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3 • British Enlightenment: the Triumph of Commercial Cosmopolitanism

Introduction: a cosmopolitan Enlightenment?

The eighteenth century has usually been seen as a cosmopolitan age before the advent of nationalism in the wake of the French Revolution. In a recent publication, for instance, we find the claim that ‘the Enlightenment … was cosmopolitan in style and content’, and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau are cited as examples.¹ This standard interpretation has to be qualified. I illustrate this claim with a few examples: Hume is often regarded as a cosmopolitan thinker, an assessment which is primarily based on his famous statement that ‘not only as a man, but as a BRITISH subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of GERMANY, SPAIN, ITALY, and even FRANCE itself’.² The context of the passage is decisive: Hume argues that jealousy of trade is largely unfounded. The ‘enlarged and benevolent sentiments’ of the cosmopolitan coincide with the self-interest of a particular state’s citizen. Presumably not all communities qualify as potential trading partners, although Hume takes for granted that poorer countries can undersell richer ones, as long as they are industrious and ambitious. At any rate, Hume mentions only European countries. In another famous passage, Hume is blatantly racist. He considers ‘negroes, and in general all the other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites’ and praises white civilization as the pinnacle of human evolution.³ Hume is apparently Eurocentric rather than cosmopolitan. If he endorsed cosmopolitanism, then it was its economic rather than its moral version. He was not a narrow-minded Scot (or Briton), but perhaps a narrow-minded European.

The Abbé de Saint-Pierre is another case in point. Often praised as one of the founding fathers of the United Nations, the Abbé in fact focused on European affairs, stating that the aim of his proposed league was to establish ‘everlasting peace amongst all the Christian states’. The designed European Union was supposed to fight the Turks and throw them out of Europe, Asia and Africa. Global peace was not intended.⁴

Voltaire does indeed refer to ‘the citizen of the world’, but he is in fact a moderate patriot who tolerates other nations and despises inter-state envy, rivalry and aggression. ‘The man who would want his homeland never to be larger, or smaller, or richer or poorer would be a citizen of the world.’ This is an extremely thin notion of moral cosmopolitanism. The main thrust of his article ‘La Patrie’ in the Dictionnaire Philosophique is that most people do not have anything they could legitimately call their ‘homeland’. Either they are suppressed by their leaders and priests, or they are greedy merchants who ‘have no country apart from their stock exchange and their ledgers’, or they are, for instance, ‘pleasure-loving’, narrowminded, arrogant and monolingual Parisians.⁵ Voltaire’s main focus is on a genuine form of patriotism, and cosmopolitan attitudes apparently serve to counterbalance national pride.

I hasten to add that some thinkers of the Enlightenment were cosmopolitan, but we should stay clear of sweeping generalizations.⁶ In particular, we should not overlook the category of Europeanism ‘in between’ patriotism and cosmopolitanisms. Another cliché is the assumption of harmless, unpolitical and cosmopolitan theories of patriotism in the eighteenth century, until ‘the fall’ into xenophobic and extreme nationalism triggered by the French Revolution. This assessment is apparently in need of qualification. Some authors, even in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire (which are usually seen as rather backward and provincial, compared with France or England), endorsed a militant, aggressive and brutal form of nationalism long before 1789.⁷

How can we characterize the cosmopolitanisms of the eighteenth century? I think that we can distinguish several common trends or aspects. First of all, there is a widespread openness towards and fascination with other cultures, especially in art and literature. Typical examples are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder, but there are lesser-known attempts such as Sir William Jones’s translations of Sanskrit poems or the contributions in the journal Der Patriot (1724–6, published in Hamburg).⁸ It goes without saying that many intellectuals were not free from prejudice (examples abound), but a considerable number at least aimed at open-mindedness, tolerance, and impartiality. For instance, Montesquieu’s theory of oriental despotism, developed in his extremely influential work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), became widely accepted by the end of the eighteenth century. However, even then European intellectuals repeatedly challenged Montesquieu’s claim (which was based on a misreading of Sir John Chardin). An outstanding example is Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who argued in Législation orientale (1778) that the category of ‘oriental despotism’ was biased and unfounded. John Crawfurd visited Vietnam and neither found tyranny nor terror, but a happy population – ‘as if they had nothing to complain of’. Edmund Burke was among those who challenged Montesquieu (see below). Hume’s racism also did not go unchallenged.⁹

