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Kant or wont: theory and moral responsibility (The BISA Lecture,

December 1995)

PHILIP ALLOTT

Review of International Studies / Volume 23 / Issue 03 / July 1997, pp 339 - 357

DOI: null, Published online: 04 April 2001

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0260210597003392

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PHILIP ALLOTT (1997). Kant or wont: theory and moral responsibility (The BISA Lecture, December 1995). Review of
International Studies, 23, pp 339-357

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Review of International Studies (1997), 23, 339357 Copyright British International Studies Association

Kant or wont: theory and moral responsibility

(The BISA Lecture, December 1995)
PHILIP ALLOTT

Theory and morality

All history is the history of human consciousness.

To say such a thing is not merely to take a certain view of the metaphysics of
history or of the epistemology of historiographyaligning oneself, perhaps, with
R. G. Collingwood.1 To say such a thing is itself a significant event within the
history of human consciousness, an event whose ironical power is centred in the
word is. And that is really all I want to talk about this evening. The word isand
the awful moral responsibility which rests on the shoulders of those of us who are
masters of the world of Is. Let us call ourselves isarchs, the ruling-class of Istopia.
Let us call ourselves the Wizards of Is.
I am referring, of course, in particular to us academics, and, more particularly, to
us academics of the thoughtful kind. It is we who have taken upon ourselves the
responsibility to say what is. It is the nature of that responsibility that I want to
consider. It is a form of intellectual behaviour which rests on two far-reaching, if
subliminal, philosophical assumptions.
(1) In the first place, we are saying that the world is not as it is, but as we conceive it
to be.
(2) Secondly, we are saying that the world as we conceive it to be is a possible world
for human beings, a world we can choose to live in.
We might call those the Two Glorious Assumptions on which the whole majestic
academic enterprise rests.
I will call the first assumption Bishop Berkeleys Revenge. You will remember that
Bishop Berkeley, the idealist, supposed that being is more or less the same thing as
being perceived. Esse est percipi. Perceiving is in the eye of the perceiver. We profes-
sional academics of the last two centuries go one step further. We have been
beKanted, even if we do not realize it. To be is to be conceived. Esse est concipi. That
is the first foundational assumption of us theorizing academics. Conceiving is in the
mind of the conceiver.
The second foundational assumption takes us beyond Kant in the general
direction of Hegel and Marx: our conceived worlds are possible worlds, not merely
1
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), p. 305. In An Autobiography (London,
1939), Collingwood said: My lifes work . . . has been in the main an attempt to bring about a
rapprochement between philosophy and history (p. 77). May greater success attend our efforts to
reconcile philosophy and international studies!

339
340 Philip Allott

worlds of the imagination. We might call this assumption Leibnizs Revenge. Our
theorizing is not merely theorizing about possible natural worlds. It is about possible
worlds of human consciousness. And it is not merely about possible worlds. For the
human species, possible human worlds in consciousness are necessary human worlds
for living. It is we isarchs who tell the citizens of Istopia about the possible and the
necessary. In short, it is we who define human freedom.
Nietzsche said that philosophers are the commanders and the legislators, saying
thus shall it be.2 As usual, he understated the case. We are the commanders and the
legislators because we say, not thus shall it be, but thus it is.
If we are legal theorists, we are saying to those involved in the lawlawyers and
lawyeesthese are the limits and the possibilities of your law-life, because this is
what law is.
If we are psychological theorists, at least if we are of the Freudian persuasion, we
are saying to the good people of Istopia, these are the limits and the possibilities of
your mental life, because this is what sanity is.
If we are political theorists, we are telling the practitioners of politicspower-
holders and power-heldthese are the limits and the possibilities of your com-
munal life, because this is what society is.
And if we are international relations theorists, we are saying to all those involved
in international relationsthat is, roughly speaking, the whole human racethese
are the limits and the possibilities of human species-life, because this is what the life
of humanity is.
And so, we might call the theoretical enterprise Seventh-Day Creationism. While
God rested on the seventh day, we human beings recreated God and Gods world in
our own image and likeness, a kingdom of human means serving human ends. The
Garden of Eden was not good enough for us, or was too good for us. And so we
made a Garden of Ideas, a world of and in human consciousness. And the gardeners
in the Garden of Ideas are those of us who think for a living.
You may feel inclined already to reject the tendency of what I am saying. Maginot
lines of academic self-defence rise up unbidden in our minds.
We academics are humble toilers, surely, not in any metaphysical Garden of Ideas
but in the obscure but workaday Grove of Academe. We dont make or change the
world. We dont have, and dont aspire to, any such power. Its true what Francis
Bacon said about us reasoners, as he called us, when he was being rude about
Aristotle: we are spiders spinning subtle and sticky cobwebs out of our own mental
substance.3 But were also honey-bees, his image for his blessed putative natural
scientists. We also make sweet honey from our small but intense labours, as we buzz
about collecting the rich nectar of human experience. Our highest academic
ambition is not to remake Gods world, but to become the honey in someone elses
academic hivepreferably not merely as a footnote.
Our last line of defence is that no one takes any notice of academics in any case,
so we cannot possibly be accused of harbouring such vainglorious ambitions. The
ideas-people who have had the most substantial world-changing effects have not
been professional academics at all: Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke,
Voltaire, Hume, Vattel, Rousseau, Herder, J. S. Mill, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche,
2
F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1966), p. 136, 211.
3
F. Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings (1620), ed. F. H. Anderson (Indianapolis and
New York, 1960), p. 93. Aphorism XCV.
 Kant and moral responsibility 341

