The title of Michael Sonenscher’s book, After Kant, denotes a temporal period—the era of post-Kantian political thought that sought to comprehend the novel socio-political, economic, and cultural order emerging in “the period that straddles the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution” (xv). At the same time, it refers to the reactions to and ramifications of Kant’s Copernican turn for theorizing a set of perennial problems, questions, or tensions, such as temporal-eternal, particular-universal, immanent-transcendent, mind-world. Central to Kant’s philosophic legacy and Sonenscher’s account of European political thought from the 1780s to the decades following the 1848 revolutions is the thesis that the “underlying engine of human history” is humanity’s “unsocial sociability”—humanity’s intrinsic propensity to enter into society combined with a resistance to society that threatens to undermine society (6). For Sonenscher, Kant’s concept of unsocial sociability and the “grim philosophy of history implied by Kant’s concept” is a kind of synecdoche for the monumental effects and continuing ramifications of Kant’s philosophical revolution (312). As After Kant amply illustrates, modern political thought has been decisively shaped by the effort to overcome or bridge “the gap that Kant had opened up between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the ideal and the real, the spiritual and the physical, and, ultimately, individual lives and human history” (273).
Drawing upon the work of thinkers as diverse as the Swiss-French émigré Madame de Stael, the German philosophic-historian Johann Gottfried Herder, and the Russian agrarian-socialist Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Sonenscher reconstructs a multifaceted conversation that sought to understand the rapidly changing present in order to find an adequate orientation toward the emerging future. Sonenscher offers a novel perspective on this conversation by weaving together a “contextually oriented story about the unintended consequences of Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’” with an account of how “narrowly technical philosophical and theological arguments” that were originally formulated as criticisms of Rousseau and Kant converged with “the broader body of moral and political debate generated by the events of the French Revolution” (455). Sonenscher’s exploration of nineteenth century political thought is thus a deeply historical inquiry into the advent of a new form of historical and historicized thinking, wherein a range of socio-political, ethical, and religious questions came to be seen as inextricably interwoven with the meaning, purpose, or logic of history.
Sonenscher’s turn to intellectual history, however, is not motivated by mere antiquarian interest; for just as the authors Sonenscher investigates probe the past in search of the historical origins of contemporary political ideas and institutions as well as for models, examples, and analogies by which to understand the present, so too does Sonenscher practice a form of intellectual history that is simultaneously a form of thinking about politics today. As he persuasively argues, many familiar “political ideologies”—the array of ‘ism’s which structure contemporary political discourse, from nationalism, communism, and liberalism to republicanism, environmentalism, and feminism—have their origins in “the long sequence of discussions generated by Kant’s moral and historical vision” (25–26). Yet, if Sonenscher practices a form of political theory whereby the study of the past can inform the political present by reminding us of the alternative ways of formulating and framing political questions, he is equally cognizant of the truth of L.P. Hartley’s quip that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” His genealogical inquiry into the roots of the political present avoids anachronistic or facile false equivalence—eschewing the temptation to treat the past as a repository of ready-to-hand answers to our own most urgent political questions.
While space precludes even a cursory overview of the multiple topics, authors, contexts, and genres explored in this wide-ranging and erudite work—which touches upon everything from the historiographical significance of the concept of palingenesis to the idea of esthetic education as reconciling moral autonomy with social harmony—there is nonetheless an overarching and unifying theme concerning, on the one hand, the relation of morality to history, and, on the other, new ways of conceptualizing the temporal condition of the human being. Sonenscher details the role that such novel forms of historical self-consciousness played and continue to play in the formation of the sociopolitical identity of modern European nations. There are three principal touchstones to Sonenscher’s inquiry into the advent of such historically self-conscious political debates: (1) a sustained examination of the Roman legacy after the French Revolution—both in terms of Roman political thought and of the image or idea of Rome—that intersects with ideas about republicanism, classicism, and individual rights; (2) the interest in uncovering an alternative to this Roman legacy, denoted as the “Germanic legacy” but encompassing the medieval, feudal, and Christian counterparts to the political heritage of antiquity; and (3) the way in which the dualisms afflicting modernity—in particular, the tension between the individual will and the general will—might be ameliorated by a new understanding of history and the transfiguration of Heilsgeschichte (theological salvation history) into Weltgeschichte (an immanent account of humanity’s development).
Sonenscher’s book is structured around the interplay of these three topics. Following an elaboration in the opening two chapters of the multifaceted theoretical legacy bequeathed by Kant, especially the reasons for “Kant’s disturbing claim that any historical justification of political legitimacy was likely to be arbitrary, while any moral justification was likely to be viable only when history had run its course” (xiii), Sonenscher excavates in chapters 3–5 the “largely forgotten” “hostility toward Rome and Roman law that developed in early nineteenth-century Europe” and the concomitant pan-European “interest in developments in German-language moral and political thought, notably in the close and alarming relationship that came to be seen between Kant’s concept of autonomy and the idea of the death of God” (26–27). The subsequent responses to and repercussions of the apprehension about the tension between human freedom and the ground of human values are then explored in chapters 6–7, with particular attention given to the development of theories of intersubjective recognition and the relation between civil society and the state. Against this backdrop of the various attempts to integrate Kantian notions of rational agency within a stable cultural, juridical, and economic framework through the appropriation of the Germanic political heritage, Sonenscher reconstructs the debate between Romanticism and Classicism that was simultaneously an extension of the seventeenth and eighteenth century querelle des anciens et des modernes and a radical transformation of that earlier debate insofar as the development of a novel understanding of the relation between human historicity and normativity challenged the validity of the presuppositions operative in such trans-historical comparisons of art, literature, philosophy, and politics. As chapters 8–9 illustrate, the belief that ethical, political, and esthetic standards of evaluation were relative to a particular epoch called into question the very idea of historical progress and undermined the hope for a future historical reconciliation of the dualities afflicting modernity.
Exploring the revival of the Roman legacy in the years that preceded and followed the revolutions of 1848, Sonenscher then shows how far the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction: rather than seeing “the arrangements and institutions of modern Europe [as] Germanic in origin,” Roman models of political and constitutional order took center stage (28). The final three chapters then explore the repercussions of this revival of the Roman legacy, showing how a series of contested dualisms that continue to structure political thought—such as individualism and collectivism, autonomy and democracy, Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft—were debated with reference to an ever-shifting and kaleidoscopic series of reinterpretations of the dual origins of modernity. From this perspective, Sonenscher shows that Kant’s postulated historical teleology was not so much a solution for, but a reflection of the fact that “modern politics were both Roman and German and, as a result, that modern politics were, in fact, the politics of unsocial sociability” (452).
Sonenscher’s inquiry combines remarkable breadth and a penetrating depth in a comprehensive study that immerses the reader in a wide-ranging conversation that spans all literary genres and cuts across disciplinary boundaries. After Kant is intellectual history at its finest; for it enables us to be privy to the discussion and thereby the wisdom of the past, inviting us to become interlocutors with thinkers of former epochs, and thus to engage them as dialogical partners in our own philosophic thinking. Students and scholars alike should be grateful to Sonenscher for making the past so vividly present.
