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Guest editorial
Towards a new human universal:
rethinking anthropology for our times
We should take Kant as our inspiration and reclaim anthropology as a
practical guide for living, argues Keith Hart
Magellan’s crew completed the
first circumnavigation of the
planet some 30 years after
Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At
much the same time, Bartolomé de las
Casas opposed the racial inequality of
Spain’s American empire in the name of
human unity. We are living through
another ‘Magellan moment’. In the
second half of the 20th century,
humanity formed a world society – a
single interactive social network – for
the first time. This was symbolised by
several moments, such as when the
space race in the 1960s allowed us to
see the earth from the outside or when
the internet went public in the 90s,
announcing the convergence of
telephones, television and computers in
a digital revolution of communications.
Our world too is massively unequal
and the voices for human unity
are often drowned. Emergent
world society is the new human
universal – not an idea, but the fact of
our shared occupation of the planet
crying out for new principles of
association. In this editorial, I will
explore the possible contribution of
anthropology to such a project. If the
academic discipline as presently
constituted would find it hard to
address this task, perhaps we need to
look elsewhere for a suitable
intellectual strategy.
Keith Hart is honorary research
professor in the School of
Development Studies, University
of Kwazulu-Natal, and professor
emeritus at Goldsmiths,
University of London. Email:
johnkeithhart@gmail.com. See
www.thememorybank.co.uk.
Kant’s Anthropology
Immanuel Kant published Anthropology
from a pragmatic point of
view in 1798. The book was based on
lectures he had given at the university
since 1772-3. Kant’s aim was to
attract the general public to anthropology
– and it was Kant more than
anyone who gave ‘anthropology’ as
an independent discipline its name.
Remarkably, histories of anthropology
have rarely mentioned this work,
perhaps because the discipline has
evolved so far away from Kant’s
original premises. But it would
pay us to take his Anthropology
seriously, if only for its resonance
with our own times.
Shortly before, Kant wrote Perpetual
peace: a philosophical sketch. The last
quarter of the 18th century saw its
own share of ‘globalisation’ – the
American and French revolutions, the
rise of British industry and the
international movement to abolish
slavery. Kant knew that coalitions of
states were gearing up for war, yet he
responded to this sense of the world
coming closer together by proposing
how humanity might form society as
world citizens beyond the boundaries
of states. He held that ‘cosmopolitan
right’, the basic right of all world
citizens, should rest on conditions of
universal hospitality, that is, on the
right of a stranger not to be treated
with hostility when he arrives on
someone else’s territory. In other
words, we should be free to go
wherever we like in the world, since it
belongs to all of us equally. He goes
on to say:
The peoples of the earth have entered
in varying degree into a universal
community, and it has developed to
the point where a violation of rights
in one part of the world is felt
everywhere. The idea of a
cosmopolitan right is not fantastic
and overstrained; it is a necessary
complement to the unwritten code of
political and international right,
transforming it into a universal right
of humanity.
This confident sense of an emergent
world order, written over 200 years
ago, can now be seen as the high
point of the liberal revolution, before
it was overwhelmed by its twin
offspring, industrial capitalism and
the nation-state.
Earlier Kant wrote an essay, ‘Idea for a
universal history with a cosmopolitan
purpose’ which included the following
propositions:
1. In man (as the only rational creature
on earth) those natural faculties which
aim at the use of reason shall be fully
developed in the species, not in the
individual.
2. The means that nature employs to
accomplish the development of all
faculties is the antagonism of men in
society, since this antagonism becomes,
in the end, the cause of a lawful order
of this society.
3. The latest problem for mankind, the
solution of which nature forces us to
seek, is the achievement of a civil
society which is capable of
administering law universally.
4. This problem is both the most
difficult and the last to be solved by
mankind.
5. A philosophical attempt to write a
universal world history according to a
plan of nature which aims at perfect
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