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Juridical and colonial racisms: On Kant’s modern/colonial gender system

Jordan Pascoe
p. 99-116

Abstract

This essay examines how inequalities are structured and rendered rightful in Kant’s political philosophy in order to offer a sketch of Kant’s juridical racism, or the ways in which his political philosophy is well-equipped to contain and maintain racial exclusions. By drawing on Nkiru Nzegwu’s conception of colonial racism, it highlights the forms of institutional racism that are perpetuated through juridical and colonial orders, which exceed Kant’s own theory of race, operating as what Huaping Lu-Adler has called a “racial ideology” embedded in his political philosophy. It first mines Kant’s arguments about the dependency of women in the Doctrine of Right, showing that these arguments offer a conceptual map of how raced inequality might be organized within the rightful state, organized as a form of juridical racism. It then turns to his cosmopolitan arguments, showing that working towards a rightful cosmopolitan condition will involve developing a shared conception of possessive rights, which Kant took to be a priori. In Kant’s inclusion of domestic right in this basic scheme of rightful possessive relations, we see an example of what Maria Lugones called the “modern/colonial gender system”, through which the invention and enforcement of normative gender roles becomes a critical method of coloniality. Thus, instead of treating gender as analogous to race in Kant’s arguments, I propose that we understand the normative structure of gendered dependency as a feature of Kant’s racial ideology.

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Introduction

1Kant’s mature cosmopolitanism has been defended as a universalist and inclusive argument, which marks a definitive break with his theory of race (Kleingeld 2007; 2014). Because Kant said little directly about race in the late 1790s, and because he critiqued colonial practices, the argument goes, his final articulation of cosmopolitanism is both racially egalitarian and inclusively universalist.

2This paper will challenge this argument by attending to what Jasmine Gani has called the coloniality of Kant’s final cosmopolitan arguments (2017), and drawing out the cultural or colonial racism in his mature political philosophy. It does so by exploring the linkages between Kant’s defense of gendered dependency and his account of race. By examining how inequalities are structured and rendered rightful in Kant’s final vision of the state, it offers a sketch of what I call Kant’s juridical racism, or the ways in which his political philosophy is well-equipped to contain and maintain racial exclusions. It will then explore how this defense of inequality is embedded in his cosmopolitan arguments, becoming a form of what Nigerian philosopher Nkiru Nzegwu has called colonial racism: a form of racism that targets “the sociopolitical institutionalization of racial prejudice and the implementation of social policies from that base” (1999: 127). Taken together, these arguments trouble what Elvira Basevich has called Kant’s “colorblind cosmopolitanism” (2022b), and attend to the ways in which Kant’s cultural racism exceeds his theory of race.

  • 1 See Lu-Adler 2023: 279 for the distinction between the “thin” and “thick” versions of Kant’s theory (...)

3In the 1770s and 1780s, Kant famously developed a theory of race and racial hierarchy in his anthropological and geographical work, which would become important to his theorization of teleology as he developed his critical work. Kant theorized the concept of a human race, which focused on physical differences (namely skin color) (e.g. BBM, 8: 100; VRM, 2: 433), which he linked to a wider range of capacities, such as the development of concepts and the use of reason (e.g. VRM, 2: 438). These extended beyond the conceptual framework and pointed towards a hierarchical account of the human races; Kant took these claims to be less conceptually grounded, but understood them to have popular appeal.1 Finally, by drawing links between the supposed cognitive capacities of nonwhite races and their capacity for forming political institutions to support the free exercise of reason, Kant develops what Lu-Adler calls his racial ideology, which mapped European societies as the only ones capable of developing both the concepts and conditions of freedom (e.g. VRM, 2: 438; IaG, 8: 29-30).

  • 2 See Anth Mron, 25: 1413 and Anth Fried, 25: 536. Lu Alder argues that reliance on “pictorial” langu (...)

4In making this distinction, Lu-Adler relies on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s distinction between raciology as a way of theorizing races (which is not necessarily racist) and racism as a practice of exclusion, which may exceed the theorization of raciology precisely because it is, in Lu-Alder’s terms, a political tool rather than a systematic conceptualization of race (2023: 253). Kant’s racial ideology, Lu-Alder argues, is racist in that it “activates white people’s imaginations” and habituates them to see through a racial lens in ways that norm and perpetuate raced exclusions (2023: 280). Thus, Kant’s claims that nonwhite, nonWestern people lack both the ability to reason a priori and to make use of one’s reason in a “free” way (Log, 9: 22; WDO, 8: 814; Lu-Adler 2023: 311) are more than raciology: they have implications for the kinds of political conditions, and cosmopolitan interactions, that are possible.2 Thus, as Basevich argues, “for Kant, we can be juridical equals in an abstract sense – such that Europeans ought not take advantage of ‘pastoral peoples’ – and yet still assume that ‘pastoral peoples’ have failed to exercise an innate capacity for legislative reason in an “empirical” sense” (2022b).