Lenin, Hitler, Mao. Or else they were wholly unconvincing academics, like Freud or
Weber or Keynes or Wittgenstein.
What I want to say this evening is that this self-denying self-image of the profes-
sional academic is an infantile fantasy, a retreat from reality, a sort of collective
neurosis. And, worst of all, it is a sort of sin, a dereliction of moral duty. And I
want also to say, in this august forum, that nowhere is the sin more grave in its
consequences than in the field of international studies.
Man is what he eats.
Hell is other people.
Love is not having to say youre sorry.
All history is the history of class struggle.
The state is the actualization of the ethical idea.
Man is a political animal.
A state is a body politic possessed of a will.
International society is a society of states.
War is the continuation of politics by other means.
The aim of all life is death.
Man is born free.
Law is the command of a superior.
The state is me.
God is love.
An ecstasy of is-sentences.
They all have one thing in common, the word is. All of them say A is B.
What is the function of is in such sentences? Is it empirical? Is it ontological,
about being, metaphysical essence of some kindquidditas or haecceitas, perhaps?
Is it asserting a generic identity between one thing and another? Is it definitional,
about speech habits? Is it analytic, about the logic of propositions? Is it meta-
phorical? Is it hypothetical, whatever that may mean? Is it aspirational or hortatory
or prescriptive? Is it merely a rhetorical device?
You may say, in a relaxed Wittgensteinian sort of way: is can be performing any of
those functions, probably many others too, maybe several of them in the same
sentence. As Wittgenstein might have saidprobably did sayis is much the same
thing as a Swiss Army knife.
Or you may find comfort in the ample bosom of post-structuralist linguistic
scepticism, the French flu, which is a modern strain of an ancient and perennial and
perfectly reasonable scepticism about the possibility of communicated knowledge and
about the nature of intersubjectivity. There is much to be said for the view that such is
sentences succeed precisely because we have no idea, or no fixed idea, or no agreed
idea, or no right idea, of what is is doing. The is effect is irreducible. Is is what is does.
Some such epistemic relativism is probably most peoples everyday working
epistemological hypothesis.
We might even call it William of Occams Revenge. To be is to be misunderstood.
Language bears no other relation to reality than its communicative effects. Esse est
male intelligi. (And William of Occam was not the originator of the problem. In the
third and second centuries BC, not only Carneades the sceptic, but also the Stoics,
who were certainly not sceptics, struggled with the problem, left over from Aristotle,
as to the nature and functioning of our abstract ideas.)
342 Philip Allott

Or you may want to find refuge with Richard Rorty, who seems at last to have
found peace and contentment in the view that everything thought and everything
said is more or less a metaphoras if that could be the end of the problem, rather
than something close to its beginningand who has been toying with the idea that
the French flu may be a sort of B-strain of American liberal pragmatism.
Liberal pragmatism is as comfortable as old carpet-slippers and as comforting as
warm soup on a cold night. It is one of the many labour-saving devices which the
world owes to the United States of America. Thought-processing. MaytagTM
blender-philosophy. It is a first cousin to personal psychotherapy, in which one is
supposed to handle problems, work through emotions, and get comfortable with ideas.
Relax! Things intellectual will sort themselves out in the social marketplace of
ideas. The fittest is will survive. Its fitness to survive will be nothing but the fact that
it does survive. Who are we to legislate or arbitrate, still less to pontificate ex
cathedra?
I want to insist this evening on another point of view. Is sentences are acts of
power. And acts of power are moral acts. And is sentences of the kind listed above,
about ultimate thingsGod, man, the state, history, life, death, law, loveare acts
of absolute power, entailing ultimate moral responsibility.
If all history is the history of human consciousness, then such sentences are the
great battles and the great revolutions, the great events of human history. All history
is the history of is sentences.
We who are, for the time being, transcendental philosophers (in the meta-
philosophical sense of the word: philosophizing about philosophy) must sometimes
undertake Michel Foucaults archaeology of knowledge (larchologie du savoir).4 We
must dig into collective human consciousness, to unearth, layer by layer, and to
unthink the deep structure of the continuous present of theory-making conscious-
ness. And we must accept the risks of self-analysis. Philosophy is a dangerous
business, as Nietzsche said. It is a dangerous enterprise to dig at oneself . . . How
easily a man damages himself that way.5
Foucaults conception of knowledge or knowing (savoir) is quite close to what I
call in my work a theory. A theory is a socially constituted structure-system of ideas
which helps to organize the self-constituting of a society, the social construction of
is-worlds within social consciousness.6 In doing the archaeology of theory over the
last two centuries, we have to unearth and unthink two especially intractable pheno-
mena of human consciousness: the social function of theory, and the social function
of the university, where people are paid by society to think and speak about is.

Theory and society

I want to try to bring into is-conjunction an unlikely A and an unlikely B. The A is

4
M. Foucault, LArchologie du savoir (Paris, 1960); The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. Sheridan
(New York, 1972). Archaeology was a metaphor which Sigmund Freud also applied on several
occasions to the psychoanalytic project.
5
Cited in S. Corngold, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (London, 1986),
p. 186.
6
P. Allott, EunomiaNew Order for a New World (Oxford, 1990), pp. 31 ff.; 2.4549.
 Kant and moral responsibility 343

the benevolent totalitarianism of late twentieth-century society. The B is the

totalitarian university.
Nostalgia for an intellectual ruling class (medieval schoolmen, Renaissance
humanists, the French Academy, the Royal Society, the philosophes) became acute
in the nineteenth century, with the decline of Christianity and the rise of democracy
and capitalism. The cultural crisis was at first analyzed (in the 1830s, by Coleridge
and others) as a problem of the relationship between religion and society.7 But the
true nature of the problem had been detected, with wonderful prophetic insight, by
de Tocqueville, also in the 1830s: the intellectual and moral centre of gravity of the
social mind (and hence the content of societys dominant theories) would thereafter
be determined by aggregate social forces rather than by the minds of the self-
identifying aristoi.
Culture-critics frantically condemned the detranscendentalizing, the philistining,
the materializing, the communalizing of human culture, the crude hegemony of the
actual, the popular, the practical, the economic.
By the 1920s the struggle seemed to be lost. The French culture-critic Julien
Benda, writing in 1928, called it the Betrayal or the Treason (la trahison) of the
intellectuals. Coleridges natural clerisy, whose ideal function was to perfect their
inward cultivation on behalf of society as a whole, to take responsibility for
societys higher thinking, had been swamped by mass phenomena. The new masters
of the social mind were preaching a new anti-transcendental metaphysic: the cult of
the particular, scorn for the universal; adoration for the contingent, and scorn for
the eternal.8
But there was worse. The revolt of the masses (as Jos Ortega y Gasset charac-
terized the phenomenon with superb disdain in 1936) was accompanied by a strange
mutation of the universities. The universities had become necessary instruments of
global totalitarianism.
The notorious totalitarianisms of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao and the rest are
classed as malevolent totalitarianisms because of their practical excesses. But their
structural significance has been no different in kind from that of the benevolent
totalitarianism which is democracycapitalismscitechracy. It is simply that, in
benevolent totalitarianism, we, the people, believe in the benevolence of the system;
or, at least, we suspend our disbelief for everyday practical purposes. We believe, or
try not to disbelieve, that the social system is the best in the best possible human
world, that the ideal possibility of the Good Life is to be equated with the
potentiality of actual social life.

