Theories of Dynamic Cosmopolitanism in Modern European History

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Acknowledgements

This book grew out of various conferences, debates, and articles I have written over the last decade. My special thanks go to Sorin Baiasu, Gideon Baker, Garrett Brown, Kirstin Bunge, Lorena Cebolla, Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven, Lutz Koch, Chris Laursen, Rudolf Langthaler, Rebecca Lettevall, Robert Louden, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Hans Schelkshorn, and Howard Williams. Christabel Scaife from Peter Lang has been very helpful in getting the book published.

Most chapters are based on previous articles and papers. Chapter 1, “Dynamic cosmopolitanism”, is based on a paper presented at a conference at the University of Trento, and was subsequently published in Lorena Cebolla Sanahuja and Francesco Ghia, eds, Cosmopolitanism: Between Ideals and Reality (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 35–58), published with permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Chapter 2, “From Francisco de Vitoria to Alfred Verdross: The right to preach the gospel and the international community”, was first published in Kirstin Bunge, Stefan Schweighöfer, Anselm Spindler, and Andreas Wagner, eds, Kontroversen um das Recht. Beiträge zur Rechtsbegründung von Vitoria bis Suárez (Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2013, pp. 1–35). Chapter 3, entitled “From hospitality to the right of immigration in the law of nations, 1750–1850”, grew out of a workshop at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and was subsequently published in Gideon Baker, ed., Hospitality and World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 68–95). Chapter 4 is very different from its first version, printed as “Kantian Perspectives on Democratic Peace: Alternatives to Doyle” in the Review of International Studies (vol. 27 (2001), pp. 229–48). I have completely rewritten the piece, noting a considerable and sustained interest in my criticism of the democratic peace proposition. Chapter 5, on the development from embedded cosmopolitanism to dynamic national cosmopolitanism at the end of the eighteenth century, is an original contribution. Chapter 6, which focuses on the Austrian international lawyer ← vii | viii → Heinrich Lammasch, grew out of a paper presented at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm in March 2008, and was subsequently printed under the title “Eye-deep in hell: Heinrich Lammasch, the Confederation of Neutral States, and Austrian Neutrality, 1899–1920” in Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen, and Sven Widmalm, eds, Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe. Intersections of Science, Culture, and Politics after the First World War (New York and London: Routledge, 2012, pp. 273–94). The Introduction and the Conclusion are original contributions. I want to thank all publishers for their permission to use previously printed material.

All references to Kant’s works are in accordance with the Akademie-Edition of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin and Leipzig, 1902ff). References to the Critique of Pure Reason follow the customary pagination of the first (A) and second (B) edition. The English translations are from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992ff).

Unless otherwise indicated, translations of German and French texts are my own.

As always, my greatest debts are to my family, to my wife Angelika, and to our three thriving children, Clemens, Valentina, and Antonia.

Vienna, January 2017

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Introduction

In The Question of German Guilt (1947), German philosopher Karl Jaspers claimed that the legal concept of “crimes against humanity” applied at the Nuremberg trials could be interpreted as the beginning of a new cosmopolitan order with individuals – just like states – held accountable to international law. Domestic legislation would no longer exonerate individuals from their responsibilities as human beings.¹ Since the end of the Cold War, philosophers, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have picked up on the topic of cosmopolitanism and the possibilities of a new world order, among them Daniele Archibugi, Ulrich Beck, and David Held.² In addition, scholars have studied aspects of hospitality, triggered by accelerating global migration since the 1990s the rise of “cosmopolitan” megacities, and the publications of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. There has been a renewed interest in the history of the law of nations, the historical origins of contemporary international law, and a growing awareness that the concepts of state sovereignty and legal positivism are fairly recent phenomena. Immanuel Kant has become the most respected founding father of contemporary cosmopolitan theories. ³ ← ix | x →

The main claim of this book is that distinctly modern cosmopolitan theories have evolved since the Renaissance. There might be a very abstract and formal core idea of cosmopolitanism, but it is always fleshed out in a particular cultural and historical context. I define cosmopolitanism as the belief, theory or view that attaches importance to the community of all human beings. Static cosmopolitanism is the belief that all humans already belong to some sort of community, whereas dynamic cosmopolitanism holds that this community is a goal in the future, and that it should be formed, cultivated, and promoted. In this book, I claim that dynamic cosmopolitanism is a version of cosmopolitanism that can be found in some authors of early European modernity from 1500 to 1800.