5This essay addresses the consistency between such claims to juridical equality and commitments to empirical accounts of inequality. This is not unique to Kant’s cosmopolitan arguments: he makes a similar claim in the Doctrine of Right about the standing of passive citizens, whose political inequality and dependency has, he assures us, no bearing on our “freedom and equality as human beings” (RL, 6: 315). Arthur Ripstein (2014) draws on this account of passivity to argue that for Kant, colonies have a status of passivity akin to those of children – dependent upon a colonial power until they reach a state of development to govern themselves. We see this most clearly in Kant’s insistence, in the 1784 Idea for a Universal History, that a cosmopolitan world entails that Europeans will just “legislate for” everyone else (IAG, 8: 29-30), an argument consistent with his claim that nonwhite nonWesterners lack the capacity to legislate freedom for themselves. But Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism in the late 1790s has been defended as a pluralist, anti-colonial one that does not position colonies as “children”, and thus, as evidence of a newfound commitment to racial egalitarianism (Muthu 2009; Kleingeld 2014).

6Kant’s cosmopolitan vision in the 1790s is grounded in his vision of the rightful republican state: as the structure of the Doctrine of Right reflects, it first begins from an account of private, or individual rights, second institutionalizes these rights through an account of public right, or the rightful structure of the republican state, and third extends those rights through cosmopolitan practice, in the form of trade relations and cosmopolitan hospitality, as well as the project of working towards a global federation of states. Tracing the colonial racism in Kant’s cosmopolitan vision, then, requires us to begin with his vision of the republican state, and to attend to how entitlements and inequalities are embedded in that vision as the conditions under which human freedom can flourish. To draw this out, I explore the consistencies between the way that Kant embedded gendered inequality into his rightful theory of the state in ways that are (1) taken to be a normative extension of the principles of right and (2) offer a model for embedding racial inequality in a state characterized by formal equality. This allows me to sketch how the gendered structure of Private Right is important for assessing the universalism and egalitarianism of his mature cosmopolitan arguments. This analysis paves the way for an engagement with the problems of race and gender in Kant’s cosmopolitan arguments, which can help us to track the presence of colonial racism in those arguments and to insist upon the linkages between Kant’s juridical sexism and racism.

  • 3 See Muthu 2009; Kleingeld 2007 and 2014. Jasmine Gani (2017), Ingrid Valdez (2019), and Huaping Lu- (...)

7In making this argument, I build on Nzegwu’s articulation of the ways that racism often exceeds the raciology of the body, naming the ways that colonial practices in West Africa and elsewhere reflected a of racist priorities where people were marked by “culturalized” markers, like “modes of dress, facial markings, names and language” (1999: 130). Linda Alcoff has argued that biological racisms, like that developed by Kant in his essays on race, often “bloom for a time” within a broader matrix of cultural and colonial racism, while cultural racisms target what Fanon called “certain modes of existing” (Alcoff 2023: 250, 263). To identify Nzegwu’s colonial racism as a form of cultural racism present in Kant’s cosmopolitan argument, I draw on Nzegwu’s theorization of the colonial transformation of the family to illustrate the coloniality embedded in Kant’s claims about domestic right as an essential feature of Private Right. I argue that Nzegwu’s conception of colonial racism gives us a framework for identifying how the “sociopolitical institutionalization of racial prejudice” operates through Kant’s juridical and cosmopolitan arguments, such that even if Kant distanced himself from his raciology in the 1790s, it would not follow that his political philosophy is free from the sociopolitical institutionalization of racial prejudice.3

1. From biological inferiority to rightful inequality: towards an account of juridical racism

8Kant’s theory of the state is often defended on the grounds that it offers a comprehensive, innovative vision of freedom that entails a thoroughgoing account of equality. This entanglement is reflected in the Universal Principle of Right, which requires that “the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom” (RL, 6: 230), as well as in the formulation of innate right, which is said to entail “innate equality” (RL, 6: 237).

9But Kant’s theory of freedom as a state of equality is infamously complicated by his assertion that in this state, not everyone will be equal as citizens: those with lawful freedom, civil equality, and self-sufficiency or independence will be active citizens, while those who find themselves in conditions of dependency will be merely passive citizens (RL, 6: 314-315). This poses thorny questions about the distinction between innate and civic equality, and about what, exactly, this independence or self-sufficiency entails (Hasan 2018, Moran 2021, Pascoe 2022, Vrousalis 2022, Davies 2023). Kant’s account of dependency reflects the relations of Private Right: independence requires not merely owning property (a la Locke) but owning the means of productive labor, so that one is not dependent upon another (RL, 6: 314, Moran 2021, Pascoe 2022, Basevich 2022a); it requires entering into contracts that do not produce relations of dependency, as employment contracts will; and it requires having the status of the “head of household” rather than being dependent on that head of household (RL, 6: 283). Civil equality requires meeting each of these standards, and though it has no bearing on our equality “as human beings” (RL, 6: 315), it does limit one’s capacity to participate in political life. In making this argument, Kant takes the material inequality of those in positions of social and economic dependency, and transforms it into political inequality, which is defended as rightful so long as “each can work their way up” (RL, 6: 315).

  • 4 See Lu-Adler 2022: 286n.8 and Marwah 2012: 552-554 for discussion of Kant’s beautiful/sublime disti (...)

