Why Carl Schmitt (and others) got Kant
wrong
Paola Romero*
Fribourg
University, Switzerland
Abstract
This essay traces the influence of Carl
Schmitt on an interpretative tendency found
in a number of contemporary readings of Kant’s political philosophy. This
influence can be traced back to two basic commitments: the idea that Kant’s
philosophy (i) seeks to defend a pacifist and humanitarian ideal of history and progress, and (ii) that political
conflict must, for this reason, be somehow pacified or eradicated. I argue that
these ‘anti-conflict’ readings
of Kant go astray in ignoring the systemic role conflict
plays in Kant’s understanding of agency and freedom on the one hand, and in
overlooking that this conflict is not empirical but normative, and thereby,
unavoidable. In light of this ‘agential conflict’, Schmitt’s critique to
Kant begins to lose all its force.
Key words
Kant, Schmitt, conflict, humanity, pacifism, agency.
This essay is born out of a perplexity,
namely that of recognising how a number of contemporary interpretations of Kant
lend themselves to be a clear target to Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism.
This is worrisome for two reasons: if we take Schmitt’s critique seriously,
specifically his accusation against liberalism’s appeal to the idea of
‘humanity’[1] as a means wage war and to
depolitise political life, this argument seems to be too often rooted back to
Kant. Second and relatedly, if it turns out that Kant is indeed a case in view
of Schmitt’s critique, by holding a humanitarian/universalist philosophy
stripped from a concern for conflict and politics, was Schmitt then right to
target his philosophy as naïve and depoliticised?
In what follows I show that Kant does not
need to be defended from Schmitt’s critique, because he holds a distinctive
theory of conflict as developed in his account of agency and external freedom.
This bears significant implications if one is inclined to read Kant’s political
philosophy as aiming at a ‘conflict-free’ world. I have identified this
interpretative tendency in contemporary appropriations of Kant coming from the
field of political science and international relations, and in more strictly
Kantian interpretations of his thought. What these approaches share is a common
pacifist approach to Kant, dismissing the role conflict plays as an unavoidable
and inherent fact of our constitution as free agents. My aim in this essay is to explain why
Schmitt and ‘anti-conflict’ readings of Kant have got Kant wrong on the specific issue of conflict. I do
this by showing how the philosophical presuppositions underlying his theory of
agency under a juridical state, and the normative role conflict plays in our
external and mutually-affecting political and social relations, frees us from
(i) defending Kant against Schmitt’s ‘anti-conflict’ objection, and from (ii)
accepting a de-politicised and sanitised version of Kant’s political
philosophy. The combination of these two interpretative claims brings a third,
salutary benefit: (iii) recognising that conflict, albeit not of an
empirical-kind, is ever-present and a necessary condition of the possibility of
a shared juridical existence. This claim invites us to rethink the status of
Kant’s teleological arguments about peace, and the possibility of establishing
such a condition in a world where conflict cannot be ever fully eradicated.
My purpose is, therefore, to offer an argument that gives conflict its
due systematic place within Kant’s theory of the agency in politics. So, in
‘getting Kant straight’ on the issue of conflict, we also get straight why the
naïve idealism sometimes attributed to him [2], and the objection of his
endorsement of an abstract humanitarian morality with covert political aims,
are ill-founded. If conflict is, as I argue, a basic fact of our constitution
as free agents with a will, who stand
in unavoidable practical relations with other agents, then ‘the end of
politics’ is nowhere in sight. What follows from this reading is a distinct
approach to Kantian politics that is not vulnerable to Schmitt’s caricature of
a ‘conflict-free’ and moralizing liberalism, and a reading that precludes
reducing Kant’s thought to the calculations of the empirical benefits of
liberal democracy, peace, and of a cosmopolitan world-order. Three basic ideas
furnish my argument: (i) politics should be understood as a system enabling us
to influence and affect one another through the free exercise of agency; (ii) a
juridical condition is therefore tasked with the job of establishing the
rightful limits of such interaction, instead of remedying the conflicts that
arise from material scarcity or from our passions and interests; finally, (iii)
this condition of freedom of agency under law takes conflict as constitutive, and legislates
accordingly.
The dialectic of the argument is as
follows: In Section I, I offer a summary reconstruction of Schmitt’s critique,
by focusing on two aspects –neutrality and the hypocrisy of liberal humanism.
In Section II, I appeal to a series of contentious issues –liberal democratic
peace, humanitarian intervention, and a cosmopolitan world-state– to show how
appropriating Kant’s thought on these specific issues commits him to a kind of
pacified liberalism geared towards the elimination of conflict of the type
Schmitt objected to. In Section III, I present my positive account of the role
of conflict in Kant, in order to defend the centrality of this idea in the
context of his theory of agency and freedom. Finally, I contrast my reading in
Section IV with a number of ‘anti-conflict’ interpretations of Kant to see how this interpretative tendency gets rehabilitated
in the literature. I conclude that little sense can be made of a conflict–free world in Kant, at least once
we accept the relational nature of our interactions as human beings.
