Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom

David Harvey

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231519915
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Geografia umana

Liberty and freedom are frequently invoked to justify political action. Presidents as diverse as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush have built their policies on some version of these noble values. Yet in practice, idealist agendas often turn sour as they confront specific circumstances on the ground. Demonstrated by incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the pursuit of liberty and freedom can lead to violence and repression, undermining our trust in universal theories of liberalism, neoliberalism, and cosmopolitanism.

Combining his passions for politics and geography, David Harvey charts a cosmopolitan order more appropriate to an emancipatory form of global governance. Political agendas tend to fail, he argues, because they ignore the complexities of geography. Incorporating geographical knowledge into the formation of social and political policy is therefore a necessary condition for genuine democracy.

Harvey begins with an insightful critique of the political uses of freedom and liberty, especially during the George W. Bush administration. Then, through an ontological investigation into geography's foundational concepts—space, place, and environment—he radically reframes geographical knowledge as a basis for social theory and political action. As Harvey makes clear, the cosmopolitanism that emerges is rooted in human experience rather than illusory ideals and brings us closer to achieving the liberation we seek.

Part One

Universal Values

Chapter One

Kant’s Anthropology and Geography

I begin with Kant because his inspiration for the contemporary approach to cosmopolitanism is impossible to ignore. I cite perhaps the most famous passage from his essay on “Perpetual Peace”: “The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it is developed to the point where a violation of laws in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan law is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international law, transforming it into a universal law of humanity.”¹

Kant’s conception of cosmopolitan law arises in the context of a certain kind of geographical structure. The finite quality of the globe defines limits within which human beings, by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, are forced to accommodate (sometimes violently) with each other. Human beings have the inherent right, if they so desire, to range across the surface of the earth and to associate with each other (through trade and commerce, for example). Means of transport (Kant mentions the ship and the camel) facilitate increasing contacts over space. But in Kant’s schema, the earth’s surface is presumed to be territorially divided into sovereign states. These will tend in the long run to become both democratic and republican. Inhabitants will then possess distinctive rights of citizenship within their states. Relations between states will be regulated by a growing requirement to establish perpetual peace because of increasing interdependence through trade and commerce. War between states becomes less likely for two reasons. First, in a democratic state it will be necessary to gain the consent of a public that would have to bear the brunt of the costs. The habit of sovereigns, emperors, and the nobility of waging war for reasons of personal prestige or aggrandizement will be constrained. Second, trade disruptions from war would inflict greater and greater losses as the levels of economic interdependence between states increased. The cosmopolitan ethic requires that individuals (presumed citizens of one state) would have the right to hospitality when they cross clearly defined borders (particularly for purposes of trade): “Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. A special contract of beneficence would be needed in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only the right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other.”²

Cosmopolitan right is, therefore, circumscribed. “The right of hospitality,” Benhabib notes, “occupies that space between human rights and civil rights, between the right of humanity in our person and the rights that accrue to us insofar as we are members of specific republics.”³ The presumption of a sovereign (preferably democratic and republican) state authority defined by its distinctive territoriality lies at the basis of this formulation. For purposes of citizenship the territoriality of the state is regarded as an absolute space (that is, it is fixed and immovable and has a clear boundary). But it is the universal (that is, deracinated) right to hospitality that opens the absolute spaces of all states to others under very specific conditions.

Kant’s formulation of the cosmopolitan ethic has been the subject of considerable analysis and debate. But no one has cared to explore the implications of Kant’s assumptions about geographical structure for the cosmopolitanism he derives. The only substantive discussion I can find concerns the role that the common possession of a finite globe plays in Kant’s justification of cosmopolitan right. The consensus seems to be that “the spherical surface of the earth constitutes a circumstance of justice but does not function as a moral justificatory premise to ground cosmopolitan right.”⁴ This conclusion is understandable. To conclude otherwise would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy or, worse still, to fall into a crude environmental determinism (the idea that spatial structure—the sphericity of the globe—has direct causative powers). But relegation of the geographical circumstances to the status of a mere “circumstance of justice” is not the end of the issue. It is as if the nature of the geographical space has no bearing in relation to principles applied to it. Though the material (historical and geographical) circumstances may be contingent, this does not mean that the characterization of those circumstances in the form of anthropological and geographical knowledges is irrelevant to the formulation of a cosmopolitan ethic. Nussbaum and, as we shall see, Kant himself clearly think the circumstances matter. And so, it turns out, does Foucault. So how and why does it matter?

