Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T19:56:00.085Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Empire as a Subject for Philosophy (Polis, Imperium, Cosmopolis)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2019

James Alexander
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In order to consider the question of whether empire is a subject for philosophy, I do three things. I sketch an original typology of three types of state, which I call polis, imperium and cosmopolis, in order to show that the second is an important philosophical conception which lies behind the terminology of empire and imperialism. I also consider modern theories of empire and imperialism in order to indicate some of their limitations as theories. And finally I indicate that it is important even for philosophers to recognise that all imperial terminology emerges out of a very complicated history in which the concept of imperium has been extended and distorted in meaning, so that, at best, any good theory of empire or imperialism can only be some sort of recapitulation of that history. Neither the second nor the third of these claims undermines the claim of imperium to be a concept of the state which is of great political and philosophical significance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 94 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 243 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Pitts, Jennifer, ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism’, Annual Review of Political Science 13 (2010), 211–235, at 211Google Scholar.

3 Barker, Ernest, The Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1942)Google Scholar; ‘The Conception of Empire’ in Bailey, Cyril ed. The Legacy of Rome (Oxford University Press, 1951), 45–89Google Scholar.

4 Schmitt, Carl, Der Nomos von Erder im Völkerrecht der Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950), The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum trans Ulmen, G.L. (New York: Telos Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

5 Koebner, Richard, ‘The Concept of Economic Imperialism’, Economic History Review 2 (1949), 1–29Google Scholar, ‘The Emergence of the Concept of Imperialism’, Cambridge Journal 5 (1952), 726–741Google Scholar, Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1961)Google Scholar, which was already posthumous, and from his notes, completed and co-authored by Schmidt, H.D., Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

6 I shall say nothing about Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, except that it is a deliberately provocative book which was in content nothing more than a hopeful sketch of the future which only attracted attention because it the used the wholly inappropriate word ‘empire’ for its vague hints about the historical stage which will succeed Lenin's ‘imperialism’. Their argument had nothing to do with empire; and only indicate that we are in an age in which the right and left often sell their wares most effectively when they confound expectations by adopting the terminology of their opponents. The book should be condemned by anyone who cares for clarity about the subject.

7 Hume, David, ‘Of the Original Contract’ in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 465–487, at 487Google Scholar.

8 Berent, Moshe, ‘The Stateless Polis: A Reply to Critics’, Social Evolution and History, 5 (2006), 141–163Google Scholar.

9 Hume, op. cit. note 7, 88–9.

10 For recognition by states of states, see, classically, Lauterpacht, Hersch, Recognition in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 1948)Google Scholar.

11 For instance, Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capitalism and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar.

12 Hsiao, Kung-chuan, A History of Chinese Political Thought Vol. I: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century AD trans. Mote, F.W. (Princeton University Press, 1979), 23Google Scholar.

13 See, for instance, Jaggar, Alison, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), 41Google Scholar; Ankersmit, Frank. R., ‘Metaphor in Political Theory’, in Ankersmit, F.R. and Rooij, J.J.A., Knowledge and Language Volume III, Metaphor and Knowledge (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1993), 155–202, at 174Google Scholar; Fierke, Karin, ‘Whereof We Can Speak, Thereof We Must Not Be Silent: Trauma, Political Solipsism and War’, Review of International Studies 30 (2004), 471–492CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ando, Clifford, Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 73Google Scholar.

14 Schmitt, op. cit. note 4, 51.

15 Beckwith, Christopher, Empires of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2009), 137–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Bell, Duncan, The Idea of a Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108–112Google Scholar

17 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.76, from Rex Warner's translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 80.

18 Dawson, Christopher, Mission to Asia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 83Google Scholar.

19 Res Gestae Divi Augusti, v. 31, in the Loeb ed. trans. Frederick Shipley (Harvard University Press, 1924), 395.

20 For the symbolic significance of cities, see Eliade, Mircia, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 12Google Scholar.