10The “each can work their way up” stipulation is important to Kant’s claim that civic inequality is not inconsistent with innate equality. But as I have argued elsewhere, the right of any individual to work their way up does not entail that everyone can work their way up: relations of dependency are a normative feature of the Kantian state, which means that civic inequality is a normative feature of the Kantian state (2022). We see this most clearly, as many Kant scholars have noted, in Kant’s account of women’s political inequality: as dependents, in the household, women are passive citizens. In making this argument, we see Kant cashing out decades of anthropological analysis of women’s capacities and characteristics, and mapping this account of natural inferiority into a form of rightful inequality in his juridical philosophy (Sabourin 2021; Shorter-Bourhanou 2023).4

11Admittedly, as Stella Sandford has argued, gender is “not subject to any philosophical determination in Kant’s work” (2023): Kant never develops gender as a classificatory category, and his treatment of it in his anthropological work is far from systematic (although it is strikingly consistent (see Pascoe 2022: 30)). It is by embedding gendered dependency as a normative feature of his account of citizenship that Kant comes closest to systematizing his account of gender, rendering it as part of the architecture of the rightful state. In doing so, he models a strategy for converting “natural” inferiority into rightful inequality, explicitly arguing that the husband is rightfully the “master” of the wife, and that this inequality reflects “the natural superiority of the husband to the wife in his capacity to promote the common interest of the household” (RL, 6: 279).

12Unlike gender, race was systematically theorized by Kant, developed as a concept critical to understanding humanity and its destiny (Sandford 2023, Lu-Adler 2023). But race, unlike gender, is neither explicitly theorized nor positioned in Kant’s final vision of the state. What I want to suggest, however, is that this does not mean it cannot be: Kant’s theorization of how women’s biological inferiority can be transformed into rightful inequality offers a model for how racial dependency might be built into the rightful state.

  • 5 See Pascoe 2018 for Kant’s engagement with the Code of 1794.

13This might simply track the de facto presence of – and dependence of – non-whites in the state. We know that Kant repeatedly thought about slavery in relation to domestic servitude (RL, 6: 283; Pascoe 2022: 21-24); as I have shown elsewhere, the forms of labor that organize dependency in Kant’s rightful state (in his time and our own) are not only gendered: they are raced (2022; see also Basevich 2022a). For Kant, domestic service is a status that allows presence within the state without participation in it: just as domestic right contained gendered difference, its structure could contain raced difference. Kant was aware of nonwhite others in European states (Lu-Adler 2023: 260), and several prominent legal cases concerning the standing of slaves within Prussia in the 1780s and 90s shaped public debate and law (von Mallinckkrodt 2021).5 It is unlikely that Kant was ignorant of these debates; he had been engaging the thorny question of the distinction between the status of slaves and servants for years (Pascoe 2022) – a question which Prussian law took up in the 1790s.

14But even if we reject the possibility that Kant had race or nonwhites “in mind” when he theorized domestic dependency, we can attend to parallels between the ways that he theorized dependency in the Rechtslehre and the way that he theorized raced dependency. From his claims about how Blacks are well-suited to slavery (V-Anth/Mensch, 25: 1187) to his arguments about the inability of nonwhite races to govern themselves (V-Anth/Mron, 25: 1413), Kant had long practiced imagining nonwhites as unable to develop concepts or to set and pursue ends. A critical feature of domestic dependency in the Rechtslehre is that subordinate members of the household take the ends of the household as their own: they are not posited as end-setters, but as dependent on the end-setting projects of others (RL, 6: 283; Pascoe 2022). This demarcates a position within the state that is consistent with Kant’s characterization of the capacities of nonwhites. And, just as Kant worries that nonwhites will have neither the skill of making use of their reason, subordinate members of the household are blocked not only from voting by their position of dependency, but from participating in public reason: their position of dependency – specifically, their dependency on the ends of the household – prevents them from speaking or reasoning publicly (RL, 6: 315; Pascoe 2022). In other words, there is nothing in the structure of the Rechtslehre that necessitates Kant having given up his views on race, nor their implications: rather, we can read his dependency arguments as wholly consistent with his defense of juridical equality.

15Accordingly, claiming that Kant was not thinking about the place of nonwhite citizens (or about the colonial or slaveholding household) cannot assure us that his normative vision of the state is not also a map of juridical racism, which attends, like colonial racism, to the ways that sociopolitical institutions assume racial prejudice in the background. It points us to the ways that defenses of normative juridical inequality are the mechanisms through which racial exclusions are embedded in republican institutions, which serve to transform social and economic dependency into political dependency. Treating such dependencies as rightful is an important part of the process of developing a racial ideology which will appear as a colorblind state. Our persistent habits of reading Kant’s political philosophy as if all people of color were elsewhere – aided by Kant’s own references to the sugar islands (RL, 6: 330) and the Coast of Guinea (RL, 6: 288) – make us complicit in treating Kant’s vision of the state as a colorblind society, in which equality is systematic and oppressive/hierarchical social orders are somehow external – either geographically (the sugar islands) or philosophically (as belonging properly to his geography/anthropology).