7
In the troubled mental development (intellectual, religious, moral, sexual, political) of W. E.
Gladstone (four times British Prime Minister), we can see a vivid epitome of the revolutionary
reconstituting of the British social mind. In addition to the unsurpassed biography by John Morley
(London, 1903), see the exceptionally lucid account in H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 18091874
(Oxford, 1986). It is interesting that Coleridges elitist argument (rather than Hegels idea of the
universal class or even the impressive precedents of the new Prussian bureaucracy and the reformed
German universities) may have been the spark which inspired Gladstones commissioning of the
NorthcoteTrevelyan report, leading to the creation of a highly selective administrative class in the
British civil service, and his approach to the parliamentary reform of Oxford University (1854): see
Matthew, Gladstone, pp. 40, 834.
8
J. Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des clercs), tr. R. Aldington (New York,
1969), pp. 99, 100. Benda (p. 183) compares modern Europe to the brigand in a story by Tolstoy.
After he had made his confession to a hermit, the hermit said: Others were at least ashamed of
being brigands, but what is to be done with this man, who is proud of it?
344 Philip Allott

In their effect on the mind of society, the three aspects of benevolent totali-
tarianismdemocracy, capitalism, and scitechracy (science and engineering)are
better seen as aspects of a single phenomenon: social totalization through social
division.
Yet again we have to acknowledge that Plato and Aristotle got there first.
Benevolent totalitarianism was foreseen philosophically twenty-three centuries
before it began to be realized actually. But its social actualization has been a great
achievement of modern Europe over the last two centuries; and we should be proud
of it, in a rather desperate sort of way. In what we idealize as democracy
capitalismscitechracy, we have found a way to divide all human effort systematically
in order to aggregate all human effort socially.
In this way, every society member is a participant, everyone is a contributor,
everyone is involved in the collective product. But there is a dramatic side effect.
Everyone participates but no one is responsible. All the social good and all the social
evilwar, social injustice, human indignities of all kinds, the exploitation of women,
the oppression of minorities, mass unemployment, the criminal law, popular culture,
the arms trade, drugsare the work of the system, and a social system is not a
moral agent.
Everyone is morally responsible for their own participationif the quaint old
word morally is a word which you are still inclined to usebut no one is morally
responsible for the social outcome, because social outcomes are surplus social effects
of totalizing systems.
States are not moral agents, so states are not morally responsible. States do evil,
but they do not sin. States act shamefully, but they do not know shame.
Hobbess Mortal God is the totalizing Gestalt of a society unified by the enslave-
ment of its members under the legislative will. Rousseaus General Will is the
superhuman, inscrutable and indefeasible will of the Mortal God. Hobbes and
Rousseau are convenient names for ideas that we live and love, every day of our
lives.
Hegel thought that the great merit of Rousseaus idea was that it postulates a
thinking mechanism as the mechanism of society, rather than the will of God or
authority. Unfortunately, to answer Hegel with another of his own formulations, the
collective will of democracycapitalismscitechracy has thought as its form only.9
Our godless world is full of gods, to echo Thales the pre-Socratic. Plato sourly
dismissed Homers gods and goddesses as monstrous projections of human charac-
teristics. But as Max Weber noted, the old gods, with their magic taken away (dis-
enchanted), rise up from their graves, in the form of impersonal forces.10 The
Hundred Names of Godto borrow the title of a book by Fray Lus de Len, a hero
of Spains Golden Centuryare now the names of the totalitarian social powers
which rule our little lives.
And then Inflation Rate, descending in cloud, spoke and said: I will spread
Unemployment among the people like a plague. But Non-Trade-Balance, hearing this
from afar, rose up and gathered to her side Short-term Interest Rates, and smiled upon

9
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1821), tr. T. M. Knox (London, 1952), p. 156, 258.
10
M. Weber, Science as a Vocation, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr. and ed. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1958), p. 149.
 Kant and moral responsibility 345

the decision-makers and the opinion-formers. And they all Felt Good. And the people
greeted with grateful eye the rosy-fingered dawning of Renewed Business Confidence.
The mythology of capitalism. The social poetry of social absolutism.
Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, suggested the delightful idea that the
philosophers, those friends of the gods, invented free will because they thought the
gods would get bored with a deterministic world.11
We might go on to say that the gods must have been ecstatic when philosophers
invented the idea of the free will of aggregating systems, such as the so-called state.
Now they could watch an unending spectacle of human evil and human stupidity on
a very grand scale indeed. In the grand theatre of the world, the so-called state-
actors would be literally monstrous projections of what it is to be a man or a
woman. La commedia dello stato.
And the new-old gods certainly smiled on the collectivist ideas of Adam Smith
and struck down the ideas of Thomas Malthus in the most dramatic way possible,
through overwhelming day-to-day practice. Since 1789 the population of Europe has
multiplied severalfold, and has overflowed into every corner of the world, above all
into North America, carrying with it European consciousness, European self-con-
stituting, the European is. More people, more wealth, more law, more socialization
of every kindthe relentless degradation of the human spirit as the human body
flourishes in health and comfort.
In the promised land of democracycapitalismscitechracy, liberty and equality
and fraternity are systematized, rather ironically, in the form of slavery and
inequality and dehumanization. And the hegemony of capitalism over everything
else in society is secured by law, enforcing the unequal distribution of effort, power
and desire through, respectively, the division of labour, property and money.
The public realmsocietys totalizing enginehas taken power over everything
human: human work, the human will, human desire, the human mind. And slavery
in the name of emancipation is colonizing the whole human world. John Locke said,
in the beginning all the World was America.12 Hegel called America the Land of
the Future, but said that so far it was nothing but a recycling of Europe, boring old
Europe, as he quotes Napoleon as saying.13 Cette vieille Europe mennuie. One
hundred and seventy years later, America is still Europe recycled, and Europe is
boring in new forms of its old ways.
I am speaking of the enslaving of the human mind: the misery of the intellectual
and the disgrace of the academic. And I am speaking of the ambiguous excitement
of us internationalists, as the shadow of the invisible hand of social absolutism
spreads across the face of the whole earth.
In the brief history of human time, we are living in very interesting times. We are
living what may be the last days of human self-creating, as humanity has one last
opportunity to say what all-humanity is, and is for, just before all-humanity finally
succumbs to its paranoia, trapped in a self-threatening self-made reality, over which
it has finally lost control.

