Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht; Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose; Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

In this short essay, consisting of nine long paragraphs, Kant raises the question of whether or not it is possible to identify general principles in human history.

Paragraph One begins: ‘Alle Naturanlagen eines Geschöpfes sind bestimmt, sich einmal vollständig und zweckmäßig auszuwickeln’; ‘All natural capacities of a creature are intended to develop themselves completely and purposefully’.

Paragraph Four begins: ‘Das Mittel, dessen sich die Natur bedient, die Entwickelung aller ihrer Anlagen zu Stande zu bringen, ist der Antagonism derselben in der Gesellschaft’; ‘The means which nature uses in order to develop all of its capacities is the social antagonism of those capacities’. In other words, competition between people helps to stimulate their development.

Kant develops this idea further in Paragraph Five, using the metaphor of trees: trees which grow close to each other in a wood are forced to grow tall by their mutual competition for sunlight, whereas isolated trees grow in a crooked and crippled manner.

Paragraph Six raises the problem of government: people need laws, political leaders and government in order to prevent them misusing their freedom, but how can political leaders be prevented from misusing their own power? This, for Kant, is the essential political problem:

Diese Aufgabe ist daher die schwerste unter allen; ja ihre vollkommene Auflösung ist unmöglich; aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Nur die Annäherung zu dieser Idee ist uns von der Natur auferlegt.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/kant/absicht/absicht.html

This is the most difficult task of all; indeed it is impossible to resolve it perfectly, since humans are made from such crooked timber that nothing entirely straight can ever be crafted from it. But nature has imposed this task upon us: to get closer to this idea.

Lewis White Beck translates this as follows: ‘for from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built’ (see link below; NB the second sentence is missing from Beck’s translation).

Paragraph Seven suggests that it might be possible to see wars as the prelude to a higher form of governance: ‘einen weltbürgerlichen Zustand der öffentlichen Staatssicherheit’; ‘a cosmopolitan condition of public state security’.

Paragraph Eight develops this idea, claiming that the capacities of the human species can be developed most fully in this cosmopolitan condition. Paragraph Eight also suggests that the Enlightenment could lead people disobey own their political leaders:

Aufklärung, als ein großes Gut, welches das menschliche Geschlecht sogar von der selbstsüchtigen Vergrößerungsabsicht seiner Beherrscher ziehen muß, wenn sie nur ihren eigenen Vortheil verstehen

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/kant/absicht/absicht.html

Enlightenment is a great good, which must even lead the human race to abandon the selfish, self-aggrandizing intentions of its rulers, if those rulers only pursue their own advantage

Paragraph Nine concludes that when future generations consider past history, their primary concern will be to see the extent to which people and governments have contributed towards the cosmopolitan development of humanity as a whole, or not (as the case may be):

unsere späten Nachkommen […] werden die [Geschichte] der ältesten Zeit […] nur aus dem Gesichtspunkte dessen, was sie interessiert, nämlich desjenigen, was Völker und Regierungen in weltbürgerlicher Absicht geleistet oder geschadet haben, schätzen.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/kant/absicht/absicht.html

Our later descendants […] will appreciate the history of the oldest times […] only from the point of view which interests them, namely, what people and governments have done to promote or to damage this cosmopolitan intention.

When Schiller read this essay in 1787, it inspired him to study Kant’s philosophy, and it also influenced Schiller’s own inaugural lecture given in Jena in 1789, entitled ‘Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?’; ‘What is and to what end does one study universal history?’ (1789).

English Translation

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm

Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, trans. by Lewis White Beck

Further Reading

Elisabeth Ellis, Kant’s Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005)

T. J. Reed, ‘So Who Was Naive? Schiller as Enlightenment Historian and His Successors’, in Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, ed. by Jeffrey High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 271-83