16And of course, the juridical racism patterned in Kant’s vision is not limited to European states: as a feature of his account of rightful labor, trade, and political relations, it is also foundational to his account of cosmopolitan right.

2. Juridical cosmopolitanism and coloniality

  • 6 My sketch of Kant’s cosmopolitan arguments will necessarily be brief; accordingly, I focus on his c (...)
  • 7 Leah Ypi (2014) points out that there is disagreement about whether Kant aimed at free trade (Fleis (...)

17In the Doctrine of Right, Kant suggests two pathways to perpetual peace: first, in a variation of his arguments from Perpetual Peace, Kant proposes a “federation of states”, though he worries this “is indeed an unachievable idea” though we have a duty to work towards it (RL, 6: 350).6 The second is cosmopolitan right, which organizes international rights through a “thoroughgoing relation of each to all the others of offering to engage in commerce with any other” (RL, 6: 352). Kant’s description of cosmopolitan right has been hailed as a particularly inclusive one, owing to his insistence upon the contractual nature of this commercial contact, and his references to the importance of not forcing pastoral peoples to cede their land (RL, 6: 353, Muthu 2009, Kleingeld 2014, Ajei and Flickshuh 2014). This right, Kant tells us, “has to do with the possible union of all nations with a view to certain universal laws for their possible commerce” (RL, 6: 352): it concerns the structures necessary for facilitating rightful global trade as a potential pathway towards perpetual peace.7

  • 8 Katrin Flickschuh (2000) foregrounds this shared inhabitance on a closed planet in order show why a (...)
  • 9 I am guided here by Dilek Huseyinzadegan’s insight that Kant’s vision of cosmopolitan hospitality c (...)

18Concerns with global trade will arise “inevitably,” Kant argues, because “the earth’s surface is not unlimited but closed” (RL, 6: 311) and “all nations stand originally in a community of land, though not of rightful possession” (RL, 6: 352).8 This produces a conundrum: if all people stand in a community of provisional possession of the earth’s surface, then none of our respective possessive rights can be made rightful unless there is some kind of association of states designed to conclude these rights (RL, 6: 311, 350). Kant worries, however, that such a project may lead to “too vast” a governance structure incapable of securing these rights (RL, 6: 350) and that it may lead some states to try to “make settlement on the land of another nation” (RL, 6: 353); cosmopolitan right attempts to ensure that we can fulfill our duty to work towards a globally rightful condition by “try[ing] to establish community with all” (RL, 6: 353) without force or settlement. At the heart of Kant’s cosmopolitan argument, then, is the question of how we can work towards “rightful possession” and just trade in a global context.9

  • 10 Katrin Flikschuh emphasizes the “conceptual continuity” between relations of right at the national, (...)
  • 11 Martin Ajei and Katrin Flickschuh note that “insofar as Kant’s mature anti-colonial position is pre (...)
  • 12 See, in particular, Varden (2006; 2020) on the importance of domestic right in a non-voluntarist sc (...)
  • 13 In making this claim, I am focused on the extension of these juridical rights in order to support c (...)

19Kant’s cosmopolitan arguments are an extension of his arguments in the Rechtslehre: they ask what institutional frameworks are necessary to ensure reciprocal recognition of rights and protection of external freedom in a world united by global trade relations (RL, 6: 355).10 This ought not to surprise us: the Rechtslehre presents possessive rights as a necessary extension of our right to external freedom, and then develops an institutional framework to protect those rights through property rights and criminal law, to extend those rights through contract, and to produce spaces in which those rights are shared through domestic right (or the household).11 This constellation of rights are essential to rightful trade relations – both within nations and at the global level.12 Rightful global trade will require a minimal level of agreement about what constitutes a rightful contract, and who has property rights to enter into such contracts. Thus, rightful global trade will involve a basic agreement about the structure of private rights – which include property, contract, and domestic relations.13

20Kant’s mature cosmopolitanism has evolved from the “Europeans will legislate for everyone else” model he proposed in 1784, but it retains the assumption that European juridical structures, including the institutional structures of private right, will be essential building blocks for a world united by trade. Kant is explicit about this in the Conclusion to the Doctrine of Right, where he argues that “the rule for this constitution, as a norm for others, cannot be derived from the experience of those who have hitherto found it most to their advantage; it must, rather, be derived a priori by reason from the ideal of a rightful association of human beings under public laws as such” (RL, 6: 355). He is no longer advocating global legislation by Europeans, but he is asserting that the system of Right is derived a priori, and as such, can be taken as a standard for cosmopolitan right, global trade, and perpetual peace. But of course, deriving such concepts a priori is precisely what Kant has claimed that nonwhite, nonWesterners lack the capacity to do (see Section 1). Such principles will have to come from somewhere: from those (Europeans) with the capacity to derive a priori principles of right.

