Enlightenment against Empire.
Title:
Enlightenment against Empire.
Author:
Muthu, Sankar.
ISBN:
9781400825882
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (428 pages)
Contents:
Contents -- Acknowledgements -- One: Introduction: Enlightenment Political Thought and the Age of Empire -- Enlightenment Anti-imperialism as a Historical Anomaly -- Synopsis -- Two: Toward a Subversion of Noble Savagery: From Natural Humans to Cultural Humans -- Noble Savagery in Montaigne's "Of Cannibals" -- Lahontan's Dialogue with a Huron -- New World Peoples in Rousseau's Conjectural History -- Diderot and Bougainville's Voyage -- Diderot's Tahiti: Appropriating and Subverting Noble Savage Theory -- The New World as a Device of Social Criticism: The Overlapping and Rival Approaches of Diderot and Rousseau -- The Dehumanization of Natural Humanity -- Three: Diderot and the Evils of Empire: The Histoire des deux Indes -- The General Will of Humanity, the Partial Incommensurability of Moeurs, and the Ethics of Crossing Borders -- On the Cruelties Unleashed by Empire in the Non-European World -- Trading Companies and Conquest: On Commerce and Imperial Rule -- The Disastrous Effects of Empire upon Europeans -- Europe: Not a Civilization Fit for Export -- Four: Humanity and Culture in Kant's Politics -- Humanity as Cultural Agency -- Cultural Freedom and Embedded Reason -- From Humanity to Personality -- Kant's Social Criticism: The Vulnerability and Commodification of Cultural Agency -- Humanity as Dignity -- Noumenon as the Curtailment of Metaphysics -- Aesthetic Humanity: The Opportunities and Injustices of 'Civilized' Sociability -- Humanity as Cultural Agency in Political Context: Combating State Paternalism -- Humanity as Cultural Agency in a Philosophy of History: Kant's Narrative of Hope -- Five: Kant's Anti-imperialism: Cultural Agency and Cosmopolitan Right -- Self-Cultivation, Pluralism, and Cultural Freedom -- Anthropological Diversity: From Race to Collective Freedom -- Anti-imperialism and Cosmopolitan Right.
An Unusual Social Contract Doctrine -- Six: Pluralism, Humanity, and Empire in Herder's Political Thought -- Generalizations, Contingency, and Historical Judgement -- The Flux of History -- On the Horizons of Knowledge and Universal Standards -- Early Thoughts on National Communities -- 'Humanity' as Philosophical Anthropology -- Conceptualizing Human Diversity: Sedentary versus Nomadic Societies -- Beyond Empire and toward International Justice: 'Humanity' as a Moral Ideal -- Seven: Conclusion: The Philosophical Sources and Legacies of Enlightenment Anti-imperialism -- Pluralizing 'the' Enlightenment -- Universal Dignity, Cultural Agency, and Moral Incommensurability -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Abstract:
In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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Electronic Access:
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