These lively debates took place among intellectuals who saw themselves as members of a transnational ‘republic of letters’ which they deemed as important as, or even more important than, membership of their particular communities. The philosophe could be at home ‘anywhere in the world’, provided that he (sometimes, even, she) could communicate with like-minded intellectuals and exchange ideas in journals such as the Journal encyclopédie. This intellectual cosmopolitanism was not truly global: in fact, the enlightened cosmopolite was at home in western Europe and North America. In principle, the res publica litteraria or Gelehrtenrepublik disregarded social hierarchies and denominational or national differences. It continued a tradition going back to fifteenth-century humanists like Erasmus.¹⁰

Lively debates across borders also led to an impressive diversity of attitudes, opinions and theories, and especially with respect to cosmopolitanisms. German-speaking authors are a case in point. I can only hint at this diversity, mentioning two authors. Friedrich Schiller’s cosmopolitanism is moral at its core. He focuses on the emotional development of the individual who aims at the cosmopolitan transformation of her society. While Kant’s political writings serve as Schiller’s starting point, he later moves towards a theory of aesthetic education, believing that beauty paves the way towards (political) freedom.¹¹ Partly following Adam Smith (see below), Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch (1746–1812) espouses market or economic cosmopolitanism, arguing for porous borders, the right to emigrate, the free movement of labour and perpetual mobility. He combines this with a thin form of moral cosmopolitanism, postulating that there are natural human rights and that all humans should be seen (and tolerated) as equal trading partners.¹²

Finally, Enlightenment cosmopolitans usually tried hard to strike a meaningful balance between patriotism and cosmopolitan obligations. Rousseau opened the debate with his intricate – and often misleading – theory. Rousseau emphatically rejected various forms of cosmopolitanism as deformed, immoral or degenerate, such as cultural or economic cosmopolitanism. He tried to balance defensive republican patriotism with genuine moral cosmopolitanism.¹³ A string of authors took part in this debate on the proper relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, among them Thomas Paine, Christoph Wieland, Kant, Richard Price, Voltaire and Edmund Burke.¹⁴

Types of cosmopolitanism in Locke, Hume, Smith, Paine, Bentham and Burke

I start with an assessment of so-called ‘classical’ or more or less mainstream British authors. John Locke’s vision of international relations (to use a modern term alien to Locke himself) is reminiscent of Hugo Grotius (see the previous chapter): he starts off with the traditional idea that, originally, humankind was one community.¹⁵ Later on, people formed separate, smaller and distinct communities. When citizens united to establish ‘one body politick’, these independent communities were still in a state of nature with each other.¹⁶ ‘So that under this Consideration, the whole community is one Body in the State of Nature, in respect of all other States or Persons out of its Community.’¹⁷

Locke holds that, in general, the state of nature is unbearable and has to be left. Though this condition is characterized by equality and freedom, it is ‘full of fears and continual dangers’ and the enjoyment of property is ‘very unsafe, very insecure’.¹⁸ The key argument against Hobbes and Filmer is that the right of individual self-preservation must not be replaced by reasons of state, or the self-preservation of the state itself. For instance, Locke criticizes absolute monarchy as arbitrary because from an individual perspective, it does not overcome the state of nature. As far as individual self-preservation is concerned, absolute monarchy, tyranny, oppression and the state of nature coincide. It would be foolish, Locke asserts in a famous passage, that citizens agreed ‘to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions’.¹⁹

Now the logical step would have been to overcome the equally ‘unsafe’ and ‘insecure’ international state of nature and form a social contract among states. Locke notes that there is a difference between mere promises and compacts or treaties where states or individuals are still in a state of nature and a social contract or compact where parties agree ‘together mutually to enter into one Community, and make one Body Politick’.²⁰ Locke seems to hold that this community of states is theoretically possible. We do not get the standard argument that international anarchy ‘is not that bad’ (as in Hobbes and others). Locke does assert that being judge in one’s own case – a key feature of the state of nature – is unreasonable. But Locke does not draw the logical conclusion that the international state of nature has to be left. Instead, we get a rather conventional theory of the law of nations: for instance, defensive wars are acceptable and politics should be based on the people’s consent.²¹ As in Hume, foreign policy is a matter of ‘prudence’ and ‘wisdom’ of politicians, and cannot be regulated by ‘antecedent, standing, positive laws’ as in domestic affairs. In short, Locke gives foreign ministers a free hand as long as ‘the advantages of the Commonwealth’ are not lost sight of.²²

Locke’s famous labour theory of property has important consequences on an international level. His labour theory is fully compatible with colonial expansion at the expense of native nomadic populations who, according to Locke, do not really own the land because they do not permanently enclose and farm it (see Chapter 2). Locke’s international relations theory is incomplete and contradictory. His contractual theory and his normative individualism hint at an inherent cosmopolitan dimension but do not spell it out.²³

