Kant’s Challenge

Kant’s essay is the object of a strain of interpretation according to historical materialism in certain quarters. Not so fast, we should say, with the intent to take a look at the idea of ‘asocial sociability’.

A short and very accessible text, it avoids the technical language of Kant’s larger works, but was written right between the 1st and 2nd editions of ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and thus represents Kant in his ‘mature’ stage. As a meditation on themes of world history, progress and enlightenment the essay picks up themes that Kant developed elsewhere but in a bold and programmatic fashion. It can thus be read productively in comparison to Hegel and Marx’s approaches to world history, and can in some ways be seen as setting a challenge which Hegel was to take up in his own philosophy, and which Marx was consequently to develop. Of particular interest in relation to Hegel and Marx is Kant’s reference to man’s “unsocial sociability” in the Fourth Thesis, which seems to suggest something like a socio-historical dialectic.