The political status of women in the West, and in many places beyond it, has changed completely since the late eighteenth century. Men and women now enjoy formal civil equality and have the same legal rights and freedoms. But Wollstonecraft argued that this is not good enough. The full emancipation of women requires a revolution in the broader culture and its general attitude towards women, including established conceptions of gender. She wanted women to be given the same education and options in life as men so that they would have the same opportunity to lead fulfilling lives and develop their faculties to their fullest potential, an argument that John Stuart Mill was still making, without much success, in the late nineteenth-century, as we shall see. But Wollstonecraft’s belief that men and women are essentially the same is still a matter of fierce debate, not least among feminists. In the eighteenth century, she was arguing against traditionalists who believed that there are essential differences between the sexes, which were used to justify their different (and worse) treatment. Today, the argument about essential differences is made by some feminists, who criticize Wollstonecraft for saying that women should ‘become more masculine’. It is a debate involving modern science, at least to some degree, since it is as much about facts as it is about values. Given her own commitment to reason and to science, we can be sure that she would at least want us to keep our minds open to what they can tell us about the sexes.
15
Immanuel Kant: The Purist
Immanuel Kant was born in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad), on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where he lived for all of his 79 years. It is thought that he never ventured far from his native city, which was totally destroyed in the Second World War. Here, the unmarried Kant lived a quiet, monkish life in provincial obscurity following the same undeviating daily routine decade after decade. But when he was 70 his peace was disturbed by a letter sent on behalf of the king, reprimanding Kant for his critical writings on religion. Prussia was then at war with revolutionary France, so a nervous government was cracking down on dissenting opinions. Kant, who was sympathetic to the Revolution and shared its anti-clerical views, was ordered never to publish or speak publicly about religion again. ‘Failing this’, the frail professor was warned, ‘you must expect unpleasant measures for your continued obstinacy.’ Kant obeyed, if only until the king died.
Many have been surprised by Kant’s submission to the state on this occasion, which appears like a disappointing betrayal of his strong commitment to individual freedom and his devotion to the truth. As a citizen and a philosopher, he claimed, he should be free to use his reason to enlighten the public and openly to criticize established powers and laws, to ‘speak truth to power’, as we would say today. But as a professor at a public university, Kant was also a civil servant, and therefore felt constrained to obey the king’s commands, just like a soldier who must obey orders. His advice to those torn between their rights as private individuals and their duties as public office-holders was: ‘Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!’ Practically, this meant that minds should be free to follow reason wherever it leads, but that enacted laws and edicts of the state must finally be obeyed, even when they contradict the truth.
Recall that, 2,200 years earlier, Socrates faced a similar dilemma as both a philosopher devoted to the truth and a law-abiding citizen of Athens. Like Kant, he found himself caught between the competing demands of philosophy and politics. Socrates carried on his public philosophizing and so was eventually sentenced to death by his fellow citizens for not respecting the gods of Athens, just as Kant was threatened with ‘unpleasant measures’ for attacking Prussia’s state religion. Yet when a friend offered to arrange for Socrates to escape from prison before his execution, the philosopher refused. He said that he had a civic duty to respect the laws under which he had long lived peacefully and freely as a citizen, even if those same laws now decreed his death. Socrates was no more of an anarchist than Kant. Argue, but obey!
Although Kant was a man of the Enlightenment, committed to freedom, open government and individual rights, he believed that revolution is never justified under any circumstances. Whatever the laws decreed by the sovereign are, they must be obeyed, since rebellion is destructive of all legal order and, as Hobbes had argued, even a bad state and bad laws are better than no state and no laws. Governments can, and should, be criticized, but they must never be overthrown. For Kant, rebelling against a tyrant is wrong ‘in the highest degree’, in direct contrast to Locke, who had argued that subjects are released from their obligation to obey when their rulers breach the original compact that established political society. Kant called that high treason, which should be punished by death. And only those views ought to be tolerated that do not advocate the overthrow of the constitution. He was perfectly unambiguous on this point: ‘It is the people’s duty to endure even the most intolerable abuse of supreme authority’.
However, for Kant, no sovereign is above the moral law, which forbids a ruler from ordering or compelling citizens to commit immoral acts such as lying and murder. Rulers should be judged by universal principles of right and publicly criticized, but still obeyed. And no sovereign should ever be punished for issuing unjust laws or for committing wrongful political actions, according to Kant, even if they can and should be judged morally. While it is not the role of the state to enforce morality, which is a personal matter, Kant wrote that it must act in a manner consistent with it. ‘True politics’, he said, ‘cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals’.
So what is the moral law to which everyone (including rulers) is subject, and how do we know it? For Kant it is contained in common human reason and is therefore potentially accessible to every rational person. As such, it is universal, at least for humans, since animals are not rational beings and therefore morality does not directly apply to them. Our rational nature gives us a unique status which we are required to respect in each other and in ourselves by treating humans as ends in themselves, never as means to other ends. Kant credited Rousseau with showing him that all human beings have inherent dignity. On this, he said, ‘Rousseau set me right’. This is something we discover not through practical experience but by our own reason, according to Kant, making it immediately knowable and irrefutable. Morality imposes an absolute duty on everyone never to use people (including oneself) to promote other ends, since doing so reduces humans to the status of instruments rather than respecting their special character as rational beings. Governments have a duty to issue laws consistent with this moral imperative, even though, as citizens, we are never justified in rebelling against rulers who violate it.
