The Anti-Colonial Kant, and the Universalism That Outran Its Author

In 1795, Immanuel Kant, a seventy-one-year-old professor in Königsberg, published a short essay called Toward Perpetual Peace, and in it he did something remarkable for a European writer of his era: he declared that no nation had the right to force itself upon another people, and named the colonial powers of his day as the offenders. Paul Guyer, tracing the political Kant, shows how a single principle about individual freedom expands, step by step, into an argument against empire, and he does not flinch from the fact that Kant himself failed to apply his own universalism consistently.

No One Can Coerce Me to Be Happy in His Way

The principle starts small and personal. Guyer fastens on a sentence from Kant's 1793 essay on theory and practice that he says made him think "be still my heart" when he reread it. Kant's formula for the freedom of a citizen: "no one can coerce me to be happy in his way." A government has no right to impose its idea of happiness on its people. Guyer explains the reasoning through Kant's account of happiness itself. Happiness is not a determinate goal; it is "person relative, and consists in the satisfaction of your desires," and desires differ from person to person and change across a life. So "the idea that we can have any determinate conception of the happiness of all is an illusion." What is not an illusion is freedom, each person's right to pursue happiness their own way, so long as it coexists with the same freedom for everyone else.

This anti-paternalism has a hard consequence, because Kant thinks a government holds only the rights that individuals first transferred to it, and individuals have no right to dictate each other's happiness. But where do governments come from in the first place? Kant's answer, Guyer notes, is not the comfortable myth of a social contract. Kant thinks "all actual governments originate in some form of violence," not a group of strangers gathering under a spreading tree to write a compact, but "somebody asserts themselves and sets himself up as a ruler and subjects others to his rule by force." The social contract, for Kant, is not history but a thought experiment, a test of legitimacy: is this the kind of arrangement people could have agreed to? Guyer likens it to John Rawls's original position.

Even so, Kant holds that government is ultimately a good thing, indeed a moral obligation, because without it human contact descends into "the Hobbesian war of all against all." So the duty is not to overthrow government but to reform it, and Guyer reaches for Martin Luther King's phrase to capture Kant's meliorism: "the arc of history bends slowly, but it ultimately bends in the direction of justice." Government originates in violence yet points toward justice, and our obligation is to keep bending it that way.

Cosmopolitan Right as an Anti-Colonial Weapon

Then the argument goes international, and this is where it becomes an anti-colonial weapon. Toward Perpetual Peace lays out conditions for lasting peace among nations, and Guyer is careful about what Kant does and does not claim. Kant wants republican government, which makes war less likely because those who must fight and pay for it get a say, though Guyer stresses that Kant, in his words, is "not talking about a guarantee," only a shift in probability. He wants a federation of free states, not a world government, which Kant distrusts as "too damn big," bound to collapse into either anarchy or despotism. And he wants cosmopolitan right, which sounds mild, the right of a visitor to be received without hostility, but which Guyer shows is aimed at something sharp.

What Kant is really targeting with cosmopolitan right, Guyer explains, is not lost travelers but empire. "He's thinking about colonialism. He's thinking about Western Europeans trying to force their way into China and Japan for their own purposes. And he's saying no, they have no right to do so." A visitor may ask to be received; the host nation may refuse. China and Japan, Kant holds, "were perfectly within their rights to shut themselves off from foreigners for centuries." The trading companies, Dutch, British, Portuguese, who assumed a right to force their way into other nations regardless of those nations' governments or religions, had no such right. Guyer's summary of Kant's verdict on the competing colonial powers is blunt: "a pox on both your houses." Since none of them had the right to force themselves on other peoples in the first place, none had the right to fight each other over who got to do it. The cold-open line of the whole discussion is the thesis: "None of that gives anyone, gives the Europeans or anybody else, a right to force themselves upon another people."

The Guarantee Kant Should Not Have Promised

Guyer also flags where Kant, characteristically, overreaches. Kant claims nature itself provides a "guarantee" of perpetual peace, that the great artist nature bends human discord toward eventual concord. Guyer says this cannot be right, and the reason is Kant's own deepest commitment. "He cannot mean this is a guarantee, because of his theory of human freedom." No matter how strongly nature tends toward peace, "we can still screw it up. That's the flip side of freedom." A guaranteed peace and a free humanity are incompatible, and Kant, of all people, should not have promised the former.

Where Kant Failed His Own Principle

The deepest tension, though, is not internal to the argument but between the argument and its author, and Guyer's series does not let it pass. The same universalism that generates cosmopolitan right, the principle that every people deserves not to be coerced, sits alongside a Kant who elsewhere limited full citizenship to property-holding men and who held racial views his modern readers rightly find repugnant. The anti-colonial argument of 1795 was written by a man who did not consistently extend his own universalism to all the people it logically covered. Guyer's reading holds both facts at once. The inconsistency is real, and it does not dissolve the argument. If anything, it sharpens it: the principle Kant articulated, that no one has the right to force themselves upon another people, turns out to be more universal, more radical, and more binding than Kant himself managed to be. The argument carries further than its author did.

That is finally why the political Kant is worth reading with a guide like Guyer, who will neither sanitize the man nor discard the philosophy. Kant built, from a single principle about individual freedom, one of the earliest philosophical arguments against colonialism, an argument still doing work today. And he did it while falling short of it himself. The essay outlived its blind spots, because a principle, once stated clearly enough, belongs to everyone it covers, whether or not its author had the courage to mean it that fully.