I. Schmitt’s critique to liberal pacifism
Recall our initial perplexity: if we take
Schmitt’s critique to liberalism seriously, we begin to see how, underlying a
commitment to a liberal democratic peace, grounded in the universal value of a
shared humanity, lies a corresponding commitment to the eradication of conflict
in human relations. What interest me of this critique, and the reason why I
appeal to it in the context of a discussion about Kant, is the fact that a
number of arguments in favour of (i) a democratic liberal peace, (ii) a
justification for humanitarian intervention, and a (iii) a defence of a
cosmopolitan order, appeal back to Kant as a philosophical ground for their
approaches. More importantly as I will argue in what follows, these
interpretations seem to make the further commitment identified by Schmitt to
the ideal of a world free of conflict. It is on this specific issue of the
connection between an alleged Kantian liberal peace on the one hand, and an
ideal of a world order free from conflict and antagonism on the other hand,
where I think lies the need to revisit Kant in light of Schmitt’s critique. His
critique is vast and multi-layered, but for the purposes of my argument I want
to focus on three specific aspects, namely, liberalism’s commitment to neutrality,
its appeal to an abstract concept of ‘humanity’ to justify war, and the
Kantian-type universalism underlying a quest for total pacification. Looking at
these aspects more closely will allow us to see how, knowingly or not, some of
Schmitt’s critical diagnosis of liberalism, and in particular of its political deficits, can be targeted
against contemporary interpretations of Kant on the issue of peace, war, and of
a cosmopolitan world-order.
According to Schmitt, a liberal democratic
peace requires if not the elimination of conflict altogether, at least its
progressive pacification. What
this kind of liberal approach to peace ignores is the realization that “the
ever-present possibility of conflict must always be kept in mind”,[3] if we are to keep the central distinction animating
all political life: the distinction between friend and enemy. The political
deficits of liberalism lie therefore in its tendency to seek neutrality in the
place of antagonism: “if the different states, religions, classes, and other
human groupings on earth should be so unified that a conflict among them is
impossible” Schmitt predicts, “then the distinction of friend and enemy would
also cease.” [4] To be sure, one can resist the connection Schmitt tries to draw between
a set of liberal values such as unity, neutrality, and consensus, and the inevitability leading to a world where
“the possibility of conflict is eliminated, [of] a completely pacified planet”.[5] One would be right to resist it partly
because the analysis depends on a contentious commitment to the idea of
politics as an inherently conflictual sphere, anchored in the friend and enemy
distinction. This sui generis definition of politics as the relationship between
friend and enemy is part of the explanation of why Schmitt links the
anti-political nature of liberalism –in its dismissal of antagonism–, with a
commitment to pacifism. As I will show in the following sections, a similar
link between pacifism and an anti-conflict stance is rooted back to Kant’s
philosophy, thereby overlooking the centrality of conflict in his political
philosophy.
But before presenting my own positive
account, it is worth dwelling deeper into Schmitt’s diagnosis of liberalisms
faults, to see how it gets rehabilitated in a number of Kantian interpretations.
For Schmitt, the friend and enemy distinction started to crumble in the light
of the rapid technological advances of the twentieth century (however this
pretence of “un-political purity” was already in the making in the
eighteenth-century)[6].
Technology’s “promise of neutrality” was meant to bring about the progressive
erosion of antagonism to give place to a world where “everything should go
smoothly and free from unnecessary frictions”.[7] Lying behind this illusion of “fluidity”, distinctive
of a consumerist capitalism, lay for Schmitt a subterranean longing for
pacification and neutralization of political life altogether.[8] As
I mentioned, his polemic against
liberalism’s anti-political stance and its relation to a capitalist way of life
was also grounded in a deeper critique to the rationalism of the eighteenth-century century, in its universalist and humanitarian
variants. He traces a connection between the desire of a universal kind of
morality shared among all humans on the one hand, and the elimination of
conflict and differences to form a unitary, global community on the other. This “eighteenth-century humanitarian concept of
morality”, and note the tacit reference to Kant here, is “universal, i.e. all
embracing, a social ideal, a system of relations between individuals” that
materializes itself “only when the real possibility of war is precluded and
every friend and enemy grouping becomes impossible”.[9]
We can begin to see how a version of Kant as a
representative of this way of thinking comes to the fore. Put more
systematically, this Kantian universalism is problematic for Schmitt in two
ways: one, it abstracts from the
specific circumstances of the individuals that constitute the political body,
thereby disembodying the existential reality of the friend and enemy
distinction, and the importance of the “concrete situation”[10]. By legislating positive
law from the ideal of an abstract universalism, laws are not for someone but become a mere vehicle of
a form of humanity with no concrete agency. Second, this Kantian universalism
is problematic in that the notion of ‘humanity’ with which it operates is not
only abstract but disinterested: it
precludes the possibility of identifying ‘someone’ or ‘something’ against which
we can define our interests and be committed to risk our lives in defending
them. According to Schmitt, we can only know who we are by knowing who is
the other, and this dynamic is of course inherently conflictual. When we
cease to identify another as our enemy –as this humanitarian philosophy
allegedly does–, ‘humanity’ becomes “an ideological instrument particularly
useful for an imperialistic expansion and, in its ethical-humanitarian form, it
becomes also a vehicle for economic imperialism”.[11] From this it
would follow that a Kantian
liberal peace, directed at negating the enemy of its existential role in
shaping political dynamics, is a kind of peace that actually intensify and
perpetuates conflict rather than eliminate it, by camouflaging economic
interests under the guise of moral values.