Going beyond boundaries: Dynamic cosmopolitanism

The story of modernity has been told in numerous ways. The German intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg emphasized in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (1966) the independence and originality of modernity, criticizing an earlier account by another German, Karl Löwith.⁴ In Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, Charles Taylor rejected the “subtraction” theory of secularization and pointed at the complex development of modern identity within Christian reform movements. More recently, two authors have investigated into the cosmopolitan dimension of early modernity. Without referring to the concept of cosmopolitanism, Larry Siedentop has argued for the central role of Christianity in two of his books. He asserts that Christianity went beyond conceptions widespread in antiquity – of natural inequality, immutable order, fate, and the focus on the family, the tribe, and the polis – with the idea of salvation to the whole human species. ← x | xi → “Christianity took humanity as a species in itself and sought to convert it into a species for itself. Thus, the defining characteristic of Christianity was its universalism. It aimed to create a single human society, a society composed, that is, of individuals rather than tribes, clans or castes. The fundamental relationship between the individual and his or her God provides the crucial test, in Christianity, of what really matters. It is, by definition, a test which applies to all equally.”⁵ Drawing on a distinction of Karl Marx, Siedentop holds that Christian beliefs in the value of each soul, one’s conscience and inner life led to a gradual process that eventually helped the human species to achieve a form of self-consciousness: that each individual is – at least potentially – a member of “a single human society”. According to Siedentop, concepts of moral universalism, of individualism, of equality and a common future formed a matrix that reinforced and influenced each element in a dynamic process. This process started with the “moral revolution” of Paul and the theologians of late antiquity, in particular with Augustine and Pelagius. Siedentop reads the intellectual and cultural history of Europe from Paul and his notion of “Christian liberty” to the nineteenth century as the transformation or conversion of a moral claim – the belief in the equality of souls – into liberal secularism. By the early fifteenth century, canon lawyers, theologians, and philosophers had developed theories revolving around the key role of conscience as a sphere of personal choice, the centrality of personal will, moral equality, and natural rights.⁶ The cosmopolitan and dynamic elements were the following. Paul emphasized the “new creation” that started with Jesus’ resurrection: “See, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). The possibility of a “moral rebirth” and individual “transformation”, in short, the “project” of a “reconstruction of the self” led to a new focus on development and perfection – both on the personal and on the societal level. Augustine’s Confessions, for instance, were the story of his inner development, of his ← xi | xii → heart, his will, faith, and feelings.⁷ The process of forming or “creating” a moral community was linked to the idea of the city of God to come – not only in the afterlife, but also in this world. A new understanding of community undermined traditional conceptions of hierarchy and social status. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3: 29). Augustine’s City of God was not about escaping from the world but transforming it, exhorting Christians to be “otherworldly in the world”.⁸ Pelagius held that personal perfection was possible, and diminished Augustine’s emphasis on the will’s fallibility. He also stressed the importance of societal change. The Roman world, by his time “officially” Christian, should transform itself into a real Christian society, namely, “a society trying to live up to the moral demands of Christianity”.⁹ This is one of the roots of what I have called dynamic religious cosmopolitanism (see Chapter 1).

Hans Schelkshorn is the second author who has analysed the cosmopolitan dimension of early modernity. He picks up the story of modernity where Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual (2014) ends, namely with the Renaissance, and characterizes modernity as a dialectical process of going beyond boundaries – he calls it Entgrenzungen. He sees modernity as a complex interplay of secularization, the process of enlightenment understood as self-reflection, of cultural innovations, European expansion, and of its impact on mentalities. The key modern ideas are curiositas, the vis creativa of the human being, perfectibilité, and later progress. According to Schelkshorn, the beginnings of modernity can be traced back to three sets of ideas of Renaissance philosophy.¹⁰ The first crucial ideas were those of a ← xii | xiii → universe without boundaries and of insatiable curiosity, the desire to know about the world, concepts that can be found in the thought of Nicholas of Kues (1401–64). Whereas antiquity tended to see curiosity as fairly dubious, because the care for the soul was considered more central, Cusanus developed a new philosophy of the mind since De coniecturis (1442–3). Paralleling human reason with God’s creative power, Kues argued that the human mind can be compared to a city with five gates (the five senses). The human being was similar to a mapmaker “who, through his inventive art, creates his own visualization of the order he observes in the external world.”¹¹ The mind perfects itself by turning to the world, yet our knowledge about the mind’s limitations is a powerful antidote against unwanted arrogance or superbia. Cusanus rejected the traditional arguments against curiosity with the help of his theological doctrine of God’s self-revelation in the world.