11
F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, tr. F. Golffing (New York, 1956), p. 201.
12
J. Locke, Two Treatises on Government: Second Treatise, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), p. 343, II.
49.
13
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (lectures given in 18301), tr. J. Sibree (New York, 1956),
p. 86.
346 Philip Allott

Soon all the world will be Europe. Can Europe re-imagine the human world that
Europe has made? Can the human mind remake the human mind? Such is the great
task and question for the twenty-first century.
We are all familiar with Nietzsches prediction that the twentieth century would be
the era of great politics, politics on a worldwide scale. The great task and question for
the philosophers was approaching humanity inexorably as a terrible destiny. The
question is: how shall the whole earth be governed? To what end shall man as a
whole be raised and trained?14
What on earth happened to that great task and question? What on earth
happened to the philosophers, in all the human frenzy of the twentieth century, all
the wonders, all the wickedness?
In trying to answer these questions, we may find an answer, by the way, to the
question: what is the proper study of international studies?

University and society

What happened was that the academy found a comfortable role for itself. It would
keep out of the business of what shall it be?. Its function would not be to prophesy,
to enlighten, to lead, to elevate the human spirit. Least of all would the academic
role be to sit in judgment. Our job would be to say what is, nothing more than that.
We would uncover the humanly natural and necessary, and hence the humanly
possible, simply by talking to each other about things human. We would be the
surveyors and the map-makers of Istopia. We reasoners would cultivate our garden,
the Garden of Ideas, the hortus conclusus of the academic mind.
And the academic hortus conclusus would be a strange parallel moral universe, an
intellectual unmoral order, whose high values would be, not moral values, but
academic values, intercommunicative values of neutrality, objectivity, detachment,
rigour, propriety, loyalty. The coldest of all cold monsters, Nietzsche called the state.
Wrong again. That title belongs by right to the university.
It is interesting that the professionalization of the universities coincided exactly
with the emergence of the modern rationalized state: the coming of bureaucratic
absolutism in Germany, democratic absolutism elsewhere. Germany was already the
land of universities (more than 200 of them) when Savigny helped to reform the
University of Heidelberg in the 1790s, when he and Humboldt founded the
University of Berlin in 1808.
In this country, after the founding of a university in London in the 1820s, a
serious modern university, even the older universities began a long overdue
aggiornamento in the following decades. At Cambridge the Moral Sciences Tripos
was founded in the 1850swhat an awful HumeanMillian name that was! If only it
had meant that somebody was studying the Immoral Sciences.
The professionalization of the universities meant that the process Weber was
referring to, die Entzauberungthe unmagicking, the unmystifyingcould be orga-
nized systematically, as part of the social division of labour. The new or reformed
universities rapidly became totalizing systems in their own right, a public realm of

14
F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1967), 957.
 Kant and moral responsibility 347

the mind, dividing the work of the mind among little nation-states called faculties,
each protected by the territorial sea of its own exclusionary academic discourse.
And very soon the universities would find that they were part of a transnational
totalitarian system. Francis Bacons idea of an invisible college of international
natural philosophy reproduced itself in the humanities, in professory learning as he
called it.15 Samuel Johnsons community of mind 16 became the global campus. And
there would be academic hegemonies: of Germany up to 1914, of the United States
after 1945Prussianization followed by Americanization. After 1945 we moved
effortlessly from Prussianism to Taylorism: academic mass production, time-and-
motion of the mind. The university rebellions of the 1960s, like the Frankfurt
Parliament of 1848, simply faded away.
One revealing feature of the Prussian hegemony was what B. F. Skinner, and
probably others, called foot-and-note disease. We might call it the German flu.
Interestingly, German flu crossed the Atlantic and infected American academicism
rather seriously: a peculiar by-product of the Third Reich. (To even up the nosology
(or gnosology) of the nations it must be said that the English flu is the idea that
intellectualism is a character defect, like gambling.)
The universities were not merely integrated into the totalitarian division of labour.
They became shrines of totalitarian consciousness.
A strange and important step in the story was that even philosophers profes-
sionalized themselves and, miracle of miracles, they came to the conclusion, after
much ingenious thought, that philosophy is, after all, impossible. We must salute it
as a notable achievement of twenty-six centuries of European philosophy: the im-
possibility of philosophy philosophically demonstrated.
The American Willard Quine put the matter cheerfully and chillingly, in his John
Dewey Lectures: I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same
world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same em-
pirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for prior philosophy.17
(This is a particularly interesting instance of is, with overtones of the Cretan Liar.
There is no place for a prior philosophy. Schelling (philosophical bridge between
Kant and Hegel) would have saiddid saywithout philosophy he cannot know
that that there is no philosophy.)18

15
It seems that it was Robert Boyle who invented the term invisible college, rather than Francis
Bacon, with whose name it is usually associated. Bacons imagining of Salomons House (of natural
philosophers) in New Atlantis, his various recommendations for the internationalization of learning
through cooperation among European universities, and the general spirit of his new philosophy of
science were factors in the creation of scientific societies which preceded the founding of the Royal
Society, including a Philosophical College, which was also called the Invisible College. See M.
Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (London, 1967), chs. 2 and 3. See also F. Bacon,
Advancement of Learning, in Bacons Works, vol. 3, eds. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath
(London, 1858), pp. 3234, 327; and the preface to the second book of Bacons De augmentis
scientiarum, in Works, vol. 4, pp. 2856.
16
J. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1904/53), p. 1143 (entry for 8 May 1781).
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
17
W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969),
p. 26.
18
F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797/1802), tr. E. E. Harris and P. Heath
(Cambridge, 1988), p. 45.
348 Philip Allott

