In his impressively informed and mesmerizing book, After Kant, Michael Sonenscher sets himself the daunting task of tracking some of the surprising transformations of political thought in the nineteenth-century Western European debates among scholars, readers and politicians. While the ambition of the book is to illuminate certain trajectories of intellectual history, it also engages with the philosophical argumentation involved. The book might be said to have multiple starting points, one of them being the effect of Kant’s conception of history and progress on the political imaginary. Kant famously argued that moral progress was something that could not be realized in the individual, but rather in the human species as such. For Kant’s critics, this exposed his theory to the gulf of intergenerational injustice as persons at different instances of a historical progress would have different moral capacities and status. The conceived moral affront stemming from Kant’s historical theory gave new impetus to debates about the historical ground of social institutions, their transformations, and legitimacy. The stated aim of Sonenscher’s book is to give an account of “the many different attempts that were made to think about how this gap could be closed and, more broadly, about what the impact of these attempts to close the gap has been” (14).
One of Sonenscher’s perceptive guiding claims is that the debate about political continuation and transformation is itself a confusing story of continuation and transformation. In mapping out the reactions to Kant’s historical thesis, Sonenscher intends to show how different conceptions of political origins were woven together in thinking about political history. Thus, the binaries of the Romans and the Germans, the ancients and the moderns, and the classics and the romantics, were conceptual tools in thinking about human history, sovereignty, legitimacy, and progress. This gives some insight into the book’s method of presentation, as part of the claim is that these concepts themselves and their relations often underwent surprising transformations of meaning, and the book’s aim “has been to be a genealogy, not a teleology, with as much room for choice and chance as for causes and consequences” (480).
The book consists of twelve chapters covering an impressive number of English, French, and German thinkers, from the fairly well-known to now forgotten, and tracks how their ideas unfolded and became entangled. Giving a summary of this content is difficult, as Sonenscher describes it “not so much a narrative as a cumulatively fuller reconstruction of a pattern or a half-buried mosaic” (26), but some of the main discussions can still be highlighted. Should societal continuation and transformation be understood as stemming from unsocial sociability, as Kant suggested, or through the concept of palingenesis, as Herder, amongst others. argued? Was the division of labor, material or intellectual, a condition for human progress, or rather a hindrance to it? Was the prevalence of Roman law in European institutions a source for institutional justice or for proprietary injustice?
The list of contributors to this debate is too long to replicate, but the book will satisfy a wide range of interests. Some examples are the legacy of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and The Spirit of the Laws (chapter 2), the discussion of the nature of modern politics within the Coppet group and their relation to Germaine de Staël and Wilhelm von Humbolt (chapters 3 and 4), Kant’s and Herder’s discussions of palingenesis and the issue of autonomy (chapters 5–7), the impact of Saint-Simonianism and the role of civil society (chapters 8–11), and the politics of Kantian unsocial sociability (chapter 12).
While Sonenscher often shows connections between these thinkers and topics and argues for their plausibility, he also makes certain interpretative conclusions quite explicit. One example of this is his engagement with the debates about community and nationalism and the common historical interpretation and his understanding of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the nation as a reaction to the cosmopolitanism, materialism, and atheism of the Enlightenment. In Sonenscher’s interpretation, it makes more sense to think of this preoccupation as “explaining how something imagined could be translated into something with commonly identified emotional, rational, or simply intelligible content” (138).
It follows from one of the self-proclaimed aims of the book, namely, to show “a number of overlapping stories” (494) and how they “were the largely unforeseen outcomes of chance and choice” (455), that its argumentative force is at times difficult to grasp. While the the book’s different pieces make for a coherent picture, if a mosaic, what is sometimes lacking is a more clear evaluation of the weight carried by the different voices or thinkers. The wide range of thinkers and texts gives rise to the question of whether they really talking about the same issues, even when using the same terms. While another aim of the book is to show how these concepts and words changed their meaning and purpose over time, it leaves the reader wanting a clearer discussion of the conceptual coherence of the discourse: a better grasp of whether something is best understood as a continuity or transformation, rather than as a rupture or discontinuity of the discourse.
These questions seem to arise quite naturally from the methodology and ambitions of the book. For while the mosaic of the work allows for a grand picture, it also comes at the cost of analytical depth. But what is gained by the approach is also quite apparent. In this truly impressive feat of intellectual history, Sonenscher opens up ground for new narratives and scopes that will provide both insight and inspirations for scholars in several fields of research.