At the bottom of this critique lies
Schmitt accusation of liberalism’s hypocritical
stance towards its own aims: it presents itself as wanting to end all wars,
but only to covert its interest in perpetuating its power and domination
–particularly abroad. As we will see, this point will become particularly
relevant to our discussion on humanitarian interventions, and the
‘Kantian-type’ justifications in the name of a shared, valued humanity. This appeal to war as a means to end all wars
is commonly voiced in political discourse. For example in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Obama captured
the idea in a nutshell: “America will always be a
voice for those aspirations that are universal…I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian
grounds”.[12] This is the logic Schmitt is trying to disclose, and
one he thinks is deeply rooted in the humanitarian/universalist philosophy of
Kant’s century. So,
a war in the name of humanity to
guarantee a liberal peace free of all potential enemies, misses two important
facts for Schmitt: that in order to wage a war you need a concrete enemy, and that the pacification of all forms of conflict
would not mean the end of all war, but the end of politics altogether:
Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no
enemy, at least not on this planet…When a state fights its political enemy in
the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war
wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its
military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself
with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and
civilization in order to claim these as one’s own and to deny the same to the
enemy.[13]
What follows from the ideological tool of a ‘war in
the name of humanity’ is the establishment of a homogeneous liberal world
order, closely linked to the cosmopolitan ideal prominently defended in Kant’s
time. What is implied by a cosmopolitan world order is the ultimate erasing of
the friend and enemy distinction, and the subsequent elimination of the role of
conflict from politics since, “for
many people the idea of a global organization means nothing else than the
utopian idea of total depoliticalization”.[14] However, it is not my purpose to evaluate the
coherency of Schmitt’s polemic treatment of liberalism’s ‘true’ but ‘covered’
intentions, but rather to show that the way he portrays the value of liberal
peace, of a humanitarian war and cosmopolitanism, seems to find home in
contemporary interpretations of Kant.
II. ‘The end of all wars’[15]: a
contemporary appeal to Kant
One appealing feature of
Kant’s political philosophy can be found in the available philosophical and
particularly moral arguments for those interested in grounding theories relating
to democratic peace, humanitarian intervention, and cosmopolitanism. I focus on
these issues partly due to a surprise in recognizing how common it is to find
explicit appropriations of Kant’s thought on these matters in political science
and international relations studies.[16] What they seem to find in Kant is a useful philosophical source to
justify the role a liberal democratic peace plays in fostering peaceful
relations between states, and in contributing to promote “conflict inhibition” and “growing war-weariness"
among peoples and states.[17] What strikes me about these approaches is precisely
the connection they make between liberal democracy, and the potentially
measurable benefits of its potential to reduce conflict-driven relations at the
international sphere. This connection between democracy, peace, and “conflict
inhibition” is sometimes explained as the result of fruitful forms of free commercial exchanges among
nations, thus delivering a framework for peace-driven international relations.[18] This idea of peace
understood in terms of the progressive pacification of conflict through robust
commercial exchange, can also be found in a more radical version according to
which, a cosmopolitan world-order would ultimately demand the end of the
principle of state sovereignty, to give place to a form of intra-people
relations free from conflict and antagonisms.[19]
There is, to be sure, a legitimate place in Kant’s
thought to find an argument in favor of a condition peace, and to establish as
a matter of “direct duty” a “league of a special kind” that does not seek to
end only one war, but “to end all war forever.”[20] However I want to problematize two things in the face
of this Kantian duty to peace: on the one hand, I want to show how some
contemporary interpretations of Kant draw a connection between the value of a
liberal democratic peace, and of the peaceful potential of humanitarian
interventions, with the claim that these conditions entail a commitment to the
progressive eradication and pacification of conflict. This leads me to my
second point of contention, namely, that such a link between liberal democracy,
peace, and humanitarian intervention and conflict
is not a claim we can attribute to Kant. As I will defend in the next section,
conflict is ever-present in the fact that we are free agents who stand in
practical relations to other free agents. This equality of agency I argue,
precludes the elimination of conflict at least in the way that some
interpretations seem to attribute it to Kant. What I want to question,
therefore, is the claim that the progressive pacification of conflict (at least as an ideal), is entailed
by the conciliatory benefits of liberal democracy as an interpretation of Kant. This I hope will become clearer as we
advance in the argument.
However, it is common to see the attribution of these interrelated
claims in some degree to Kant. As Howard Williams notes, “the end of the Cold War brought with it an enthusiasm for
democratic ideals and their supposedly pacifying effects, which openly and
directly connected itself with Kant’s political thinking – particularly his
tract on Perpetual Peace.” Attention
focused on the “republican mode of government” and in “the federation of free
states that Kant hoped would develop from the growth of republican states”,
resulting if necessary from required humanitarian interventions.[21] In political science,
efforts have been made to quantify this ideal connection between democratic
processes and peace, by calculating the progressive presence of conflict at the
domestic and international level. Most camps of the democratic peace hypothesis
agree that “Immanuel Kant laid the intellectual foundation of the
hypothesis in the late eighteenth century. Whether aiming at corroboration or
refutation, most contemporary scholars appear to believe that they are
operationalizing and testing some version of the Kantian thesis.”[22] Michael W. Doyle
for example has tried to rework Kant’s thesis from an empirical perspective,
approaching peace as a “long run ‘inevitable’”, predicting it as a global
condition “by the year 2113”.[23] These attempts
to meet scientific standards are laudable, but should not blind us to the fact
that such an appropriation of Kant’s moral and political vocabulary when
defending a theory of democratic peace, should not commit him to a further
claim about an inevitable –and somehow empirically testable– elimination of
conflict. It seems to me that these approaches become targets of Schmitt’s
objections to a naive and unpoliticized liberalism.
To be sure, a different question arises as
to whether the benefits of a democratic peace among free nations might require
a humanitarian intervention to expand these ideals around the globe. As we
noted in the previous section, for Schmitt this is precisely the kind of
hypocrisy underlying all forms of liberalism, in their attempt to cover
national and imperialistic interests under the guise of an expansionist war in
the name of Kantian-like values. On the thesis for a humanitarian intervention
as a means to peace, Kant is sometimes read as endorsing an argument in favour
of such an intervention, as a means to achieve morally just political ends.[24] A different issue is
exactly how these interpretations address Kant’s critical attitude against
interventionist war in the international arena.[25] However, my purpose is to
show how these set of claims about democracy and peace, lead also to an appeal
to Kant to further ground the humanitarian character of such interventionist
enterprises.
