Indigeneity in Immanuel Kant’s Global Politics

Immanuel Kant believed in progress. He held that humanity regressed when it passed from nature to civilization, but argued that human progress could only reach its ultimate aim within civilization. How could Kant believe humanity was getting better – and worse? This volume answers the question with a particular interpretive emphasis placed on Kant’s views about indigenous peoples; in doing so, it challenges the trend in scholarship to interpret Kant’s political philosophy as anti-colonial and anti-racist. Kant’s ideas are placed in the context of the circulation of travelogues and of contemporaries such as Herder, his one-time student, and Georg Forster, a travel writer of some renown. This compelling new study looks not only to the past, but also carries Kant’s work into the future by proposing a post-Kantian path to advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples in the international system.