In Lewis Carrolls The Hunting of the Snark, the ships crew of snark-hunters were
grateful to the Bellman for bringing a large map representing the sea, without the
least vestige of land.
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.19
In a totalitarian world, it is convenient to be told by the Wizards of Is that the ship
of state is sailing on a sea without the least vestige of land. These heroes of
philosophical labourthe twentieth-century unphilosophersshould be given
statues in public places. They have served demcapscitech society well. The
remaining plinth in Trafalgar Square should be occupied, not by Margaret Thatcher,
as many hope, but by Wittgenstein or Russell or Ayer or Popper.
The universities reassured society with the thought that social actuality would not,
could not, be negated by the best that the human mind could conceive. The rest of
society could, if it wished, forget about our very existence. No one outside the
universities need actually pay any attention to anything we say about anything in
particular: about Aristotles lost works, or love lyrics in medieval Provence, or
puberty rites in Magnesia, or deterrence theory or regime theory or whatever. And
until recently, nobody did take much interest in usuntil the academic accountants
moved in. Research Assessment. Soviets of writers and teachers have now been given
the task of mass-producing left-shoes, and the left-shoes are stored in warehouses
called university libraries. At last the universities have found a social function. The
Gulag of Academe.
And there would be no threat to society from our graduates either. The university
is a finishing school. The graduates leave us finished: terminally confused, finally
cleansed of the hope of learning any great secret about anything. Virginia Woolf
described our graduates rather well: pale, preoccupied and silent. She was speaking
in 1906, or thereabouts. But the archetype is still archetypal.
She went on to say that it was as if, during their three years at Cambridge, some
awful communication had been made to them, and they went burdened with a secret
too dreadful to impart.20
Of course, we know what the secret too dreadful to impart is: it is that there is no
secret to impart. There is no hope of human redemption to be found in the life of
the mind. That is what our students learn from us. It is a terrible thing that we are
doing to bright young people.
The neutering of the intellectual in modern society is strongly reminiscent of the
monastic emasculation of the thinking classes in the Middle Ages. Medieval
monasticism left the world safe for men of action, the cynical manipulators of social
systems. And so does the modern university. Whatever the situation in the rest of the
animal world, in the world of the mind neutering is not the same thing as
emasculation. Even neutered, we academics go on conceiving prolifically, not to say
promiscuously, not to say incestuously.
These fateful developments in the life of the human mindthe poverty of
philosophy, the industrialization of the university, the university as monastery, the
brainwashing of the studentsare bound together by a post-mystical religion, the
religion of naturalism.
19
L. Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Fit the Second, lines 78.
20
L. Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writers Life (Oxford, 1984), p. 123.
 Kant and moral responsibility 349

The human being, a being-for-itself, product of human consciousness in human

consciousness, has become, for the academic, a being-in-itself, an object of study.
Subjectivity became an object. The universities created a parallel human world, in
which we are not morally engaged through value and purpose; in which everything
human is present, other than the moral responsibility of the observer for the
situation of the observed.
Derrida calls it heterological thought, humanity studying itself as an object.21
Humanity became for itself a thing, a thing which speaks about itself (to borrow a
phrase from Lacan).22
And there was certainly a lot of speaking. The poverty of philosophy proved to be
remarkably rich in the philosophy of human impoverishment. The unphilosophers
went rushing in again, where angels had feared to tread: utilitarianism, positivism,
pragmatism, behaviourism, phenomenology, logical positivism, analytical philo-
sophy, structuralism, post-structuralism.
Derrida calls all these -isms empiricism, a thousand times denounced, he says, but
still going strong.23 I use the word naturalism, which is also the word used by Husserl
to make much the same point.24 Marcuse called it academic sado-masochism, self-
humiliation, self-denunciation.25 Elsewhere I have called it the philosophy of mis-
anthropy, misanthropology.26 The academy has surrendered itself to a masochistic
and misanthropic ecstasy of human self-denying.
It was not, as is so often supposed, simply that human studies adopted the
methods of the natural sciences; nor even that they adopted what Quine, in the
sentence quoted earlier, called the empirical spirit of natural science (as if the
natural sciences were a single intellectual phenomenon); nor even what Georges
Canguilhem called the scientific ideology, which, as he said, is something supposed
by philosophers of the non-sciences, rather than by natural scientists themselves.27
The religion of human naturalism, the religion of the universities, is expressed rather
in those most sinister words in the Quine sentence: knowledge, mind, and meaning
are part of the same world that they have to do with.
Terrifying words. They deny the possibility of human self-transcending. They
condemn humanity to become the by-product, the surplus social effect, of its
totalizing systems. Human consciousness, human language, becomes an object of
study like any other. Epistemic relativism becomes what Quine called ontological

21
J. Derrida, LEcriture et la diffrence (Paris, 1967), p. 224. Derrida has recently called for a
profound transformation of international law, to get beyond the concepts of state and nation: J.
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, tr. P. Kamuf (New York and London, 1994), pp. 58, 84ff. The possible transcendental
significance of Derridas thought, the possibility that he may himself be among the thousand
prophets of human self-transcending (see text at n.23), is a tantalizing possibility for those whose
wish it would fulfil. But cf. n.28 below.
22
M. Borch-Jacobsen, Lacanle matre absolu (Paris, 1990), p. 139.
23
Derrida, LEcriture.
24
P. Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, tr. E. G. Ballard and L. E. Embree
(Evanston, IL, 1967), p. 59. See also, on the development of the human sciences since Kant, M.
Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1966/70), pp. 309,
341, 387.
25
H. Marcuse, One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London,
1964), p. 173.
26
P. Allott, Law, Justice and the Return to Idealism (the University of Philanthropology), Global
Security Lecture, Cambridge, 1992.
27
G. Gutting, Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge, 1989), p. 44.
350 Philip Allott

relativity. All we can know about the nature of things is what we can say to each
other usefully about them, which is not very much.
Or one might reluctantly quote one of Rortys charming sayings: the very idea of
a ground for propositional attribution is a mistake. A concept is just the
regular use of a mark or noise which human beings use to get what they want;28
which sounds rather reminiscent of the notorious description of abstract concepts
which Ogden and Richards offered years ago: symbolic accessories enabling us to
economize our speech material.29
Academic naturalism is dogmatic anti-transcendentalism, as dogmatic as any old
religion.
So how did it come about that the dogmatic naturalism of the marginalized and
isolated universities became the mind-incarnate of totalizing systems, the self-
consciousness of malevolent and benevolent totalitarianism not only at the national
level, but now also at the global level? How could the mass production of graduates
and booksbooks mostly unread by anyone outside the academyhave any
profound social significance?
To answer this, at last, we have to return to the archaeology of is sentences, my
King Charless head this evening.