This renewed celebration of the republican
ideal and its peace-inducing benefits has been sometimes appropriated in the
context of a discussion on just war. For contemporary interpreters like
Fernando Tesón, Kant is an ideal source for offering theoretical justifications
in the international sphere with a humanitarian outlook. For Tesón “the Kantian thesis includes a theory of just war; it
is the war waged in defence of human rights”.[26] Human rights become a
central Kantian feature for the justification of war, to the extent that it is in their name that such a war becomes
justified. Tesón’s “hyper-interventionism”[27] rests therefore in the
duty of democratic governments to “defend and promote human rights and global
democracy”, on the basis of the “universal” character of such rights (think
back to Obama’s Nobel Prize speech here).[28] It is tempting to read
this form of justified interventionism in the name of the abstract ideal of
‘human rights’, as echoing the ‘humanitarian wars’ that Schmitt was so keen in
disclosing. Unfortunately, Tesón’s direct appeal to Kant seems to revitalise
Schmitt’s critique, rather than respond to it.
Let me highlight a couple of things at this point:
First, it is not the aim of this article to adjudicate on Kant’s position as a
representative of the theory of humanitarian intervention, particularly in the
context of his prohibition against interventionists wars in Perpetual Peace. However, I have
appealed to a specific version of this theory, namely the justification of
humanitarian intervention on the basis of human rights because such a
‘humanitarian’ approach to war, and its alleged connection to Kant’s
philosophy, puts pressure on whether Schmitt’s accusation to a humanitarian
liberalism is, after all, so off the mark. The task is even more pressing when
we are able to find in interpretations such as Tesón’s and that of other
democratic peace theories, a direct attribution to Kant of a theory of
humanitarian war based on ethical premises that would minimise the presence of
conflict. Second, we can assume that
the task of defending human rights across the globe comes with the need of
establishing, protecting, and preserving a democratic kind of peace, that will
in turn enable people to exercise such rights. Would this kind of peace allow
for a friend and foe distinction of politics? I doubt it. So, if the enterprise
of a humanitarian intervention as a means to peace and human rights is broadly Kantian in outlook, the resulting system
of politics will be one stripped from the pressure of conflict, henceforth the
link I have been trying to explore between peace, war-like intervention, and
conflict resolution.
I think this “world without politics” [29] is not Kant’s own. Once we assume the normative role conflict plays in Kant’s
theory of political agency, we are in a better position to see how his theory
of peace, and the appropriations Kantians make of it, must be revisited and
further qualified. A step towards this qualification can be made by recalling
an important distinction in Kant between the empirical and the ideal levels operative
in his theory, and the arguments pertaining to the realms of law and morality
respectively. One way of explaining the status of Kant’s pacifist ideals is
done by attributing to him a kind of normative optimism, grounded in a version
of natural law. This seems to be Richard Tuck’s approach who reads Kant as a
representative of liberalism’s natural law tradition. For Tuck “Kant was notably more optimistic
than Rousseau about the propensity of republics to live in peace with one
another”,[30] an optimism which, from the perspective of
political realism, would amount to a kind of “juridical pacifism”.[31] I disagree in reading the
status of Kant’s claims on peace and the pacification of conflict as a vestige
of natural law. On this point I share Macarena Marey’s approach according to
which what this
‘realist’ objection against an alleged Kantian optimism ignores is the
fundamental difference in Kant’s philosophical registers between the empirical
and the normative. More specifically, what is missed is the complex
relationship in Kant between:
The notion of a republic, of the right of
non-intervention, the cosmopolitan character of a federation of states, and
[his] rejection to use empirical theses about the actual workings of the world,
and the existing constitutions within it, with the aim of justifying normative
ideals.[32]
What this qualification helps to resists
is a too common tendency to sit Kant in two opposite ends, none of which fully
capture the distinctiveness of his thought: either to sit him with a “blank
realism (or positivism)”, or with a “rationalist natural law, to which Tuck associates, in a rather paradoxical
way, the whole liberal humanist tradition”. In other words, if Kant cannot be
defended as a representative of a political realism tout court, it seems that the only available alternative is to
attribute to him a “series of robust natural laws”, capable of justifying the
humanitarian interventionism and the cosmopolitan pursuits carried by his
philosophy.[33]
What we see here is that in both of these ‘versions’ of Kant, the Schmittean
objection still holds: if his realism is based on mere empirical optimism,
those who appeal to Kant to justify their own agendas could be objected of
covering ‘true’ political aims in the guise of a naive optimism. On the other
hand, if Kantian ideals are ultimately grounded in robust natural laws of a
universalist scope, we revert back to Schmitt’s critique regarding the lack of
concrete political referents to ground a theory of politics that takes conflict
seriously.