21 Seneca, De Otio iv. 31, quoted in Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge University Press), 93.

22 Excerpted from The Epistle to Diognetus, quoted in From Alexander to Constantine: Passages and Documents Illustrating the History of Social and Political Ideas 336 B.C.–A.D. 337 trans. Barker, Ernest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 421Google Scholar.

23 Alexander, James, ‘The Fundamental Contradiction of Cosmopolitanism’, The European Legacy 21 (2016), 168–183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 This paraphrases a very useful sentence by Reinhart Koselleck on ‘republicanism’ found in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times trans. Tribe, Keith (Camb. Mass: MIT Press, 1985), 287Google Scholar.

25 Hobson, J.A., Imperialism: A Study (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938)Google Scholar.

26 Lenin, V.I., Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (London: Penguin, 2010), 114Google Scholar.

27 Schumpeter, Joseph, ‘The Sociology of Imperialisms’, in Imperialism, Social Classes: Two Essays trans. Norden, Heinz (New York: Meridian, 1951), 1–98, at 6Google Scholar.

28 Arguably Hannah Arendt's account of imperialism is torn between these two theories. See, for instance, The Origins of Totalitarianism orig. 1951 (New York: Schocken Books, 2001), 170 & 176Google Scholar.

29 Doyle, Michael W., Empires (London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 12Google Scholar.

30 Motyl, Alexander J., Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 4Google Scholar.

31 Münkler, Herfried, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States trans. Camiller, Patrick (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 4–5Google Scholar.

32 Colás, Alejandro, Empire (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 6–8Google Scholar.

33 This was the same problem faced by Hans J. Morgenthau. Since the state was for him the status quo, he offered the remarkable definition of imperialism (not empire) ‘as a policy that aims at the overthrow of the status quo’, that is, as a word for any attempt to overthrow the established system of states. Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations: The Struggle For Power and Peace 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 46Google Scholar. This illustrates, I hope, the absurdity of trying to define these terms if one takes the state – the type of the state I call polis – to be the fundamental element of politics.

34 Colás, op. cit. note 32, 18.

35 Doyle, op. cit. note 29, 19.

36 Motyl, op. cit. note 30, 32.

37 Münkler, op. cit. note 31, 8.

38 Colás, op. cit. note 32, 71.

39 No complete scholarly history of imperial concepts has been written. Until we have one, the best single account remains the one in the two volumes of Richard Koebner, op. cit. note 5. The many histories of eras of imperial thought, in the works of Dvornik, Brunt, Syme, Jones, Ullmann, Muldoon, Folz, Pagden, Armitage, Pocock, Mehta, Bell and Pitts etc, offer many refinements, but have not yet been incorporated into a single story.

40 Finley, M.I., ‘Empire in the Graeco-Roman World’, Review (Ferdinand Braudel Center) 2 (1978), 55–68 at 56Google Scholar.

41 These useful names are owed to Ernest Barker, Ideas and Ideals, op. cit. note 3, 11 and Motyl, op. cit. note 30, 4 respectively.

42 This may explain why so many defenders of the British empire made sense of in terms of Greek models. See Kumar, Krishnan, ‘Greece and Rome in the British Empire: Contrasting Role Models’, Journal of British Studies 51 (2012), 760–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Barker, Ideas and Ideals, op. cit. note 3, 81.

44 Quoted in Koebner, Empire, 54 & 106 and Imperialism, 32, both op. cit. note 5.

45 Finley, op. cit. note 40, 64–5.

46 Hobson, op. cit. note 25, 368.

47 Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review 6 (1953), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Finley, op. cit. note 40, 59.

49 Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2003), xxiiGoogle Scholar.

50 Brunt, P.A., ‘Reflections on British and Roman Imperialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 7 (1965), 267–288, at 286CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Richard Koebner, ‘The Emergence of the Concept of Imperialism’, op. cit. note 5, 741.

52 Brown, Michael Barratt, After Imperialism (William Heinemann, 1970), viiiGoogle Scholar.

53 Thornton, A.P., review of Richard Koebner, Empire, in The English Historical Review 78 (1963), 546–552 at 551CrossRefGoogle Scholar.