The critics of the ancien régime regarded domestic despotism as a cause of both war and imperialism, and argued that popular sovereignty combined with free trade would bring an end to these destructive practices. But while this criticism was undertaken in the name of a universal human community, most of these writers could present no viable alternative to the system of states which was emerging in Europe. Old universalistic proposals were rapidly becoming obsolete, and the idea of any legal or political authority over and above that of individual states was becoming increasingly difficult to defend in this new context

But how, then, could the idea of a unified mankind be translated into political practice, and reconciled with the existence of a plurality of sovereign states? While the authors discussed in the previous chapter were struggling to overcome the undesirable consequences of the division of mankind into distinct peoples, they had little to say about the political relations between particular communities, and how these should be arranged for the benefit of mankind as a whole. And while these authors articulated conceptions of a universal humanity and then projected these conceptions onto a global space, they found it difficult to explain how such a world community could be realized in historical time. This difficulty was largely due to the fact that the underlying cosmological framework made it hard to reconcile the classificatory ambitions of geography and natural history with the ideas of historical evolution and progress.