Kant’s philosophical teaching concentrated on logic, metaphysics, and ethics. But he also taught geography and anthropology on a regular basis. Is there any relation between these teachings? His writings on anthropology and particularly geography have, until very recently, been generally ignored or relegated to a zone of insignificance in relation to his three major critiques. The Anthropology has, however, been translated into several languages and subjected to some commentary. Foucault, for example, translated the Anthropology into French in 1964, promising a deeper analysis of it in a subsequent publication. He never made good on this promise (though he did leave behind an extended commentary that is now finally available to us). Kant’s Geography is known hardly at all (Foucault, interestingly, barely mentions it). Whenever I have in the past questioned Kantian scholars about it, their response has almost always been the same. It is “irrelevant,” “not to be taken seriously,” or “there is nothing of interest in it.” There is as yet no published English edition (though there is a translation of Part I as a master’s thesis by Bolin). A French version finally appeared in 1999, and an English translation is scheduled.⁵ There is as yet no serious study of Kant’s Geography in the English language other than May’s, coupled with occasional forays by geographers into understanding Kant’s role in the history of geographical thought (without any attempt to link this to his metaphysics or ethics). The introduction to the French edition of the Geography does attempt an evaluation, and a recent English-language conference bringing together philosophers and geographers finally promises serious examination of the problems the Geography poses.⁶

This historical neglect of the Geography does not accord with Kant’s own assessment. He went out of his way to gain an exemption from university regulations in order to teach geography in place of cosmology. He taught geography forty-nine times, compared to the fifty-four occasions when he taught logic and metaphysics, and the forty-six and twenty-eight times he taught ethics and anthropology, respectively. He explicitly argued that geography and anthropology defined the “conditions of possibility” of all knowledge. He considered these knowledges a necessary preparation—a “propaedeutic” as he termed it—for everything else.⁷ While, therefore, both anthropology and geography were in a “precritical” or “prescientific” state, their foundational role required that they be paid close attention. How else can we interpret the fact that he taught geography and anthropology so persistently alongside his metaphysics and ethics? Though he signally failed in his mission, he plainly thought it important to bring anthropology and geography into a more critical and scientific condition. The question is: why did he think so?

F. Van de Pitte, in his introduction to the Anthropology, provides one answer to this question. As Kant increasingly recognized that “metaphysics could not follow the method of pure mathematics,” then, as Kant himself put it, “the true method of metaphysics is basically the same as that introduced by Newton into natural science.” Metaphysics must rest, therefore, upon a scientific understanding of human experience. But if metaphysics now was to begin in experience, where would it find the fixed principles in terms of which it could build with assurance? As Kant himself expressed it, the variations in taste and different aspects of man give to the flow of experience an uncertain and delusive character. “Where shall I find fixed points of nature which man can never shift and which can give him indications of the shore on which he must bring himself to rest?”

Kant, according to Van de Pitte, turned to Rousseau’s writings to find an answer. There he discovered that “because man can consider an array of possibilities, and which among them is more desirable, he can strive to make himself and his world in a realization of his ideals.” This could be so because human beings possessed powers of rational thought (though mere possession of these powers did not guarantee their appropriate use). But this meant in turn that metaphysics need no longer be purely speculative. It must proceed “in terms of clearly defined absolute principles derived from man’s potential.”⁸ By what means, then, could man’s potential be established, if God and traditional cosmology could not provide the answer?