21There are two distinct problems here. One is that Kant’s racial ideology leads him to assume that only Europeans will have the capacity to grasp a priori principles. Of course, those who adopt the “second thoughts” approach can resolve this problem by arguing that if Kant is no longer committed to his racial ideology, then he need no longer believe that this capacity is unique to Europeans. However, a second problem still looms: Kant’s argument assumes that those principles are enacted through an institutional order – including private property, contract, and domestic right – that seem universal from a European perspective. Such an assumption is a common feature of cultural or colonial racism: the treatment of some norms as modern, enlightened, or guided by reason and of others as “cultural” (and thus, non-universal) (Alcoff 2023, 252). Even if Kant has abandoned his assumptions about the capacities of nonwhite and nonWestern people, it does not ensure that his argument is not premised upon a pernicious form of cultural and colonial racism.

  • 14 Gani draws on both Quijano and Mignolo’s articulations of the coloniality of power in making this d (...)
  • 15 See Ripstein 2014 for a discussion of these forms of colonial wrongs.

22This should temper our assessment of Kant’s criticism of colonialism – for two reasons. The first is that, as Jasmine Gani has pointed out, Kant criticizes the activities of contemporary colonization, “but not the practice of coloniality as a way of knowing the world – one exemplified by his own theorization of race” (2017: 435).14 In drawing this distinction between colonization and coloniality, Gani troubles the claim that a critique of discrete contemporary colonial practices is either a refutation of the epistemology of coloniality, or a commitment to racial egalitarianism. A second, related point is that in critiquing the colonial practices of his day, Kant does not critique either coloniality itself, or novel variations of colonial practice that might emerge from it (Huseyinzadegan 2019: 138). Thus, Kant focuses on the use of force to subjugate foreign populations as colonies (RL, 6: 347), on the settler colonial practices that involve unjust acquisition of land (RL, 6: 353), and on the slave trade as violations of cosmopolitan hospitality.15 But this does not exhaust the possibilities of colonial practice.

3. Kant’s modern/colonial gender system

23Instead, as Nzegwu’s arguments can help us to see, Kant’s juridical cosmopolitanism will entail its own colonial project: a colonial project aimed at transforming the institutions of private right in order to support the development of “rightful” global trade. This transformation need not originate in war, settlement, or enslavement: it may take the form of a “contractual” agreement to engage in commerce in a cosmopolitan spirit. But if that engagement in commerce entails basic agreements about (a priori) relations of rights, then it will involve the institutional transformation of deinstitutionalized peoples. In this sense, Kant’s mature cosmopolitanism retains both the markers of his racial ideology -- his assumption that nonwhite races will not have the wherewithal to develop rightful relations that support trade – and of his cultural racism – that European nations will provide a (a priori) model of a rightful juridical order. For example, his respect for the rights of pastoral peoples positions their practices as “cultural” while the European model of trade is a priori and guided by reason.

24Because this cosmopolitan vision centers on the transformation and development of social, cultural, and institutional practices to support the development of rightful trade, it looks markedly like what Nzegwu calls colonial racism. This mode of racism was primarily experienced “through administrative policies in which culture rather than the body was the site of racism” (1999: 133) such that “nebulous things such as cultural norms and patterns, socialized behavior, legal entitlements, and the environmental may be attacked once the focus is shifted from skin pigmentation to the community and the society” (1999: 134). Kant’s juridical cosmopolitanism need not remain steeped in his raciology in order to further the racism of coloniality: it can simply assume both that only Europeans will have developed (a priori) rightful institutions, and that only European institutions provide the material conditions in which freedom – and trade – can be rightfully exercised.

25Embedded in this map of the institutions required to support rightful trade are, as we have seen, claims about rightful (gendered) dependency relations that ground Kant’s account of rightful inequality. There is, of course, the claim about the dependency of children, on which the passivity of colonial states is modeled (Ripstein 2014). But this does not exhaust the resources of Kant’s dependency argument. Relations of domestic dependency aren’t just features of Kant’s anthropology: they are built into the normative structure of Kant’s account of the rightful state, distinguishing the civil state from a state of nature, and making rightful possessive relations possible by making legible who counted as a property owner or an agent in contracts. As we have seen, they transform Kant’s reflections on gendered inferiority into an account of rightful inequality – and in doing so, embed a gendered account of the conjugal, bourgeois family into his juridical arguments.

  • 16 See Pascoe 2019: 93-94 for discussion of these arguments in relation to Kant’s political philosophy
  • 17 Arthur Ripstein argues that one way colonial rule can be wrong is if it treats all citizens as “mer (...)
  • 18 See the history of government programs in colonial and postcolonial Africa that were explicitly des (...)

26Nzegwu notes that this was a persistent feature of colonial racism, as juridical and administrative practices focused on reorienting women’s identities in relation to men, locating them in dependency relations and structuring politics, property and inheritance, the household, and labor in ways that systematically centered men, ensuring the coherence of property ownership and contract rights (1999: 133, 153; 2005).16 In so doing, colonial practice in West Africa (and elsewhere, see Lugones 2008) aimed at creating a “mono-sex” system by inventing normative gendered political dependency through the creation of a recognizable (male) political and economic subject prepared to engage in trade and offer “cosmopolitan hospitality”.17 But the creation of this subject involved significant social, cultural, and institutional transformations, which amounted to what Oyèrónké. Oyěwùmí calls “the invention of women” (1997). A central project of colonial racism, in the form of both global trade and juridical cosmopolitanism, was the creation of what Maria Lugones has called the “modern/colonial gender system”, through which the concept and practice of gender is “narrowed” to its sexual and reproductive function, and enclosed within domestic dependency relationships.18 Mapping this system, Lugones argues, “is pivotal to understanding the nature and scope of changes in the social structure that the processes constituting colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism imposed” (2008: 12).

