Enlightenment Anti-Imperialism - )

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Sankar Muthu

A REMARKABLE, though ;also a largely neglected, episode in the history of theorizing liberty and pluralism can be found in the anti-imperialist political writings of the Enlightenment era. In this essay, I explore the historically anomalous character of Enlightenment anti-imperialism. That is, I explain why in the centuries immediately preceding and following the eighteenth century, there existed almost no truly anti-imperialist political philosophy. I then detail the three central theoretical features of the philosophically most robust strand of anti-imperialist thinking, which includes the writings of Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder. These thinkers went beyond straightforward affirmations of individual human dignity by developing an understanding of humans as fundamentally cultural agents, beings who are embedded within social contexts and who draw upon their capacities of freedom and reason to create, sustain, and transform plural values, practices and institutions. These thinkers also developed a moral universalism that was effective in bringing non-European peoples into the moral fold for the paradoxical reason that it was informed by a doctrine of moral incommensurability which greatly limited the reach of cross-cultural moral judgements. Finally, I elaborate some of the historical and theoretical lessons that a reading of this understudied strand of political thought offers. Historically, it represents a set of arguments that challenge the view that `the Enlightenment' is exemplified above all by an attachment to universal norms and concepts that were articulated at the expense of taking cultural pluralism seriously. In addition, I argue against speaking of the Enlightenment as such or constructing ideas of a single `Enlightenment project' that one must defend or reject. Rather, I suggest that we pluralize our understanding of Enlightenment thought, with Enlightenment anti-imperialism representing only one of many diverse, and often conflicting, strands of eighteenth-century intellectual thought. Philosophically, Enlightenment anti-imperialism offers a set of counterintuitive arguments about humanity, cultural pluralism, and moral judgement. The standard oppositions that continue to structure debates among moral and political theorists over cultural pluralism--the autonomous, universal subject versus embedded, diversely constituted selves, universalism versus relativism, rational versus contextual morality--fail to capture the nuanced, symbiotic relationship between the universal and particular features of humanity and moral judgement that Diderot, Kant, and Herder theorized. Intriguingly, as the particularity and partial incommensurability of human lives came to the fore in their political thought, the moral universalism that occupied a formal, but ultimately hollow position in other modern political theories became more genuinely inclusive.

Enlightenment Anti-Imperialism as a Historical Anomaly

Enlightenment anti-imperialist political theory has been the object of far less study than the anti-slavery writings of the same period. Some of the best contemporary scholarship on slavery details the rising tide of philosophical opinion against it, and the emergence of a humanitarian ethic that provided the concepts and languages that newly formed anti-slavery societies and activists deployed in their controversial, lengthy, and ultimately successful campaigns. In their landmark studies on slavery, David Brion Davis and Robin Blackburn attempt to discern why an institution that is universally decried today underwent no sustained opposition from a critical mass of thinkers and political actors until the eighteenth century (Davis, 1975; Blackburn, 1988). The same question can plausibly be asked with regard to imperialism, for it is only in the latter half of the eighteenth century that a group of significant European political thinkers began to attack the imperial and colonial enterprise as such.

To be sure, in surveying the philosophical and political debates that followed the European discovery of the New World, one encounters strikingly compassionate discussions about the hypocrisy of European imperialists (Montaigne, 1958), humanitarian attacks upon the practice of Amerindian slavery and other cruelties perpetrated by the conquistadors in the New World (Vitoria, 1991; Las Casas, 1974, 1992), and romanticized (though ultimately dehumanizing) accounts of noble savages in travel, literary, and philosophical texts (Amerigo Vespucci, 1992; Lahontan, 1931). Before the late eighteenth century, however, those who sympathized with the plight of colonized peoples and those who launched explicit criticisms of Europeans' relations with the non-European world (including the most morally impassioned accounts, such as Bartolome de Las Casas's arguments against the Castilian crown in the mid-sixteenth century) generally decried the abuses of imperial power, but not the imperial mission itself. Imperial rule, however it may have been perceived and justified (inter alia, in light of religious conversion, the civilizing mission of imperialism, economic and other commercial benefits, or the more rational use of otherwise wasted natural resources), was widely endorsed even by the most zealous critics of the violence perpetrated by Europeans in the New World.