Globalization and the Continental Philosophies of the Enlightenment: Requestioning the Synthetical Incorporation of Dichotomies

Abstract

Though this paper fully agrees that the ongoing project of globalizing world identities is an offshoot of today's boom of state-of-the arts technologies, it tries to also argue that it is an advanced stage of the intellectual continuum of Enlightenment's universalist grand narratives. Of the narratives of the Enlightenment that I choose to focus on, are seventeenth century imperial ‘liberalism’ of John Locke (1632–1704) and eighteenth century humanist ‘globalism’ of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The Lockean ‘liberalist’ and Kantian ‘globalist’ ideals seem to have been – for the last three centuries – at the backdrop of continental politics and philosophical thoughts preoccupied with the ‘World Citizenship’ project. I also try to argue that its enduring alias – globalization – has been kept feasible through the little spoken of but constantly operational Hegelian dialectic. Its capacity to insulate old models of classical political theories against obsoleteness occurs through the constant negotiative conflicting theses out of which integrative syntheses emanate. The recent Western Europe's far-right maintenance of a Kantian fear – mongering ‘status naturalis,’ the border – effacing demise of national sovereignty, and the rise of neoliberal globalization intimately correlate. An in medias res recapitulation of Kant's ‘World Citizenship’ seems to be the ‘end of history's’ final synthesis.