David Hume’s vision of international society is clear, but also rather conventional. Enlightened political economy teaches us that transborder interaction is usually both mutually advantageous and ‘even sometimes necessary’, because resources and commodities are unevenly distributed over the globe. However, all states can exist without international society, albeit perhaps not luxuriously. Individuals, by contrast, depend on civil society for their very survival.²⁴ With this distinction between domestic and international society in mind, Hume rehearses arguments of the natural law tradition, for example Pufendorf. Compared with his attempt to revolutionize moral philosophy, Hume’s account of the law of nations and international society is highly conventional. The same principles of natural justice, namely ‘the stability of possession, its transference by consent, and the performance of promises’, should be operative both in the domestic and the international sphere.

However, the domestic analogy is soon qualified. The principles of natural justice have lesser ‘force’ based on the just-mentioned utilitarian calculus: the comparatively smaller usefulness or utility of international society translates into reduced moral necessity.²⁵ As the philosopher is in no position to assess with accuracy the precise degree of the moral ‘force’ of the right of nations, it is left to the politicians and their experience and judgement to do so. Again, this is reminiscent of Pufendorf: state sovereignty is emphasized, international lawlessness accepted as inevitable and political decisions are most likely a matter of reasons of state. Like some other representatives of the Enlightenment, Hume goes out of his way to argue for the European system of a balance of power. For him, it is a safeguard against the threat of a universal monarchy, checks the ambition of rulers such as Charles V and Louis XIV, maintains the independence of states and guarantees common security and relative stability.²⁶

Hume endorses what could be labelled qualified, indirect or long-term economic cosmopolitanism. The upshot of his economic analysis is that trading partners naturally profit from commercial interaction, without directly intending this result. In other words,

while every man consults the good of his own community, we are sensible, that the general interest of mankind is better promoted, than by loose indeterminate views to the good of a species, whence no beneficial action could ever result, for want of a duly limited object, on which they could exert themselves.²⁷

It is better to focus on specific objects or projects than on lofty ones, Hume asserts. Because of the law of unintended consequences, the more limited perspective inevitably promotes the broader ‘general interest of mankind’. It does not make sense to characterize Hume as either cosmopolitan or anti-cosmopolitan. To some extent, he is both: there is no doubt that the interests of one’s own state or community come first. However, assuming that interests converge if unintended consequences are operative, Hume can also claim that his version of economic cosmopolitanism is more efficient and thus better than direct, traditional natural law cosmopolitanism. He implies that only if societies or regions become trading partners and thus part of the economic market, do they qualify as members of this – either European or truly global – community.

Of the classical British authors, Adam Smith is the most original thinker. To some extent, Smith can be interpreted as a representative of political realism who follows a Hobbesian approach: he does not assume a natural harmony of interests across borders, his focus is on the state or commonwealth, he views international relations as anarchic, endorses the balance-of-power doctrine, and emphasizes the importance of defence.²⁸ Smith combines a weak form of political realism with a state-centred and patriotic perspective and cosmopolitan ideas. On the one hand, he asserts that the love of humanity is too vague, that patriotism is more feasible and that Britain should be loved ‘for its own sake’. However, as in Hume, the great society is indirectly supported by efforts consciously focusing on the domestic sphere. Worldwide economic gains are an unintended by-product. Free trade would turn states into a sort of ‘provinces’ of one great empire: the idea of a monarchia universalis is transformed into the vision of a truly global free exchange of commodities, with overall beneficial results such as the end of local famines, and a situation where respect for rights is guaranteed by a roughly equal distribution of economic and military power. In addition, people with ‘enlarged and enlightened’ minds would overcome the passions of ‘savage patriotism’.²⁹

Distinguishing between European politics and global international relations, Smith holds that the balance of power in Europe is efficient, with the overall result being ‘peace and tranquillity’ and the protection of the freedom and independence of the sovereign European states. The situation is different on a global scale. Since 1492, Europeans have enjoyed military superiority, which enabled them ‘to commit with impunity every sort of injustice’ wherever they wanted to.³⁰ Smith speaks as an impartial spectator; he is not interested in defending or trivializing European atrocities, or constructing a teleological theory of possible benefits arising from these injustices. However, as in European politics, the global remedy is a system of power balance (the standard remedy of political realism). Smith speculates that perhaps in the future, European power will decline and that of non-European communities will increase, so that in the long run ‘the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another’. This equality of force can be established by worldwide commerce and the transfer of technology.³¹ In short, commerce reduces material inequalities among nations and parts of the globe, and contributes to peace and ‘respect for rights’ in the long run. A natural superiority of Europeans, or a right to civilize backward barbarians, is not implied.