27Lugones’ articulation of the modern/colonial gender system can help us to see that Kant’s emphasis on domestic right as a foundational feature of private right does not merely provide us with a model of dependency relations through which we can conceptualize racial or colonial dependency. Rather, these normative dependency relations are a practice of juridical and colonial racism, a central mechanism for critiquing the backwardness of nonwhite, nonWestern cultures, and key site of juridical transformation through capitalist and colonial processes. Kant is quite explicit about this in his anthropological arguments, arguing in 1798 that “nature’s end in establishing womankind” were “(1) the preservation of the species, (2) the cultivation of society and its refinement by womankind” (Anth, 7: 305-306). But Kant does not think that all women fulfill this second end: he had long pointed to the ways that Black and savage women are “no different” from men in their labor and roles (Anth Frie, 25: 699), as well as to the ways that “oriental” women are too confined in domestic spaces to fulfill this essential function (Anth Frie, 25: 706; see Pascoe 2022: 29). “Nature’s ends” for women may be fulfilled by European women – by white women – who have both the natural capacities (raciology) and find themselves in the right kind of political conditions (racial ideology) to do so (Lu-Adler 2023; Pascoe 2022). Kant’s account of domestic dependency relations in the Rechtslehre reflect an already raced conception of gender, and a key function of his juridical vision is to provide a normative framework (the household) through which women can fulfill both of nature’s ends (although this may not be attainable for women of all races; the question is under what conditions humanity –and women as a portion of it – may fulfill these ends, and not whether all of humanity, or all women, can fulfill these ends (Lu-Adler 2023: 54; Marwah 2013)). The establishment of the domestic realm and of dependency relation for women is a critical part of creating the conditions in which humanity can fulfill nature’s ends of “cultivating society and its refinement” and it is thus an integral part of both Kant’s teleological account of human progress, and his cosmopolitan vision.

28Attending to the modern/colonial gender system in Kant’s political and cosmopolitan arguments expands our capacity to map the presence of racial ideology in his philosophical system, and to disrupt well-worn distinctions between his account of gender and race, while at the same time complicating claims that he was a thoroughgoing critic of colonialism. As Lugones argues,

‘coloniality’ does not just refer to ‘racial’ classification. It is an encompassing phenomenon, since it is one of the axes of the system of power and as such it permeates all control of sexual access, collective authority, labor, subjectivity/inter-subjectivity and the production of knowledge from within these inter-subjective relations. Or, alternatively, all control over sex, subjectivity, authority and labor are articulated around it. (2008: 3)

Kant’s theorization of the rightful state is unusually explicit in laying this out, by integrating domestic right as a structural feature of the basic scheme of rights that make all rightful political relations possible. In doing so, his juridical vision is particularly helpful in revealing the ways in which “the elements that constitute the global, Eurocentered, capitalist model of power do not stand in separation from each other and none of them is prior to the processes that constitute the patterns” (Lugones 2008: 3). The disciplining and dependency of gender is a critical aspect of Kant’s understanding of racial progress, just as the racial characteristics and capacities of women are an integral part of his understanding of gender.

  • 19 We see this, for example, in his description of “families” alongside with individual men in state o (...)

29At the same time, by treating domestic right as a foundational feature of the juridical order, Kant is complicit in “the mythical presentation of these elements as metaphysically prior [as] an important aspect of the cognitive model of Eurocentered, global capitalism” (Lugones 2008: 3).19 The Kantian juridical vision of domestic right as the location of rightful relations of dependency is not, as Lugones, Nzegwu, and Oyěwùmí remind us, the only way to organize labor or the family, to distinguish the public and private parts of one’s life, to structure access to political participation, or to construct gender. And so the problem is not only that Kant has taken a specifically European and bourgeois story about the family which emerges out of his18th century Prussian experience and offered it as a model of the (a priori) rightful juridical order in a universalist key, but that this framing operates in a broader context of colonial/racist worldmaking, through which this norm is made universal, rather than merely “metaphysically prior.”

  • 20 Nzegwu, accordingly, offers the challenge of envisioning a contemporary “dual-sex” society that dra (...)

30As Lu-Adler points out, the problem is not only that Kant made these arguments, but that he made them as an authoritative figure in a broader project of knowledge formation that we have inherited in ways that often make it difficult for us to think, and to know, otherwise.20 Thus, as Nzegwu, Oyěwùmí, and Lugones point out, other modes of organizing labor, the family, gender or the structure of political life become unthinkable for us, and the location of normative gender and family structures in Kant’s theorization of right become unremarkable to us. It is in this sense that the coloniality in Kant’s arguments exceeds his criticism of colonialism, and that his ideology of race operates as a world-making project still embedded in his juridical philosophy.