The second crucial idea, that of the creative power of the human being, was developed by some intellectuals of the Renaissance, in particular by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). Pico emphasized the creative power (vis creativa) of humans, and characterized in Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486–7) the individual as “tui ipsius quasi […] plastes et factor”, as a designer and creator of oneself.¹² Though humans did not create themselves ex nihilo since they were God’s creatures, they had a range of possibilities at their hands which made self-formation possible and freed them of the strict and immutable laws of nature. In Mirandola’s account, God is speaking to man: “Once defined, the nature of all other beings is constrained within the laws We have prescribed for them. But you, constrained by no ← xiii | xiv → limits, may determine your nature for yourself, according to your own free will, in whose hands We have placed you … so that you may, as the free and extraordinary shaper of yourself, fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer.”¹³ The passage emphasizes the free will of humans as a faculty to go beyond boundaries set by nature. The theological framework in Mirandola’s speech is obvious: human creative freedom was based on what God had provided. Human “germs” or dispositions were given, but they had to be formed, cultivated and transformed. Mirandola emphasized the stark contrast between the concept of the indeterminacy of humans on the one hand and the unchanging nature of animals as well as angels on the other.¹⁴ Although there were some similarities with Aristotle, two differences – and dynamic elements – were crucial. First, Pico included all humans, even the so-called “barbarians”, in his account. Secondly, and in a manner more radical than Aristotle, he asserted that humans can form various “second natures”, just like chameleons. Human dignity was no longer something static, but dynamic, the realization of human potential, achieved through creative powers. This replaced anthropological essentialism with a dynamic conception of human nature.¹⁵ Pico and other Renaissance philosophers perhaps influenced the thinking of subsequent generations. Hobbes held that reason might be understood as an inborn capacity, but that it had to be cultivated over time, “attayned by Industry”.¹⁶ Samuel Pufendorf pointed out that “natural” sometimes referred to a “fitness” or “aptitude”. Reason and fitness for society could be trained and cultivated by discipline, so that “full development which nature intends” was achieved. In a historical process, humans eventually came to realize that sociability would lie in ← xiv | xv → their self-interest. The natural law which specified that we should cultivate a sociable attitude was “natural” in a very specific sense. Pufendorf offered an early outline of the history of civil society, elaborated by subsequent authors (see Chapters 1 and 2 below).

The third major idea of the Renaissance was the “idea of global moral responsibility” and of a global “community of communication”, Vitoria’s homo cosmopoliticus (see below and Chapter 2 for more). Starting with the Renaissance, the sphere of theoretical knowledge was also progressively conceived in evolutionary or dynamic terms. Francis Bacon’s Instauratio magna and Novum Organum held that the human condition could be at least “ex parte” improved, and the power over nature increased, in spite of the fall and the loss of innocence and paradise. “For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences”.¹⁷ Bacon went beyond boundaries in two respects. The power to do all kinds of work (omnis operum potentia) aimed at individual and collective self-perfection, not self-control or the vita contemplativa. Secondly, Bacon envisioned global cooperation of scientists across generations in the name of scientific and technological progress and for the benefit of the human species – “to renew and enlarge the power and empire of mankind in general over the universe”.¹⁸

A key step towards modern philosophy was conceptualizing normative individualism, the belief that humans and their natural rights were the morally relevant units of concern. As mentioned above, by the early fifteenth century, canon lawyers, theologians, and philosophers had developed theories revolving around the key role of conscience, the centrality of personal will, moral equality, and natural rights. Inspired by Roman law and jurisprudence, canonists of the twelfth century created what is now called canon law, a combination of Christian beliefs with Roman law, emphasizing the equality of souls and the primacy of natural law. The revolutionary ← xv | xvi → work of the canonists reached a climax with Gratian’s Decretum around 1140, which “amounted to a reversal of assumptions in favour of human equality”. For, in effect, it stipulated that all “persons should be considered ‘individuals’, in that they share an underlying equality of status as the children of God”.¹⁹ By the time of the Spanish conquista, Vitoria distinguished between two concepts of ius (see Chapter 2). The dominant understanding was the conventional one, defining ius as an objectively given iustum. It was complemented by, and coexisted with, the new concept of ius being a personal potentia or faculty. The relationship between individual rights and objective natural law was understood as symbiotic and correlative.²⁰ The doctrine of individual rights was embedded in a framework of natural law. Right was a faculty, and described a sphere of free choice allowed by permissive natural law. Subjective right was grounded in, derived from, and limited by natural law, the standard of what was objectively right. The distinction between objective law and subjective or personal natural right was a basic assumption of Vitoria’s lecture on the Native Americans. The distinction itself, and the nascent theory of human right, were not revolutionary. Vitoria’s originality should be located in his uncompromising application of the theory to a new context, that of the Native American “barbarians”. “Vitoria … was not using a new language of rights; he was deploying an old language in a new context”.²¹