A final issue remains on the tendency to appeal to
Kant to ground the possibility of a world-order guaranteeing the absence of
intra-state conflict. A cosmopolitan world-order seems to be implied by a duty
to peace, thereby testifying to Schmitt’s concern about the universalising
character of eighteenth-century morality. Habermas was particularly alert to
this when discussing Schmitt’s critique to Kant: “The politics of a world
organization,” he writes, “that takes its inspiration from Kant’s idea of perpetual
peace and is directed to the creation of a cosmopolitan order, harkens to the
same logic, according to Schmitt: its pan-interventionism would inevitably lead
to pan-criminalization, and hence the perversion of the goal it is supposed to
serve”.[34] This logic of a pan-interventionism justified via Kant’s
ideal of perpetual peace that Schmitt tries to disclose is at fault according
to Habermas, in that it ignores the crucial distinction operative in Kant
between law and morality. More importantly, the establishment of a true
cosmopolitan order would not have to hide behind abstract values –as a supposed
argument for the ‘legality’ of war’ in the name of its ‘morality’–, but it
would rather be subjected to strict legal procedures and positive law. What Habermas
attributes to Kant and Schmitt ignores, is the independence that should be
drawn between (public) law and (individual) morality, allowing for a
“cosmopolitan transformation of the state of nature among states into a legal
order”.[35]
However, to think that Kant, or Kantian
forms of cosmopolitanism, are committed to endorsing a world order where
conflict would be somehow eradicated, would mean to overlook a fundamental
distinction Kant himself makes. He distinguishes between a ‘world republic’ or Volkerstaat, and the idea of a
‘federation of states’ or Volkerbund.[36] Kant further
distinguishes between these two conditions in terms of what is required by
practical reason ‘in thesi’, and what
is possible only in a provisional manner in practice, namely a federation of
states. So:
[…] (if all is not to be lost) in place of the
positive idea of a world republic
only the negative surrogate of a league that averts war, endures, and
always expands can hold back the stream of hostile inclination that shies away
from right, though with constant danger of its breaking out.[37]
In the light of this clarification between
the ideal of a world republic, and a feasible yet perfectible federation of
states, Schmitt’s accusation against a liberal world republic free from conflict
as inherited from Kant starts to look less challenging. To be sure, the
universalism of a Volkerstaat, as we
saw in the passage from Perpetual Peace will
remain in Kant within the limits of a regulative ideal of reason, and must be
kept separate from the “negative surrogate” of a league of nations, always
prone to conflict and “constant danger”. But how are we to understand the nature of conflict in Kant’s politics
such that we can legitimately say that it has a necessary role to play in his
theory? This is important because, as I have indicated, some contemporary
interpretations of Kant become problematic to the extent that they assume that
the pursuit of Kantian ideals, as appropriated by their specific debates,
involves the progressive elimination of human conflict both at a domestic and
international level. To put it slightly differently: if a humanitarian peace of
the Kantian type is at all possible, so the argument goes, then conflict must
slowly leave the political arena. The problem is that such a thesis as an interpretation of Kant leaves us
with a deeply depoliticised version of his philosophy. In contrast, I defend
the thesis that conflict is indeed central for Kant, in the sense that it is necessarily entailed by the practical
relations that individuals establish between one another as agents with a will
to choice and action. Despite Schmitt and others, conflict does have a role to play, and a fundamental one.
III.The role of conflict in Kant
Whether Kant conceived of a cosmopolitan
world order beyond the state, or held firmly to a precarious but nevertheless
pacific league of free sovereign states, is an ongoing debate.[38] The question that I want
to engage here is more specific: if
there is an argument for giving conflict, albeit of a normative and not
empirical kind, a central place in Kant’s political thought, should this change the way we interpret
his commitment to the ideal of perpetual peace, moral progress, and of a
pacific order among states? My contention is that it does, and it does this in
the following way: once we accept that conflict between free agents of choice
is normative for Kant, i.e. necessary
given our condition as equal beings with a will to choice and action [Willkür], questions about whether
conflict should be pacified, harnessed, or ultimately eradicated, need to be
revisited. They need to be revisited in light of the inherent conflict that
arises from the idea of equality among agents, who in their legitimate exercise
of external freedom, affect the normative landscape of everybody else. This
conflict as I said is not empirical, nor it has to do with the conflicts
arising from scarcity of resources in our shared use of the earth, or from our
passions or our interests. In this sense, it is a conflict that remains as an ever-present fact about our
constitution as agents. I think that this ‘agential conflict’, as I want to
call it, is indeed compatible with Kant’s commitment to a teleology of peace,
and with Kantians who endorse and rehabilitate his pacifist project, to the extent
that such a conflict does not preclude the empirical
pacification of hostile attacks, violent threats, and material wrongs in this
world.
My assumption, therefore, is that pace Schmitt, conflict plays a central
role in Kant, but not as it is commonly understood. In his political writings, Kant himself flags different
descriptions of conflict, some of which tempt us to reduce conflict to a
contingent and empirical kind. In a somewhat Hobbesian spirit, he describes
conflict as a “resistance” between our strong inclinations to live together
within the precincts of law, and the drive to “constantly [threaten] to break
up this society”. This resistance comes with the difficulty of overcoming our
“propensity to indolence”, and our tendency to desire to “gain worth in the
opinion of others”.[39]
The centrality of conflict is further explored through his analysis of the
state of nature. This state is portrayed primarily as a situation where
“everyone follows his own judgment”, driven by “the unsocial characteristic of
wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas”. As “Hobbes maintains”, Kant goes on to
explain, in the face of violence “we have no option save to abandon [the state
of nature] and submit ourselves to the constraint of law, which limits freedom
solely in order that it may be consistent with the freedom of others and with
the common good of all”.[40]
In Part III of Religion, this
“perilous state” is explained not by “what comes (to a person’s) way from his
own raw nature, so far as he exists in isolation, but rather from the human
beings to whom he stands in relation or association”. This leads Kant to
conclude that in a state where law is absent, men “must remain forever armed
for battle”.[41]
I presented these remarks with the
intention of highlighting how conflict is a key ingredient of human experience
for Kant. Noteworthy, however, is the fact that in these descriptions Kant
oscillates between limiting conflict to actual or potential hostilities among individuals due to
their desires and needs, and a much more agential
understanding of it due to the fact that human beings “stand in relation or association”. Despite the Hobbesian enmity that surfaces in some of
these descriptions, Kant overall does not appeal to an instrumental and
empirical explanation of the root of such conflicts –be this something about
the contingency of the condition we find ourselves in, or the structure of our
selfish desires and fears. Rather, he proposes an analysis of the relational nature of a conflict that is
rooted in the non-empirical and a priori fact that we are beings endowed with a
will to choice [Willkür], with the
power to affect everybody else’s equal capacity to freedom. Two further claims
render my argument more explicit: first, that Kant’s relational approach to
agency as involving the coexistence of conflicting claims to freedom, does not
mean that such a conflict has to do with the presence of more or less choices available to the agent. As he puts it “Rightful (hence external) freedom cannot be defined,
as it usually is, by the warrant to do whatever one wants provided one does no
wrong to anyone.”[42]
In this sense, the conflict I am trying to articulate
has nothing to do with my exercise of will involving a limitation to your
available choices, nor a restriction
to the scope of your action so long as I do not wrong you. When I speak of
there being a conflict between my claim to external freedom and your claim to
the same thing, this should be read as a formal requirement of what it means to
be an agent, namely, a requirement that entails the duty to live a shared
juridical existence, where our freedom-claims are rightly respected. [43] Second and relatedly, Kant’s agential conflict is
formal to the extent that it
identifies an unavoidable tension that arises from conceiving freedom as an
equal right to each to choose and to act. It is in this equality of choice and
action as a formal constraint on our
exercise of will [Willkür], that
Kant’s account of conflict arises.