Kant was a moral absolutist. Since morality is commanded to us by our reason, it is unconditional, meaning it must be obeyed by everyone in all situations and circumstances. It admits of no exceptions ever, any more than logic and mathematics do, since all are ‘facts of reason’. Context is irrelevant. Morality consists of absolutely binding laws that are pure and categorical. That is why Kant insisted that right ‘ought never to be adapted to politics, but politics ought always to be adapted to right’. There is simply no space in the Kantian moral universe, which encompasses politics, for expediency, fudge or compromise on principles, although there is an important place for prudence and flexibility within the boundaries of morality. For example, he believed that lying is morally wrong. This means that it is impermissible under any circumstances, irrespective of its consequences, which have no bearing on morality. All that matters for Kant morally is a good will, which is an internal matter for each of us, and not good consequences, which are an external matter over which we do not have control and for which we therefore have no responsibility. Whereas lying is prescribed by Machiavelli as an indispensable part of the everyday toolkit of princes, for Kant it is absolutely forbidden, even if telling the truth results in mass death and the destruction of oneself and one’s state. Indeed, he occasionally went even further, commending the phrase fia
t iustitia pereat mundus as a ‘sound principle of right’: let justice be done though the world be destroyed. Nothing could be further from Machiavelli, who, you may remember, wrote of princely criminality that ‘if his deed accuses him, its consequences excuse him’. Even so, Kant did allow that it is morally permissible to remain silent, to withhold the truth, although you must never actually lie under any circumstances.
Kant’s strong disapproval of paternalism, where governments compel their citizens to act against their will for their own good, just like well-meaning parents often treat their children, derives from his respect for human dignity, which is the only unconditional good in nature. No matter how enlightened and benevolent, paternalism is still ‘the greatest despotism imaginable’ because it treats rational beings as means to an end (their own wellbeing) rather than as ends in themselves. For the same reason, Kant argued that it is not the business of the state to secure the wellbeing or happiness of its citizens, contrary to the views of Aristotle (and later Martha Nussbaum), who believed that that is the ultimate end of political life. Kant saw happiness as a vague and subjective concept, unlike reason, which is objective and absolute. Political arrangements should therefore set out a stable framework of laws and institutions that allow individuals to lead a moral life and attain happiness in their own particular way, a position that has profoundly influenced late twentieth-century liberal thought, as we shall see. For Kant, a just regime will be governed by a constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom that safeguards the freedom of others. Governments must actively safeguard individual freedom, which sometimes means forcibly removing impediments to it: for example, arresting a citizen who is threatening another and causing him not to act freely. This is what Kant called ‘hindering a hindrance to freedom’, which is a freedom-enhancing use of legal force. It may also justify welfare policies that support those who are unable to help themselves and whose freedom is therefore diminished, provided that it is not forced on recipients paternalistically.
It is perhaps not surprising that such a strongly moralistic outlook made Kant very wary of democracy, which he said is ‘necessarily a despotism’. By ‘democracy’ he meant direct, participatory democracy of the kind practised in ancient Athens rather than the form of representative democracy typical today. Kant was concerned to protect individual rights and freedoms from despotism above and below, a concern he shared with nineteenth-century liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. He favoured a limited constitutional state where political power is regulated by laws consistent with morality and where the civil rights of citizens are protected from the arbitrary exercise of power, including that of the ‘great unthinking mass’ of people. As much as Kant respected Rousseau (whose portrait alone hung in his study), he did not share his belief in democratic rule, which can too easily become tyrannical. The ideal, and safest, form of government for Kant separates legislative from executive power and mixes authority, liberty and representative (not direct) democracy, so that only a minority of independent, propertied men (and no women) can actively participate in the making of laws, although he generously allowed that women might have the status of ‘passive’ citizens. In this, Kant was much closer to the conservative Hume than to the populist Rousseau.
Domestic political arrangements like these, consistent with the moral law, will always be at risk in a world of constantly warring states. So Kant proposed that all nations unite in a world federation of states committed to perpetual peace. Indeed, he claimed that everyone has a moral duty to promote this ideal as the only one compatible with the universal moral law that commands our reason. He was optimistic that, over time, world history had been moving and would continue to move in that pacific direction, however slowly – an unsurprising conclusion for someone who never left the safety and comfort of his academic perch on the Baltic.
Kant’s moral idealism has proved enormously appealing to modern academic philosophers such as John Rawls, writing from his own comfortable academic perch in New England. His influential book A Theory of Justice helped to inspire a Kantian renaissance in the late twentieth century, as we shall see. In fact, the terms of contemporary debate in moral and political philosophy have been fundamentally shaped by Kant’s writings, in the West at least. And beyond the ivory tower those writings echo very loudly today in the language of international law and political discussions about global justice and human rights. Kant’s basic belief in the inherent dignity of human beings is an immensely attractive idea in a world constantly ravaged by war, exploitation and brutality.