The history of the concept of moral self-legislation is a long and complex story. In Jerome B. Schneewind’s account, the starting point is the ← xvi | xvii → traditional understanding of morality as obedience – towards God, the Deity, the cosmos or nature; the end result is the idea of autonomy and self-governance of moral agents. “The new outlook that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century centred on the belief that all normal individuals are equally able to live together in a morality of self-governance”.²² The champions of this gradual intellectual development are numerous and diverse. Schneewind starts his story with theologians like St Thomas and Luther. The turning point came in the early eighteenth century, when this new theory became “self-conscious”.²³ The crucial revolutionaries were the forgotten Crusius and Reid as well as well-known figures like Rousseau, Kant, and Bentham in the second half of the century. The most succinct analysis was provided by Kant. His “fact of reason” should not be misunderstood as something “given”, but as “made” by the human agent: in the process of deliberation, humans try to find in themselves a maxim that can be universalized, and consistently upheld by their own practical reason. In this process, they “make” – the Latin term is facere – their own law (thus Kant’s term “fact of reason”), which at the same time can pass the test of consistency, universality, and critical examination by other humans who have developed the “enlarged way of thinking”. The context of this possible generation of a universal maxim is social, as it is rooted in the agent’s interaction with other human beings.²⁴

The new concept of morality as autonomy or self-legislation had implications for cosmopolitanism. First of all, in theory, self-governance was a capacity all humans shared equally; it bestowed dignity on each human regardless of class, education, and intellectual capacities. Kant famously held that “common human reason” helps ordinary humans to have an implicit if only vague moral knowledge, and philosophers like Socrates merely ← xvii | xviii → make them attentive to their own reason’s principle.²⁵ This was in contrast to the older conception of morality as obedience, and even in contrast to modern authors such as Locke, who “wanted plowmen and dairymaids to take their morals from the pulpit”.²⁶ Secondly, morality became procedural: moral maxims were the result of personal reflection and approval; the moral agents looked for inner coherence and consistent principles as opposed to self-contradictory ones. Third, moral knowledge was meta-knowledge of one’s own mode of thinking, not metaphysical knowledge of a pre-established moral order. In this sense, the moral world was created by the self-legislating agent, irrespective of the world in itself not accessible to humans.²⁷ The upshot was the dynamic idea of perfection, especially in the area of morality (see Chapters 1 and 5).

Since the 1750s, the notion of the final vocation (Bestimmung) of the human species was woven into emergent cosmopolitan theories of history (see again Chapter 1). Inspired by Rousseau’s notion of the “perfectibilité de l’homme”, Kant expressed the concept in the following way: “The sum total of pragmatic anthropology, in respect to the vocation of the human being and the characteristic of his formation, is the following. The human being is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself by means of the arts and sciences. No matter how great his animal tendency may be to give himself passively to the impulses of ease and good living, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacles that cling to him because of the crudity of his nature”.²⁸ Bestimmung incorporates three meanings. The first level refers to human beings as part of the natural world, as animals which are equipped with certain germs (Keime) that in turn are determined to ← xviii | xix → develop in a certain way. Here it is “merely a matter of proper sowing and planting that these germs develop”²⁹ in a natural way, and this process is subject to the laws of nature. The second level relates Bestimmung to the concept of indeterminacy, since human beings are capable of reflection, self-reflection, deliberation, and the freedom of choice.³⁰ Kant called these capacities skilfulness and prudence, and it is part of our task to cultivate them. The third level interprets humans as beings with moral predispositions and the capacity of moral freedom and moral autonomy as self-legislation. “The human being shall make himself better, cultivate himself, and, if he is evil, bring forth morality in himself”.³¹ Here, our Bestimmung is a vocation or a calling, of individuals as well as of the whole human race. Humans “feel destined [or called] by nature to [develop], through mutual compulsion under laws that come from themselves, into a cosmopolitan society (cosmopolitismus) that is constantly threatened by disunion but generally progresses toward a coalition”.³² The difference between this approach and more traditional forms of philosophy is obvious. The ontological question about the essence of the human being has been transformed into a teleological question about human purposes and ends. The concept of autonomy – the third level – was formulated by Pico della Mirandola in a similar way, unlike the first two levels.

