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15 results

  • 8 - A Cosmopolitanism of Countervailing Powers

  • Edited by Joan-Pau Rubiés, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Neil Safier, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment
    Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023, pp 239-262

  • Summary

    Global domination – including imperial oppression and commercial exploitation across borders and, especially, across continents – was a key concern for many modern thinkers, and among its roots and its remedies were often thought to be the various forms of antagonism and resistance that fundamentally characterize humans’ social practices and interactions. Unsocially sociable individuals, in this view, are characterized by a seemingly contradictory array of impulses that both draw them together in a spirit of humane association and yet pull them apart, as they seek to resist others either to forestall being dominated themselves or to indulge their prideful and hierarchical sense of superiority. Among the many treatments of what one could call "cosmopolitan unsocial sociability" are the incisive – and complementary – theoretical writings of the 1780s and 1790s respectively by the Afro-British political thinker Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant and Cugoano together exemplify an intriguing and complex strand of Enlightenment thought that viewed global connections as both corrosive to our shared humanity and yet essential for resisting the domination that afflicted both European and non-European peoples.

Empire and Modern Political Thought
  • Edited by Sankar Muthu
  • Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    17 September 2012
  • This collection of original essays by leading historians of political thought examines modern European thinkers' writings about conquest, colonization and empire. The creation of vast transcontinental empires and imperial trading networks played a key role in the development of modern European political thought. The rise of modern empires raised fundamental questions about virtually the entire contested set of concepts that lay at the heart of modern political philosophy, such as property, sovereignty, international justice, war, trade, rights, transnational duties, civilization and progress. From Renaissance republican writings about conquest and liberty to sixteenth-century writings about the Spanish conquest of the Americas through Enlightenment perspectives about conquest and global commerce and nineteenth-century writings about imperial activities both within and outside of Europe, these essays survey the central moral and political questions occasioned by the development of overseas empires and European encounters with the non-European world among theologians, historians, philosophers, diplomats and merchants.

  • 8 - Conquest, Commerce, and Cosmopolitanism in Enlightenment Political Thought

  • Edited by Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Empire and Modern Political Thought
    Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    17 September 2012, pp 199-231

  • Summary

    The debate that lasted on and off from 1511 until the early seventeenth century was initially, as Francisco de Vitoria phrased it, an attempt to explore the right (ius) of the barbarians subjected to Spanish rule. Vitoria pointed to issues that have still not been resolved about the right of any people to impose upon others what it believes to be the natural rights of all humankind. Rome demonstrated that a conquest could only be justified if it were the outcome of a just war. Vitoria employed two more natural law arguments in favor of the conquests, both of which make broad general assertions that were to have a lasting impact on all subsequent thinking about the legitimation of the intervention of one state in the affairs of another. The Roman law of vicinage, to which Vitoria alludes, required that neighbors support each other in times of crisis.

  • Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement

  • Sankar Muthu
  • Journal:
    Perspectives on Politics / Volume 4 / Issue 1 / March 2006
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    24 February 2006, pp. 153-154
    Print publication:
    March 2006

  • Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. By Stephen Eric Bronner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 224p. $29.50.

    Stephen Eric Bronner reclaims what he takes to be the genuine spirit of Enlightenment thought from a variety of contemporaneous and historical critics on the Left and Right, but first and foremost from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE) (1947). Bronner contends that many criticisms of Enlightenment thought today can be traced to what he characterizes as Horkheimer and Adorno's brilliant but ultimately inaccurate and misleading analysis. The losses involved are not only scholarly but political, Bronner argues, for progressive activists and intellectuals today can benefit from the ethical orientations and philosophical temperaments that informed Enlightenment thinkers. Reclaiming the Enlightenment is also a response to historians of political thought who have too often, in Bronner's opinion, missed the forest for the trees. While the recent historiography of Enlightenment thought has deepened and broadened our understanding of particular figures, themes, and regional variants of eighteenth-century political philosophy, he contends that the contemporary emphasis on multiple Enlightenments can have the effect of obscuring what he takes to be the fundamental ethos of Enlightenment thought.