In the first three Propositions of his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (Idea), Kant tells us that nature intends all natural human capacities to be developed to their fullest in the species, though not in the individual. Moreover humans are meant to provide, by their own efforts, whatever they enjoy of happiness and perfection (8:18–20). In the Fourth Proposition Kant lays out the means nature employs to bring about this result. It is what he calls the “unsocial sociability” (ungesellige Geselligkeit) of men. We have, he says, a “propensity to enter into society.” But we also have a “thoroughgoing resistance” to this tendency so that we are always liable to isolate ourselves and tear society apart (8:20).

This seems an unfortunate combination of basic character traits, but Kant does not find it so. On the contrary, he sees in it the goad needed to make us overcome our natural laziness. We do not want to live solitary lives. But we find in ourselves a strong desire to have everything go as we want it to. We know we would resist this desire coming from others, so we expect the others with whom we want to live to resist our desire. The resistance stirs us to try to overcome it.

Of the many puzzling elements in Kant's Idea for a Universal History (hereafter the Idea), one that has seemed to me most puzzling, and in some ways most provocative, is its effacement of the individual moral agent. Persons are around in the story, most often as the vehicles for envy and greed, or the other aspects of human unsocial sociability. But the sincerely good person, careful and thoughtful in ends and deeds, might as well not bother, at least not from the point of view of the questions that the Idea is about (and then also, perhaps, from the point of view of human history). In the post-Hegelian world-view, that may seem right. But in Kant's philosophical voice, it is jarring.

A related source of puzzlement concerns the intended audience for the Idea. There is some reason to think it is Frederick the Great (the tone of the remarks in the Ninth Proposition suggests a worldly advisor whispering in the king's ear about honor and posterity). In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant made a plea for the protection of freedom of the press as necessary for the liberation of human rational powers; in the Idea there is something like a plea for the end of war-making in order to liberate resources for the education and culture of citizens. But the Idea doesn't read like an argument for princes, and it is not entirely clear that Kant regards peace, as he does freedom of thought and expression, as a possible aim of public policy (as opposed to something one hopes for and should not impede).

In the Seventh Proposition of the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, Kant advocates the establishment of a federation of states with coercive powers to enforce its laws. He states that a “cosmopolitan condition,” which such a worldwide federative body would create, is required for the security and stability of its member states. Their security and stability, in turn, are required in order to facilitate the complete development of the human predispositions for the use of reason, which Kant suggests is the final end of human history.

The ideal of an international federation of states returns many times in Kant's later writings, for instance, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), “On the Common Saying: That May Be True in Theory, But it is of No Use in Practice” (1793), The Contest of the Faculties (1798), and most notably in Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Compared to its formulation in the Idea, however, Kant's later texts introduce fundamental changes on a number of important points, although this usually goes unnoticed in the literature. In other words, the view formulated in the 1784 essay is Kant's early view, which he later modifies in important respects.

In this essay, I aim to explicate Kant's early cosmopolitan view as found in the Idea.

So many of the themes that later surface in German idealism's treatment of the philosophy of history make their first appearance in Kant's essay – indeed, so much so that it is tempting to see Kant as foreshadowing Hegel's own famous treatment of the subject in his lectures. This has not gone unnoticed, and there have been recent attempts to make Kant into a Hegelian avant la lettre (or maybe Hegel into a Kantian propter hoc). However, as Pauline Kleingeld has convincingly shown in her work on the topic, the idea that Kant is really offering up a version of Hegel's own historicized conception of reason, or that Kant can make the assertions he makes only at the cost of inconsistency with the basic tenets of the critical philosophy, are not really tenable positions to hold, even if Kant's own lists of the various problems to be solved by such a philosophy of history looks in some respects like the checklist that the later post-Kantians read as they constructed their own views on the matter.

On the one hand, there is one strikingly obvious difference between Kant and his idealists successors (most prominently, Hegel) which has been noted so often that it is only worth briefly mentioning here. Whereas Kant thinks that the achievement of a free political and social life is a regulative ideal, something for which we hope and progressively approximate but never actually fully attain, Hegel holds that it is in fact entirely possible to have a free society in the here and now which answers to all we can reasonably hope for in a free society.

Although the title of Kant's essay Idea for Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim indicates its central theme, it reveals little or nothing about its underlying methodology and its connection with the emerging critical philosophy. Indeed, as far as the title is concerned, the only hint of a connection with the latter is provided by the inclusion of the term “Idea.” This is a technical term for Kant referring to concepts of reason, which, as distinct from concepts of the understanding, whose legitimate use is restricted to possible experience, involve the thought of an absolute totality or completeness that can never be met with in a possible experience and is, therefore, “transcendent” with respect to the latter. In the first Critique, Kant's appealed to the Platonic republic and a constitution that provides for “the greatest human freedom according to laws that permit the freedom of each to exist together with that of others” as examples of such ideas (A 316/B 372–3); but his focus was on the “transcendental Ideas” (the soul, the world, and God), which arise from extending certain concepts of the understanding to the “unconditioned,” thereby producing the thought of a complete systematic unity. While illusory, in the sense that no real object corresponds to them, these Ideas nonetheless play an essential regulative role in guiding the understanding in its endemic search for unity in experience.