Conclusion

31This article develops strategies for recognizing the coloniality of Kant’s mature political philosophy, making the case that the colonial and juridical racism of his final cosmopolitan arguments exceed his own criticisms of colonialism. By building on Nkiru Nzegwu’s articulation of colonial racism and Maria Lugones’ conception of the modern/colonial gender system, I sketch how Kant’s commitments to gendered dependency in his mature political philosophy is a critical feature of his vision of the rightful state, as well as of his cosmopolitan project. At the same time, Kant’s defense of gendered dependency demarcates a pattern of dependency within the juridical state that aligns with his racial ideology, suggesting that Kant’s account of equality in his mature political philosophy cannot provide evidence that he abandoned his racial ideology. Instead, I draw on Kant’s anthropological arguments to suggest that the ideal of womanhood offered in the Rechtslehre is itself a white – and thus, a raced – ideal, emphasizing the continuities between Kant’s appeal to a modern/colonial gender system and his racial ideology. Thus, instead of treating gender as analogous to race in Kant’s arguments, I propose that we understand the normative structure of gendered dependency as a feature of Kant’s colonial racism.

32List of Abbreviations of Kant’s Works. All references are to the Cambridge Editions.

Anth

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (AA 07)

BBM

Determination of the Concept of a Human Race (AA 08)

Fey

Feyerabend Lectures on Natural Right (Winter 1784) (AA 27)

GSE

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (AA 02)

IaG

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (AA 08)

KU

Critique of the Power of Judgment (AA 05)

Log

Logic (AA 09)

RL

Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right (AA 06)

V-Anth/Fried

1775/1776 Anthropology Friedländer (AA 25)

V-Anth/Mensch

1781/1782 Anthropology Menschenkunde (AA 25)

V-Anth/Mron

1784/1785 Anthropology Mrongovius (AA 25)

V-Lo/Blomberg

Logik Blomberg (ca. 1771) (AA 24)

V-Lo/Dohna

1792 Logik Dohna-Wundlacken (AA 24)

WDO

What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?(AA 08)

VRM

Of the Different Races of Human Beings (AA 02)

ZeF

Toward Perpetual Peace (AA 08)

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Bibliografia

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Davies, L. 2023, Kant on civil self-sufficiency, “Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie”, 105, 1:118-140.

Fleischacker, S. 1996, Kant’s response to the wealth of nations, “History of Political Thought”, 17, 3:379-407.

Flikschuh, K. 2010, Kant’s sovereignty dilemma: A contemporary analysis, “Journal of political philosophy”, 18, 4, 469-493.

Gani, J.K. 2017, The erasure of race: Cosmopolitanism and the illusion of Kantian hospitality, “Millennium”, 45, 3, 425-446.

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Huseyinzadegan, D. 2019, Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

Lu-Adler, H. 2023, Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Lugones, M. 2007, Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system, “Hypatia”, 22, 1: 186-219.

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Note

1 See Lu-Adler 2023: 279 for the distinction between the “thin” and “thick” versions of Kant’s theory of race and Kleingeld 2007: 579-580 for discussion of Kant’s belief that “attaching” discussion of moral characteristics to his theorization of physical differences would appeal to a wider audience.

2 See Anth Mron, 25: 1413 and Anth Fried, 25: 536. Lu Alder argues that reliance on “pictorial” languages reflects both an inability to form abstract concepts and principles (V-Anth/Fried, 25: 536), and that “freedom of thought originates from a free form of government” (V-Lo/Blomberg, 24: 183; see Lu-Adler 2023: 312 for discussion). See Lu-Adler 2023: 279 for the distinction between the “thin” and “thick” versions of Kant’s theory of race and Kleingeld 2007: 579-580 for discussion of Kant’s belief that “attaching” discussion of moral characteristics to his theorization of physical differences would appeal to a wider audience.

3 See Muthu 2009; Kleingeld 2007 and 2014. Jasmine Gani (2017), Ingrid Valdez (2019), and Huaping Lu-Adler (2023) have challenged this reading by attending to the ways that Kant never offered a rebuttal of his theory of race, and often criticized colonial practice in terms of its costs to Europeans.

4 See Lu-Adler 2022: 286n.8 and Marwah 2012: 552-554 for discussion of Kant’s beautiful/sublime distinction in this context.

5 See Pascoe 2018 for Kant’s engagement with the Code of 1794.

6 My sketch of Kant’s cosmopolitan arguments will necessarily be brief; accordingly, I focus on his claims from the Doctrine of Right.

7 Leah Ypi (2014) points out that there is disagreement about whether Kant aimed at free trade (Fleischaker 1996) or just trade (Kleingeld 2012). Peter Niesen (2007) argues that Kant is ambivalent about the merits of free trade, given contemporary colonial practices.

8 Katrin Flickschuh (2000) foregrounds this shared inhabitance on a closed planet in order show why acquired and possessive rights are foundational to Kant’s cosmopolitan arguments, rather than innate right (see Kleingeld 1998, Benhabib 2004). See Niesen 2007 and Huseyinzadegan 2019 for discussion of this distinction.

