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.

  5. 5.

    Pauline Kleingeld , ‘Kant’s Second Thought on Colonialism’, in Kant and Colonialism, eds. Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi, 45.

  6. 6.

    Jurgen Habermas, ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight’, in Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideas, eds. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, 114.

  7. 7.

    Introduced by Antonio Gramsci and developed by Fernando Coronil, Homi Bhabha and others, the term ‘subaltern’ denotes a combination of political domination, economic exploitation and cultural oppression that occurs mainly, though not exclusively, in colonial situations (including the situations of internal colonization) . For helpful reviews, see Prakash, Gyan. ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, The American Historical Review, December, 1994, 99:5, 1475–1490; Marcus E. Green, ‘Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks’, Postcolonial Studies, 14:4 (2011), 385–402.

  8. 8.

    Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 26.

  9. 9.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. G. H. Bernard (New York : Cosimo, 2007), 155–161.

  10. 10.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 155–161.

  11. 11.

    August Schlözer, Allgemeine nordische Geschichte, 2 vols. (Halle 1772), and for some details, my Internal Colonization, chap. 1. For a comparison between Kant’s and Schlözer’s projects of universal history , see Thomas Sturm, ‘What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History ?’ http://openanthcoop.net/press/, http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Sturm-Working-Paper-12.pdf.

  12. 12.

    Maria Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope. Literaturnoe obshchestvo Arzamas i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov (Moscow: NLO, 2008), 74.

  13. 13.

    Kostiushev Iu. V., and G. V. Kretinin. Petrovskoe nachalo: Kenigsbergskii universitet i rossiiskoe prosveshchenie v XVIII veke (Kaliningrad : Iantarnyi skaz 1999).

  14. 14.

    Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe . The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 171.

  15. 15.

    Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Different Races of Human Beings’, in idem, Anthropology , History , and Education , eds. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92.

  16. 16.

    Andrei Bolotov , Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, ed. Arsenii Gulyga (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1986), 124 (later cited with page reference in the text).

  17. 17.

    Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier. The Making of a Colonial Empire , 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 182.

  18. 18.

    The Austro–Russian–Turkish War (1735–1739), the Russo–Swedish War (1741–1743), the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), the Russo–Turkish War (1768–1774), the Partitions of Poland (1772, 1790, 1795), the Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790), the Russo–Turkish War (1787–1792), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) , the Russo–Persian War (1796), the Napoleonic Wars (1797–1815). The Russian Empire did not take part in the wars for Spanish secession, Austrian secession or American Independence (though it was invited to interfere in the latter on the British side). On the continuity of these eighteenth-century wars, see Francois Crouzet, ‘The Second Hundred Years War: Some Reflections’, French History , 10 (1996), 432–450.

  19. 19.

    G.V. Kretinin, ‘O vozvraschenii prusskoj provintsii Fridrikhu II v 1862 godu’, Voprosyistorii, 6(2002), 139–143; see also M.Iu. Anisimov, Semiletniaia voina i rossijskia diplomatiia v 1756–1763 гг. (Moscow: KMK publisher, 2014).

  20. 20.

    Friedrich Meinecke , Cosmopolitanism and the National State , 33. It is instructive how deeply these thoughts about Kant, Prussia and cosmopolitanism differ from contemporary ones. Isaiah Berlin wrote that the German intellectual revival was ‘in complete harmony’ with Prussian nation-building. See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment (London : Pimlico, 2000), 263.

  21. 21.

    Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 162, 158.

  22. 22.

    Reinhart Koselleck , Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York : Columbia University Press, 1994), 118, 124.

  23. 23.

    Cited from Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, 267.

  24. 24.

    In this and two following sections, I use the materials from my Internal Colonization (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

  25. 25.

    Francine-Dominique Liechtenhan, ‘Königsberg, capitale de la Nouvelle Russie? La Prusse orientale sous l'occupation russe (1758–1762)’, in Histoire, Economie et Société, 2 (2013), 75095.

  26. 26.

    Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony . History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  27. 27.

    John H Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 58.

  28. 28.