Smith became famous for his elaborated version of the so-called four-stage theory. While his account is developmental and culminates in the commercial society, Smith avoids, and warns against, what he sees as civilizational self-deception: the belief that one’s own society or culture is superior to others. Smith’s moral balance-sheet of commercial society is much more nuanced than Hume’s, emphasizing the paradoxes, ambivalences and negative side-effects of commercial progress.³² In addition, Smith explains societal change in Europe, at least partially, with the help of material or physical factors, thus enabling him ‘to avoid the self-congratulatory note common in discussions attributing such developments to European’s special understanding of the values of freedom or political equality’.³³

While Smith’s assessment of European achievements was mildly sceptical (and never enthusiastic), his treatment of non-European societies was quite tolerant and non-judgmental. The often arrogant and condescending tone of numerous nineteenth-century historians is missing. Practices and institutions of earlier forms of society are usually depicted as reasonable. Smith implicitly denies that Europeans are qualified to export their type of society to other continents; he warns that the ‘man of system’ is bound to neglect contexts, ‘interests’ and ‘prejudices’ when attempting to realize his ideal plan.³⁴ Smith’s culturally sensitive judgements are rooted in his moral theory, which aims at what Kant would later call ‘enlarged thinking’ or erweiterte Denkungsart: we should see ourselves from the perspective of others, should reflect upon the cultural and social contexts of our judgements, should step beyond the narrow confines of our own group, should try to broaden the circle of comparison. Smith arrives at a delicate balance between a thin version of moral universalism (the traditional, but modified natural law element) and a contextual theory of moral judgements (the new element of history). Smith does not upset this balance in favour of fully fledged moral relativism, similar to Pufendorf, Wolff or Kant (see Chapters 2 and 4). The outcome is a ‘posture of humility in the evaluation of unfamiliar practices’ of non-Europeans, even if Smith sometimes does not refrain from criticism.³⁵ These practices are usually understood as possibly reasonable responses to different contexts and circumstances.

Smith’s cosmopolitanism combines patriotism with indirect, long-term economic as well as natural law (or human rights) cosmopolitanism. Smith’s criticism of colonialism corresponds with these three elements: colonies are detrimental for the metropolitan state (they may lead to war, for instance); they contradict economic prudence because they are simply too expensive; they lead to destruction, oppression, abuse and arbitrary rule, as the case of the East India Company illustrates.³⁶ As in Bentham (see below), there is a delicate balance between economic (or utilitarian) and moral arguments.

Born in England, Thomas Paine (1737–1809) pursued several occupations and finally emigrated to the American colonies in 1774, with a letter of introduction and recommendation by Benjamin Franklin in his pocket. His first major work and an immediate best-seller, Common Sense (1776), helped inspire the Declaration of Independence. It has been said that his work leaves us

with all the features of cosmopolitan thinking in international relations: Faith in reason and progress, the evils of authoritarian regimes, the democratic peace, the peaceful effect of trade, nonprovocative defense policies, open diplomacy, obsolescence of conquest, the universal respect for human rights, and the democratic propensity to engage in messianic interventionism.³⁷

This generous use of the label ‘cosmopolitan thinking’ must be rejected: ‘cosmopolitan’ should not be mixed with ‘liberal’ or ‘liberal internationalist’. In the first place, Paine is a liberal thinker who criticizes monarchies, argues for republican and democratic principles of government, and defends the American and French revolutions. He also develops an early version of the democratic peace proposition. However, these are liberal, not cosmopolitan convictions or theories.

As a cosmopolitan, Paine endorses commercial as well as moral or human rights cosmopolitanism. His most succinct statement on commerce is in the second part of The Rights of Man (1792): ‘I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend of its effects. It is a pacific system, operating to unite mankind by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other.’ This belief is backed up by the ancient ‘doctrine of universal economy’ (Jacob Viner), endorsed in the fourth century by Libanius. The elements of this doctrine are the moral cosmopolitan belief in a universal commonwealth, the conviction that the exchange of goods is beneficial in a world where resources are distributed unequally, and finally the religious and teleological faith that God or Nature arranged all this to promote peaceful cooperation and social relationships. This doctrine had been a standard argument of cosmopolitan thinkers before Paine such as Montesquieu and representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment.³⁸