At several points in his articulation of the cosmopolitan ethic, Kant expresses the view that the ethic arises out of nature or out of human nature (he sometimes seems to conflate the two). The cosmopolitan ethic is therefore based on something other than pure speculation or idealism. Kant (unlike President Bush) refuses to invoke any notion of God’s design. The attention Kant pays to both geography and anthropology then makes more sense. If theology and cosmology could no longer provide adequate answers to the question “what is man?” (hence Kant’s determination to eliminate cosmology from the curriculum and replace it with geography), then something more scientific was needed. Where was that “science of man” to come from, if not from anthropology and geography? The distinction between geography and anthropology rested, in Kant’s view, on a difference between the “outer knowledge” given by observation of “man’s” place in nature and the “inner knowledge” of subjectivities (which sometimes comes close to psychology in practice). This dualism bears a heavy burden, for it underpins the supposedly clear distinctions between object and subject, fact and value and, ultimately, science and poetry that have bedeviled Western thought ever since. He began teaching geography first (in 1756), and much of what he there examines concerns the physical processes that affect the earth’s surface and human life upon it. This suggests a certain initial attraction to an underlying theory of environmental determinism as providing a potentially secure scientific basis for metaphysical reflection (and, as we shall see, many of the examples he evokes in his geography reflect that tendency). His later turn to anthropology (which he began teaching in 1772), and the fact that he paid far greater attention to elaborating upon it (even preparing it for publication) in his later years, suggests that he increasingly found the inner knowledge of subjectivities more relevant to his philosophical project. “As a result,” Foucault provocatively suggests, “the notion of a cosmological perspective that would organize geography and anthropology in advance and by rights, serving as a single reference for both the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of man, would have to be put to one side to make room for a cosmopolitical perspective with a programmatic value, in which the world is envisaged more as a republic to be built than a cosmos given in advance.”⁹ It is significant that the final passages of the Anthropology address the whole question of cosmopolitan law directly, while there is no mention of this topic in the Geography.

Consider first, then, the implications of his Anthropology. The work amounts to a detailed inquiry into our species being (it foreshadows, therefore, Marx’s examination of the concept in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). The purpose is plain enough. Not only must we understand what we have been about and how we now are as a human species: we must also understand what we can become by virtue of our particular capacities and powers. Human nature is not fixed but evolving, and by studying that evolution we can say something about the destiny of the human race. Foucault, in his commentary, is as profoundly admiring of Kant’s capacity to ask these questions as he is critical of Kant’s actual answers. “Man is not simply ‘what he is,’ but ‘what he makes of himself.’ And is this not precisely the field that Anthropology defines for its investigation?” Foucault asks. The Anthropology is, therefore, in Foucault’s view, a central rather than marginal text in relation to the three major philosophical critiques that Kant contributed. Amy Allen summarizes Foucault’s argument this way:

Thus, Foucault suggests, the Anthropology (perhaps unwittingly) breaks open the framework of the critical philosophy, revealing the historical specificity of our a priori categories, their rootedness in historically variable social and linguistic practices and institutions. Foucault’s reading of Kant’s Anthropology thus suggests that Kant’s system contains the seeds of its own radical transformation, a transformation that Foucault will take up in his own work: namely the transformation from the conception of the a priori as universal and necessary to the historical a priori; and the related transformation from the transcendental subject that serves as the condition of possibility of all experience to the subject that is conditioned by its rootedness in specific historical, social and cultural circumstances.¹⁰