    Arsenij Gulyga, Immanuel Kant. His Life and Thought, trans. Marijan Despalatovic (Boston : Birk, 1987), 31. More recently, A.N. Kruglov has disputed this conjecture as ungrounded. See Kruglov, Filosofiia Kanta v Rossii (Moscow: Kanon 2009, 35). It could be someone else in the Russian Governor’s office who acted in Buck’s favour, but Kant clearly blamed the Russian authorities for his academic failure. Applying for the next academic opening, Kant wrote in an official letter from 16 March 1770 that in 1758, Buck could have obtained the professorship ‘only because of the support of the Russian administration’ (Kruglov, op.cit., 35).

  29. 29.

    Quoted from Hannah Arendt , Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20.

  30. 30.

    Gulyga, Immanuel Kant. His Life and Thought, 36.

  31. 31.

    Andrei Bolotov , Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, ed. Arsenii Gulyga (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1986), 382.

  32. 32.

    Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 71, 76.

  33. 33.

    Howard Williams, ‘Kant’s Optimism in his Social and Political Theory’, in Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), 1–15.

  34. 34.

    Arendt , Kant’s Political Philosophy, 18.

  35. 35.

    Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 123.

  36. 36.

    Bolotov , Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia, 289.

  37. 37.

    Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe . The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment , 234.

  38. 38.

    Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, 337–338.

  39. 39.

    Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Human Being. Essays on His theory of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 121–130.

  40. 40.

    Arendt , Kant’s Political Philosophy, 8.

  41. 41.

    La Vopa, Anthony J., ‘Herder’s Publikum: Language, Print, and Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Germany ’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29:1 (1995), 5–24, 17.

  42. 42.

    Paul Guyer, ‘Freedom as the Foundation of Morality : Kant’s Early Efforts’, in Kant’s Observations and Remarks. A Critical Guide, eds. Susan Meld Shell and Richard Velkley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 77–98.

  43. 43.

    Arendt , Kant’s Political Philosophy, 17.

  44. 44.

    Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology , 61.

  45. 45.

    A.N. Kruglov, Filosofiia Kanta v Rossii, 26–29. Having reviewed this historiographical tradition, the Russian philosopher Kruglov joins it with much enthusiasm; moreover, he accuses of ‘Russophobia’ everyone who wrote about the cruelty of Russian troops in the Seven Years’ War. The idea of an unusually benevolent character of the Russian occupation of Eastern Prussia was probably launched by Kurt Stavenhagen, a philosopher from Göttingen who taught in Latvia, held Kant’s chair in Konigsberg from 1940 to 1941, and later fled to Hamburg . In his pamphlet, Kant and Königsberg (Göttingen 1949), Stavenhagen alleged that the occupation shuttered ‘the pedantic prudery’ of Pietism, destroyed social barriers and emancipated women. Zammito in his Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (p. 100) refers to Stavenhagen uncritically.

  46. 46.

    Gulyga, Immanuel Kant. His Life and Thought. Bolotov’s memoirs have been published in two versions, both of them incomplete: Andrei Bolotov , Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, vols. 1–3. Moscow: Academia. 1931; Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov, ed. Arsenii Gulyga (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1986) (the latter edition will be quoted in the text with referring to the page number).

  47. 47.

    Bolotov, Zhizn’ i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova (1931), v. 1, 462.

  48. 48.

    Maria Maiofis, Vozzvanie k Evrope. Literaturnoe obshchestvo Arzamas i rossiiskii modernizatsionnyi proekt 1815–1818 godov (Moscow: NLO, 2008).

  49. 49.

    Carl Schmitt , The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York : Telos, 2003).

  50. 50.

    Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt . For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 23.

  51. 51.

    Arendt , Kant’s Political Philosophy, 26, 52, 22.

  52. 52.

    Arendt, Kant’s Political Philosophy, 5.

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  1. European University Institute, Florence, Italy

    Alexander Etkind

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  1. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Dina Gusejnova

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Etkind, A. (2018). Kant’s Subaltern Period: The Birth of Cosmopolitanism from the Spirit of Occupation. In: Gusejnova, D. (eds) Cosmopolitanism in Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95275-5_3

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