Key to Kant’s argument is his insistence that the way
the exercise of our external freedom unavoidably affects the equal right of
everybody else to do the same, has nothing to do with human beings’ tendencies
to be violent, selfish, or ambitious in the
use of their freedom. To be sure, he does not deny that “envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations
associated with these assail [our] nature”, but
this is not what makes a juridical condition necessary:
However well-disposed and law-abiding human beings might be, it still lies
a priori in the rational idea of such a
condition (one that is not rightful) that before a public lawful condition is established individual human beings,
peoples and states can never be secure against
violence from one another… So, unless it wants to renounce any concepts of
right, the first thing it has to resolve upon
is the principle that it must leave the state of nature, in which each follows its own judgment, unite itself
with all others… that is, it ought above all else
to enter a civil condition.[44]
Note that “violence” here should not be equated with a
Schmittean hostility, not even with an existential kind of violence arising
from a concrete enemy. For Kant this conflict among agents when their freedom
is not strictly under the coercive power of a law that is public, need not be
actual for it to require the establishment of a public authority, since “it is
not necessary to wait for actual hostility”, and that no one “need[s] to wait
until he has learned by bitter experience” that we are “authorised to use
coercion against someone who already, by his nature, threatens him”. We are
then authorised to coerce others to leave this state where our freedom is
“wild” and “arbitrary”, and hence where the inherent conflict of equal agency
is exacerbated.[45] More to the point, Kant describes the state of our
will in the state of nature as a “state of externally lawless freedom”.[46] What this conception of non-freedom gives expression
to is that, unless we abandon this condition and constitute an external public
will, our will as our capacity to choice and action will continue to stand in
conflict with everybody else’s.
From this perspective, the agential
conflict I have tried to articulate requires a kind of ordering, if our equal
capacity to freedom is to be exercised with
right, i.e. legitimately. This for Kant demands abandoning the state of
nature, and entering into a civil condition to put our wills, and hence, our
freedom, under a universal law. It follows that the ordering of this
constitutive, normative conflict I am here defending turns out to be at the
basis of Kant’s particular solution to the problem of political authority in
terms of universal law: “[S]o
act externally that the free use of your choice can coexist with the freedom of
everyone in accordance with a universal law”.[47]
It follows that Kant’s theory of conflict is conceptually tied to his account
of political authority in terms of a Public Will. [48] This form of
rightful coercion is not meant to merely remedy
the inconveniencies of an empirical conflict, but to attempt to render
practical relations between agents rightful, without ever being able to fully
eradicate the tension lying at the heart of a commitment to equality of agency.
Does this mean that this agential conflict I have
tried to articulate, once it is rightfully ordered under the laws emanating
from a public will –embodied in the empirical institutions and effective
exercises of positive laws- is somehow, eradicated? This question is important
in light of my criticisms to the ‘anti-conflict’ readings of Kant explored in
Section II, and it is particularly relevant in the context of Schmitt. If we
read Kant’s political/juridical solution to the conflict of equal agency as a definite solution, that is, as a
solution where public law would make the limits of freedom strict and clear in
a way that no friction would ever arise from our free exercise of choice, then
we seem to fall back into a picture of Kantian politics closer to a
depoliticized liberalism where conflict is, after all, eliminated. I do not
think this is Kant’s approach to politics, and my reason for this is derived
from his commitment to free agency. When I stated that this conflict is constitutive of what it means to be an agent
endowed with a will, what I mean by this is that such agents, even under
the strict authority of an external and coercive law, will always have their
claim to external freedom in tension with that of others.
Two claims follow from my argument at this point:
firstly, that such a constitutive conflict among free agents can be ‘resolved’
in a qualified sense, namely, through
the establishment of a juridical condition, embodied in an omnilateral and
public will [öffentliche
Wille], [49]
endowed with the coercive power to draw the limits of rightful interaction.
Secondly, the establishment of this omnilateral and public authority becomes
then the locus that enables the
exercise of such rightful interaction. In more familiar Kantian terms, a public
will becomes the condition of possibility of a political life in common where
conflict is, indeed, present, but ordered under the limits of universal law.
From this point of view, Schmitt’s critique to all “ethical-humanitarian” [50] theories as unconcerned with conflict starts to
crumble.
