Political Theory

H01(b) - Economy and Race in the History of Political Thought

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 08:30am to 10:00am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Erik Cardona-Gomez (SOAS, University of London)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Chris Barker (The American University in Cairo)

Enlightenment Political Economy, Marx, and the Question of China: Simon Kow (University of King's College)
Abstract: This paper situates the Marxist ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in relation to aspects of Enlightenment political economy on China—a perspective not robustly examined in the scholarship on Marx or Enlightenment political thought. Amidst the general denigration of China in later Enlightenment political thought, François Quesnay (1694-1774) was exceptional in his idealisation of China’s political economy. In his Despotisme de la Chine (1767), China exemplified ‘physiocratic’ principles concerning agriculture, internal commerce, and—contra Montesquieu—perfect despotic government ensuring unimpeded flows of wealth throughout society. Adam Smith (1723-1790) was highly critical of the Physiocrats’ dismissal of manufacturing and overseas commerce as ‘unproductive’, and unsurprisingly was less positive than Quesnay in his scattered remarks on China in The Wealth of Nations (1776)—but he characterized China as confirming what is true about the physiocratic system. Although Smith assessed the inferiority of China’s political economy to that of commercial societies such as Britain’s, he saw China as capable of economic reform and improvement. Karl Marx (1818-1883) noted Smith’s advances on physiocratic thought, but noted the failure across Enlightenment political economy to consider historical change. Marx analyzed Chinese society (and that of India) through the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, but this very conception was in tension or even contradiction with his historical materialism. In other words, Marx’s historicist critique of Enlightenment political economy when applied to China generated further problems for his system, suggesting the deficiencies of philosophy of history when attempting to account for the non-European world.

The Rural Roots of Herder’s (Ethno-)Pluralism: Timothy Berk (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: Johann Gottfried Herder’s pluralist political philosophy, championed by both Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor, has a contentious legacy, providing theoretical resources for both the anti-colonial left and the identitarian right. This paper will trace both strands to Herder’s exploration of the mutual influence of a people’s creative power (Kraft) and their rootedness in a particular landscape. For Herder, the material, spiritual, and political link between a nation and the land justifies both a nation’s right to their cultural particularity, as well as their right to their indigenous land. I argue that despite the anti-colonial implications of this doctrine, the Herderian tradition remains more politically ambiguous: it also contains a rejection of liberal-multiculturalism, insofar as Herder fears that the absence of a unifying, indigenous culture organically rooted in the land, will require a turn to the cold centralizing machinery of the state to hold society together. Herder thus points towards both the opportunities as well as the fundamental problems of grounding political pluralism in autochthony.

Hegel and Haiti Reconsidered: Andrew Young (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History surveys what Hegel knew of the Haitian Revolution to argue that he fails to live up to the radical potential of his own philosophy and thus fails to deliver on the promise of a truly universal history. Concluding by considering what a truly universal history could mean, Buck-Morss briefly engages with the writings of the Haitian statesman and political philosopher Baron de Vastey to suggest that Haiti itself failed to live up to its own radical potential as well. In the reception of Buck-Morss’s work, this aside has received very little attention, so, in this paper, I will propose a speculative genealogy of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right with Vastey as one of its influences. Vastey wrote mainly from 1814 until his death in 1820, and his work was well-known in European presses; indeed, a newspaper that Hegel read regularly reviewed one of Vastey’s books in 1819. Moreover, Carl Ritter, Hegel’s colleague at Berlin whom Hegel cited on matters of geography, knew Vastey personally, having traveled throughout Haiti in 1820. To consider Vastey's potential influence on Hegel, I will argue that Hegel’s famous concept of the rabble – those who demand rights without duties – is deeply rooted in critiques of slavery and colonization like Vastey’s. Vastey shows how slavery corrupts a polity, degrading the civic-mindedness of its citizens, and his arguments can helpfully illuminate Hegel’s enigmatic suggestion that the United States never rises to becomes an ethical state and remains a mere civil society.

Rethinking Rudolf Kjellén: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, and the History of Racisms: Karl Dahlquist (University West)
Abstract: In the early 1900s, the influential Swedish political thinker Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) coined the terms and pioneered the fields of biopolitics and geopolitics. Today, Kjellén is largely overlooked, and his ideas are often misinterpreted when discussed. This misinterpretation is overdetermined by controversy: Kjellén’s ideas on biopolitics and geopolitics were adopted and modified by the Nazi regime. This paper aims to examine Kjellén’s conception of biopolitics and its relation to geopolitics, as well as their connections to National Socialism and the broader history of racisms. The consensus among scholars is that, although there are similarities between Kjellén's biopolitical and geopolitical theories and the ideological tradition of Nazism, his theories are not founded on a racial-biological basis. Instead, Kjellén's use of the term ’race’ is rooted in the idea that it is nationally and culturally conditioned, which sets it apart from racism and National Socialism (Bert Edström, 2014; Tunander, 2001). I re-evaluated this assertion in light of the past thirty years of research on the history of racisms. The theoretical lenses offered by the scholarship on new racisms will allow us to see that: (i) racism need not be articulated in the language of biology to be designated as racist, (ii) the dismissal of Kjellén’s political theory as categorically ‘not racist’ only works insofar as an outmoded and exclusively biological definition of racism is maintained, and (iii) that Kjellén himself slipped between both cultural and biological articulations when he spoke of race, with the mode of articulation altering in line with different contexts.