9 I am guided here by Dilek Huseyinzadegan’s insight that Kant’s vision of cosmopolitan hospitality concerns not just communication or interaction, but specifically the contractual exchange of goods or property; cosmopolitanism then requires a political economy of hospitality as grounded in commercial relations (2019: 154).

10 Katrin Flikschuh emphasizes the “conceptual continuity” between relations of right at the national, international, and cosmopolitan levels (2010: 476); Peter Niesen (2007, 2021) emphasizes the problem of rightful relations at the cosmopolitan level, arguing that Kant’s cosmopolitanism refers to something like “provisional constitutional law, liable to institutional consolidation and transformation” (2021: 5).

11 Martin Ajei and Katrin Flickschuh note that “insofar as Kant’s mature anti-colonial position is premised upon his – equally mature – rights formalism, his final stance on race may be irrelevant to his final anti-colonialism” (2017: 231). On their account, this “rights formalism” entails that a rights claim against another produces an assumption reciprocal juridical equality, even if one denigrates or despises this other. Kant gives us a model of this in his reference to the people “of the American Wilderness” in his discussion of the right of nations, when he asserts the importance of “attribute[ing] to these people the greatest industry (which they do not have)” (RL, 6: 345). We have here an example of treating foreign (raced) others as if they had the capacities we would expect in equals, while at the same time asserting claims about Native American laziness drawn straight from his raciology (Lu-Adler 2022b). Kant models what I take to be Ajei and Flikschuh’s point: that rights claims against others involves treating them as if they were equal, through an assumption of “reciprocal juridical equality.” But this assumption is premised on the European explorer/trader’s understanding of juridical standing, then it prioritizes European conceptions of juridical right (which Kant takes to be a priori [RL, 6: 355]) in ways that may reflect what Nzegwu calls colonial racism.

12 See, in particular, Varden (2006; 2020) on the importance of domestic right in a non-voluntarist scheme of private right, and Pascoe (2022) on the role of domestic right in labor and trade relations.

13 In making this claim, I am focused on the extension of these juridical rights in order to support cosmopolitan exchanges, not on the duty of states to submit to international juridical institutions (see Flikschuh 2010). The problem I raise is the importance of an agreed upon (or a priori) system of possessive rights across national contexts to support the possibility of rightful cosmopolitan trade; this question is motivated both by Flikschuh’s assertion that “Cosmopolitan Right concerns just trade relations among propertied citizens of different states” (2010: 476) and Huseyinzadegan’s suggestion that cosmopolitanism be read in the context of a political economy that foregrounds contractual commercial relations (2019). If this is the case, then we will need a shared conception of both property and contract in order for the possibility of rightful cosmopolitan trade. I make the case for the inclusion of domestic right in this scheme below.

14 Gani draws on both Quijano and Mignolo’s articulations of the coloniality of power in making this distinction. I will also draw on this claim, below, in my discussion of Lugones’ conception of the modern/colonial gender system.

15 See Ripstein 2014 for a discussion of these forms of colonial wrongs.

16 See Pascoe 2019: 93-94 for discussion of these arguments in relation to Kant’s political philosophy.

17 Arthur Ripstein argues that one way colonial rule can be wrong is if it treats all citizens as “merely passive” – either through paternalistically legislating for them, or by enslaving them (2014). The form of colonialism I consider here, following Nzegwu, actively works to ensure that some citizens can be recognized as “active” citizens in Kant’s sense, by transforming property, inheritance, contract, and marital practices to produce intelligible independent male citizens. This project can be seen, from a Kantian perspective, as “working towards” a rightful condition in which these transformed active citizens will be in a position to self-legislate – but this condition is achieved through the structural disenfranchisement of women that Nzegwu (1999, 2005) and Oyěwùmí (1997) describe.

18 See the history of government programs in colonial and postcolonial Africa that were explicitly designed to produces wives and domestic spaces, such as the Usumbura Foyer in Belgian Ruanda-Urundi in the mid 20th century, which taught middle class African women European domestic arts like cooking, housekeeping, and mothering, and held contests like the “clean baby” and “clean house” (Hunt 1990).

19 We see this, for example, in his description of “families” alongside with individual men in state of nature (RL, 6: 343): women are not agents for Kant, even in the state of nature, but included as members of “families” which are then metaphysically prior to the development of rightful possessive relations, and thus foundational to them.

20 Nzegwu, accordingly, offers the challenge of envisioning a contemporary “dual-sex” society that draws on precolonial Igbo practices, and asks how such a society might challenge contemporary liberal and feminist assumptions about the structure of the rightful state (2005: 220).

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Jordan Pascoe, «Juridical and colonial racisms: On Kant’s modern/colonial gender system»Rivista di estetica, 87 | 2024, 99-116.

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Jordan Pascoe, «Juridical and colonial racisms: On Kant’s modern/colonial gender system»Rivista di estetica [Online], 87 | 2024, online dal 01 mars 2025, consultato il 07 juillet 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/estetica/17925; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13tup

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