The poverty of naturalism

I can put the essence of the argument in four pithy points, no longer through a glass
very darkly, but now face to face.

(1) Is sentences are concealed is not sentences. They deny all that they do not affirm.
They choose the content of self-made human reality. To utter an is sentence is to
make a moral choice about possible human reality.
(2) When such self-made human reality becomes the theory of a society, becomes
part of societys ideal self-constituting, then is sentences take on great social
power.
(3) The naturalism of the universities acts as a mirror, reflecting back into society
societys necessary ideas of itself; validating, reinforcing, rationalizing,
moralizing those ideas. And totalizing social systems then become self-sustaining
and self-regulating, self-explaining and self-justifying. The charisma of
benevolent totalitarianism is the charisma of the theoretically natural, the
charisma of the absence of transcendental negation.
(4) People who think for a living become servants of totalizing social systems. But
they bear moral responsibility for the moral choices which societies make in
their ideal self-constituting, to the extent that they, the thinkers, present and re-
present to society its ideas of itself. And hence it follows that nowhere is the
28
R. Rorty, Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?, in Essays on Heidegger and Others
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1257. For Rorty, all talk about transcendental philosophywhether of
Plato, Kant, Hegel or anyone elseis nonsense, crazy, delusion, a gimmick. Apparently, for Rorty,
Derridas thought would continue to have value only if he could still be counted among the nay-
sayers or, at least, among the not-say-either-wayers.
29
C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language
upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London, 1923), p. 96.
 Kant and moral responsibility 351

moral responsibility of the thinker greater than in international studies, where

the totality of all human self-constituting is presented and re-presented to
humanity itself.

So, how do we set about redeeming ourselves from our iniquity? We will need
some help from one Immanuel Kant, the master of the masters of is.
The dialectical tradition in philosophy goes back, beyond Plato, to Heraclitus and
Pythagoras. It has become newly fashionable in the post-Hegelian world, in a fruit-
ful constellation of ideas which includes negation in Hegel, bracketing in Husserl,
nothingness in Sartre, silence in Foucault, difference (or diffrance!) in Derrida and
others.
Hegel acknowledged his debt to Spinoza, in particular to a saying of Spinozas:
omnis determinatio est negatio.30 All affirmation is negation. Or, in the terms I have
been using this evening: all is sentences are also is-not sentences. We masters of the
is, creating a factitious world of human ideas, are also tyrants of the shadow-world
of is-not, a world full of all that we have consigned to non-existence, to nothingness,
to silence.
Michel Foucault, in his study of the way in which the dichotomy madnesssanity
became established as social knowledge, shows how this development reduced to
silence all other possible conceptualizations.31 It is a silence which haunts all our
treatment and mistreatment of people deemed by society to be mad. The con-
ceptualization became a source of specific evil. The possible of human consciousness
became the necessary of human action, at great human cost.
There is no better example of the process of dialectical negation-in-affirmation
than the concept of the state, that alpha and omega of traditional international
studies. A possible idea within consciousness came to be a natural phenomenon for
consciousness and, ultimately, a necessary part of our conception of human social
organization.
Our consciousness of the state was, once upon a time, full of dialectical richness. I
have in mind the word in its most general sense, as the concept of the legally
organized social totality. The ideal state in Plato, the necessary state in Aristotle and
Aquinas, the hypothetical state in Hobbes and Locke, the possible state in Rousseau
(offering a possibility of human redemption through society), the rational state in
Hegel (the means of actualizing human perfectibility).
The ideal, the necessary, the hypothetical, the possible, the rational.
All these things were contained, layer upon layer, in our collective consciousness
of society and sociality. But think now of our poor impoverished notion of the so-
called state, as a constituent of the so-called international system, the naturalized
state mirrored and validated in the collective mind of the academy.
The externalized statethe state of the international systemis simply the
externalization of the public realm of societies which happen to have developed a
30
S. Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven, CT, and London,
1974), pp. 73, 110 (referring to Spinozas Epistolae, no. 50).
31
M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. R. Howard
(London, 1961). I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology
of that silence (p. xiii). Irving Babbitt tells the story of the bombing of the asylum at Charenton
during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Each of the patients was able to relate the shelling to his
private reality: I. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) (New York, 1955), p. 229. A more
difficult problem would be to relate it to the sanity of the public world.
352 Philip Allott

specific kind of public realm, a public realm capable of interacting with other such
public realms. But the process has not been morally neutral or innocent. The
externalization of the public realm is the institutionalization of selfishness. The
public realm within a given society socializes the self-interest of human beings by
universalizing the possibilities of their good life. The public realm externalized as the
state institutionalizes the self-interest of a society. The external state is the negation
of the universality of society through the affirmation of each societys individuality.
The external anti-sociality of the so-called state is a necessary part of its internal
sociality.
This world-determining phenomenon is a dramatic story within the history of
human consciousness. It was not achieved without the manipulation of human
consciousness by the controllers of that consciousness. The socialized intellectuals of
the totalitarian universities are among the hero-workers of this historical process.
How did the idea of state come to be the fact of state?
The modus operandi is a particular form of an ancient and familiar feature in the
history of human consciousness. It is an aspect of a great constellation of ideas
which has haunted European philosophy from its earliest days: the conceiving of
ideas themselves as having characteristics reminiscent of the things that ideas con-
ceive. In conceiving them we transform them into something else, and then we
reinsert the transformed concept back into the world.
From the criticism by Aristotle of Platos over-realization of his Ideas or Forms,
through the medieval battles between nominalists and realists, and Francis Bacons
Idols of the Theatre, to Marxs identification of false consciousness, to the linguistic
and analytical philosophy of the twentieth century, isarchs have practised and con-
demned hypostasization and reification and personification with equal and opposite
vigour.
But it is not merely a matter of hypostasization and reification and personi-
fication. The phenomenon is more substantial than that.
The conceiving of the state, over the last two centuries, has been an instance of a
more subtle process, identified by A. N. Whitehead, in the philosophy of mathe-
matics: the principle of abstract extension.32
The idea ingeniously identifies an important feature of hypothetical thinking
which consists in dealing with totalities as totalities, without regard to their inter-
nality. Scientists in the different scientific disciplines treat the phenomena at their
own specific level: at the level of the neurological systems, at the molecular level, and
so on. In human studies, abstract extension met naturalism, and formed the most
fruitful of theoretical marriageswhole shoals of empty totalities, empty but very
vigorous: state, nation, market, wealth, class, war, sex, the unconscious . . . (to name
only the most notorious). The progeny acquired extraordinary social power. They
became part of human reality, that is to say, part of the structure of self-con-
templating human consciousness.
In the idea of the state, it felt as if something had been demystifiedpower,
perhaps, another empty totalitylike so-called bodies in the physical world which
have so-called mass and are interrelated by so-called gravity. In the naturalized human
world, demythologization is a remythologization. We may call it postmystification.

