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cover of episode Michael Sonenscher, "After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Michael Sonenscher, "After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)

2025/1/26
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Michael Sonenscher: 我试图通过更直接的编年史的方式，纠正我们对政治思想史的既有历史、史学和概念记录。例如，"历史首先是悲剧，然后是闹剧"这句话并非马克思首创，而是康德在其早50年的文章中提出的；"上帝之死"的概念并非源于尼采，而是在18世纪末19世纪初广泛流传于德语地区和法国；"消极自由"和"积极自由"的概念也并非柏林首创，而是康德提出的。我们对许多政治思想概念的起源时间存在误解，许多概念的出现时间远早于我们通常认为的时间。 我对康德的"非社会性社会性"概念进行了重新解读，我认为康德并非强调人的非社会性，而是强调人们过早、过快、过分局部地形成社会，导致社会间的竞争关系。康德的历史哲学的核心在于人类能力在相对稳定的制度和道德框架下的发展变化。康德的历史观是其"非社会性社会性"的另一面，旨在缓解人类难以界定善、正义、自由等抽象概念所带来的后果。 卢梭的可完善性和康德的自主性概念都与人类想象能力有关，卢梭更积极地强调了这种能力。本书探讨了以"-ism"结尾的政治术语，认为这些术语并非新概念，而是对长期存在的思想集群的概括。许多政治意识形态是法国大革命和欧洲工业化的产物。 Morteza Hajizadeh: (无核心论点，仅为访谈主持)

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This chapter revisits Immanuel Kant's work, correcting common misinterpretations and placing his ideas within their proper historical context. It challenges the conventional understanding of Kant's concepts and their chronology.
  • Kant's concept of history happening as tragedy then farce predates Marx.
  • The "death of God" idea circulated earlier than Nietzsche.
  • Kant's concept of negative and positive liberty predates Berlin and Constant.

Shownotes Transcript

In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions.

What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought.

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Before the Deluge (Princeton), Sans-Culottes (Princeton), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Morteza Hajizadeh) is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel). Twitter).

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