Yet another example of this appearance of a governmental rationality that has the entire planet for its horizon is the eighteenth century projects for peace and international organization. If you consider those that existed in the seventeenth century, you will see that these projects for peace were essentially based on European equilibrium, that is to say, on the exact balance of reciprocal forces between different states; between the different powerful states, or between different coalitions of states, or between the powerful states and a coalition of the smaller states, and so on. From the eighteenth century, the idea of perpetual peace and the idea of international organization are, I think, articulated completely differently. It is no longer so much the limitation of internal forces that is called upon to guarantee and found a perpetual peace, but rather the unlimited nature of the external market. The larger the external market, the fewer its borders and limits, the more you will have a guarantee of perpetual peace.
If you take Kant’s text on the project of perpetual peace, for example, which dates from 1795,4 right at the end of the eighteenth century, there is a chapter entitled “On the Guarantee of a Perpetual Peace.” How does Kant conceive of this perpetual peace? He says: What fundamentally is it in history that guarantees this perpetual peace and promises us that one day it really will take shape and form in history? Is it men’s will and their mutual understanding, the political and diplomatic devices that they will have been able to construct, or the organization of rights that they will have been able to install between them? Not at all. It is nature, just as in the physiocrats it was nature that guaranteed the good regulation of the market. And how does nature guarantee perpetual peace? It is very simple, Kant says. Nature after all has done some absolutely marvelous things, since it has managed, for example, to get not only animals, but even peoples to live in lands completely scorched by the Sun or frozen by eternal sheets of ice. There are people who manage to live there in spite of everything, which proves that there is nowhere in the world where human beings cannot live. But for people to be able to live they must be able to feed themselves, to produce their food, have a social organization, and exchange their products between themselves or with people from other regions. Nature intended the entire world, the whole of its surface, to be given over to the economic activity of production and exchange. And on that basis, nature has prescribed a number of obligations that are juridical obligations for man, but which nature has in a way dictated to him secretly, which she has, as it were, marked out in the very arrangement of things, of geography, the climate, and so on. What are these arrangements?
First, that men can have relations of exchange with each other individually, supported by property, etcetera, and this prescription or precept of nature will be taken up in legal obligations and become civil law.Second, nature determined that men be distributed across the world in distinct regions and that within each of these regions they have privileged relationships with each other that they do not have with the inhabitants of other regions, and men have taken up this precept in legal terms by forming separate states which maintain certain legal relationships between them. This will become international law. But in addition, nature has wished that there are not only juridical relationships between these states, guaranteeing their independence, but also commercial relationships that cross the borders between states and consequently make the juridical independence of each state porous, as it were. Commercial relationships cross the world, just as nature intended and to the same extent as nature intended the whole world to be populated, and this will constitute cosmopolitan law or commercial law. This edifice of civil law, international law, and cosmopolitan law is nothing other than man’s taking up of a precept of nature as obligations. So we can say that law, inasmuch as it resumes the precept of nature, will be able to promise what was in a way already outlined in the first action of nature when it populated the entire world: something like perpetual peace. Perpetual peace is guaranteed by nature and this guarantee is manifested in the population of the entire world and in the commercial relationships stretching across the whole world. The guarantee of perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization. Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979, Lecture 3, The Birth of Biopolitics. 56-58*
Foucault quite correctly inserts Kant's Perpetual Peace into the framework of eighteenth century liberalism.* But he does so with an unusual, uncharacteristic for him misstep. On his view of the eighteenth century, perpetual peace is derived from the size of the external market, which presupposes few borders, which are, presumably sites of conflict ("the larger the external market, the fewer its borders and limits, the more you will have a guarantee of perpetual peace.") It's very much in the spirit of some such discussions.
But this is not (recall) Kant's Madisonian position, which relies on the growing size of the internal market without or, perhaps better put, relatively minimal borders. As these internal markets expand they create continental wide spheres of peace within these federations and promote pacific relations among multiple continental-wide federations. In particular, and this draws on Addison), trade is then conducive toward peace in virtue of generating a shared legal framework and facilitating a cosmopolitan outlook.
While he is an important influence on Kant's views on federation, Smith, in turn, deviates from this narrative because he thinks, presciently, that export led growth and international trade increase the possibility of conflict when such trade is conceived in zero-sum terms (see also Paganelli & Schumacher). That is to say, and Kant mentions it explicitly in Perpetual Peace, what's required is that the pacific "spirit of commerce" (as distinct from the warlike mercantile spirit) diffuses itself through a federation. Thus, while Kant and Smith do not agree on all the details, they agree that a peace-conducive ideology or civic religion is one of the building blocks of a peaceful international system.+
Foucault's mistake makes sense because he also wants to help explain a regional consciousness that leads to a particular kind of nineteenth century imperialism. And for that narrative (pp. 54-46) growing markets external to Europe are central part of the story.
I don't mean to suggest that Foucault's interpretation of Kant is mistaken on a more fundamental level. Kant, indeed, echoes the providential literature in which the existence of trade is both explained by the post-tower-of-Babel and post Noah-ite flood spread of humans and animals, and justified by the mutual gains from trade and specialization. (I warmly recommend Joost Hengstmengel's, Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought.) And, quite clearly, God's providence (which can be merely regulative) has been displaced on or is exhibited by nature, or, Nature's Order, which, in turn, becomes the source of a funny kind of normativity (in terms of precepts). Of course, in this sense Kant echoes not just Smith, but the whole strain of natural law thinking in authors as diverse as Hobbes, Vittoria, and Leibniz (Hume being the main outlyer) some of which, indeed, constitutive of international law (Francesco Suarez, Grotius, Pufendorf, etc.).
And, indeed, we can recognize in the (quasi-Stoic) demand to live in accord to nature's precepts, which are themselves orderly, and increasingly even law-like, a guide both an ideal of peace and an ideal of law-governed-ness. To be without law is to be in the state of permanent war and to be uncivilized. The desirable contrast is a global political order of the civilized.
What Foucault recognizes about the previous paragraph is that alongside the juridical-theological conceptualizations, this is also inscribed, constitutively into science of political economy. For, and here I am drawing on my work on the afterlife of the so-called Posidonian argument (recall here; here; here; here), in this period, it is standard to assume that nature's order, now understood as a global, political order, is constitutive, a condition of possibility, on scientific progress. When this conceptualization is inscribed in the liberal art of government, Foucault calls this "governmental naturalism" (61).
*The present post is number (VIII) because it should be read after this one (here)
+In Smith it is pretty clear that this, in turn, is, in part, a matter of material and economic circumstances of a polity.
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