Considering that Kant dismisses all arguments that
explain conflict by appeal to empirical aspects of our world or of our nature,
and if we are to defend, as I do, that his political philosophy is attentive to
conflict as a fact of life, this ‘fact’ has to be understood in a very particular
way. I suggested that this conflict should be called normative, and it is normative in in two senses: on the one hand, it is a normative
conflict to the extent that it arises independently of empirical conditions
–scarcity of resources, the particular constitution of our desires, the
contingency of our needs–. It arises, instead, due to the fact that we stand in
unavoidable relations to one another in respect to our equal freedom to choose
and to act. Nothing about our empirical circumstances, or about human nature
explains or triggers this conflict. It is, in contrast, constitutive of our
being agents endowed with a will. On the other hand, this conflict is normative in the sense that it is not
about the relationship of our will to things outsides ourselves, and the
conflict this unilateral claim over objects might arise in the face of other’s
equal claims to it; rather, the normativity of this conflict arises from the
relationship of our will to the will of
another, namely from the relational aspect underlying human agency in
general. What Kant’s political solution to this problem tries to achieve
is not the eradication of conflict to give place to a conflict-free world, but
rather the juridical condition becomes the condition of possibility of being able
to stand in practical relations with others, by drawing rightful limits to our otherwise conflictive exercise of
freedom of choice and action. Such a lawful ordering by means of public
legislation does not aim at making political life a frictionless exchange as
Schmitt’s critique would have it, but rather it aims at the legislation of
lawful interactions. Therefore, a
juridical condition is then tasked –through its institutions and its
officials–, to guarantee “the most precise determination and protection of the
limits of [each person’s] freedom so that it can coexist with the freedom of
others”.[51]
I should note that the reading I am offering here is
necessarily limited to the specific aim of this paper, that is to show that
conflict plays a systematic role in Kant’s political philosophy that makes it
neither vulnerable nor accommodating of Schmitt-like critiques of a
‘conflict-free’ liberalism. As discussed in the previous section, however, some
appropriations of Kant as a paradigmatic defender of a long-lasting peace, and
as a source of robust values such as human rights, have contributed to think of
Kant’s philosophy as an ‘anti-conflict’ philosophy, resembling in some respects
the ‘anti-conflict’ liberalism that Schmitt alerted us against. Therefore, arriving at a better understanding of both the
role and nature of conflict as it operates in Kant, allows us to re-address
some issues in his political philosophy, and the various ways in which it has
been appropriated. I suggest that from this perspective, political life
in common is conflictive since it
involves the exercise of entering into “external and indeed practical
relation[s] of one person to another”, in ways that our actions and deeds bear
a significant “influence on each other”.[52] It is precisely this fact
of agency that I think is crucial for Kant, and for the way he thinks of
conflict as an ever-present reality. To put it differently: it is the fact that
freedom involves influencing and affecting others in ways that are constitutive
and inevitable of what it means to be an agent, that such an influence will
always be relational, and hence, conflictive. I suggest we think of this as a
kind of dynamising conflict that can
hardly be reduced to a picture of Kant’s politics as a blunt and moralising pacifism.
This commitment to agency as a deeply relational and mutually affecting
business precludes such a reading.
However, conflict in Kant has not always been
systematized in this way. My initial perplexity in this essay had, in fact, two
sources. We are now familiar with the worry that, at least from the perspective
of contemporary appropriations of
Kant in the field of political science and international relations, these
appropriations required us to take Schmitt’s critique of Kant seriously. Yet
there is a second source of discomfort, namely contemporary philosophical
interpretations of Kant himself. What these interpretations have in common is
their approach to Kant’s political philosophy in general, and his teleology of
history specifically, as tasked with the role of progressively sublimating,
harnessing, or eventually eradicating conflict from human interaction. Are we
to take these interpretative tendencies as targets of Schmitt’s objections to a
‘conflict-free’ world? To some extent we should, and I suggest it is worth
understanding why.
IV. ‘Anti conflict’ readings of Kant:
pacification and eradication
So far, I warned against reading conflict
in Kant’s political philosophy as an empirical fact having to do with violent
enmity between individuals, or with the contingent constitution of human
nature. I argued in contrast that for Kant conflict is to be understood
normatively, as a tension in the way our agency affects the freedom of others.
If Schmitt’s accusation to Kant is that his theory of peace and his
universalist morality cannot deliver us with a robust view of politics as ‘the’
sphere of human conflict, then that can be partly explained by Schmitt’s
limited identification of conflict with sheer violence. To be sure, for Schmitt
conflict can manifest in many ways, as fear of violent death, or as a deeper,
existential threat posed by an enemy who intends to “negate his opponents way
of life”.[53] However, it is wrongly entailed by Schmitt’s
critique to all theories committed to a universalist and humanitarian morality,
based on formal and legalistic principles in the way Kant does, that they ought
to reject the presence of all forms of
conflict, regardless of whether its manifestation happens at a normative or
at an empirical (and literally) physical level. Schmitt goes wrong, therefore,
in equating a commitment to universalism with a commitment to total pacifism,
since for him universality “would necessarily have to mean total
depoliticalization”.[54]
However, an interpretative issue seems to
persist, namely what I identify as properly
‘anti-conflict’ readings of Kant.
I find these interpretations particularly problematic because they explicitly
read his political philosophy, and in particular his teleology of history, as
aiming towards the pacification and progressive eradication of conflict. This is worrisome for the systematic reasons
I defended in Section III, and for the way these strictly Kantian interpretations might further influence
other appropriations of Kant, as discussed in Section II. Getting Kant straight
on the issue of conflict becomes, once again, a pressing task.
