What is barbarism?
Immanuel Kant defined it as “violence, without freedom and law”.
That was spoken abstractly and aimed at the internal constitution of the states.
Kant is thus among a long line of political philosophers who have argued similarly.
To this day, the word powerfully marks outlawed practices.
The study by Oliver Eberl cleverly and emphatically suggests that we should say goodbye to this rhetoric, as the underlying idea is morally contaminated.
Eberl argues precisely from the sources.
His book impresses with the clarity of the train of thought and transparency in dealing with the history of ideas.
The author does not mince his words when it comes to the far-reaching consequences of his historical findings for the present.
Because Eberl shows how both the justification and criticism of the state order are based on an idea of barbarism that was shaped by colonialism and has remained so to this day.
Foreign companies were almost consistently devalued
The easiest way to prove this is for the classics of early modern political thought. In high-sounding words and vivid pictures, they designed a so-called “state of nature”. One should not only imagine this natural state in Hobbes as lawless disorder full of violence and fear. This has often been described and analyzed, as has its overcoming: “Founding a state as a civilization” is the universal solution. It brings people out of need and misery, civil war and the economy of scarcity.
But Hobbes wrote this not without intuition, and Eberl proves that the abstraction of the state of nature and barbarism was based on something that we have previously overlooked and suppressed: the intercultural experience of discovering other continents, ways of life and notions of order.
An image of the “other” was constructed from travel reports in order to legitimize one's own political model.
In the process, other organizational forms of society were almost consistently devalued.
They have been ascribed a life in a state of nature and have been downright killed at the desks of political philosophers.
Poor life, scandalous social relationships, primitive manners
Intercultural tolerance like that of Montaigne remained the exception. The latter had judged very carefully that the travel reports about the strangers were full of exaggerations. If one as a reader omits these illustrations, it becomes apparent that “the natives in their world have nothing barbaric or wild about them, or only insofar as everyone calls it barbarism, which is uncommon with him”. Rousseau also refrained from evaluating non-European peoples from a colonialist perspective; instead he discovered their freedoms.
“Wrong,” shouted the majority of political philosophers and stated: The non-European foreigners are undoubtedly savages or barbarians, their lives are poor, social relationships are scandalous, their manners primitive.
The idea is that they lack any statehood that Europe had created for itself, which in the distant past presumably existed in a state of nature itself and which has to fear this again and again in the form of war and civil war as a relapse into barbarism.
The colonial perception was a deliberate distortion
Above all, however, the state of nature encountered the Europeans allegedly on their voyages of discovery and conquest in the sense of "America, you have it worse". In truth, opposing perceptions were faded out, instead inventions (such as cannibalism and castrating women) were added. “The colonial perception was not a misunderstanding, but a deliberate distortion,” writes Eberl.