“FROM SUCH CROOKED TIMBER AS HUMANKIND IS MADE OF NOTHING ENTIRELY STRAIGHT CAN BE MADE”

In the Sixth Proposition of the essay Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784) Kant famously states that “From such crooked timber as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made.” That humankind is made from crooked timber is why the Sixth Proposition says that the problem described in the Fifth Proposition “is both the hardest and the last that will be solved by the human species,” and one to the solution of which we can never expect more than an “approximation” or “gradual approach” (Annäherung) (Idea 8:23). But it is not clear why humankind's being made of crooked timber should cause the problem described in the Fifth Proposition to be so difficult to solve and indeed impossible to solve entirely. For what the Fifth Proposition says is that “The greatest problem for the human species, to the solution of which it is compelled by nature, is the attainment of a civil society administering justice universally” (8:23). Yet the administration of justice in civil society seems to be designed precisely to deal with the fact that humankind is made of crooked timber, for such administration is designed to enforce the universal principle of right (to “so act externally that the free use of your choice can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law” [MS, Doctrine of Right, Introduction, section C, 6:231]) by external and coercive or aversive incentives (MS, Introduction, section IV, 6:219) precisely because people cannot be counted on to comply with this principle merely from respect for the moral law (although the universal principle of right is nevertheless ultimately grounded in the moral law).

Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim presents an “idea” in Kant's technical sense of the term, namely, an a priori concept of reason (KrV A 312–38/B 368–96). The proper function of such concepts, in theoretical matters, is to regulate our rational inquiry with the aim of achieving maximal completeness and systematicity among our cognitions (KrV A 515–67/B 543–95, A 643–704/B 670–704732, A 832–51/B 860–79). Kant conceives of a rational system of cognitions as one in which reason sketches, in accordance with an idea, what it would be for our cognitions to attain to the greatest conceivable unity, systematicity and intelligibility, and then makes empirical inquiries, ordering the results in such a way as to fill in the sketch as far as the facts of nature and the limits of our cognitive capacities make this possible. In this essay, the topic is human history, and the idea in question is therefore an idea of a maximal theoretical intelligibility to human history. The results of this project may converge (as they finally do in the Ninth Proposition) with our practical strivings, motivated by moral considerations. But to regard Kant's main project in Idea for a Universal History as motivated by morality is totally to misunderstand the essay from the ground up.

PRELIMINARY: KANT'S FIRST THREE PROPOSITIONS

Human history is the collective result of people's free actions.

Kant's Idea For a Universal History articulates a vision of a future for the human race centered on the idea of a “cosmopolitan goal” – a world order in which institutions and practices of international justice will achieve, for the relations between nations, something analogous to the relations and restraints which transform a collection of individuals into an ordered state. Kant is here deeply concerned with the idea of progress – with the question whether human life is getting better or worse, and with how his own times should be judged with regard to maturity in reason and morals. But this rich and elegantly constructed essay is also centrally concerned with the idea of Providence, and Kant's ingenious conceptual play with that idea marks a crucial point of transition in its history: its transformation into the secular idea of progress. In this essay I want to focus on the relations between Kant's treatment of Providence, his version of cosmopolitanism, and his ingenious use of a narrative device – a philosophical story of human origins and development.

The conceptual connections between Providence and cosmopolitanism can be difficult to grasp, now that cosmopolitanism has come to mean little more than cultural sophistication, while the idea of Providence is relegated to religious piety. Novel though Kant's version of Providence is, the connections he draws between Providence and cosmopolitanism are not new. Both ideas, and the connections between them, go back to ancient Greek thought.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

This essay appears to have been occasioned by a passing remark made by Kant's colleague and follower Johann Schultz in a 1784 article in the Gotha Learned Papers. In order to make good on Schultz's remark, Kant wrote this article, which appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift late in the same year.

This is the first, and despite its brevity the most fully worked out, statement of his philosophy of history. The “idea” referred to in the title is a theoretical idea, that is, an a priori conception of a theoretical program to maximize the comprehensibility of human history. It anticipates much of the theory of the use of natural teleology in the theoretical understanding of nature that Kant was to develop over five years later in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. But this theoretical idea also stands in a close and complex relationship to Kant's moral and political philosophy, and to his conception of practical faith in divine providence. Especially prominent in it is the first statement of Kant's famous conception of a federation of states united to secure perpetual peace between nations.

The Idea for a Universal History also contained several propositions that were soon to be disputed by J. G. Herder in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, leading to Kant's reply in his reviews of that work (1785) and in the Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786).

Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht was first published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift IV (November 11, 1784).

After a great many surprising statements Kant's essay Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim offers the reader a truly amazing one in the end: namely, that the description of history that Kant envisages may itself contribute to history's moving towards the aim that history, in that account, is said to have. That aim, the “cosmopolitan aim” of the essay's title, is “the perfect civil union of the human species” (8:29), and Kant claims that philosophers describing history as pursuing that aim thereby help history to reach it. In what follows I shall investigate first what this help is supposed to consist in and second on what grounds Kant can claim that philosophy will be helpful in this way.

Here is the Ninth Proposition, the passage putting forward Kant's claim most explicitly:

“Possible” presumably means something like “feasible” here, since merely to claim that one could make the attempt so to describe history would seem trivial – of course one can try that. In calling this enterprise possible, Kant is probably asserting that it can be completed, that this enterprise is not bound to fail. On what this confidence is based need not concern us at the moment.

Some philosophical scholars understand the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim of 1784 as Kant's most explicit formulation of his “philosophy of history.” Put differently, they understand this essay as his attempt to uncover the fundamental laws of the historical development of humanity, similar in intent to the efforts of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and others, who offered compelling accounts of what they took to be the meaning and direction of history. But there are many reasons why such an interpretation should be rejected. The English word “history” is just as ambiguous as the German word “Geschichte.” It can refer either to the totality of events that we call “history” or to the way in which history is conceived or written. In the latter sense, we also speak of “historiography” (“Geschichtsschreibung”), and use the terms “history” (Geschichte) as a mere shorthand for the former. The Universal History presents and defends an “idea” and a “point of view” for the writing of such a universal or world history. In other words, Kant was addressing in this essay Geschichtsschreibung or historiography, advocating and giving reasons for a certain way of writing history from a philosophical point of view that introduces a “plan” or a “purpose of nature” into the historical account we give of human events. He claimed that such a plan must concern the progress of human abilities toward their full development or perfection.

Kant's pivotal essay of November 1784 is the key text that links his Critical philosophy directly to the issue of history, and it does so in a way that, from the very beginning, also clearly transcends a focus on the mere individual. Nonetheless, the fact that this essay, like many of Kant's other writings, devotes considerable attention to history and human society as a topic does not by itself show that Kant's own philosophy is historical in a “fundamental” way, even if it is admittedly not “ahistorical” in a typical “pejorative” sense. For this reason alone the essay deserves further examination, even if there is no non-controversial way to establish whether it shows that Kant's philosophy is fundamentally historical, or whether this would be a good thing.

AN INITIAL GLANCE: THESIS, CONTEXT, TITLE

Many of the main difficulties that arise here can be gathered from simply an initial glance at the essay's carefully worded title, its complex historical context, and its bold first thesis, that “All natural predispositions of a creature are determined sometime to develop themselves completely and purposively” (8:18).

The genetic problem

It is only natural to object that the formulation of the thesis goes much too far in many ways by speaking of what is “determined,” “complete,” “purposive,” and about “all” natural dispositions of “all” creatures.

Kant's discussion of the Eighth Proposition of the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim marks an all-important turning point of his entire argument. Let us first take note of the proposition itself.

This Proposition, Kant states, is a consequence of the previous one. Indeed, lawful external relations between states such as to make wars between them unnecessary are a prerequisite for a stable civil society in which reason can flourish. For reason, Kant had stated in the Second Proposition, can develop fully only in the species, but not in the individual. Its development requires favorable conditions in society, which can only be fulfilled if a certain amount of international stability prevails.

As a human capacity reason is still a product of nature. It is what distinguishes us from all the other natural creatures. Most animals are endowed by nature with species-specific instincts (or organs) that guide their struggle for survival. Humans, by contrast, were initially endowed by nature only with those instincts that belong to animals in general – sexual instincts, instinct for food, etc. – but with none that were specific to their species.

Lively current debates about narratives of historical progress, the conditions for international justice, and the implications of globalization have prompted a renewed interest in Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. The nine Propositions that make up this brief essay raise a set of questions that continue to preoccupy philosophers, historians, and social theorists. Does history, whether construed as a chronicle or as a set of explanatory narratives, indicate anything that can be characterized as meaningful? If so, what is its structure, its rationale and direction? How are we to understand the destructive and bloody upheavals that constitute so much of human experience? What connections, if any, can be traced between politics, economics, and morality? What is the relation between the rule of law in the nation state and the advancement of a cosmopolitan political order? Can the development of individual rationality be compatible with the need for the constraints of political order? Does the study of history convey any philosophical insight? Can it provide political guidance?

Kant's nine propositions subtly and implicitly express – and recast – some of the philosophical sources of his views: the voices of the Stoics and Augustine are heard clearly; and although Kant had reservations about Grotius, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Rousseau, their contributions, along with those of Mandeville and Adam Smith, are manifest in the Idea for a Universal History.