But Kant failed to exorcize completely the ghost of Hume, whose troubling scepticism still haunts us. It is hard to share Kant’s faith in reason as an infallible source of absolute moral truths, the ultimate foundations of which even he admitted were enigmatic. And many sceptics see something very parochial in his universalism and something rather sinister in his quest for moral purity. It is hard to see how any political or social system could function within the absolute ethical constraints that Kant insisted our reason commands us to obey. For example, a complete prohibition on lying, ‘that admits of no expediency whatsoever’, would either lead to political disaster or turn all politicians into hypocrites. Machiavelli said that, for ethical reasons, lying is an indispensable part of everyday politics, and Kant said, also for ethical reasons, that it has no place in politics ever. One held that politicians must lie constantly, the other that they must never lie. There is a lot of space between these two extremes for ethics and politics to meet.
16
Thomas Paine: The Firebrand
It is deeply ironic that Thomas Paine, the most influential and widely read advocate of revolution in his lifetime and the scourge of monarchs, came closest to being beheaded when he publicly opposed the execution of a king. Although an enthusiastic supporter of the abolition of the monarchy, Paine opposed sending the dethroned French monarch to the guillotine. Instead he proposed exiling the king to the United States, a fate worse than the guillotine for many Frenchmen, then and now. For this, and other crimes, Paine was arrested by the revolutionary government in France, where he was then living. Later, while in prison, he was among a group of inmates who were slated for execution the following day. Their cell doors were marked with chalk so their gaolers would know who had been condemned when they came in the morning to collect them for the final journey to the guillotine. Paine’s door was open when it was chalked that night. So when they came for the condemned the next day, there was no mark visible on his closed cell door and he was not executed with the rest, by sheer luck. The radical revolutionaries who had ordered his death were soon overthrown by the more moderate revolutionaries supported by Paine and he was released from prison after almost a year behind bars. Paine’s faith in the French Revolution, like his friend Mary Wollstonecraft’s, never seriously wavered despite this near-death experience.
Like Wollstonecraft, Paine had thrown himself into the revolutionary fray in Paris, writing an inflammatory pamphlet, The Rights of Man, that sold even more copies than Common Sense, his earlier, best-selling defence of the American Revolution. And like Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men, it was a direct rebuttal of Edmund Burke’s fierce attack on the Revolution, the vehemence of which had shocked Paine. He personally knew and liked Burke, who called Paine ‘the great American’, at least until the French Revolution. Events in France, however, pushed Paine and Burke in opposite directions, just as they divided the new political world that emerged from the Revolution into ‘left’ and ‘right’ and, in the process, gave powerful voice to two competing traditions of political thought.
Paine’s influence on the political events of his times is difficult to overstate. His books and pamphlets were read by hundreds of thousands in America alone (with a population then of just 2.5 million) and did much to advance the revolutionary cause in Britain’s 13 colonies in North America and in France. Even so, he always lived modestly because he refused on principle to keep the roya
lties his works earned. He was a popularizer of radical ideas, with a genius for expressing them in language both simple and stirring. John Adams, the future US president, wrote with only slight exaggeration that ‘without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain’. Paine was the right man in the right place at the right time with the right message and, crucially, the right way of expressing it when he arrived in Pennsylvania from his native England in 1774.
It is remarkable that, when Paine arrived in the United States shortly before the outbreak of rebellion there, he was 37 years old, with little formal education and completely unknown, much like the penniless Rousseau when he arrived in Paris a generation earlier. Common Sense was published in 1776, shortly after the Revolution had started, and it exploded like a bomb, propelling Paine from obscurity to fame virtually overnight. He had brought his own radical political ideas with him from England, and these struck a deep chord with the angry mood of insurrection he found among many of the inhabitants of the 13 colonies.
Paine told his fellow colonists in blunt and impassioned terms that monarchy was an illegitimate form of governance, inherently prone to corruption and tyranny, and that they should break completely with Britain to found a new republic in which the people are sovereign. He did not flinch from violence to achieve this aim. He depicted the American Revolution as a world-historical event with global significance. The principles on which it was based – freedom, equality and democracy – are universal, which is why he supported them and why, in his view, everyone else should too. ‘It was neither the place nor the people but the Cause itself that irresistibly engaged me in its support’, Paine wrote. He was on the side of the rebels because their cause was ‘the cause of all mankind’. This was the beginning of the idea of American ‘exceptionalism’, the belief that the founding of the United States was the creation of something radically new in human history with a mission to lead the world towards liberty and republicanism, an idea still popular in Paine’s adopted country. He exhorted his readers to reject the past completely and ‘begin the world over again’ in North America by establishing a wholly new form of government and society based on reason, equality and natural rights. ‘The birthday of a new world is at hand’, he prophesied in 1776, predicting that, if the colonists could successfully found a new system of government embodying these principles, then ‘the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world’.
How to Think Politically Page 11