We are able to find traces of this broadly
‘anti-conflict’ reading of Kant in the interpretations of Hans Saner, Patrick
Riley and Allen Wood. Saner
for example maintains that Kant’s thought “proves time and again to be the turn
from diversity to unity”. As a “peacemaker” both in metaphysics and in
politics, Kantian politics can be synthesised in the question “[H]ow is it
possible, despite the antagonistic forces of the passions that always work in
politics, to unify the state-building will” and achieve “long lasting peace?”.[55]
This search for unity and harmony arising from conflict and antagonism, is shared by Patrick Riley, for whom
the process of going from a state of “empirical
politics” to the “sublimely metaphysical” idea of a perfect republic requires
“the sublimation of conflict”. [56]
This quest for a conflict-free condition
is also present in Allen Wood’s reading of Kant. Wood’s interpretation is particularly relevant to the
development of our present discussion: first, there is a point of contact
between his interpretation and my own in our shared interest in the systematic role conflict plays in Kant’s
thought. Second, I believe Wood is correct in placing Kant’s interest in
conflict against a broader concern by highlighting the “historical urgency”
that underpins all of Kant’s ethical concerns.[57] This relation
between conflict and history is, in my view, a beneficial one, as it increases
our sensitivity to the political implications of Kant’s thought. I suspect,
however, that Wood’s appeal to history relies on teleological underpinnings to
a greater extent that the interpretation I have tried to advance here, and it
is possibly the reason why his defense of a progressive eradication of conflict
has to be done in Kant through the lenses of a teleological plan of reason.
Taking moral philosophy as his starting point, Wood
defines Kant’s ethics as a “radical moral philosophy aimed at abolishing
conflict”.[58] This
radical project develops alongside a teleology of history. For Kant, history
develops in epochs, starting with the “epoch of nature” and finishing with the
“epoch of freedom” in which men, and not nature, establish their own
“autonomous ends”. According to reason’s “conscious and collective plan”, the
natural antagonism between human beings “will gradually be overcome, vanquished
by reason’s free concord”.[59]
But, how does politics fit into this picture? For Wood, there is a tension
between politics and moral progress since politics belongs to the “epoch of
nature”, and morality is found only in the “epoch of freedom”. These two
conflicting realms are nevertheless bridged by history. The philosophy of
history acts as a kind of pacifier for the tension Wood thinks exists between
these two realms. So the solution is ultimately achieved by a teleological
approach to morality, of which politics is just a stage. As Wood concludes,
“whereas right is to control social
conflict in the interest of nature’s ultimate purpose, morality is to abolish it in order to actualise the
final human ends”.[60]
Two things are worth clarification: first,
for Wood, a true pacified condition is ultimately our task as moral beings with a collective destiny,
and a different issue is how this ideal abolition of all frictions is
predicated on the social control of
conflict through the effective and coercive power of institutions and
public law. Second, the fact
that Wood understands conflict empirically, and as pertaining human nature, explains why it is malleable
and open to be first controlled by law, and then abolished by teleological
means. This progression will be slow and achieved only in stages, but the
‘anti-conflict’ goal is nevertheless clear. As Wood himself concludes, Kant’s
political philosophy (at least from a teleological point of view) is aimed at
the “historical task of controlling [conflict] externally by achieving peace
with justice, through cosmopolitan republicanism”.[61] A very different picture of Kantian politics emerges
from this set of assumptions if we make the abolition of conflict as an
explicit teleological end.
What these ‘anti-conflict’ interpretations
of Kant reveal is that at least some aspects of Schmitt’s critique are able to
find a space in versions of Kant’s philosophy. I am not however claiming that
Saner, Riley or Wood would commit Kant to the kind of liberal pacifism Schmitt
portrays. My appeal to Wood was done with the interest of showing that there is
an interpretative tendency to dismiss conflict as a
systematic element in Kant’s theory of political and social agency. In
contrast, what we commonly find is a commitment to the eradication of conflict
as a basic aim of Kant’s philosophy, thereby ignoring one of the most original
and distinctive aspects of his approach to politics. These “practical
relations” that Kant was interested in exploring, showed how the fact that we
are beings with a will which ineludibly affect the exercise of another’s
freedom, makes it impossible in my view to hold to a completely pacified,
conflict-free world.
V. Between peace and conflict: concluding
remarks
To conclude: I can make little sense of a
conflict–free world in Kant – at least once we accept the relational nature of
his approach to freedom and agency. An understanding of Kant’s philosophy as
aimed at “abolishing conflict altogether”[62]
fails to recognise (i) what it means to be an agent endowed with a will to
choice and action, and therefore (ii) what it means to be an agent in a world
where others have equal claims to the exercise of such a capacity to freedom.
What would political life be reduced to if the ideal of a world free of all
conflicts were, indeed, attainable? What I have tried to show is that this, at
least, would not be Kant’s world. However, taking on
board this insight into the inherently conflictual nature of free agency does
raise interesting and novel questions worth exploring, for example: ‘how should
we understand the ideal of perpetual peace if conflict between agents is
ever-present?’; ‘is moral progress compatible with the fact that we are beings
with an equal faculty for choice and action?’; ‘if conflict is necessary at the
level of agency, is it so at the level of states?’. I did not offer definite
answers to these questions. Instead I suggested how an account of agential
conflict in Kant requires a deeper and more global analysis of the relationship
between his teleology and his politics, and between his theory of law and his
theory of individual morality. I think that the pacifist projects underlying
some contemporary appropriations of Kant from the camp of political science and
international relations, as well as the more teleologically oriented approaches
to his political philosophy, are both compatible with the positive account of
agential conflict I defended here. What we must not lose sight of is the fact
that such a normative conflict as a structural feature of agency, will be
ever-present. If this is right, then Schmitt’s critique to
Kant looks like a blunt distortion, or at least conceptually weak.
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RL Doctrine
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ZeF Perpetual
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Prol
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RGV Religion
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