I can only briefly hint at the impact of this dynamic understanding of anthropology on legal, political, and cosmopolitan theories. As the individual chapters try do demonstrate, a dynamic conception of law and rights and of the international community was developed and elaborated in the period covered in this book, from roughly 1530 (Francisco de Vitoria) to 1960 (Alfred Verdross). It has been argued that some Enlightenment ← xix | xx → thinkers integrated the idea of dynamic or evolutionary temporality into their respective social contract theories. Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant are usually mentioned in this context. According to this interpretation, there was a paradigmatic change from static and material natural law theories to the procedural rational law of modernity based on popular sovereignty.³³

Any historical narrative has to avoid familiar fallacies, for instance, the binary juxtaposition of ancient or medieval philosophy versus modern philosophy, where the former is considered static and the latter is dynamic. Hobbes is a case in point. In his famous attack on Aristotle’s notion of the human being as a zóon politikón, Hobbes contrasts the Aristotelian conception of humans as by nature “born fit for society”³⁴ with his own anthropological assumptions. He concludes that the origin of societies lies “not in mutual human benevolence but in men’s mutual fear” and that consequently, “man is made fit for Society not by nature, but by training”.³⁵ Training is the English translation of disciplina, with familiar connotations such as systematic instruction, the raising and nurturing of infants or self-control. “Not by nature, but by training”: this phrase seems to neatly juxtapose Aristotle’s static and essentialist philosophy with Hobbes’ dynamic and modern philosophy. However, Aristotle could be defended with the simple argument that training and education does play a crucial role in his political philosophy, because citizens have natural potentials and dispositions that must be actualized in society or the polis – a dýnamis or possibility that might be or might not be realized.³⁶ Along these lines, it might be argued that some forms of Cynic or Stoic cosmopolitanism, although often ← xx | xxi → difficult to pinpoint, entailed dynamic elements. Cynic cosmopolitanism, for instance, might amount to nothing more but a “rejection of dependence upon externals”, whereas Zeno’s ideal was perhaps just an exclusive “community of sages” based on right reason, yet with the possibility of dynamic development.³⁷ However, what might be a possible interpretation suitable for a few authors like Zeno is clearly spelled out in the writers of early modernity. As Kaldis put it, the Stoic idea of a universal community “to which human beings already belong to”, and which is thought of “as a metaphysical given”, is very different from the modern version “presenting a way of accomplishing this”.³⁸ The universal community is neither a fact nor a metaphysical entity, but a goal we should try to realize in the future. In the words of Reinhard Brandt, dynamic cosmopolitans like Kant differed from the Stoics insofar as they conceived of “the individuals as members and citizens not only of the kosmópolis contemporary to them, but as members and citizens of the human species in its historical dimension as well. The human being becomes thereby a member of and means to the future humanity”.³⁹ This historical dimension, which implies the idea of progress, of dynamic change to a different, and perhaps superior, state of affairs, is one missing element in ancient forms of cosmopolitanism.

There might be additional differences. Ancient thinking in the Greek and Roman world assumed a natural inequality among humans, with the paterfamilias, the priest and citizen on top of the social hierarchy. Reason or logos usually defined an unchanging order, fate or cosmos and was unequally ← xxi | xxii → distributed among people. The crucial unit was not the individual but the clan, the extended family and later the polis or the patria. Cicero, for instance, developed the idea of societas humani generis, of a global moral society based on recta ratio and common, shared feelings. However, there was a clear hierarchy with family and patria coming first, and the cosmopolitan elements of Cicero’s philosophy were inextricably tied to his enthusiasm for the Roman Empire and his defence of Roman imperialism.⁴⁰ According to Siedentop, humans of antiquity lived in a “moral enclosure”, which was broken up by the New Testament. Combining Jewish monotheism with the universalism of later Greek philosophy, Christianity “changed ‘the name of the game’, emphasizing the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social role”.⁴¹