32
C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London, 1923), pp. 38ff. On abstraction in mathematics, see A. N.
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge, 1927), ch. 2.
 Kant and moral responsibility 353

Postmystification is remystification through demystification.

We might call it Nachzauberung in German. Nachzauberung ist Wiederzauberung
durch Entzauberung.
This is the efficient mechanism by which theory demoralizes the human world.
Moral responsibility of the observer for the observed disappears into the vacuum of
a naturalist abstraction. A naturalized abstraction becomes part of the furniture of
the world made by human consciousness. It is human and a-human at the same
time. We made it but, in making it, we made something which is no longer us.
Postmystification is demoralization. Moral agency may possibly attach to the work
of the maker; it cannot possibly attach to the work of that which is made.
Naturalism is the intellectual institutionalization of moral irresponsibility, of evil
which is not evil.
Human consciousness has made a human world which is empty of morality, a
world of is without ought.
In the case of the concept of the state, one can relive the moment of conception
as it happenedthe conceiving of the state as internal totality, with a view to its
externalization as a self among other identical selves. We may call to mind a few
familiar sentences from Vattels The Law of Nations (1758) and Hegels Philosophy of
Right (1821).
[A nation or state] has its own affairs and interests; it deliberates and takes resolutions in
common, and it thus becomes a moral person having an understanding and a will peculiar to
itself, and susceptible at once of obligations and rights.33
The state [is] . . . the hieroglyph of reason which reveals itself in actuality.34 The state is the
actuality of the ethical idea.35
Vattels book was very influential in the minds of the new ruling classes of the
nations which transformed their public realms at or after the time of the French
Revolution. Hegel spoke the self-imagining of the new universal class of bureaucrats
and managers who would become the new-old regime of Europe, the masters of
totalitarianism, benevolent and otherwise.
The new rulers of these new unmoral pseudo-persons could see their power
mirrored and validated in the mirror of high theory; high theory which managed to
ape the rhetorical theology of revolution in wonder-words like free, equal,
independence, will, consent, law, but wonder-words now applied to the conceiving of
the so-called state.
The new external public realm formed from the new internal public realms would
be a conspiracy of the executive branches of government, a public realm of post-
revolutionary social power to be exercised in pre-revolutionary conditions. The king
is dead, and looks like living happily every after.
A splendid new game had been invented, or rather a new version of a very old
game, like William Webb Ellis picking up the football and inventing Rugby football.
The destiny of all humanity became the great game of diplomacy: an aristocratic
game, a tough and sophisticated game, with rules which were not the rules of law or
morality.
33
E. de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law applied to the Conduct and to the
Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (1758), tr. C. G. Fenwick (Washington, DC, 1916), p. 3.
34
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 288.
35
Ibid., p. 155.
354 Philip Allott

The academic theory-master of thus it is joined in the gameinternational law

and international studies, naturalizing the new theoretical necessity. Thus shall it be,
because thus it is.
It took a good deal of effort, but in the end we, the people, found a way of dealing
with the Jacobins. It remains for us to deal with the global Jacobins, and their
academic acolytes, who have taken power over the social mind of all-humanity. The
revolutionary liberation of the social mind of all-humanity is our millennial
challenge.

Theory and the ideal

If now, finally, I invoke the name and the spirit of Kant, it is not the Kant of the
essays on perpetual peace or universal history.
I know that Kants political writings are fashionable at the moment, but, for me, it
would be better if they had not been written. And I say the same of Dantes De
Monarchia. If Dante and Kant had been living at this hour, I do not believe that
they would have written such things. They would have seen that the problem now is
that Dantes mon-archia is being realized: a post-papal monarchy, which he would
have deplored, in the form of the whimsical decrees of the UN Security Council or
NATO or the Group of Seven or the Council of the European Union or the boards
of global corporations, legislating for the world. They would have seen that the
Emperor, whom Dante preferred as a candidate for global monarchy, is being
realized in the form of a global public realm, a Leviathan of Leviathans, a Global
Mortal God.
It is the triple global public realm of benevolent totalitarianism. There is the
global bureaucratic absolutism of the intergovernmental organizations and of
multilateral diplomacy. There is the global economic absolutism of the transnational
economy, with the public realms of industrial and commercial and financial
corporations exercising joint and several hegemonic economic power, helped (and
sometimes hindered) by the visible hands of the interacting national public realms.
And there is the global scitech absolutism of science and engineering, determining
the way of living of humanity, but determining also human potentiality, the possible
Good Life of all humanity.
And in Europe, there is the best new-old game of all. Having tried the exhilarating
and virile game of killing each other by the tens of millions, our games masters have
found a delightful new game to play called European integration, a cynical per-
version of a wonderful idea. The wonderful idea is the redeeming of the European
peoples from their historical iniquities in the name of their historic achievements;
the re-creation of European-wide society, in the richest sense of the wordideal,
necessary, hypothetical, possible, rational. The cynical perversion is the system which
is forming itself in Europe at the moment: a counter-revolutionary conspiracy of the
public realms under the slogan, Forward to the nineteenth century.
If Kant had been living now he would have seen that the federalizing of the public
realms, even of republicanized nations, has only transferred to the global level the
perennial revolutionary challenge, the age-old tragic human challenge. How can
humanity take power over human power in the name of the ideal, in the name of the
best of human potentiality, the best of human self-conceiving?
 Kant and moral responsibility 355

