Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism: Marriage, Race, and Kant's Philosophy of the Family

Title

Identifier

d_2009_2013:67733f52e23d:11449

identifier

11840

Creator

Pascoe, Jordan,

Contributor

Sibyl Schwarzenbach

Date

2012

Language

English

Publisher

City University of New York.

Subject

Abstract

As concerns with global interconnectedness have moved cosmopolitanism to the center of political philosophy, interest in Kant's cosmopolitan arguments has surged. Kant's vision of cosmopolitanism and his claims to universalism have been attacked by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, postmodernists, and African philosophers, and have been defended -- just as adamantly -- by contemporary moral and political philosophers who argue that his mature cosmopolitanism involves both a rejection of his racist views and a critique of European colonialism. This project counters those claims through an examination marriage and the family as central elements of the institutional order that shapes Kant's political vision.;Marriage is, at first glance, an odd pathway into an interrogation of Kant's universalism. I argue that, to understand Kant's universalism, we must examine the institutions that organize his political thought and condition his account of personhood, independence, and equality. By focusing on Kant's philosophy of the family, which I understand as a particular construction of marriage, labor, and the household that organizes political spaces and subjectivities, I am able to show how the domestic realm plays a central role in Kant's political arguments, by operating as an enclosed juridical space within which rights and responsibilities are radically transformed. All intimacies and interdependencies are contained within the domestic realm, which in turn allows the Kantian political subject to emerge as independent and fully rational in the public sphere. Because Kant's political subject is conditioned by the domestic sphere in this way, his account of political rights and freedoms is dependent upon a particular juridical order and on the invisible labor of wives and domestic servants to maintain the illusion of external freedom in the public sphere.;This analysis of the family offers a new vantage point from which to understand the role of race in Kant's political philosophy: if Kant's political subject is conditioned by a particular construction of marriage and the family, then the exclusions that undermine his universalism depend not simply on his own racist and sexist views, but on a structural argument internal to his account of the rightful political state. In other words, personhood in Kant's political philosophy is institutionally structured. This move towards an institutionally organized account of personhood suggests that the theory of race that undergirds Kant's mature cosmopolitanism has shifted away from the forms of racism that organized colonial rule in the New World and instead presages the "colonial racism" developed in colonial Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.;Building on this analysis of the philosophy of the family and the role of race in Kant's arguments, this project asks how, concretely, Kant thought a united cosmopolitan world might be achieved. By tracing Kant's own account of the necessary features of a cosmopolitan world, this project argues that the juridical cosmopolitanism Kant envisions might take a form strikingly similar to the forms of colonial rule developed in Africa in the late 19th century. It imagines Kant's cosmopolitan arguments in Africa by examining the colonial transformations wrought by Indirect Rule in colonial Nigeria, and by focusing on the transformations of the household, the family, and of the position of women produced by the introduction of "rightful" European rule. By exploring this transformation from the perspective of the African women who were most disenfranchised by the new institutional order it entailed, this project argues that, owing to the cooperation of colonial racism and a patriarchal philosophy of the family, Kant's vision of a rightful juridical order would in fact produce a radical reduction of the rights of women. In making this argument, it shows how contemporary Western and feminist projects have replicated Kant's cosmopolitan assumptions by introducing schemes of rights that continue to depend on a hidden and often sexist philosophy of the family.;Thus, this project shows, first, that Kant's political subject is conditioned by a particular construction of family and the domestic sphere, and that the exclusions that undermine his universalism depend not simply on his own racist and sexist views, but on a structural argument internal to his account of Right. Second, by introducing a distinction between colonial forms of racism, and by highlighting the differences between early and late colonial practices, it demonstrates that Kant's mature cosmopolitanism is not a rejection of colonialism but a move towards the emerging logics of late colonialism. It argues that contemporary theorists who draw on Kantian claims about the importance of well-functioning institutions to cosmopolitanism must engage with the raced and gendered assumptions built into Kant's account of institutions, and consider alternative institutional constellations. By offering African feminist challenges to Kant's philosophy of the family, this project suggests one method for a more radically inclusive de-colonial cosmopolitan philosophy. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).

Type

dissertation

Source

2009_2013.csv

degree

Ph.D.

Program

Philosophy

Item