This transition in thinking from a disembodied to a rooted human subject is critical, and the vehicle is in the first instance supplied by the Anthropology. Kant’s views on our species being are not confined to his text on Anthropology, so on this point some contextualization is needed. Kant generally rejects any notion of the inherent goodness of humanity. He does not appeal to any figure of the noble savage or of Godly innocence. “Everything,” he says, “is made up of folly and childish vanity, and often of childish malice and destructiveness.”¹¹ Enlightenment, he says in his celebrated essay on that subject, depends upon “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” defined as the inability to use understanding “without the guidance of another.” Only a few, Kant suggests, “have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and in continuing boldly on their way,” while all manner of prejudices (even the new ones created in the course of revolution) “will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass.” For enlightenment to progress depends on “the most innocuous form” of freedom—“the freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” While we live in an age of enlightenment, we do not live in an enlightened age. This way of thinking enters into the final passages of the Anthropology. Human beings, he says:

cannot be without peaceful coexistence, and yet they cannot avoid continuous disagreement with one another. Consequently, they feel destined by nature to develop, through mutual compulsion and laws written by them, into a cosmopolitan society which is constantly threatened by dissension but generally progressing toward a coalition. The cosmopolitan society is in itself an unreachable idea, but it is not a constitutive principle. . . . It is only a regulative principle demanding that we yield generously to the cosmopolitan society as the destiny of the human race; and this not without reasonable grounds for supposition that there is a natural inclination in this direction. . . . [W]e tend to present the human species not as evil, but as a species of rational beings, striving among obstacles to advance constantly from the evil to the good. In this respect our intention in general is good, but achievement is difficult because we cannot expect to reach our goal by the free consent of individuals, but only through progressive organization of the citizens of the earth within and toward the species as a system which is united by cosmopolitical bonds.¹²

The mission of Kant’s anthropology—written, as he insists, from “a pragmatic point of view”—is, therefore, to define “the conditions of possibility” for that “regulative principle” that can lead us from a condition of folly and childish vanity, from violence and crude brutality, to “our destiny” of a peaceful cosmopolitan society. This entails an analysis of our cognitive faculties, of our feelings (of pleasure and displeasure), and of desire (the influence on Foucault’s work is obvious). It also entails reflection on how and why natural endowments (“temperaments”) are transformed by human practices into “character.” Kant writes: “what nature makes of man belongs to temperament (wherein the subject is for the most part passive) and only what man makes of himself reveals whether he has character.”¹³ While this introduces an unfortunate dichotomy between our “animal” and our “civilized” being, it does open up the possibility for the ongoing work of perpetual transformations of character. Pheng Cheah summarizes Kant’s argument as follows:

As natural creatures with passions and sensuous inclinations, we are, like things and animals, creatures of a world merely given to us and are bound by the same arational mechanical laws of causality governing all natural objects. However, as moral subjects we are self-legislating rational agents. We belong to a transcendent realm of freedom we create for ourselves, a world that encompasses all rational beings governed by universal laws we prescribe through our reason. The moral world is supersensible and infinite because it is not subject to the blind chance of meaningless contingency that characterizes finite human existence . . . culture provides a bridge to the transcendent world of freedom because it minimizes our natural bondage by enhancing the human aptitude for purposive self-determination . . . [it] liberates the human will from the despotism of natural desires and redirects human skill toward rational purposes by forming the will in accordance with a rational image.¹⁴

The general proposition that “man makes himself” carries over very strongly, of course, into the Marxist tradition. Echoes of Kant’s transcendent definition of freedom can also be heard in Marx’s pronouncement that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and of mundane considerations ceases” and that this “lies beyond the realm of material production.”¹⁵ Kant reflects on how far we have progressed in reshaping temperaments into character through the making of culture by examining differentials in national character and cultures. The text is lighthearted, anecdotal, and on occasion deliberately amusing in the national stereotypes it evokes. But this should not detract from the seriousness of Kant’s purpose. Human beings have made themselves differently in different places and produced different cultures. Our task—and on this point Kant’s arguments are surely powerfully to the point—is to exercise both judgment and intelligence with respect to this process: “Just as the faculty of discovering the particular for the universal [the rule] is called judgment, so the faculty of discovering the universal for the particular is called intelligence. Judgment concentrates on detecting the differences within the manifold as to partial identities; intelligence concentrates on marking the identity within the manifold as to partial differences. The superior talent of both lies in noticing either the smallest similarity or dissimilarity. The faculty to do this is acuteness, and observations of this sort ar...