The Kant whose spirit we must summon from the turbulent depths of the last two
centuries is the Kant of the three Critiques, but a Kant who has, in the meantime,
thought carefully about the megalo-idealism of Hegel and Marx, in particular, and
about the overwhelmingly intense social experience of the human race over the last
two centuries.
And so I will now give a social idealist reading of Kant.
Why not? He has been hijacked for many other less desirable purposes; even by
the positivists, as if he had offered a sort of metaphysical groundwork for their
wretched naturalism.
I want to suggest the interesting conclusion that the proper study of International
Studies is humanity.
Leo Tolstoy, eccentric but passionate culture-critic, said that people talk a lot
about Kants first Critique, on the nature of knowledge, but are dismissive of the
equally important second Critique, on the nature of moral responsibility.36 Tolstoy
was agonizing about the redeeming of Holy Russia. Our task is somewhat greater:
the redeeming of all-humanity. But Tolstoy was right. And I go further and say that
we need also, and we need urgently, the Kant of the third Critique, the least con-
sidered of the three, the Critique which concerns itself with our judgment of beauty
and purpose.
With pure reason, we think our possible worlds. With practical reason, we will a
possible world. With judgment, we make a better world.
The mind of pure reason is the mind in wonderland: our creativity is controlled
only by our knowing that our mind is one among many. We are all conceptualizing
Mad Hatters together. The mind of practical reason is the mind through the looking-
glass, in a world of alternative worlds, where our willing in moral freedom is
constrained only by knowing that our freedom is the same freedom as everyone
elses. We are all legislating Humpty Dumpties together. The mind of judgment is the
mind in search of the snarkin search of happiness, perfection, immortality, the
ideala destination we will never reach, but without which there can be no human
journey.
Our self-knowing, self-making, self-perfecting humanity, our ideal humanity,
consists in these things, and in their inseparable co-presence in our individual minds
and in the mind of all-humanity.
Since the end of the Roman Empire in the West, we have had four enlightenments.
The Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century. The twelfth-century renaissance,
symbolically centred on the University of Paris. The fifteenth-century renaissance,
symbolically centred on Florence. The eighteenth-century enlightenment, symbolic-
ally centred on France, even if the eighteenth century was really the triumph of
British ideas (as Voltaire, Nietzsche and others, including more recently Ren
Pomeau,37 have said).
So it seems that there is a regular enlightenment cycle, like the sunspot cycle or the
trade cycle. And that means that we are due for another enlightenment soon. The
making of the enlightenment of the twenty-first century is in our hands. It should
have been in the hands of the universities, of people who think for a living. It should
36
Leo Tolstoy, What then Must we Do? (1886), tr. A. Maude (Bideford, 1991), p. 155.
37
Ren Pomeau, LEurope des lumires (Paris, 1966/91), p. 118. We may take the use by all three
writers of the word English in this context as being intended to mean British, given the
substantial contribution of, in particular, Scottish thinkers.
356 Philip Allott

have been in the hands of those who practise International Studies, since it will be a
New Humanism, an enlightenment of, and in the name of, all-humanity.
Whoever undertakes it, it calls for a special sort of moral courage, a special sense
of our moral responsibility as intellectuals, as masters of the World of Is.
I could also invoke the Kant of one of his very last writings, The Struggle of the
Faculties (Streit der Fakultten), in which he deals with a theme very close to what I
have been considering here: the place of philosophy in the university.38
Or else I might have invoked his essay on What is Enlightenment? and Kants
Horatian slogan for the eighteenth-century enlightenment: Dare to know! Sapere
aude! Dare to be a philosopher! We would tell a reborn Kant that we do still have the
courage to think; and that, during his absence, we have learned four interesting
lessons from all our frenzied social experience:

(1) The only historical inevitability is ceaseless human change.

(2) Human systems are capable of evil, great evil: all kinds of social systemthe so-
called state, the corporation, the family, the academy, and now the society of all-
humanity.
(3) Whatever our anguished social experience and whatever the sophistries of the
unphilosophers, human beings remain capable of love, of longing for the good,
the true, and the beautiful, of longing for justice.
(4) Those of us who think for a living have a moral responsibility to say not only
what-is, but also what might be; to speak about the possibility of human
progress, of human self-perfecting.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud said that primitive man transposed the structural
relations of his own mind into the external world.39 To become less primitive, we
must rescue the human mind from its subjection to the external world which the
human mind has created; retrieve, recover, redeem the human mind from all the
totalitarianisms by which it has enslaved itself. Our task as international philo-
sophers includes what Plato called psychagogia40 (mind-guidance): helping to perfect
the thinking of the social mind, of what David Strauss called the collective individual
of society,41 and what I have elsewhere called the mind politic of the nation.42
But our philosophical task in the fifth enlightenment, the cultural revolution of
the twenty-first century, is to do this now at the level of human society, to liberate
the social mind of the society of all human societies. We have to enable the human
mind to take power over humanitys self-perfecting, in the name of humanitys best
ideals, to the limit of human potentiality.
The social function of philosophy is not to analyze speech material, but to say
what human life might be. Its function is to uncover the potentiality of the human-
made world, as one world in the universe of all-that-is.

38
For a summary, see E. Cassirer, Kants Life and Thought, tr. J. Haden (New Haven, CT, and
London, 1981), pp. 4028.
39
S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, tr. J. Strachey (London, 1950), p. 91.
40
S. Lovibond, Platos Theory of Mind, in Companions to Ancient Thought 2: Psychology, ed. S.
Everson (Cambridge, 1991), p. 52. The reference is to Plato, Phaedrus, 261.a.8.
41
D. Strauss, Leben Jesu (18356), vol. 1, p. 74; quoted in J. E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward
Dialectical Humanism 180541 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 261.
42
P. Allott, The Nation as Mind Politic, in Journal of International Law and Politics, 24 (1992),
pp. 136198.
 Kant and moral responsibility 357

I will end with the words of a prophetic figure of the third enlightenmentPico
della Mirandola, in his great humanist manifesto, the oration on the Dignity of
Man:
God made man . . . to know the laws of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its
greatness. I created you, says the Creator to Adam, . . . neither heavenly nor earthly, neither
mortal nor immortal, that you might be free to shape and overcome yourself . . . You alone
have growth and development according to your own free will. You bear within you the seeds
of a universal life.43

43
Quoted in J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), tr. S. G. C. Middlemore
(New York and Toronto, 1960), p. 257; Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, ed. H. Gnther
(Frankfurt am Main, 1989), p. 352. The splendid original passage (in Latin, with Italian translation)
may be found in G. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, ed. E. Garin (Firenze, 1942),
pp. 1067.